The Rules of an Ordinary Day

Bhrigu had finished with Bharadwaja by then, and the origin of the universe had been narrated in detail, and the old man on the arrows had asked the king whether there was anything further he wished to hear.

There was.

"I think, O grandsire, that thou art acquainted with everything, O thou that art conversant with duties," Yudhishthira said. "I desire to hear thee discourse to me, O sinless one, of the ordinances about conduct."

It is a small question to ask after a large one. The making and unmaking of the world had just been set out in front of him, the five great elements, the northern country beyond Himavat where death comes at the proper season, the regions won by penance. And what the king wanted next was the rules for getting through an ordinary day.

Bhishma took the question exactly as it was asked. What follows in the text is a single long answer with no story inside it and almost no argument, a list of practices running from where a man may relieve himself in the morning to how he should address his elders at night, and it does not rise once into anything abstract until the last few lines. It is the plainest thing the grandsire says in the whole of his instruction.

He began with the definition, because the words good and wicked were about to be used a great many times.

"They that are of bad conduct, of bad acts, of wicked understanding, and excessive rashness, are called evil or wicked men."

Four things, and it is worth noticing what is not among them. Nothing about a man's birth. Nothing about what he believes or which gods he prefers. Conduct, acts, understanding, and haste. The last is the odd one and the sharpest: a man can be reckoned wicked in this reckoning simply by moving too fast.

"They, however, that are called good are distinguished by purity of conduct and practices."

Purity of conduct and practices. Sadachara. Everything the old man said after that sentence was an itemising of it.

He started at the bottom, with the body and its waste, which is where a discourse on purity has to start if it is going to be honest.

"They are good men who never answer calls of nature on the high roads, in cow-pens, or in fields overgrown with paddy."

Three places, and each of them is somebody else's. The high road belongs to everyone who will walk down it after you. The cow-pen belongs to the animals that have to lie in it. The field thick with standing paddy belongs to the man who ploughed it and to everyone who will eat out of it. The rule is not about disgust. It is about the plain fact that a man is never alone in a settled country, and that the first mark of good conduct is remembering it in the one moment when he feels most private.

"Having finished the necessary acts one should perform his ablutions in river-water and gratify the deities with oblations of water. This is said to be the duty of all men."

That last clause is doing real work. The duty of all men. Not of Brahmanas, not of the twice-born, not of those under vows. The river washes everybody who steps into it, and the handful of water lifted and let fall for the gods costs nothing and is available to a man who owns nothing else.

The rest of that cluster is put down without ceremony and without euphemism. One should not pass urine with the face turned toward the sun. One should not look at one's own excreta.

A modern reader tends to file such lines under superstition and move on. But set them beside the sentence about the high road and a single principle is visible under all of them. What leaves the body is to be put away from the road, away from the cattle, away from the food, away from the sun, and away from the eye. The householder is being taught to keep his own filth out of the shared world without making a performance of it.

Then the old man raised his eyes from the ground and put the sun in the sky.

"Surya should be always worshipped. One should not sleep after sunrise."

Two sentences, and the second is the one with teeth in it. A man may say he worships the sun and go on sleeping through the hour when it comes up, and the rule closes that door before he can walk through it. The worship and the waking are one practice.

"Morning and evening the prayers ordained in the scriptures should be said, sitting with face turned towards the east and towards the west respectively."

The body is turned to follow the light. At dawn a man faces where it is coming from and at dusk he faces where it is going, so that twice a day he is physically pointed at the thing he is praying about, and the day is bracketed at both ends by the same act performed in opposite directions.

And then, immediately, a prohibition that seems to contradict all of it.

"One should never behold the Sun at the moment of rising."

Worship Surya always, and do not stare at him as he comes over the edge. There is no contradiction in it once you take it as written. Reverence and gazing are not the same operation. The god may be adored at every hour and still not be looked in the face at the one moment when looking would be an intrusion, or would simply hurt.

"At the hours ordained for Homa one should pour libations on the sacred fire."

The fire, like the sun, keeps hours, and the man keeps them with it.

Then a rule of movement rather than of time. One should every day circumambulate a sacred spot, a bull, a sacred image, a cow-pen, a place where four roads meet, a pious Brahmana, and a sacred tree.

