| Abstract: |
The Mahabharata, the eighteen-parva Sanskrit epic, is celebrated as a profound laboratory of dharma, yet the entanglement of emotional turbulence with ethical choice inside its narrative has seldom been measured systematically. This paper presents a focused empirical data analysis of emotional conflict and moral decision-making across eight pivotal episodes of the epic. A mixed-methods design combined three instruments: structured content analysis of 320 narrative segments coded independently by three trained annotators (mean inter-coder agreement kappa = 0.86), a reader-response survey of 150 respondents using five-point Likert scales, and lexicon-based sentiment analysis of 64 landmark speeches. The results are fivefold. First, emotional conflict intensity peaked at 9.6/10 during Arjuna's pre-battle crisis, ahead of Abhimanyu's death (9.4) and Draupadi's disrobing (9.2). Second, emotional conflict intensity correlated strongly with moral ambiguity (r = 0.82, p < 0.001), and regression explained 67% of the variance in ambiguity (R-squared = 0.67). Third, sentiment polarity dissociated from moral worth: Draupadi's righteous plea scored -0.86, while Duryodhana's unjust refusal of compromise scored -0.71 with a moral valence of only 1.9/5. Fourth, across 346 coded decisions, dharma alignment ranged from 18% (Duryodhana) to 88% (Krishna). Finally, 68% of 118 high-conflict decisions were ultimately judged dharma-aligned, indicating that emotional conflict is a crucible of moral maturity rather than it’s opposite. An independent reader survey converged with the coded episode ranking (Spearman rho = 0.91), underscoring the practical value of these dilemma vignettes for ethics education. These findings, summarised in Tables 1-5 and Figs. 1-5, directly frame the conclusions drawn in Section 7. |
