Bhishma: the Law of Giving, the Last Teaching, and the Ascent of Bhishma

About 215 minutes · in 7 sittings

Bhishma lay on the bed of arrows, the shafts still in him, the wounds around them gone bad and weeping, and his voice, when it came, carried the gravity that belongs only to a wise man standing at the door of death. Yudhishthira sat close, and his heart would not come to rest. He folded his hands and said that the grandsire had taught him many roads to quiet of mind, that he had listened to every one of them, and that quiet still would not come, because a road cannot be walked by the man who is himself the cause of the wreck. He looked at the body in front of him, covered in arrows and running with blood the way a hill runs with water from its springs, and said that he was wilting like a lotus in the rains. What could be more painful than this, that the grandsire had been brought to this state on his account, by his own people fighting his own enemies, and that so many other princes, with their sons and kinsmen, had gone down for his sake. Duryodhana, he said, was fortunate in one thing at least: he did not have to see the grandsire lying like this. He himself would count death better than life. If the grandsire wished him well, let him teach in such a way that this sin might be washed from him even in another world. This is the Anushasana Parva, Bhishma’s last teaching from the bed of arrows, weighted toward the law of giving, in which the secret of action, the rules of charity, the greatness of the Brahmin and of the cow, and the dialogue of Uma and Maheshvara open one after another, each answering a question that the broken king can no longer keep inside.

Gautami, the snake, and death: whose fault is it

Bhishma’s answer began with a question of his own. Why, he asked, did the king take a soul that stands under God, under destiny, and under Time, and hold it to be the sole author of its deeds? The way a soul refrains from acting is subtle; the senses cannot catch it. On this matter, he said, there is an old story about Death and an old woman named Gautami, with Time, a fowler, and a snake in it, and he asked Yudhishthira to listen.

Gautami was old, and what she had left in her was patience and a mind that had settled. One morning she found her son dead. A snake had bitten him. Before she had finished looking at the boy, a fowler named Arjunaka came in out of the trees with the snake trussed in a cord, dragging it, and threw it down in front of her. He was shaking with anger. “This wretch is the one that killed your son,” he said. “Tell me quickly how it is to die. Shall I throw it into the fire, or hack it into pieces? A creature that kills a child has no business living another hour.”

Gautami looked at him with something like pity. “Let it go, Arjunaka,” she said. “You have very little understanding. It does not deserve death at your hands. Who is so foolish as to ignore the lot that waits for every one of us, and to load himself with a folly like this, and to sink under it into sin? Those who have made themselves light with good deeds cross the sea of this world the way a ship crosses the ocean. Those who have made themselves heavy with sin go to the bottom like an arrow thrown into water. Killing the snake will not bring my boy back to life, and letting it live will cost you nothing. Who would walk into the endless regions of Death for the sake of killing one living thing?”

The fowler did not put down the cord. “I know that you can tell right from wrong,” he said, “and I know that great souls are pained by the pain of every creature. But what you are saying is instruction for someone whose mind is already at rest. It is no use to a man drowning in grief. So I am going to kill this snake. People who prize peace of mind hand everything over to Time and call Time the cause. Practical men ease their grief by taking revenge. Ease yours, and let me destroy it.” Gautami answered that people like her were never struck down by such a loss, that good men keep their souls fixed on what is right, that the boy’s death had been settled before it happened, and that she could not consent to the killing of the snake. Brahmins do not harbor resentment, she said, because resentment leads only to pain. Forgive it, and let it go. He tried merit next: by killing this creature they would both earn merit that never runs out, the way a man earns merit by a sacrifice on the altar and confers it on the victim too, and merit is earned by killing an enemy. She asked what good there was in tormenting and killing an enemy, and what was won by refusing to release an enemy already in one’s power; why not forgive the snake and earn the merit of letting it go? He said that the many should be protected from the one, and that virtuous men abandon the wicked to their fate. She said again, more quietly, that her son would not come back, and that she could see no other end that its death would serve.

He had one more argument, and it was the biggest he owned. Indra, he said, had won the best share of the sacrifice by killing Vritra, and Mahadeva had won his own portion of the offerings by wrecking a sacrifice; let her then destroy this snake at once and stop doubting. Bhishma said that Gautami, goaded again and again toward the killing, never once let her mind lean toward it. And the snake, painfully bound in the cord, sighing a little, holding its composure with great difficulty, chose that moment to speak.

It spoke slowly, and in a human voice. “Foolish Arjunaka,” it said, “what fault is there in me? I have no will of my own. I am not free. Death sent me on this errand. By Death’s order I bit this child, and there was no anger in it and no choice of mine. If there is any sin in this, fowler, the sin is Death’s.”

The fowler had an answer ready. If the snake had done the evil at another’s prompting, the sin was still its own as well, because it had been the instrument. In the making of a clay pot, he said, the potter’s wheel and the rod and the other tools are all counted as causes, and so the snake was a cause in the death of the child. The guilty deserve death at his hands, the snake was guilty, and it had confessed as much itself. The snake replied that the wheel and the rod are counted as causes without being free causes, and that it was the same kind of cause, so the fault was none of its own. If the fowler wanted to think otherwise, then all of them had to be treated as causes working together, and once causes are seen to work together, the question of which is cause and which is effect becomes a doubt with no floor to it. The snake deserved no death and carried no sin; and if the fowler insisted on finding sin somewhere in such causation, then the sin lay in the whole gathering of causes. Not the prime cause, said the fowler, and not the agent, and still the cause of the death; you deserve to die. If a doer who does an evil act is never implicated in it, then there is no such thing as a cause at all. Whether there is a cause or not, said the snake, no effect comes without an act in between, so causation counts for nothing either way, and only its part as an intermediate cause deserved to be weighed; and if the fowler truly held it to be the cause, the guilt of killing a living being rested on the one who had sent it. The fowler called it a wretch that was fit only to die and asked why it bandied so many words. The snake said that the priests who pour the clarified butter into the fire at a sacrifice do not take the merit of the sacrifice for themselves, and that its own place in this matter should be judged the same way. Between the two of them the argument went on and on, cause against effect, sin against punishment, and the boy lay where he had fallen.

Then Death came to the place where the snake had been sent from, and stood there, and spoke to the snake. “I sent you on that errand,” Death said, “and I was guided by Time. Neither you nor I is the cause of this child’s death. The wind tosses the clouds this way and that; I am tossed by Time in the same way. Every state of being that belongs to purity, to passion, or to darkness is provoked by Time and works in every creature. Everything that moves and everything that stands still, in heaven and on earth, stands under Time. The whole universe is soaked in it. Every act in this world and every abstention, and every change in them, is said to come under Time, and so are the Sun and the Moon and Vishnu, water and wind, the god of a hundred sacrifices, fire and sky and earth, Mitra and Parjanya, Aditi and the Vasus, the rivers and the oceans, everything that exists and everything that does not. Time makes them and Time unmakes them. Knowing this, why do you hold me guilty? And if any fault does attach to me in this, then it attaches to you as well.”

The snake was careful. “I do not blame you, Death,” it said, “and I do not clear you of blame. I say only that I am directed by you and moved by you. If any blame belongs to Time, or if it is wrong to lay any blame on Time, it is not for me to look into that fault. We have no right to. It falls to me to clear myself, and it falls to me just as much to see that no blame sticks to Death.” Then it turned its head toward the fowler. “You have heard what Death has said. It is not right for you to torment me, who am guiltless, by keeping me tied in this cord.”

The fowler had listened to the snake and had listened to Death, and he said so, and said that nothing in it cleared the snake. Death and the snake were both the cause of the child’s death; he counted both of them as the cause, and he would call nothing a cause that was not one. He cursed Death as wicked and vengeful, a bringer of affliction to the good, and he promised the snake that he would kill it for its sinful work. Death answered that neither of them was a free agent, that both stood under Time and did the work assigned to them, and that a man who thought the matter through would find no fault in them. The fowler asked the question that was left. If the snake and Death both stood under Time, then where did the pleasure that comes from doing good arise, and where the anger that comes from doing evil? Whatever is done, Death said, is done under the sway of Time; he had said already that Time is the cause of everything, and that the two of them did their appointed work at Time’s prompting, and that neither deserved any reproach from him.

Then Time itself arrived at that place where the point of morality was being fought over, and spoke to the snake, to Death, and to the fowler Arjunaka together. “Neither Death,” Time said, “nor this snake, nor I, fowler, is guilty of the death of any creature. We are only the immediate exciting causes of what happens. Arjunaka, the karma of this child was what excited us to act. There was no other cause by which the boy came to die. He was killed by the result of his own karma; he met death as the fruit of what he did in the past; his own karma destroyed him. All of us are subject to our own karma. Karma helps toward salvation the way sons do, and karma is the mark of virtue and vice in a man. We urge one another on, the way acts urge one another on. As men shape whatever they wish out of a lump of clay, so men arrive at the results that karma has settled for them. Light and shadow are bound to each other; that is how men are bound to karma through their own actions. So neither you, nor I, nor Death, nor the snake, nor this old Brahmin woman is the cause of the child’s death. He is the cause himself.”

Time had laid the matter out, and Gautami, hearing it, came to a certainty that men suffer according to their own actions. She said as much to Arjunaka. Neither Time, nor Death, nor the snake was the cause; the child had died as the fruit of his own karma, and she herself must once have acted in such a way that a son’s death was its consequence. Let Time and Death go back from here, she said, and you, Arjunaka, let the snake go. Time and Death and the snake each went back to their own places, and Gautami was consoled in her mind, and so, in the end, was the fowler.

Bhishma turned this on the man in front of him. “Having heard all this,” he said, “let go of every grief and find peace of mind. Men reach heaven or hell as the result of their own karma. This evil was neither your making nor Duryodhana’s. Know that all these lords of the earth were killed as the result of the acts of Time.” Yudhishthira, hearing it, was a little consoled, and turned, as a man does who has been given one answer, to the next question.

A key to reading this (the idea): The heart of the tale is the law of karma. Time, Death, and the snake are instruments; the root cause of the boy’s death is his own accumulated action, and Gautami’s own past action stands somewhere behind her loss. Her patience shows what the wise do with grief: they refuse to let it turn into revenge, and they set even the killer free.

The gist: Bhishma quiets Yudhishthira’s guilt with the law of karma. Every death is the fruit of its own past action, and the burden of the war’s ruin therefore belongs neither to the king alone nor to Duryodhana, and the same law, once understood, is what lets a grieving mother release the snake.

Sudarshana: a householder who conquered death by the duty to guests

Yudhishthira had one more question ready before the first answer had fully settled. Had any householder, he asked, ever conquered Death by the practice of dharma alone, with a wife and a hearth and a roof, and if so, would the grandsire tell it in full. Bhishma said there was an old history kept for exactly that purpose, and he began it at the root of a family tree. The Prajapati Manu had a son named Ikshvaku, and that king, bright as the sun, had a hundred sons. The tenth of them was Dasasva, a prince whose strength never failed him, and he became king of Mahishmati. His son was Madirasva, a man given to truth, charity, and devotion, who studied the Vedas and the science of arms with the same steadiness. Madirasva’s son was Dyutimat, rich in fortune and force. Dyutimat’s son was Suvira, devout and famous through all the worlds, wealthy as Indra. Suvira’s son was Sudurjaya, unbeaten in battle, and Sudurjaya, whose body was built like Indra’s, had a son who shone like fire. His name was Duryodhana, and the royal sages counted him among the very first of their number. In his kingdom Indra poured rain in abundance. The king never turned his back on a battlefield. His cities and his countryside were full of wealth, gems, cattle, and grain of every kind. There was no miser in his realm and no one in want, no one sick, no one weak in body. He was clever, easy in speech, without envy, master of his passions, compassionate, brave, and never boastful. He performed sacrifices, gave freely, honored the Brahmins and the truth, never humiliated anyone, and knew the Vedas and the Vedanta.

The river Narmada, whose waters run cool and holy, courted this king of her own accord, and by her he had a lotus-eyed daughter named Sudarshana. No woman born before her had been so beautiful. Agni himself wanted her. The god of fire took the shape of a Brahmin and came to the king to ask for her hand, and the king, seeing only a poor Brahmin who was nothing like his equal in rank, would not give his daughter to him. Agni vanished from the king’s great sacrifice. The fire simply went out of the rite, and the king, sick at heart, turned to the Brahmins. “What sin have I committed,” he asked them, “or what sin have you, that Agni should disappear from this sacrifice the way a kindness disappears from the memory of a wicked man? Great must the sin be. It is yours or it is mine. Find out which.” The Brahmins held their tongues and, with every faculty gathered, sought the protection of the god of fire. He came, blazing like the autumn sun, wrapped in his own light, and told them plainly what he wanted. “I seek the daughter of Duryodhana for myself.” The Brahmins were astonished, and in the morning they carried the words to the king.

The king heard it with delight and said, “So be it.” Then he did what a father does who is giving his daughter to a god: he asked for a bride-price of his own choosing. “Stay with us here always, Agni. That is the dower I ask.” Agni agreed, and that is why fire has always been present in the kingdom of Mahishmati to this day, the same fire that Sahadeva saw there when he marched south on his conquering expedition. The king gave his daughter to the god dressed in new garments and covered in jewels, and Agni accepted the princess Sudarshana by the Vedic rite the way he accepts the libations of clarified butter at a sacrifice, pleased with her looks, her grace, her character, and her birth, and minded to have children by her. A son was soon born to her, and he too was named Sudarshana. He was as beautiful as the full moon, and while he was still a child he came to the knowledge of the supreme and everlasting Brahman.

There was at that time a king named Oghavat, the grandfather of Nriga, who had a daughter, Oghavati, and a son, Ogharatha. Oghavat gave Oghavati, lovely as a goddess, in marriage to the learned Sudarshana, and the two of them settled into the life of a householder at Kurukshetra. It was there that this prince of blazing energy took his vow, and the vow was a strange one: he would conquer Death while living as a householder, with no forest and no renunciation, only a house and the duties of a house. The son of Agni explained to Oghavati what that would require of her. “Never act against the wishes of anyone who comes to us for hospitality,” he said. “Have no scruple about the means by which a guest is to be honored, even if you have to offer your own person. This vow is always in my mind, because for a householder there is no higher virtue than the hospitality shown to a guest. Keep it in your mind too, without ever doubting it, if my words carry any authority with you. If you have any faith in me, never slight a guest, whether I am at your side or far away.” Oghavati folded her hands, laid them on her head, and answered him. “Nothing you command will be left undone.”

From that day Death took an interest in Sudarshana. Wanting to outwit him, Death began to watch him for a single lapse. One day, when the son of Agni had gone out to the forest to fetch firewood, a graceful young Brahmin came to the door and asked Oghavati for hospitality. “If you have any faith in the virtue of hospitality as it is laid down for householders,” he said, “then I would ask you to extend its rites to me today.” The famous princess welcomed him according to the Vedic rites, offered him a seat and water to wash his feet, and asked what his business was and what she could offer him. The Brahmin told her. “My business is with your person. Do as you should, without any hesitation in your mind. If the duties laid down for householders are acceptable to you, princess, then satisfy me by offering me yourself.” She tempted him with many other gifts. He asked for none of them. Seeing him resolved, and remembering the directions her husband had given her, she was overcome with shame and still said to him, “So be it.” Holding in her mind the words of a husband who wanted the merit that belongs to householders, she went to the Brahmin.

Sudarshana, meanwhile, had gathered his firewood and was walking home, and Death, fierce and inexorable by nature, walked at his side the whole way, close as a devoted friend. When the son of Agni reached his hermitage he called Oghavati by name. No answer came. He called again, and again. “Where have you gone?” The chaste woman, devoted to her husband and at that moment held in the arms of the Brahmin, gave no reply. Believing herself defiled, she had lost her voice to shame. Sudarshana kept calling. “Where can my chaste wife be? Where has she gone? Nothing matters more to me than this. Why does that simple, truthful woman, who is devoted to me, fail to answer my call today, when she always used to answer with a smile?” It was the Brahmin who answered him, from inside the hut. “Understand, son of Agni, that a Brahmin guest has arrived. Your wife tempted me with many other offers of welcome, and I have desired only her person, and this fair-faced woman is engaged in welcoming me with the proper rites. You are free to do whatever you think fits the occasion.”

That was the moment Death had been waiting for. Iron club in hand, Death went after the sage himself, certain that Sudarshana was about to break his promise and could then be destroyed. Sudarshana stood there astonished. Then he put away every trace of jealousy and anger from his eyes, from his words, from his acts, and from his thoughts, and spoke to the man in his house. “Enjoy yourself, Brahmin. It is a great pleasure to me. A householder gains the highest merit by honoring a guest. The learned say that for a householder there is no higher merit than what comes to him when a guest leaves his house properly honored. My life, my wife, and whatever other worldly possessions I have are all dedicated to the use of my guests. That is the vow I have taken. As I have truly said this, by that truth I shall attain the knowledge of the Self. The five elements, fire, air, earth, water, and sky, together with the mind, the intellect, the Soul, time and space, and the ten organs of sense, are all present in the bodies of men, and they always witness the good and evil that men do. I have spoken this truth today. Let the gods bless me for it, or destroy me if I have spoken falsely.”

A voice answered from every direction at once, in repeated echoes. “This is true. This is not false.” The Brahmin came out of the hut. He rose like a wind that fills both earth and sky, he made the three worlds ring with Vedic sounds, and he called the virtuous man by his name and blessed him. “I am Dharma. All glory to you. I came here to test you, lover of truth, and I am well pleased, knowing you to be virtuous. You have subdued and conquered Death, who has always pursued you, seeking your lapse. No one in the three worlds has the power to insult this chaste woman, devoted to her husband, even with a look, far less to touch her person. She has been protected from defilement by your virtue and by her own chastity. Nothing can stand against what this proud woman says. This speaker of Brahman, this woman of austere penances, shall for the salvation of the world become a mighty river. You shall attain all the worlds in this very body, and as surely as the science of yoga lies within her power, this highly blessed woman will follow you with half of her bodily self, and with the other half she will be known as the river Oghavati. With her you shall reach the worlds that are won through penance, the eternal worlds from which no one comes back, in this same gross body of yours. You have conquered Death. You have attained the highest of all felicities, and by your own power of mind you have gained the speed of thought and risen above the power of the five elements. By holding to the duties of a householder you have conquered your passions, your desires, and your anger, and this princess, by serving you, has conquered affliction, desire, illusion, enmity, and weariness of mind.”

Then Indra himself came to that Brahmin, riding a fine chariot drawn by a thousand white horses. Death and the Soul, all the worlds, all the elements, intellect and mind, time and space, desire and wrath, had all been conquered in one house at Kurukshetra by a man who kept a house. Bhishma drew out the lesson for the king in front of him. “So keep this in mind: for a householder there is no higher divinity than the guest. The learned say that the blessings of an honored guest do more than the merit of a hundred sacrifices. Whenever a deserving guest seeks the hospitality of a householder and is not honored by him, he takes away all the householder’s virtues with him and leaves his own sins behind in exchange. I have told you this excellent story of how Death was conquered of old by a householder. Its recital gives glory, fame, and long life to those who hear it. A man who wants worldly prosperity should count it a remover of every evil, and the learned man who recites this story of Sudarshana every day attains the regions of the blessed.”

A key to reading this (the lineage): The Duryodhana of this tale is a royal sage of the Ikshvaku line, lord of Mahishmati, who lived many generations before the Kaurava prince who shares his name. His daughter Sudarshana became the wife of Agni, and their son carried her name as Sudarshana too. The name that Vishnu’s discus bears comes from another episode of this same book, where Shiva gives it, and the two Sudarshanas have nothing to do with each other.

The gist: The householder Sudarshana conquered Death through an unbending duty to guests and through truth. The force of the tale is that for a householder hospitality is the supreme dharma, that a vow kept when it costs the most is what defeats Death, and that a chaste woman’s honor is guarded by dharma itself.

Vishvamitra: how a kshatriya became a Brahmin

Yudhishthira’s next question came out of the story he had just heard, in which a king of the Ikshvaku line had produced a Brahmin-knowing son. If the status of a Brahmin is so hard for the other three orders to reach, he asked, how did the great Vishvamitra, a kshatriya by birth, become a Brahmin? He knew the man’s record and he laid it out. By the force of his austerities Vishvamitra had destroyed the hundred sons of the great Vasishtha in a moment. In his anger he had created evil spirits and Rakshasas of terrible strength, creatures like Time the destroyer himself. He had founded in this world the learned race of Kushika, hundreds of sages praised by the Brahmins. Shunahshepa, the austere son of Richika, chosen to be killed as the animal at the great sacrifice of Ambarisha, had won his deliverance through Vishvamitra. Harishchandra, having pleased the gods at a sacrifice, had become a son of the wise Vishvamitra. Fifty of Vishvamitra’s sons who refused to honor their eldest brother Devarata, a son he had received from the gods, had been cursed and made Chandalas. Trishanku, son of Ikshvaku, cursed by Vasishtha into a Chandala and abandoned by his friends, hanging head down in the lower regions, had been carried to heaven by Vishvamitra’s pleasure. The great river Kaushiki, where the celestial sages and the gods came to bathe, was his. The nymph Rambha, who disturbed his devotions, had been cursed into a rock. Out of fear of Vishvamitra the glorious Vasishtha had once bound himself with creepers and thrown himself into a river, and had risen from it released from his bonds, so that the river was called Vipasha ever after. He had prayed to Indra, and Indra, pleased, had freed him from a curse. He shone now in the northern sky among the seven sages, near Dhruva the son of Uttanapada. All this a kshatriya had done, and Yudhishthira’s curiosity would not let him go: how, without shedding his body and taking another, could such a man become a Brahmin, when Matanga, born a Chandala, had failed to reach Brahminhood with all his austerities? Bhishma told him to listen to how it had happened, in detail and from the beginning. In the race of Bharata there was a king named Ajamidha, a performer of many sacrifices and the best of virtuous men. His son was the great king Jahnu, and Jahnu’s daughter was Ganga. Jahnu’s son was the famous and equally virtuous Sindhudvipa; from Sindhudvipa came the royal sage Balakasva; his son was Vallabha, like a second Dharma in a body; and Vallabha’s son was Kushika, radiant as the thousand-eyed Indra. Kushika’s son was the illustrious king Gadhi. Gadhi had no children, and wanting a son he went to live in the forest. A daughter was born to him there instead. Her name was Satyavati, and no one on earth could match her beauty.

Richika, the austere son of Chyavana of the line of Bhrigu, came to ask for her hand. Gadhi looked at him, thought him poor, and refused. Then, as the dismissed sage was walking away, the king called after him with a condition that he expected would end the matter. “Give me a marriage dower and you shall have my daughter for your wife.” Richika asked what dower he should offer for the girl’s hand, and told the king to name it truly and without hesitation. Gadhi named it. “Give me a thousand horses, descendant of Bhrigu, swift as the wind, with the color of moonbeams, and each with one black ear.” The mighty son of Chyavana went to Varuna, the son of Aditi and lord of all the waters, and asked him for exactly that: a thousand horses with the speed of the wind and the sheen of the moon, each with one black ear. Varuna answered, “So be it. Wherever you look for them, the horses will rise before you.” As soon as Richika thought of them, a thousand high-mettled horses, bright as the moon, rose out of the waters of the Ganga. Not far from Kanyakubja the sacred bank where they came up is still famous among men as Ashvatirtha, the ford of the horses. Richika, pleased, gave the thousand horses to Gadhi as the marriage dower, and Gadhi, full of wonder and afraid of a curse, gave his daughter to the son of Bhrigu, dressed in jewels. The sage married her by the prescribed rites, and the princess found that she was glad to be the wife of that Brahmin.

Richika was pleased with her conduct and wished to grant her a boon. Satyavati told her mother, and her mother, standing before a daughter who kept her eyes on the ground, asked for a share of the good fortune. “Secure a favor for me too from your husband. That sage of austere penances can grant me a boon as well, the boon of a son.” Satyavati went back quickly to Richika and told him everything her mother wanted. Richika did not hesitate. “By my favor she will soon give birth to a son possessed of every virtue. Your request is granted. Of you too shall be born a mighty and glorious son, rich in virtue, who will carry my line forward. I say this truly. When the two of you have bathed in your season, she is to embrace a pipal tree and you are to embrace a fig tree, and by doing so you will both get what you desire. And both of you must eat these two sacrificial offerings of charu, which I have consecrated with mantras. Then you will have the sons you wish for.” Satyavati, delighted, told her mother everything Richika had said, and gave her the two balls of charu. What she did not know was what Richika had put into them. He had set the whole accumulated energy of Brahman in the charu meant for Satyavati, and the energy of a kshatriya in the charu meant for her mother.

