The Python's Way

"There is a way of living," said Bhishma, "that is named after a snake, and it is called the ajagara-vritti, the python's way. It is the third of the teachings I have kept for the end, and it is the one that men most often get wrong."

The great python does not hunt. It does not stalk, it does not run down, it does not lie in ambush with a plan. It lies where it is, enormous and unhurried, and what fate brings to its mouth it takes, and what fate does not bring it does without. It is not thin with anxiety and it is not fat with cleverness. Whole seasons pass in which it eats nothing and it does not seem to have noticed. Then it eats, hugely, and goes back to lying where it was.

"Do not confuse this with the python of the mountain that once took your brother Bhima in its coils and would not loosen them until the riddles were answered," said Bhishma. "That was a creature with a curse on it and a lesson of its own. This is a vow named after the animal, and the animal is only the illustration."

A great sage had taken this vow. Bhishma did not give his name, because the man had given it up along with everything else.

He had been born to learning, and he had learning still, for that is the one possession a man cannot hand back. He had the frame of a man who had once been strong. But he had put down, deliberately and in a single season, the entire apparatus by which people arrange to be fed: the fixed hour, the known doorway, the householder who is glad to see him coming, the reputation that makes a village send out food before it is asked for. He had put down the asking itself.

"He resolved," said Bhishma, "to live as the great serpent lives. To take what came unsought. To pursue nothing, refuse nothing, store nothing, and expect nothing. And then to find out, over the remainder of his life, what such a man actually becomes."

This was the shape of his days.

If a householder saw him passing and set before him rice and curds and sweet things, he sat down and ate them, and he ate them fully, and he did not deliver a discourse on the vanity of sweet things while he was eating them. He simply did not brighten. The pleasure went through him the way weather goes through a field.

If nothing came for a day, he did not eat that day. If nothing came for four days he did not eat for four days, and he did not mention it, and he did not go one step out of his way toward a place where food was more likely, and he did not go one step out of his way to avoid such a place either, which is the harder half of the discipline. He would not arrange his route so as to be seen. He would not arrange it so as not to be seen. He walked where he was walking.

He wore what had been thrown away, cloth found at a burning ground or dropped from a cart, and he wore it without any particular pride in its poorness. He slept where night found him: a porch, a river stair, the ash of a burnt field, the lee of a wall. He did not build even the smallest shelter, because a shelter is a claim on tomorrow, and tomorrow was precisely the property he had renounced.

He kept nothing overnight. Not a coin, not a grain, not a promise, not an appointment.

"And here is the part that men do not expect," said Bhishma. "The rich pitied him. They pitied him extravagantly. Great men would come out and look at him lying in the dust and be moved, and go home and speak of him at dinner as a sad case, a fine mind that had come to nothing.

"And he pitied no one. Not the rich, not the poor, not the sick, not the dying. Not because his heart was hard. Because he had looked carefully and could not find, in the whole visible world, a single person who was in a worse position than he was in, and he could not manufacture a pity he did not feel."

Word of him came at last to Prahlada, king of the daityas, who was old, and just, and famously curious about the insides of things.

The king went out and found him where the report had placed him, lying on the bare ground beside a road in the middle of the afternoon, with the dust of passing carts settling on him, entirely at his ease. Prahlada dismounted and stood over him, and the sage neither rose nor apologised for not rising.

"I have questions," said the king, "and I shall ask them rudely, because I am too old to be polite for an hour before getting to the point."

"Ask," said the sage.

"Are you idle? I have a great many idle men in this kingdom and I know the look of them, and you have it. They also lie down in the afternoon.

"Are you a beggar? If you are, you are a very poor one, since you do not beg. I passed nine men on the road here who beg better than you and eat better than you.

"Are you a fool? Is this simply the result of an unlucky mind, and are we all admiring a defect?

"Are you ill? Has some sickness taken your strength, and is this dignity of yours merely a name you have put on a weakness?

"Or has some misfortune done it? Was there a wife, a son, a burnt house, a lost office? Grief will lay a man down in the dust for years and he will call it philosophy.

"I am not mocking you," said Prahlada. "Look at my position. You are learned. You are still strong enough to walk. Any door in my city would feed you, and several would compete for the honour. Men with a tenth of your gifts are running my provinces. And you lie beside a public road like something that has fallen off a cart. I have governed for a long time and I know what wanting looks like, and I cannot find any wanting in your face at all, and that is a thing I have never once seen. Tell me what I am looking at."

The sage sat up, unhurried, and looked at the king with the mild attention of a man answering a question about the weather.

"I am not idle," he said. "The idle man is a man who is still wanting and has stopped moving, and there is no rest in him at all; open him up and you will find the whole market inside, running. I have not stopped moving. I have stopped wanting, and the sitting still is a consequence, not the practice.

"I am not a beggar. A beggar asks. I have given up asking, which is a larger renunciation than giving up eating, and a more difficult one, since a man may fast for a week by will and cannot go one day without asking for something unless he has changed underneath.

"I am not a fool, and I will let you judge that by the end of this. I am not ill. Nothing has been taken from me. There was no burnt house.

"Here is what you are looking at, king. I am the one man in your kingdom who cannot be robbed, cannot be disappointed, and cannot be dismissed.

"I cannot be robbed, because I keep nothing overnight, and a thief who came to me would go away with the day's food at most, and I should have fasted a day, which I do anyway and without resentment.

"I cannot be disappointed, because disappointment is the distance between what a man expected and what arrived, and I expect nothing, so the distance is always nothing, and every meal I eat is a gift and no meal I miss is a theft.

"I cannot be dismissed, because I hold no post. You are a king and you can take a man's office, his lands, his rank and his name in a morning. There is no sentence you can pronounce over me that would change my afternoon.

"So do not call this the python's laziness. The python does not chase, but neither does it starve on principle, and neither does it refuse what falls in front of it. Contentment is the highest gain, king. And the man who wants nothing commands fate, because fate has nothing left to bargain with. What will you offer a man who is not buying?"

Prahlada, who had ruled a long time and had heard a great deal of clever talk, went away silent, which for that king was the highest form of applause.

"Now hear the danger in this teaching," said Bhishma, "because it is the teaching most easily counterfeited. Half the men lying in the dust of any kingdom will tell you they are keeping the python's vow. They are not. The sloth of a tired man and the stillness of that sage look the same from the road and are opposite in every particular. The tired man has given up the road to his wanting; he has not given up the wanting, and it lies in him and sours. The sage gave up the wanting and kept the road, and walks it without a destination. One of them is resting. The other is practising.

"And you, Yudhishthira, will hear this and think that you are being told to leave the throne and go and lie beside a road. You are not. There are two errors and men fall into them by turns, and both of them are a hand shut. There is the grasping hand, which cannot receive anything because it is already full and busy holding. And there is the fist of the great renouncer, who refuses everything on principle and is as fixed upon the world as the miser is, since a man who must push a kingdom away all day long is thinking about the kingdom all day long.

"Between the grasping and the giving up there is a third way, and it is the open hand. It takes what falls into it and does not close. It lets go what leaves it and does not clutch. That is what the python's vow teaches a king, and it is why I have told it to you on this bed instead of telling it to a hermit.

"You did not chase this crown. It has fallen into your hand. Do not close on it and do not throw it away. Hold it open, and rule, and when the hour comes to set it down you will find that your fingers have not stiffened around it. That is the whole art, and it takes a lifetime, and you may begin this evening."