Value Education and Spirituality 13 – Mahabharata 7 – Yudhisthira 1 – Gambling

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Welcome back to the Elegition and Spirituality series. We are discussing from the Mahabharata and we will discuss about Yudhishtira and how gambling ruins even the extraordinary, the great, what to speak of the ordinary people.
So, Yudhishtira was a virtuous king who was known as Dharmaraj. And he was the eldest of the five Pandava brothers. And he, because their father passed away when they were quite young.
So, being the eldest, he took almost a parental role towards the whole family. And he naturally became the king being the eldest and primogeniture being the principal, operational in dynastic succession at those times. So, he became the king of the, he was supposed to become the king of the whole Kuru kingdom.
But because Duryodhana was power hungry and in order to maintain peace, they decided to divide the kingdom into two. And Duryodhana became the king of the existing Kuru capital. That meant the major half of the kingdom, the prosperous half.
So, that was Hastinapur’s kingdom, he became the capital. And then another part was Khandavprastha for which Yudhishthira became the capital. And he, by his industriousness and by his virtuousness, he made that into a flourishing kingdom also.
And then he performed a great celebratory sacrifice to proclaim his monarchy. That made Duryodhana envious. And Duryodhana called Yudhishthira for a gambling match.
So, now when the sacrifice got over and he could see actually that he was envious. Yudhishthira could see that Duryodhana was envious. Yudhishthira decided that I will try my best to ensure that there will be no violence at all.
That there will be no discord. And he says that discord happens when we disobey our elders. So, I will try my best to avoid disobeying my elders also.
This was a vow he took when he saw the signs of conflict and Vyasadeva also told him that actually there are many omens that there will be an impending war in future. So, he wanted to minimize chances of all that. Now, in the meanwhile, Duryodhana, engorded by Shakuni, hatched a scheme to get the Pandavas to come there for a fight, for a gambling match.
And they sent Vidura. Now, initially when the gambling match was proposed, at that time Vidura, Bhishma, the elders strongly opposed. They said gambling will lead to dissension and it will lead to destruction eventually.
So, please avoid it. But Duryodhana was not ready to listen. And so, they decided to have the match.
And Vidura was sent as the emissary to invite the Pandavas. When Yudhishthira first heard this, he said, Oh Katra, actually the match takes place. Katwa was like another name for Vidura.
Oh Katwa, if we gamble, we will surely fight. We should avoid gambling. So, Vidura’s face was also crestfallen, filled with anxiety and sorrow.
He could foresee the imminent conflict and destruction that would result from the conflict. He said, yes, I know. I tried my best to advise the king against the gambling match, but he did not listen to me.
And Yudhishthira felt morally torn. He did not want to gamble. But he also had just, it was his nature to obey his elders.
And just now he had also taken a vow that I will obey my elders. He had not thought, so now he has put a situation where he did not know what to do. And then he thought, it is not just a matter of sticking to his words.
Even if he decided to disobey and not go for the gambling match, not only would he be labeled as a coward, but what the conflict that was there, that would anyway, which was simmering anyway, would come in the open. And maybe there will be direct hostilities. Maybe if he went for gambling and he could keep the hostilities at a low level and maybe things would not become as bad as they might become.
Otherwise, the hostilities came out in the open. So, he decided to go along. And when he reached the Kuru assembly, at that time, he told Duryodhana, first thing he said, Why do you want to steal away from me the money that I am using for serving society? Serving for the, using for the well-being of society.
So, Dushyakuni and Duryodhana put on innocent faces and said, We don’t want to steal any money. We just want to have a game. And if you are afraid of playing, don’t play.
Nobody is forcing you. So, now, Duryodhana also knew that Yudhishthira was an honourable person. So, according to Kshatriya codes at that time, Duryodhana, I knew that if a Kshatriya is challenged for a gambling match, Kshatriya cannot refuse.
Duryodhana said, so Yudhishthira said, If you ask me for a gambling match, I cannot refuse. But I do not wish to fight. You know, I have enough wealth and I do not wish to gain any more.
Then he asked, oh, we all fight because we want to gain some wealth. So, if you’re not ready to fight, that’s okay. So, now Yudhishthira was still trying to find out some way to avoid the conflict.
He said, okay, I’m ready to fight. But who will stake wealth equal to mine? Yudhishthira was also shrewd. And his hope was that if there was a match between him and Duryodhana, Duryodhana was also not such a great gambler.
So, actually, Duryodhana was simply a bragger. He was neither a great gambler nor a great fighter. He had some skill at mace fighting.
But actually, time and time again in the war, Bhima pounded him to defeat in arrow fights and twice actually fell unconscious and he would have died if other warriors had not come and saved him in time. But the point is that Duryodhana was not a good gambler over here. So, of course, ultimately, nobody is a good gambler.
Gambling itself is bad. But the point is good gambler means in terms of expertise in playing the game. Now, what happened essentially is that Duryodhana realized that Yudhishthira was right.
They had already made a plan. So, he said, yeah, I’ll be taking the wealth and Shakuni will be throwing the dice on my behalf. Immediately, Yudhishthira raised his eyebrows.
All the Pandavas stiffened. This is highly improper. According to the codes of gambling, for every game, there are rules for that game.
According to the rules for gambling, the person who is taking the money is the person who has to throw the dice. Imagine if there is a match between India and Pakistan. And Pakistan says that, yeah, we will play the match.
But we will get the batsman from, say, South Africa, bowler from Australia, wicket-keeper from England and fast-ballers from West Indies or wherever. We will get all the people from different parts of the world and we’ll call it a Pakistani team and we’ll play. This is not a Pakistani team then.
