IN CLASS: Arjuna's advice

For your 100-word assignment for today, you had to think about Arjuna's attempt to convince Yudhishthira to accept the kingdom. For this group activity, please share your answer with your group, compare notes, and discuss your position. Did you all have similar reaction or different ones? Have any positions changed in the course of the conversation? Please submit some collective notes about how your discussion went. Designate a "scribe" to do the "minutes" of your conversation or to write a summary at the end, whichever is easier. Please submit only ONE COLLECTIVE TEXT for the group, not individual statements for each member. 

EXTRA/OPTIONAL

If you want to think through this further, here is some EXTRA information: 

Here, just for fun, is the same passage in full in Debroy's translation. As you can see, Arjuna's thoughts about the inevitability of causing harm are part of a more general discourse on 'daṇḍa', literally 'stick, rod', a metaphor for punishment and/or order. As you know, Arjuna's speech completely fails to persuade Yudhishthira, who does not respond to Arjuna directly. Many more attempts follow with Yudhishthira responding either by silence or by declining the kingdom and always coming back to the grief and loses of the war.

Yudhishthira's response to Vaishampayana (who speaks right after Arjuna) does, however, echo Arjuna's talk of animals eating animals. Here is a quotation from what he says: 

"Desire cannot be satisfied in a day or a month. A desire incapable of being satisfied cannot be gratified in a lifespan. When it is fed, a fire blazes and when there is no kindling, it is pacified. Pacify the fire that has arisen in your stomach with a little bit of food. Conquer your stomach. This vanquished earth will then be conquered for the greater good. You have praised human desire, pleasures and prosperity. But those who do not enjoy objects of pleasure and are weak attain the supreme state. The kingdom’s acquisition and preservation, and both dharma and adharma, are based on you. Free yourself from that great burden and resort to renunciation. The tiger, for the sake of a single stomach, creates a great carnage. Other slow-moving animals sustain themselves on that [i.e. eat carrion]. An ascetic withdraws from material objects and resorts to sannyasa ('renunciation of desire'). However, a king is never satisfied. Behold the difference in their intelligence. Those who subsist on leaves... those who subsist on water and those who subsist on air are capable of conquering hell. Between a king who rules over every part of this entire earth and one who regards stone and gold as equal, the latter is the successful one, not the king. (Debroy chapter 1345)

And so it goes. But, of course, Yudhishthira does accept the kingdom in the end. Here is the chapter where this happens (Debroy chapter 1366), after some final words by Vyasa (who plants in Yudhishthira's mind the idea of talking to Bhishma about kingship) and by Krishna.

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