Bhagavatam · Rantideva’s Compassion

Parikshit turned to the sage Shukadeva. “Bhagavan, I have heard the names of many generous men. But charity stays easy while the giver still has plenty in hand. I have only a few days of life left to me now, and one question keeps coming back to me. Was there ever a man who gave in the very hour when to give was to hand over his own life?”

A quiet shadow crossed Shukadeva’s lips. “Rajan, there was such a king. His name was Rantideva, a son of Sankriti, of the ancient line of Bharata. His glory is sung in this world and in the worlds beyond it. Listen to his story, and then you tell me what giving truly means.”

Rantideva was no ordinary giver. No one who came to his court ever left it empty-handed, and yet his mind carried not a trace of pride in the giving. He gave the way a hand carries food to its own mouth and claims no favor for the act. To him the beggar at the gate and the king on the seat were one body, and that body was the Lord’s.

He hoarded nothing and clung to nothing. Whatever came to him unasked, that alone he used. Whatever a supplicant asked for, that he set down before the man. So his wealth thinned from one day to the next, and he watched it go without a flicker of regret.

Even the little that reached him he shared out, and stayed hungry himself. He bore it with a patience that did not crack, and his family bore the hardship at his side, worn down to the bone with him.

Then a season came that broke even that. For forty-eight days together no food reached him, and not so much as water passed his lips. His wrists thinned, his cheeks caved in, his family trembled around him with hunger and thirst. Yet the stillness in his eyes never moved. It was the calm of a man who had already given himself away and had nothing left he was afraid to lose.

On the morning of the forty-ninth day, food came to him at last, from where he never knew.

A little ghee, some kheer, a little halwa, a little milk, and cool water to drink.

Rantideva sat down before it with his family. They were all in deep distress, trembling from hunger and thirst, and he had just reached for the first morsel.

In that instant a shadow filled the doorway. A brahmin, caked in dust, worn to nothing, swaying where he stood.

“O Rajan, I am hungry. Give me something to eat.”

Rantideva saw the Lord in every living thing. The worn man in the doorway was, to his eyes, Bhagavan himself arrived as a guest, and with reverence he lifted a fair share of that food and laid it in the brahmin’s hands.

The brahmin ate, blessed him, and went on his way.

Rantideva drew what remained back toward himself. Before he could lift a morsel, a second stranger stood at the door, a shudra.

“Rajan, let me too have something to eat.”

Remembering the Lord, Rantideva placed a portion of the food that was left into his hands, and he too went away satisfied.

He had only just slid the last of the food toward himself when a third guest arrived, this one with a pack of dogs at his heels.

“Rajan, my dogs and I are faint with hunger. Give us something to eat.”

With the deepest reverence Rantideva gave away everything that was left, down to the last grain, to the dogs and to the man who kept them. Then, lost in the thought of the Lord, he bowed his head to the animals and their master, for in them too Bhagavan had come to his door.

Now only the water remained, a single cupped handful, barely enough to wet one throat.

His own throat was dry, his lips had split. He was about to divide even that little water among his family and take a swallow himself.

Then another voice reached him from the doorway. A chandala, panting, hardly able to stand.

“I am the lowest of the low, Rajan. Give me water. My throat is closing.”

The words came out of the man in fragments, each one costing him pain to speak, and hearing them Rantideva was wrung through with pity. He looked once at the water on which his own life now hung, and once at the dying man, and something in him had already decided.

His cracked lips moved, and a prayer rose out of him. It asked for nothing. It rose on its own, from some place deeper than thought.

“I do not ask the Lord for that highest state crowned with the eight great powers, the powers that begin with shrinking to an atom. I do not even ask for moksha, for release from birth and death.

“I ask for one thing only. Let me stand within the heart of every living being and take their whole burden of suffering onto myself, so that no creature anywhere is left with pain.

“Look. This poor man drinks, and lives, and in the very act of handing him the water my own hunger and thirst fall away, the ache of my limbs, my wretchedness, my weariness, my grief, my despair, my delusion, all of it quiet now, gone along with his thirst. This is all I ever wanted. In this I am already content.”

With that, though the want of that water was taking his own life, he poured every drop into the chandala’s hands. Compassion was the whole make of him, and he could no more hold it back than a spring can dam its own flow.

Forty-eight days of fasting, and now he had nothing at all, no food, no water, only two empty palms and the ease of one thirsty man given his fill.

The guests had all been shapes fashioned by the Lord’s own maya. Vishnu had raised those disguises to weigh the fortitude of his devotee, and the trial was finished. The three lords of the worlds, who grant their devotees whatever they long for, the three who had come as the brahmin, the shudra, and the chandala, now stood before him in their own forms: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

Rantideva bowed at their feet. There was nothing he wished to take from them. By the Lord’s grace every attachment and every craving had already left him, and with love as pure as love can be made he sank his mind wholly into Bhagavan Vasudeva. He asked for nothing at all.

He wanted no thing that was not the Lord. He fixed his mind on Bhagavan and held it there, and the maya of the three gunas broke and scattered the way a dream scatters at the first touch of waking.

His people, merely by keeping his company, ripened into yogis, and one and all they took refuge in the Lord and grew into great devotees given wholly to Narayana. In Rantideva’s own eyes there was never any shine of the royal seat, only that old, unbroken call answering every hunger and every thirst that came to his gate.

Here Shukadeva fell silent a while, as though the taste of that one handful of water still hung in the air between them.

Parikshit said quietly, “Bhagavan, I have spent my life counting up my acts of charity. Rantideva gave away the very thing his life hung on, and even then he found something left to ask for, the suffering of others. Until today I had thought giving so small a thing.”

Shukadeva smiled. “Rajan, giving has little to do with wealth. It is the letting go of the line between what is mine and what is another’s. Rantideva handed water to a thirsty man, and anyone at all can manage that much. But in that hour he could not find a hair’s width of difference between his own thirst and the chandala’s, and there, in that vanished difference, the whole of his long austerity came to fruit. For the man in whom that line dissolves, what is there in death left to fear?”