The Mad King in the Dharma Field

The mad king has never belonged to one era alone. He appears again and again in human history, his features altered by culture but his essence unchanged. Babylon had Nebuchadnezzar, Rome had Caligula and Nero, Europe its erratic monarchs, and the modern age its autocrats in new dress. The archetype is perennial: whenever the conditions ripen, the mask reappears.

What makes him “mad” is not simply cruelty or incompetence. It is the way his ego swells until it eclipses all proportion. His identity fuses with the state; his moods dictate the fate of millions. He mistakes flattery for loyalty, fear for love, and bluster for strength. Surrounded by courtiers, he inhabits a hall of mirrors where every reflection confirms his magnificence. Yet behind the mask lies fragility, a gnawing insecurity that demands constant reinforcement.

No king survives on ego alone. He is sustained by the court and by the crowd. The court is a theater of ambition and fear — opportunists who climb by flattery, zealots who mistake his whims for providence. They shield him from reality, spinning his excesses into legend until folly hardens into doctrine. The crowd supplies the fuel. Gathered in fear and longing, it abandons discernment for belonging. Stirred by nostalgia for imagined pasts or the promise of certainty, it pours its hopes into the ruler, excusing his contradictions and defending his delusions as though they were its own. The king does not create these conditions; he exploits them. Like a spark falling on dry grass, he ignites what was already waiting to burn.

From a Vedantic lens, the entire drama is nothing but Maya at work. Maya projects a world of forms and conceals their unity. Within its spell, rulers imagine themselves sovereign, nations imagine salvation lies in a single persona, and enemies imagine that removing the tyrant would restore harmony. All mistake the shadow-play for reality. But in truth, no one rules. What appears to be choice is conditioning, what appears to be chaos is simply the gunas — sattva, rajas, and tamas — weaving and unweaving the fabric of events.

The Bhagavad Gita states:

O Arjuna, the Lord abides in the hearts of all beings and makes them revolve by His Maya, as if they were mounted on a wheel. (XVIII:61).

The king imagines he commands, the court imagines it shapes, the crowd imagines it is saved — yet all are being moved, bound by the same mechanism.

If Maya explains the illusion, the watch reveals the correction. Every force meets its counterforce, every excess its limit, every imbalance its recall. The mad king may strut upon the ramparts, intoxicated with the illusion of mastery. But no one escapes for long. Gravity reasserts itself, and the descent is sudden. History is littered with such splats. The same is true of empires. They expand beyond measure, convinced of permanence. But indulgence weakens, resistance rises, collapse follows. The watch is patient, but unyielding.

Step back far enough, and the grotesque theater resolves into pattern. Humanity grows cleverer with tools, but not wiser in self-knowledge. Fear gives rise to a savior myth; the savior overreaches; collapse follows; the pendulum swings again. Rome believed it eternal. So did Britain. So does modernity with its screens and weapons. But the watch does not stop. What was expansion becomes contraction; what was triumph becomes decline. Novelty may change the dial, but the gears remain the same.

And the gears of history also tick within us. The same gunas that drive nations — rajas with its striving, tamas with its inertia, sattva with its clarity — drive the rhythms of our own minds. We rise with determination, only to be pulled back by doubt. We pursue desire as if compelled, then watch it dissolve into regret. Each of us is a kingdom of competing impulses where mad kings rise and fall in thought, courtiers of reasoning whisper their flattery, and crowds of craving cheer their demands.

To open the inner watch is to see that the outer spectacle is a projection of the same forces within. Recognizing this parallel is the beginning of freedom, for once the mechanism is understood, we are less deceived by the dial.

When the watchmaker closes the case, the hands resume their sweep across the dial. The surface looks unchanged, but the illusion is gone. The ticking is no longer chaos but necessity. So it is with history. To the casual eye, kings and crowds spin the world off its axis. To the watchmaker’s eye, they are only gears turning, springs recoiling, escapements keeping time. What once provoked outrage now yields clarity.

The world is not perfect because it is free of turmoil, but because it cannot be otherwise. The gunas will turn, the watch will restore balance, and the play will go on. Our task is not to stop the mechanism, but to see it clearly — and in that seeing, to stand a little apart.