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STORIES · THE MAHĀBHĀRATA · Anuśāsana

Bhishma on the bed of arrows gives the thousand names

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The most chanted Hindu text in South India is a deathbed answer to a grieving king.

The war is over, and the Pandavas have won, but Yudhishthira cannot enjoy it. The throne feels heavy. He has questions about kingship and duty that no one living can answer fully, and he wants to put them to the man who knows the most: Bhishma, lying on his bed of arrows.

The way the story begins is unusual. Yudhishthira finds Krishna deep in meditation, and he is alarmed. He says that Krishna's breath is still, his senses drawn into his mind, his speech and mind drawn into his understanding, and his body is as still as a post or a stone or a lamp flame in windless air. He asks what is happening and whether the three worlds are all right.

Krishna explains. Bhishma, lying on his bed of arrows and near his end, has been in his thoughts, and so Krishna turned his own mind to Bhishma. He then praises the old warrior at length. Bhishma beat all the assembled kings at the princesses' marriage ceremony of Kashi and carried off the three princesses for his brother. He fought the sage Rama of the Bhrigu line for twenty-three days without losing. He was born of the river Ganga and taught by Vasishtha, he mastered the celestial weapons and the four Vedas, and he knows the past, the present and the future. When he goes to heaven, Krishna says, the earth will seem like a moonless night. So Yudhishthira should go to him now and ask him about the aims of life, the duties of the four orders and the four stages of life, and the whole duty of kings, because all this knowledge will vanish with Bhishma.

Yudhishthira, with tears in his voice, agrees. They will go when the sun turns north, the moment Bhishma has chosen for his death. Krishna asks Satyaki to have his chariot yoked, and Daruka brings it, with its golden fittings and its Garuda banner.

In the next section Bhishma, surrounded by sages, withdraws his soul inwards as the sun starts its northward course and, with joined hands, he sings a hymn of praise to Krishna. Krishna, learning of this through yoga, gives him divine knowledge of past, present and future and leaves. The whole company, with Krishna, the Pandavas, Kripa, Yuyutsu and Sanjaya, drives out in their chariots.

Then comes the long teaching, which fills much of the Mahabharata's later books. At the start of the Anushasana Parva's chapter 149, Yudhishthira, having heard all about duties and the acts that cleanse sin, asks Bhishma five questions. Who is the one god in the world? What is the one refuge? Whose praise or worship brings people what is good? Which religion is the best of all? Which mantras free a living creature from the bonds of birth?

Bhishma answers by pointing to Vasudeva, Vishnu, Lord of the universe and God of gods. Devotion, meditation, bowing and sacrifice to him bring freedom from sorrow, and that, Bhishma says, is the best dharma. He calls Vasudeva the highest energy, the highest penance, Brahma and the refuge, and the source of all beings. And so he says he will recite the thousand names which the sages have sung, for the good of all. The chapter then begins to list the names.

That is the Vishnu Sahasranama: not a stand-alone hymn, but a reply to five questions from a grieving king, given by a dying teacher whose own mind was just then fixed on Krishna. Later traditions also carry a version in the Padma, Skanda and Garuda Puranas, but the epic form is in the Anushasana Parva.

Who: Bhishma, Yudhishthira, Krishna

Bound to

Two commentaries on the thousand names: Shankara and Parasara Bhattar teaches

Bhishma: a Vasu, a cow, and Bhishma Ashtami trivia-about

The phala-shruti and the claim that one Rama name equals the thousand trivia-about

Day ten: Śikhaṇḍin and Arjuna fell Bhīṣma; the bed of arrows, the pillow and the water origin

Bhīṣma Leaves His Body at the Turning of the Sun origin

Places: Kurukshetra

Where this comes from

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