The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c17.13

c17.13

Allegedly there once was a golden age, the *kṛtayuga*, when the dharma not only reigned from on high but fully governed man’s affairs on earth. But even in that golden age, the matter was not unambiguous, for how is it that in spite of the dharma’s governance, the world could progressively fall away from it till it reached our own wretched age, the irredeemable *kaliyuga*, fourth and last of the world periods? The answer, as given in a passage from the *Mahābhārata*, is in the very perfection of the dharma’s governance.²³ We are told that in those blessed times, people protected each other with the help of the dharma alone (*dharmenaiva*)—as, of course, they should. But it is precisely thereby that, as our text dryly explains, the people became overwhelmed and confusion entered the world. This, then, is meant to explain the necessity of kingship. Now the king is indeed the mediator between dharma and world. But this does not solve the problem, for kingship could do little if anything to stop the progressive weakening and eventual dissolution of dharma in the successive world ages. The institution of kingship could only offer a focus for the unresolved and essentially insoluble tension. Far from patching over the rift, mythic imagination shows it to have been there from the very beginning, waiting to be focused on the king. We can now see how fatal its descent into the world is for the dharma, for in order to be universal, it has to accommodate within itself its own opposite, the principle of confusion and disorder. That, after all, is what is meant when the texts emphasize the utter subtlety of the dharma. This is not the subtlety of literate doctrine but the tension that only the sage can handle, even though he cannot resolve it.