The mother looked at the two portions and at the two trees, and she thought about her son-in-law. “Daughter,” she said, “I deserve more consideration from you than your husband does, so obey my words. The charu your husband has given you, consecrated with mantras, give to me, and take for yourself the one meant for me. If you have any respect for my word, let us also exchange the trees assigned to us. Everyone wants an excellent and stainless being for his own son, and the glorious Richika must have acted from the same motive, as will become clear in the end. That is why my heart leans toward your charu and your tree. Think, too, how to secure an excellent brother for yourself.” The mother and the daughter did as the mother wished, and both of them conceived. When the great sage found his wife with child he was glad, and then he looked at her more closely, and what he saw he read at once. “You have not done well in exchanging the charu, as will soon become apparent. It is clear too that you have changed the trees. I had placed the entire energy of Brahman in your charu and kshatriya energy in your mother’s. I had arranged it so that you would give birth to a Brahmin whose virtues would be famous through the three worlds, and that she would give birth to an excellent kshatriya. Now that you have reversed the order, your mother will bear an excellent Brahmin and you will bear a kshatriya terrible in action. You have not done well, acting this way out of affection for your mother.” Satyavati fell to the ground like a creeper cut in two. When she came to herself she bowed her head to her husband and begged. “Take pity on me, your wife, who is trying to appease you. Order it so that a kshatriya son is not born to me. Let my grandson be the one famous for terrible deeds, if that is your wish, and not my son. Grant me this favor.” The man of austere penances gave her his word. “So be it.”

Satyavati gave birth to a blessed son named Jamadagni. The wife of Gadhi gave birth to Vishvamitra, a sage versed in the knowledge of Brahman, by the favor of Richika. That is how the devout Vishvamitra, a kshatriya by descent, reached the state of a Brahmin and became the founder of a race of Brahmins. His sons became the progenitors of many Brahmin lines, men of austere penances and Vedic learning and founders of many clans: the adorable Madhuchchhandas and the mighty Devarata, Akshina, Shakunta, Babhru, Kalapatha, the celebrated Yajnavalkya, Sthula of high vows, Uluka, Mudgala, the sage Saindhavayana, the illustrious Valgujangha, the great sage Galava, Ruchi, the celebrated Vajra, Shalankayana, Liladhya, Narada, Kurchamukha, Bahuli, Mushala, Vakshogriva, Anghrika, Naikadrik, Shilayupa, Sita, Suchi, Chakraka, Marutantavya, Vataghna, Ashvalayana, Shyamayana, Gargya, Jabali, Sushruta, Karishi, Sangshrutya, Para Paurava, Tantu, the great sage Kapila, Tarakayana, Upagahana, Asurayani, Margama, Hiranyaksha, Janghari, Bhavravayani, Suti, Vibhuti, Suta, Surakrit, Arani, Nachika, Champeya, Ujjayana, Navatantu, Bakanakha, Sayanya, Yati, Ambhoruha, Amatsyasin, Srishin, Gardhavi, Urjjayoni, Rudapekshin, and the great sage Naradin. All of these were sons of Vishvamitra and knowers of Brahman. Bhishma closed the account where the question had begun: Vishvamitra, though a kshatriya, became a Brahmin because Richika had set the energy of the supreme Brahman in the charu. That was the whole story of the birth of a man who carried the energy of the sun, the moon, and the god of fire, and if the king had any other doubt, Bhishma said, let him name it and it would be removed.

A key to reading this (the idea): Charu is the cooked offering of a sacrifice, consecrated with mantras before it is eaten. Richika filled two portions with two kinds of energy, and when mother and daughter exchanged them the order of energy was reversed, so Vishvamitra, born in a kshatriya house, received the energy of Brahman and became a Brahmin sage. The kshatriya energy that had been meant for Satyavati was pushed one generation down at her plea, past her son Jamadagni to her grandson, Rama of the Bhrigu line, the Rama who later wiped out the kshatriyas twenty-one times with an axe that Mahadeva gave him.

The gist: The secret of Vishvamitra’s Brahminhood is the energy of Brahman that Richika set in the charu of the womb. The exchange of charus and trees between mother and daughter reversed the order of the two energies, so the Brahmin was born to the queen and the kshatriya energy passed to Satyavati’s grandson.

The parrot and the dried tree: the greatness of compassion

Yudhishthira asked next about the merits of compassion and the marks of a devout person, and Bhishma answered with the old story of Indra and a parrot. In the territories of the king of Kashi a fowler left his village with poisoned arrows to hunt antelope. Deep in a great forest he found a herd not far off and loosed an arrow at one of the animals. The arrow of that fowler of unerring arms missed the antelope and went into a mighty forest tree. The tree, pierced by an arrow tipped with virulent poison, withered, shedding its leaves and its fruit. A parrot had lived in a hollow of its trunk all his life, and when the tree withered the bird did not leave his nest, out of love for the lord of the forest. He stopped moving. He stopped eating. Silent and sorrowful, that grateful and virtuous parrot withered along with the tree. Indra, the conqueror of Paka, saw it and was struck with wonder at a bird so large in spirit and generous in heart, unmoved by misery or happiness, so extraordinary in his resolve. A thought rose in his mind: how could a creature of the lower world of animals come to possess a feeling so humane and generous? And then a second thought answered it: perhaps there was nothing wonderful in it at all, since every creature can be seen to show kindness and generosity toward others.

Indra took the shape of a Brahmin, came down to the earth, and spoke to the bird. “Parrot, best of birds, the granddaughter of Daksha is blessed in having you for a son. I ask you: why do you not leave this withered tree?” The parrot bowed to him. “Welcome, chief of the gods. I have recognized you by the merit of my austere penances.” “Well done, well done,” the thousand-eyed god said aloud, and to himself he said, how wonderful the knowledge is that this bird possesses. He knew by now that the parrot was of high virtue and meritorious action, and still he asked the reason for his attachment to the tree, because the reason was what he wanted to hear. “This tree is withered. It has no leaves and no fruit, and it is no longer fit to shelter birds. Why do you cling to it? The forest is vast, and there are many other fine trees in this wilderness whose hollows are covered with leaves, and you may choose freely among them to your heart’s content. Patient one, use the discrimination your wisdom gives you and leave this old tree, which is dead and useless and stripped of its leaves and can do no more good.”

The parrot heaved a deep sigh and answered in grief. “Consort of Shachi, chief of the gods, the ordinances of the deities are always to be obeyed. Now listen to the reason for the matter you have asked me about. Here, within this tree, I was born. Here in this tree I acquired all the good traits of my character. Here in this tree I was protected in my infancy from the assaults of my enemies. Why are you, in your kindness, tampering with the principle of my conduct in life? I am compassionate. I am devoutly intent on virtue, and I am steadfast in conduct. Kindliness of feeling is the great test of virtue among the good, and this same compassionate and humane feeling is the source of perennial felicity to the virtuous. All the gods question you to remove their doubts in religion, and for that reason you have been placed in sovereignty over them all. It does not become you, thousand-eyed one, to advise me now to abandon this tree forever. When it was capable of good, it supported my life. How can I forsake it now?”

The destroyer of Paka was pleased by these well-meant words. “I am gratified with your humane and compassionate disposition,” he said. “Ask a boon of me.” The compassionate parrot asked for one thing. “Let this tree revive.” Knowing the bird’s great attachment to the tree and his high character, Indra had the tree quickly sprinkled over with nectar, and it filled out again and rose to an exquisite grandeur through the penances of the parrot, who at the close of his life obtained the companionship of Indra by virtue of that act of compassion. Bhishma set the lesson beside the story: by communion and companionship with the pious, people attain everything they desire, just as the tree came back to life through its companionship with the parrot.

The gist: The grateful parrot’s compassion and steadfastness brought a dead tree back to life and carried the bird himself into Indra’s company. Kindliness of feeling is the touchstone of virtue among the good, and the company of the pious wins every aim.

Effort and destiny: which is stronger

The next question was the one a defeated man asks and a victorious man asks too. Which is the more powerful, Yudhishthira wanted to know, exertion or destiny? Bhishma answered with a conversation between Vasishtha and Brahma from the oldest days. Vasishtha had once asked Brahma which of the two shapes a creature’s life more strongly: the karma he acquires in this birth, or the karma he acquired in previous births, which is what people call destiny. And the great god, who had sprung from the primeval lotus, answered him in words that were well reasoned and full of meaning.

“Nothing comes into existence without seed,” Brahma said. “Without seed no fruit grows, and from seeds come other seeds, which is how fruit is known to come from seed. Good or bad as the seed is that the farmer sows in his field, good or bad is the crop he reaps. A field that has been plowed and left unsown gives nothing, and in the same way destiny gives nothing without a man’s own exertion. One’s own acts are the soil, and destiny, the sum of one’s acts in previous births, is the seed. The harvest grows from the union of the two. It is seen every day in the world that the doer reaps the fruit of his good and evil deeds, that happiness comes from good deeds and pain from evil ones, that acts once done always bear fruit, and that where nothing is done no fruit arises. A man of good acts acquires merit along with good fortune, while an idler falls from his estate and reaps evil, like caustic poured into a wound. By devoted application one acquires beauty, fortune, and riches of many kinds. Everything can be secured by exertion. Nothing can be gained through destiny alone by a man who lacks exertion of his own. It is by well-directed exertion that a man attains heaven, and every object of enjoyment, and the fulfillment of the desires of his heart. All the luminous bodies in the sky, all the gods, the Nagas and the Rakshasas, the sun and the moon and the winds, rose to their high station from the station of men by the force of their own action. Riches, friends, prosperity handed down from generation to generation, the graces of life: these are hard for men without exertion to reach.”

Brahma went on to the four orders. “The Brahmin attains prosperity by holy living, the kshatriya by prowess, the vaishya by manly exertion, and the shudra by service. Riches and the other objects of enjoyment do not follow the stingy, or the impotent, or the idler. They never come to the man who is not active and manly and devoted to austerities. Even the adorable Vishnu, who created the three worlds with the Daityas and all the gods, is engaged in austere penances in the bosom of the deep. If karma bore no fruit, all action would become fruitless, and men, relying on destiny, would turn into idlers. The man who follows destiny alone and does not pursue the human modes of action labors in vain, like a woman with an impotent husband. A man’s powers, properly exerted, follow his destiny. Destiny alone cannot confer any good where exertion is lacking. Even in the celestial regions the position of the gods themselves is unstable, and how would they keep their own position, or anyone else’s, without proper karma? The gods do not always approve of the good deeds of others in this world; fearing their own overthrow, they try to thwart them. There is a constant rivalry between the gods and the sages. And still it cannot be denied that destiny exists, for it is destiny that sets all karma in motion. One’s own self is one’s friend and one’s enemy, and the witness of one’s good and evil deeds. Good and evil show themselves through karma. Righteousness is the refuge of the gods, and by righteousness everything is attained. Destiny does not thwart the man who has attained virtue and righteousness.”

Then Brahma began to count cases, and the cases were the whole argument. In the old days Yayati fell from his high estate in heaven and came down to the earth, and was restored to the celestial regions by the good deeds of his virtuous grandsons. The royal sage Pururavas, the descendant of Ila, went to heaven through the intercession of the Brahmins. Saudasa, the king of Kosala, though he had performed the horse sacrifice and other rites, became a man-eating Rakshasa through the curse of a great sage. Ashvatthama and Rama, both warriors and both the sons of sages, failed to reach heaven because of their own actions in this world. Vasu performed a hundred sacrifices like a second Indra and was sent to the nethermost regions for a single false statement. Bali, the son of Virochana, righteously bound by his own promise, was consigned to the regions under the earth by the prowess of Vishnu. Was not Janamejaya, who followed in the footsteps of Indra, checked and put down by the gods for killing a Brahmin woman? Was not the sage Vaishampayana, who killed a Brahmin in ignorance and was stained by the killing of a child, put down by the gods as well? In old times the royal sage Nriga was turned into a lizard; he had given cows to the Brahmins at his great sacrifice, and it did not save him. The royal sage Dhundhumara was overwhelmed by old age while he was still performing his sacrifices, and he gave up their merit and fell asleep at Girivraja. The Pandavas won back the kingdom that the powerful sons of Dhritarashtra had taken from them by their own valor, with no help from the fates. Do sages of rigid vows, devoted to austerities, pronounce their curses by some outside supernatural power, or by their own puissance, won by their own acts? Whatever good the wicked come to possess, of the kind that is won with such difficulty in this world, is soon lost to them. Destiny does not help the man who is sunk in ignorance and greed.

Brahma closed with images a farmer or a lamplighter would recognize. “A small fire, fanned by the wind, becomes a mighty one, and in the same way destiny, joined with a man’s own exertion, increases greatly in power. As the light of a lamp goes out when the oil runs low, so the influence of destiny is lost when a man’s acts stop. A man who has obtained vast wealth, and women, and every enjoyment of this world, cannot enjoy them long without action, while a man of great spirit who never stops working can find riches buried deep in the earth and watched over by the fates. The good man who is generous in charities and sacrifices is sought by the gods for his conduct, since the celestial world is better than the world of men, while the house of a miser, however it overflows with wealth, is looked on by the gods as the house of the dead. The man who does not exert himself is never content in this world, and destiny cannot alter the course of a man who has gone wrong. There is no authority inherent in destiny. As a pupil follows his own perception, so destiny follows exertion. Where a man puts forth his own exertion, there alone destiny shows its hand. I have described all the merits of individual exertion, having always known them in their true meaning by the power of my yogic insight. By the influence of destiny and by putting forth their own exertion, men attain heaven. The combined aid of destiny and exertion is what bears fruit.”

A key to reading this (the idea): Destiny here is the sum of the accumulated deeds of past births, a seed that a man himself once sowed. Brahma’s image is clear: one’s own action is the soil and destiny is the seed, and seed without soil stays a seed, so a man’s active effort is indispensable to whatever his past has stored up for him.

The gist: Effort and destiny complete each other, and a man’s effort is the root. The idler who sits on fate alone gains nothing, while the man who works finds destiny working with him, as the lamp burns only while the oil is fed.

The fruits of good deeds

Yudhishthira asked what fruits good deeds bear, and Bhishma told him he would answer with what amounted to the secret knowledge of the sages: the ends, long coveted, that men attain after death. Whatever acts are done by a being in a particular body, the fruits of them are reaped by that doer in a body of the same kind; the fruits of acts done with the mind are enjoyed in dreams, and the fruits of acts done physically are enjoyed in the waking state, physically. In whatever condition creatures perform good or evil deeds, in that same condition they reap the fruit in the lives that follow. No act done with the help of the five organs of sense is ever lost. The five organs of sense and the immortal soul, which is the sixth, remain its witnesses.

Then Bhishma counted out the fruits one by one, the way a man reads a ledger. One should give one’s eye to the service of the guest, and one’s heart to the same; one should speak agreeable words, and one should follow and honor the guest. That is called the sacrifice with five gifts. He who offers good food to unknown, weary travelers worn down by a long journey attains great merit. Those who use the sacrificial platform as their only bed obtain commodious mansions and beds in births to come. Those who dress in nothing besides rags and the bark of trees obtain fine clothing and ornaments in the next birth. One who has penances and a soul set on yoga gets vehicles and riding animals as the fruit of his renunciation in this life. The king who lies down beside the sacrificial fire attains vigor and valor. The man who renounces every delicacy attains prosperity, and he who abstains from animal food obtains children and cattle. He who lies down with his head hanging downward, or who lives in water, or who lives secluded and alone in the practice of celibacy, attains all the ends he desires. He who gives shelter to a guest and welcomes him with water for his feet, and with food, light, and a bed, attains the merit of the sacrifice with five gifts. He who lays himself down on a warrior’s bed on the battlefield in the posture of a warrior goes to the eternal regions where every desire is fulfilled. A man who makes charitable gifts attains riches. By the vow of silence one secures obedience to one’s word; by austerities, all the enjoyments of life; by celibacy, long life; and by abstaining from injury to others, beauty, prosperity, and freedom from disease. Sovereignty falls to those who live on fruits and roots alone. Residence in heaven comes to those who live on nothing besides the leaves of trees. A man wins happiness by fasting. By confining his diet to herbs he comes to possess cows, and by living on grass he attains the celestial regions. By giving up all intercourse with his wife, bathing three times a day, and inhaling only air for his sustenance, a man obtains the merit of a sacrifice. Heaven is attained by the practice of truth, nobility of birth by sacrifices. The Brahmin of pure practices who lives on water only, keeps the Agnihotra without ceasing, and recites the Gayatri obtains a kingdom. By fasting, or by regulating his food, one attains residence in heaven. By taking nothing beyond the prescribed diet while engaged in sacrifices, and by making pilgrimage for twelve years, one attains a place better than the abodes reserved for heroes. By reading all the Vedas one is instantly freed from misery, and by practicing virtue in thought one attains the heavenly regions.

Bhishma said that a man who can renounce the intense yearning of the heart for happiness and material enjoyment, a yearning that fools cannot conquer, that does not abate as the body’s vigor abates, and that clings to a man like a fatal disease, is the man who is able to secure happiness. As a young calf can find its own mother among a thousand cows, so a man’s previous acts pursue him through all his transformations. As the flowers and fruits of a tree never miss their proper season, though nothing visible urges them, so the karma done in a previous existence brings its fruit at the proper time. With age a man’s hair goes gray and his teeth loosen, and his eyes and ears grow dim in their work, and the one thing that does not abate is his desire for enjoyments. Prajapati is pleased by the acts that please one’s father, the Earth is pleased by the acts that please one’s mother, and Brahma is adored by the acts that please one’s teacher. Virtue is honored by the man who honors these three, and the acts of those who despise these three do nothing for them. The princes of the Kuru line who sat listening were filled with wonder at this speech, and all of them were pleased in mind and overcome with joy. Bhishma added one more thing before he asked what else the king wished to hear: as mantras applied for the sake of victory, or a Soma sacrifice performed without proper gifts, or oblations poured on the fire without the proper hymns, all become useless and lead to evil, so sin and evil results flow from falsehood in speech. This, he said, was the doctrine of the fruition of good and evil acts as the sages of old had told it.

The gist: Every deed brings its own matching fruit, in a body like the one that did it, and no deed of the senses is ever lost, because the senses and the soul remain its witnesses. Honoring mother, father, and teacher, these three, is the foundation of dharma.

Who is worthy of worship: the greatness of the Brahmin

Yudhishthira asked whom a man should worship, before whom he should bow, before whom the grandsire himself would bend his head, whom he liked, and what it was that his mind rested on when affliction overwhelmed him, and he asked Bhishma to speak of what is beneficial both here, in the region of human beings, and hereafter. Bhishma answered from his own heart. He liked those twice-born men whose highest wealth is Brahman, whose heaven is the knowledge of the soul, and whose penances are made up of the diligent study of the Vedas. His heart went out to the families in which the young and the old bore the ancestral burdens without buckling under them. Brahmins trained in the several branches of knowledge, self-controlled, mild in speech, versed in the scriptures, well behaved, possessed of the knowledge of Brahman and righteous in conduct, discourse in respectable assemblies like flights of swans. Auspicious, agreeable, excellent, and well pronounced are the words they utter in a voice as deep as the clouds, and full of happiness both temporal and spiritual are the words they speak in the courts of kings, where they are received with honor and served with reverence by the rulers of men. His heart went out to those who listened to such men in the assemblies and courts, and to those who, to please the Brahmins, gave them with devotion food that was well cooked and clean and wholesome.

“It is easy to fight in battle,” Bhishma said. “It is hard to make a gift without pride or vanity. There are brave men and heroes in this world by the hundred, and when they are counted, the one who is a hero in giving should be regarded as the greater. If I had been born even an ordinary Brahmin I would have thought myself very great, to say nothing of one born in a good Brahmin family, righteous in conduct and devoted to penance and learning. There is no one in this world dearer to me than you, son of Pandu. And dearer to me than you are the Brahmins. Since the Brahmins are so much dearer to me than you, it is by that truth that I hope to go to all the regions of felicity that my father Shantanu won. Neither my father, nor my father’s father, nor anyone else joined to me by blood, is dearer to me than the Brahmins. I expect no fruit, small or great, from my worship of them; I worship them because they deserve worship. Because of what I have done for the Brahmins in thought, word, and deed, I feel no pain now, lying on this bed of arrows. People used to call me the man devoted to the Brahmins, and that way of naming me always pleased me greatly. To do good to the Brahmins is the most sacred of all sacred acts. I see many regions of blessedness waiting for me, who have walked reverently behind the Brahmins, and very soon I shall go to those regions for everlasting time.”

Bhishma gave the king a comparison drawn from a household. In this world, he said, the duties of women refer to and depend on their husbands; to a woman the husband is the deity, and he is the highest end she should strive for. As the husband is to the wife, so are the Brahmins to the kshatriyas. If there is a kshatriya a full hundred years old and a good Brahmin child of only ten, the child is to be regarded as the father and the old man as the son, because of the two the Brahmin is the superior. A woman whose husband is absent takes his younger brother for her lord, and in the same way the Earth, unable to obtain the Brahmin, made the kshatriya her lord. The Brahmins should be protected like sons and honored like fathers or teachers; they should be waited on with the reverence people show their sacrificial fires. The Brahmins are endowed with simplicity and righteousness. They are devoted to truth. They are always engaged in the good of every creature. And when they are angry they are like snakes of virulent poison, and for all these reasons they should always be waited on and served with reverence and humility.

Bhishma then warned the king to be afraid of two things, energy and penance, and to keep both at a distance, since the effects of each are swift. Of the two, penance has the superiority, because Brahmins endowed with penance can, if they are angry, kill the object of their wrath whatever measure of energy that object possesses. Energy and penance, each at its largest measure, are both neutralized when they are turned against a Brahmin who has conquered anger. If the two are set against each other, destruction overtakes both, and the destruction is unequal: energy applied against penance is destroyed without leaving a remnant, while penance applied against energy cannot be destroyed completely. As the herdsman with his stick protects the herd, so should the kshatriya always protect the Vedas and the Brahmins, and protect every righteous Brahmin as a father protects his sons, and keep his eye on the houses of the Brahmins to make sure that their means of livelihood never run short.

The gist: For Bhishma the Brahmin is dearer than his own father and dearer than the king he loves, and he says so by the truth of which he hopes to reach Shantanu’s worlds. Guarding the Brahmins and the Vedas is the kshatriya’s supreme duty, and the strength of penance outlasts the strength of energy when the two collide.

The fruit of a promise unkept: the jackal and the monkey

Yudhishthira asked what becomes of the men who, through stupefaction of mind, promise a gift to Brahmins and then do not give it, what the duties are in that matter, and what end those wicked men come to. Bhishma said that a man who promises and does not give, whether the promised thing is little or much, has the mortification of seeing every one of his hopes go fruitless, like a eunuch’s hope of children. Whatever good he does between the day of his birth and the day of his death, whatever libations he pours on the sacrificial fire, whatever gifts he makes, whatever penances he performs, all of it comes to nothing. That is the opinion of those who know the scriptures, arrived at with a well-ordered understanding. And they hold that such a man may be cleansed by giving away a thousand horses with ears of a dark hue.

On this subject Bhishma told an old story of a conversation between a jackal and a monkey. While both of them were human beings they had been close friends. After death one became a jackal and the other a monkey. One day the monkey saw the jackal in the middle of a cremation ground, eating the carcass of an animal, and remembering his own former birth and his friend’s, he spoke to him. “What terrible sin did you commit in your former birth, that in this one you are made to feed in a cremation ground on food as repulsive as the rotting carcass of an animal?”

The jackal answered him without excuses. “Having promised to give to a Brahmin, I did not make him the gift. For that sin I have fallen into this wretched order of existence, and that is why, when I am hungry, I am forced to eat such food.” Then the jackal asked his question back. “What sin did you commit, that you have become a monkey?” The monkey said, “In my former life I used to take for myself the fruits that belonged to Brahmins. That is how I became a monkey. So it is clear that a man of intelligence and learning should never appropriate what belongs to Brahmins, and as he keeps from that, he should also avoid every dispute with them, and having promised, he should certainly make them the promised gift.”

Bhishma said that he had heard this from his own teacher while the teacher was discoursing on Brahmins, from that righteous man reciting the old and sacred declaration on the subject, and from Krishna as well, when Krishna spoke of the Brahmins. The property of a Brahmin should never be taken. Brahmins should always be left alone. Poor, or miserly, or young in years, they should never be disregarded; the Brahmins had always taught him that. Having promised to make them a gift, the gift should be made, and a superior Brahmin should never be disappointed in his expectations. A Brahmin in whom an expectation has been raised is said to be like a blazing fire, and the man on whom such a Brahmin turns his hopeful eye is sure to be consumed, as a heap of straw is consumed by a blazing fire. When a Brahmin, gratified with honors and gifts by the king, speaks to him in affectionate words, he becomes a source of great benefit to the king, for he goes on living in the kingdom like a physician fighting the many ills of the body, and by his power and good wishes he keeps safe the king’s sons and grandsons, his animals, his relatives, his ministers and officers, his city, and his provinces. Such is the energy of the Brahmin on the earth, like that of the thousand-rayed sun. So a man who wishes for a respectable or happy order of being in his next birth should, having passed his promise to a Brahmin, certainly keep it by making the gift. By making gifts to a Brahmin one is sure to attain the highest heaven. The making of gifts is the highest of acts, and by the gifts one makes to a Brahmin the gods and the ancestors are supported. The Brahmin is the highest object to whom gifts should be made, and at no time should a Brahmin be received without being properly honored.

A sub-tale: This little tale of the jackal and the monkey binds a single moral point with two examples. One friend’s fault was to promise a gift and withhold it, the other’s to take a Brahmin’s fruit for himself, and both fell into low births for wronging a Brahmin, as if to mark that a promise once given becomes a debt, and a debt to a Brahmin is collected across lives.

