The Sage of Eight Bends

On their long pilgrimage through the holy places of the land, the Pandavas came with the sage Lomasha to the banks of a clear and gentle river called the Samanga, whose waters were said to wash away not only sin but deformity itself. Yudhishthira asked why so small a stream was held so sacred, and Lomasha smiled and sat down upon the bank to tell them.

"There was once a boy," he said, "born so crooked in his body that men laughed aloud to see him - bent in eight places, so that he was named Ashtavakra, the Eight-Bends. He was mocked for his twisted frame by the proudest scholars in the proudest court in the land. And that crooked boy, with nothing but the straightness of his mind, overthrew the greatest debater of the age, brought his drowned father back from the dead, and then washed his crookedness away in this very river. Listen, and I will tell you how."

Draupadi and the brothers settled on the cool grass by the water, and Lomasha began the story of Ashtavakra.

In a forest hermitage there lived a learned sage named Uddalaka, who had a favorite disciple, a young brahmin named Kahoda, so devoted and able that Uddalaka gave him his own daughter Sujata in marriage. In time Sujata grew great with child.

Now Kahoda, though learned, was not perfect in his recitation, and each evening he would sit and chant the sacred verses aloud, sometimes stumbling, sometimes mispronouncing a holy word. And the unborn child in Sujata's womb, who already carried the wisdom of the scriptures, could not bear to hear them recited wrongly. One night a small clear voice rose from within the womb itself.

"Father," said the unborn child, "by your grace I have learned the whole of the Veda even before my birth - but I must tell you, with respect, that you are reciting it incorrectly. You have made an error in that verse." And so it happened not once but many times, the child gently correcting its father's mistakes from inside the womb.

Kahoda was a good man, but he was tired and his pride was stung, and to be corrected by his own unborn child, again and again, before his wife, was more than his temper could bear. In a flash of anger he pronounced a curse upon the child still in the womb: "Since you mock your father even before you are born, crooked is your conduct - so crooked shall your body be. You shall be born bent in eight places." And so the curse was set, and the child would come into the world deformed.

Soon after, want came upon the little hermitage, and Kahoda set out for the court of King Janaka of Mithila, ruler of the Videhas, hoping to win wealth at the great sacrifice the king was holding, where learned men gathered and were rewarded. But the road to Janaka's favor ran through a danger.

At that court there presided a formidable scholar named Bandin, who claimed to be the son of the god Varuna, lord of the waters. Bandin had set a cruel rule: any learned man who came to debate would be challenged by him, and whoever lost the contest of wits would be seized and drowned in the river, cast into the deep on Bandin's word. Many proud scholars had come, and many had been defeated and lost beneath the water, and none had bested him.

Kahoda, confident in his learning, entered into the debate with Bandin - and Kahoda lost. By the terrible rule of the court he was taken and drowned in the river, sent down into the waters, and he did not come home. In the hermitage Sujata waited and waited, and at last understood that her husband would not return. And in her grief she gave birth to the cursed child, a boy bent in eight places, whom she named Ashtavakra. She kept from him, as he grew, the truth of how his father had died.

Ashtavakra grew up in his grandfather Uddalaka's hermitage, believing the old sage to be his own father, for so he had always been treated. He had a young uncle, Shvetaketu, Uddalaka's true son, who was nearly his own age, and the two were raised as brothers. Despite his twisted body, Ashtavakra's mind was a marvel; he drank in the scriptures as the earth drinks rain, and by the age of twelve he was already a master of sacred learning.

Then one day, when Ashtavakra in his innocent affection climbed into Uddalaka's lap and called him father, his uncle Shvetaketu, stung by some childish jealousy, pushed him off and said sharply, "That is my father's lap, not yours. You have no father of your own to climb upon."

The words struck deep. Ashtavakra went to his mother Sujata and demanded the truth, and at last, weeping, she told him everything - how his true father Kahoda had gone to King Janaka's court, how he had been defeated in debate by Bandin, and how he had been drowned in the river by that scholar's cruel rule, and never returned.

When Ashtavakra had heard it all, the crooked boy grew very still. Then he went to Shvetaketu and said, "Come. You and I will go to the great sacrifice of King Janaka. There I will challenge this Bandin who killed my father, and I will defeat him, and I will free my father if he can be freed." And though he was only a boy, and bent in eight places, there was that in his voice which made his uncle follow.

The two boys came to Mithila and to the gate of King Janaka's sacrificial hall, where the great rite was in progress and learned men were gathered in their splendor. But the gatekeeper barred the crooked child's way. "This is an assembly of grey-haired scholars and aged sages," he said. "What business has a child here? Go back."

Ashtavakra answered him, and the words were the first sign of the mind within the twisted body. "Doorkeeper, gray hair does not make a man old, nor does youth make him a child. The wise have said: he is old who knows the scriptures, though he be young in years; and he is a child who has not learned them, though his head be white. Do not measure me by my size or my age. Test me by my wisdom, and then decide whether to let me pass."

The gatekeeper, startled, carried these words to the king, and Janaka, intrigued, ordered the boy admitted. But the king himself, when Ashtavakra was brought before him, decided to test the child first with a string of hard riddling questions before allowing him near the famous Bandin.

