Ch. 1, Verses 12–13: The battle of the conches, part 1
Understanding Bhīṣma’s call to war
On this doubly holy day, celebrating both Vijayadaśamī and the birth of Swāmī Vedānta Deśika (Puraṭṭāsi Tiruvōṇam as per the Tamil calendar), let us resume our journey through the Śrīmad-Bhagavad-Gītā.
We have been immersed in questions and speeches and words so far. Lest we forget, the Gītā is about action, and we see this in the next scene—one of my absolute favorites in the Gītā, and one of the most powerful and thrilling scenes from a battlefield. If you liked the scene in The Return of the King where King Theoden encourages the Rohirrim to go to war, and they respond by blowing their horns, then this scene too will resonate with you. It foreshadows the unfolding and the ultimate outcome of the Mahābhārata war.
This pakṣa, we will look at verses I.12 and I.13 that describe the Kaurava side. Next pakṣa, we will turn to the Pāṇḍava response (verses I.14–18) and the effect it has on the Kauravas (I.19). Spoiler alert: It does not go well for the Kauravas!
The Kaurava call
Our intricate analysis of Duryodhana’s mental state during his speech to Droṇa and then to his generals was not able to get to a clear answer about his state of mind. The following verses make Duryodhana’s dejection abundantly clear, and additionally serve to introduce Bhīṣma as a character in the Gītā as well.
tasya sañjanayan harṣaṃ Kuru-vṛddhaḥ pitāmahaḥ | siṃha-nādaṃ vinadyô ’ccaiḥ śaṅkhaṃ dadhmau pratāpavān || tataḥ śaṅkhāś ca bheryaś ca paṇavâ-’’naka-gomukhāḥ | sahasaîvâ ’bhyahanyanta; sa śabdas tumulo ’bhavat || (BhG I.12–13)
To cheer him up, Bhīṣma the Kuru elder, the grandsire, let out a lion’s roar and, blazing with valor, loudly blew his conch. At that signal, conches and shawms were blown, and kettle-drums and snares and large drums were pounded all at once—and that sound was deafening.
These two verses look quite straightforward, but they also conceal some substantial grammatical nuances that support a more complex and ambiguous interpretation. Let us first look at the straightforward interpretation, which might be satisfying enough for many people. I’ll then turn to the deeper, more complex interpretations.
The straightforward interpretation
After Duryodhana’s speech, and especially after his defensive downer of a conclusion, Bhīṣma decides to cheer up Duryodhana and to boost his morale (harṣa). This fact, that Bhīṣma even needed to cheer Duryodhana up, tells us that he was dejected, and therefore that we should favor the more pessimistic interpretations of Duryodhana’s speech.
Bhīṣma—although you may notice that in the original Sanskrit verse he isn’t actually referred to by name at all!—unleashes a lion’s roar (siṃha-nāda) as he unleashes his inner lion: it is now time for war, and men revert to their bestial nature, “bloody in tooth and claw”. When even the pitāmaha “grandfather” of the Kuru dynasty, the grand old man of the clan, can act in this fashion, it becomes clear that the descent into violence is inevitable.
Bhīṣma then blows his conch (śaṅkhaṃ dadhmau), thus announcing the commencement of the war. This triggers a simultaneous outburst of noise from across the whole Kaurava army. A wide variety of military musical instruments of all sorts are sounded in unison (sahasā + eva), suggesting that this may have been a pre-planned move on the part of the Kaurava army to emphasize their numerical superiority and to attempt to break the Pāṇḍava spirit even before the fighting starts.
The resultant uproar is described as tumultuous (tumula), a word that we will soon see repeated. War is no joke and the Kaurava army is no pushover: this will be a brutal conflict unto death.
Bhīṣma’s portrayal in this scene
Let us go back to the point above about Bhīṣma’s name not being used in this verse. This is true, but he is referred to by four different words in this verse, each of which tells us something different about Bhīṣma’s role in this scene even as per the straightforward interpretation.
sañjanayan: Bhīṣma gives rise to joy in Duryodhana, helping to restore his spirits. As Generalissimo of the Kaurava forces, it is up to Bhīṣma to ensure that order and morale are maintained in the Kaurava ranks.
