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Pratapbhanu is answering the word beggar. His host has just given it as his name, in the dark of the hermitage, seventy yojanas from the king’s city. The king answers the name with a saying: the wise keep themselves hidden. He bows at feet whose owner he cannot name. The host knows exactly whose head is bent before him.
What follows in the night is a boon and a plan. The host will give himself a name that means one body, and then give the king the name the king has been hiding, with his father’s beside it. He will grant the king the boon he asks with the brahmin line left out of it, and bind him to silence about this meeting. Then, pressed by the king’s plea, he will lay out the means of winning that line: a year of feasts, cooked by him and served by the king. And his own coming in the guise of the king’s priest. When the king is asleep, a night-walker will come there, the boar of the hunt with a name and a count of dead kin. The two will take counsel. Yajnavalkya is still telling Bharadvaja the story Shiva told Parvati, another cause of Rama’s birth.
The deceivers, and the one deceived
The main figures in this episode
- Pratapbhanu Satyaketu’s son and the king of Kaikaya. He trusts the ascetic. He asks him for a body free of old age, death, and pain, for no defeat in battle. And for rule of the earth under one umbrella for a hundred kalpas. He names a brahmin’s curse as the one fear in his mind. He begs the ascetic to bear the hardship of coming to his city, and sleeps while the plot against him is made.
- The false ascetic a king in a sage’s guise who calls himself Ekatanu, one body. He tells the king his own name and his father’s. He grants the boon with the brahmin line left aside and binds the king to silence. He gives him the plan of the feasts and of the priest’s guise. He sits awake and worried once the king is asleep, and takes counsel with Kalaketu.
- Kalaketu a rakshasa deep in deceit, who had become the boar that led the king astray. He is the ascetic king’s great friend. His hundred sons and ten brothers the king killed in battle. He comes in the night and, remembering the old enmity, takes counsel with the ascetic.
- The royal priest the king’s priest, spoken of here and not present. The ascetic says he will carry him off by maya, make him like himself by tapas, and keep him for a year. It is his guise he will wear.
- The brahmins the one line left outside the boon, strong by tapas, with no protector against their anger. Their curse the king fears. The ascetic promises to bring them under the king’s power with a year of feasts.
The guise that won the king
“Those who are treasuries of wisdom like you,” the king says, “with pride melted away, always keep themselves hidden. Welfare in every way lies in a poor guise. That is why the saints and the Vedas cry out that the utterly possessionless are dear to the Lord. About the penniless, the beggars, the men without a home like you, Brahma and Shiva fall into doubt.” The doubt, the commentary adds, is whether such a man is a true saint or a beggar. “Whoever you are, I bow at your feet. Now be gracious to me, master.” The king reads the host’s poverty as the evidence of his wisdom.
Seeing the king’s natural love for him and his great trust in him, the ascetic made the king his own in every way, showed him more affection, and spoke. “Hear, king, I tell you the truth: a long time has passed while I have lived here. Until now no one has met me, and I make myself known to no one. The world’s esteem is like fire. It burns the forest of tapas.” The king had said that the wise keep themselves hidden. The host answers with his own solitude, and gives it a reason.
Here Tulsi speaks in his own voice, as the commentary reads the line. At the sight of a fine guise, he says, quick-witted men are deceived, and fools with them. Look at the beautiful peacock. Its voice is like nectar, and its food is snakes. The king has just praised a poor guise. When he first saw his host, the verse called the host’s guise fine, the word Tulsi uses now.
The story of Ekatanu, and a growing trust
The ascetic goes on. “That is why I live in secret in the world. Apart from the Lord I have no purpose in anything at all, and he knows everything without being told. Say, what success is there in pleasing the world? You are pure and of good sense, and very dear to me, and you have love and trust in me. Now, dear one, if I hide anything from you, a dreadful fault falls on me.” The more the ascetic talked of detachment, the more the king’s trust grew. When he saw the king under his power in deed, mind, and word, the ascetic spoke. The verse names him at that moment with one word: a heron at its meditation. It is the bird that stands motionless in the shallows with the stillness of a sage, and is fishing.
“Our name is Ekatanu, brother.” Hearing it, the king bowed his head again and spoke. “Tell me the meaning of the name, and tell it at length, knowing me as your very own servant.” The ascetic answered. “When the first creation arose, then was my birth, and I have not taken a body again. For that reason the name is Ekatanu. Do not wonder in your mind, son. Nothing is hard to get by tapas. By tapas’s strength Brahma makes the world. By tapas’s strength Vishnu became the protector. By tapas’s strength Shiva destroys. Nothing in the world is beyond tapas.” Hearing it, the king felt great love. Then the ascetic began on old stories: karma, dharma, and histories of many kinds. He expounded dispassion and discernment. Stories of the world’s arising, its keeping, and its dissolution, wonders without limit, told at length. The king listened, and came under the ascetic’s power, and began to tell his own name.
