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This chapter attempts to “map” dharma in relation to bhakti, proposing that such a map must begin with the divine plan or plans one has been hearing about. It becomes a project of mapping the Mahābhārata in relation to three other texts—not only the Rāmāyaṇa and the Harivaṃśa, but Manu as a text that “resists” bhakti. Such a map involves locating implicit bhakti usages of the names Dhātṛ and Vidhātṛ, the Placer and the Ordainer, and tracing the emergence of notions of avataraṇa. This complex concept takes in not only themes of divine “descent,” including Kṛṣṇa and Rāma as “avatāras” of Viṣṇu, along with Kalki, who in the Mahābhārata is prophesied to end the Kali yuga, but descents of the goddess Gaṅgā. With Gaṅgā, it also takes in dynastic descent through generations into a carefully targeted dharmic geography of madhyadeśa, the Middle Land. By attending further to how dharma and bhakti interrelate in the lives of Rāma and Kṛṣṇa on this terrain, it maps dharma and bhakti in relation to what the Mahābhārata calls Rṣidharma (the dharma of Ṛṣis), which is illustrated through the practice of gleaning, and through the interpersonal themes friendship, hospitality, and separation.

This chapter comes back to women's dharma: now depicted not so much through maternal generations as in its enactment by each epic's chief heroine. Rather than being portrayed biographically, the heroine appears episodically. She is introduced through brief and indirect glimpses of her scenes of birth, youth, and marriage, and emerges centrally only in her handling of each epic's decisive crisis, which involves specifically her violation: Draupadī's hairpulling and disrobing at the Mahābhārata dice match and Sītā's abduction. Focusing on Draupadī and Sītā as dharmapatnīs or “legal wives” brings into relief what each makes of her svadharma, and of a woman's dharma in crisis, exile, and especially in Sītā's case, captivity. In both cases, the heroine intimates a perception of being the pawn and victim of a divine plan beyond her own devising.

This chapter explores the topics of strīdharma or womens's dharma and marriage law as the Mahābhārata portrays them through the three generations of dynastic instability that precede the generation of the epic's main heroes. This skein shows how the women marrying into the central dynastic line, beginning with the river goddess Gaṅgā, make women's dharma central to intersecting dimensions of time in which dharmic norms come under repeated scrutiny. Gaṅgā, who takes an interest in the Bhārata dynasty's “history” (itihāsa) as part of a divine plan, leaves her husband; he then marries Satyavatī, who brings her prermarital son Vyāsa, the Mahābhārata's “author”—and thus something like authorial time—into the line's genealogy. The next generation is then traced through the stories of how Gaṅgā's son Bhīṣma, ineligible to rule and sworn to celibacy, abducts the three sisters Ambā, Ambikā, and Ambālikā to marry them to Satyavatī's one remaining son, and how, once Ambikā and Ambālikā become widows, Vyāsa sires sons with them. The role of the chief queen (mahiṣī) in the Vedic horse sacrifice (Aśvamedha) is drawn into interpreting Vyāsa's unions with Ambikā and Ambālikā. In the third generation, Vyāsa's two flawed sons then marry: Pāṇḍu with Kuntī and Mādrī; Dhṛtarāṣṭra with Gāndhārī; and these three ingenious women then become mothers of the Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas.

What, taking an implausible time out in the middle of the battlefield just before the outbreak of war, did God (Kṛṣṇa) say to the world's greatest warrior, who, for a moment, thought better of being a killer? This chapter explores how the Bhagavad Gītā, which from many angles may be considered to lie at the center of the Mahābhārata, puts dharma at the center of a vast vision of the workings of time. It distinguishes what the Gītā has to say about svadharma from what the rest of the epic says about it along with ksatriyadharma or warrior's dharma, and treats the Gītā's teaching of karmayoga as virtually a unique teaching for Arjuna, comparing it with the treatment of karmayoga in The Laws of Manu. It then approaches the Gītā through what the larger epic shows are its ripple effects in the way dharma is depicted inward and outward from the Gītā itself in the formulaic “Where, … then” or yatas … tatas maxims, “Where dharma is, there is victory” and “Where Kṛṣṇa is, there is victory.” The chapter then takes the Gītā itself to present dharma through a ring structure, taking up Kṛṣṇa's disclosures about yugas, kalpas, and Time (Kāla) itself and the divine plan to his instructions on living dharma over ordinary time experientially, allowing that Arjuna will need time to digest what he has to say about fulfilling has svadharma in a supremely difficult time in a way that allows one to transcends it.

The chapter analyses the philosophical/theological dialogues of Aeneas and Zacharias. They ridicule Neoplatonic ideas and show knowledge of contemporary Neoplatonic debates, for example, about Timaeus interpretation, but rarely engage with Neoplatonism on its own terms. Christian problems structure their thinking. Narratives of the divine plan of salvation move them to justify the possibility that God can bring the cosmos to an end and transform it into immortality. They seek to render God’s ultimate perfection of the cosmos credible, and therefore argue for the future finitude of the cosmos, changing the Neoplatonic emphasis on origins, and moving their physics towards ethics and soteriology. The doctrine of the Trinity provides a generative grammar for their ideas about creation from nothing, the eternity of the world, and the pre-existence of the soul. Origenism may provide one context for the creation debates, especially for Aeneas.

The chapter interprets Procopius’ account of creation and the eternity of the world. Procopius presents a coherent and attractive Christian account of creation based on a narrative of the divine plan of salvation rather than engaging in a point-by-point refutation of Neoplatonism. The chapter elucidates how Procopius’ idea of the divine plan reframes Neoplatonic arguments and gives unity to his account. It considers central arguments about creation and freedom, matter, causation, and theodicy. His Neoplatonic arguments, particularly about the creation of form from nothing and the way in which God can be said to will creation, were developed further by Philoponus in the next generation.

Having robbed the Aristotelian divine science of its primacy, Gersonides endeavours to develop an alternative ‘divine science’ that would accord with his belief that the world was created. The underlying philosophical assumption of the new world picture is that the stars are the instruments of God’s providence and that their effects on the sublunar region and especially on humanity were programmed at the time of creation. The underlying physical basis is the theory of rays presented in a pseudo-Avicennian work translated into Hebrew from Latin. Gersonides draws in particular on the notion of the ‘mixing of rays’ described in that work to explain combinations of stellar influences. He draws on the general framework of natural astrology and on several mathematical rules of proportion that describe how the stellar influences can in principle be computed.