Additionally, we should not forget that the narrator of this verse is Sañjaya speaking to Dhṛtarāṣṭra father of Duryodhana: hearing this effect of Bhīṣma on his son is undoubtedly meant to boost Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s spirit as well.Kuru-vṛddha: Bhīṣma is the eldest of the Kurus on the battlefield, but age has done nothing to wither his vitality or his prowess on the battlefield. By supporting Duryodhana the Kuru king in this war, Bhīṣma is thus upholding his duty to the Kuru throne. But in doing so, he is prioritizing due process instead of supporting the objectively better ruler (Yudhiṣṭhira).
This ambiguity is captured in the two different senses of the word vṛddha itself: It can mean “advanced” or “eminent” (compare the noun vṛddhi that means “prosperity” or “advancement”), but it can also mean “aged”.1pitāmaha (“grandfather”): The standard title given to him by both the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, this word highlights the love and respect that both sides extended to Bhīṣma.2 Again, this qualifier carries an implicit critique of Bhīṣma: Though both sides love him, and though he loves both sides, he is going to pick one—and the “wrong” one, at that.
There is yet another way to understand this word: pitāmaha is sometimes also used as an epithet for Brahmā, the creator god. This shade of meaning, when applied to Bhīṣma, is darkly ironic: Bhīṣma, who got his name due to his terrible dual vow to give up his rightful claim to the Kuru throne and to remain celibate forever, has failed to (pro)create and continue the Kuru lineage; to the contrary, he has created the situation that led to the conflict between the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava cousins through his well-intentioned actions on multiple occasions. The use of sañjanayan then amplifies this sense of irony: The meaning of the root sam+jan is “to be born” and the word can thus literally mean “giving birth”.3
pratāpavān: I have translated this word as “blazing with valor”, though this is a hard concept to get across. Literally, the word means “one who possesses pratāpa”. And that word in turn is built around the root tap (“to heat”, “to burn” and so on) with the intensifying prefix pra-.4 But pratāpa isn’t used to mean “intense heat”; instead, it shares semantic space with another word derived from the same root, tapas “ardor, austerity”. Tapas is the inner “heat” built up over time through long spiritual practice. Pratāpa is the external projection of this inner heat in the form of valor, courage and confident action. Bhīṣma has built up his inner heat through his lifelong celibacy, and is now channeling it into bloodlust.
So why is Bhīṣma not called by that name here? Because he is not just Bhīṣma by name, he is bhīṣma “terrifying” by nature as well: His lion’s roar and his powerful blowing of the conch are name enough for him.
A contrast in styles
Finally, we can read Bhīṣma’s noise-making in verse I.12 as a contrast to the Blessed Lord Kṛṣṇa’s words in the Gītā—just like Duryodhana’s despairing speech is meant to serve as the foil to Arjuna’s despairing speech. But where Kṛṣṇa engages in a deep conversation with his friend and confidant in order to re-instill a sense of dharma in him, Bhīṣma simply roars like an animal and declares war, and does nothing to spiritually awaken Duryodhana.
Thus, in this simple interpretation, Duryodhana and Bhīṣma’s interaction at the beginning of the Gītā casts into clear relief the critical role played by a true ācārya and mārga-darśaka (someone whose conduct is worthy of emulation and who shows us the way forward). I use the word “critical” in both its senses:
the true spiritual guide is a necessary catalyst in the process of spiritual transformation and
the true spiritual guide must sometimes necessarily poke and prod and push us in uncomfortable ways.
Someone who reinforces or amplifies your worst tendencies is not a useful guide if you seek to better yourself.
