Why Bhishma waited for Uttarayana

The fall

"I am still here."

Arjuna's arrows brought Bhishma down when only a little of the day was left. So many arrows had gone into him that "he did not touch the ground." He lay on them as on a bed.

Any other man would have died there. Bhishma "did not allow his senses to depart, but thought about the right time."

The time was wrong. The sun was on its southern course, which is called dakshinayana. Voices in the sky asked why so great a warrior should choose such a time to go. Bhishma answered them from the ground: "I am still here."

He had decided to wait. Knowing this, his mother, the river Ganga, sent sages to him in the form of swans. They walked around him, spoke of the southern sun, and started to leave. Bhishma said to them:

"I will retain my life, wishing for uttarayana. I have always had complete control about when I would give up my life."

Uttarayana is the northern course of the sun. The notes to the Critical Edition's translation place it from the middle of January to the middle of July.

The boon

A father's gift.

How could he say this? The epic tells us much earlier, in the Adi Parva, its first book. Young Devavrata, as Bhishma was then called, gave up the throne and promised never to marry. He did this so that his father, King Shantanu, could marry Satyavati. That promise earned him the name Bhishma.

His father was so pleased that he granted him a boon: "he would only die when he himself so willed."

So Bhishma was not hoping to last until the sun turned. He had held this power since he was young, and on the bed of arrows he used it.

Two old presidents

4 July 1826.

The epic's answer needs a boon, and most of us have none. Yet people still tell stories of someone who seemed to hold on for a day that mattered. In his book Beyond Belief, the writer Nir Eyal tells a story from America that sounds very like Bhishma's.

In the summer of 1826, Thomas Jefferson, who had once been president of the United States, lay dying at his home. He was eighty-three. He had written the Declaration of Independence, the paper that announced America's freedom from Britain. America marks it every year on 4 July, as India marks 15 August, and the fiftieth anniversary was coming.

His family remembered him asking whether 4 July had come. He died on that day, a little before one in the afternoon.

Far to the north, his old rival John Adams, who had also been president, was dying too. Adams was ninety, and he had helped to make the same Declaration. He died that evening, on the same date. He did not know that Jefferson had gone. His last words are said to have been "Thomas Jefferson survives."

Five years later, on 4 July 1831, James Monroe died as well. He was the third American president to die on that date. To Eyal, it looks almost as if they had chosen it.

A fair question

Can people really do this?

It is a lovely idea, so we should be careful with it.

The Adams story is less tidy than it sounds. It seems his last word was hard to make out. His own son wrote in his diary that the last word was "indistinctly and imperfectly uttered."

The science is untidy too. In 1990, two researchers looked at the deaths of old Chinese people in California. The Harvest Moon Festival is the autumn festival when Chinese families gather. The researchers reported that deaths fell by about a third in the week before it, and rose by about a third in the week after. It seemed that people were holding on for the festival.

Then others checked. In 2004, an economist named Gary Smith studied later records and found no such dip. He also said that the old result depended on one choice. Were deaths on the festival day itself counted in the week before, or in the week after?

The same year, researchers studied more than 300,000 cancer deaths in the American state of Ohio. They found no sign that patients held on for Christmas, for their birthdays, or for Thanksgiving, the American family holiday in November. A review of eighteen earlier studies said the case for holding on was not convincing. One of the Ohio researchers said the belief came from wishful thinking and selective memory. Selective memory means remembering the deaths that fit the story and forgetting the rest.

A few scholars still suspect that devout people may hold on a little before their holy days. So the question is open, and most of the evidence leans against it. Three presidents on one date may be nothing more than chance.

Not the same wait

"It has been like one hundred years."

The two stories look alike, and they are different. If Jefferson held on, he did so in the way a tired old man holds on for a day that matters to him. Nobody promised him anything.

The Mahabharata makes a far larger claim about Bhishma, and it makes it openly. He had a boon. Krishna told him that the Vasus, the gods he had once been one of, were guarding him unseen until the sun turned. At the very end, Krishna said to him: "Like a servant with a bowed head, death was under your control."

The epic does not pretend that this was easy. When the time came, Bhishma told Yudhishthira how long it had been:

"Fifty-eight nights have passed since I have been lying down here, on these arrows that are sharp at the tip. It has been like one hundred years."

Why the north?

The path of no return.

Why did the direction of the sun matter so much? Before the fighting began, Krishna had explained it to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. There are two roads after death, he said. One of them runs through "the six months when the sun heads north", and those who take it do not come back to be born again. The other runs through the six southern months, and it brings a soul back.

Later, teaching Yudhishthira, Bhishma repeated the words of the sage Parashara on this. A man who dies under the northern sun, at an auspicious hour, is one who has done auspicious deeds. So 4 July was a date in a nation's memory. Uttarayana, for Bhishma, was the way out of the world.

What the wait became

Two whole books.

Here is the part of the story that the American one does not have. Bhishma did not only wait.

After the war, Yudhishthira was broken with grief for all the kinsmen he had killed. Krishna went with him to the bed of arrows and told Bhishma, "Fifty-six days still remain in your life." Then he gave him a task: "Speak meaningful words that will dispel his sorrow."

A reader who counts will find that the numbers do not agree. The war still had eight days to run after Bhishma fell, so fifty-six more days from this visit is longer than the fifty-eight nights he counts at the end. The text does not explain this.

Bhishma said that he was too weak, and that his mind was not clear. So Krishna gave him one more boon, a clear mind and no weakness. And the old man began to teach.

What he said fills the Shanti Parva and the Anushasana Parva, two long books of the epic. It covers kingship, duty, grief and moksha, the soul's freedom from rebirth. It also holds the Vishnu Sahasranama, the thousand names of Vishnu, which millions still chant today.

Once, in the middle of the teaching, Yudhishthira said what any of us would say to a dying grandfather:

"There are only a few days left for the sun in dakshinayana. When the illustrious sun turns, you will go to your supreme objective. When you have departed, where will we hear what is best for us?"

The day

He gave up the world himself.

When the sun turned, Yudhishthira came back to Kurukshetra with fire for the funeral. Bhishma told him, "The sacred month of Magha has arrived." He spoke to his family one last time and asked their permission to go.

Then he drew his breath upward through his body by yoga. As it moved, his wounds closed, and everyone around him saw it. It left through the crown of his head, like a great meteor. The text is careful about who did this. Bhishma, it says, did "himself give up this world."

Did Jefferson choose his day? Nobody can say. The Mahabharata has no such doubt about Bhishma.

Where this comes from

This site follows the Critical Edition, the text rebuilt at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.

The passages above are from: Bhishma Parva, chapter 114; Adi Parva, chapter 94; the Bhagavad Gita, chapter 8; Shanti Parva, chapters 51, 52, 286 and 291; and Anushasana Parva, chapters 135, 153 and 154. The dates of the two courses of the sun are from the translation's notes.

The American part is not from the epic. It draws on Nir Eyal with Julie Li, Beyond Belief (2026); Phillips and Smith, JAMA (1990); Young and Hade, JAMA (2004); and Smith; Skala and Freedland; and Idler and Kasl, all in Psychosomatic Medicine (2004).

Keep reading

Bhishma fell on the tenth of the eighteen days of Kurukshetra. See where his long teaching sits in the eighteen parvas. Or learn the names he spoke, in the Vishnu Sahasranama.