Read that list slowly, because it is an unexpected one. A shrine and an image belong on it without surprise. But so does a bull. So does a cattle enclosure. So does a crossroads, which is nobody's property and has no priest. So does a tree, and so does a particular living man who happens to be good. The circuit a person walks in the course of an ordinary day, going about ordinary business, is being quietly turned into a round of worship without a single additional errand being added to it.

The eating rules are the closest thing in the section to a portrait, and they can be assembled into a single picture of a man at his meal.

He has washed the five limbs, which is to say the two hands, the two feet and the face, so that nothing of the road is brought to the dish. He sits facing east. He does not talk. He does not say a word against the food that has been put in front of him, whatever it is and whoever cooked it. He eats what is good to the taste. When he has finished he washes his hands and then he rises, in that order, and not the other way about. And at night he does not go to sleep with wet feet.

That last one sits oddly among the rest, a piece of household caution among ordinances, and the text seems to know it, because it is here and only here that the old man stops to say where the whole list came from.

"The celestial Rishi Narada said that these are indications of good conduct."

Narada, who goes everywhere and sees every house in the three worlds and carries what he sees from one to the next, is the authority cited for the smallest domestic details in the catalogue. It is the right attribution. Nobody has watched more people eat.

Then the ordinance about frequency, which is put as arithmetic.

"Eating twice a day in the morning and evening is an ordinance of the gods. It is not laid down that one should eat once more at any intermediate period. He who eats according to this rule acquires the merit of a fast."

That is a remarkable piece of accounting and it is meant to be taken seriously. A man who simply does not pick at food between his two meals is credited, day after day, with the merit of an austerity he never undertook. The fast is not something added to an ordinary life. It is what an ordinary life already amounts to if nothing greedy is added to it.

And then the rule that governs who eats what, which is put in one line and is the hardest line in the section to keep.

"One should not make distinctions between one's guests and attendants and kinsmen in matters of food. Equality in this respect with servants is applauded."

From food the discourse goes to the two things that make food difficult: what may be eaten, and what is left over.

The leavings first, and the language is startling.

"The remnants of a Brahmana's dish are like ambrosia. They are like the lacteal sustenance that is yielded by the mother's breast. People highly prize those remnants. The good, by eating them, attain to Brahma."

What is on the plate when a holy man has finished is set beside two things only: the drink of the gods, and milk from the breast. Both are images of something given downward from a source that is not diminished by giving. This is the opposite of the instinct that treats another man's leavings as beneath one, and it is placed here deliberately, a few lines after the rule that a household must not grade its food by the rank of the eater.

Then a warning that qualifies the whole of it.

He who pounds turf into clay for altars, or who cuts the sacrificial grass, or who uses only his nails and no weapon for eating sanctified meat, or who always subsists on the remnants of Brahmanas' dishes, or who acts induced by desire for reward, has not to live long in the world.

The last item in that list is the key to the other four. Every one of the practices named is pious, and one of them is the very practice that was just compared to ambrosia. What is being condemned is not the act but the man who has made a technique of it, who performs the humble thing because he has been told what it pays. A rule that has been turned into a method of purchase stops working, and the text says so by putting the reward-seeker in the same sentence as the professionals of humility.

On meat the ordinances are three and they are narrow.

One who has abstained from meat under any vow should not take meat even if it be sanctified with mantras from the Yajurveda. The vow outranks the consecration. One should avoid the flesh about the vertebral column of any animal. And one should avoid the flesh of animals not slain in sacrifices, which is the whole of the permission in a single negative: what was killed at the altar, and nothing that was killed for the pot.

"Whether at one's own place or in a strange land, one should never cause one's guest to fast."

At one's own place or in a strange land. The obligation does not weaken when a man is himself a visitor, badly housed and short of everything. Wherever he is, if somebody arrives, that person eats.

What follows is the finest passage in the section, and it survives translation into any household in any century, because it consists of three questions to be asked aloud at a meal.

When giving eatables to another who is seated at his dish, one should say: "Is it sufficient?"

When presenting drink, one should ask: "Will it gratify?"

And when giving sweetened milk and rice, or sugared gruel of barley, or milk with sesame or pease, one should ask: "Has it fallen?"

The first two are courtesy. The third is attention of a rarer kind. Those dishes are the thin ones, the gruels and the milk preparations that are poured rather than laid down, and the question is whether the pouring has actually landed, whether the guest has in fact got what the host believes he has given him. A man may serve generously and serve badly. The ordinance requires him to check.

The rest of the hospitality cluster is about seniors, and it is physical.

