It is a promise that quakes with a wild and feverish anger that overwhelms Vyasa’s cool speculations.

With Arjuna’s oath the Vedic correspondences in the epic begin to give out. In the Veda, ritualisation is about control. Though war in the epic can be ritualised with some success, it cannot be controlled, since it is driven most fundamentally by the limitless irrationality of human behaviour, of which Arjuna’s vendetta is a prime example.12 It is precisely that which is inexplicable in Arjuna’s decision to identify Jayad·ratha as the focus of his rage that defines the fatal strategy of the epic hero, and throws him out of balance with the Vedic cosmos. That fatal strategy is revenge.

Vyasa’s Vedic interpretation of events can help us to understand the universe of the “Maha·bharata” but it can never explain it. Nor, indeed, can the epic’s rising deities. Scholars have often seen Krishna as some sort of key to the epic’s deeper “meaning,” perhaps because of his self-disclosure as omnipotent being in the “Gita.”13 This regularly misguided predilection first takes root in the very text of the epic itself. Those around Krishna often turn to him in search of answers or help, and receive little useful advice in response. When he encounters Duryodhana clad in his magic armour, it is Arjuna and not Krishna who under-stands why his arrows cannot pierce through it.14 Krishna has to contend with exactly the same mysteries that perplex the rest of the epic’s cast, mysteries expressed in the prismatic seams of the Sanskrit language, where the meaning of things glitters with a restless, alien light. Krishna describes Arjuna’s encounter with Duryodhana as a dyuta, a “dice game,” reminding us of the gamble that brought this entire ________