Ashtavakra answered all of King Janaka's riddles swiftly and perfectly, his replies so deep and so apt that the king marveled and granted him leave to enter the assembly and face Bandin. So the crooked boy walked into the great hall, among the proudest scholars of the age, in their fine robes and grey beards, seated in their rows of honor.

And when they saw him - this small figure bent in eight places, his arms and legs and neck and spine all twisted, lurching as he walked - the learned assembly burst into laughter. The dignified scholars of the land pointed and jeered at the deformed child who dared to enter their company.

Then Ashtavakra threw back his crooked head and laughed louder than all of them, a great ringing laugh that silenced the hall. The king asked him why he laughed, and the boy answered without anger: "I laugh, O King, to find that in the court of the wise Janaka, there is so little wisdom. I came expecting an assembly of seers, and I find instead a crowd of leather-workers - for only a worker in hides judges a thing by its skin. These men see that my body is bent and think therefore that my soul is bent. They look at the crooked vessel and cannot see the straight and shining water it holds. The sky is not made small by the smallness of a well that reflects it, nor is the spirit within me crooked because my limbs are. He is no scholar who mistakes the body for the man."

The laughter died in the hall, and the scholars fell silent, ashamed, for the child had shamed them all with a single truth.

Then Ashtavakra turned to Bandin, the scholar who had drowned his father, and demanded the contest. "You have defeated many and sent them to their deaths beneath the water," he said. "Now stand against me. We will speak in turn, building upon numbers, and the one who falters or falls silent has lost."

So began one of the great verbal duels of the old world - a contest of riddling verses, each speaker capping the other, weaving the sacred numbers and the secrets of the cosmos into their lines. Bandin began: "One fire blazes in many forms; one sun illumines all this world..." and so up through the count he went, two, three, and onward, naming for each number a truth of the gods, the rites, the seasons, the parts of the world.

Ashtavakra answered him at every step, matching and surpassing, his crooked little body trembling with the force of his speaking, his mind perfectly straight and swift. Number by number they climbed, the whole assembly holding its breath, until they reached twelve, and Bandin completed his half of the verse for the number thirteen - and there, for the first time in his life, the son of Varuna stopped. He could not complete it. His learning had reached its end.

And Ashtavakra, without a pause, took up the unfinished verse and finished it whole. The hall erupted. The undefeated Bandin had at last been defeated, and by a crooked child.

"Now," said Ashtavakra, his voice fierce, "by your own cruel law, this man Bandin who has drowned so many should himself be cast into the river. Seize him and drown him as he drowned my father and all the rest."

But now Bandin, defeated at last, revealed the secret he had kept. "Hear me, O King, before you condemn me. I am indeed the son of Varuna, the lord of the waters. My father the god was holding a great twelve-year sacrifice in his realm beneath the waters, and he had need of the most learned brahmins on earth to conduct it. So I came up into the world and set my contest, and those whom I defeated I did not kill - I sent them down into the waters to my father, to serve at his sacrifice in honor and safety. They are not dead. They have been living all this while in Varuna's realm below."

And now, he said, the great sacrifice beneath the waters was complete. "The time has come for them to return." At his word, the waters gave back what they had taken. Up out of the river came all the brahmins who had been thought drowned over the long years, alive and well and richer for their stay - and among them, restored to the daylight, came Kahoda, the father Ashtavakra had never seen.

Kahoda looked upon the crooked boy who had won him back from the deep and learned that this was his own son, born after he had gone, bent by the curse he himself had laid in anger before the child was even born. His heart was full, and he embraced Ashtavakra with pride and sorrow mingled, grieving the curse and marveling at the son who had undone its worst effect.

King Janaka honored them both with great gifts and sent them home rejoicing. And as father and son journeyed back, Kahoda told Ashtavakra, "Go, my son, and bathe in the holy waters of the river Samanga, and your body will be made whole." Ashtavakra went down into that sacred stream and bathed - and as he rose from the water, the eight bends straightened one by one, and the crooked boy came up out of the river with a body as straight and beautiful as his mind had always been.

So the curse was lifted at last, in the very waters that had once swallowed his father. And the river Samanga was held sacred ever after, for it had given a deformed sage his true form.

Lomasha finished the tale and gestured to the gentle waters of the Samanga running past their feet. "This is that river, son of Pandu, and these are the waters that made the crooked sage straight. That is why it is held holy."

Yudhishthira sat thoughtful by the bank. He had seen, in the story, more than a marvel. He had seen a boy mocked by the great and wise for the shape of his body, who answered scorn not with rage but with a truth that turned the scorn back upon the scornful: that the spirit is not crooked because the limbs are, and that the smallest and least-favored vessel may hold the deepest water. He had seen the danger of a hasty curse spoken in anger, and the patience by which its harm was at last undone. And he had seen that true greatness is measured by the straightness of the mind and not the straightness of the body, nor by grey hair, nor by the pride of the assembly.

The brothers bathed in the holy river, and went on along the road of their pilgrimage, carrying the story of the crooked sage with them.