Itihāsa / Mahābhārata chronicle / Śānti · 44 of 50
44. The king who will not be king
Śānti (शान्ति)
Yudhiṣṭhira will not sit down. He says the kingdom is a crime, that the throne is the fee of a lie and a broken thigh and a night attack he did not order and does not get to disown. He wants the forest, permanently, the way the thirteenth year was not permanent. His brothers answer, each in character. Bhīma with impatience, Arjuna with the warrior's law, the twins with duty. Draupadī, who has earned the right to a harder speech than any of them, tells him that a grief which abandons the living is another way of losing.
Vyāsa says it. Kṛṣṇa says it. A king who leaves the kingdom to chaos is not innocent of what the chaos does to the weak. The argument is not that the war was clean. The argument is that the bill has come due in the form of people who are still alive. Yudhiṣṭhira sits. He does not sit as a man convinced. He sits as a man out-argued by the living.
Bhīṣma is still on the arrows, waiting for the sun. The new king goes to the old commander to be taught how to be the thing he does not want to be. The Śānti-parva, the longest stretch of teaching in the poem, begins as a bedside instruction of a ruined victor by a dying man who helped to ruin him. Nothing about the setting lets the doctrine float free of the field.
नेपालीमा
युधिष्ठिर सिंहासनमा बस्न मानेनन्। उनले राज्य अपराध हो भने। उनले वन चाहे। भीम, अर्जुन र जुम्ल्याहाले आ-आफ्नै स्वभावअनुसार उत्तर दिए। द्रौपदीले जीवितलाई छाड्ने शोक अर्को हार हो भनिन्। व्यास र कृष्णले पनि भन्नुभयो, राज्यलाई अराजकतामा छाडेर जानु निर्दोष होइन। युधिष्ठिर बसे, विश्वस्त भएर होइन, जीवितहरूसँग तर्कमा हारेर। भीष्म अझै वाणमा थिए। नयाँ राजा शासन गर्न सिक्न उनीकहाँ गए। शान्तिपर्वको सिद्धान्त मैदानबाट अलग भएर तैरिएको होइन।