Bhagavatam · Yayati’s Old Age

The Ganga’s water was cold that morning, and the air carried the faint smell of wet sand. Parikshit rubbed his palms together, as if searching them for a little warmth, then looked at Shukadeva.

“Bhagavan, yesterday you spoke of those royal lineages in which one man lived by dharma and another stayed sunk in pleasure. My days are numbered now, and every night I wonder how to live the ones that remain. My mind keeps whispering the same thing over and over, that with a little more time, a little more license, perhaps this thirst would be quenched. Is that true, Bhagavan? If a man is given as much as he wants, is he satisfied? Or does the thirst only go deeper?”

Shukadeva was quiet a few moments. A heron came down on the water, then stood still. “Rajan, one king spent a thousand years finding the answer to that very question, and on the day he found it, nothing was left to him except the answer. His name was Yayati, son of Nahusha. Listen.”

Yayati was a great king. The earth lay under his rule, the treasury was full, and his arms still carried the strength that let no enemy stand. But there was one thing that nobody could see. Whatever he gained pleased him a little while, then went flat, and from beneath that flatness a new hunger raised its head. He would sit on his throne, and inside him was someone who never sat down at all.

He had two queens, and the road that had brought each of them to his side was a story in itself. The first was Devayani, daughter of Shukracharya, preceptor of the Danavas, the demons’ own guru and the one teacher alive who could raise the dead. Devayani had once been left for dead herself, thrown down a well in a quarrel by the very woman who now waited on her. A brahmin could never be her husband; Kacha, whom she had loved and cursed, had cursed her back with exactly that. So when a hunting king, thirsty, leaned over the mouth of a well and saw a girl clinging to its wall, and reached down and drew her up by the hand, Devayani called it destiny’s own arrangement and claimed him on the spot. The king was Yayati. The girl he lifted from the well became his queen.

The second queen was the woman who had thrown her in. Sharmishtha, daughter of the Danava king Vrishaparva, a princess who had once walked the palace gardens with a thousand companions of her own. When her insult sent Devayani down the well, Shukracharya’s fury threatened to leave the demons without their preceptor, and to keep him Vrishaparva handed over his own daughter. So Sharmishtha came to Yayati’s house as Devayani’s handmaid, a princess waiting on a princess, her thousand companions serving alongside her. Shukracharya had told Yayati plainly, never take Sharmishtha to your bed. But in private, in her fertile season, Sharmishtha herself begged him for a son, and Yayati, holding to the shastra’s word that a woman’s plea for a child accords with dharma, inclined toward her. Sons were born to her by him.

When Devayani understood that Sharmishtha too had borne her husband’s children, rage carried her past all sense, and she left the palace weeping and made straight for her father’s house. Yayati went after her. He tried to soften her the way a doting husband tries, with sweet words, with his own hands pressing her feet, and nothing he did reached her. Shukracharya watched his daughter refuse to be comforted, and turned to the king.

The sage’s anger was said to last no longer than half a breath. This time it did not cool. “Yayati, you have deceived my daughter, and you have broken your word to me. You are a slave to women, a dull-witted man, and a liar. The youth on whose strength you did all this, on that very youth I will now lay the punishment.”

“What punishment, Munivar?”

“Go. Let the old age that makes men ugly come into your body.”

The words had barely settled in the air when Yayati felt a pull inside him, as if someone behind his chest had taken hold of a cord and drawn it slowly out. The knees answered first. The strength that had been there one moment earlier drained down and away, and his thighs began to tremble as though they had walked in from a great distance. Then the hands. He raised his own palms before his face and watched the skin thin and slacken over the bones, the veins stand out, the fingers shake of their own accord while he could do nothing to still them. A taste came into his mouth, sour and metallic, as if fear had a flavor of its own. A whistling started in his ears, and the muni’s next word was lost somewhere inside it.

He passed his tongue over his lips to wet them, but the tongue too was dry. His breath snagged high in his chest and would not go down to his belly. A king who one moment earlier had held his hand over the whole earth could not now hold his hand over his own breath. And through all of it a single thought kept circling his mind, over and over, straight as a fool: so much is still left. I had only just begun.

“Shukracharya,” and the voice no longer sounded like his own, cracked, trembling, “forgive me. So many of my desires are still unfinished. I cannot rise and go in the middle like this.”

The muni looked at the trembling king, and his daughter’s tears must also have stayed with him. For half a moment the heat of his anger dropped.

“There is one way. Take the youth of one of your sons, and give this old age of yours to him. But only if he gives it of his own will.”

Yayati walked back to his capital on shaking legs. And then, for the first time, he looked at his sons as he had never looked at them before: at their straight backs, their full faces, the youth that had just been stripped from his own body.

He called the eldest first, Yadu, Devayani’s elder boy. “Son, my satisfaction is not yet complete. I need your youth for some years. In exchange, take this old age your grandfather has given me.”

Yadu looked at his father’s white hair, then at his own young palms, and shook his head. “Father, with an old age come before its time, I would not even want to live. And until a man has tasted the pleasures of the senses, how is vairagya toward them ever to come? I cannot do this.”

