Ethics and Hermeneutics in the "Mahābhārata"

[...]the notion of dharma performed for the sake of something, particularly for the sake of acquiring merit to safeguard one from misfortuneeither in this life or beyond turns out to be a fundamentally awed conception of dharma (219). [...]if we wish in the future to recover a deeper, truer understanding of dharma, we must be reoriented to an understanding of it that would be divested of all pretenses of security (1034). Having snapped the texts spinal cord of ideas, she then laments that the text does not grant us the solace of divine retribution, or justice, or even an explanation for the tremendous suffering that many of the characters endured (21415). [...]she insists that the Mahbhrata is trying to get us to see a fundamental truth of existence: the truth of universal suffering (219, see also 72) and claims thatas a consequenceacademic discussion of ethics in the Mahbhrata should be decentered from the topic of dharma and re-centered on the issue of suffering, particularly on the relationship between suffering and dharma (49, see also 35 and 2 Other terms that would have required clarication are varramadharma (the dharma of the various castes and stages of life), idharma (the dharma of renunciates), strdharma (the dharma of women), rjadharma (the dharma of kings), and paddharma (the dharma of emergencies). [...]this claim appears to be true only because Hudson considers suffering only from an aesthetic (that is, disinterested) perspective: consequently, it now appears as though the epics only answer consists in its stark revelation of the structure of the world (49).5 Even at the level of pravtti dharma, Hudsons analysis is problematic. [...]where I found problems with her work they were primarily due to her recurrence to nineteenth-century attitudes to Indian texts: reading them selectively, reading them without the guidance of an authoritative tradition, and reading them in order to nd meanings at variance with the received interpretation.19 Adluri, Vishwa. 2011.