The King Who Lost His Son

The sages told the Pandavas of King Chitraketu, who lost the one son he had longed for, and was led through his grief to the knowledge of the soul - a tale of bereavement, of the deathless self beyond all births, and of the hard road by which a grieving heart is brought to wisdom.

Chitraketu was a great and prosperous king, the lord of a vast realm, with many wives and every blessing of fortune; yet in all his happiness one sorrow gnawed at him, for he had no son to continue his line, and his longing for an heir grew into an aching grief that all his wealth and power could not ease. He felt his life empty for want of a child, and his heart was set upon a son above every other thing. So when a great sage came to his court, the king implored him to grant by his power the son for whom he so longed.

The sage, moved by the king's longing, performed a rite and granted that one of the king's queens should bear him a son; and in time that queen, the king's favorite, gave birth to a boy. The king's joy was boundless: the son he had longed for all his life was born at last, and he doted upon the child with all the pent-up love of his heart, and favored above all the queen who had borne him.

But the king's overflowing love for this one son and his mother bred sorrow in the palace. The king's other queens, who had borne him no children, were consumed with jealousy of the favored queen and her precious son, on whom all the king's love was lavished while they were neglected and forgotten. Their envy festered and darkened, until it grew into a terrible resolve; for jealousy, unchecked, can drive even highborn women to dreadful deeds. And so the very son whose birth had brought the king such joy became, through the jealousy he stirred, the cause of a great grief about to fall.

The jealous queens, unable to bear the favor shown to the one son and his mother, gave the child poison in secret; and the boy, the king's only son and heir, sickened and died. The palace that had rejoiced at his birth was plunged into mourning, and the king's joy was turned in a moment to the deepest grief that a father can know.

King Chitraketu was utterly broken by the death of his longed-for son. He had set his whole heart upon the boy, and now the boy was gone; and the king fell into a grief so wild and so consuming that he could not be comforted at all. He clung to the dead body of his child, weeping without ceasing, refusing to let it be taken for the funeral rites, lost in a bottomless sorrow, his reason almost overthrown by the loss of the one thing he had loved above all. All his wealth and power and kingship were as nothing to him now; he wished only for his son, and his son was dead.

Into the king's bottomless grief came the great sage Narada, together with another holy sage, drawn by compassion to the broken king, to lift him out of his sorrow not with empty comfort but with the truth. They found him clinging to the body of his dead son, weeping inconsolably; and they spoke to him of the deeper truth that his grief had blinded him to.

'O King,' said Narada, 'for whom do you grieve so? This body that lies here, and your own body, and the bodies of all your kin - what are they? The soul that dwelt in this child is not born and does not die; it has passed through countless bodies before this one, and will pass through countless more. The relationships of this life - this is my son, this my father - are fleeting things, true only for a moment in the soul's long journey, like travelers who meet at an inn for a night and part in the morning. You weep as though you had truly lost something that was truly and forever yours; but the soul was never yours to keep, and it is not lost, for it cannot die.' And to show the king the truth of his words, the sage by his power summoned back, for a moment, the very soul of the dead child, that it might speak.

By the sage's power, the soul that had dwelt in the dead child was called back for a moment and made to speak; and it spoke not as a grieving son, but as the deathless soul that it was, which had worn many bodies and known many parents in its long passage through the worlds. 'Who is my father, and who my mother?' the soul asked. 'In life after life I have had countless fathers and mothers, countless sons and kinsmen, in body after body; which of all these shall I call truly mine? This king grieves for me as his son; but I have been the son of many, and the father of many, and the friend and foe of many, through all my births. The bond between this body and that king was the bond of a single life only, now ended; it was never the eternal truth of what I am.'

The soul declared that it was eternal and unborn, belonging to no one and bound to no one, passing on from body to body untouched by birth or death; and that the king's grief, though natural, rested upon an illusion - the illusion that a passing relationship of one short life was a possession that could be held and lost. Then the soul departed again, leaving the king to weigh what it had said. And King Chitraketu, hearing the very soul of his son disown the bond he had wept over, and declare itself deathless and free, felt the ground of his grief give way beneath him, and the beginning of a great understanding dawn.

The king's grief was lifted, and in its place came wisdom. He understood now that the soul does not die, that the bonds of kinship are fleeting and not the eternal truth of the self, and that to grieve as though one had lost a possession forever was to be deceived by illusion. His wild sorrow was healed, not by forgetting his son, but by understanding the truth that placed the loss in its true and larger light. He performed the funeral rites for the child with a calmed heart, his mourning transformed into knowledge.

Freed from the bondage of his grief, the king turned his heart toward the truth the sages had shown him. He took up the spiritual teaching they gave him, learned the sacred knowledge and the worship of the Lord, and devoted himself to it; and by his sincere devotion he was purified and uplifted, attaining great spiritual power and a high celestial station, becoming a lord among the heavenly beings. The grief that had nearly broken him had become, by the grace of the sages and the truth they taught, the very door through which he passed to wisdom and to a higher life. His bereavement had been turned into his liberation.

Yet the tale, the sages said, did not end with the king's uplifting, but went on to show how long and winding is the road of the soul, even for the wise. For Chitraketu, raised now to a high celestial station and great in spiritual attainment, later spoke once, lightly and without ill intent, words that seemed to make light of the great Lord Shiva in the presence of his consort; and the goddess, displeased, laid a curse upon him. And Chitraketu, who had risen so high, accepted the curse with perfect calm and equanimity - neither angered nor cast down, but serene, for he knew that all such things, fortune and misfortune, blessing and curse, are but passing waves upon the deathless soul, which they cannot truly touch.

By the curse he was to be born again into a lower estate; and in time, the tale tells, that very soul was born as the mighty Vritra, the foe of Indra - and even in that fearsome form retained, beneath it, the wisdom and devotion he had won, a great soul wearing a demon's shape. So the tale showed that the journey of the soul is long, winding through height and depth, through blessing and curse and many births; and that the truly wise meet every turn of it, even a curse, with the same calm, knowing that none of it touches the deathless self within.

The sages drew the lessons of the tale for the Pandavas.

'See, first, the truth that heals grief: that the soul does not die. King Chitraketu was broken by the death of his longed-for son, until the sages showed him that the soul is deathless and unborn, that it has worn countless bodies and known countless kin, and that the bonds of a single life, dear as they are, are fleeting and not the eternal truth of the self. His wild grief was healed not by forgetting but by understanding; and his bereavement became the door to wisdom. Grieve, then, when you must, as is human; but know that the soul of the one you mourn is not lost, for it cannot die, and let that truth lift your sorrow into peace.

'And see the equanimity of the wise, who meet every turn of fortune with the same calm. Chitraketu, raised high and then cursed low, accepted the curse without anger or despair, knowing that fortune and misfortune are but passing waves upon the deathless soul, which they cannot touch; and even born at last into a fearsome form, he kept the wisdom he had won. The tale teaches that the journey of the soul is long, through height and depth and many births, and that the truly wise pass through it all unshaken, attached to nothing, serene in the knowledge of the deathless self within. Hold fast, then, to that self that does not die; and let neither grief nor blessing nor curse disturb your peace.'

And the Pandavas, who had known much loss and would know much more, took deeply to heart the tale of the grieving king brought to the knowledge of the deathless soul.