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The question is whether it is a sacrificial or a suicidal spring, and whether the text
justifies the exaltation of Billy Kwan, especially when so many critics find him to have fallen
into deep depression. The answer lies again in understanding Koch’s source material, in
particular those cited by Kwan himself, the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, and The
Gospels.
8.4.3. The Dilemma of Righteous Action in the Mahabharata and The Gospels
The Bhagavad Gita with its tale of the dilemma faced by Arjuna over choosing a
righteous course of action is but a brief part of the Mahabharata, which has as a central theme
the similar dilemma faced by Arjuna’s brother, King Yudhishthira, the Judistira of the wayang
kulit whose very name means ‘King of Righteousness’. The problem comes out of the two,
sometimes contradictory notions of dharma: ‘the sanatana dharma or absolute moral order
which can never be precisely defined yet is felt to have absolute validity, and the dharma of
caste and canon law as laid down in the various law-books’ (Zaehner, 8). Complicating
matters further is the will of God—whether Brahma, Krishna, Hari, Vishnu or another form of
the eternal, supreme creative force—which is both the eternal sanatana dharma and yet
beyond any limitations of dharma, time or any other imaginable entity. Yudhishthira is the
archetype of the virtue of dharma, and so longs and strives for a peaceful and equitable
settlement between the Kuravas and Pandavas. Krishna, however, repeatedly forces him to act
in ways that are contrary not only to the eternal dharma as interpreted by the ancient texts of
the Brahmanas, ‘but also to the dharma that the King of Righteousness himself embodies and
which the common conscience of the human race acknowledges to be true’ (Zaehner, 64).
Krishna drives Yudhishthira into violence and untruthfulness, causing in him a crisis of guilt
even though he knows that Krishna’s will transcends dharma. ‘His conscience was the first to
protest against a violent and unjust society: there had been no reformers before him’ (Zaehner,
171). Yudhishthira’s paradigmatic struggle with the ambiguities of justice and virtue has
provided strength to all Hindus after him, including Mahatma Gandhi, who ‘was in history
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