The complex interpretation
The straightforward interpretation of verses I.12–13 creates a rather negative impression of Bhīṣma, which does not accord well with the strongly positive attitude towards Bhīṣma throughout the Hindu tradition. My quest for what has ended up as this second interpretation initially stemmed from my desire to rehabilitate Bhīṣma’s portrayal in this scene. In the process, I came to identify some issues in these two verses that eventually helped me get to a deeper, more complex interpretation in which Bhīṣma is playing a more positive role:
Who is the person who is being cheered up here? Phrased more technically: who is the referent of the pronoun tasya here?
What is the relationship between Bhīṣma’s action of cheering someone up and his action of blowing the conch?
What role does the second verse play in all this?
We will go through all of these issues, but fair warning that there are going to be some pretty technical details here. As always, I will draw horizontal lines to mark off these sections so you can skip them on the first read if you so wish.
Issue 1: Who is being cheered?
Let’s start with the first issue: It is not at all obvious who is being cheered up in verse I.12.
The straightforward interpretation is to assume that the referent of the pronoun tasya is Duryodhana, since we have just heard him rant for 9 verses—but we are not obliged to read it that way if we have a meaningful alternative! And there is in fact a meaningful alternative, and one that is in fact taught to us by Bhīṣma himself in the Mahābhārata (though not in the Gītā proper).
Bhīṣma the Knower of Names
Fast-forward to the end of the Mahābhārata war: Fatally wounded, Bhīṣma is lying on the battlefield upon his bed of arrows. He has not died despite his wounds, for his father Śantanu granted him the boon to choose the moment of his passing. Yudhiṣṭhira, now finally consecrated king after his Pyrrhic victory in the war, approaches Bhīṣma to study all matters of statecraft, duty, and religion from Bhīṣma.
Included within this discourse, which spans a full two out of the eighteen parvans of the Mahābhārata, is the Viṣṇu Sahasranāma (the “Thousand Names of Viṣṇu”). In the 135th chapter of the Anuśāsana-parvan of the Mahābhārata, Bhīṣma recites a thousand names of Viṣṇu to Yudhiṣṭhira and recommends the contemplation and unbroken recitation (japa) of these names as a surefire path to felicity.
In the 78th verse of the Viṣṇu Sahasranāma (corresponding to verse XIII.135.91 in the link above), we see the name tad.5 While this name is interpreted differently in different commentarial traditions on the Viṣṇu Sahasranāma, the simplest way is to understand it as the pronoun “That”. With this interpretation, we can translate tasya sañjanayan harṣam as meaning “in order to delight Him” or “delighting Him”, in reference to the Supreme Being Viṣṇu / Kṛṣṇa.
More puzzles
Now this opens up a whole new set of questions: Why would Kṛṣṇa be delighted by Bhīṣma’s action? Was Bhīṣma acting in order to please Kṛṣṇa or to please Duryodhana? And is there any evidence from within the Gītā itself that tat could be a name for Viṣṇu / Kṛṣṇa?
I’ll answer the last question first, for the response will be short: The Gītā indeed offers an explanation of the word tad (in the context of the phrase oṃ tat sat) in verse XVII.25, towards the very end of the text.6 I don’t want to short-circuit our journey through the Gītā by jumping to its near-conclusion, but I will note that the word tad is associated in the Gītā with the Vedas, and with performing any actions without regard to their worldly fruit and solely with the intention of attaining liberation. As we will soon see, this is enough of a hook for us to rehabilitate Bhīṣma.
Issue 2: How are Bhīṣma’s actions connected?
The answers to the two other questions raised above—Why would Kṛṣṇa be delighted by Bhīṣma’s action? Whom was Bhīṣma trying to please?—will be both be addressed by answering the second major issue: how are Bhīṣma’s actions of cheering tad up and of blowing the conch linked?
To actually understand what is going on here, we must turn to Pāṇini’s grammar of Sanskrit. Since this section may be quite technical, I will suggest you skip it on a first read and focus on its conclusions.
A grammatical interlude: the semantics of Sanskrit present participles
The word sañjanayan “producing [something]” is a present participle (ŚatṚ-anta): it is used to refer to an action that happens in parallel with (vartamāne, in Pāṇinian terms) the main action expressed in the sentence and which is being performed by the agent of the main action as well. Thus it is Bhīṣma who blows the conch (dadhmau) and it is also Bhīṣma who is involved in producing delight, i.e., in cheering tad up.