Yayati said nothing. He turned and called Turvasu, Devayani’s younger son. “No, Father.” Then Druhyu, Sharmishtha’s eldest. “No.” Then Anu. He too joined his palms: “Forgive me.”

Four times he asked, four times the same answer. None of the four could see what their father was truly asking, or what a body is worth; each clung to a youth that had only been lent to him as though it were his to keep forever. With every refusal Yayati’s head sank a little lower. The sons he himself had brought into the world would not lend him their bodies for even a moment, and there was no fault in that either. This was exactly what he had done all his life, keeping his own pleasure back from everyone else.

Now one son remained, Sharmishtha’s youngest, the least of them in age and the greatest in virtue: Puru. He was sent for.

“Son, your four brothers have refused. Do not turn my word aside as your elder brothers did.”

Puru looked at his father’s face, settled into its wrinkles, and at the restlessness in those eyes that even a king could not hide. For a moment he said nothing. Then he spoke, very softly, as one states a simple thing that needs no thinking over.

“Father, what man in this world can ever repay the one who made his body, and by whose grace he can reach the highest thing there is? The best son does what his father wants before he is even asked. The next does only what he is told. The low one obeys with a sour face. And the son who says no to his father is no son at all, only the waste the father’s body cast off. This body was your gift to begin with. Take it. My old age begins today.”

And it was done. Puru’s straight back bent, his full face settled into wrinkles, his hands began to tremble, and all of it flowed the other way into Yayati’s body: the warmth, the strength, the old heat. Puru never let out so much as a sigh.

Then for a full thousand years Yayati yoked his mind to his senses and followed them after their beloved objects. His senses held their full power, and he enjoyed whatever pleasures came, as occasion offered, to his heart’s content. He also worshipped Bhagavan Shri Hari, the Yajna-purusha whom all the Vedas proclaim, the form of all the gods, with yajnas of vast gifts, and day by day he pleased his beloved Devayani more and more with mind, speech, body, and things. And through all of it he kept the Lord Vasudeva seated in his own heart, the indweller subtler than the subtlest thing, and worshipped him even there. Whatever entered his mind, he enjoyed it. A thousand years flowed past like water.

One evening he sat alone in his palace. Outside, the lamps were about to be lit, and from some distant courtyard a woman’s song came floating in, the same old raga he had heard past counting, and in which no new rasa remained. For one instant everything paused, the song, even the wind.

And then the thing rose up from within that he had been putting off for a thousand years. He looked inside himself, at the place where the thirst used to rise, to see whether peace had come there now. And there stood exactly the same thirst, undiminished by even a grain, deeper if anything, as though every pleasure of those thousand years had only widened it.

From his mouth, very softly, for his own ears alone, it came. “A thousand years I have served my desires, and still, moment upon moment, the craving for them keeps growing.” He fell silent, then, softer still, “Pour offerings of ghee into a fire, and it does not go quiet. It flares higher.”

The moment the words were said, something inside him grew light. The wing he had been beating for a thousand years had come free at last, and the nest was falling away behind him of its own accord.

He sent for Puru.

Puru was old now, carrying the weight of a whole lifetime that had never been his own.

Yayati looked at his bent back, at his trembling hands, the same hands that a thousand years earlier had been straight and young, and his own head bowed of itself.

“Son, my satisfaction with pleasures has not come even today. But having taken your youth, I have seen this much, that the satisfaction is never coming, at any age. All the grain of the earth, all its gold, all its cattle, all its women, together they cannot content a mind being worn raw by the blows of desire.”

“Take this youth of yours back now. And return my old age to me.”

Puru joined his trembling hands. “No, Father. Let it stay with you.”

“No, son. What I stayed to learn, I have learned. If I linger now, I will only make the same mistake again.”

And the same thing happened once more, in the opposite direction. Strength and warmth flowed out of Yayati’s body and back into Puru; his back straightened, the trembling of his hands stopped, and Yayati became again the old man that Shukracharya’s curse had made him.

Then he divided the kingdom. To Druhyu he gave the southeast, to Yadu the south, to Turvasu the west, and to Anu the north. And judging Puru, the youngest of them all, the worthiest vessel in the whole circle of the earth, he consecrated him upon his own throne, setting the four elder brothers under him. From that same Puru descended the line that would later be called the great Puruvamsha.

Then Yayati set out for the forest. He walked among the deer now, past the pull of the opposites, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, emptied of every last trace of I and mine. There he took his leave of every attachment, and when the last of it fell away and the atman stood plain before him, even his subtle body of the three gunas dissolved. He merged into Vasudeva, the supreme Brahman, the Paramatma with no stain of maya upon him, coming to the very state that comes to the great saints who love Bhagavan.

Shukadeva paused for a few moments. The Ganga’s waves were touching the sand of the bank and turning back, and every returning wave carried a little sand away with it.

For a long while Parikshit said nothing. Then he said softly, “Bhagavan, Yayati had a thousand years and they ran short. I have seven days, and I have been afraid, thinking them too few.”

“So Yayati thought too, Rajan, for a thousand years. Then one evening he did one thing, only this much, that he stopped once and turned his face inward.” Shukadeva watched the water a while. “Days are never many or few. There is only one day, the day a man turns and looks.”

Parikshit said nothing. On the water before them the last light of evening trembled, and one more day was gone.