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For decades, the gentle murder paradox has been a central challenge for deontic logic. This article investigates its millennia-old counterpart in Sanskrit philosophy: the syena controversy. We analyze three solutions provided by Mımam. sa, the Sanskrit philosophical school devoted to the analysis of normative reasoning in the Vedas, in which the controversy originated. We introduce axiomatizations and semantics for the modal logics formalizing the deontic theories of the main Mımam. sa philosophers Prabhakara, Kumarila, and Man. d. ana. The resulting logics are used to analyze their distinct solutions to the syena controversy, which we compare with formal approaches developed within the contemporary field of deontic logic.