The semantic relation between the action expressed by the participle and the main action is captured in a sūtra of Pāṇini: lakṣaṇa-hetvoḥ kriyāyāḥ (AA III.2.126): the participle can express either a characteristic (lakṣaṇa) of the main action or a hetu of the main action. This second word is ambiguous and can be understood in two different ways: either as the result (phala) of the main action or as the cause (kāraṇa) of the main action.
The standard examples adduced for these are quite illuminating:
(Participial action expresses a characteristic, lakṣaṇa, of the main action) Here the standard example is śayānā(ḥ) bhuñjate Yavanāḥ “the Ionians (Greeks) eat reclining”.
The participle “reclining” describes a characteristic of the Greeks’ main action of eating—in this case, their posture. Incidentally, this is a well-known feature of Ancient Greek culture.(Participial action expresses the result, phala, of the main action) The stock example for this is adhīyāno vasati “he dwells studying”.
By living with his teacher, the student is able to study. His dwelling there is motivated by his desire to study with his teacher; in turn, he obtains the desired result of studying by living with his teacher.(Participial action expresses a cause, kāraṇa, of the main action) The example for this subcategory comes from Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s Bāla-manoramā autocommentary on his Siddhānta-kaumudī rearrangement of the Aṣṭâdhyāyī of Pāṇini for sūtra III.2.126: Hariṃ paśyan mucyate “Seeing Hari, he is liberated.” The glimpse of the Lord is the cause of the devotee’s liberation.
Here the participle is used to emphasize the simultaneity (vartamāne) of the two: there is no temporal gap between seeing the Divine and being liberated. If there had been a temporal sequence, the sentence would have been Hariṃ dṛṣṭvā mucyate “Upon seeing Hari, he is liberated.”
Back to our regularly scheduled programming: We see that Bhīṣma’s cheering up can be related to his blowing of the conch in one of two different ways:
(The result interpretation) He is blowing the conch in order to delight tad.
(The characteristic interpretation) He is blowing the conch in such a manner that he delights tad.
But here we can have our cake and eat it too! Thus, at one and the same time, we can have one of two interpretations:
(The negative interpretation) Bhīṣma is blowing the conch in order to cheer Duryodhana up (as a good general should), and in such a manner as to (incidentally) delight Kṛṣṇa (through Bhīṣma’s dedication to his warrior dharma).
(The positive interpretation) Bhīṣma is blowing the conch in order to delight Kṛṣṇa (thus, without regard to the result of his actions), in such a manner as to (incidentally) cheer up Duryodhana (who mistakenly thinks this is intended for him).
In both cases, Bhīṣma’s actions delight both Duryodhana and Kṛṣṇa! The Gītā artfully leaves it for us to decide which interpretation to go with.
Moving towards rehabilitating Bhīṣma
I believe, though, that the closing word pratāpavān “blazing with valor” should guide us towards the positive interpretation that rehabilitates Bhīṣma. As I discussed above, Bhīṣma’s pratāpa (valor) is an outward manifestation of his inner tapas (spiritual heat, ardor), built up through his lifelong steadfast observance of his vow to celibacy and continence (brahmacarya).
Taken literally, Bhīṣma has followed the path (carya, cārin) of brahman: he has engaged in a lifelong quest to understand the true nature of reality, of the self and of the Self, of society, of the cosmos. It should therefore not be surprising that Bhīṣma understands Kṛṣṇa-Viṣṇu’s true nature and thus aims to please Him directly. Bhīṣma’s conch-blowing here is not a declaration of war, but an act of worship heralding the entry of the Blessed Lord Kṛṣṇa.
Issue 3: What is the point of verse I.13?
