Vicakhyu Gītā

The Vicakhyu Gītā is in the Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Mokshadharma Parva, Chapter 265. It is the praise of ahiṃsā (non-harm) given by King Vicikhna, a king who became one of the royal voices of non-violence as the highest dharma. Vicikhna taught that a yajña (fire ritual) that involves the killing of animals, even when the texts allow it, is lower than the full practice of ahiṃsā in body, speech and mind. Bhīshma tells the Gītā to Yudhishṭhira. He tells it straight after the Tulādhāra and Jābali dialogue, as a king’s support for the same teaching that Tulādhāra gave to Jābali.

Vicikhna’s argument

Vicikhna starts from the same point as the Tulādhāra and Jābali dialogue. Ahiṃsā is the highest dharma. It is higher than the yajña of ritual, even when that yajña is done correctly and with proper authority. He gives his argument in several steps.

Hiṃsā weakens śraddhā. The act of killing involves, inside the person, the wish to harm another being. This is so even when the killing is covered by the protection of ritual permission. This inner wish to harm, however well the texts may seem to justify it, wears away śraddhā (trust and openness). Śraddhā is the ground of all true sādhanā (spiritual practice). So an act of hiṃsā spoils the one who does it, even when it meets an outward need of the ritual.

The body is not the self. The body of the animal in the yajña is destroyed. But what is the being that lived in that body? It is made to leave against its will, and its consent is not asked. A way of reckoning dharma that counts the killing of an animal in yajña as bringing puṇya (merit) at no cost has to count the harm done to the animal’s own journey of karma. It also has to count the responsibility of the one who caused that harm.

Ahiṃsā is the complete yajña. Vicikhna said that a person who has fully set ahiṃsā in all three ways has done the complete inner yajña. The three ways are kāyika (not harming with the body), vācika (not harming with speech) and mānasika (not even thinking of harm to any being in the mind). The outer animal yajña was meant to point to this inner yajña. The inner yajña is the fulfilment, and the outer one is only a first form.

A king as speaker

What gives the Vicakhyu Gītā its special place in the Mokshadharma Parva is that the speaker is a king. The tradition often links ahiṃsā with the renunciant āśramas and with munis, sannyāsīs and tapasvins. Vicikhna shows that holding ahiṃsā as the highest dharma does not depend on formal renunciation. A king rules, protects, punishes and sometimes goes to war. Yet he can make ahiṃsā the base of his inner life while he does the outer duties of government. The outer act and the inner aim are on different levels, and the rule of ahiṃsā works at the inner level, where all true dharma has its root.

Other dialogues in the same group

The Mokshadharma Parva also holds the Tulādhāra and Jābali dialogue, the Cirakārī upākhyāna, the dialogue of Dyumatsena and Satyavān, and the dialogue of Syūmaraśmi and Kapila. Together with the Vicakhyu Gītā these form a group of narratives on ahiṃsā and dharma. The thread that runs through them is that hiṃsā, however it is dressed in ritual, custom or government, shows a limit in the understanding of dharma, which the fully wise go beyond.

Sources

• Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Mokshadharma Parva, Chapter 265