The gist: A promised gift to a Brahmin must be kept, or all merit goes barren and a low birth follows, with only the gift of a thousand dark-eared horses to cleanse the fault. Seizing a Brahmin’s property is a sin of the same order, and the man a hopeful Brahmin looks at is straw before a fire.

The fault of instructing a shudra: austerity and rebirth

Yudhishthira wanted to know whether any fault is incurred by a man who, out of friendship, whether interested or disinterested, gives instruction to a person of low birth. He asked to hear it in detail, because the course of duty is exceedingly subtle and men are often bewildered about it. Bhishma said he would recite in order what he had heard certain sages say long ago. Instruction should not be given to one who belongs to a low order, and the teacher who gives it is said to incur a great fault. To show the evil consequences of teaching a low-born person in distress, he told of something that had happened in a hermitage of sages on the breast of the Himalaya.

On the breast of that prince of mountains stood a holy hermitage, shaded by trees of many kinds and overgrown with creepers and plants, the resort of many animals and birds, and so delightful, with its woods in flower in every season, that Siddhas and Charanas made their home there. Many celibate students lived in it, and many who followed the forest mode of life, and many Brahmins, highly blessed, who had the energy of the sun or of fire. Ascetics of every kind lived there under their various restraints and vows, men who had taken initiation, frugal in their food, cleansed in soul; large numbers of Valakhilyas and many who kept the vow of renunciation dwelt there too, so that the whole hermitage rang with the chanting of the Vedas and the sacred mantras. One day a shudra, a man full of compassion for every creature, ventured into that hermitage, and all the ascetics honored him duly. He looked at those men of every class and every kind of initiation, radiant with energy, godlike in their purity and power, and he was filled with gladness, and after he had looked at everything he found that he wanted to give himself to austerities. He touched the feet of the head of the hermitage and said, “Through your grace, foremost of the twice-born, I wish to learn and to practice the duties of religion. Discourse to me on those duties, and bring me by the rites of initiation into a life of renunciation. I am certainly inferior in color, for by caste I am a shudra. I wish to wait on you and serve you here. Be gracious to one who humbly seeks your shelter.”

The head of the hermitage gave him a plain answer. “It is impossible for a shudra to live here bearing the marks reserved for those who practice renunciation. If it pleases you, you may stay here, waiting on us and serving us. By such service you will certainly attain many regions of high felicity.” The shudra thought it over. How should he act now? His reverence for the religious duties that lead to merit was great. Let it be settled, he decided, that he would do whatever was for his own good. He went to a spot far from the hermitage and built a hut of the twigs and leaves of trees. He raised a sacrificial platform, made a small space for his sleep, and set up platforms for the gods, and there he began a life ruled by rigid observances and vows, practicing penances and keeping silence the whole time. He bathed three times a day. He kept other vows in the matter of food and sleep, made sacrifices to the gods, poured libations on the sacrificial fire, and honored the deities. Restraining every carnal desire, living sparely on fruits and roots, controlling all his senses, he welcomed and entertained every guest who came to his retreat, offering them the herbs and fruits that grew in plenty around him. In this way he passed a very long time.

One day an ascetic came to the shudra’s retreat to make his acquaintance. The shudra welcomed him and honored him with the proper rites and pleased him greatly, and the sage, a man of fierce energy, righteous in soul and firm in hard vows, talked with his host on many agreeable subjects and told him where he had come from. He came back to the shudra’s hermitage many times after that, to see him. On one of those visits the shudra made a request. “I wish to perform the rites ordained for the ancestors. Please instruct me in this matter.” “Very well,” the Brahmin said. The shudra purified himself with a bath, brought water for the sage to wash his feet, and brought kusha grass, wild herbs and fruits, a sacred seat, and the seat called the vrishi. He set the vrishi toward the south, with its head turned to the west. The sage saw it, knew it was against the ordinance, and corrected him. “Place the vrishi with its head turned toward the east, and after purifying yourself, sit with your face turned toward the north.” The shudra did everything as the sage directed. Intelligent and observant of righteousness, he received from that sage of penances every direction about the shraddha as it is laid down in the ordinance: how to spread the kusha grass, how to place the arghya, and what rites govern the libations to be poured and the food to be offered. When the rites in honor of the ancestors were done, the sage took his leave and returned to his own abode.

After a long time spent in such penances and vows, the shudra ascetic met his death in those woods. By the merit he had earned, he took birth in his next life in the family of a great king, and in time became a man of great splendor. The sage, too, paid his debt to nature when his time came, and in his next life he was born in the family of a priest. That is how those two, the shudra who had lived a life of penances and the sage who had kindly instructed him in the rites of the ancestors, were reborn, one a scion of a royal house and the other a member of a priestly family. Both of them grew up, and both acquired great knowledge in the usual branches of study. The Brahmin became well versed in the Vedas and in the Atharvans; in all the sacrifices ordained in the sutras, in the Vedanga that deals with religious rites and observances, and in astrology and astronomy he reached great excellence, and in the Sankhya philosophy he took great delight. The reborn shudra, now a prince, performed the last rites for his father the king when he died, purified himself by completing all the funeral ceremonies, and was installed by his father’s subjects as their king on the ancestral throne. And soon after his own installation he made the reborn sage his priest.

With that Brahmin as his priest the king passed his days in great happiness. He ruled righteously and protected and cherished all his subjects. And every day, whenever he received benedictions from his priest, and whenever religious and other sacred rites were performed, the king smiled at him or laughed at him out loud. It happened on numberless occasions: the reborn shudra who had become a king laughed at the sight of his priest. The priest noticed that the king always smiled or laughed whenever his eye fell on him, and he became angry. One day he met the king in a place where no one else was present, pleased him with agreeable talk, and took his moment. “Grant me a single boon.” The king answered warmly. “I am ready to grant you a hundred boons; what is one? Out of the affection I bear you and the reverence in which I hold you, there is nothing I cannot give you.” “I want only one boon,” the priest said, “since you are pleased with me. Swear that you will tell me the truth and no untruth.” The king said, “So be it. If what you ask me about is known to me, I shall certainly tell you truly. If the matter is unknown to me, I shall say nothing.” Then the priest asked. “Every day, when you receive my benedictions, and again when I perform religious rites on your behalf, and at the homa and the other rites of propitiation, why do you laugh when you look at me? Seeing you laugh at me on every occasion, my mind shrinks with shame. I have made you swear to answer me truly, and it does not become you to say what is untrue. There must be some grave reason for it. Your laughter cannot be causeless, and my curiosity to know the reason is great. Speak truly to me.”

“Since you have asked me in this way,” the king said, “I am bound to enlighten you, even though the matter is one that should not be told in your hearing. I must tell you the truth. Listen closely, foremost of the twice-born, as I disclose what happened to the two of us in our former births. I remember that birth. In my former life I was a shudra practicing severe penances. You were a sage of austere penances. Gratified with me, and moved by the wish to do me good, you were pleased to give me certain instructions in the rites I performed on one occasion in honor of my ancestors. The instructions you gave me concerned the way of spreading the vrishi and the kusha blades, and the offering of libations and meat and other food to the departed. Because of that transgression of yours, you have taken birth as a priest, and I have taken birth as a king. Look at the turns that Time brings about. You have reaped this fruit because you instructed me in my former birth. That is why I smile at the sight of you. I certainly do not laugh from any wish to disrespect you. You are my teacher. At this change of condition I am truly sorry; my heart burns at the thought. I remember our former births, and so I laugh when I see you. Your austere penances were all destroyed by the instructions you gave me. Give up your present office of priest and strive to win a superior birth. Exert yourself, so that in your next life you do not get a birth meaner than this one. Take as much wealth as you wish, learned Brahmin, and cleanse your soul.”

Dismissed by the king from the office of priest, the Brahmin made many gifts of wealth and land and villages to persons of his own order. He kept many rigid and severe vows as the greatest of the Brahmins had laid them down, traveled to many sacred waters, made many gifts to Brahmins there, and by giving cows to members of the twice-born order cleansed his soul and came to know it. He went back to the very hermitage where he had lived in his former birth and practiced very severe penances, and as the result of all this he reached the highest success and became an object of veneration to every ascetic who lived there. And yet, Bhishma said, that was how the sage had fallen into great distress in the first place, and the lesson was to be drawn from the fall. Brahmins should never give instruction to shudras. A Brahmin should avoid instructing the low-born, for it was by instructing a low-born person that a Brahmin came to grief. He should never wish to receive instruction from, or give it to, a person of the lowest order. Brahmins, kshatriyas, and vaishyas, the three orders, are regarded as twice-born, and a Brahmin incurs no fault by instructing them. Good men, therefore, should never discourse on any subject, for the sake of giving instruction, before persons of the inferior order. The course of morality is exceedingly subtle and cannot be grasped by persons of uncleansed souls, which is why ascetics take the vow of silence and pass through initiation, respected by all, without speaking. For fear of saying what is incorrect or what may offend, ascetics often give up speech altogether. Even men who are righteous and accomplished, truthful and simple in their conduct, have been known to incur great fault through words spoken improperly. Instruction should never be given on anything to just anyone, because if the instructed commits a sin as a result of what he was taught, that sin attaches to the Brahmin who taught him. The wise man who wants to earn merit should always act with wisdom. Instruction given in barter for money always pollutes the instructor. When asked, one should say only what is correct, after settling it by reflection, and one should teach in such a way that the teaching earns merit. People very often fall into great affliction through giving instruction, and so it is fitting, Bhishma said, to abstain from instructing others.

A key to reading this (the idea): The vrishi is the seat set out for the shraddha, and the direction of its head and of the performer’s face, east and north, is one of the subtle rules of the rite. The tale rests on the old severity of the law of the orders, in which even instruction was measured against the fitness of the receiver, and its sharpest turn is that the kind sage’s austerities are said to have been destroyed by the one lesson he gave, so that he was born again as the king’s own priest.

The gist: Instruction should be given with thought, and only to the fit, since the pupil’s sins reach the teacher. A sage lost his whole store of austerity by teaching the shraddha to a man of the low order, and only recognized it when his former pupil laughed at him from the throne.

Where Shri (Lakshmi) dwells

Yudhishthira asked in what kind of man, and in what kind of woman, the goddess of prosperity always resides. Bhishma answered with something that had happened and that he had heard about. Once, seeing the goddess of prosperity blazing with beauty and colored like the lotus, the princess Rukmini, mother of Pradyumna whose banner bears the makara, was filled with curiosity, and in the presence of Devaki’s son she put the question to the goddess herself. Who were the beings at whose side she stayed and whom she favored, and who were those she refused to bless? She asked her to tell it truly, calling her the beloved of the lord of all creatures, equal to a great sage in penance and power. And the goddess of prosperity, whose face was as beautiful as the moon, moved by grace and in the presence of him who bears Garuda on his banner, answered in words that were sweet and charming.

“Blessed lady,” Shri said, “I always reside with the man who is eloquent, active, attentive to his business, free from wrath, given to the worship of the gods, grateful, in complete control of his passions, and high-minded in everything. I never reside with the man who is inattentive to his business, or an unbeliever, or one who causes a mixing of the orders through his lust, or one who is ungrateful, or impure in his practices, or harsh and cruel in his words, or a thief, or one who bears malice toward his teachers and elders, or with people who have little energy, strength, life, or honor, who are distressed at every trifle and always indulging in wrath. I never reside with those who think in one strain and act in another. I never reside with the man who desires no acquisition for himself, or the man so blinded that he rests content with the lot he finds himself in without any exertion, or with those who are content with small acquisitions.”

“I reside with those who observe the duties of their own order, with those who understand the duties of righteousness, with those who serve the aged, with those who hold their passions under control, with those whose souls are cleansed, with those who practice forgiveness, with those who are able and prompt in action, and with such women as are forgiving and self-restrained. I reside with those women who are devoted to truth and sincerity and who worship the gods. I do not reside with women who let the household furniture and provisions lie scattered all over the house, or who always say what runs against their husbands’ wishes. I always avoid women who are fond of other people’s houses and who have no modesty. I reside with women who are devoted to their husbands, blessed in their behavior, always dressed in ornaments and good robes, truthful in speech, handsome and agreeable in their features, blessed and accomplished in every way. I always avoid women who are sinful and unclean, who lick the corners of their mouths, who have no patience or fortitude, who are fond of dispute and quarreling, who are given to too much sleep, and who are always lying down.”

Then Shri named the places where she lives, and the list ran across the whole visible world. “I always reside in conveyances and in the animals that draw them, in maidens, in ornaments and fine garments, in sacrifices, in clouds heavy with rain, in full-blown lotuses, and in the stars that spangle the autumn sky. I reside in elephants, in the cow pen, in good seats, and in lakes adorned with blossoming lotuses. I live in rivers that babble sweetly as they run, melodious with the music of cranes, their banks lined with rows of many kinds of trees, where Brahmins and ascetics and men crowned with success come to bathe. I reside in rivers with deep, rolling waters that lions and elephants have turned turbid, plunging in to bathe or to slake their thirst. I reside in elephants in rut, in bulls among the cattle, in kings, on the throne, and in good men. I always reside in the house whose inmate pours libations on the sacrificial fire and honors cows, Brahmins, and the gods, and in the house where offerings are made to the deities at the proper time in the course of worship. I always reside in Brahmins devoted to the study of the Vedas, in kshatriyas devoted to righteousness, in vaishyas devoted to cultivation, and in shudras devoted to the service of the three higher orders. With a heart that is firm and unchangeable I reside in Narayana, in my embodied self. In him is righteousness in its perfection and full measure, and devotion to the Brahmins, and the quality of agreeableness; in none of the other places I have named do I reside in my embodied form. And the person in whom I reside in spirit increases in righteousness and fame and wealth and every object of desire.”

The gist: Shri dwells in effort, truth, restraint, gratitude, and the service of gods, Brahmins, and cows, and in a house kept in order; she leaves behind sloth, ingratitude, and quarrel. In her full embodied form she rests steady only in Narayana.

Bhangashvana: the pleasure of woman and of man

Yudhishthira’s next question was a frank one. Which of the two, he asked, man or woman, takes the greater pleasure from an act of union, and would the grandsire resolve his doubt. Bhishma answered with the old story of Bhangashvana and Indra, which had been kept as the precedent on exactly this point. Long ago there was a king named Bhangashvana, so righteous that he was known as a royal sage. He was childless, and wanting a son he performed a sacrifice, and the sacrifice this mighty king chose was the Agnishtuta, in which the god of fire alone is worshiped, a rite Indra has always disliked for that reason, and one that men nonetheless desire when, wanting a child, they seek to cleanse themselves of their sins. Indra, the highly blessed chief of the gods, learned that the king intended to perform the Agnishtuta and from that moment began to look for a lapse in that royal sage of well-restrained soul, since a lapse would let him punish the man who slighted him. For all his vigilance, he could find none.

Some time later the king went out hunting. Indra told himself that this was his chance, and he stupefied the king’s senses. Bhangashvana rode on alone, confused, and hunger and thirst so overwhelmed him that he could no longer tell the points of the compass. Wandering in his thirst, he came upon a lake of exceptional beauty, full of transparent water. He got down from his horse, went into the lake, and made the animal drink, and when its thirst was slaked he tied it to a tree and plunged into the lake again to bathe. When he came up he found that the water had changed him into a woman. He looked at his own altered body and was overcome with shame, and his mind ran in every direction at once. How would he ride his horse? How would he return to his capital? By the Agnishtuta he had a hundred sons, all of them mighty, all of them children of his own loins. Transformed like this, what would he say to them, and to his wives, his relatives and well-wishers, and the subjects of the city and the provinces? The sages who know the truths of duty say that mildness and softness and a liability to extreme agitation are the attributes of women, and that activity, hardness, and energy are the attributes of men. His manliness was gone. For what reason had womanhood come over him? How, with this change, would he ever mount his horse again? Having thought all this, the king, with great effort, mounted the horse and rode back to his capital in the form of a woman. His sons, his wives, his servants, and the people of the city and the provinces looked at that extraordinary transformation and were amazed. The royal sage, an eloquent man, told them the whole of it: how he had gone hunting with a large force, lost all knowledge of the compass, entered a thick and terrible forest at the prompting of fate, been overcome by thirst and lost his senses, found a beautiful lake full of every kind of waterfowl, plunged into it to bathe, and come out a woman. Then he called his wives and counselors and every one of his sons by name, and gave them their orders. “Enjoy this kingdom in happiness. As for me, I am going to the woods, my sons.”

The king went to the forest, and there she came to a hermitage where an ascetic lived. By that ascetic the transformed king gave birth to a hundred sons. She took all those children of hers and went back to where her former children were, and set the two hundred face to face. “You are the children of my loins from when I was a man. These are my children, brought forth by me in this transformed state. Enjoy my kingdom together, all of you, like brothers born of the same parents.” At their parent’s command all the brothers came together and began to enjoy the kingdom as their joint property.

Indra watched the king’s children ruling together as brothers born of one father and mother, and he was filled with wrath at the outcome. By turning this royal sage into a woman, he told himself, he had apparently done the man a good turn in place of an injury. So Indra of the hundred sacrifices took the form of a Brahmin, went to the king’s capital, met all the sons, and set about dividing them. “Brothers never stay at peace,” he told them, “even when they are the children of the same father. The sons of the sage Kashyapa, the gods and the Asuras, quarreled with each other over the sovereignty of the three worlds. You princes are the children of the royal sage Bhangashvana. These others are the children of an ascetic. The gods and the Asuras are the children of one common father, and even they quarreled; how much more should you? This kingdom, your paternal property, is being enjoyed by the children of an ascetic.” With these words Indra split them, and very soon they were at war and killing one another.

The news reached Bhangashvana where she lived as an ascetic woman, and she burned with grief and poured out her lamentations. Indra came to that spot in the guise of a Brahmin and asked her, as if he knew nothing, what grief burned her so that she wept like this. She told him in a piteous voice. “Two hundred sons of mine have been killed by Time. I was formerly a king, learned Brahmin, and in that state I had a hundred sons, begotten by me in my own form. One day I went hunting. Stupefied, I wandered in a thick forest, and seeing a lake at last I plunged into it, and when I rose I found I had become a woman. I went back to my capital, installed my sons in the sovereignty of my dominions, and left for the forest. As a woman I bore a hundred sons to my husband, an ascetic of great soul, all of them born in his retreat, and I took them to the capital. My children, through the influence of Time, quarreled with one another. Afflicted by destiny, I am grieving.” Then Indra spoke to her in harsh words. “In former days, lady, you gave me great pain, for you performed a sacrifice that Indra dislikes. Though I was present, you did not invoke me with honors. I am that Indra, you of wicked understanding. It is I with whom you purposely sought hostility.” Seeing Indra, the royal sage fell at his feet, touching them with her head. “Be gracious to me, foremost of the gods. The sacrifice you speak of was performed from the desire for children, and from no wish to hurt you. Grant me your pardon.”

Seeing the transformed king prostrate before him, Indra was gratified, and he wished to give a boon. “Which of your sons do you wish to revive: those you bore after you were changed into a woman, or those you begot when you were a man?” The ascetic woman joined her hands. “Vasava, let those sons of mine come to life who were borne by me as a woman.” Indra was filled with wonder at the reply and asked again. “Why do you feel less affection for the children you begot in your form as a man? Why do you bear greater affection for those you bore in your transformed state? I wish to hear the reason for this difference. Tell me everything.” “The affection that a woman feels,” she said, “is much greater than the affection a man feels. That is why, Shakra, I wish those children to come back to life who were borne by me as a woman.” Indra was highly pleased. “You who are so truthful, let all your children come back to life. And take another boon, whatever you like. Take from me whichever status you choose, that of a woman or that of a man.” “I desire to remain a woman, Shakra. I do not wish to be restored to manhood, Vasava.” Indra asked once more why she wished to give up the status of a man for the status of a woman, and the king who had become a woman answered him. “In acts of union the pleasure that women enjoy is always much greater than what men enjoy. That is why I desire to continue as a woman. I tell you truly, foremost of the gods, that I take greater pleasure in my present womanhood. I am quite content with this state that I now have. Leave me now, lord of heaven.” The lord of the gods said, “So be it,” took his leave of her, and went back to heaven. And so, Bhishma said, it is known that in the circumstances the king had asked about, a woman takes much greater pleasure than a man.

A key to reading this (the idea): The Agnishtuta is a sacrifice in which Agni alone is worshiped and Indra is passed over, which is why Indra dislikes it and why he spends the whole tale hunting for a lapse he can punish. The story answers a question about pleasure, and it answers two more on the way: a woman’s love for her children is the greater, and a king who has lived as both would rather stay a woman.

The gist: Bhangashvana, having lived as both a man and a woman, is himself the witness that a woman’s love and her pleasure in union are greater than a man’s, and with both statuses offered to him he chose to remain a woman.

The deeds of body, speech, and mind to be renounced

Yudhishthira asked what a man should do to pass pleasantly through this world and the next: how he should conduct himself, and what practices he should adopt with that end in view. Bhishma answered with a count. A man should avoid the three acts that are done with the body, the four that are done with speech, and the three that are done with the mind, ten paths of action in all.

The three acts done with the body, which should be wholly avoided, are the destruction of the lives of other creatures, theft or the appropriation of what belongs to others, and the enjoyment of other men’s wives. The four acts done with speech, which should never be indulged in or even thought of, are evil conversation, harsh words, publishing other people’s faults, and falsehood. Coveting the possessions of others, doing injury to others, and disbelief in the ordinances of the Vedas are the three acts done with the mind that should always be avoided. So a man should never do any evil act in word, body, or mind. By doing good and evil acts a man is sure to enjoy or to endure their just consequences, and nothing, Bhishma said, is more certain than that.

A key to reading this (the number): These are the ten paths of action: three of the body, four of speech, and three of the mind. The count is the teaching, because the body, the tongue, and the mind each have their own doors through which a wrong can enter, and the list names every door.

The gist: Avoiding the ten deeds of body, speech, and mind that are to be renounced is the road to happiness in this world and the next, and the consequences of good and evil acts are the one thing of which there is no doubt.

The episode of Uma and Maheshvara, and the vision of Upamanyu

Yudhishthira turned to the largest subject of all. “Son of the river Ganga, you have heard all the names of Maheshvara, the lord of the universe. Tell us all the names that are applied to him who is called Isha and Shambhu, who is called Babhru, the vast one, who has the universe for his form, who is the illustrious teacher of all the gods and the Asuras, who is called Svayambhu, the self-created, and who is the cause of the origin and the dissolution of the universe. Tell us also of the power of Mahadeva.” Bhishma, who had answered every question so far, began this one by declining it. He was quite incompetent, he said, to recite the virtues of Mahadeva of highest intelligence. He pervades all things in the universe and yet is not seen anywhere. He is the creator of the universal self and of the knowing self, and he is their master. All the gods, from Brahma down to the Pishachas, adore and worship him. He transcends both Prakriti and Purusha. He is the one on whom the sages versed in yoga and the knowledge of the tattvas think and reflect. He is indestructible and the supreme Brahman, and he is both the existent and the non-existent. Stirring Prakriti and Purusha by his energy, he created from them Brahma, the universal lord of creatures. Who is competent to tell the virtues of that god of gods? A man is subject to conception in the womb, to birth, to decrepitude, and to death, and being such, what man like Bhishma could understand Bhava? Only Narayana, the bearer of the discus and the mace, can comprehend Mahadeva.

Bhishma explained why Narayana could. The one who bears the discus is without deterioration, and no being surpasses him in attributes; he is Vishnu because he pervades the universe; he is irresistible, endowed with spiritual vision and supreme energy, and he sees all things with the eye of yoga. It was because of the devotion Krishna gave to the illustrious Rudra, whom he gratified by penances in the retreat of Badari, that Krishna had succeeded in pervading the whole universe, and it was through Maheshvara of celestial vision that Vasudeva had obtained the attribute of universal agreeableness, an agreeableness far greater than anything that goes by the name of wealth. For a full thousand years this Madhava had undergone the severest penances and at last gratified the illustrious boon-giving Shiva, master of all that moves and all that stands still. In every new yuga Krishna has gratified Mahadeva by such penances, and in every yuga Mahadeva has been gratified by Krishna’s great devotion. How great the power of Mahadeva is, that original cause of the universe, Hari had seen with his own eyes during the penances he undertook at Badari to obtain a son. Bhishma saw no one superior to Mahadeva, and he knew only one person competent to expound the names of that god of gods fully, without leaving the listener wanting more: Krishna, the great warrior of Yadu’s race. So the grandsire of the Kurus turned on his bed of arrows to Vasudeva and asked him to do it. “You are the master of all the gods and the Asuras. You are illustrious. You are Vishnu because you pervade the whole universe. It falls to you to discourse on the subjects connected with Shiva of universal form that Yudhishthira has asked me about. Long ago the sage Tandi, sprung from Brahma, recited the thousand names of Mahadeva in Brahma’s region and before Brahma himself. Recite those names before this gathering, so that these sages rich in asceticism, observant of high vows and possessed of self-restraint, with the island-born Krishna among them, may hear you. Speak of the high blessedness of him who is immutable, who is always cheerful and happy, who is the Hotri, the universal protector, the creator of the universe, and who is called Mundin and Kapardin.”

