The Sage and the Dog's Haunch

For many days Yudhishthira had sat at the foot of the bed of arrows and learned the dharma of kings: how to protect, how to punish, how to take without harming, how to appoint and how to dismiss. On a grey afternoon, when the field wind had a smell of ash in it, he asked a different kind of question.

"Grandfather, you have taught me the dharma of a kingdom that is standing on its feet. Teach me what a man does when the kingdom is lying down."

"Say what you mean," said Bhishma.

"I mean famine," said Yudhishthira. "I mean the year the rain does not come, and the year after that. I mean plague, and an army camped in the barley, and the granary burned, and the priest fled, and the river gone to cracked mud. I have just spent eighteen days making such a country out of a good one. What is a man's duty in such a time? Does dharma go on saying to a starving man exactly what it said to him when he was fed? For if it does, then dharma is a rule for the comfortable, and I will not believe that. And if it does not, then any thief in a hard year can say that the times excused him, and I will not believe that either."

"There is a name for what you are asking after," said Bhishma. "Apaddharma. The dharma of calamity, the law for the time of ruin. Understand at once that it is not a second dharma set up beside the first, and it is not a door out of the law. It is the same law speaking at the top of its voice to a man who is drowning, and it says a harder thing than you expect.

"Hear an old story, and do not be quick to judge the man in it. He was one of the greatest of the sages, and he did a thing that would have carried a lesser man straight to hell."

"Who was he?"

"Vishvamitra," said Bhishma. "Vishvamitra, and a haunch of dog's meat, in the twelfth year of a drought."

"In an age long gone," said Bhishma, "Indra withheld the rain for twelve years, and the world came apart.

"The rivers drew back into their beds and then out of them altogether. The wells went to dust, and then men went down into the wells for the wet clay and ate that. There was no ploughing: no seed left that had not been eaten, and no beast to draw the plough that had not been eaten also. The sacrifices ceased, because a sacrifice needs grain and butter and a priest with strength enough to stand. No smoke of oblation went up anywhere in the world, and the gods, who live on that smoke, went hungry with the men who had fed them. Fathers left off feeding sons. The dead lay unburned, because nobody could spare the firewood. Markets became places where men waited with sticks for other men to come out. It was the law of the fishes again, but the fishes were dying too.

"Through that country walked Vishvamitra. You know what he had been: a king who by sheer terrible penance had made himself a brahmin, who had wrestled with Vasishtha, who had built heavens of his own. He had given all of it to the fire of his austerities, and now the fire had nothing left to burn but him. His wife and his son had been carried away from him in the wandering; he did not know where. He was a skeleton with a memory in it. He walked because a man who stops walking in such a year does not get up.

"For fourteen days he had eaten nothing at all. On a night with no moon he came at last to a hamlet at the edge of a dead village, the quarter where the chandalas lived, who handle what nobody else will touch: the skinners of dead cattle, the burners of the dead. Broken pots. Shards of skulls. The hides of dogs and asses pegged out to dry. Dogs going about in the dark, and asses, and men lying where they had fallen.

"Everyone in it was asleep, or lying still enough to pass for asleep. Vishvamitra went from hut to hut like a thief, because that is what he had become, and in one of them he found meat: the haunch of a dog, freshly cut, hanging from a peg."

"He stood looking at it a long time," said Bhishma, "arguing with himself, as a learned man will even when dying.

"He said: it is dog, the food of the lowest, forbidden to any twice-born mouth. He said: it is another man's, and he sleeps; taking it is theft. He said: I am a brahmin by my own labour, and no man ever paid more for that word. He said, and this was the true argument: what will be left of me if I eat it?

"Then he stretched out his hand and took it from the peg. And the chandala woke.

"The man rose out of the dark of his own hut, a starved wretch as ragged as the sage, and he did not fall at the great man's feet. He guarded what was his, and something else besides.

