Krishna's Embassy

Before the embassy, both sides went to the same man for help, and the scene is the hinge of the whole war. Duryodhana and Arjuna arrived at Krishna’s chamber in Dwaraka at the same hour, while he slept. Duryodhana, in his nature, took the seat at the head, by Krishna’s crown. Arjuna, in his, stood waiting at the feet. Krishna woke and saw the man at his feet first, and so the choosing fell, by Duryodhana’s own arrangement of the room, to Arjuna. Krishna offered the terms exactly: on one side, himself alone, and he would not lift a weapon; on the other, his entire vast army. Duryodhana could hardly believe his luck when Arjuna chose the unarmed man over the host — and took the army home delighted, having mistaken, as he always did, the seeming of strength for its substance. The whole epic is in that division of the spoils.

Then Krishna went to Hastinapura as envoy. The Pandavas asked him to bring back peace if peace could be had on any terms that left them their honour, and not to spend lives to spare their pride; Draupadi alone asked him to remember, in that hall, her hair. He went into the city to a great public welcome that fooled no one, least of all him, and stayed not in the palace but with Vidura, taking sides in advance by the choice of a roof.

In the assembly he put the case without ornament. He set the history before them — the lac house, the dice, the disrobing, the exile kept to its last day — and against it the smallness of what was now asked, and he offered the elders the last clean exit any of them would be given. Bhishma and Drona and Vidura urged Dhritarashtra to take it. Even some of Duryodhana’s own would have taken it. The blind king wished to and could not, because he had never once in this story been able to refuse his son, and the inability was now about to consume an age.

Duryodhana’s answer was not an argument but an act. Rejecting peace, he and his faction resolved to seize the envoy himself — to arrest Krishna in the hall, as though the messenger were the war and could be ended by being bound. It is the dice hall’s lesson refused one final time: the belief that force applied to a person settles the thing the person stands for. Warned by Vidura’s whisper and his own foreknowledge, Krishna let them come, and then showed them, for one instant, what they were proposing to put in chains — the form that the hall could not contain, gods at his every limb, the whole of the cosmos standing in a man they had thought to handcuff. The elders saw it; the blind king begged to be given his sight for the length of it and was; the conspirators fell back. Then the form was gone and there was only the envoy again, declining to be detained, walking out of a hall that had just refused, with both hands, the last peace it would ever be offered.

On the way out Krishna did one more thing the parva insists on. He took Karna aside, alone in the chariot, and offered him the truth and the world with it — but that is its own chapter, and the war now turned, fully and finally, from the question of whether it would happen to the question of who, in it, was really whose.