Yudhishthira's Anguish

The victory brought Yudhishthira no peace, but only the leaden weight of the slaughter pressing on his conscience; and then, on the banks of the Yamunā, at the funeral rites, the deepest blow of all fell upon him.

For Kuntī stood before her sons, with tears streaming down her aged face, and made the disclosure she had hidden for a lifetime: that Karṇa, the bitterest enemy of the Pāṇḍavas, the warrior they had mocked and hunted and at last killed by controversial means, was her own firstborn son, born of the Sun before her marriage; and she wept as she confessed her youthful folly of setting him afloat on the river and denying him his birthright.

This shattered Yudhishthira. To learn that he had engineered the death of his own eldest brother, the one to whom, as the elder, he owed allegiance, the one who by right should have sat upon the throne while Yudhishthira served him, threw him into an abyss of despair. By keeping this secret, he wept to his mother, you have made me the murderer of my own blood; we fought for a kingdom and slaughtered the very foundation of our line.

And in his anguish he pronounced a strange, historic curse upon all women: that henceforth no woman in the world should ever be able to keep a secret; a bitter cry, born of a son's unbearable grief at a secret kept too long and too well.

And the sage Nārada came to give him a wider view, to lift him from the belief that Karṇa's death was his doing alone.

Karṇa's end, Nārada explained, was not the work of your arrows only, but the culmination of a whole web of past deeds and curses gathered across his life: the curse of Parashurāma, that his weapons would fail him at his hour of need, the punishment for a deception; the curse of a brāhmaṇa whose cow he had killed, that his chariot wheel would sink in his final combat; the sacrifice of his natural armour, begged from him by Indra in disguise to protect Arjuna; the constant demoralizing of his spirit by his own charioteer Shalya; and above all his own pledge to Kuntī to spare four of her sons.

All these together brought Karṇa down; do not grieve as though you alone had killed him.

Yet the metaphysical consolation brought little comfort to Yudhishthira's weeping heart; and the story lets it be so, for it knows that a true grief is not argued away, that even the correct understanding that many causes wove together to bring about a death does not lift from a brother the horror of having killed his brother. Some sorrows are not to be reasoned out of, only borne; and Yudhishthira had now to bear the heaviest of them, the knowledge of the noble brother he had never known and had helped to kill.