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considerations and hesitations to ignore the consequences and act. The Gita does reiterate the
inescapable force of karma when Krishna tells Arjuna that nature will compel him to fight the
battle he longs to avoid:
Because thou art in the bondage of Karma, of the forces of thine own past life;
and that which thou, in thy delusion, with a good will dost not want to do,
unwillingly thou shalt have to do. (Bhagavad Gita 18.60)
Yet, alongside this statement of predestination, Krishna reaffirms Arjuna’s freedom of will:
I have given thee words of vision and wisdom more secret than hidden
mysteries. Ponder them in the silence of thy soul, and then in freedom do thy
will. (BG, 18.63)
The interaction of fate and free will is an important theme throughout the Mahabharata.
Zaehner notes that, while it ‘stresses time and again the primacy of fate over human effort, it
none the less compares the two to the rain which prepares the ground and the seed that man
puts into it (5.78.2-5): the two are interdependent and work in harmony together’. Karma is a
universal phenomenon of which human karma is but a part, and ‘the cosmic dharma’ and ‘fate’
are other terms for God’s will. It is therefore precisely ‘man’s co-operation with fate’ which
‘justifies him and earns him a place in heaven or that causes him to enter into God’ (Zaehner,
107).
8.4.1. Billy Kwan’s Sacred Battle for the Soul
It is clear that Billy is searching for such a way to exercise his will in co-operation with
dharma, but has been unable to bring himself beyond an intellectual commitment in which he
is, like Arjuna, overwhelmed by the contradictions. He is therefore looking for a surrogate, a
man of action rather than of thought, and thinks he has found one in Guy Hamilton. When he
organises Hamilton’s interview with the Indonesian Communist Party chief, Billy says the
interview needs a ‘good instrument to transmit it’, adding, ‘I’ve chosen a good instrument’
(YLD, 36). Cookie agrees that Hamilton’s natural inclination to act without being inhibited by
considerations of the ‘natures, intensities, and needs’ of those around him made him ‘the
perfect vessel for Billy Kwan’s purposes’ (YLD, 38). Hamilton finally comes to sense those
purposes after the PKI interview which makes him an instant celebrity, mixing a feeling of
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