The ascetic cut in. “King, I know you. You practiced deceit, and it pleased me. Hear, king: such is statecraft, that kings do not tell their names anywhere and everywhere. Considering that quick wit of yours, I have great love for you. Your name is Pratapbhanu, and King Satyaketu is your father. By the guru’s grace I know everything, king, and I do not tell it, knowing my own harm. Dear one, at the sight of your natural simplicity, your love, your trust, and your skill in statecraft, affection has arisen in my mind. I tell my own story at your asking.” The name the king kept back when he got down from his horse comes back to him from the host’s mouth, with his father’s name beside it. The host calls the keeping back statecraft and the cause of his love. He praises the king for simplicity and for skill in statecraft in the same line.
A hundred kalpas of rule, and the one thing left out
“Now I am pleased. Have no doubt of it. Ask, king, for whatever is in your mind.” Hearing the fine words the king rejoiced, and clasping the ascetic’s feet he entreated him in many ways. “Sage, by the sight of you the four goals are in the palm of my hand.” The commentary names the four: wealth, dharma, desire, and release. “Yet seeing my lord pleased, let me ask a boon hard to come by, and be free of sorrow. A body free of old age, death, and pain. Let no one defeat me in battle. And rule of the earth under one umbrella, without a rival, for a hundred kalpas.” The king who praised a man for owning nothing asks last for the earth, to rule it for a hundred kalpas, a hundred ages of the world.
“So be it, king,” the ascetic said. “One thing is hard. Hear that too. Even Death will bow his head at your feet, lord of the earth, with one line left aside, the line of brahmins. By tapas’s strength brahmins are always powerful. From their anger there is no protector. If you bring the brahmins under your power, king, then Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva are under your power. Force does not work against the brahmin line. I say it truly, with both arms raised. Hear, king: without a brahmin’s curse there is no destruction of you at any time.”
The king rejoiced at his words. “Master, now there is no destruction for me. By your grace, lord, I have welfare at all times.” The ascetic set the exception out at the start of his answer and named it again, as a curse, at its end. The king’s answer has no exception in it: no destruction, and welfare at all times.
The fear of a tale reaching a sixth ear
Saying so be it, the false sage, crooked, spoke again. “Our meeting, and your losing of your way: if you tell of them, the fault is not ours. That is why I forbid you, king. In the telling of this story lies your great harm. When this tale falls on a sixth ear, your destruction. My word is true.” Four ears are in the hermitage. A sixth belongs to someone else. “By revealing this, or by a brahmin’s curse, is your destruction. Hear it, Pratapbhanu. By no other means will your death come, should the Lord and Shiva grow angry in their minds.” The commentary reads the pair as Brahma and Shiva. The boon granted a moment ago now has a condition fastened to it, and the condition is the king’s own tongue.
The king clasped his feet. “True, master. From the anger of brahmins and of the guru, tell me, who can protect? If Brahma is angry, the guru protects. Against the guru’s hostility there is no protector in the world. If I do not walk by your word, let my destruction come. I have no care for that. My mind trembles at one fear, lord: a brahmin’s curse is very dreadful. By what means can the brahmins be won? In your kindness tell me that too. Apart from you I see no well-wisher of my own.” The brahmins the ascetic set outside the boon are the ones the king now asks him how to win. The asking ends with the king’s own count of his well-wishers. It is one, and is this man.
The dilemma, and the plea it drew
“Hear, king,” the ascetic said. “There are many means in the world. They are hard to accomplish, and moreover they may succeed or they may not. There is one very easy means, yet in it is one difficulty. That device is in my hands, king, and my going to your city cannot be. From the day I was born until today I have not gone to anyone’s house or village. If I do not go, your work is spoiled. Today a dilemma has come.” The easy means is in his hands, and so is the difficulty.
Hearing it, the king spoke in a soft voice. “Master, the Vedas have set out this rule: the great show love to the small. Mountains always bear grass on their heads. The fathomless sea carries foam on its crest. The earth always bears dust on its head.” So saying, the king clasped his feet. “Master, be gracious. For my sake, lord, bear this hardship, you who are good and kind to the humble.” Three images, and in each the great thing carries the small one on its head. The king was the one king of the whole circle of the earth. He is asking to be the grass, the foam, and the dust.
Knowing the king to be subject to him, the ascetic, skilled in deceit, spoke. “I tell you the truth, king. Hear it. Nothing in the world is hard for me to get. I will surely do your work. In mind, body, and word you are my devotee. The power of yoga, of device, of tapas, and of mantra bears fruit only then, when it is kept hidden.” The verse has just called the king subject to him. The ascetic’s own word for the same state is devotee. And hidden is a word the night has heard before. The king used it of the wise, and the ascetic of the dreadful fault that would fall on him if he hid anything from the king.
