Dharma, standing on its single remaining leg, addresses the grieving Earth and asks who is responsible for the assault it's suffering. What comes back isn't an accusation. It's an admission of genuine uncertainty, offered by the party best positioned in the entire text to know:
We do not know the being who caused our hardship. We are confused because different doctrines do not agree.1
This is a striking thing for a personified cosmic principle to say. If anyone should know the cause of dharma's decline, it should be Dharma itself, or Earth, speaking from direct, unmediated experience of the harm. Instead, the text has them defer the question entirely to human philosophical schools — and those schools disagree.
What follows is a genuine catalogue of competing explanatory frameworks, each attributed to a real school of thought, none singled out as correct:
Some who deny duality say that one is the master of one's atman. Others think of destiny. Others mention action. Some others think that nature is the master. Some have determined that this cannot be decided through reasoning and arguments.2
Debroy's endnotes identify these precisely: the first belongs to those who believe in yoga, holding that one is responsible for one's own happiness and unhappiness; the second and third correspond to fate and karma respectively; the fourth is the mīmāṃsā school's position that nature governs; the fifth is sāṅkhya's position.3 Five distinct, real philosophical positions — self-responsibility, destiny, action/karma, nature, and outright epistemic skepticism about whether the question can be resolved at all — presented side by side, with no sixth voice arriving to declare a winner.
Having laid out the five competing doctrines without adjudicating between them, Earth (still speaking as Dharma's interlocutor) does something remarkable: she hands the unresolved question directly to Parīkṣit, a mortal king, as though his judgment might succeed where philosophical schools have failed.
O royal sage! That being the case, use your own intelligence to judge.2
This is worth sitting with. The text has just demonstrated, through its own catalogue, that the wisest available theoretical frameworks cannot agree on causation — self, fate, karma, nature, or unknowability, five genuinely different metaphysical claims about how the world works. Rather than resolving this disagreement authorially, the narrative delegates the resolution to a character within the story, effectively asking a king embedded in a specific crisis to do what abstract philosophy, working from outside that crisis, couldn't manage.
The king's response is worth examining for what it does and doesn't attempt. He doesn't pick one of the five doctrines and defend it philosophically. Instead, he offers something closer to a provisional, humble non-answer, immediately followed by direct action regardless:
Or indeed, it may be the case that the path of the god's maya cannot be fathomed. Creatures cannot ascertain this through their intelligence and their words.4
He essentially sides with the fifth position — unknowability — while still proceeding to act: comforting Dharma and Earth, restoring the broken legs, confronting Kali. This is a genuinely coherent stance, worth naming precisely: Parīkṣit treats the causal question as unresolvable and proceeds to remedial action anyway, without waiting for the metaphysics to settle first. The philosophical disagreement doesn't paralyze him. He acts under uncertainty about ultimate causation while still being fully certain about what needs doing in front of him.
It's worth being explicit that this isn't a case where the narrative secretly favors one of the five doctrines and simply declines to say so outright. The scene structure — five named positions, no explicit ranking, a king's own answer that leans toward the fifth (unknowability) without fully committing even to that — reads as a genuine, sustained refusal to resolve a live philosophical dispute the text's own tradition contained. Given how confidently this same volume asserts positions on matters like Kṛṣṇa's supremacy or the priority of devotion, the comparative caution here, on the specific question of ultimate causation for suffering, stands out as a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.
It's worth asking why Earth hands this unresolved philosophical question specifically to Parīkṣit — a ruling king in the middle of confronting an active assault — rather than to one of the many sages who populate this same volume and would seem, on paper, better positioned to adjudicate a dispute between yoga, mīmāṃsā, and sāṅkhya on their own philosophical merits.
The likely answer lies in what the situation actually demands. A sage consulted in the abstract could deliberate at length, weighing each doctrine's merits without time pressure. Parīkṣit is standing over an actively suffering bull, sword or intention to act already in hand. The text may be making a quiet point about when causal certainty is actually required for right action: a king in the middle of a crisis doesn't have, and arguably doesn't need, the luxury of resolving centuries of philosophical dispute before responding to what's directly in front of him. The delegation to Parīkṣit rather than to a seated sage may itself be part of the lesson — some questions get handed to whoever is positioned to act, not to whoever is best positioned to theorize.