"'Who is in my house?' he said. And then, seeing the matted hair and the sacred thread on the bones: 'Put it down, holy one. That is dog's flesh, mine, and unclean for you twice over. Steal from me if you must; I am used to being robbed. But do not eat that. This is my food, and my fathers' food, and no shame in me for eating it. It is not yours. You will fall, and drag your ancestors after you, and all that penance will run out like water from a cracked jar. I keep the little law that was given me. Keep the great one that was given you.'

"'You speak well,' said Vishvamitra, 'and I will answer you. Of all things a man is given, life is first, because it carries the others. A dead man performs no sacrifice, gives no gift, speaks no truth, fathers no son to make offerings for his fathers. Dharma is not practised in the next world; it is practised here, by the living, with hands and breath. If I die tonight in this doorway with clean hands, my dharma dies with me, and is not the better for my cleanliness.

"'Between death and defilement I choose defilement, for the defiled may be purified, and the dead may not. I do not take this to please my tongue. I take it to keep alive the man who is going to do dharma later. And I shall pay for it afterwards, and I know already what it will cost me.'"

"The chandala stood in his doorway and looked at the sage for a long moment," said Bhishma, "and then he stood aside.

"'Take it, then,' he said. 'I have never in my life been argued with by a brahmin. Take it, and do not say I gave it and do not say you stole it. Say the year took it.'

"Vishvamitra carried the haunch out into the fields. He would not eat it as an animal eats. He gathered what dry stuff he could find and made a fire, and he cooked the meat, and then, being what he was, he did first what he had done every day of his life: he set apart the portions and offered them, to the gods and to the fathers, saying the words over dog's flesh in the twelfth year of the drought. There was nobody to see it but the sky.

"And the sky saw it. Indra had been watching the whole of that night, and now Indra was ashamed. The lord of rain looked down on a starving man performing the rite with the only thing left in the world, and he understood what he had done to the earth by holding back his hand. He let it go.

"The rain came. It came first as a smell, which the people in the hamlet woke to and could not name; then as a few drops in the dust that dried before they were dark; and then it came down in earnest, all night and all the next day, until the dry rivers filled and roared and took the dead trees with them. Grass came up on the eleventh day. The herbs came back, and the cattle that were left grew fat, and the seed that had been hidden in the walls of a hundred huts came out and went into the mud. Within the year men were making sacrifices again, and the smoke went up, and the world stood back on its feet.

"Vishvamitra lived. He found his wife and his son again. And when he was strong he went into the wilderness and did such penance for that one night as would have burnt a mountain, and came out of it clean, and greater than before."

Yudhishthira sat still a while. "Then in a hard year," he said slowly, "a man may do anything."

"No," said Bhishma. "That is why I told you the story rather than the rule, for the rule is short and men bend it; the story will not bend. Hear the measure of apaddharma.

"First: it is not licence, it is triage. The sage did not ask, what may I get away with? He asked, what is the least I can do to remain alive? He took the haunch of a dog. He did not take a cow, or a granary, or a neighbour's field, or a widow's gold. A man in ruin may reach for what keeps breath in him, and not one finger further; and the moment the ruin passes, the permission is withdrawn, whether or not he has finished enjoying it.

"Second: the reason must be dharma, never comfort. He saved his life for the sake of what a living man can do. That, and nothing else, is what raised the act out of the mud. Take the same haunch for the pleasure of eating it, and it is only a hungry man stealing meat. The permission lives entirely in the purpose, and every man who abuses it knows in his own heart what he was really reaching for.

"Third: the debt comes due. Apaddharma does not wash the act; it only postpones the reckoning. Vishvamitra went straight from that fire into a penance that would have killed most men. A king who breaks his own law to save his people in a famine has still broken it, and must be seen to answer for it, or his people will learn that the law breaks whenever it is inconvenient. Never say afterwards that it was not a fall. Say that it was a fall, and that you have paid for it."

Yudhishthira put his hands over his face, then took them away and said: "I have been thinking of the villages between the rivers, in the years we were fighting for them. I used to wonder how they lived at all, and I judged them for the way they did it."

"They lived by apaddharma," said Bhishma, "as men have always lived through the times that kings make. Remember that when they come to your hall. You made the calamity. Do not also punish them for having survived it."