Verse I.13 illustrates the Kaurava army’s response to Bhīṣma’s battle-cry. On its surface, the message is loud and clear, no pun intended: the Kaurava army is fully prepared for war and is charged up to fight by Bhīṣma’s roar. Yet, as we will see both now and in the next pakṣa, when we explore the contrast between the Kaurava response and the Pāṇḍava response, there are more things going on underneath the surface.
As above, this is best seen through an exploration of Sanskrit grammar, so here is another grammatical interlude for folks to skip on a first reading.
A second grammatical interlude: The reflexive voice in Sanskrit
The key verb in question here, which is used to indicate the playing of all the Kaurava martial instruments, is abhyahanyanta. In Pāṇinian grammatical analysis, this is formed by adding to the prefixed root abhi+han “to strike well, to strike hard, to strike from close proximity” the suffixes yaK and laṄ.
The laṄ suffix indicates the past tense (or “imperfect” in Western grammars of Sanskrit). It is semantically straightforward and irrelevant to our discussion.
The yaK suffix, however, is precisely the issue. In general, it indicates that the verb is being used either in the passive voice (karmaṇi prayoga) or in the impersonal (bhāve prayoga).
The impersonal bhāve prayoga is invariably formed with a singular ending. However, the verb ending is plural here, so this cannot be an impersonal construction.
We must therefore be dealing with the karmaṇi prayoga, in which the verb expresses the object of the action. In English grammar we would call this the passive voice.
With a normal karmaṇi prayoga usage, the agent of the action can be indicated with the “instrumental” or tṛtīyā case-ending. (Thus, the sentence “Rāvaṇa was killed by Rāma” would be translated in the karmaṇi as Rāvaṇo ’hanyata Rāmeṇa.) However, we see in verse I.13 no such word in the tṛtīyā / “instrumental”. Why might this be the case?
One reason is simply that the agents of noise-making are simply not being expressed directly in the verse, suggesting that they are simply not that important to the poet.
More interestingly, this sentence could be interpreted as being constructed using the karma-kartari prayoga, loosely translatable into English as the “reflexive voice”. This cuts out the actual musicians from the picture entirely and focuses our attention entirely on the instruments: It’s as if there are no musicians at all, and the instruments are themselves making all the noise!
Unfortunately, in this particular case there is no way to distinguish between the karmaṇi prayoga passive and the karmakartari prayoga reflexive in Sanskrit.7 We can understand the difference between the two by looking at three English sentences that cover similar ground:
“The window was broken by the boy.” This is a classic passive-voice sentence, which fronts the object of the action of breaking (the window) and marks the agent of the action of breaking (the boy) with the preposition by.
“The window was broken.” This is an ambiguous sentence that can be interpreted in two different ways:
We can think of it as still being in the passive voice, only now without any mention of the agent of the breaking. In this sense, this sentence has a dynamic aspect to it, as is clear if you embed this in a bigger sentence: “Though it resisted their attempts for a while, at long last the window was broken.” This would be one way to interpret the Sanskrit sentence in the verse here.
We can also think of this sentence as a simple predicative sentence, parallel in structure to a sentence like “the window was pretty”. This is a simple, static description of the state of the window. Importantly, on this interpretation, this sentence is not in the passive voice even if it looks identical to it.
“The window broke.” This is also a dynamic sentence, but importantly there is now no role whatsoever for any external agent. Such a sentence is said to be in the reflexive voice in English and karmakartari prayoga in Sanskrit.
Back to our discussion. By eliminating all mention of any actual Kaurava soldiers in this verse, the poet gently pushes us to think of the Kaurava army as an automaton, as a war-machine: It receives the input Bhīṣma blows conch and responds with the output make some noise, without thinking or feeling in any way. We will see in the next pakṣa how this behavior contrasts with the Pāṇḍava behavior.
For now, in the context of Bhīṣma’s conch-blowing, it also acts as a hint that the Kaurava army itself was not affected in spirit or morale by Bhīṣma’s action; it simply responded mechanically, robotically. This is thus an indirect suggestion that we should go with the positive interpretation that Bhīṣma’s action was indeed intended to please Kṛṣṇa, with any other effects on the Kauravas being purely incidental.
