“If you give love, happiness will come to you; if you take a life, the punishment of death will be yours.”
When a person receives the punishment for his offense, sometimes, on seeing that justice, the mind is pierced with unease. A question rises in the heart: when that offense was committed the person was one man; afterward he repented so deeply and changed himself so greatly — then why should he still be punished? But wherever there is a blow, there follows a counter-blow.
A question rises in the heart: when that offense was committed the person was one man; afterward he repented so deeply and changed himself so greatly — then why should he still be punished?
Then are atonement and repentance of no value at all?
In other words — what value is there in accepting punishment with no atonement behind it?
Chapter 13 of 35 — a single teaching, 1 min in total.
Statecraft in the Mahabharat treats danda — the rod, punishment, the king's coercive power — as one of the central subjects a ruler must understand. The Shanti Parva, the long instruction Bhishma gives from his bed of arrows, returns to it at length: what restraint is for, when it is legitimate, and what a kingdom becomes without it.
The distinction the epic keeps drawing is between punishment as correction and punishment as revenge. The war itself can be read as the second dressed as the first, which is part of why the aftermath is so bleak.