Having obtained alms or any other fruit of an optional act, one should offer them to one's seniors first. One should offer them seats. One should salute them with respect. By worshipping one's seniors, a man obtains long life, fame, and prosperity.

Every time one meets with another, one should make polite enquiries. The saluting of Brahmanas every morning and evening is ordained, and the worship of Brahmanas at those hours according to due rites produces great merit, and the merit is described in terms nobody would call spiritual: in consequence of such worship, the stock-in-trade of the merchant becomes abundant and the produce of the agriculturist increases, the yield of all kinds of corn is great, and the supply of everything the senses enjoy becomes copious.

After shaving, after spitting, after bathing, and after eating, people should worship Brahmanas with reverence. Such worship, the text says, is sure to bestow longevity on sickly men.

In temples, amid cows, in the rites laid down for Brahmanas, in reading the Vedas, and in eating, the right hand should be raised.

The rules about husbands and wives are put down among the rest without any change of tone, which is itself the point.

"Without seeking the companionship of other people's wives, the man of wisdom who seeks his own wife in her season acquires the merit of Brahmacharyya."

Brahmacharyya is the celibate's discipline, and it is being handed here to a married man who is not celibate at all. The merit of the ascetic goes to the householder who keeps within his own house and within the season. Nothing has to be renounced for it. The continence being asked for is a continence of direction, not of appetite.

And the negative side of the same rule.

"One should never turn one's gaze towards a naked woman that is another man's spouse."

"Congress with one's wife in her season is not sinful, but it is an act that should always be done in privacy."

The first half of that sentence is stated as flatly as the second. There is no sin in it. There is a place for it, and the place is out of sight. What is permitted is not thereby made public.

One should not lie on the same bed with a woman, nor eat with her.

Then the ordinance about speech, which is about elders and about the two words that go wrong with them.

"In addressing seniors one should never apply the pronoun you to them or take their names."

A senior is not to be thou-ed and is not to be called by the name his mother gave him. Both are ways of setting a man level with yourself, and both are forbidden upward and permitted sideways and downward, since thouing and the taking of names is not censurable in addressing inferiors or equals in age. The rule costs the speaker nothing except the small daily labour of finding another form of words, which is exactly the labour it is asking for.

And around those specifics, two lines of a different order, dropped in without warning and worth more than most of the catalogue.

The heart of all sacred spots and shrines is the Preceptor. The heart of all pure and cleansing things is Fire.

All acts done by a good and pious person are good and laudable, including even the touching of the hair of a cow's tail.

At the end of the list the old man stopped describing practices and said what the practices were for, and the section changes register in a single sentence.

"The hearts of sinful men betray the sins committed by them."

Everything that had gone before was visible conduct, the sort of thing a neighbour can observe and a servant can report. Now the discourse goes inside, and it goes there through the subject of concealment.

Those sinful men who conceal their conscious sins from good men meet with destruction. Only ignorant fools seek to hide what they have knowingly done. It is true that human beings do not see those sins, and the text concedes the point rather than arguing with it. Men do not see. But the gods see them.

Then the arithmetic of hiding, which is put as a pair.

A sin concealed by another sin leads to fresh sins. An act of merit, if concealed by an act of merit, increases the merit.

The same operation, covering one thing with another of its own kind, multiplies whatever it is applied to. The man who buries a lie under a lie has made two. The man who does a good act and hides it under another good act has made more than two.

A man destitute of understanding never thinks of the sins committed by him. Those sins, however, overtake the doer who has fallen away from the scriptures. And here comes the one image in the whole section, saved for the end.

"As Rahu comes to Chandra at his proper time, those sinful acts come to the foolish man."

The eclipse is not an accident and it is not a punishment sent in anger. It is an appointment. The shadow arrives at the hour it was always going to arrive at, and the moon does nothing to summon it, and the only creature surprised is the one who was not counting.

The last lines run quickly. Objects stored up in expectation are scarcely ever enjoyed, and such storing is never applauded by the wise, for death waits for no one. The righteousness of all creatures is an attribute of the mind, and for that reason one should in one's mind do good to all. Virtue is to be practised singly. In the practice of virtue a man has no need of the help of others, for if he has the ordinances of the scriptures, what can an associate do?

"Righteousness is the origin of mankind," Bhishma said. "Righteousness is the ambrosia of the gods. After death, men enjoy, through Righteousness, eternal happiness."