So, call it a match of India XI versus World XI. Don’t call it an India-Pakistan match. If it is an India-Pakistan match, then Pakistani players should be there.
Similarly, if it’s a gambling match between Duryodhana and Yudhishthira, then Duryodhana should be playing. Not that Duryodhana gets somebody else to play on his behalf. So, at that time, again, Yudhishthira looked up at the king.
Dhritharashtra remained passive. And now Yudhishthira felt torn. He didn’t want to play the gambling match.
He knew that the gambling match would be unfair. He knew that it would lead to dissension and possible destruction. But he felt torn.
He looked again at Dhritharashtra. But Dhritharashtra remained passive. And then the gambling match started.
And Shakuni was a diabolical man. He tossed the throne in such a way that eventually Yudhishthira lost everything. He lost not only his wealth, his chariots, his kingdom.
He lost himself. Everything he lost. So now, sometimes here the question may come up.
How could Yudhishthira have got so intoxicated with gambling that he lost everything? The point was that Yudhishthira was compelled to play that match. Compelled by circumstances. Compelled by his own word of honor.
And compelled by manipulative people. Although Draupadi was the most hurt by this whole event. Draupadi never blamed Yudhishthira.
She said, evil men manipulated him. So the point is that Yudhishthira, he thought that I lost so much. Maybe I’ll just gamble once more and I’ll get things back.
I’ll get things back. And certainly we could say that the extent to which he gambled was unnecessary. That was undesirable.
But that only illustrates the principle of the danger of gambling. How dangerous gambling is that actually one ends up, even a person as virtuous as Yudhishthira, once gets into gambling, the fever of gambling can get to the person and the person can lose everything. So a person like Yudhishthira can be felled by gambling.
Then what to speak of lesser people? Now all of us are vulnerable to temptation. And we don’t have a virtue as strong as Yudhishthira that we can stay immune to temptation. Even amidst the gambling, Yudhishthira was not blind.
Yudhishthira actually gambled himself before he gambled Draupadi. So that means he considered his wife to be not his property, but it is his wife to be what he was going to protect. He staked his property, lost his property, lost himself, lost his brothers and finally he staked Draupadi.
So the point here is that gambling has such a fever to it. There are people who go into gambling where there are gambling casinos or whatever, where there are millionaires and they come across losing everything. And today’s culture has made gambling available in a myriad ways.
Now one doesn’t even have to go to casinos to play gambling. Of course, if one goes to a casino, then they have a whole atmosphere over there. First they will accept cash money, then they will accept credit money and they will arrange it in such a way that the atmosphere is so seductive that people can sit at the same place and there if they want some snacks, you can eat also, you can drink also, everything will be there.
So just sit in one chair and the whole casino is arranged in such a way as to make a person forget everything else and just get to lose oneself in gambling. So sit in a chair and a millionaire will serve you everything, will give you food, will give you whatever you need, drinks, will provide you facilities till you become a beggar. Once you become a beggar, they will throw you out also.
So today the culture is such that as I said there are casinos and there are so many myriad ways in which through the internet also people can gamble with credit money available and things like that. And everything can be lost in just one moment. Therefore, we all have to be very careful.
And the perverse lesson could be from this is that if a virtuous king like Yudhishthir gambled, then why should we not gamble? But that is a perverse lesson because the Mahabharata’s point is to depict the consequences in such a dramatically disastrous way that even a king like Yudhishthir, when he gambled, he lost everything. So then if an ordinary person gambles, won’t that person lose? And how much more cautious we should be? It’s like the lesson that is demonstrated over here is suppose there is some Formula 1 racing and there is a super skilled racer and that person meets with a terrible accident. So that person meets with a terrible accident racing, how dangerous it is? And if an ordinary person tries to race like that person and meets with a, how much more likely is it to meet with a disaster in that? So the lesson here is that if a person like Yudhishthir gambles and loses everything and lesser people in the gamble, they too will lose everything.
And that’s why gambling should be avoided. And that way we can keep our intelligence and our finances protected. See there is, the gambling basically goes against the fundamental principle of nature.
That is we have to give something to get something. So when we work hard, use our talents, use our intelligence, by that hard work, we get the results, we earn some money. And gambling means we don’t do any work and we just hope by luck we will get something.
So even if somebody gets some money by that, that person is not going to grow, that person is not going to become a better person, not going to become more skilled, more intelligent, growing in character. All that happens when a person wins in a gambling match is, one gets the taste of that ill-gotten money, that quick money. And that taste is actually even more dangerous.
Because initially when a fish catches, when the fish catches the bait, the fish thinks that actually I have caught the bait and I am going to enjoy. But what is actually happening is the bait has caught the fish. So similarly, actually when the first time a person wins in gambling, the person says, oh I got so much money.
But those who are doing gambling, they know, oh we got this person now. This person got the taste of quick money, that person is trapped now. And he is going to stake more and eventually he is going to lose more.
We should not think that we can beat the odds in gambling. Because if people could win and become wealthy by gambling, then they would have no reason to actually have the gambling casinos. The gambling casinos are designed in such a way that they are meant to be profit-making businesses for the gambling casino owners.
And where is the profit going to come from? From the people who are gambling. So they are designed in such a way that the odds are stacked against the gamblers and the odds are stacked for the gambling organizers. And that’s why rather than imagining that we can be one of the lucky ones, which is very unlikely, and even if that happens, that is only going to make one more hooked on, more intoxicated and likely to get more entangled.
Rather than that, we stay away from gambling and work hard, develop ourselves as talented, intelligent, principled human beings and attain success through that. Thank you. Hare Krishna.