Vasudeva began, as Bhishma had, with the size of the subject. The gods themselves, with Indra and the grandsire Brahma among them, and the great sages too, are incompetent to understand the course of Mahadeva’s acts truly and in all their details. He is the end that all righteous people attain. The very Adityas, with their subtle sight, cannot see his abode. How then could a mere man comprehend him? He would therefore recite truly some of the attributes of that illustrious slayer of Asuras who is regarded as the lord of all sacrifices and vows. He touched water to purify himself, and then he spoke to the Brahmins, to Yudhishthira, and to the son of Ganga, and what he told them first was how he had once obtained, in the days when the son who would be Samba was still only a wish, a sight of the great god that is very hard to obtain. He had seen the illustrious deity in the abstraction of yoga.

Twelve years after Pradyumna, the son of Rukmini, killed the Asura Shambara, Krishna’s wife Jambavati came to him with something on her mind. She had been looking at Pradyumna and Charudeshna and the other sons born of Rukmini, and she wanted a son of her own. “Grant me a son of unfading glory,” she said, “endowed with heroism, foremost among mighty men, with the most agreeable features, sinless in conduct, and like yourself. And let there be no delay in granting this prayer of mine. There is nothing in the three worlds you cannot attain; you could create other worlds if you wished it. Observing a vow for twelve years and purifying yourself, you worshiped the lord of all creatures and then begot on Rukmini the sons she has from you: Charudeshna and Sucharu, Charuvesha and Yashodhana, Charushravas and Charuyashas, Pradyumna and Shambhu. Grant me a son like those sons of great power.” Krishna asked her leave to go away for a time, and promised to obey her wish. “Go,” she said, “and may success and prosperity always attend you.” Then she blessed him with a list that took in everything that protects: Brahma and Shiva and Kashyapa, the rivers, the deities who preside over the mind, the soil, all the herbs, the meters that carry the libations of sacrifice, the sages, the earth, the oceans, the sacrificial presents, the syllables that complete the cadences of the samans, the stars, the ancestors, the planets, the wives of the gods, the celestial maidens and the celestial mothers, the great cycles, the cows, the moon, Savitri, Agni, the knowledge of the Vedas, the seasons, the year, and every division of time down to the kshana, the lava, the muhurta, and the nimesha, and the yugas one after another. Let all of these protect him and keep him happy wherever he stayed; let no danger meet him on the way, and no heedlessness be his. Blessed like that, Krishna took his leave of her. He went to his father and his mother, to the king, and to Ahuka, and told them what Jambavati had asked of him in her distress. He said goodbye to them with a sorrowful heart, went to Gada and to Balarama, who told him cheerfully to let his penances increase without obstruction, and with everyone’s permission in hand he thought of Garuda. The bird came at once and carried him to the Himalaya, and there Krishna dismissed him.

On the Himalaya, greatest of mountains, Krishna saw many wonderful sights, and among them an excellent and agreeable retreat for the practice of penances, the home of the great sage Upamanyu, a descendant of Vyaghrapada. The gods and the Gandharvas praised and revered that retreat, and it seemed clothed in Vedic beauty. It was adorned with dhava and kakubha and kadamba and coca trees, with kuruvaka and ketaka and jambu and patala, with banyans and varunaka and vatsanabha and bilva, with sarala and kapittha and piyala and sala and palmyra, with badari and kunda and punnaga and ashoka and mango and kovidara and champaka and jackfruit, and with many other trees loaded with fruit and flowers, and with the straight stems of the plantain. Heaps of ash from the sacrificial fires lay in their proper places all around, which added to the beauty of the scene. The place was full of ruru deer and apes, tigers and lions and leopards, deer of many kinds and peacocks, cats and snakes, buffaloes and bears, and many other animals. Delicious breezes blew constantly, carrying the melodious strains of celestial nymphs, and the babbling of mountain streams and springs, the notes of birds, the grunting of elephants, the songs of the Kinnaras, and the voices of the ascetics singing the samans made the retreat so charming that imagination could conceive no other like it. There were large houses in that hermitage for keeping the sacred fire, covered all over with flowering creepers. The river Ganga, with her clear and sacred water, ran through it; the daughter of Jahnu was always there. And there were many ascetics, first among the righteous, great in soul, their energy blazing like fire. Some lived on air and some on water. Some were devoted to the silent recitation of sacred mantras, some cleansed their souls by the practice of compassion, and some were yogins absorbed in meditation. Some lived on smoke alone, some on fire, some on milk. Some had taken the vow of eating and drinking like cows, without the use of their hands. Some husked their grain with two stones and some with their teeth. Some lived by drinking the rays of the moon and some by drinking froth, some had taken the vow of living like deer, some lived on the fruit of the pipal, and some on water. Some dressed in rags, some in animal skins, some in the bark of trees. Krishna saw ascetics of the foremost order keeping these and other painful vows, and he wanted to go in. The gods and every great being, Shiva among them, honored that hermitage, and it stood in all its beauty on the breast of the Himalaya like the disc of the moon in the sky. The mongoose played there with the snake and the tiger with the deer, like friends who had forgotten their natural enmity, because those ascetics of blazing penance lived close by, and their energy held every creature at peace.

In that hermitage, the finest of all, delightful to every creature, the home of many Brahmins fully versed in the Vedas and their branches and of many great sages famous for the difficult vows they kept, Krishna saw, as soon as he entered, a mighty sage with matted locks on his head, dressed in rags, who seemed to blaze like fire with his penances and his energy. His disciples waited on him, his soul was tranquil, and though no Brahmin stood above him, he looked young. His name was Upamanyu. Krishna bowed to him with a nod of his head, and Upamanyu welcomed him. “Welcome, you whose eyes are like lotus petals. Today, by this visit of yours, we see that our penances have borne fruit. You are worthy of our adoration, and yet you adore us. You are worthy of being seen, and yet you wish to see me.” Krishna joined his hands and asked the usual questions about the well-being of the animals and birds that lived in the hermitage, about the progress of his righteousness, and about his disciples. Then Upamanyu spoke to him in words that were exceedingly sweet. “You shall obtain, Krishna, without any doubt, a son like yourself. Take yourself to severe penances, and gratify Ishana, the lord of all creatures. That divine master sports here with his spouse at his side. It was here, Janardana, that the gods with all the sages, in days gone by, gratified that foremost of deities by their penances and celibacy and truth and self-restraint, and won the fruition of many high desires. That illustrious god is the vast receptacle of all energies and penances. He projects into existence and withdraws into himself everything that is good and everything that is evil, and that inconceivable deity, whom you seek, lives here with his spouse.”

Upamanyu then gave Krishna the record of what Mahadeva had done for those who sought him, and the record was long. Hiranyakashipu, born a Danava with strength enough to shake the mountains of Meru, obtained from Mahadeva the power belonging to all the gods and enjoyed it for ten million years. His foremost son, Mandara, through a boon from Mahadeva, fought Indra for a million years, and neither the discus of Vishnu nor the thunderbolt of Indra could make the slightest mark on him. The discus Krishna himself carried had been given to him by Mahadeva after Mahadeva killed a Daitya who was proud of his strength and lived in the waters; since no one besides Shiva, the wielder of the Pinaka, could bear to look at its blaze, Bhava had named it Sudarshana, and the name had passed current in all the worlds ever since, and even that weapon, and hundreds like it, had failed to scratch Mandara. Mahadeva gave the Danava Vidyutprabha the sovereignty of the three worlds for a hundred thousand years, a hundred million children, and the region called Kushadvipa. The Asura Shatamukha, who poured the flesh of his own body into the fire for a hundred years, asked for the power of creating new creatures and for eternal power, and was told, “So be it.” Brahma himself, sacrificing for three hundred years to obtain children, received a thousand sons. Yajnavalkya won his fame by adoring Mahadeva, and Vyasa, the son of Parashara, his celebrity by adoring Shankara. The Valakhilyas, slighted by Indra, gratified Rudra and were promised that their penances would create a bird to rob Indra of the amrita. When the waters of the world vanished in Mahadeva’s wrath, the gods won them back with the sacrifice called Saptakapala. The wife of Atri, who left her husband in a huff and sought Mahadeva’s protection, fasting for three hundred years and sleeping on wooden clubs, was promised a son without any need of a husband, who would carry a name after her. Vikarna won high success by his penances; Shakalya, after a mental sacrifice of nine hundred years, was told he would become a great author whose line would never end and whose son would make the sutras of his work; Savarni, in the Krita age, after six thousand years of penance in this very hermitage, was set beyond decrepitude and death and made an author celebrated through all the worlds; Indra, adoring Mahadeva at Varanasi, obtained the sovereignty of the gods; and Narada was promised that no one would equal him in energy and penance and that he would always attend on Mahadeva with his songs and his instruments. Then Upamanyu told Krishna his own story. In the Krita age there was a famous sage named Vyaghrapada, a master of the Vedas; Upamanyu was born as his son, and Dhaumya as his younger brother. One day, with Dhaumya, the boy wandered into the hermitage of some sages and saw a cow being milked, and the milk looked to him like amrita itself. He went home and asked his mother for food made with milk. There was no milk in the house. Grieved, she boiled a piece of rice cake in water until the water turned white, set it before the boys, and told them it was milk. But Upamanyu had drunk milk once, at a sacrifice to which his father had taken him, where a celestial cow was being milked, and he knew at once what he had been given, and it gave him no pleasure at all. “Mother, this that you have given me is no preparation of milk.” She embraced him and smelled his head, her eyes full of tears. Where could ascetics of cleansed souls get milk, she asked him, living by the rivers where the Valakhilyas come, with mountains and forests for their home, eating only what the wilderness gave? There could be no milk in a wilderness where there were no offspring of Surabhi. They passed their time in penances and mantras, with Shiva as their highest refuge, and without gratifying the boon-giving Sthanu of the three eyes no one could get milk, or fine robes, or any of the objects of enjoyment in the world. “Devote yourself to Shankara with your whole soul, my dear son. Through his grace you are sure to obtain everything your wishes ask for.” The boy joined his hands and asked her the questions that would shape the rest of his life. Who was this Mahadeva? How could one gratify him? Where did he live? How might he be seen? What pleased him? What was the form of Sharva? And if he was gratified, would he show himself? His mother patted his body gently and answered him with great humility. Mahadeva, she said, is exceedingly hard to know for people whose souls are not cleansed; they can neither hold him in their hearts nor obtain a sight of him. His forms are many, and many are the places where he lives, and many the forms of his grace, and out of compassion for his worshipers he grants them the sight of his person. Then she told her son the forms Bhava takes, as the sages had recited them: the forms of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, of the Rudras, the Adityas, the Ashvins, and the Vishvedevas; of men and women, of Pretas and Pishachas, of Kiratas and Shabaras, of every creature of the water and of the woods, of tortoises and fishes and conches and the coral men wear for ornament; of Yakshas and Rakshasas and snakes, of Daityas and Danavas, of everything that lives in a hole; of tigers and lions and deer, wolves and bears, owls and jackals, swans and crows and peacocks, chameleons and lizards and storks, cranes and vultures and chakravakas; of mountains; of cows and elephants and horses and camels and asses, of goats and leopards and every bird of beautiful plumage; of Brahmins with their staffs and umbrellas and water gourds. He is sometimes six-faced and sometimes many-faced, three-eyed and many-headed, with millions of legs and innumerable arms, and he takes the forms of sages and Gandharvas and Siddhas, and a form made white with ashes, with a half-moon on his forehead. He is Sharva, the destroyer of all creatures, and the foundation on which all creatures rest. He dwells in every heart and knows every worshiper’s desire. He rejoices and he rages, he utters the syllable Hum with a great noise, he arms himself now with the discus, now with the trident, the mace, the mallet, the scimitar, the battle axe. He has snakes for his belt and his earrings and his sacred thread and an elephant’s skin for his upper garment. He laughs and sings and dances most beautifully; he wanders over the cremation grounds, yawns, cries, makes others cry, puts on the guise of a madman or a drunk, speaks with exceeding sweetness, and then laughs aloud in appalling fierceness and frightens every creature with his eyes. He recites mantras and he is the god of the mantras; he performs penances and he is the god for whom penances are done; he makes gifts and he receives them. He may be seen on the sacrificial platform, in the cow pen, in the fire, as a boy or as an old man, and then not seen there at all. He is perfectly naked, with the horizon for his garment; he is fair, darkish, dark, pale, smoke-colored, and red, and his eyes are large and terrible. Who can understand the limits of Mahadeva, who is formless, one and indivisible, without beginning or end or birth? He is the prana, he is the mind, he is the jiva in its case of matter; he is the soul of yoga and the contemplation into which yogins enter; he is the supreme soul, and no sense can comprehend him, only the soul seizing his existence. Devote yourself to him, she told her son, depend on him, accept him as your one refuge, adore Mahadeva, and you will obtain everything you wish for. From that day, Upamanyu said, his devotion went to Mahadeva and to nothing else. For a thousand years he stood on the toe of his left foot. For the next thousand years he lived on fruit alone, for the next thousand on fallen leaves, for the next thousand on water, and after that for seven hundred years on air alone, until he had adored Mahadeva for a full thousand years of the gods.

At the end of it the mighty Mahadeva, master of the whole universe, was gratified with him, and wanted to find out whether Upamanyu was devoted to him alone. So he came in the form of Indra, surrounded by all the gods. He had Indra’s thousand eyes on his person and Indra’s thunderbolt in his hand. He rode an elephant of the purest white, with red eyes and folded ears and the temple juice running down its cheeks, its trunk contracted, terrible to look at, with four tusks; he wore a beautiful crown and garlands round his neck and bracelets round his arms; a white umbrella was held over his head; Apsaras waited on him and Gandharvas sang his praise. He came to where Upamanyu stood and said, “Foremost of the twice-born, I have been gratified with you. Ask of me whatever boon you desire.” Upamanyu heard Indra say it and felt no gladness at all. “I do not desire any boon at your hands,” he told him, “or from the hands of any other god. Amiable deity, I tell you truly, it is Mahadeva alone from whom I have boons to ask. True, true, Shakra, true are these words I say to you. No other words are agreeable to me except those which concern Maheshvara. At the command of Pashupati, the lord of all creatures, I am ready to become a worm or a tree with many branches. If it does not come through the grace of Mahadeva’s boons, the very sovereignty of the three worlds would be unacceptable to me. Let me be born among the very Chandalas, and let me still be devoted to the feet of Hara. Without devotion to that lord of all creatures I would not want birth in the palace of Indra himself. If a person is wanting in devotion to that lord of the universe, that master of the gods and the Asuras, his misery will not end even if for want of food he has to live on air and water alone. What need is there of other discourses, full of other kinds of morality and righteousness, for those who do not want to live even a moment without thinking of the feet of Mahadeva? When the unrighteous and sinful Kali Yuga comes, one should never pass a moment without devoting one’s heart to Mahadeva. Whoever has drunk the amrita that is devotion to Hara is freed from the fear of the world. One who has not obtained the grace of Mahadeva can never devote himself to Mahadeva for a single day, or half a day, or a muhurta, or a kshana, or a lava. At the command of Mahadeva I shall cheerfully become a worm or an insect, and I have no relish for even the sovereignty of the three worlds if you bestow it, Shakra. At the word of Hara I would become even a dog; in fact that would suit my highest wish. If Maheshvara does not give it, I would not have the sovereignty of the gods themselves. I do not want this dominion of the heavens, or the sovereignty of the celestials, or the region of Brahma. I do not even want that cessation of individual existence called emancipation, which is complete identification with Brahman. I want to be the slave of Hara. As long as that lord of all creatures, the illustrious Mahesha, with the crown on his head and a body white as the disc of the moon, is not gratified with me, I shall cheerfully bear all the afflictions of a hundred rounds of decrepitude, death, and birth that fall to embodied beings. What person in the universe can obtain tranquility without gratifying Rudra, who is free of decrepitude and death, who has the effulgence of the sun, the moon, and fire, who is the root cause of everything real and unreal in the three worlds, and who exists as one indivisible entity? If, because of my faults, rebirths are to be mine, in those new births I shall devote myself solely to Bhava.”

Indra had one more question, and it was the philosopher’s question. “What reason can you give for the existence of a supreme being, or for his being the cause of all causes?” Upamanyu answered him with the whole of his mother’s teaching turned into argument. “I ask boons of that great deity named Shiva whom the speakers of Brahman describe as existent and non-existent, manifest and unmanifest, eternal and immutable, one and many. I ask boons of him who is without beginning and middle and end, who is knowledge and power, who is inconceivable, who is the supreme soul, who was produced by no one and who, sprung from no seed, is the seed of everything in the universe. I ask boons of him who is blazing effulgence beyond darkness, who is the essence of all penances, whom no faculty of ours can comprehend, and by knowing whom everyone is freed from grief. I worship him, Purandara, who knows the creation of all the elements and the thought of every living creature, who cannot be comprehended by argument, who is the object of the Sankhya and the Yoga, whom everyone versed in the topics of inquiry adores. I ask boons of him, Maghavat, who is the soul of Maghavat himself, who first created Brahma, the creator of all the worlds, having filled space with his energy and called into existence the primeval egg. Who else besides that supreme lord could be the creator of fire, water, wind, earth, space, mind, and that which is called Mahat? Tell me, Shakra, who besides Shiva could create mind, understanding, the ego, the tanmatras, and the senses? The wise say that the grandsire Brahma is the creator of this universe, and Brahma acquired his high power by adoring Mahadeva; the power of creation, protection, and destruction that dwells in the one being who created Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra was derived from Mahadeva. Who else than that god of gods could invest the sons of Diti with lordship, to judge by the sovereignty conferred on the chiefs of the Daityas and Danavas? The points of the horizon, Time, the sun, everything that burns, the planets, wind, water, the stars and constellations: know that these are from Mahadeva. Who else than Mahadeva created sacrifice and destroyed Tripura? What need is there, Purandara, of many well-sounding statements full of specious sophistry, when I look at you of the thousand eyes, worshiped by Siddhas and Gandharvas and gods and sages, and know that all of it is due to the grace of Mahadeva? Everything that exists, animate and inanimate, has flowed from Maheshvara, who is its soul, and was created by him for the enjoyment of the jiva. In the worlds called Bhu, Bhuvah, Svah, and Mahah, in the Lokaloka mountains, in the islands, on Meru, in everything that gives happiness, and in the hearts of all creatures resides Mahadeva. If the gods and the Asuras could see any other powerful form than Bhava’s, would not both, and especially the gods when the Asuras oppressed them, have sought its protection? Who besides Maheshvara bestowed boons on, and then chastised, Andhaka and Shukra and Dundubhi and Maharshi and the lord of the Yakshas, Indra and Vala and the Rakshasas and the Nivatakavachas? Was not the vital seed of Mahadeva poured as a libation on the fire, and did a mountain of gold not spring from it? Who else is praised as having the horizon alone for his garments? Who else is a celibate with his seed drawn up, and who else has half his body occupied by his beloved spouse? Who else has subdued Kama, the god of desire? Who else has the cremation ground for his sporting ground, and who else is so praised for his dancing? Who else sports with spirits and ghosts, and has companions of strength like his own? Who else pours rain and gives heat and blazes with energy, and from whom else do we get our wealth of herbs? Know Maheshvara to be the original cause. He is adored by yogins, sages, Gandharvas, and Siddhas with knowledge and ascetic success and the rites of the scriptures, and by gods and Asuras with sacrifices, and the fruits of action can never touch him, for he transcends them all. He is both gross and subtle. He is without compare. He has attributes and he is divested of them, and he is the lord of attributes. He is the cause of the creation, the maintenance, and the destruction of the universe. He is the past, the present, and the future. He is the mutable and the unmanifest, knowledge and ignorance, every act and every omission, righteousness and unrighteousness. Him, Shakra, I call the cause of everything. See in the image of Mahadeva the marks of both the sexes: Rudra, the cause of both creation and destruction, shows in his form the marks of both sexes as the one cause of the creation of the universe. My mother told me long ago that he is the one cause of everything, and that there is no one higher than Isha. If it pleases you, throw yourself on his kindness and protection. You have visible evidence, chief of the gods, that the universe has sprung from the union of the sexes as Mahadeva represents it, and Brahma and Indra and Agni and Vishnu and all the other gods, with the Daityas and Asuras, crowned with a thousand desires fulfilled, always say that there is none higher than Mahadeva. We have never heard that the gods at any time adored the sign of any other god than Mahadeva. If Maheshvara is not accepted, tell me, if you have ever heard of it, whose sign has been worshiped by all the gods. He whose sign is worshiped by Brahma, by Vishnu, by you, Indra, and by all the other gods is the foremost of all adorable deities. Brahma has the lotus for his sign, Vishnu the discus, Indra the thunderbolt. The creatures of the world bear none of the signs that distinguish those gods. All creatures bear the signs that mark Mahadeva and his spouse, and so all creatures must be regarded as belonging to Maheshvara. All creatures of the feminine sex have sprung from Uma’s nature and bear the mark of femininity that distinguishes Uma; all creatures that are masculine have sprung from Shiva and bear the masculine mark that distinguishes Shiva. Whoever says that there is any other cause than the supreme lord in the three worlds should be regarded as wretched and left out of the count of the creatures of the universe. Every being with the mark of the masculine sex belongs to Ishana; every being with the mark of the feminine sex belongs to Uma. This universe of moving and unmoving creatures is furnished with these two kinds of form.”

“It is from Mahadeva that I wish to obtain boons,” Upamanyu told Indra. “Failing that, I would prefer dissolution itself. Go or remain, Shakra, as you desire, slayer of Vala. I wish to have boons or curses from Mahadeva. No other god shall I ever acknowledge, and from no other god would I take the fruition of all my wishes.” Having said this to the chief of the gods, he was overwhelmed with grief at the thought that Mahadeva had not been gratified with him in spite of all his austerities. And within the twinkling of an eye he saw the celestial elephant in front of him transformed into a bull as white as a swan, or a jasmine flower, or a lotus stalk, or silver, or the ocean of milk. It was huge, the hair of its tail was black, and its eyes were tawny like honey. Its horns were hard as adamant and the color of gold, and with their sharp, faintly red ends the bull seemed to tear the earth. It was adorned all over with ornaments of the purest gold, its face and hoofs and nose and ears were exceedingly beautiful, its neck very thick, and its hump shone so that it seemed to occupy the whole of its shoulder, like the summit of a mountain of snow or a cliff of white cloud in the sky. On the back of that animal he saw the illustrious Mahadeva seated with his spouse Uma. Mahadeva shone like the lord of stars at the full. The fire born of his energy was like lightning among clouds, and it seemed as if a thousand suns had risen there, filling every side with a dazzling splendor, like the Samvartaka fire that destroys all creatures at the end of the yuga, and the horizon was so overspread with it that Upamanyu could see nothing on any side, and he wondered, in anxiety, what it could mean. It did not last long. Through the illusion of that god of gods the horizon cleared, and he saw the illustrious Sthanu seated on the back of his bull, blessed and agreeable in appearance and looking like a smokeless fire, with Parvati of faultless features beside him. He saw Sthanu, the blue-throated god, unattached to everything, the receptacle of every kind of force, with eighteen arms and every kind of ornament, clad in white, wearing white garlands, with white unguents on his limbs, a white banner that nothing in the universe could resist, and a white sacred thread. His companions surrounded him, each with prowess equal to his own, singing or dancing or playing on many kinds of instruments. A pale crescent moon formed his crown, like the moon rising in the autumn sky, and his three eyes were like three suns, and the garland of purest white on his body shone like a wreath of white lotuses set with jewels. Upamanyu saw also the weapons of Bhava, standing in their embodied forms and full of every kind of energy. There was a bow with the hues of the rainbow, celebrated as the Pinaka, which is in reality a mighty snake of seven heads and vast body, with sharp fangs and virulent poison, wound round with the cord that served as its bowstring. There was a shaft with the splendor of the sun, or of the fire at the end of the yuga: the excellent Pashupata, the mighty and terrible weapon without a second, with one foot and large teeth and a thousand heads and stomachs and arms and tongues and eyes, seeming to vomit fire continually, superior to the Brahma, the Narayana, the Aindra, the Agneya, and the Varuna weapons and able to neutralize every other weapon in the universe. With it Mahadeva had, in days gone by, burned the triple city of the Asuras in a moment with a single arrow, and shot by his arm it can consume the whole universe in half the time of a blink; there is no being, Brahma and Vishnu included, that it cannot kill. There was another mysterious and very powerful weapon, equal or perhaps superior to the Pashupata, celebrated in all the worlds as the Shula of Mahadeva, which hurled by him can split the earth, dry up the ocean, or annihilate the universe. Long ago King Mandhata, the son of Yuvanashva, the conqueror of the three worlds, an emperor of abundant energy and mighty as Indra in prowess, had been destroyed with all his troops by that weapon: the Rakshasa Lavana had killed him with the help of this Shula, which Lavana had obtained from Shiva. Its point is very keen and it makes everybody’s hair stand on end, and Upamanyu saw it in Mahadeva’s hand as if it were roaring with rage, its forehead contracted into three wrinkles, its handle a mighty snake, so that it looked like the universal destroyer himself armed with his noose. And there was the sharp-edged battle axe that the gratified Mahadeva had once given to Rama to exterminate the kshatriyas, the axe with which Rama of Bhrigu’s race killed the great Kartavirya, ruler of all the world, and with which the son of Jamadagni wiped out the kshatriyas twenty-one times; with its blazing edge it hung on Mahadeva’s shoulder, adorned with a snake, and shone on his person like the flame of a fire. There were innumerable other celestial weapons with Mahadeva, and Upamanyu named only a few, on account of their principal character.

