The image of dharma as a bull losing a leg in each age is not only a diagram. The Bhagavata Purana stages it as a scene, and the scene belongs to Parikshit, the Pandavas’ grandson, early in his reign. Touring his kingdom, he comes upon a bull standing on a single leg and a cow in tears beside it, while a man dressed as a king beats them both with a club. The bull is Dharma himself; the cow is Bhumi, the Earth, grieving because Krishna has left the world; and the man in royal clothes is Kali, the personified spirit of the new age, already at work.
Parikshit asks the bull who has maimed him, and the answer is one of the Bhagavata’s small philosophical jewels. Dharma declines to name a culprit. Some say the self is the cause of suffering, he says, some blame fate, some karma, some nature, some God; he will not presume to say which. Parikshit recognises the reply for what it is, the answer of dharma itself, which does not cast blame, and he identifies the missing legs for the reader: austerity, purity and compassion are gone, and the bull now stands on truthfulness alone, which Kali is working to break.
Parikshit draws his sword to kill Kali, and Kali falls at his feet and asks for refuge. Bound by the duty of a king to protect those who surrender, Parikshit spares him but restricts where he may live: gambling, drinking, illicit sex and slaughter. When Kali asks for somewhere more, Parikshit grants him a fifth place, gold, and the text notes that with gold come falsehood, pride, lust, enmity and envy. It is an unusually precise piece of moral psychology for a myth: the new age is not allowed to rule openly, but it is given lodgings inside specific human habits, and wherever those habits are indulged, it has a home.
Parikshit’s own story, told at the close of the previous series on this site, ends with him cursed to die in seven days, and the Bhagavata is the text recited to him in those days. The two scenes belong together. The king who confined Kali to a few rooms of the world is still undone by a single moment of irritation, a dead snake draped over a silent sage. The bull on one leg is not only an image of an age; it is a description of how fragile any single person’s dharma is when truthfulness is the only leg left to stand on.
Part 7 of 30 — Series V: What Time Is Made Of
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