Conclusion
Bhīṣma is different from both Duryodhana and Arjuna: Whereas the former needed but a battle-cry to get motivated to fight a selfish war for personal gain, and whereas the latter will soon need a six-hundred-verse–long sermon directly from the Supreme Lord to figure out what to do, Bhīṣma is crystal-clear in his understanding of his duty. His vow is to uphold the Kuru dynasty, regardless of who sits on his throne, and to do so, he will fight even the Supreme Lord Himself in combat if it comes to it.
But Bhīṣma does not mount this struggle out of defiance or out of ignorance: he does it knowing fully well who Kṛṣṇa truly is and what the outcome of the war will be. Bhīṣma does not need to listen to the Gītā because he already understands its core message: Do your deeds without focusing on its result, and dedicate all you do as an offering to the Supreme Lord.
Bhīṣma thus richly deserves the respect and admiration he has earned over the millennia. That said, he is outshone in the verses that follow describing the Pāṇḍava response. There is no shame in this, nor a diminution of Bhīṣma’s own stature. As the famous verse in the Pañcatantra says:
guṇavattara-pātreṇa chādyante guṇināṃ guṇāḥ | rātrau dīpa-śikhā-kāntir, na bhānāv udite sati || (PT I.310)
The virtues of the virtuous are eclipsed by those of the yet-more-virtuous: A candle’s flame is radiant at night, not once the sun has risen.
|| Sarvam Śrī-Kṛṣṇârpaṇam astu ||
The Hindi word buḍḍhā is a tadbhav derivative of vṛddha via the sequence vṛddha > vuḍḍha > buḍḍhā.
Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Pāṇḍu, the fathers of the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas respectively, are the legal (though not biological) sons of Vicitravīrya, who is Bhīṣma’s half-brother.
For instance, see verse I.100 of Swāmī Vedânta Deśika’s Yādavâbhyudaya, describing the manifestation of the Blessed Lord Kṛṣṇa in the womb of Devakī:
sādhūnāṃ sva-pada-saroja-ṣaṭpadānāṃ dharmasya sthitim anaghāṃ vidhātukāmaḥ | yad-garbhaṃ jagad akhilaṃ sa eva garbho Devakyāḥ samajani deva-deva-vandyaḥ || (YA I.100)
Seeking to establish a flawless state of dharma for saintly folks
who are as bees hovering over the lotuses that are His feet,the Lord
who is venerated by the gods of the gods,
who is the womb for the entire cosmos,took birth in the womb of Devakī.
Think about modern Hindi like taptī garmī “scorching heat” or Urdu/Persian āftāb “sun(shine)” to get a sense of the meaning of this root.
The whole verse reads:
eko, naîkaḥ, sa(, )vaḥ, kaḥ, kiṃ, yat, tat, padam anuttamam | loka-bandhur, loka-nātho, Mādhavo, bhakta-vatsalaḥ || (VS 78 = MBh XIII.135.91)
The other name I have bolded here is going to be significant in the next post.
The full verse reads as follows, with a tentative translation:
«tad» ity anabhisandhāya phalaṃ yajña-tapaḥ-kriyāḥ | dāna-kriyāś ca vividhāḥ kriyante mokṣa-kāṅkṣibhiḥ || (BhG XVII.25)
Those who seek liberation perform multifarious sacrifices, austerities, and gift-givings without seeking any worldly fruit, reciting the word tat.
In certain other verbal forms, in particular the aorist of vowel-final roots as described in a sūtra of Pāṇini, acaḥ karmakartari (AA III.1.62), a distinction can indeed be made between the passive and the reflexive forms. To wit:
The passive form of the sentence “the pot is made by Devadatta” would be Devadattena ghaṭo ’kāri, with the verb obligatorily used in the form akāri.
The reflexive form of the sentence, something like “the pot is made” or even “the pot makes (itself)” could be either ghaṭo ’kāri or ghaṭo ’kṛta, with the choice of verb forms between akāri and akṛta allowing the speaker to express the karmakartari or reflexive sense.