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 it was plain that neither reason nor the weight of the assembled kings was going to move Duryodhana an inch, Krishna did not raise his voice or his weapon, though everyone in that hall knew he could have ended the argument with either. Instead he asked for a moment more, and 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, and said so, impatient to return to the matter of villages and armies. Krishna only asked him to listen a little longer, 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 Krishna'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, doing something that at first looked like nothing at all.

They were making arrows, Dambhodbhava realized as he came closer, though not out of wood and iron. Nara and Narayana sat surrounded by the tall grass of the hillside, breaking off blades and setting them beside them in neat rows, as unhurried as two old friends passing an afternoon with no war anywhere in the world.

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 playing with weeds. The emperor himself, less amused than curious, asked the elder of the two what he thought he was doing, arming himself against 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. 'An army is only as dangerous as the weapon it fears,' he said, or words close enough to that meaning, 'and you have not yet learned what a determined hand can do with whatever lies nearest to it.'

Dambhodbhava, who had never in his life been spoken to like that by anyone, ordered his army to take the two hermits, alive if it could be managed, dead if it could not. 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, and every target went down, though not one of them died. 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 asked the two ascetics who they truly were, and what he could do to undo whatever he had begun. Nara and Narayana asked nothing of him in return, not his crown, not his army's surrender, not even an apology. Go home, they told him, 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.

Krishna 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. Krishna 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. You have met them both, Duryodhana. One of them 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.