The Song of Bodhya

'Grandfather,' Yudhishthira said, 'I have known men who owned everything I own and never slept a full night, and I have seen men on the road with a bowl and one cloth who sleep the moment they lie down. Where is that learned? Under what teacher does a man study it, and how long does the study take?'

'You have asked the question a king once asked in almost your words,' Bhishma said, 'and the answer he got was not the one he had come for. Men still repeat it as the song of Bodhya.'

Bodhya kept no fixed house. He was seen in the country around Naimisharanya, walking in and out of the great forest as the road took him, sleeping where the dark found him, eating what was put into his hand and never asking a second time. He owned a cloth. Men who had watched him for years disagreed about whether he owned a bowl.

Nahusha, who was a great king and had heard every kind of counsel that a great king's court attracts, came upon him at the edge of the forest and put the question to him with a king's directness.

'They tell me you are at peace,' Nahusha said, 'and I can see for myself that you are. So give me the name of your preceptor, and his lineage, and the school he taught in, and I will send for a man of that same line and seat him in my house.'

Bodhya laughed, though not unkindly. 'You have come for a lineage,' he said. 'I will give you a list instead. I have had six teachers, and not one of the six ever knew that he was teaching me. Pingala. The osprey. The serpent. The bee. The arrow-smith. The maiden. There is no seventh, there is no school, and there is nobody in the world you can send for.'

'Those are not men,' Nahusha said. 'One of them is a bird. One is an insect.'

'Instruction is not fussy about the shape it arrives in,' Bodhya said. 'Sit down. I will give you all six, and afterward you may decide whether they were beneath a king's attention.'

'The first is Pingala,' Bodhya said, 'a courtesan whose long night of waiting is told wherever such things are told, and I will not tell it again. Take from it only what I took. She had swept her house and lit it and dressed for a man who did not come, and she stood at the door through the whole of the night while hope held her upright. When hope finally broke, some time before dawn, she lay down and slept as she had not slept in years.

'That is the first lesson and it is the least popular. Hope is the thinnest chain and the longest. A man is not made restless by what he lacks; he is made restless by what he still expects. Cut the expectation and the same night that was unbearable becomes a night, and he sleeps in it.'

Nahusha, who ran a kingdom on expectations, said nothing.

'The second is the osprey,' Bodhya said. 'I watched one come in over the trees with a strip of meat in its claws, and every bird in that country came after it. They struck at its wings and tore at its back and would not be driven off, and the osprey turned and climbed and dived and could not shake a single one of them loose. Then it opened its claws, because it was exhausted or because it was wise, and the meat fell.

'The whole flock went down after the meat, and the osprey sat on a branch, unhurt from that moment on, and nobody troubled it again for the rest of the day. Do you see the arithmetic of it, king? Not one of those birds had ever wanted the osprey. They wanted what it was carrying. And for as long as it carried the thing, it could not tell the difference between being hunted and being hated.'

'The third is the serpent,' Bodhya said. 'It lives in a hole it did not dig. Some other creature spent its labor on that hole and moved on or died, and the serpent came and lay in it and was warm, and when the hole floods it leaves without a backward look and finds another. It builds nothing, repairs nothing, and mourns nothing.

'So I sleep where a house already stands, and I ask nobody to raise one for me. What is built has to be guarded, and the guarding of a house is a second house, put up inside the mind, heavier than the first and never finished.'

'A king cannot live in another man's hole,' Nahusha said.

'A king can hold a kingdom the way the serpent holds the hole,' Bodhya said. 'Live in it. Do not become it. It was there before you and it will shelter someone else after you, and the difference between a ruler and a possessor is exactly the difference between lying in the hole and having dug it.

'The fourth is the bee. Watch one work a field. It takes from many flowers and very little from any one of them, and it leaves each flower standing, unbroken, still able to make fruit. Nothing it visits is ruined by the visit. Compare that with the man who strips a whole tree because he is standing under it, and comes back the following season to find nothing there and calls the season bad.

'That lesson has a plain use for you, since you are a king and will not be a wanderer. The bee is the whole science of a treasury, if you want it in one sentence. Take from many, take lightly, leave the source able to grow again, and nothing you take from will come to hate you. A tax gathered like a bee is paid; a tax gathered like a bear is survived.'

'The fifth is the arrow-smith,' Bodhya said. 'I passed his door on a day when a king went by in procession. There were drums and criers and elephants in trappings, and the noise filled the street from wall to wall and took a long time to pass. The smith sat at his bench with one eye shut, straightening a shaft against the light, and did not lift his head once.

'Afterward a man asked him whether he had seen the king go past. He said, what king. He asked when this had happened. He was not deaf and he was not being insolent. He was inside his work, entirely, with nothing of himself left standing outside it to be interrupted.

'That is absorption, and it is worth more than any vow. A mind wholly given to one thing is not available to be disturbed by another. Half a mind on the shaft and half on the drums, and he would have ruined the arrow and missed the procession both.

'The sixth is the maiden, and she is my best teacher. Guests arrived at a house without warning and there was nobody there but a girl, so she had to husk the rice herself. Her wrists were stacked with shell bangles and they clashed at every stroke of the pestle, and the noise carried, and she did not want the guests in the next room to hear what she was doing or how thin the household had become.

'So she broke one off, and the noise was less. She broke another, and it was less again. She went on breaking them one at a time until a single bangle was left on each wrist, and then the pestle rose and fell in silence and no one heard anything at all.

'She said it herself when I asked her, and she said it better than any teacher of mine has ever said anything. Where many are gathered there is quarreling. Where two are, there is conversation. I go alone, like the last bangle, and I make no sound.'

'Six,' Bodhya said. 'A woman who slept when hope died. A bird that was left alone the moment it let go. A serpent in a borrowed hole. A bee that ruins nothing. A man who did not hear a king pass. A girl with one bangle. Now put your question to me again and see whether it still has a shape.'

Nahusha did not put it again. He had come looking for a preceptor with a lineage behind him, an authority he could summon, seat, feed and consult, and he had been handed a list of six creatures who had taught without intending to and could not be sent for.

'It is three things, not six,' Bodhya said, seeing him work at it. 'Hold nothing so tightly that another has to tear it out of your hands, and then most of what you call your enemies will discover they were never interested in you. Give your whole mind to the work that is actually in front of you, because a divided mind spoils the work and enjoys nothing. And want less company than you have been taught to want. The last bangle makes no noise because there is nothing left for it to strike against.'

The king offered him something, as kings do, and Bodhya took nothing and walked back into the forest, because a man who has learned from an osprey does not accept a gift that other birds will follow him for.

'You are going to be a king, Yudhishthira,' Bhishma said, 'and you cannot break your bangles and walk into Naimisharanya tomorrow, whatever you may want at this moment. But you can hold Hastinapura the way the serpent holds the hole. You can gather from your people like the bee. You can give a judgment the way the smith straightened his shaft, with nothing of yourself left over to be flattered or provoked while you give it.

'And on the day you find that a thing you own has set the whole flock on you, remember that the osprey was not clever. It was only tired enough to open its claws.'