Badari, Hermitage of the Twin Sages

Higher than the forests of Gandhamadana, where the mountain's flank turns to bare rock and the pines give out altogether, there is a shelf of level ground beside a river. The Ganga is young there, and loud, and so cold that a hand put into it comes straight back out. Little grows at that height. What does grow is the badari, the jujube, a small stubborn tree with a small sweet fruit, and it grows on that shelf in such numbers that the place took its name from them. Badarikashrama, the hermitage of the jujube trees.

There is nothing else there. No hall, no gate, no wealth, nothing that a king would recognize as a possession. It is a place a person walks to after deciding that almost nothing is needed, and the tradition holds that the two who came there first needed nothing whatever.

Pilgrims reached it rarely and never easily. The road went up through Kubera's country, past waterfalls that fell so far they arrived as mist, and the last stretch had to be walked because nothing with wheels could follow. Those who arrived described the same things afterward: the thinness of the air, the sound of the river, the smell of the mountain, and a silence underneath all of it that did not feel like emptiness but like attention.

Sages said the ashrama had no founding date because it had no founding. It had simply always been in use. Whatever age the world happened to be passing through, whatever kings rose in the plains below and whatever they did to one another, at Badari two figures sat under the jujube trees, indistinguishable from each other, doing the one thing they had always done. The mountain kept them, and they kept the mountain, and the river went past both without comment.

Their names were Nara and Narayana, Man and the Refuge of Man, sons of Dharma, and they were born together and were never once seen apart. What they did at Badari was tapas, austerity, the deliberate turning of the whole of oneself toward one point until the self stops arguing. They stood on one foot with their arms raised for years measured in the counting of gods. They ate air, then the fruit of the badari trees, then nothing. Ages passed in the world below and neither of them looked down at it.

In heaven, Indra grew afraid. He had good reason to be nervous about austerity, having seen what men could win by it, and he assumed, as kings assume, that so much accumulated power must be aimed at something, and that the only thing worth aiming it at was his own seat. So he sent what he always sent. Spring came to that frozen shelf out of season. Kama came with his flower arrows. And the apsaras came, the dancers of heaven, singing, in numbers that had emptied the celestial court.

Nara and Narayana opened their eyes and were courteous. That was all. There was no anger in them and, more disturbingly for the visitors, no interest.

Then Narayana, to end the matter gently rather than with a curse, struck his own thigh with the flat of his hand, and out of the thigh stepped a woman. She was more beautiful than every dancer standing on that rock, and her beauty had cost the sage nothing at all, no austerity spent, no power drawn down. Because she came from the thigh, uru, they called her Urvashi.

"Take her back with you," Narayana said, "as our gift to your king."

The apsaras went home ashamed, and Indra understood at last that the austerity at Badari had never been aimed at his throne, or at anything.

The epic does not leave that hermitage in the distant past. It says plainly, and repeatedly, and in the mouths of the people best placed to know, that Nara and Narayana are born into the world together whenever dharma needs them, and that in this age they were born as Arjuna and Krishna.

Vyasa says it. Bhishma says it, lying on his bed of arrows. Sages say it to Yudhishthira in the forest as a matter of settled fact, the way one states a family connection. Krishna is Narayana. Arjuna is Nara. The friendship between them that everyone in Hastinapura took for a fortunate political marriage of cousins was older than Hastinapura, older than the Kuru line, older than the gods' present arrangement of the sky.

Only one of the two remembered it. That is the difference the whole epic turns on. Arjuna went through his life as a man goes through his life, brilliant and uncertain and needing to be told things twice. Krishna remembered everything and said so, once, in the middle of a battlefield: many births of yours have passed, and of mine also, and I know them all while you do not.

So when the chariot rolled out into the space between the two armies at Kurukshetra and one of the two men in it put down his bow and could not go on, what happened next was not a new teaching. It was Badari, in motion, at speed, under a war's noise. The austerity practiced on that cold shelf for ages, wanting nothing, fearing nothing, refusing to be moved by pleasure or by grief, was finally spoken aloud to the one person who had practiced it beside Narayana and then forgotten. The hermitage had been preparing that conversation for a very long time.

In the high years of the exile, when the pilgrimage of the tirthas had carried them past the last road that men use, the Pandavas came to Badari themselves and lived there.

They were four brothers and a wife by then, because Arjuna had gone on ahead and further up, north out of the world entirely, to Indra's heaven, to learn the weapons the thirteenth year would demand. Nobody at Badari knew how long that would take. Nobody could send word after him. So the others did what people do when the only available action is waiting: they made a life out of it, on a shelf of rock beside a river too cold to touch.

Yudhishthira sat with the sages who came and went, and asked his endless questions about dharma, and got answers he then turned over for days. Draupadi kept the fire and the discipline of the camp, and did not speak often of Hastinapura, though the queen who had been dragged by the hair into a hall of kings was still perfectly present in her. The jujube fruit was small and sweet and there was enough of it. Snow came down and shut the passes and lifted again.

It was here, on this ground, that the pair from the older age had once sat, and the household of exiles kept their fire in that same air without particularly dwelling on it. Sages reminded them. Yudhishthira listened.

They were living, without any of them putting it that way, in the place where the argument that would save Arjuna on the field had first been worked out, waiting for Arjuna to come back down from the sky. When he finally did, the chariot of Indra set him on the summit above them, and Badari's long patience with the family was rewarded in one afternoon.

There is one more thing the mountain is said to hold, and it is the strangest of them, because it is the reason any of the rest can be told at all.

Tradition places a cave near Badari, above the river, and in that cave it places Vyasa. He was the great-grandfather of both sets of cousins and had watched the whole thing from inside it, arriving in doorways at the worst moments, giving counsel that was taken too late or not at all. When it was finished, when the kings were ashes and the widows had walked out to the field to look for their husbands among the dead, he withdrew to the mountain and set about doing the only thing left to do with such a story, which was to compose it whole.

The story says he asked for a scribe who could keep pace with him, and that Ganesha agreed on the condition that the dictation never pause; and Vyasa agreed on the condition that nothing be written down until it was understood; and so, whenever he needed a moment to think, he tied a knot of verse so dense that even that scribe had to stop and unpick it. In this way the epic came into being, one difficult line at a time, high above the young Ganga among the jujube trees.

So Badari is not only where two sages practice forever, and not only where the teaching given at Kurukshetra was first learned. It is also where the account of it was made. The hermitage of people who wanted nothing produced, in the end, the longest thing ever said, and then sent it down the mountain with the river to the plains where kings live, so that the argument could go on being had by everyone who came after.