The story cycle set up for the Pandavas’ pilgrimage in the Tirtha-Yatra Parva of the Mahabharata continues to deliver, with sage Lomasha narrating tales conveying the significance of each sacred spot that the brothers visit. The next story in this cycle is the story of Ashtavakra and his debate with sage Bandi.
The simplest way to introduce Ashtavakra is to call him a debate champion of the ancient times. So fond of argumentation is he that even from inside his mother’s womb, he cannot help but point out a logical flaw to his father, sage Kahod, who is, at the point of Ashtavakra’s interjection, lecturing his students. Ashamed and angered, Kahos curses his own unborn son, decreeing that he be born crooked in eight ways (ashta-vakra).
Later, goaded on by his wife, Sujata, to seek riches, Kahoda goes to the court of king Janaka of Mithila. But there a sage named Bandi has monopoly over the king’s patronage. Bandi is an expert conversationalist, someone who in ancient Greece would have been called a Sophist. Any challengers to his primacy are coerced into a public debate, a spectacle of intellectual one-upmanship that the king himself seems to sponsor. The loser has to submerge himself in the river (commit a jal samadhi, so to say). Kahoda loses to Bandi, and is thus forced to kill himself.
At the age of 10, Ashtavakra learns of his father’s fate, and heads towards Mithila to avenge him. In Mithila, when a gatekeeper bars him from entering the tournament of debates, Ashtavakra is able to show that ability, not age, should be a criteria for entry.
The eventual debate with Bandi proceeds rather plainly in the Mahabharata text, and I suspect that other, livelier versions are present in other Hindu texts. Here, Ashtavakra and Bandi take turns in enumerating the glory of each number, starting from two. For example, with the number four, Ashtavakra says: “There are four stages of life for a brahmana. Four are required to complete the sacrifice. There are four directions and four varnas…”
(Caste enforcing, yes. But then, what else did you expect from the Mahabharata?)
At number 13, Bandi runs out of things to say and loses the contest. The feast in Mithila has to progress, though, so he is quickly made to take the jal samadhi. Thus, Ashtavakra, cursed by his father and therefore physically deformed, avenges the same father through his intellect.
Once again, we have a Mahabharata story in which the importance of having an able son is highlighted. The moral here: “To a weak one may be born a strong one, to a foolish one an intelligent one and to an ignorant one a wise one.” The important thing is to have a son. To be without a son is to have no chance of salvation: the worst fate that can befall a man. Safe to say that after the caste system, the primacy of the male child is the most recurrent theme in the epic.
Tanuj Solanki
Twitter@tanujsolanki
The writer is reading the unabridged Mahabharata