Dharma and range of test

Yudhishthira passes the following tests
The First Test: Yudhisthira and the Dog [summary]
Draupadi and the Pandavas leave Hastin~pura, and a dog joins Yudhi.s.thira.
As they walk, they each fall dead until only Yudhisthira and the dog are left
alive. Indra appears and invites Yudhi.s.thira into his chariot to take him to
heaven. Yudhisthira responds that he does not want to go to heaven without
his brothers and Draupadi. Indra assures YudhiHhira they are all in heaven.
Yudhisthira then agrees to fide Indra's chariot, but only if he can bring his
dog along. Yudhi.s!hira says he does not want to be cruel to one who has been
loyal to him. Indra replies "Abandon the dog. There is no cruelty in that"
(Mah~bh~rata 17.3.8). 5 Yudhi.Hhira refuses, and so Indra reminds Yudhi.st.hira
of how dirty, how polluted, and how polluting dogs are. Still Yudhi.s[hira does
not budge from his position. Eventually the dog turns into the god Dharma
and congratulates Yudhishthira: "Great king, Bharata, you are well born, with
the good conduct and intelligence of your father and with compassion for all
creatures" (17.3.17). Dharma then reminds Yudhi.s!hira that it was he who tested
Yudhis.lhira before in the Dvaita forest (17.3).
Curiously, Dharma does not tell Yudhi.s.thira why he tested him. We shall
return to this question later.
The Second Test: Yudhishthira and the False Heaven [summary]
When Yudhi~!hira reaches heaven, he sees Duryodhana seated on a throne. He
does not see the other PAod.avas, and, more emphatically, he does not see Kam.a.
(The other P~dava brothers are surprisingly less prominent than Karma in
Yudhisthira's lament.) And so Yudhisthira wants to leave. Indra "in a speech
utterly devoid of cruelty ''6 says "Great king, dwell in this place, that you have
won by your own good actions. Why do you still drag human affection about,
even now?" (17.3.30-31). The test continues in an even harder form than the
two previous ones. A messenger of the gods leads Yudhi.s.thira to a dark, awful,
bad-smelling place; he is tired and exhausted. When Yudhis..thira turns to leave
The Untested Dharma is Not Worth Living / 121
(he is at the limits of his endurance, 18.2.30-31), voices call out imploring him
to stay. When he asks their names, they are the P~.nd.avas, Karn. a, Draupadi, and
the sons of Draupadi. He then decides to stay there. Just as he does, all the Gods
appear, and it turns out that there, where Yudhisthira is standing, is really
heaven (18.1-3).
In both of these tests, Yudhisthira makes the right choice and upholds dharma,
despite an argument based on dharma to lead him in a different direction--an
argument which is, moreover, an argument proposed by a god.
The fact that Yudhi.s.thira, the Dharma king, is tested raises two interesting
points: one about Yudhi.st.hira's character, and the other about the epic's attitude
towards dharma. Central here is the word that the god Dharma uses for "test,"
namely jijhasa. (This is a desiderative from the root verb j~a, "to know.")
Significantly, the desire to know dharma is caught up in testing dharma.
Furthermore, just as Yudhi.s.thira gambles to the extreme, the epic authors
push dharma to the extreme through their imaginations. In their desire to know
dharma, the epic authors test dharma, as encapsulated by jijaasa. (From
Draupadi humiliated at the Kaurava court, to Arjuna on the battlefield, to
Yudhisthira at the gates of heaven, the epic is constantly posing serious ethical
dilemmas, even dilemmas about the very systems that it itself seems to propose.)
Just as the god Dharma tests Yudhi.s.thira, the authors test dharma. Just as the
god Dharma's test is a test of resilience, the authors test dharma in that they
show how, even in extreme situations, extraordinary human beings not only
recognize dharma but do so despite its subtlety and despite all other diversions.
The resilience of that human aspect of dharma is the true test of its resiliency:
dharma would not be dharma if no human being could ever know it.
This raises a methodological point: it seems the Mahabharata is driven by a
search for order and a search for limits. The text contains both long stretches of
rule-based dharma as well as story after story where dharma is subtle, paradoxical,
surprising, and still surprisingly not ungraspable or impossible. A. K.
Ramanujan (1989) compared Manu to Kant; comparing the epic authors to Kant
may help clarify their position. They would agree with Kant that every moral
dilemma has an answer; in that way, dharma is never ambiguous, even if it is
subtle (suk.sma). But they would disagree with Kant that we know that we are
truly ethical when we rise above our natures; rather, the epic authors would say
that we know we are fulfilling our human potential when our ethical decisions
line up with the duties of our biological natures. The epic authors would also not
agree with Kant that the answer to every moral dilemma can emerge from a
(rationalized) system of dharma (in the sense of "ethics"). No dharmagastra, not
even the Mahabharata itself, has all the answers. (Even if the Mahabharata
contains all that human beings need to know, perhaps, like an ironic Socratic
122 / Aditya Adarkar
ignorance, this fact is also something that human beings need to know.) Finally,
even though incomplete, a rationalized, systematic approach can provide almost
everything that we do need to resolve ethical dilemmas. So the Mah~bhdrata as
a system of dharma is almost complete, but never radically complete. The
project, then, of the epic authors is not to show that there is some "counterexample"
to dharma; instead, it seems the epic authors are stretching the limits
of what dharma contains.
If we suspect that the god Dharma knew that Yudhi.s.thira would "pass" his
tests, we might also suspect that the epic authors are not so much truly "testing"
dharma as helping the reader (or listener) believe that dharma is indeed universal
and resilient, that it is ever subtle, but also within the human capacity to
grasp. In other words, they want to help their readers to have faith in dharma, to
not waver in that faith, and to have faith in the idea of dharma even when it
seems dharma has collapsed around them.
Dharma also gets tested when Yudhisthira is asked to tell a lie and not repent in return a test that dharma can also be twisted to meet ends.