His cooking, the king’s serving
“If I cook the food, king, and you serve it, and no one knows me, then whoever eats that food will follow your command. Moreover, whoever eats in their houses, hear, king, that one too comes under your power. Go, king, and set this means going. Make a resolve for a full year. Every day invite a hundred thousand brahmins, new ones, with their families. For the length of your resolve I will cook the feast daily. In this way, king, with very little trouble, all the brahmins will come under your power. The brahmins will perform fire-offerings, yajnas, and worship, and by that connection the gods come easily under your power.”
The kitchen is his, the serving is the king’s, and the guests have only to eat. The verse gives the feast four measures, a hundred thousand, new each day, with their families, for a year. The man who proposes it takes all of the cooking on himself. The circle he draws widens as he speaks: those who eat, then those who eat in their houses, then all the brahmins, then, through the brahmins’ rites, the gods. The king asked how the brahmins could be won. The answer runs past the brahmins without stopping.
The priest’s guise, and the sign to know him by
“And one more sign I give you: I will not come in this guise at any time. Your royal priest, king, I will carry off by my own maya. By tapas’s strength I will make him like myself and keep him here for a year. And I, wearing his guise, will accomplish your work in every way. Hear it, king. Much of the night has gone. Sleep now. On the third day, king, you and I will meet. By tapas’s strength I will carry you to your home with your horse while you sleep. I will come wearing that guise. Know me then, when I call you aside and tell you the whole story.”
The priest is spoken of in his absence, and the verse gives him no name. The year that was the length of the king’s resolve is now also the length of his keeping. The guise the king praised earlier in the night was a poor man’s. The one the ascetic will wear is the king’s own priest’s. The king came to this hermitage lost, with his horse, and he is to leave it asleep, with the horse, by the power of tapas. And the sign by which he will know his man is the story he has been forbidden to tell. Told back to him in private, by the one who forbade it, it will serve as the proof of who is speaking.
The king’s sleep, and Kalaketu’s enmity awake
The king obeyed the order and lay down to sleep, and the one whose knowledge was deceit went and sat on his seat. The king was worn out, and a deep sleep came over him. How could the other sleep? His worry was great.
Then Kalaketu came there, a night-walker, a rakshasa: the one who had become the boar and led the king astray. He was the ascetic king’s great friend, and he knew deceit in great abundance. The beast the king followed through the Vindhya had a name. He had a hundred sons and ten brothers, wicked, unconquerable, tormentors of the gods. The king had killed them all earlier in battle, seeing brahmins, saints, and gods in distress. That villain, remembering the old enmity, met the ascetic king and took counsel. Between them they devised the means by which their enemy would be destroyed. In the grip of what was to be, the king knew nothing.
The verse gives Kalaketu the verb it gave his friend earlier this same night, when the breast smoldered like a kiln: he remembers his enmity. It also gives, in one line, the killing and what the king saw before it: brahmins, saints, and gods in distress. The plan the king has taken to sleep with is a year of feeding brahmins.
What is left to an enemy alone
Then the verse sets down a maxim. A mighty enemy, even alone, is not to be counted small. Rahu, with only his head left, still today gives pain to the sun and the moon. Kalaketu’s hundred sons and ten brothers are dead, and what is left to him is his enmity, his deceit, and a friend to plot with. The Rahu who had the moon in his mouth when the king first saw the boar is the Rahu of the maxim, and the boar was Kalaketu.
An enemy called a well-wisher
The king told the ascetic that apart from him he saw no well-wisher of his own. After that sentence everything he does goes to the same man. From him he hears the means. Him he begs to bear the hardship of the journey. His order to sleep he obeys. At each step the king moves toward his own welfare as he sees it. Through the night the verse names what the man he trusts is: the heron at its meditation. The false sage, crooked. The one skilled in deceit. The one whose knowledge was deceit.
The ascetic knew the king to be subject to him before he promised him the brahmins. The word the verse uses for the king, twice before the boon, is the word the ascetic uses for the brahmins and the gods in his plan: under power. The assurance of power over others was handed to a man already in another’s.
And the guise stays in the story to the end. Early in the night the king praised a poor guise for the wisdom it hid. The line the commentary gives to Tulsi set a fine guise beside it, and the peacock. And the plan rests on the guise of a priest. The last to come there that night is the one who had become a boar.
Pratapbhanu is asleep with a plan for a year of feasts and the hope of a hundred kalpas of rule. The two men awake have taken counsel for his destruction. The story stops here, with the feast still ahead and the trust it will rest on already in the enemy’s hands.
Source: the Gita Press edition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, Balkand, doha 161 (a) to 170, read with Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s Hindi commentary.