The Son Who Delayed

The sages told the Pandavas the tale of Chirakari, the son who saved his mother's life and his father's soul by the simple virtue of doing things slowly - a tale that stands as the deliberate opposite of all hasty obedience.

There was a sage named Gautama who had a son so given to slowness and long deliberation that he was named for it: Chirakari, which means 'one who takes a long time to act,' the slow-doer. Whatever he undertook, Chirakari did with great care and after long thought; he never acted in haste, never did anything on impulse, but weighed and considered every deed at length before he performed it. His family and others sometimes mocked him for this slowness, thinking it a fault, a sign of a dull and dithering nature. But the day was coming when this very slowness, so often derided, would prove the saving of them all.

It happened that the sage Gautama came to believe that his wife, Chirakari's mother, had committed some grave fault against him - a suspicion that, whether justified or not, filled him with a sudden and violent anger. In the heat of that wrath, without pausing to weigh what he was doing, the sage did a terrible thing: he commanded his son Chirakari to kill his own mother, to put her to death for her supposed fault. And having flung out this dreadful order in his fury, Gautama himself strode off into the forest, leaving his son alone with the monstrous command, and went away to be by himself.

So Chirakari was left standing with the most appalling charge a son can be given: to take up a weapon and slay his own mother, at the command of his father. It was the very same kind of terrible test that, in another tale, the axe-warrior Parashurama had met with instant, unflinching obedience. But Chirakari was a very different son, and he met it in a very different way.

Chirakari did not rush to obey. It was not in his nature to do anything quickly, least of all a deed so grave and so irreversible as this. He took up the weapon, as his father had commanded - but then, true to his name, he paused, and he began to think. He would not strike until he had thought the matter through completely; and a matter of life and death, of a father's command and a mother's life, was a matter to be thought through very thoroughly indeed.

So Chirakari stood, weapon in hand, and deliberated. And his deliberation was not mere dithering; it was a deep and careful weighing of the two duties that the command had set at war with each other: the duty of a son to obey his father, and the duty of a son to honor and protect his mother. The longer he stood, the more he saw how much there was to weigh, and the slower he became - and every moment of his slowness was, though he did not yet know it, holding back a catastrophe.

Chirakari reasoned thus within himself: 'My father has commanded me to obey, and a father's word is sacred; to obey one's father is a high duty. Yet my mother's life is at stake, and the mother is not a small thing to be set aside. The scriptures and the wise have said that the mother is greater even than the father, greater than the earth itself; that she who bears us in her body, who nourishes us with her own life, who suffers for us and tends us, is the highest of all the gods set before a child. There is no refuge like a mother, no protector like a mother. How then can it be a son's duty to slay the very one whom it is most his duty to protect?

'And she is innocent, so far as I can know; my father acted in anger, and anger is a poor and blinding counselor. A deed done at the command of wrath may be a deed my father will bitterly repent when his wrath has cooled. Shall I make myself the instrument of a rage that may pass, and do a thing that can never, ever be undone? The dead cannot be brought back; if I am wrong to strike, no repentance of mine or my father's can mend it afterward. A deed this final must not be done on the strength of a moment's fury.'

Still Chirakari weighed it, turning the matter over and over. 'To obey a father is a duty - but is it a duty to obey a father even into grievous sin? Surely a command that is itself unrighteous does not bind a son to unrighteousness; surely the duty to obey has its limits, and does not reach so far as to compel matricide. And yet to disobey a father is also a fault. Here are two duties, each real, pulling against each other, and I must find which is the higher.

'When two duties conflict, the wise choose the higher and the more enduring. The protection of the innocent, the honoring of the mother, the refusal to do an irreversible evil - these weigh more, surely, than the obeying of a command flung out in anger that the giver himself will rue. If I obey and slay her, and my father repents, I have done an evil that nothing can undo, and made myself a matricide forever. If I wait, and my father repents, then by my waiting I have saved him from a lifetime of grief and saved my mother's innocent life, and lost nothing but a little time. The risk of waiting is small; the risk of haste is beyond all mending.'

And so, by this long and careful reasoning, Chirakari resolved to do what his slow nature already inclined him to do: to wait, and not to strike, until he was certain - which meant, in truth, not to strike at all in haste. He stood there, weapon lowered, and let the slow hours pass.

Meanwhile, out in the forest, the sage Gautama's wrath began to cool. As the heat of his anger drained away and his reason returned, he was overcome with horror at what he had done. He saw now, with terrible clarity, that he had flown into a rage and, on the strength of an unproven suspicion, had commanded his own son to murder his own mother - an innocent woman, very likely - and had then stormed off and left the dreadful order to be carried out.

Grief and dread seized the sage. 'What have I done?' he cried to himself. 'I have ordered the killing of my wife in a fit of anger! And my son is obedient - if he has obeyed me, then by now she is dead, slain by my command and my son's hand, and I am the murderer of my own innocent wife, and I have made my son a matricide! Oh, fool that I was, to act in anger, to give so terrible a command without weighing it!' Half-mad with remorse and fear, dreading what he would find, the sage rushed back toward his hermitage, praying with all his heart that somehow, by some mercy, the deed had not yet been done.

Gautama came rushing back to his hermitage in an agony of dread - and there he found, to his overwhelming relief and joy, that all was well. His wife was alive and unharmed. And there stood his son Chirakari, weapon in hand but unused, still standing in his long deliberation, having weighed the matter so slowly and so carefully that he had never struck the blow at all. The very slowness for which the boy had so often been mocked had held back the catastrophe; his deliberation had bought exactly the time the father's anger needed to cool, and so had saved the mother's life and the father's soul both.

Gautama embraced his son with tears of gratitude and relief, and he blessed Chirakari's slowness as the highest wisdom. 'Blessed are you, my son,' he said, 'and blessed is your deliberation, which I once thought a fault! Your slowness has saved your mother's life and saved me from a sin I could never have washed away. Praised be the one who does not act in haste, who weighs grave matters long before he acts, for he does not commit the irreparable evils into which the hasty rush. You did right to be slow; never let anyone scorn your deliberation again.'

The sages drew the lesson for the Pandavas, and they set it deliberately beside the tale of Parashurama's instant obedience, that the two might be weighed against each other.

"Here is the other answer to the terrible test, son of Pandu. Where one son obeyed a father's monstrous command at once, without a moment's hesitation, and so slew his mother (to be restored only by a boon), this son did the opposite: he would not act in haste on so grave and irreversible a matter, but weighed it long and carefully - and his very slowness saved his mother's life and his father's soul. The tale praises Chirakari's deliberation as a high virtue, and teaches that in matters that cannot be undone, slowness is wisdom and haste is folly.

"For anger is a blind and passing thing, and commands given in anger are often bitterly repented; and deeds done in haste, especially the irreversible ones - a killing, a curse, a word that cannot be recalled - can never be mended once they are done. The wise, therefore, do not rush to act on grave and final matters; they pause, and weigh, and let the heat of the moment pass, and consider whether the deed will look as right tomorrow as it seems to demand today. Better to be thought slow, and to wait, than to do in an hour an evil that a lifetime cannot undo. When the matter is grave and the deed cannot be taken back, be a Chirakari: think long, and do not strike in haste."

And the Pandavas, who would soon face grave and irreversible choices of their own, took deeply to heart the wisdom of the son who saved everyone by being slow.