On the left side of the great god stood the grandsire Brahma, seated on an excellent chariot drawn by swans with the speed of the mind. On the same side was Narayana, seated on the son of Vinata and bearing the conch, the discus, and the mace. Close to the goddess Uma sat Skanda on his peacock, with his deadly dart and his bells, looking like another Agni. In front of Mahadeva stood Nandi, armed with his Shula and looking like a second Shankara in prowess and energy. The sages headed by the self-born Manu, the rishis with Bhrigu at their head, and the gods with Indra at their head all came there. All the tribes of spirits and ghosts and the celestial Mothers stood around Mahadeva, saluting him with reverence, and the gods sang his praises in many hymns. The grandsire Brahma praised Mahadeva with the Rathantara, Narayana sang the praises of Bhava with the Jyeshtha saman, and Indra did the same with the Shatarudriya, the highest of all Vedic mantras. Brahma and Narayana and Indra, those three great gods, shone there like three sacrificial fires, and in their midst shone the illustrious god like the sun in the middle of his corona, come out from the autumn clouds. Upamanyu saw myriads of suns and moons in the sky as well. Then he praised the illustrious lord of everything, the supreme master of the universe.

His praise was a litany of salutations, and it named the god by every form he takes. Salutations to you, illustrious one, refuge of all things, who are called Mahadeva; to you who take the form of Shakra, who are Shakra, and who disguise yourself in Shakra’s form and vestments; to you who are armed with the thunder, who are tawny, who are always armed with the Pinaka, who always bear the conch and the Shula. Salutations to you who are clad in black, whose hair is dark and curly, who wear a dark deerskin, who preside over the eighth lunation of the dark fortnight; to you who are white, clad in white, smeared with white ashes, ever engaged in white deeds; to you who are red, with a red banner and red garlands and red unguents; to you who are brown, with a brown banner and brown garlands. Salutations to you over whose head the umbrella of royalty is held, who wear the foremost of crowns, who are adorned with half a garland and half an armlet, who have the speed of the mind and the greatest effulgence; to you who are the foremost of deities, of ascetics, and of celestials; to you who have half your body smeared with sandal paste and half decked with garlands. Salutations to you whose complexion is the sun’s, whose face is like the sun, whose eyes are each like the sun; to you who are Soma, as mild as Soma, who bear the lunar disc; to you who are dark and who are fair, whose form is half yellow and half white, whose body is half male and half female, who are both male and female. Salutations to you whose vehicle is the bull, who ride the foremost of elephants, who go where no one else can go; to you whose praises are sung by the Ganas and who are devoted to the Ganas as to a vow; to you who have the color of white clouds and the splendor of evening clouds, who cannot be described by names, who have your own form and nothing to compare it to. Salutations to you whose crown is decked with gems and a half moon, who have eight flowers on your head, who have a fiery mouth and fiery eyes and the form of fire, who are inconceivable and mysterious; to you who range through the sky, who love the lands where cows graze, who walk on the earth and who are the earth, who are infinite; to you who are unclad, who make a happy home of every place you happen to be, who have the universe for your home and knowledge and felicity for your soul; to you who have a snake for the garland round your neck, who have the sun, the moon, and Agni for your three eyes, who have a thousand eyes, who are both male and female and who are divested of sex, who are a Sankhya, who are a yogin. Salutations to you who are the Atharvans, who relieve every disease and pain, who dispel every sorrow; to you who roar as deep as the clouds, who put forth many kinds of illusion, who preside over the soil and the seed sown in it, who are the creator of everything, the lord of all the celestials, the master of the universe, who have the speed and the form of the wind. Salutations to you who tore away one of the heads of the grandsire Brahma, who killed the Asura Mahisha, who destroyed the triple city of the Asuras and Daksha’s sacrifice and the body of Kama, who wield the rod of destruction; to you who are Skanda, who are Vishakha, who are Bhava, who are Sharva, who are Ishana, the destroyer of Bhaga, the slayer of Andhaka, who are the universe, who are both conceivable and inconceivable. You are the one end of all creatures, the foremost, the heart of everything. You are the Brahma of all the gods and the red and blue Nilalohita of the Rudras. You are the soul of the creatures, the Purusha of the Sankhya, the Rishabha among all sacred things, what the yogins call auspicious and without parts. Among those who keep the modes of life you are the householder; you are Kubera among the Yakshas and Vishnu among the sacrifices. You are Meru among mountains, the moon among the lights of the sky, Vasishtha among sages, the sun among the planets, the lion among wild animals, and among domestic animals the bull that everyone honors. Among the Adityas you are Vishnu, among the Vasus Pavaka, among birds the son of Vinata, among snakes Ananta. Among the Vedas you are the Samans, among the Yajus the Shatarudriya, among yogins Sanatkumara, among the Sankhyas Kapila. Among the Maruts you are Shakra, among the ancestors Devarat, among the regions the region of Brahman, and among all the ends that creatures attain you are moksha. You are the ocean of milk among oceans, Himavat among the rocky heights, the Brahmin among the orders, and among learned Brahmins the one who keeps the initiation. You are the sun among all things in the world, and you are the destroyer called Kala; you are whatever else of superior energy exists in the universe, and you possess supreme power. That is my settled conclusion. Salutations to you, mighty and illustrious one, kind to all your worshipers. Salutations to you, lord of yogins. I bow to you, original cause of the universe. Be gratified with me, your worshiper, who am very miserable and helpless, and be the refuge, eternal lord, of this adorer who is very weak. Pardon all the transgressions of which I have been guilty, taking pity on me because I am your devoted worshiper. I was stupefied by you, lord of all the gods, by the disguise in which you showed yourself to me, and I did not give you the arghya or water to wash your feet. Having hymned Ishana in this way, Upamanyu offered him with great devotion the water and the ingredients of the arghya, and then, with joined hands, resigned himself to him, ready to do whatever he was told. An auspicious shower of flowers fell on his head, celestial in fragrance and wet with cold water, the celestial musicians began to play on their kettledrums, and a delicious, fragrant breeze began to blow.

A key to reading this (the idea): This episode of Uma and Maheshvara is the prelude to the thousand names of Shiva, which Krishna tells through his own experience at Upamanyu’s hermitage. In it Shiva is called the root cause of creation in his half-man, half-woman form, with every female being marked by Uma and every male being by Shiva. The Sudarshana named here is Vishnu’s discus, so called by Shiva because no one besides its maker could bear to look at it, and it has nothing to do with the royal sage Sudarshana of the earlier tale.

The gist: Krishna himself, wanting a son, comes to Upamanyu’s hermitage and is set on the path to the vision of Mahadeva. Upamanyu’s single-minded devotion, which refuses even Indra’s boons and emancipation itself, establishes that Mahadeva is the cause of all causes and, in his half-woman form, the root of creation.

The vision of Mahadeva in Upamanyu’s words, and the eight boons Krishna gained

Krishna, seated in that assembly, was telling Yudhishthira and the sages the tale he had heard from the great sage Upamanyu. Upamanyu had told him how he had seen with his own eyes, by the power of austerity, that god of gods, Mahadeva. He had praised Mahadeva with a long litany of salutations, and in those salutations were gathered the dark one, the white one, the red one, the tawny one, the lord whose body is half man and half woman, the bearer of the bow named Pinaka, the bearer of the trident, the lord of the Ganas, and the form of Kala, the destroyer of all. And Mahadeva, with his spouse beside him and the bull for his sign, had been gratified, and had turned to the assembled gods and told them to look at the devotion of Upamanyu, that great soul, steady and great and entirely unchangeable, since it existed unalterably. The gods, with the grandsire Brahma among them, had bowed to the god armed with the Shula and joined their hands and asked him, as the god of gods and master of the universe, to let this best of the twice-born obtain from him the fruition of all his desires. And Sharva, who is also called Isha and Shankara, had spoken to Upamanyu as if smiling.

“Dear Upamanyu,” Shankara had said, “I am gratified with you. Look at me, foremost of sages. You are firmly devoted to me, and I have tested you well. I have been very highly pleased with your devotion to Shiva, and so I shall give you today the fruition of whatever desires you have in your heart.” Upamanyu had wept with joy, and his hair had stood on end, and kneeling and bowing again and again he had said, in a voice choked with delight, that it seemed to him he had been dead until then and had only that day been born, and that his birth had only that day borne fruit, since he now stood in the presence of the master of both the gods and the Asuras, whom the gods themselves could not see without first paying him hearty worship. The boon he asked was this: that his devotion to Mahadeva remain unchanged; that he have, through Mahadeva’s grace, knowledge of the present, the past, and the future; that he and all his kinsmen and friends always eat food mixed with milk; and that the illustrious god be forever present at their retreat. Mahadeva gave him all of it and more. He set him free of every misery and pain and beyond decrepitude and death; he gave him fame, great energy, spiritual knowledge, good and righteous behavior, every desirable attribute, universal knowledge, and an agreeable appearance; he gave him undecaying youth and an energy like fire; he promised that the ocean of milk would appear before him wherever he wished it, so that he and his friends would always have food prepared with milk and mixed with celestial nectar; he promised that after the expiration of a kalpa Upamanyu would obtain his companionship, that his family and kinsmen would never run out, that his devotion would be eternal, and that Mahadeva would always be present at his hermitage. Live wherever you like, son, the god had told him, and have no anxiety; thought of by you, I shall grant you a sight of myself again. Having said this and granted these boons, the illustrious Ishana, with the effulgence of millions of suns, had disappeared there and then.

Hearing this account, and seeing, as it were, with his own eyes everything Upamanyu had described, Krishna was filled with wonder, and the longing rose in him to see Mahadeva himself. He said to the great ascetic that he deserved great praise, since no other righteous man’s retreat enjoyed the distinction of being honored by the presence of that god of gods, and then he asked whether the mighty Shiva, the great Shankara, would grant him too a sight of his person and show him favor. Upamanyu looked at him with his spiritual eyes and told him what he saw. “Without doubt, you whose eyes are like lotus petals, you will obtain a sight of Mahadeva very soon, as I obtained it. I see that in the sixth month from this you will succeed in seeing Mahadeva, and from Maheshvara and his spouse you will obtain twenty-four boons. I tell you what is true; through the grace of that deity of supreme wisdom the past, the future, and the present are known to me. The great Hara has favored these sages by the thousand and as many others; why would he not show favor to you, who are devoted to the Brahmins, full of compassion and full of faith? I shall give you certain mantras. Recite them continuously, and you are certain to see Shankara.” Eight days passed there like an hour, all of them spent in talk about Mahadeva. On the eighth day Krishna underwent the initiation according to the due rites at the hands of that Brahmin.

Krishna told the assembly what the initiation had asked of him. “I received the staff from Upamanyu’s hands. I underwent the prescribed shave. I took up a quantity of kusha blades in my hand, I wore rags for my vestments, I rubbed my body with ghee, and I tied a cord of munja grass round my loins. For one month I lived on fruit. The second month I lived on water. The third, the fourth, and the fifth months I passed living on air alone, standing the whole time on one foot with my arms raised, and never sleeping. Then I saw in the sky an effulgence as dazzling as a thousand suns together. Toward the center of it I saw a cloud like a mass of blue hills, adorned with rows of cranes, set with many a grand rainbow, with flashes of lightning and the thunder-fire looking like eyes set in it. And within that cloud was the mighty Mahadeva himself, of dazzling splendor, with his spouse Uma at his side, shining with his penances, his energy, his beauty, and his effulgence, and with his beloved beside him, like the sun among racking clouds with the moon at his side. The hair on my body stood on end, and my eyes widened with wonder as I looked on Hara, the refuge of all the gods and the dispeller of all their griefs.”

Krishna described what he had seen. “Mahadeva wore a diadem on his head. He was armed with his Shula. He was clad in a tiger skin, with matted locks on his head, and he carried the staff of the renunciate in one of his hands, and with it the Pinaka and the thunderbolt. His teeth were sharp-pointed. He wore an excellent bracelet on his upper arm. His sacred thread was a snake, and on his chest hung an excellent garland of many colors that reached down to his toes. I saw him like the exceedingly bright moon of an autumn evening, and surrounded by the many clans of spirits and ghosts he looked like the autumn sun, hard to gaze at for its brightness. Eleven hundred Rudras stood around that deity of restrained soul and white deeds, seated on his bull, all of them hymning his praises. The Adityas, the Vasus, the Sadhyas, the Vishvedevas, and the twin Ashvins praised the lord of the universe with the hymns of the scriptures. The mighty Indra and his brother Upendra, the two sons of Aditi, and the grandsire Brahma uttered the Rathantara saman in the presence of Bhava. Innumerable masters of yoga, all the twice-born sages with their children, all the celestial sages, the goddess Earth, the sky between earth and heaven, the constellations, the planets, the months, the fortnights, the seasons, night, the years, the kshanas, the muhurtas, the nimeshas, the yugas one after another, all the celestial sciences and branches of knowledge, and every being versed in truth were seen bowing to that supreme teacher, that great father, that giver of yoga. Sanatkumara, the Vedas, the histories, Marichi, Angiras, Atri, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu, the seven Manus, Soma, the Atharvans, Brihaspati, Bhrigu, Daksha, Kashyapa, Vasishtha, Kashya, the meters, initiation, the sacrifices, the sacrificial fee, the sacrificial fires, the clarified butter poured in sacrifices, and every requisite of sacrifice stood there in their embodied forms. All the guardians of the worlds, all the rivers, all the snakes, the mountains, the celestial Mothers, all the wives and daughters of the gods, and thousands upon thousands and millions of ascetics were seen bowing to that mighty lord who is the soul of tranquility. The mountains, the oceans, and the points of the compass did the same, and the Gandharvas and Apsaras, highly skilled in music, sang in celestial strains the praises of Bhava, who is full of wonder. The Vidyadharas, the Danavas, the Guhyakas, the Rakshasas, and every created being, moving and unmoving, adored that mighty lord in thought, word, and deed. Before me that lord of all the gods, Sharva, appeared seated in all his glory, and when the whole universe, with the grandsire and Indra, saw that Ishana had shown himself to me by sitting in glory before my eyes, it looked at me. I, however, had no power to look at Mahadeva. Then the great deity spoke to me. ‘Look, Krishna, and speak to me. You have adored me hundreds and thousands of times. There is no one in the three worlds dearer to me than you.’ After I had bowed to him, his spouse, the goddess Uma, was gratified with me, and I spoke to the great god whose praises are hymned by all the deities with the grandsire Brahma at their head.”

Krishna praised Mahadeva in these words. “Salutations to you, eternal origin of all things. The sages say that you are the lord of the Vedas. The righteous say that you are penance, that you are sattva, rajas, and tamas, and that you are truth. You are Brahman, you are Rudra, you are Varuna, you are Agni, you are Manu, you are Bhava, you are Dhatri, you are Tvashtri, you are Vidhatri; you are the mighty master of all things, and you are everywhere. All beings, moving and unmoving, have sprung from you. This triple world with all its moving and unmoving entities has been created by you. The sages say that you are superior to the senses, the mind, the vital breaths, the seven sacrificial fires, everything that takes refuge in the all-pervading soul, and all the gods who are adored and worthy of adoration. You are the Vedas, the sacrifices, Soma, the sacrificial fee, Pavaka, the offering, and every other requisite of sacrifice. The merit won by sacrifices, gifts, the study of the Vedas, vows, the rules of restraint, modesty, fame, prosperity, splendor, contentment, and success all exist to lead to you. Desire, wrath, fear, greed, pride, stupefaction, and malice, and pains and diseases, are your children. You are every act that creatures do, you are the joy and the sorrow that flow from those acts, you are the absence of joy and sorrow, you are the ignorance that is the indestructible seed of desire, you are the high origin of mind, you are power, and you are eternity. You are the unmanifest, you are Pavana, you are inconceivable, you are the thousand-rayed sun, you are the effulgent consciousness, you are the first of all the topics, and you are the refuge of life. The words Mahat, soul, understanding, Brahman, universe, Shambhu, and self-born, which follow one another in the Vedas, show that those versed in the Vedas judge your nature to be identical with Mahat and with the soul, and regarding you as all this, the learned Brahmins conquer the ignorance that lies at the root of the world. You reside within every creature’s heart, and the sages adore you as Kshetrajna, the knower of the field. Your arms and feet extend to every place, and your eyes and head and face are everywhere. You hear everywhere in the universe, and you stay, pervading all things. Of every act performed in the nimeshas and the other divisions of time that spring from the power of the sun, you are the fruit. You are the original effulgence. You are Purusha, and you reside in the hearts of all things. You are the yogic attributes of success: subtlety and grossness and fruition and supremacy and effulgence and immutability. Understanding and intelligence and all the worlds rest on you. Those who are devoted to meditation, who are always engaged in yoga, who are firm in truth and have subjugated their passions, seek you and rest on you. Those who know you as the immutable, or as the one who resides in all hearts, or as the one of supreme power, or as the ancient Purusha, or as pure knowledge, or as the effulgent consciousness, or as the highest refuge of all intelligent persons, are certainly persons of great intelligence, and they stay transcending intelligence. By understanding the seven subtle entities, by comprehending your six attributes, and by knowing the yoga that is freed from every false notion, the man of knowledge enters into your great self.”

When Krishna had said these words to Bhava, the dispeller of grief and pain, the whole universe, moving and unmoving, sent up a shout like a lion’s roar in approval of them. The innumerable Brahmins present, the gods and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Pishachas, the ancestors, the birds, the many Rakshasas, the many classes of ghosts and spirits, and all the great sages bowed to that great deity. Showers of fragrant celestial flowers fell on Krishna’s head, and delicious winds blew across the place. Then the mighty Shankara, devoted to the good of the universe, looked at the goddess Uma and at the lord of the gods and at Krishna, and spoke to him. “We know, Krishna, that you are filled with the greatest devotion toward us. Do what is for your own good. My love and affection for you are very great. Ask for eight boons. I shall certainly give them to you. Tell me what they are, chief of the Yadavas. Name what you wish. However hard they are to attain, you shall have them.”

A key to reading this (kalpa and Rathantara): A kalpa is one whole turn of the world, from its creation to its dissolution, the longest span of time the text reckons with; when Mahadeva promises Upamanyu his presence after a kalpa has run out, he is naming a wait past any count of human years. The Rathantara is one of the oldest of the samans, the hymns of the Samaveda sung to a fixed melody at the sacrifice, and in the vision Krishna describes it is Indra, his brother Upendra, and Brahma himself who sing it before Bhava, which is the highest honor a song can be given.

Krishna bowed his head, and the joy in him was the joy of a man told to name his own reward by the one being who can pay it. Shankara had offered eight boons. He asked for firmness in dharma, the slaying of his enemies in battle, the highest fame, the greatest strength, devotion in yoga, nearness to Mahadeva himself, and children in their hundreds. “So be it,” Shankara said, and he repeated the words Krishna had spoken, one by one, so that each wish went back to its asker sealed. Then Uma spoke, the mother of the universe, who upholds all things and makes all things clean, the wife of Sarva and a vessel of austerity in her own right. She told Krishna, her voice restrained, that Mahadeva had already given him a son, and that the boy would be named Samba; and she offered eight boons of her own, whichever he chose. He bowed to her as he had bowed to her lord and asked: that he never feel anger toward Brahmins, that his father look on him with favor, that he have a hundred sons, that he know the highest enjoyments, that he love his own family, that his mother look on him with favor, that he attain tranquility and peace, and that he be skilled in every task he set his hand to.

“It shall be so,” Uma said. “I never speak what is untrue. You will have sixteen thousand wives, and your love for them and theirs for you will have no limit. From every one of your kinsmen you will receive the highest affection. Your body will be the most beautiful of bodies, and seven thousand guests will eat in your house every day.” With the boons given, the god and the goddess vanished from that place, and their hosts of attendants vanished with them, and the mountain was a mountain again. Krishna went back down to the hermitage and told all of it, in full, to the Brahmin who had prepared him for it, Upamanyu, from whose hands he had taken initiation before he ever began the worship. Upamanyu bowed toward the place where the god had stood. “There is no deity like Sarva,” he said. “There is no end and no refuge like Sarva. No one gives so many boons, or boons so high, and no one is his equal in battle.”

The gist: After hearing Upamanyu’s account, Krishna undertook the austerity himself and saw Mahadeva and Uma with his own eyes. Each of them granted him eight boons, sixteen in all: from Mahadeva, firmness in dharma, victory, fame, strength, devotion in yoga, nearness, and sons by the hundred; from Uma, among the rest, the promise of the son Samba, sixteen thousand wives, and seven thousand guests fed daily at his table. Bhishma had said he was unequal to describing Mahadeva and had asked Krishna to speak in his place, and this is the first proof Krishna lays before Yudhishthira.

The tale of Tandi and the origin of the thousand names of Mahadeva

Upamanyu had one more ancient account for Krishna, and he told it before he gave him the names. “In the Krita age,” he said, “the first of the four ages, there was a sage named Tandi. For ten thousand years he worshiped the great god with a devoted heart, through the meditation of yoga, thinking always of the one who is the supreme self, unchanging and beyond decay. Hear what such devotion earned him. He came to see Mahadeva, and he praised him in hymns.” Upamanyu explained that even before the god appeared, Tandi had already put his trust where the Sankhyas point and the yogins fix their minds: in the Supreme, the Foremost, the Person who pervades all things and is master of everything that exists, the one the learned call the cause of the making and the unmaking of the world, higher than gods and demons and sages, with nothing above him, unborn, without beginning or end, of supreme power and the highest felicity, radiant and sinless. And then that ocean of austerity stood before him, the one the mind cannot conceive, who is whole and undivided, who is Brahman, who is beyond every attribute and yet wears attributes, who is the delight of yogins and is called Liberation, the refuge of the mind and of Indra and Agni and the wind and the whole universe and Brahma the grandsire, hard to reach for people of uncleansed soul, the origin of the universe and beyond both the universe and the darkness. Tandi, who had spent many years in the severest austerities to see him, began his praise.

“You are the holiest of the holy,” Tandi said, “and the refuge of all, the foremost of all beings who possess intelligence. You are the fiercest energy of every kind of energy, the hardest austerity of every austerity. You give blessings without stint. You are the supreme Truth. I salute you, thousand-rayed one, refuge of all happiness. You give that Nirvana which the ascetics, standing in fear of birth and death, labor so hard for. Brahma the grandsire, Indra of the hundred sacrifices, Vishnu, the Vishvedevas, the great sages: none of them can comprehend you or your real nature. How then can people like us hope to? From you flows everything. On you rests everything. You are called Time, you are called the Person, you are called Brahman. The celestial sages who know the Puranas say that you have three bodies, one belonging to Time, one to the Person, one to Brahman, which is to say the three forms of Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra.”

Tandi went on. “You are the Person who fills the body from head to foot, and you are the principle within the self, the principle in all beings, the principle in the gods, in the worlds, in knowledge, and in the sacrifice. The wise who come to know you, seated within themselves and hidden even from the gods, are freed from every bond and pass into a state that lies beyond all sorrow. Those who do not wish to know you must go through births and deaths without number. You are the gate of heaven and the gate of liberation. You send all beings out into existence and draw them back into yourself. You are the great giver. You are heaven, you are release, you are desire, the seed of every act, and you are the anger that drives creatures. You are goodness, passion, and darkness, the lower regions and the upper. You are Brahma the grandsire, you are Bhava, Vishnu, Skanda, Indra, Savitri, Yama, Varuna, Soma, Dhatri, Manu, Vidhatri, and Kubera the lord of treasures. You are earth, wind, water, fire, and space; you are speech, understanding, steadiness, and intelligence; you are the deeds that creatures do; you are truth and you are falsehood, the existent and the nonexistent, the senses and that which lies beyond nature. Whatever is supreme Brahman, whatever is the highest entity, whatever the Sankhyas and the yogins alike are reaching for, is beyond doubt yourself. Today I have been rewarded, for you have let me see your form, and I have reached the end that only the righteous reach. For so long I was steeped in ignorance, a senseless fool, because I did not know you. It has taken lives without number to gain the devotion that has brought you before me.”

Whoever knows him, Tandi said, tastes immortality; and yet he stays a mystery to gods, demons, and ascetics alike. Brahman lies hidden in the cave of the heart, where even the ascetics fail to find him. He is the doer of everything and his face is turned to every direction; he is the self of all things, sees all, pervades all, knows all; he makes himself a body and bears it, and he is the refuge of every embodied creature and the giver of every creature’s breath. He created the worlds beginning with the earth and all who live in heaven, and he holds them up, dividing himself into his well-known eight forms. Brahma and the siddhas who expound the mantras have hidden him in a cave so that gods and demons and men should not see him, and though he lives in every heart he stays concealed, and those he stupefies cannot understand him; to those who cleanse themselves by devotion he shows himself of his own accord. Then Tandi turned to how the Vedas themselves sing him. “In ancient days Brahma the grandsire praised you as Nilalohita, the blue and the red, with hymn after hymn, and urged you to create living creatures. Brahmins who know the Rig praise you with its verses, seeing you unattached to all things and stripped of every form. The Adhvaryu priests pour their libations to you in the sacrifice, chanting the Yajus in the three well-known ways, to you who are the sole object of knowledge. Those of cleansed understanding who know the samans sing you with samans. And those who know the Atharvan hymn you as Rita, as Truth, as the Highest, and as Brahman.”

