The Cosmic Origin of the Lunar Dynasty

The great kings who would one day face each other across the terrible field of Kurukshetra were not men of some ordinary house. They came of an ancient and a sacred line, the Chandravamsha, the Lunar Dynasty, which traced its descent all the way back to Chandra, the god of the moon himself; and there is meaning in that descent, and it is worth pausing on before we follow the line down through the generations.

For there are two great royal lines in the old stories, and they are set against each other like the sun and the moon. There is the Sūryavamsha, the Solar Dynasty, the line of Rāma, and it is like the sun: blazing, steady, unyielding, the line of absolute discipline and public duty, of the dharma that holds firm whatever it costs.

And there is the Chandravamsha, the Lunar Dynasty, the line we now follow, and it is like the moon: cool, reflective, changeable, shadowed, the line of deep emotion and deep desire and the tangled struggles of the human heart. If the story of Rāma is a story of duty held fast against every sorrow, the story of the Chandravamsha is a story of the human soul in all its complexity, its passions and its errors and its long slow learning, and the difference is written into the very lineages from which the two epics spring.

From Chandra came Budha, the lord of intellect, who wedded Ilā; and from that union was born Purūravas, the first mortal king of the line. Purūravas was a ruler of great brilliance, honoured by gods and men alike, and it was he who first gave the dynasty its earthly root, coming down into the fertile plains of the north, into the good land that lies between the sacred rivers Gangā and Yamunā, and founding there the ancient capital that would become the seat of the Kuru power, the city of Hastināpura.

And from Purūravas the line came down, generation upon generation: Āyus, and then Nahusha, and then Yayāti, and Kuru, and at last Shantanu, each a king in his turn, and through them all the city of Hastināpura grew from a royal settlement into a great and glorious metropolis, famed for its wealth and its learning and its devotion to dharma.

The kings of the Lunar Line ruled, at their best, with a deep understanding of the sacred purpose of a kingdom, holding that the state was not merely an engine of power but a field consecrated to a higher end, a ground upon which the human soul might grow toward the divine, and they built their cities to mirror that order, with broad streets and great temples and halls where the wise debated the deepest questions of the spirit.

And yet, and here is the shadow that lies over the whole line and the whole story we are about to tell, the very richness of the Chandravamsha, its depth of feeling and of desire, was also its danger.

For a heart capable of great love is capable also of great longing, and a soul of deep passion is a soul easily pulled by passion into error; and the kings of the Lunar Line carried in their very blood, along with their brilliance and their virtue, a susceptibility to the pull of desire, to the tangling of the heart, that would work itself out, across the generations, in a long chain of passions and curses and tragic choices, until it came at last to its terrible harvest on the field of Kurukshetra.

The seeds of both the highest virtue and the deepest ruin lay together in that blood, waiting for the turning of the generations to bring them to their fruit; and the story of the Mahābhārata is, in large part, the story of that ripening.