The King Who Declared War on Himself

Yudhishthira had grown quiet in the days since the war, and Bhishma, watching him from his bed of arrows, understood the particular restlessness of a man who has run out of enemies and does not know what to fight next. 'Let me tell you of a king who found himself exactly where you stand,' Bhishma said, 'though he arrived there by conquest instead of grief.'

He spoke of Alarka, ruler of Kashi, who in his youth had done what few kings manage: he had taken every kingdom worth taking. Rival after rival had fallen to his armies or bent to his terms, until there was, by any ordinary measure, nothing left in the world for Alarka to win.

So the king did what restless conquerors sometimes do when the maps run out. He handed his throne to ministers he trusted, withdrew to a quiet hermitage outside his own capital, and sat down to conquer the one territory he had never bothered with: his own mind.

It went badly from the first hour. He commanded his mind to be still, the way he had once commanded armies to advance, and his mind simply ignored him. It wandered to old battles, to unfinished appetites, to a hundred small itches of memory and desire, exactly as it pleased, exactly as though the great King Alarka were no one in particular.

He was furious in a way conquest had never made him furious, because every other opponent he had ever faced had at least had the decency to be an opponent he could see. So Alarka, being a man who understood only one language for dealing with insubordination, decided to declare war.

Alarka did not simply resolve to concentrate harder, the way a lesser man might have. He held court with himself, alone in his hermitage, and issued a formal declaration of war upon his own mind, in the same language his heralds had once carried to the courts of Anga and Magadha.

'Mind,' he said aloud, 'you have disobeyed the throne. I, Alarka, who broke every king who ever raised a hand against me, now raise mine against you. I will loose upon you an arrow whose edge nothing has ever survived, and you will submit as every other enemy of this kingdom has submitted.'

His mind, being made of the same stuff as every restless mind, did not submit. It drifted again within moments, this time toward the smell of rain reaching him through the open door of the hermitage, and Alarka realized with some irritation that he could not fight an enemy that had no single gate to storm.

So he narrowed the war. If the mind itself could not be cornered, perhaps its lieutenants could be. He turned first to his own nose, which had just betrayed him with the scent of rain, and declared war on it exactly as formally as he had declared war on his mind. 'Nose,' he said, 'you have led my attention where I did not send it. Submit, or I will loose my arrow upon you as I loosed it upon the kings of the earth.'

His nose answered him, in the story as Bhishma told it, with a courtesy no defeated king had ever managed. 'Great Alarka, loose your arrow if you must. It will kill only me, and I will die gladly, because I never once acted on my own account. I only ever went where something behind me wanted to go.'

Alarka considered this and, being thorough, moved on to the next offender. He declared war on his tongue, which had spent a lifetime demanding delicacies and had never once asked the king's permission first. 'Tongue,' he said, 'you have ruled where I should have ruled. Submit or die by my arrow.'

The tongue gave the same answer the nose had given, word for word in spirit if not in phrasing. 'Kill me if you like, great king. I have never once tasted anything for my own sake. I only ever went where something behind me sent me looking.'

Undeterred, and increasingly unsettled by the pattern forming, Alarka turned to his eye, which had spent decades chasing every fine sight the world offered, and declared war on it with the same ceremony. 'Eye, you have looked where I did not order you to look. Submit or die.'

The eye answered exactly as the others had. 'My arrow will only ever be my own death, King Alarka, and I welcome it without complaint, because I never once looked anywhere of my own will. Something behind me chooses what I see, and I only carry the sight to it.'

By the third answer, Alarka was no longer merely irritated. He was listening the way a general listens when three separate scouts return with the same intelligence from three different roads. Each sense he condemned died willingly and without protest, and each one told him, in almost the same words, that it had never once acted for itself. Something behind all of them, some single unseen commander, was sending the nose toward scent, the tongue toward taste, and the eye toward sight, and collecting the pleasure of all three for itself while none of the messengers took the blame.

Alarka pressed on to be certain, because a king who had spent his life verifying intelligence before acting on it was not about to change that habit now that the war was against himself. He declared war on his ear, which had chased music and gossip and the sound of praise for as long as he could remember. 'Ear,' he said, 'you have listened where I did not command you. Submit or die by my arrow.'

'Kill me, then,' the ear answered. 'I will die owning nothing, because I never once listened for my own pleasure. Something behind me wanted to hear, and I only carried the sound.'

Last of all he turned to his skin, which had sought warmth and touch and comfort without ever once consulting the king who wore it. 'Skin,' Alarka said, and his voice by now had lost most of its anger and gained something closer to attention, 'you have felt where I did not permit. Submit or die.'

The skin gave the same testimony as the rest. 'My death changes nothing, great king, because I never felt anything for myself. Something behind me wanted the feeling, and I only carried it to that place.'

Alarka sat with five confessions that were really one confession repeated five times, and understood at last what a lifetime of conquest had never taught him. The nose, the tongue, the eye, the ear, and the skin were not rebels. They were messengers, faithful and blameless, obeying a single commander who never showed his own face and let five servants take every accusation meant for him. The war Alarka had declared on five subordinates belonged, in truth, against exactly one enemy: the mind that sent them all out and called their obedience desire.

Having found his true enemy, Alarka did not repeat his old mistake of declaring war on it with arrows, because an arrow, he now understood, could only ever kill the messenger and never the commander. He turned instead to yoga, seating himself in the stillness he had once mistaken for weakness, and began the slower, quieter siege of holding his mind in one place until it stopped sending its servants out to fetch him distractions.

It did not surrender in an hour, or in a season. Bhishma told Yudhishthira that Alarka's second war lasted far longer than any campaign of his youth, because a mind that has spent decades ranging freely does not accept confinement without a long argument. But where his armies had eventually won every field they marched onto, this quieter war of stillness won something armies never had: an enemy that, once conquered, stayed conquered, because there was no rival mind waiting beyond the border to rise up again.

Yudhishthira, listening, said the story had made him laugh despite himself, a king solemnly declaring war on his own nose. 'That is exactly why he told it that way,' Bhishma said. 'Alarka wanted every man who ever heard the story to notice how absurd it sounds to fight an enemy with a sword when the enemy was never outside the gate. The whole world he conquered, kingdom after kingdom, was a small holding next to the one province he finally learned to govern. A quiet mind held more territory than every throne he had ever taken by force, and it was the only conquest that never had to be defended again.'