The Fall of Jarāsandha

As Indraprastha rose to its glory, the brothers and counsellors of Yudhishthira urged him to perform the Rājasūya, the great imperial sacrifice by which a king declares himself emperor over all other kings. But there stood in the way a mighty obstacle: Jarāsandha, the powerful king of Magadha, who could not be left unconquered while any man claimed to be emperor. And Jarāsandha was no ordinary tyrant.

He held eighty-six captive kings in his dungeons, and he meant to sacrifice them all, to slaughter these eighty-six men to feed his own ego under the cloak of ritual piety. He was raw material power at its most monstrous, strength wholly divorced from righteousness.

Krishna counselled Yudhishthira that Jarāsandha could not be beaten by armies, for his hosts were too vast; he must be reached another way, through the very code of honour he lived by. And so Krishna, Bhīma, and Arjuna disguised themselves as ascetics under vows of silence, and came to Magadha, and by coming at midnight, when a king of honour must receive holy guests whatever the hour, they gained entry to Jarāsandha's presence.

And Jarāsandha, noting the warrior's calluses that the bowstring leaves, and knowing these were no true ascetics, challenged them; and they threw off their disguises and demanded a duel to the death. And Jarāsandha, honourable even in his tyranny, accepted, and chose Bhīma as his match in wrestling.

The duel raged for fourteen days, a titanic struggle of two mighty bodies, and Bhīma could not prevail, for Jarāsandha, however he was broken, seemed always to knit himself whole again. And here Krishna gave the wordless clue that won the fight. For Jarāsandha had been born in two halves, joined together by a demoness, and the two halves could always rejoin; and Krishna took up a blade of grass and split it in two and threw the halves in opposite directions.

And Bhīma understood, and when next he broke Jarāsandha he tore him clean in two and cast the halves far apart, so that they could not find each other and rejoin, and the tyrant died. So fell Jarāsandha, and his eighty-six captive kings went free; and the lesson of his fall is plain, that raw strength without the light of wisdom to guide it is finally self-destroying, mighty enough to hold whole kingdoms captive and yet undone in the end by a single blade of split grass in the hand of the wise.