The Gamble

The splendour of Indraprastha and the imperial glory of Yudhishthira were more than Duryodhana's envious heart could bear. And a particular humiliation had sharpened his envy to a blade: for in the hall of illusions, that hall of crystal floors and watery-seeming stone, Duryodhana had been deceived by the cunning surfaces, mistaking solid crystal for water and lifting his robes to cross where there was no water, and falling into a real pool where he had thought there was floor; and Draupadī, it was said, had laughed at his confusion.

That laughter festered in him. And so, when he pined with jealousy of his cousins' glory, Shakuni offered him the means to destroy them without an army: a game of dice, playing upon Yudhishthira's known weakness for the game and upon Shakuni's own absolute mastery of loaded, obedient dice.

Dhritarāshtra gave his consent, overriding the grave warnings of Vidura, as he always overrode wisdom when his son desired otherwise. And when Vidura carried the formal invitation to Indraprastha, he warned Yudhishthira openly that the game was a trap laid to ruin their house. And yet Yudhishthira accepted; for by the warrior's code a formal challenge could not be refused without shame, and beneath the code there was in him too an inner, unmastered pull toward the game itself, a weakness he could not deny. And so, against all warning, he went.

In the great hall of Hastināpura, before Bhīshma and Droṇa and Kripa and Vidura, the tragic game began. Shakuni cast the dice for Duryodhana, the bone dice that answered to his will. And Yudhishthira lost, and lost, and could not stop. He staked and lost his gold and his silver; his herds and his stables; his armies; his servants; and still, gripped by the fever of the game, refusing to rise, he staked more. He staked and lost his brothers, one by one, Nakula, Sahadeva, Arjuna, Bhīma.

And at last, with everything else gone, he staked his own self, and lost that too, and fell into bondage, while Shakuni shouted his triumph.

Let us understand what the story is showing us in this terrible descent, for it is one of its deepest warnings, and the shloka the tradition sets beside it names the whole mechanism: that from dwelling on the objects of the senses comes attachment, and from attachment desire, and from desire, when it is thwarted, anger, and from anger the ruin of the mind.

Yudhishthira, the most righteous of men, the very son of Dharma, was undone here not by any villainy of his own but by a single unmastered attachment, the pull of the game, which he would not or could not set down. He was warned; he knew the trap; and still the fever held him, and drove him from stake to stake down into total ruin, dragging his brothers and his wife and his kingdom down with him.

That is the terror of an unmastered attachment: that it can take even the best of men, in a single evening, and strip him of everything, because the one weakness he would not govern became the door through which all his enemies entered. The dice were loaded; but the deeper loading was in Yudhishthira's own heart, in the one desire he had never learned to still.