Guru Dakshina (guru-dakṣiṇā)

Guru dakshina is the fee a student offers the teacher at the end of training, traditionally whatever the teacher asks rather than a fixed sum. The Mahabharata uses it to expose how much power that convention puts in a teacher's hands: Drona asks his princes to capture Drupada and settle an old humiliation, and he asks the forest-born archer Eklavya for the right thumb that made him the better bowman. Krishna's dakshina to Sandipani, by contrast, is to go down to the house of death and bring back the teacher's drowned son.