A key to reading this (the terms adhibhuta and the rest): Tandi names Mahadeva as adhipurusha, adhyatma, adhibhuta, adhidaivata, adhiloka, adhivijnana, and adhiyajna. Each word joins adhi, the one who presides, to a single field: the body, the self within, the elements that make up every material thing, the gods, the worlds, knowledge, and the sacrifice. Said together they make one claim seven times over, that whatever the field, the same being presides in it, so that a person looking inward, a priest at the altar, and a sage watching the gods are all looking at one thing from different sides.

At the last Tandi spoke of the ends men reach. The Vedas, the shastras, and the Puranas, he said, declare five of them: the end sought by those who keep the sacrifices and pour libations and give richly; the end reached by those who scorch their bodies with austerity, recitation, vows, and fasts; the end that belongs to those who are unattached and have given up all acts; the end of those who want release from rebirth and live cut off from every enjoyment; and the highest end, stainless and beyond description, which belongs to those given to knowledge. “It is by your grace that a person reaches any of these,” he said, “and if he fails to reach them, that is your grace withheld.” So Tandi, a mountain of austerity, praised Ishana, and he sang also that lofty hymn to Brahman which the Creator himself had sung in Mahadeva’s honor in the oldest days.

“Praised in this way,” Upamanyu said, “and hearing Tandi add that neither Brahma nor Indra nor Vishnu nor the Vishvedevas nor the great sages know him, Mahadeva, with Uma beside him, was pleased, and he spoke. ‘You will be imperishable and eternal. You will be free of all sorrow. Great fame will be yours, and energy, and spiritual knowledge. All the sages will seek you out, and your son, by my grace, will become the maker of sutras. What wishes shall I grant you today? Tell me what you want.’ And Tandi joined his hands and asked for one thing only: ‘Let my devotion to you be steady.’” Having given those boons and taken the homage of gods and sages, the great god vanished, and when he was gone with all his followers, Tandi came to Upamanyu’s hermitage and told him all that had happened. Now, Upamanyu said, hear the celebrated names of Mahadeva that Tandi told me, for your own spiritual success. The grandsire Brahma had once recited ten thousand names for him; a thousand of them occur in the scriptures, and not everyone knows them. Brahma had uttered them in the oldest days for adoring that great god; Tandi had won them by Brahma’s grace, and Tandi had passed them on to Upamanyu.

The gist: In the Krita age the sage Tandi worshiped Mahadeva for ten thousand years, saw him, and praised him with a hymn that names him as the source and end of everything, and with the hymn to Brahman that the Creator once sang. Mahadeva gave him imperishability, fame, spiritual knowledge, and a son who would write sutras; Tandi asked only that his devotion never waver. From Tandi the thousand names came down to Upamanyu, and Upamanyu is about to give them to Krishna.

The thousand names of Shiva: a hymn of one thousand and eight names

Upamanyu gathered his mind, joined his hands, and began, from the beginning, the short form of the names of Mahadeva. “I will adore the great god who deserves the adoration of all creatures,” he said, “with names celebrated through all the worlds: some that Brahma the grandsire uttered, some that the sages uttered, some that stand in the Vedas and the Vedangas, names that eminent persons have applied to him, and names, true and fraught with success, that Tandi drew out of the Vedic lore by the power of his devotion. Yogins who have every attainment of yoga cannot know the whole glory of Mahadeva in a hundred years; the very gods cannot grasp his beginning, middle, or end; and no one can adore him unless he permits it, so I speak only because he has let me. Hear a few names, Krishna, of that giver of boons whose form is the universe and whose wisdom is supreme. These are drawn from the ten thousand that the grandsire uttered in old days, as ghee is drawn from curds, as gold is the essence of the rocky mountain, as honey is the essence of flowers, as cream is the essence of ghee. This abstract cleanses every sin, however heinous. It carries the merit of the four Vedas. It should be learned with attention and engraved on the memory. It should be given only to one who is devoted to the great lord, who has faith, who believes; never to the faithless, the unbeliever, or the man who has not mastered himself. The creature who bears malice toward Mahadeva goes to hell with all his ancestors before him and all his children after him. This hymn is yoga itself, the highest object of meditation, the thing to be recited constantly, knowledge, and the highest mystery; whoever recites it or hears it recited even in his last moments reaches the highest end. Brahma composed it and set it first among all excellent hymns, so that it has come to be called the king of hymns. From the region of Brahman it was carried to heaven; from heaven Tandi obtained it, and Tandi brought it down to the earth. It belongs to the Veda of the Vedas, the most ancient of ancient things, the energy of all energies and the austerity of all austerities, the god of all gods and the sage of all sages, the Rudra of all Rudras, the yogin of all yogins, the cause of all causes, from whom the worlds come and to whom they return, whom they call Hara of immeasurable energy. Hear the thousand and eight names of the great Sarva, and hearing them, gain all that you wish.”

Om, Upamanyu began. He is the Immovable, the Fixed, the Powerful, the Terrible, the Foremost, the Giver of boons, the Superior. He is the self of all creatures and celebrated among all creatures; he is all things, and the maker of all things, and his name is Bhava. He wears matted locks on his head and the skins of animals for clothing, and his crest of hair stands up like a peacock’s. The whole universe is his limbs. He is the creator, and he is Hara, because he destroys all things. His eyes are a gazelle’s eyes. He is the destroyer of every creature and the supreme enjoyer of everything. He is engagement, from which all action flows, and he is withdrawal, the ceasing from action. He keeps fasts and vows; he is eternal and unchanging. He lives in the cremation grounds and he has the six attributes of lordship. He dwells within every creature’s heart, he enjoys all things through the senses, and he grinds down the sinful. He deserves the salutation of all, his deeds are great, his wealth is austerity, he creates the elements at will, and he hides his real nature under the guise of a madman. He is master of all the worlds and of everything that lives: of measureless form, of vast body, righteousness embodied, of great fame and high soul, the soul of all, the universe his shape. His jaws are vast, for at the end of things he swallows the worlds. He protects the worlds. He is the soul in the inner heart, free of the ego that ignorance breeds, one and undivided, and he is gladness itself.

He is Soma, Upamanyu said, and he makes the righteous shine in the sky as constellations. He is the moon and the sun. He is the planet Saturn, he is Ketu, the descending node of the moon, and Rahu, the ascending node; he is Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury. He is the worshiper of Atri’s wife, and the one who in anger shot his arrow at Sacrifice when Sacrifice fled from him in the shape of a deer. He is sinless. His austerities give him the power to create the universe, and his austerities give him the power to destroy it. He is high-minded toward his devotees and fulfills the wishes of everyone who gives himself up to him. He is the maker of the year, because it is he who sets the wheel of time turning by taking the form of the sun and the planets. He is mantra, the sacred syllable and every sacred word; he is the authority for every act, in the form of the Vedas and the scriptures; he is the highest austerity, devoted to yoga, merged in Brahman by it. He is the great seed, the cause of causes, and he brings the unmanifest out into the manifest shape of the world. His might has no limit. His seed is gold. He knows all things, being all things. He has ten arms. His eyes never blink, for he is watching at every moment. His throat is blue, because he holds in it the poison that rose when the ocean was churned, a poison that would have destroyed the universe had he not held it. He is the lord of Uma.

A key to reading this (Nilakantha): When the gods and the demons churned the ocean, a poison came up out of it strong enough to burn the universe. Mahadeva drank it and held it in his throat, and the throat turned blue where the poison stayed. That is why the hymn can name him in a single word, Nilakantha, the blue-throated, and why the name is at once a description and a record of the day he took the world’s death into his own body.

In one hand, Upamanyu said, he carries the water-gourd and in another the bow; in one hand arrows and in another a skull. He bears the thunderbolt. He is armed with the hundred-killer, the weapon that takes a hundred lives at a stroke, and with the sword, the battle-axe, and the trident. He holds the sacrificial ladle. His form is beautiful and his energy abundant, and he gives lavishly to those devoted to him everything that adorns them. He wears a turban; his face is beautiful; he swells with splendor and might, and he is humble and modest. He is exceedingly tall, and the senses are his rays. He is the greatest of teachers and the supreme Brahman, a state of pure felicity. He accomplishes his ends by himself, without waiting on any power won by austerity. His head is shaved, as a mendicant’s is. He does good to all creatures, is unborn, has forms beyond counting, and carries every fragrance on his body. His matted locks drank the Ganga when she first fell from heaven, and gave her up again only at the pleading of King Bhagiratha. He gives sovereignty and lordship. He is a celibate who has never once fallen from the rigid vow of continence, and his continence is his distinction. He lies always on his back. He dwells in power. Three matted locks stand on his head, he is clad in rags, and for his fierceness he is Rudra. He is the general of the gods, and he pervades everything. He moves by day and he moves by night, his wrath is fierce, and his radiance is the radiance born of Vedic study and austerity. He is the slayer of the mighty demon who came in the form of a maddened elephant to destroy his sacred city of Varanasi, and the slayer of every Daitya who oppresses the universe. He is Kala, the Time that destroys everything. He is the supreme ordainer, a mine of accomplishments, the lion and the tiger in form, the one clad in an elephant’s skin. He is the yogin who cheats Time by rising above its pull.

He is the most ancient, Upamanyu said, older than anything that exists. He is the one who can cover the three worlds with a single step; he is Vamana, the dwarf, the youngest son of Aditi and Kashyapa, who tricked the demon chief Bali out of his sovereignty over the three worlds and gave it back to Indra. He is the yogin crowned with success, as Sanatkumara is; the great sage, as Vasishtha is; the one whose every object is attained, as Rishabha and Dattatreya are; the renunciant, as Yajnavalkya is. He wears the marks of the mendicant and he is without them, and he stands above the rules of that order. He assures every creature against every fear, and he is without passions himself, so that glory and humiliation are the same to him. He is the general of the gods, and he is Vishakha, who sprang from that general’s body when Indra hurled the thunderbolt at him. He is Madhu, the founder of the race in which Krishna himself was born, and his eyes are the color of honey. He is Hanuman, the mighty ape who helped Vishnu in the Rama incarnation in the campaign against Ravana. He is Vyasa, the maker of the Puranas and the ancient histories, and he is what Vyasa made, the histories in their long forms and their short. He is the Mahabharata, and the Mimamsa treatises, and Gautama who founded the science of reasoning, and the author of the great grammar named after the moon.

A sub-tale: Folded into the hymn is a story told in a single name: he is the one who took the shape of a jackal. Once a Brahmin, insulted by a rich vaishya, resolved to kill himself, and Mahadeva came to him as a jackal and talked him out of it. The hymn does not stop to tell how the jackal argued; it only records that the god thought a humiliated man’s life worth an incarnation, and moves on to the next name.

He is the existent, Upamanyu said, which is the cause, and the nonexistent, which is the effect; he is the manifest, seized by the senses. He is the Father, the Mother, and the Grandfather. He is the door to heaven, because he is austerity; the door through which creatures are born, because he is desire; and the door of liberation, because he is the absence of desire, the one thing that leads to merging in Brahman. He is the acts of righteousness that lead to heaven, and he is Nirvana, the ending of separate existence. He gladdens every creature. He is the region of Truth which the most righteous attain, and he is above it. He created both the gods and the demons; he is the refuge of both, and the teacher of both, since he is at once Brihaspati and Shukra; he is worshiped by both, and he leads both, as the mahout leads the elephant; he is chief of both, as Indra and Virochana are chiefs, and he leads both in battle, as Karttikeya leads the gods and Keshi the Daityas. He is the celestial sages, Narada and the others. He grants boons to gods and demons alike, as Brahman and as Rudra, and he rules their hearts. Into him the universe enters when it dissolves. His body is made of all the gods, and there is no being above him for anyone to think of.

So, Upamanyu said, he had hymned the god by reciting his names in the order of their importance. “Who can praise the lord of the universe, whom the very gods with Brahma at their head cannot praise, and whom the sages fail to sing? Only by my devotion, and with his leave, have I praised the lord of sacrifices, the foremost of all beings who possess intelligence. The worshiper of devoted soul and pure heart who praises the great lord of blessedness with these auspicious names attains his own self. These names are the best means of reaching Brahman; with their aid a person is sure to reach liberation. Sages and gods praise the highest deity with this hymn, and hymned by people of restrained soul, Mahadeva is pleased. Those who hear it and recite it and repeat it with reverence, life after life, adoring him in thought, word, and deed, lying down or seated, walking or awake, opening their eyes or closing them, thinking of him again and again, become objects of reverence among their fellows and know great joy. Only when a creature has been cleansed of all its sins across millions of births in every order of being does devotion to Mahadeva spring up in its heart, and such single-minded, irresistible devotion to Rudra is seldom found even among the gods and never among men except by Rudra’s own grace. Through it men become one with Mahadeva and reach the highest success. The other gods, all of them, constantly undo the austerities of men, and the one who frees creatures from rebirth is the exception.” This, he said, is how Tandi, tranquil, splendid as Indra, praised the lord of all that exists and does not exist, the great god clad in animal skins; and Brahma had sung the same hymn in Shankara’s presence. Then Upamanyu spoke the fruit of it. “It cleanses and washes away all sins. It confers yoga and liberation and heaven and contentment. Whoever recites it with undivided devotion to Shankara reaches the high end that belongs to those who hold the doctrines of the Sankhya. Whoever recites it daily for one year, with single devotion, obtains the end he desires.” And Krishna, telling it to Yudhishthira, added the words as Upamanyu had given them: whoever recites this hymn with a pure heart, keeping the vow of celibacy and his senses under control, regularly for one whole year, gains the fruit of the horse-sacrifice, and no Danava, Yaksha, Rakshasa, Pishacha, Yatudhana, Guhyaka, or snake can do him any harm.

Upamanyu also told the hymn’s lineage, because a mystery this great is handed down, never found. It first lived in the breast of Brahma the creator. Brahma gave it to Shakra, Shakra gave it to Mrityu, Death himself, and Death gave it to the Rudras. From the Rudras Tandi received it, winning it in the region of Brahman as the reward of his severe austerities. Tandi gave it to Shukra, Shukra of Bhrigu’s race gave it to Gautama, and Gautama gave it to Vaivasvata Manu. Manu gave it to Narayana of great intelligence, who is counted among the Sadhyas and was exceedingly dear to him. Narayana gave it to Yama, Vaivasvata Yama gave it to Nachiketa, and Nachiketa gave it to Markandeya. From Markandeya, Upamanyu said, he himself had obtained it as the reward of his vows and fasts, and now he gave it to Krishna, a hymn unheard by others. It leads to heaven, it dispels disease, it bestows long life, and it agrees with the Vedas.

The gist: The thousand names of Shiva are a hymn of one thousand and eight names, drawn by Tandi from the ten thousand Brahma once spoke, in which Mahadeva is named as the maker, keeper, and destroyer of the worlds, the root of gods and demons alike, and the gate of heaven, of birth, and of liberation. Recited for a year with restraint it yields the fruit of the horse-sacrifice and puts the reciter beyond the reach of every harmful being. Its lineage runs from Brahma through Indra, Death, the Rudras, Tandi, Shukra, Gautama, Manu, Narayana, Yama, Nachiketa, and Markandeya to Upamanyu, who gave it to Krishna.

The witness of the sages: many examples of Mahadeva’s grace

When Vasudeva fell silent, another voice took up the thread, and it belonged to the one man in that gathering with the plainest reason to know what the hymn could do. Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa, the island-born, the great yogin, turned to Yudhishthira. “Recite this hymn of the thousand and eight names of Mahadeva yourself,” he said, “and let Maheshvara be pleased with you. In former days I practiced severe austerities on the slopes of Meru because I wanted a son, and this is the very hymn I recited. As its reward I obtained everything I wished for. By reciting it you too will obtain from Sarva the fulfillment of all your wishes.” He spoke as a father who had asked and been answered. And after him, one by one, the sages seated in that assembly began to tell what Mahadeva had done for them, each from his own life, so that the proof laid before Yudhishthira grew from one witness to many.

Kapila spoke first after him, the sage who set out the doctrines called Sankhya and whom the gods themselves honor. “For many lives together I worshiped Bhava with great devotion,” he said. “At last the god was pleased with me, and he gave me the knowledge that helps whoever gains it to cross over rebirth.” Then the sage Charushirsha, a dear friend of Shakra, known also as the son of Alambana, a man full of compassion, told his. “In former days I went to the mountains of Gokarna and sat down to severe austerity for a hundred years. As its reward I obtained from Sarva a hundred sons, every one of them born without the agency of any woman, restrained in soul, versed in righteousness, splendid, free of disease and sorrow, with lives that run to a hundred thousand years.”

Then Valmiki spoke to Yudhishthira, and what he had to tell was how a charge became a sin and how the sin was lifted. “Once, in the course of a disputation,” he said, “certain ascetics who kept the homa fire denounced me as guilty of killing a Brahmin. The moment they said it, the sin of killing a Brahmin took possession of me. To cleanse myself I went for refuge to the sinless Ishana, whose energy nothing can resist, and I was cleansed of every sin. That dispeller of all sorrows, the destroyer of the demons’ triple city, said to me, ‘Your fame will be great in the world.’”

Next came the son of Jamadagni, Parashurama, who shone among that conclave of sages like the sun in full blaze, and he spoke to the son of Kunti plainly. “I was afflicted with the sin of killing Brahmins,” he said, “because I had slain my brothers, and they were all learned Brahmins. To purify myself I sought the protection of Mahadeva. I praised the great god by reciting his names, and Bhava was pleased with me. He gave me a battle-axe and many other celestial weapons, and he said, ‘You will be freed from sin, and you will be invincible in battle. Death himself will not overcome you, for you will be free of disease.’ So the crested god of auspicious form spoke to me, and through his grace I obtained everything he had promised.”

Vishvamitra’s account was the shortest of them all, and it told of a change no other sage in that assembly had managed. “I was formerly a kshatriya,” he said. “I worshiped Bhava because I wished to become a Brahmin, and through the grace of that great god I obtained the status of a Brahmin, which is so hard to obtain.” The sage Asita-Devala, speaking to the royal son of Pandu, told of a loss that no austerity could have made good: through the curse of Shakra, all the merit of every righteous act he had ever performed was destroyed, and it was the mighty Mahadeva who kindly gave that merit back to him, together with great fame and a long life.

A sub-tale: The sage Gritsamada, Shakra’s dear friend, who resembled Brihaspati himself in splendor, told Yudhishthira of Ajamidha’s line what a single mispronounced hymn cost him. Shakra was performing a sacrifice that ran for a thousand years, and he had engaged Gritsamada to recite the samans. Varishtha came to that sacrifice, the son of the Manu who sprang from Brahma’s eyes, and told him that he was reciting the Rathantara wrongly, that he was earning demerit by reading so faultily, that he should use his understanding and read the samans correctly, and that such a fault was destructive of the sacrifice itself. Then his anger ran away with him, and he cursed: be an animal without intelligence, subject to grief, always afraid, living in trackless forests where there is neither wind nor water and the other animals have gone, for ten thousand eight hundred years, in a forest with no holy trees, the haunt of rurus and lions, a cruel deer sunk in grief. As the words ended Gritsamada was a deer. He sought the protection of Maheshvara, and the great god said, “You will be freed from disease of every kind, and immortality will be yours. Grief will never touch you. Your friendship with Indra will stay unchanged, and let the sacrifices of Indra and of yourself both increase.” This is how Mahadeva favors all creatures, Gritsamada said; he is the dispenser of every creature’s joy and sorrow, past the reach of thought, word, or deed, and by his grace there was no one equal to Gritsamada in learning.

Then Vasudeva spoke again. “Mahadeva of the golden eyes was pleased with my austerities,” he said, “and he told me, ‘Krishna, through my grace you will be dearer to all people than wealth, which everyone covets. You will be invincible in battle, and your energy will equal the energy of fire.’ Thousands of other boons he gave me on that occasion. And in a former incarnation I adored Mahadeva on the Manimantha mountain for millions of years. Pleased with me, he said, ‘Blessings on you; ask whatever boons you wish.’ I bowed my head and said, ‘If the mighty Mahadeva is pleased with me, then let my devotion to him never change. That is the boon I ask.’ The great god said, ‘So be it,’ and vanished where he stood.”

Jaigishavya said, “Yudhishthira, in former days, in the city of Varanasi, the mighty Mahadeva sought me out himself and conferred on me the eight attributes of sovereignty.” Garga said that he had performed a sacrifice in the mind alone, and that the great god, pleased by it, had given him on the banks of the sacred Sarasvati that wonderful science, the knowledge of Time in its sixty-four branches. He gave him also a thousand sons, all of equal merit and all fully versed in the Vedas, and by his grace their lives and Garga’s own had been stretched to ten million years.

Parashara said, “In former times I pleased Sarva, and I set my heart on a son: a son of great ascetic merit and superior energy, given to the highest yoga, who would win fame across the world, arrange the Vedas, be a home of prosperity, be devoted to the Vedas and to Brahmins, and be marked by compassion. Such a son I wanted from Maheshvara, and knowing the wish of my heart, the foremost of gods said to me, ‘By the fulfillment of what you ask, you will have a son named Krishna. In the creation that will bear the name of Savarni Manu he will be counted among the seven sages. He will arrange the Vedas and carry on the line of Kuru. He will write the ancient histories and do good to the universe. Severe in austerity, he will be Shakra’s dear friend. Free of every disease, he will be immortal.’ Having said this, the great god vanished. Such is the good I obtained, Yudhishthira, from that indestructible and immutable god of the highest austerity and supreme energy.” The son he had asked for was sitting in that assembly: Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa, who had spoken first.

A key to reading this (Mandavya and Dharma): Mandavya was no thief, and yet on a suspicion of theft a king had him impaled. He worshiped Mahadeva from the stake, and the god promised him release from it, a life of millions of years, freedom from the pangs of impalement and from every affliction and disease, an unrivaled place on earth, free passage to bathe in every sacred water, and after the body fell, the pure felicity of heaven for unending time. Mahadeva also told him that his body had sprung from the fourth foot of Dharma, which is Truth, so that an innocent man on a stake heard that his own body was made of the very thing his accusers had said he lacked.

Mandavya told that story himself, ending with the sight of the bull-riding Maheshvara, clad in animal skin and splendid beyond rival, vanishing with all his companions. Then Galava told his, and his was the one about a homecoming. He had studied at the feet of his teacher Vishvamitra, and with his teacher’s leave he set out for home to see his father. His mother, who had been widowed, met him in tears, and said through her weeping that his father would never see this son of his, who came home adorned with Vedic knowledge, permitted by his teacher, in the full grace of youth, self-restrained. Hearing her, Galava despaired of ever seeing his father again, and he turned with his whole soul to Maheshvara, who was pleased with him and showed himself. “Your father, your mother, and you yourself,” the god said, “will all be freed from death. Go quickly and enter your house; you will see your father there.” With the god’s leave Galava went home, and there was his father coming out of the house having just finished his daily sacrifice, carrying homa fuel and kusha grass and some fallen fruit in his hands, washed and fed. His father threw the things down, lifted his son from where he had fallen at his feet, embraced him with tears in his eyes and smelled his head, and said, “By good fortune I see you. You have come back with the knowledge your teacher gave you.”

Yudhishthira listened to these marvels, told by the very ascetics who had lived them, and was amazed. Then Krishna spoke once more to that ocean of righteousness, the way Vishnu speaks to Indra, and what he gave him was the rest of what Upamanyu had said, the sage blazing like the sun as he said it. “Sinful men stained by unrighteous deeds do not reach Ishana; their natures, marked by passion and darkness, cannot approach the supreme god. Only the twice-born of cleansed soul attain him. Yet a man who lives in the enjoyment of every pleasure and luxury, if he is devoted to the supreme god, comes to be counted the equal of forest recluses of cleansed soul. If Rudra is pleased with a person, he can confer on him the state of Brahma, or of Keshava, or of Shakra with all the gods under him, or the sovereignty of the three worlds. Those who worship Bhava even in the mind alone free themselves of every sin and win a home in heaven with all the gods. A man who razes houses to the ground and destroys tanks and lakes, who lays waste the whole universe, is not stained by sin if he adores and worships the three-eyed god. A man without one auspicious mark, stained by every sin, has every sin destroyed by meditating on Shiva. Even worms and insects and birds, Keshava, that give themselves to Mahadeva, move about in perfect fearlessness. It is my settled conviction that those who devote themselves to Mahadeva are certainly freed from rebirth.”