One more distinction worth drawing precisely: Dharma's admission of ignorance about ultimate causation is paired, in the same speech, with total clarity about the fact of suffering itself. "We do not know the being who caused our hardship" is not the same statement as indifference to whether the hardship matters. The passage keeps these separate — uncertainty about cause coexisting with complete certainty about harm — which is a more sophisticated position than either dogmatic causal confidence or nihilistic shrugging at suffering because its source can't be pinned down.
That separation is what actually licenses Parīkṣit's subsequent action. If uncertainty about cause had to resolve before the harm could be taken seriously, nothing would ever get remedied under conditions of genuine philosophical disagreement — which, this passage suggests, describes most real conditions. Instead, the harm is treated as self-evidently real and worth stopping, entirely independent of whatever remains unresolved about why it's happening.
You're facing a situation causing real harm — to yourself, to someone you care about, to something you're responsible for — and the explanations available to you for why it's happening are genuinely in conflict. Is it something you did? Circumstance beyond anyone's control? A pattern too complex to trace to any single source? Competent, thoughtful people you trust disagree, the way the five schools in this passage disagree.
This scene models a specific, usable stance: the causal question and the action question are not the same question, and resolving the first is not a precondition for proceeding on the second. Parīkṣit doesn't need to settle whether Kali's cruelty stems from self, fate, karma, nature, or something unknowable in order to know that the bull needs its legs restored and the beating needs to stop. If you find yourself stalled on an unresolved "why," it's worth checking whether the stall is actually necessary — whether the remedial action available to you right now depends on first settling a causal debate that may, as this text suggests happens even among its wisest voices, simply not be settleable in the time you have.
The strongest evidence that this is deliberate philosophical restraint rather than narrative vagueness is the specificity of the five positions. Each is a genuine, named school of thought (per Debroy's endnotes), not a vague gesture at "different opinions" — which argues the text is engaging real philosophical plurality rather than avoiding the question through imprecision.
Tension — the rest of this volume is confident, even dogmatic, on many metaphysical questions, which makes the caution here notable by contrast. The same text that states unambiguously that Kṛṣṇa is the source rather than a descent, and that devotion outranks every other path, declines to state a position on ordinary causation for suffering. Preserved, not resolved.
Open question. Does Parīkṣit's implicit endorsement of the fifth position (unfathomability) actually resolve the tension, or does it simply relocate the uncertainty — since "the path cannot be fathomed" is itself one of the five competing claims, not a neutral position above them?
This vault's broader material on karma and causation tends to present a relatively settled Vaiṣṇava position — divine will operating through, but ultimately superordinate to, mechanisms like karma and nature. This passage complicates that settledness by staging the disagreement openly, naming rival schools by their actual doctrines rather than folding them into a single authoritative synthesis. It's a rare moment where the text seems more interested in accurately representing philosophical plurality than in asserting its own tradition's answer.
With The Conquest as Negotiated Process. That page demonstrates how a single historical event — the fall of the Aztec empire — supports multiple, genuinely incompatible causal narratives depending on which sources and which vantage point are used: military conquest, negotiated political realignment, disease-driven succession collapse, none of which the page treats as simply replacing the others. Dharma's catalogue of five competing doctrines for its own suffering runs the identical structure at a metaphysical rather than historical register. What the pairing produces: both cases suggest that events significant enough to matter — an empire's fall, dharma's own decline — tend to resist single-cause explanation not because nobody has looked closely enough, but because multiple genuinely different causal frameworks can each account for real, non-overlapping portions of what happened, without any framework being simply wrong. The practical lesson both pages point toward is the same one Parīkṣit models: proceeding with necessary action doesn't require first collapsing a genuinely multi-causal event into a single accepted story.
Sharpest implication. A text confident enough to assert Kṛṣṇa's supremacy as settled doctrine treats the ordinary human question of "why do bad things happen" as genuinely, irreducibly contested — five real positions, no resolution offered even by a personified cosmic principle who should, in principle, know. That asymmetry suggests the tradition draws a real distinction between questions it considers settled by revelation and questions it's willing to leave to ongoing human philosophical dispute, rather than treating its own authority as extending equally to every kind of question.
Generative questions.