The King Who Challenged Two Hermits

Krishna had come to Hastinapura as an envoy of peace, one final chance for Duryodhana to return what belonged to the Pandavas before the armies that were already gathering met on a field neither side could walk back from. The arguing in the hall that day had gone the way it always went with Duryodhana, circling toward the same refusal dressed in new words, and Dhritarashtra sat where he always sat, wishing for an outcome he would not act to secure, while Bhishma watched in silence, having said what he had to say many times already and knowing none of it had taken root.

When Krishna had finished speaking, the hall sat so still that no king ventured a reply. Then the sage Rama, Jamadagni's son, who had come to the assembly among the rishis, broke the silence, and he did not threaten. He told a story.

'There was once an emperor named Dambhodbhava,' he said, 'who had conquered every kingdom he set out to conquer, and grew bored with a world that had nothing left to refuse him. He gathered his priests one day and asked them a question that only a man who has never lost can ask sincerely: was there, anywhere on earth, a warrior he had not yet defeated. He expected them to say no. They did not.'

Duryodhana did not yet understand why he was being told a story about a king he had never heard of. But the sage asked him to listen and not to doubt that the tale was true, since a story, unlike a threat, cannot be argued with while it is still being told.

The brahmanas told Dambhodbhava the truth, though it cannot have been an easy thing to tell an emperor who had never once been refused. On the slopes of Gandhamadana, they said, at a hermitage called Badarikashrama, lived two ascetics named Nara and Narayana, who practiced austerities so complete that no king's army had ever troubled them, because no king had ever thought two forest hermits worth the trouble of conquering. But strength, the brahmanas said carefully, was not the same thing as the appetite for a crown, and these two, whatever else they were, were stronger than any warrior in Dambhodbhava's court.

It was exactly the wrong thing to say to a man who had built his whole life on the belief that nothing on earth stood above him, and exactly the right thing, in the sage's telling, for Duryodhana to hear. Dambhodbhava did not send a messenger to test the claim. He marched his entire army into the forest toward Gandhamadana, certain that whatever these two ascetics were, they would kneel like every other power he had ever tested.

The forest gave no sign of the army's approach mattering to anyone in it. Birds did not scatter before the emperor's banners the way they scattered before other kings'. The hermitage, when the army reached it, was smaller and plainer than anything in Dambhodbhava's own palace, and the two men who lived there were sitting outside it, unarmed as far as any soldier could see, lean from hunger and thirst, their bodies worn thin by cold and wind and heat.

Dambhodbhava touched their feet, and they welcomed him as hermits welcome any guest, with roots, fruits, a seat and water, and asked what they could do for him. He told them he had conquered the earth and wanted only a fight with them. Anger and greed had been banished from this hermitage, they answered, and there were no weapons here; let him seek battle elsewhere. He would not be turned away, and at last Nara picked up a few blades of grass in his fist.

Dambhodbhava's soldiers laughed, and their laughter was not unreasonable. An emperor who had broken the armies of a hundred kingdoms had marched his whole host into the mountains to find two half-starved hermits holding a fistful of weeds. The emperor himself, less amused than curious, asked whether Nara truly meant to face an army with grass when steel and iron stood arrayed against him.

Nara looked up, unbothered by the ranks of soldiers, the horses, the elephants, the banners that stretched back down the slope farther than the eye could easily follow. He did not raise his voice, and he did not move to stand. 'You want a fight,' he said. 'Then come. Bring all your weapons and ready your army. From today I will cure you of your love of war forever.'

Dambhodbhava, who had never in his life been spoken to like that by anyone, surrounded Nara with his army and loosed a storm of arrows at him from every side, and Nara turned every one of them aside with his blades of grass. It was, by every account of that day, the last order he gave that entire army before the field around Badarikashrama stopped answering to him at all.

Nara rose then, and gathered a handful of the blades he had cut, no more than a man could close one fist around, and spoke a single word over them, a word none of the soldiers who lived to describe that afternoon could ever quite repeat afterward. Then he threw the grass toward the army the way a farmer scatters seed, without aiming at any one man, and let it fall where it would.

What happened next happened almost too fast to be believed by the men it happened to. Every blade found a target, slicing at eyes and ears and noses, until the sky itself was white with grass. Soldiers who had marched in perfect order dropped their weapons because their hands would no longer close around them. Men who had shouted orders a moment before found themselves unable to hear the man shouting beside them. Horses reared without visible cause, their riders thrown, blind to the ground rushing up to meet them. Within the space of a few breaths, an army that had never lost a battle in its emperor's lifetime lay scattered across the hillside, disarmed and deafened and blinded, and not a single man among them had been struck by anything sharper than a grass blade.

Dambhodbhava stood alone among his fallen soldiers, his own sword suddenly too heavy for a hand that would not answer him, and understood, for the first time in a life built on never losing, exactly what it felt like to have already lost. Nara had not raised a weapon of iron at all, and the army that no king had ever managed to break lay broken anyway, at the feet of a man who had spent the morning cutting grass.

He fell at their feet then, the emperor who had conquered every kingdom that mattered to him, and begged Nara for protection. Nara asked nothing of him in return, not his crown, not his army's surrender. Go home, he told him, insult no one again, protect your subjects, and rule the kingdoms you already have with more wisdom than you came here with. That was the whole of the punishment, and the whole of the lesson: a man does not need to be destroyed to be taught what he refused to believe.

Rama let the story sit in the hall at Hastinapura for a moment before he finished it. Duryodhana, and everyone else listening, had heard the tale as a curiosity about a proud king humbled by two forest hermits, the kind of story told to children to teach them that appearances mislead. The sage did not let it end there.

'Nara and Narayana did not stay in that forest forever,' he said. 'They took birth again, when the world needed them, as two men bound to each other the way they were bound in that hermitage, and Narayana is greater even than Nara. You have met them both, Duryodhana. One of them, Keshava, stands in your hall today. The other you call Arjuna, and you have already decided to meet him on a battlefield.'

No one in the hall spoke. Bhishma's face did not change, though something in his stillness deepened. Dhritarashtra, blind and helpless in every way that mattered, asked no question. And Duryodhana, who had been given the plainest warning any king before him had ever received, chose, as he had chosen every time before, not to hear it.