Then Krishna gave Yudhishthira the last of it, in the form of a hymn of his own. The sun and the moon, wind and fire, heaven and earth, the Vasus and the Vishvedevas, Dhatri, Aryaman, Shukra, Brihaspati, the Rudras, the Sadhyas, Varuna, Brahma, Shakra, the Maruts; the Upanishads that teach the knowledge of Brahman, Truth, the Vedas, the sacrifices and their gifts, the Brahmins who recite, Soma and the sacrificer and the gods’ shares of the offering, initiation and every restraint of vow and fast, Svaha and Vashat, the celestial cow, the wheel of Time, strength, fame, self-restraint, the steadiness of the wise, every act of goodness and its opposite, the seven sages, the tribes of gods, the drinkers of heat and the drinkers of Soma, the clouds, the beings whose bodies are mantras, those who live on scent alone or on sight alone, those who create what they need by an act of will, the Suparnas, the Gandharvas, the Pishachas, the Danavas, the Yakshas, the Charanas, the snakes, everything gross and everything subtle, all sorrows and all joys and the sorrow that follows joy and the joy that follows sorrow, Sankhya and Yoga and whatever lies beyond them: every adorable thing, every god, every guardian of the universe who enters the physical forces and holds up this ancient creation, all have sprung from that maker of all creatures. And all of it, Krishna said, is grosser than what the wise think of with the help of austerity; that subtle Brahman is the cause of life, and to it he bowed his head. Then the fruit of the recitation: whoever, subduing his senses and purifying himself, recites this hymn for one month without a break in his vow gains the merit of a horse-sacrifice. By it a Brahmin acquires all the Vedas, a kshatriya is crowned with victory, a vaishya gains wealth and skill, and a shudra wins happiness here and a good end hereafter. Persons of great fame set their hearts on Rudra by reciting this prince of hymns, which cleanses every sin, and a man who recites it lives in heaven for as many years as there are pores on his body.

The gist: Vyasa, Kapila, Charushirsha, Valmiki, Parashurama, Vishvamitra, Asita-Devala, Gritsamada, Krishna himself, Jaigishavya, Garga, Parashara, Mandavya, and Galava each testify to what Mahadeva gave them: a son, knowledge that ends rebirth, a hundred sons, cleansing from the sin of killing Brahmins, weapons and invincibility, Brahmin-hood, restored merit, release from a curse, sovereignty, the science of Time, a stake removed, a father saved from death. The testimony is meant to turn Yudhishthira toward Mahadeva, and it keeps its hard cases, such as Parashurama’s guilt for his brothers, exactly as the witnesses gave them.

Ashtavakra and Disha: the meaning of “Shared dharma” in marriage

When the sages had finished, the room came back to the two men it had been built around: the old man on the bed of arrows, and the king who could not stop asking him questions. Yudhishthira had one that had been troubling him. “When a man takes his wife’s hand in marriage,” he said, “the word spoken over them is that they will discharge all their duties together. Where does that saying come from? Does it rest only on what the great sages laid down in the old days? Does it mean the duty of begetting children for the sake of dharma? Or does it point only to the pleasure the two of them expect from each other? The doubt in my mind is great. What the sages call joint duty seems to me mistaken. This union for practicing duty together ends with death; it is not seen to last beyond it. They say it leads to heaven, yet heaven is reached by the dead, and of a married pair only one dies at a time. Where, then, does the other one stand? Tell me that. People reach different fruits by different duties, they follow different occupations, and they fall into different hells for it. And women in particular, the sages have said, are false in their conduct; the Vedas themselves say so. If human beings are like this, and women are declared false in the very ordinances, how can there be a union of the sexes for practicing every duty together? The word duty seems to have been coined for general use, and to fasten it on marriage seems a figure of speech forced onto a thing it does not fit. However hard I think about it, I cannot make it out. Explain it to me in detail, clearly, according to the shruti: what its marks are, and how it came to be.”

Bhishma answered with a story, the way he answered most things. “On this matter,” he said, “the old account is told of the conversation between Ashtavakra and the lady called Disha. In the old days Ashtavakra, a man of severe austerity, wanted to marry, and he went to the great sage Vadanya and asked for his daughter. The girl’s name was Suprabha. In beauty she had no rival on earth, and in virtue, dignity, conduct, and manners she stood above every other girl alive. With one glance of her lovely eyes she had taken his heart from him, the way a grove in spring, all in flower, takes the heart of whoever walks into it. And the sage looked at the ascetic who wanted his daughter and said, ‘Yes. I will give her to you. But listen to me first. Make a journey to the sacred north. You will see many things there.’”

Ashtavakra asked what he would see in that country, and said he was ready to do whatever Vadanya commanded. So Vadanya laid out the road. “You will pass beyond the dominions of the lord of treasures and cross the Himavat mountains. Then you will see the plateau where Rudra lives. Siddhas and Charanas dwell there, and it is full of Mahadeva’s companions, playful creatures of many shapes who love the dance, and of Pishachas of many forms, smeared with fragrant powders of many colors, dancing with joyful hearts to instruments of brass. Among these dancers, who whirl faster than lightning and then stop dead, Mahadeva lives. We have heard that this spot on the mountains is the great god’s favorite home, and that he and his companions are always there. It was there that the goddess Uma practiced the severest austerities to win the three-eyed god for her lord, so the place is dear to both of them. In the old days, on the heights of Mahaparshva to the north of the mountains sacred to Mahadeva, the seasons and the last night and many gods and the greatest of men worshiped Mahadeva in their embodied forms. You will cross that region too on your way north. Then you will see a beautiful forest, blue in color, like a mass of clouds, and in it a beautiful woman ascetic who looks like Shri herself, venerable in years, richly blessed, keeping the diksha. When you see her, worship her with due reverence. Come back to this place after you have seen her, and then take my daughter’s hand. If you accept this agreement, set out, and do what I have told you.” “So be it,” Ashtavakra said. “I will do what you ask. I will go to the country you speak of, and on your side, let your word hold true.”

Ashtavakra set out and went north, and kept going north, and at last he came to the Himavat mountains, where the Siddhas and Charanas live. There he came upon the sacred river Vahuda, whose waters give great merit. He bathed at one of its lovely fords, where the bottom was free of mud, and satisfied the gods with offerings of water, and then he spread kusha grass and lay down on it to rest, and passed the night that way. He rose with the day, bathed again in the Vahuda, kindled his homa fire, and worshiped it with the highest of the Vedic mantras. Then he worshiped Rudra and his wife Uma with the proper rites, rested a little longer beside the lake the river made there, and, refreshed, set out toward Kailasa. Ahead of him a gate of gold seemed to blaze with its own beauty, and beyond it lay the Mandakini and the Nalini, the lakes of Kubera, lord of treasures.

The lake was thick with lotuses, and the rakshasas whose business it was to guard it, Manibhadra at their head, saw the sage arrive and came out in a body to welcome him and do him honor. Ashtavakra returned the courtesy of those beings of terrible strength and asked them to carry word of his arrival to the lord of treasures at once. They told him there was no need. “King Vaishravana is coming of his own accord to meet you, without waiting for any message from us. The lord of treasures knows the purpose of your journey. There he is, that blessed master, blazing with his own energy.” Kubera came up to the faultless Ashtavakra and asked after his welfare, and when the courtesies were done he said, “You are welcome here. Tell me what you want of me, and I will do whatever you bid. Enter my house as you please. When you have been entertained and your business is done, you will go on with nothing in your way.” He took the sage’s hand and led him into the palace, gave him his own seat, water for his feet, and the arghya of welcome with all its proper ingredients, and when the two were seated, the yakshas led by Manibhadra and many gandharvas and kinnaras sat down before them. Then the lord of treasures said that the tribes of apsaras would dance, if that was the sage’s pleasure, since it was right that a guest be entertained and properly served.

Ashtavakra said, in a sweet voice, “Let the dance proceed.” Then Urvara and Mishrakeshi, Rambha and Urvashi, Alambusha and Ghritachi, Chitra and Chitrangada and Ruchi, Manohara and Sukeshi and Sumukhi and Hasini and Prabha, Vidyuta and Prashami and Danta and Vidyota and Rati, and many other beautiful apsaras began to dance, and the gandharvas played instruments of every kind. And in that music and that dancing the sage of severe austerity passed a full celestial year in the house of Vaishravana without knowing it. It was the king who told him. “A little more than a year has gone by since you came. This music and dance, the kind called gandharva, steals the heart, and it steals time. Do as you wish, or let it go on if that is your pleasure. You are my guest and so worthy of adoration; this is my house; give your commands, for we are all bound to you.” Ashtavakra, pleased, said that he had been duly honored and now wished to go on; that all this befitted the lord of treasures; and that by his grace, and according to the command of Vadanya, he would now proceed to the end of his journey. Wishing Kubera growth and prosperity, he left his house and went north.

A key to reading this (a celestial year): A celestial year is a year by the reckoning of the gods. Ashtavakra loses one whole such year to music and dancing without noticing, and it is Kubera who has to tell him that it has passed. The lapse is the first sign of what the journey is testing: how a man of rigid vows fares when what is offered to him is pleasure, and whether he can feel time slipping while he is enjoying himself.

He crossed Kailasa, and Mandara, and the golden mountains, and beyond those high ranges he came to the excellent region where Mahadeva, dressed as a humble ascetic, has made his home. He walked around the spot with his mind concentrated and his head bowed, and when he came down again onto the plain he counted himself sanctified for having seen the holy place where Mahadeva lives. Three times he circled that mountain, and then, with his face to the north, he went on with a joyful heart. Another forest opened before him, delightful to look at, rich with the fruits and roots of every season, loud with thousands of songbirds, full of pleasant groves. He saw a charming hermitage, and golden hills studded with gems in many shapes, and in the jeweled ground many lakes and tanks, and other sights so lovely that the sage’s cleansed mind filled with joy.

Then he saw a mansion of gold, set with gems of many kinds, of wonderful construction, finer in every respect than the palace of Kubera he had just left. Hills and mounds of jewels stood around it. Beautiful chariots and heaps of gems of many sorts lay about the place. The river Mandakini ran there, its waters strewn with mandara flowers. Gems that gave off their own light were scattered everywhere, and the ground was laid with diamonds of many kinds. The mansion had many chambers whose arches were set with stones of every sort and hung with nets of pearls threaded with jewels, and all around it were beautiful things made to steal the heart and the eye. Many sages lived in that retreat. Ashtavakra looked at it all and wondered where he would take shelter, and then he went up to the gate and said, “Let those who live here know that a guest has come.”

At the sound of his voice a number of maidens came out of the palace together. There were seven of them, each beautiful in a different style, every one of them utterly charming, and on whichever of them the sage let his eyes rest, that one stole his heart. He could not, with his best efforts, control his mind. At the sight of such beauty his heart lost all its calm. He felt himself giving way, and being a man of great wisdom he made a violent effort and at last brought himself under control. The maidens said, “Let the illustrious one come in,” and curious about them and about the mansion, the sage went in as he was bidden.

Inside he saw an old woman, with every mark of age on her, dressed in white robes and wearing every kind of ornament. He blessed her, saying, “Good be to you,” and she returned his good wishes in proper form, rose, and gave him a seat. Once seated, Ashtavakra said, “Let all the maidens go to their own quarters. Let only one stay here: the one who has wisdom and a tranquil heart. The others may go as they please.” The maidens walked once around the sage and left the chamber, and only the aged woman remained. The day went quickly, and night came.

The sage, seated on a splendid bed, said to her, “The night is deepening. Go to your sleep.” That ended their talk, and the old woman lay down on an excellent bed of great splendor. Soon afterward she rose from it, and pretending to shiver with cold, she left it for the sage’s bed. Ashtavakra received her with courtesy. But she stretched out her arms and embraced him tenderly, and finding him unmoved, as inert as a piece of wood, she grew very sorry and began to talk. There is no pleasure, she said, that women can take from a man except the one that waits on desire; she was under desire’s influence now, and that was why she sought him, and he should seek her in return. Let him be cheerful and unite himself with her; let him embrace her, for she wanted him greatly. This union with her, she said, was the excellent and desirable reward of all the severe austerities he had undergone. At first sight she had wanted him. All the wealth and everything of value he saw here was hers, and he could be lord of it all, together with her person and her heart; she would gratify his every wish; let him sport with her in these delightful forests that grant every wish, and she would obey him in everything. Every human pleasure and every pleasure of heaven would be theirs. There is no pleasure women find sweeter than a man’s company, she said; when the god of desire drives them, women grow capricious, and at such times they feel no pain even walking over a desert of burning sand.

“I never go near another man’s wife,” Ashtavakra said. “Those who know the scriptures on conduct condemn it. I am a complete stranger to enjoyments of every kind. Know that I have wanted marriage for the sake of children. I swear it by truth itself. With the aid of children obtained righteously I mean to go to those regions of happiness that cannot be reached without them. Know what is consistent with dharma, and knowing it, give up this effort.”

A key to reading this (the episode of the test): The scene is uncomfortable on purpose. The old woman speaks in the language of desire, and she presses the same charge against women, that they are fickle and false, which Yudhishthira had just quoted from the sages when he asked his question. Ashtavakra answers her each time with two principles: he does not touch another man’s wife, and he marries for children and the worlds that children open. The whole night-scene is Bhishma’s way of working out what shared dharma in a marriage can mean, and the answer arrives only when the woman explains who she is.

The woman did not stop. The very gods of wind and fire and water, she said, and the other celestials, are not as pleasing to women as the god of desire. Women are exceedingly fond of union. Among a thousand of them, or among hundreds of thousands, perhaps one can be found who is devoted to her husband. Under the influence of desire they care nothing for family or father or mother or brother or husband or sons or husband’s brother; chasing what they take for happiness, they destroy the families they were born into and married into, as queenly rivers eat away the banks that hold them. The Creator himself said this, she told him, quickly marking the faults of women. The sage, who was bent on finding out those faults for himself, told her to stop talking in that strain; yearning springs from liking, he said, and she should tell him what else he was to do. She answered that he would see, according to time and place, whether there was anything agreeable in her; let him only stay a while, and she would count herself well rewarded. So he told her he would stay as long as he could venture to. Then he looked at her, worn with age, and began to think hard, and his thoughts tormented him. Wherever his eyes fell on her, they took no delight; the ugliness of each limb drove them away. And yet: this lady must be the goddess of this palace. Had a curse made her ugly? It would be wrong to find out the reason in haste. He turned it over in the privacy of his heart, wanting to know, and passed the rest of the day in that anxious state. At last she said, “Look how the evening clouds have reddened the sun. What service shall I do you?” And he said, “Fetch water for my bath. When I have bathed I will say my evening prayers, restraining my tongue and my senses.”

“So be it,” she said. She brought oil and a cloth for him to wear while bathing, and with the ascetic’s permission she rubbed every part of his body with the fragrant oil. Gently she rubbed him, and when it was done he went into the room set apart for bathing and sat on a new and splendid seat, and the old woman began to wash him with her own soft hands, whose touch was exceedingly pleasant, rendering him service after service in due order. Between the lukewarm water and the soft hands, the sage of rigid vows did not understand that the whole night had gone by. He rose from the bath astonished. The sun was up over the eastern horizon. Was it really so, he asked himself, or had his understanding failed him? Then he duly worshiped the god of a thousand rays and asked her what he should do next. The old woman prepared him food as delicious as amrita, so delicious that he could not take much of it, and in taking that little the day passed and evening came. She asked him to go to bed and sleep. An excellent bed was assigned to him and another she took herself, and they lay apart at first; at midnight the woman left her bed for his.

“My mind turns away from union with another man’s wife,” Ashtavakra said. “Leave my bed. Blessings on you; give this up of your own accord.” Turned back by a Brahmin’s self-restraint, the woman answered, “I am my own mistress. In accepting me you incur no sin.” “Women can never be their own mistresses,” he said. “That is the Creator’s own opinion: a woman never deserves to be independent.”

“I am tortured by desire,” she said. “Mark my devotion to you. You incur sin by refusing to answer me lovingly.” “Many faults drag away the man who acts as he likes,” Ashtavakra answered. “As for me, I can control my inclinations by restraint. Go back to your own bed.” Then she bowed her head to him. “Show me your grace. I prostrate myself before you; be my refuge. If you see such sin in union with a woman who is not your wife, then I give myself to you. Accept my hand in marriage. You will incur no sin; I tell you truly. Know that I am my own mistress, and if there is any sin in this, let it be mine alone. My heart is devoted to you. I am my own mistress. Accept me.” “How is it that you are your own mistress?” he said. “Tell me the reason. There is not one woman in the three worlds who deserves to be called mistress of herself. Her father guards her while she is a girl, her husband while she is young, her sons when she is old. As long as women live they are never independent.” And she said, “Since my girlhood I have kept the vow of celibacy. Do not doubt it. I am a maiden still. Make me your wife. Do not kill this devotion of mine.”

“As you are inclined to me, so I am inclined to you,” Ashtavakra said. “But one question has to be settled first. Is it true that by yielding to my inclination I would not be going against what the sage Vadanya wishes? This is very strange. Will it lead to any good? Here is a maiden in beautiful robes and ornaments, exceedingly lovely. Why did old age cover her beauty for so long? Now she looks like a beautiful girl, and there is no knowing what shape she will take next. I will never swerve from the restraint I keep over desire and the other passions, or from contentment with what I already have. Such swerving cannot be good. I will keep myself joined to truth.”

The gist: Sent north by Vadanya as the price of his daughter’s hand, Ashtavakra bathes in the Vahuda, is feasted by Kubera, and loses a whole celestial year to the dancing of the apsaras without noticing. Beyond Kailasa he comes to a palace of gold where seven maidens shake his composure and an old woman presses herself on him night after night, first in the language of desire and then in the language of marriage. He refuses her every time on two grounds, another man’s wife and marriage for children only, while a doubt grows in him about who this woman is, whose age comes and goes.

The secret of Disha is revealed, and Ashtavakra’s marriage

Yudhishthira wanted to know two things. Why had the woman no fear of Ashtavakra’s curse, when he was a man of such energy? And how did Ashtavakra ever get back from that place? Bhishma told him. Ashtavakra put the question to her directly. “How do you alter your form like this? Say nothing that is untrue. I want to know. Speak the truth before a Brahmin.”

“Wherever you live, in heaven or on earth,” the woman said, “this desire of union between the sexes is to be seen. Listen with all your attention. This trial was of my devising, for testing you properly, and by not letting go of your earlier resolution you have conquered all the worlds. Know that I am the embodiment of the northern direction. You have seen the lightness of women’s character: even an aged woman is tortured by the desire of union. The Grandsire himself and all the gods with Indra are pleased with you.”

“I know the purpose for which you came,” Disha went on. “The sage Vadanya, the father of your bride, sent you on to me so that I might instruct you, and according to his wishes I have. You will return home in safety, and the journey back will not be hard. You will have for your wife the girl you have chosen, and she will bear you a son. Out of desire I solicited you, and you gave me the very best answer. The desire of union cannot be transcended anywhere in the three worlds. Go back to your own place, having won this merit. Is there anything else you wish to hear from me? I will tell it according to the truth. It was for your sake that the sage Vadanya first pleased me, and to honor him I have said all this to you.”

Ashtavakra heard her out with his hands joined in reverence, then asked her leave to go, and with her leave he went back to his own hermitage. He rested there a while, took leave of his kinsmen and friends, and in the proper way went to the Brahmin Vadanya. Vadanya greeted him with the usual inquiries, and the sage, with a well-pleased heart, told him everything he had seen. “At your command I went to the mountains of Gandhamadana,” he said. “In the country north of those mountains I saw a very great goddess. She received me with courtesy. She spoke your name in my hearing, and she instructed me in many matters. Having listened to her I have come back.”

“Take my daughter’s hand,” the learned Vadanya said, “with the due rites and under the proper stars. You are the fittest bridegroom I could choose for the girl.” Ashtavakra said, “So be it,” and took her hand, and that most righteous sage, having married her, was filled with joy. With that beautiful girl for his wife he went on living in his own hermitage, freed from every fever of the mind.

The gist: The old woman was Disha, the goddess of the north, and Vadanya had sent Ashtavakra to her so that she could test him and teach him. She tells him that desire is found everywhere in the three worlds and that he has conquered all of them by holding to his resolve; then she sends him home. He marries Suprabha and lives in peace. Bhishma’s answer to Yudhishthira lies in the story’s shape: the man fit to take a wife’s hand is the one who has kept restraint and truth through every temptation.

The worthy receiver of a gift: which Brahmin to give to

Yudhishthira turned to the law of giving. “Those Brahmins who keep the religious rites strictly, whom do they call a proper object of gifts? Is it the Brahmin who bears the marks of the order of life he follows, or the one who does not?” Bhishma said that gifts should be made to the Brahmin who keeps the duties of his own order, whether he bears the marks of a celibate student or not, since both are faultless: the one who wears the marks and the one who goes without them.

Yudhishthira asked what fault an unclean man incurs if, with great devotion, he gives ghee or food to Brahmins. Bhishma said that even the man most destitute of self-restraint is, beyond doubt, cleansed by devotion; and such a man is cleansed in every act he does, of which giving is only one.

Yudhishthira pressed on a distinction he had heard. It was said, he told Bhishma, that a Brahmin engaged for a rite that concerns the gods should never be examined, while the learned say that for a rite that concerns the ancestors the Brahmin engaged should be examined in both conduct and competence. Bhishma said that the gods’ own grace is what makes a rite for the gods bear fruit, and the Brahmin employed in it adds nothing to that; without doubt, those who sacrifice obtain the merit of the act by the gods’ favor. Brahmins, he said, are always devoted to Brahman. And the sage Markandeya, one of the wisest beings in all the worlds, had said this in the old days.

A key to reading this (fit and worthy receiver): A receiver, in the law of giving, is the person worthy to be given to. Bhishma draws the line that governs the rest of the chapter: in a rite for the gods the gods themselves supply the fruit, so the priest need not be examined, while in the shraddha, the rite for the dead ancestors, the receiver’s conduct and worth decide whether the offering reaches them, so he must be. Every rule that follows about who may and may not be invited descends from this one distinction.

Yudhishthira asked why five kinds of person are held proper receivers: the stranger who arrives as a guest, the man of learning in the duties of his order, the man connected by marriage, the man of austerity, and the man devoted to sacrifice. Bhishma said the first three, strangers, relatives, and ascetics, are proper receivers when they have these qualities: purity of birth, devotion to religious acts, learning, compassion, modesty, sincerity, and truthfulness. The other two, the learned and the sacrificers, are proper receivers when they have five of those: purity of birth, compassion, modesty, sincerity, and truthfulness. “Now listen,” he said, “to the opinions of four beings of immense power: the goddess Earth, the sage Kashyapa, Agni the god of fire, and the ascetic Markandeya.”

The Earth spoke first, and her whole teaching was one image drawn from her own body. “As a clod of mud thrown into the great ocean dissolves at once, so every kind of sin disappears in three high acts: officiating at sacrifices, teaching, and receiving gifts.”

Kashyapa spoke next, and his was a warning. “The Vedas with their six branches, the Sankhya philosophy, the Puranas, and high birth: none of these can rescue a twice-born man if he falls away from good conduct.” Then Agni: “The Brahmin who, engaged in study and counting himself learned, uses that learning to destroy the reputation of others falls away from righteousness and comes to be reckoned as cut off from truth. Such a man of destructive genius never reaches the regions of happiness hereafter.”

Markandeya spoke last, and shortest. “If a thousand horse-sacrifices and Truth were weighed against each other in a balance, I do not know whether the thousand sacrifices would weigh even half as much as Truth.” Having spoken, those four beings of immeasurable energy, the goddess Earth, Kashyapa, Agni, and the weapon-bearing scion of Bhrigu, went quickly away.

A sub-tale: Bhishma frames these four opinions as the sayings of an ancient gathering: Earth, Kashyapa, Agni, and Markandeya, whom the closing line names as the armed descendant of Bhrigu, each speak one sentence, on sin dissolved by priestly acts, on conduct outweighing birth and learning, on learning misused, and on the weight of truth, and then all four vanish at once. Each sentence is a whole teaching in itself, and the story exists to hold the four of them side by side.

Yudhishthira asked about the food of the shraddha, the offering made to one’s dead ancestors. If Brahmins under the vow of celibacy solicit those offerings, can the shraddha still be counted well performed when the performer actually hands the offerings over to them? Bhishma said that if a Brahmin who has kept the vow of celibacy for the prescribed twelve years and gained proficiency in the Vedas and their branches himself solicits the offering of a shraddha and eats it, he is held to have fallen from his vow. The shraddha itself, however, is stained in no way.

The wise have said that dharma has many ends and many doors, Yudhishthira said; what, then, are the settled conclusions? Bhishma named the marks of dharma: abstention from injuring others, truthfulness, freedom from anger, which is forgiveness, compassion, self-restraint, and sincerity. Then he named the counterfeit. There are men who wander the earth praising righteousness, practicing nothing of what they preach, and sinning all the while. Whoever gives such men gold or gems or horses sinks into hell and stays there ten years, living on the excrement of men who feed on the flesh of dead cattle and buffaloes, of the outcaste Pukkasas, of those who live on the outskirts of towns and villages, and of those who, in anger and folly, broadcast other people’s acts and omissions. And the fools who give the offerings of a shraddha to a Brahmin under the vow of celibacy go to regions of great misery.

Yudhishthira asked what is higher than celibacy, what is the highest mark of virtue, and what is the highest kind of purity. “I tell you,” Bhishma said, “that abstention from honey and meat stands even above celibacy. Righteousness consists in keeping within bounds, which is self-restraint, and the best mark of righteousness is renunciation, which is also the highest purity.”

At what time should a man practice righteousness, Yudhishthira asked, at what time seek wealth, at what time enjoy pleasure? Bhishma said that a man should earn wealth in the first part of his life, then earn righteousness, then enjoy pleasure, and attach himself to none of the three. He should honor Brahmins, worship his teacher and his elders, show compassion to all creatures, and be mild in disposition and pleasant in speech.

