The Battle Begins

The great war of Kurukshetra erupted with the blare of a thousand conches and the thunder of eighteen divisions, and the plain became a terrifying arena where the strength of men clashed against the unbending laws of cosmic justice. For ten days the aged Bhīshma led the Kaurava host as its supreme commander, and he raged across the field like a consuming fire, so swift in his movements that to the bewildered Pāṇḍava soldiers he seemed to multiply into a hundred Bhīshmas, laying waste their ranks.

The first days went hard for the Pāṇḍavas. Young Prince Uttara, the son of Virāṭa, was impaled by Shalya's javelin and fell lifeless; his brother Shveta, avenging him, broke Bhīshma's standard before Bhīshma pierced him too with a fatal shaft. And the unchecked onslaught of the patriarch threw Yudhishthira into despair, until Krishna comforted him and steadied him.

Stung by Duryodhana's bitter charge that he was sparing the Pāṇḍavas out of love, Bhīshma fought with terrible heroism; and when Arjuna, paralyzed by reverence and love for the grandfather who had raised him, held back his hand and shot weak, hesitant arrows, Krishna's righteous anger flamed up.

To defend the cause of dharma, Krishna flung down the reins, leapt from the chariot, and caught up a broken chariot wheel, brandishing it like his discus, vowing to slay Bhīshma himself; and Arjuna threw himself at the Lord's feet, weeping, begging him not to break his sacred vow never to fight, and pledging to cast off his hesitation and do his warrior's duty.

But Bhīshma could not be beaten while he chose to fight, and the Pāṇḍavas at last resorted to a solemn stratagem to release him. For Bhīshma had vowed never to raise a weapon against one who had been born a woman; and so they placed Shikhaṇḍī, who had been born the woman Ambā and reborn to be Bhīshma's death, at the front of Arjuna's chariot.

And when Bhīshma saw Shikhaṇḍī, he recognized the reincarnation of the woman he had wronged so long ago, and he understood that his hour had come; and he laid down his weapons and stood peaceful amid the storm of battle. And Arjuna, screened behind Shikhaṇḍī, steeled his heart and loosed a torrent of arrows that pierced the patriarch at every joint.

Bhīshma fell headlong from his chariot; but so densely was his body transfixed with arrows that it did not touch the earth, and he lay instead upon a bed of arrows, a bed of honour formed by Arjuna's own shafts. And as the great veteran lay there, waiting, for he had the power to choose the hour of his death and would not die until the auspicious northern turning of the sun, Arjuna, to quench his grandfather's thirst, drove an arrow into the earth and brought up a cool stream of water to his lips.

And both armies stood in silent reverence around the fallen patriarch, the grandsire of them all, who lay dying by inches on his bed of arrows, keeping the war waiting upon his own chosen hour of death.

There is a deep sorrow at the heart of Bhīshma's fall, and it is the sorrow of his whole life come to its harvest. That terrible vow of his youth, the renunciation of throne and marriage and children for his father's sake, had bound him ever after to the throne of Hastināpura, whoever held it and however they used it; and so this best of men, this soul of honour, had been chained by his own vow to fight, at the last, for Duryodhana's unjust cause, against the very Pāṇḍavas whom he loved and knew to be in the right.

His greatness and his tragedy were one: the vow that made him the wonder of the world made him also the prisoner of a lifetime, and set him at the end on the wrong side of the great war, to fall by the hand of a wrong he himself had done long ago. He fell released, at last, from the long bondage of his own magnificent renunciation.