The Challenge to being Virtuous: A Lesson from the Mahābhārata

In ‘The Challenge to being Virtuous: A Lesson from the Mahābhārata’, Nirmalya Narayan Chakraborty situates the search for liberation on a tumultuous path of rule following, versus moral particularism in an epic tale of war and peace, tolerance and ignonimity, truth and lies, vengeance and forgiveness. In the realm of moral dilemmas, he focuses on the morality of deception. Nirmalya explains how the quintessential moral player, Yudhis̩t̩hira, who is an embodiment of truth, is justified, or not, to lie to his teacher, Dron̩a. Is such an act universalizable? Even more strange and condemnable, Yudhuis̩t̩hra attempts to make his false statement appear like the truth and arguably deceives himself about his own fall from virtue, after Bhı̄ma kills an elephant belonging to the Pānd̩ava side whose name happens to be Aśvathāman, like Drona’s son. Unaware of the intentional equivocation, Dron̩a goes on rampage and falters. Is all fair in war, or is morality impossible? We shall learn from his analysis the context in which dharma ripens as the fruit of properly motivated action. The moral fruit comes in the form of a direct perception of ‘the real’ across different appearances. This is clear in lessons from Mahābhārata’s authority, Bhı̄ṣma, whose allegiance to non-monotonic reasoning reveals scepticism about universal rule-following. Bhı̄ṣma implies a philosophical account of moral reasoning cannot be given from some external standpoint, outside the worldly conventions of life.