The Price of a Sage

Bhishma, still speaking to Yudhishthira from his bed of arrows on the truth of giving, said that no gift could be understood until one understood what made a thing worth giving at all, and for that he told the story of the sage Chyavana and the price the fishermen paid for their catch.

Chyavana had gone down into a river to keep a vow of austerity, and there he stood without moving, without eating, without speaking a word to the sky above him, for twelve years. The current wore against him and left him where he stood. Silt gathered at his feet and did not wash away. In time the moss that clings to old stones began to grow along his arms and shoulders, and reeds took root at his sides as though he were a bank of the river and not a man standing in it. Fish came to shelter in the shadow he cast, the way they shelter under any fixed thing in moving water, and grew so used to him that they no longer startled when he stirred so much as a finger.

By the twelfth year there was nothing left above the surface to mark a man at all, only a low green mound with a face at its crown, eyes open, unmoving, and even that face had gathered enough silt and weed that a stranger passing would have called it a stone. Only Chyavana himself, somewhere beneath the growth, still kept count of the years and waited for the vow to complete itself in its own time, without hurrying and without complaint, as though twelve years standing in cold water were no more than a night's rest to a will fixed as his was.

It happened that fishermen came to that stretch of river to cast their net for the day's catch, knowing nothing of the sage grown into the riverbed, seeing only good water where fish gathered thick in the shade of what looked like a mound of stone. They drew their net wide and hauled it in heavy, heavier than any catch they could remember, and when they dragged it up onto the bank and began to sort the fish they found among the thrashing silver a man, weed-grown and silted, tangled in the same net as the rest of their catch.

The fishermen fell back in terror, certain they had committed some unspeakable wrong, and began at once to beg forgiveness and to cut him free. Chyavana would not permit it. He had been taken up with the fish, he said, in the same net, in the same haul, and he would not be treated differently from the catch around him merely because he could speak and the fish could not. If they meant to sell what the river had given them that day, he said, then he was to be sold with it, at whatever price the fish themselves would fetch, and no more.

The fishermen protested that this made no sense, that a sage could not be weighed against a basket of fish, but Chyavana held to the letter of what had happened. He reminded them, too, that their morning's labour could not simply be forgiven and forgotten either. They had come to the river to earn their bread by that catch, and if the catch was now bound up with a sage they dared not sell on their own authority, then whoever untangled the matter owed them for the loss of a day's honest work. Fair dealing, he said, ran in both directions.

Trembling, the fishermen carried the news to King Nahusha, for no one else in the realm could settle a matter that had a sage bound up in it. Nahusha came himself to the riverbank, alarmed at what his subjects might have done to draw such a figure's anger, and offered at once to pay whatever was needed to set the matter right and spare the fishermen any blame. He named a thousand gold coins, a sum that would have made any household in the kingdom wealthy for generations.

Chyavana refused. A thousand coins, he said, was not his measure, and Nahusha, reading the refusal as a demand for a still greater sum, doubled his offer, then doubled it again, until he had named half of everything he ruled, land and treasury and army together. Chyavana refused that as well, without anger, only with the same stillness he had kept for twelve years in the water. Nahusha, growing uncertain now rather than simply generous, offered the whole of his kingdom, holding back nothing, for he could think of no price beyond it and did not know what else a king had left to give.

Still Chyavana shook his head. The king stood at the edge of his own generosity and found it was not enough, and for the first time since the fishermen had come to him that morning he did not know what to say next. A kingdom, entire and undivided, had been set on the scale and found wanting, and no one present, sage or fisherman or king, could say what weight would finally balance it.

While Nahusha stood uncertain, a sage of the forest who had been passing that way, drawn by the crowd gathered at the riverbank, stepped forward and asked what the trouble was. When he heard that a kingdom had already been offered and refused, he laughed, not unkindly, and told the king he had been offering the wrong kind of thing entirely. Gold could be counted, and so could land, and anything that could be counted would always fall short before a sage who had stood twelve years in a river, because a number, however large, remains a number and Chyavana was not to be had for a number. What the king should offer instead, the forest sage said, was a single cow.

Nahusha did not understand at first how one cow could outweigh a kingdom, and the sage explained that a cow's worth was never counted in coin to begin with. She gives her milk without asking what it is worth, feeds the calf at her side and the stranger at the fence with the same unmeasured yielding, and no treasury anywhere holds enough gold to purchase what she offers freely each morning. A gift is not measured by what it costs the giver to hand over, but by what it cannot be exchanged for, and nothing in the king's stores answered to that description except the cow.

Nahusha sent for one and offered her, with nothing added and nothing withheld, and Chyavana accepted at once, satisfied not because the price was small but because it was, for the first time that day, a true one. The fishermen received the cow for their loss, their net was returned to them along with the day's catch, and it is said that the fish who had shared Chyavana's net rose to heaven together with the men who had caught them, carried up by the sage's satisfaction as surely as by their own dealings honestly done.

Bhishma let the story settle before he spoke again to Yudhishthira. "You have heard men argue prices all your life," he said, "coin against coin, land against land, and you have seen how quickly such arguments end in exhaustion rather than agreement, because a number can always be raised and can always be refused in turn. Chyavana was not haggling. He was waiting for someone to understand that worth is not a number at all, and that a king proves the size of his own generosity not by what sum he is willing to name, but by what single true thing he finally consents to give without holding anything back from it."

He added that this was not the only trial Chyavana had set for those who crossed his path in the river years of his life, as the tale of Sukanya, who found him half buried and married him regardless, and the tale of his dealings with Kushika's line, would each show in their turn. But the lesson of the net stood on its own, and needed no other story to complete it.

A giver, Bhishma said, was measured at the last not by his wealth but by what he would part with entirely, for a man who offers a kingdom while keeping his pride intact has given less than a poor man who offers his only cow without flinching. A receiver of true worth, in turn, was one who could tell a genuine gift from a merely large one, and refuse the second until the first was offered. Nahusha had not failed by naming too small a sum. He had failed only by not yet knowing what kind of thing a true price was, gold being a stranger's language and a cow being spoken plainly, from one living creature to another. Yudhishthira, who would spend the rest of his reign giving away what a king possesses, land and cattle and grain enough to feed provinces, took the distinction to heart, and did not forget it even in the years when his own generosity would be tested far past a fisherman's net.