Shloka 18
Karṇa-vadha-pratyaya: Yudhiṣṭhira’s Verification of Karṇa’s Fall (कर्णवध-प्रत्ययः)
तेषामन्तकरं युद्ध देहपाप्मासुनाशनम्
teṣām antakaraṁ yuddhaṁ dehapāpmāsunāśanam
Sañjaya dit : «Pour eux, cette bataille devint porteuse de mort—et pourtant aussi destructrice de la souillure pécheresse du corps et de la vie elle-même.»
संजय उवाच
Educational Q&A
The verse frames war as simultaneously terminal and morally consequential: it ends embodied life, and it is portrayed as erasing the body’s accumulated impurity (pāpmā). It reflects the epic’s tension between the horror of slaughter and the belief that certain deaths in a dharma-framed conflict can function as a kind of grim purification.
Sañjaya, narrating the Kurukṣetra events to Dhṛtarāṣṭra, characterizes the ongoing combat as fatal for the fighters—an encounter that brings their end and extinguishes their life-breath, while also being described as destroying the ‘sin/taint’ associated with embodied existence.