Then Bhishma set out the acts that weigh as heavily as the worst crime. To speak falsehood in a court of justice, to deal deceitfully with the king, and to act falsely toward one’s teacher and elders are counted equal to the killing of a Brahmin. A man must never do violence to the king’s person, and never strike a cow; both of those offenses are equal to the killing of an unborn child. He must never abandon his sacred fire, never give up the study of the Vedas, and never assail a Brahmin by word or act; every one of these is equal to the killing of a Brahmin.

A key to reading this (the greatness of the cow): Bhishma places a blow struck at a cow beside violence to the king’s own body, and rates both as equal to the killing of an unborn child. It is the first time in this chapter that the cow is set in that company, and it will not be the last: the greatness of the cow is one of the threads that runs through the whole of the Anushasana Parva, and the chapters to come widen it.

At last Yudhishthira asked what kind of Brahmins should be counted good, to which Brahmins a gift earns great merit, and which Brahmins a man should feed. Bhishma said that Brahmins who are free of anger, devoted to acts of righteousness, firm in truth, and practiced in self-restraint are the good ones, and a gift to them earns great merit. A man wins great merit by giving to Brahmins who are free of pride, able to bear everything, firm in pursuing their aims, masters of their senses, devoted to the good of all creatures, and friendly toward all.

He earns great merit, Bhishma went on, by giving to Brahmins who are free of greed, pure in heart and conduct, possessed of learning and modesty, truthful in speech, and observant of the duties the scriptures lay down for them. The sages have declared that Brahmin a deserving object of gifts who studies the four Vedas with all their branches and is devoted to the six well-known duties. A gift to a Brahmin of such qualifications earns great merit, and the man who gives to a deserving Brahmin multiplies his merit a thousandfold. A single righteous Brahmin, possessed of wisdom and Vedic learning, keeping the duties of the scriptures, marked by purity of conduct, is able to rescue a whole race.

To a Brahmin of that quality, Bhishma said, a man should give cows and horses, wealth and food and other things, and by such gifts to such persons he earns great happiness in the next world. “As I have told you, even one such Brahmin can rescue the entire race of the giver. What need is there to say, then, what merit lies in giving to many Brahmins of that kind? So in giving, always choose the one you give to. When you hear of a Brahmin of the right qualifications, respected by all good people, invite him even if he lives far away, welcome him when he arrives, and honor him by every means in your power.”

The gist: Bhishma lays down the fine rules of giving: a rite for the gods fruits by the gods’ grace, so its priest goes unexamined, while the receiver at a shraddha must be examined; devotion cleanses even an unrestrained giver; Earth, Kashyapa, Agni, and Markandeya each add one maxim, on priestly acts, conduct, learning, and truth; and the best receiver is the Brahmin free of anger and greed, restrained, learned in the Vedas, and true, one of whom can save a whole race. On the way he counts striking a cow with striking the king, and the cow’s greatness enters the chapter.

Who is the worthy Brahmin, and the dharma of giving

From the bed of arrows Bhishma had heard one more question about the Brahmin under vows. Yudhishthira wanted to know what becomes of a Brahmin who has kept the vow of celibacy, that is, the twelve years of restraint and Vedic study, and has gained skill in the Vedas and their branches, and who then himself begs for and eats the food offered at a shraddha, the rite of food and water for the dead ancestors. Bhishma answered that such a man is held to have fallen from his vow, and that the shraddha itself takes no stain from it.

Yudhishthira said that the wise had spoken of dharma as having many ends and many doors, and asked what the settled conclusions were. Bhishma said that dharma shows itself by six marks: doing no injury, truthfulness, freedom from anger, which is the same as forgiveness, compassion, self-restraint, and sincerity. Against these he set the men who wander the earth praising righteousness while they practice none of it and keep on sinning in secret. Whoever gives such men gold, gems, or horses must sink into hell and stay there ten years, and the food of that hell is the excrement of the vilest of men: those who eat the flesh of dead cattle and buffaloes, the Pukkasas, the dwellers on the edges of towns, and the people who, in anger and folly, publish the doings of others. And the fools who give the food of a shraddha to a Brahmin still under the vow of celibacy go to regions of great misery.

Yudhishthira asked what stands higher than celibacy, what the highest mark of virtue is, and what the highest purity is. Bhishma answered that giving up honey and meat stands higher even than celibacy; that dharma lies in keeping within bounds, which is restraint; and that the highest mark of dharma is renunciation, which is also the highest purity.

Then Yudhishthira asked at what time dharma should be practiced, at what time wealth should be earned, and at what time pleasure should be enjoyed. Bhishma said a man should earn wealth in the first part of his life, then earn dharma, and then enjoy pleasure, without attaching himself to any of the three. He should honor Brahmins, worship his teacher and his elders, feel compassion for every creature, keep a gentle disposition, and speak pleasantly. Then he named the sins that are weighed as the killing of a Brahmin is weighed: to lie in a court of justice, to deceive the king, and to deal falsely with teachers and elders. He named the two that are weighed as the killing of an unborn child: violence to the king’s body, and a blow struck at a cow. And he named three more that count as the killing of a Brahmin: to abandon one’s sacred fire, to give up the study of the Vedas, and to attack any Brahmin in word or deed.

Yudhishthira asked what kind of Brahmins should be held excellent, which ones a gift to brings great merit, and which ones should be fed. Bhishma answered that those free of anger, devoted to the works of dharma, firm in truth, and self-restrained are the excellent ones, and a gift to them brings great merit. Great merit comes too from giving to those who are free of pride, able to bear all things, firm in their purpose, masters of their senses, devoted to the good of every creature, and friendly to all; and from giving to those who are free of greed, pure in heart and conduct, endowed with learning and modesty, truthful in speech, and keeping the duties the scriptures lay down. The sages, he said, have called that Brahmin a worthy receiver who studies the four Vedas with their branches and is devoted to the six well-known duties: sacrificing, officiating at the sacrifices of others, giving, accepting gifts, teaching, and study.

Whoever gives to such a Brahmin, Bhishma said, multiplies his merit a thousandfold. One righteous Brahmin, wise and learned in the Vedas, keeping the duties of the scriptures, distinguished by purity of conduct, is enough to rescue a whole race. To a Brahmin of that quality a man should give cows and horses, wealth and food and every other kind of thing, and by such gifts he wins great happiness in the world to come. If one such Brahmin can rescue the giver’s entire race, what is to be said of the merit of giving to many of them? Therefore a giver should always choose the one he gives to. When he hears of a Brahmin of the right qualities, honored by all good people, he should invite him even from a great distance, welcome him when he comes, and honor him with everything he has.

A key to reading this (the terms): Shraddha is the rite in which food and water are offered for the dead ancestors, the pitris. Celibacy here is the student’s vow, twelve years of restraint and Vedic study. The killing of an unborn child is one of the sins Bhishma uses as a measure for others, as he uses the killing of a Brahmin. The six duties of a Brahmin are sacrificing, officiating at the sacrifices of others, giving, accepting gifts, teaching, and study.

The gist: Bhishma sets down the root rule of giving: look at the receiver. A gift to a pretender who preaches dharma and practices sin drags the giver into hell for ten years, and a gift to one true Brahmin, learned, restrained, and pure, can save the giver’s whole race. Dharma has six marks, doing no injury, truth, forgiveness, compassion, restraint, and sincerity, and above them all stands renunciation.

The rule of the shraddha, the share of the rakshasas, and who is fit or unfit to be invited

Yudhishthira asked what ordinances have been laid down for the rites that concern the gods and the dead ancestors on the occasion of a shraddha. Bhishma began with the clock. A man should first purify himself by bathing and the other cleansing acts, then go through the well-known auspicious rites, and then do everything that concerns the gods in the forenoon and everything that concerns the ancestors in the afternoon. What is given to men should be given at midday, with affection and regard. A gift made at the wrong time is taken by the rakshasas.

Then Bhishma described what else becomes the rakshasas’ share, and the list was long, because there are many ways for a gift to go wrong before it ever reaches a hand. Things that someone has stepped over, or licked, or sucked; things not given peaceably; things looked at by a woman impure in her season: these produce no merit, and they are the portion of the rakshasas. Things proclaimed before many people, things a shudra has eaten a part of, things a dog has seen or licked, are the rakshasas’ portion. Food mixed with hair or crawling with worms, food stained with spittle or saliva, food a dog has gazed at, food into which tears have fallen, food that has been trodden on: know all of it as the rakshasas’ portion. Food eaten by a person who cannot utter the syllable Om, or by a person bearing arms, or by a wicked person, is the rakshasas’ portion. Food that someone else has already eaten from, or that is eaten without a part of it first being offered to the gods, to guests, and to children, goes to the rakshasas, and if such stained food is offered to the gods and the ancestors they never accept it; the rakshasas take it. The food that the three twice-born orders offer at a shraddha in which the mantras were left unsaid or said wrongly, and the ordinances of the scriptures were not kept, goes to the rakshasas if it is handed out to guests and others. And food distributed to guests before it has been dedicated to the gods or the ancestors with a libation on the sacred fire, or stained because a wicked or irreligious person has eaten a part of it, is the rakshasas’ portion too.

That was the rakshasas’ share. Now, Bhishma said, hear the rules for deciding which Brahmin deserves a gift, and first the ones who do not. Brahmins who have been cast out for heinous sins, and Brahmins who are idiots or out of their minds, do not deserve to be invited to a shraddha, whether the offerings go to the gods or to the ancestors. A Brahmin afflicted with white leprosy, or lacking virility, or leprous, or consumptive, or subject to epileptic fits and their delusions, or blind, should not be invited. Those who practice medicine for a living, those who take regular pay for worshiping images that the rich have set up or who live by serving the gods, those who keep vows out of pride or for other false motives, and those who sell soma, do not deserve to be invited. Those who are by profession singers, dancers, players, instrumental musicians, reciters of sacred books, warriors, or athletes do not deserve it. Those who pour libations on the sacred fire for shudras, or teach shudras, or serve shudra masters, do not deserve it. The Brahmin who is paid for his teaching, and the pupil who attends a teacher’s lectures for the sake of an allowance, do not deserve it, because both are counted sellers of Vedic learning. The Brahmin who has once been induced to accept the food of a shraddha at the very outset, and the one who has married a shudra wife, even if he possesses every kind of knowledge, do not deserve to be invited.

Nor, Bhishma said, do Brahmins who have no household fire, or who attend on corpses, or who are thieves, or who have fallen in some other way. Brahmins whose antecedents are unknown or vile, and those who are the sons of an appointed daughter, do not deserve to be invited to a shraddha. The Brahmin who lends money, or lives on the interest of what he has lent, or lives by selling living creatures, does not deserve it. And men who have been mastered by their wives, or who live as the lovers of unchaste women, or who leave off their morning and evening prayers, do not deserve to be invited to a shraddha.

A sub-tale: Having named every fault that bars a man from the shraddha, Bhishma stops and turns the list over, because a list of the excluded is only half a rule. He goes on to name the merits that let a man be a giver or a receiver at a shraddha in spite of the faults he has just counted: a Brahmin who farms for a living, a well-born Brahmin who fights for pay, a poor man, a man stained by a minor fault. The exceptions are as much a part of the ordinance as the bars, and they are where the rule makes room for a person’s life.

Bhishma gave the exceptions. Brahmins who keep the rites and ceremonies of the scriptures, or who possess merit, or who know the Gayatri, or who keep the ordinary duties of a Brahmin, may be invited to a shraddha even if they have taken to farming for a living. A well-born Brahmin deserves to be invited even though he follows the profession of arms and fights other people’s battles. The Brahmin who has turned to trade for a living, on the other hand, should be left out, whatever merit he has. The Brahmin who pours libations on the sacred fire every day, who lives in a fixed dwelling, who is no thief, and who does the duties of hospitality to the guests who come to his house, deserves to be invited. So does the Brahmin who recites the Savitri at morning, noon, and night, or who lives on alms and keeps the rites laid down for his order. So does the Brahmin who earns wealth in the morning and is poor by afternoon, or is poor in the morning and wealthy by evening, and the one who is free of malice or stained only by a minor fault. The Brahmin who is free of pride and sin, who is not given to dry disputation, and who lives on the alms he gathers from house to house deserves to be invited to sacrifices.

Then Bhishma added the finer points. A man who keeps no vows, or is addicted to falsehood in speech and conduct, or is a thief, or lives by selling living creatures or by trade in general, becomes worthy of invitation to a shraddha if he offers everything to the gods first and only afterward drinks soma. A man who has gained wealth by foul or cruel means and then spends it on adoring the gods and on the duties of hospitality becomes worthy of invitation. Wealth gained by selling Vedic learning, wealth earned by a woman, and wealth gained by meanness, such as giving false evidence in a court of law, should never be given to Brahmins or spent on offerings to the ancestors. And the Brahmin who, at the end of a shraddha performed with his help, refuses to say the words astu svadha incurs the sin of swearing falsely in a lawsuit over land.

The time for a shraddha, Bhishma said, is when a man has a good Brahmin, curds and ghee, the sacred day of the new moon, and the meat of wild animals such as deer. At the end of a shraddha performed by a Brahmin, the word to be spoken is svadha. If a kshatriya performs it, the words are: may your ancestors be gratified. If a vaishya performs it: may everything become inexhaustible. If a shudra performs it, the word is svasti. In a Brahmin’s case the declaration of the punyaha, the holy day, is made with the syllable Om; in a kshatriya’s case without it; and in the rites of a vaishya the words spoken in place of Om are: may the gods be gratified.

Then Bhishma turned to the rites that each order performs in their proper sequence. All the rites that go by the name of jatakarma, the sacraments of birth, are indispensable for the three twice-born orders, and for Brahmins, kshatriyas, and vaishyas alike they are performed with mantras. The girdle of a Brahmin is made of munja grass; a member of the royal order wears a bowstring; the vaishya’s girdle is made of valvaja grass; so the scriptures lay it down. Then he set out the merits and faults of givers and receivers. A Brahmin who utters a falsehood fails in his duty and sins; a kshatriya incurs four times the sin a Brahmin does by lying, and a vaishya eight times. A Brahmin who has been invited by one Brahmin and then eats at the house of another, whose invitation came later, lowers himself and takes on the sin of slaughtering an animal at a time other than a sacrifice; if the earlier invitation came from a kshatriya or a vaishya and he eats elsewhere, he falls from his standing and incurs half that sin. A Brahmin who eats at rites for the gods or the ancestors performed by Brahmins, kshatriyas, or vaishyas without having bathed incurs the sin of telling a lie about a cow. One who eats at such rites while impure because of a birth or a death among his kin, knowing that he is impure and giving in to temptation, incurs the same sin. A man who lives on wealth obtained on a false pretext, such as a pilgrimage, or who asks a giver for wealth on the pretense that he will spend it on religious acts, incurs the sin of a lie. And a man of any of the three higher orders who, at a shraddha or elsewhere, distributes food with mantras to Brahmins who do not study the Vedas, keep no vows, and have not purified their conduct, certainly takes on sin.

A key to reading this (the terms): The share of the rakshasas is what a defiled offering becomes: the gods and the ancestors will not take it, and its fruit passes to the rakshasas, which is to say it is lost. The son of an appointed daughter is the child of a daughter whom a sonless father has designated so that her son may continue his line. Svadha is the word of offering spoken to the ancestors, and svasti is a word of blessing. Punyaha is the declaration that the day is holy. Savitri is the Gayatri mantra. The girdle is tied on at the initiation, and each order wears a different one.

The gist: Bhishma sets the shraddha in order: rites for the gods in the forenoon, for the ancestors in the afternoon, gifts to men at midday, and everything mistimed or defiled goes to the rakshasas. He lists the Brahmins who may never be invited, from the outcaste and the diseased to the paid priest, the money-lender, and the man ruled by his wife, and then lists the merits that open the door again. The closing words of the rite, the sacred syllable, and even the grass of the girdle differ from order to order, and a Brahmin who lies, eats at the wrong house, or eats unbathed takes on a sin with a precise name.

To whom giving brings supreme merit, and the deeds that lead to hell and to heaven

Yudhishthira asked to whom the things dedicated to the gods and the ancestors should be given for the amplest reward. Bhishma’s answer began with a picture. “Feed those Brahmins whose wives wait reverently for what is left on their husbands’ plates, the way tillers of the soil wait for the rains to come in season.” Great merit, he said, comes from giving to Brahmins who keep pure conduct always, who are emaciated by abstaining from every luxury and even from full meals, who are devoted to the vows that waste the body, and who come to a giver hoping for a gift. It comes from giving to those who regard conduct as their food, conduct as their wife and children, conduct as their strength, conduct as the refuge that carries them across this world into happiness in the next, and who ask for wealth only when wealth is absolutely necessary. It comes from giving to those who have lost everything to thieves or oppressors and come to a giver; to those who will ask for food even from a poor man of their own order who has just come by something; to those who have lost everything in a general calamity, wives and all, and come asking for alms. It comes from giving to those under vows, who have placed themselves of their own will under painful rules, who respect the declarations of the Vedas, and who ask for wealth to pay for the rites that complete their vows; to those who live far from the ways of the sinful and the wicked, who have no strength for want of support, and who are very poor; to those who have been robbed of everything by powerful men though they are perfectly innocent, and who only want to fill their stomachs somehow, without scruple about the quality of what they eat; and to those who beg on behalf of others devoted to austerity and are content with a small gift. Such, Bhishma said, are the declarations of the scriptures on winning merit by giving; and now he would say which acts lead to hell and which to heaven.

To hell go those who tell an untruth on any occasion other than the two the law allows, to serve the purpose of a teacher or to assure a person in fear of his life that he is safe. To hell go those who ravish other men’s wives, or lie with them, or assist in such acts. To hell go those who rob others of their wealth, or destroy other people’s wealth and possessions, or proclaim other people’s faults. To hell go those who break the troughs from which cattle quench their thirst, who damage the halls where people meet, who break down bridges and causeways, and who pull down the houses people live in. To hell go those who beguile and cheat helpless women, or girls, or old women, or women who have been frightened. To hell go those who destroy other people’s means of living, who wipe out their habitations, who rob them of their wives, who sow dissension among friends, and who destroy other people’s hopes. To hell go those who live by vocations laid down for others and those who are ungrateful to friends for services received. To hell go those who have no faith in the Vedas and show them no reverence, who break the vows they have made or make others break theirs, and who fall from their station through sin. To hell go those who take up improper conduct, who charge exorbitant interest, and who make unduly large profits on their sales; those who gamble, who do wicked things without any scruple, and who slaughter living creatures.

To hell go those who get servants dismissed by their masters while the servants are hoping for a reward, or expecting something definite, or drawing wages or salaries, or waiting to be repaid for valuable service already rendered. To hell go those who eat without setting aside a portion for their wife, their sacred fires, their servants, or their guests, and those who neglect the rites the scriptures lay down for honoring the ancestors and the gods. To hell go those who sell the Vedas, those who find fault with the Vedas, and those who reduce the Vedas to writing. To hell go those who stand outside the four modes of life, who take up practices forbidden by the shrutis and the scriptures, and who live by acts that are wicked or sinful or do not belong to their order of birth. To hell go those who sell hair, those who sell poison, and those who sell milk. To hell go those who put obstacles in the path of Brahmins, cows, and maidens. To hell go those who sell weapons, forge weapons, make arrows, or make bows, and those who block paths and roads with stones and thorns and pits. To hell go those who cast off their teachers, their servants, and their loyal followers without any offense given. To hell go those who set bullocks to work before the animals are old enough, who bore the noses of bullocks and other animals to control them at work, and who keep animals always tethered. To hell go kings who take a sixth of the produce of their subjects’ fields by force and do not protect them, and those who, though able and well provided, give nothing. To hell go those who cast off people of forgiveness, self-restraint, and wisdom, or people they have lived with for many years, when those people are no longer of use to them; and those who eat without giving portions of their food to children, the old, and their servants.

Then Bhishma named those who go up to heaven. The man who wrongs a Brahmin by obstructing the acts in which the gods are worshiped is struck with the loss of all his children and all his animals; those who do not so obstruct go to heaven. Those who follow the duties the scriptures lay down for them and practice charity, self-restraint, and truthfulness go to heaven. Those who gain knowledge by obedient service to their teachers and austere penance, and then grow reluctant to accept gifts, go to heaven. Those through whom other people are relieved of fear and sin, of the obstacles in the way of what they want to do, of poverty and the afflictions of disease, go to heaven. Those who are forgiving, patient, prompt in every righteous act, and auspicious in conduct go to heaven. Those who abstain from honey and meat, from the wives of other men, and from wine and liquor go to heaven. Those who help to establish retreats for ascetics, who found families, who open new country for settlement and lay out towns and cities, go to heaven. Those who give away clothes and ornaments, food and drink, and who help others to marry, go to heaven. Those who have given up every kind of harm to every creature, who can endure anything, and who have made themselves the refuge of all creatures, go to heaven. Those who wait humbly on their fathers and mothers, who have subdued their senses, and who are affectionate to their brothers go to heaven. Those who master their senses although they are rich and strong and young go to heaven. Those who are kind even to those who wrong them, mild in disposition, fond of everyone of mild behavior, and who add to others’ happiness by every humble service, go to heaven. Those who protect thousands, give to thousands, and rescue thousands from distress go to heaven. Those who give gold and cows, conveyances and animals, the things needed for a marriage, serving men and maids, clothes and robes, go to heaven. Those who make public pleasure-houses and gardens and wells, resting-places and meeting halls, tanks where cattle and men can drink, and fields for cultivation, go to heaven. Those who give houses and fields and populated villages to those who ask go to heaven. Those who make sweet drinks with their own hands, and seeds, and rice, and give them away, go to heaven. And those who, born in families high or low, beget hundreds of children and live long, practicing compassion and keeping their anger wholly under control, go to heaven. So, Bhishma said, he had explained the rites for the gods and the ancestors that people perform for the sake of the other world, the ordinances of giving, and the views of the sages of old on what is given and how.

A key to reading this (the idea): Bhishma’s two lists are the law of dharma turned into a ledger, one column of acts that drag a person down to hell and one of acts that lift him to heaven, and much of what stands in them is ordinary: a water trough broken, a bullock yoked too young, a guest left out of the meal, a well dug, a daughter helped to marry. Two entries need a word. Reducing the Vedas to writing is counted a sin because the Vedas were shruti, heard and held in memory and passed from teacher to pupil by voice alone. And the king’s sixth part of the produce was the royal tax of that age; the protection of the people was what he owed in return, and taking the one without giving the other is the fault Bhishma names.

The gist: Bhishma turns the list of worthy receivers toward compassion: the wife waiting for her husband’s leavings, the man robbed by thieves or tyrants, the vow-keeper who needs money to finish his vow, the beggar content with a little. Then he opens the two roads. Getting a servant dismissed, boring a bullock’s nose, selling milk or poison, writing down the Vedas, and eating without sharing lead to hell; digging wells, laying out towns, giving a daughter in marriage, sparing every creature, and mastering the senses while young and rich lead to heaven.

Brahmin-slaying even without killing a Brahmin

Yudhishthira asked one more thing, and asked for it truly and in detail: under what circumstances does a person become guilty of killing a Brahmin without actually killing one? Bhishma said that he had once put that very question to Vyasa, and that he would now repeat what Vyasa had told him; let Yudhishthira listen with undivided attention. He had gone into Vyasa’s presence and said, “You are the fourth in descent from Vasishtha. Explain this to me. What are the circumstances under which a man becomes guilty of killing a Brahmin without killing one?” And the son of Parashara, well skilled in the science of conduct, had given him an answer at once excellent and certain.

Know that man to be guilty of killing a Brahmin, Vyasa said, who of his own accord invites a Brahmin of righteous conduct to his house to give him alms, and then refuses to give him anything, on the pretense that there is nothing in the house. Know that man to be guilty of killing a Brahmin who destroys the livelihood of a Brahmin learned in the Vedas and all their branches and free of attachment to worldly creatures and goods. Know that man to be guilty of killing a Brahmin who gets in the way of thirsty cattle while they are drinking. Know that man to be guilty of killing a Brahmin who, without ever studying the shrutis that have flowed from teacher to pupil for ages upon ages, finds fault with the shrutis or with the scriptures the sages composed. Know that man to be guilty of killing a Brahmin who does not give his daughter, beautiful and accomplished as she is, to a suitable bridegroom. Know that foolish and sinful man to be guilty of killing a Brahmin who inflicts on Brahmins a grief that reaches the very core of their hearts. Know that man to be guilty of killing a Brahmin who robs the blind, the lame, and the simple of everything they have. And know that man to be guilty of killing a Brahmin who sets fire to the retreats of ascetics, or to woods, or to a village, or to a town.

The gist: Vyasa taught Bhishma that the guilt of killing a Brahmin reaches far past the sword. Inviting a man for alms and turning him away empty, breaking a learned Brahmin’s livelihood, stopping a thirsty cow at the water, finding fault with scripture never studied, withholding a daughter from a fit husband, wounding Brahmins to the heart, robbing the helpless, and burning hermitages, forests, villages, or towns all carry that same guilt.

Source: the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Anushasana Parva, Danadharma sub-parva, Sections 1 to 24. The Sanskrit e-text, the Gita Press Hindi edition, and Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s complete English translation were used to verify names, sequence, and principal events. Where the recensions differ, this English retelling follows Ganguli, and the Hindi edition follows Gita Press.