The Price of Excellence

Far beyond the cultivated fields of the Kurus, in the green wilderness where the Nishada tribes hunted and roamed, there lived a boy named Eklavya. He was the son of Hiranyadhanus, chieftain of the forest people, and from his earliest years he had wanted only one thing. He wanted to be the greatest archer the world had ever seen.

The Nishadas were hunters by birth. They lived by the bow. Eklavya could bring down a flying bird before it cleared the treetops, and he could pin a leaf to a trunk from across a clearing. The men of his tribe praised him and said no one of their people had ever shot so well. But Eklavya was not satisfied with being the best among the Nishadas. He had heard, carried on the lips of traders and travelers, of a teacher in the great city of Hastinapura whose skill in arms had no equal anywhere on earth.

The name of that teacher was Drona. He was the acharya, the master of arms, appointed to instruct the royal princes of the house of Kuru. It was said that Drona had learned the secrets of celestial weapons, that he could teach a student to call down fire and wind and storm from the string of a bow. To Eklavya, the name of Drona became a single shining word that meant everything he longed to become.

One morning Eklavya bowed to his father, took up his bow, and set out alone toward the city of elephants. He walked for many days. He crossed rivers and slept beneath strange trees, and at last he came in sight of the high walls and golden roofs of Hastinapura, the seat of the Kuru kings. His heart pounded. Somewhere within that city was the man who could make him whole.

Eklavya found Drona where the princes trained, on the broad practice grounds at the edge of the city. The acharya was a lean, grey-bearded brahmin with eyes that missed nothing. Around him stood the sons of the Kuru house, the hundred Kauravas led by Duryodhana, and the five Pandavas, and among them a slim boy with a steady gaze whose name was Arjuna. They were loosing arrows at distant targets, and Drona walked among them, correcting a stance here, a grip there.

Eklavya waited until the lesson ended. Then he crossed the field, set down his bow, and fell flat upon the ground at Drona's feet in full prostration.

"Acharya," he said, raising his head. "I am Eklavya, son of Hiranyadhanus of the Nishadas. I have walked many days to reach you. There is no teacher on earth like you. I beg you to accept me as your student and teach me the art of the bow."

Drona looked down at him. He saw the dark skin and the rough hide garments of the forest tribes, the calloused hands, the hunter's wiry strength. He saw also the burning hope in the boy's eyes, and for a moment something in him hesitated. But Drona was bound by his place in the world and by a promise he had made.

"Rise," Drona said quietly. "I cannot teach you, child."

Eklavya stared up at him, the words not yet understood.

"You are a Nishada," Drona went on. "You are not born of the Kshatriya line. This school is for the princes of the Kuru house. I have given my word to King Dhritarashtra that I will train these and no others. I am sorry. Go back to your forest."

Eklavya did not argue. He did not weep or plead a second time. He had been raised to honor a master's word, and Drona's word, however bitter, was law to him. He bowed once more, touching his forehead to the dust before the acharya's feet, and the gesture this time was not a request but a reverence.

Yet inside the boy a quiet fire had been lit. As he turned and walked back across the practice grounds, past the princes who barely glanced at him, past the targets bristling with their arrows, he made a vow in his own heart. If Drona would not take him as a student in the flesh, then Drona would be his teacher in spirit, and Eklavya would learn the art of the bow all the same.

The rejection had not killed his dream. It had hardened it into something like iron. He carried the image of the acharya in his mind, the grey beard, the unyielding eyes, the perfect calm of a man who had mastered every weapon, and he held that image close as a man holds a coal to keep a fire alive on a long journey.

He left the city of Hastinapura behind him and walked back into the forest, but he did not return home to his father's people. Instead he went deeper, into a quiet and lonely part of the woods where no hunters came, where the only sounds were birdsong and the wind in the high branches. There, he decided, he would build a life around a single purpose. There he would become what no one would teach him to be.

In a clearing beside a stream Eklavya built himself a rough hermitage of branches and leaves, the kind the forest sages used. And then he did a strange and beautiful thing. With clay dug from the riverbank, working with his hunter's patient hands, he shaped a statue of Drona.

He had seen the acharya only once, on the practice field, but that single sight had burned itself into his memory. He molded the lean body and the long beard and the calm, commanding face. He set the figure upright in the clearing and ringed its base with wildflowers. To this image of clay he gave the place of a living guru. He bowed before it each dawn. He spoke to it. He offered it the respect a true student owes his master.

"You are my acharya," Eklavya told the silent figure. "You did not choose me, but I have chosen you. Whatever I become, I become as your student. Whatever I learn, I lay at your feet."

It would have been easy to mock such devotion. A statue cannot correct a grip or demonstrate a draw. A statue cannot praise or scold. But the great strength of Eklavya was the strength of his own will, and the image of Drona gave that will a center to turn around. In his mind the clay master watched every arrow, and Eklavya shot to please him. He imagined the acharya's voice telling him what he was doing wrong, and he made himself answer it.

Day after day, season after season, in the silence of the deep forest, Eklavya practiced before the image of clay. He had no teacher of flesh and blood. He had only his vow, his memory, and a god of mud at the edge of a stream. It was enough.

What followed was a labor of the kind that turns ordinary men into legends. Eklavya practiced from before sunrise until after dark, and then he practiced in the dark itself. He shot at fixed targets until he never missed, and then he made the targets harder. He shot at swaying leaves, at the shadows of birds, at the splash of fish rising in the stream.

He trained himself to shoot blind, loosing arrow after arrow at sounds alone, until he could place a shaft into the exact spot where a twig had snapped or an animal had called. He shot while running through the trees. He shot from horseback at a gallop. He hung upside down from low branches and learned to send his arrows true even then. He learned to draw and loose so fast that the arrows seemed to leave the string in a single continuous stream.

There was no one to tell him he had done well, and no one to tell him to stop. The only witness to his progress was the clay statue in its ring of flowers, and each evening Eklavya knelt before it and reported what he had managed and what he had failed. "Tomorrow," he would say, "tomorrow I will do better, Acharya."

The years passed over him like water over a stone, and they wore him into a shape that few archers in the history of the world have ever taken. His body grew lean and hard. His eye grew faster than thought. His hands grew so sure that the bow became less a tool than a part of his own arm. He did not know it, alone there in his forest, but he had surpassed every prince of the Kuru house. He had, in his solitude, become perhaps the finest archer then living upon the earth, and he had done it with no master but a memory and a figure of clay.

It happened, as such things do, by accident. One day the Kuru princes rode out into that very forest to hunt, and Drona rode with them. A servant followed the party, and with the servant came a dog, a friendly animal that ranged ahead through the undergrowth as dogs will, nose to the ground, tail high.

The dog wandered far from the hunting party and came at last to the clearing where Eklavya practiced. There it saw a strange dark figure dressed in hides, his body smeared with dust, his hair matted, drawing a great bow before an idol of clay. The sight alarmed the dog, and it began to bark, a loud and ceaseless racket that shattered the quiet of the clearing and broke the archer's deep concentration.

Eklavya was not cruel. He did not want to hurt the animal, only to silence it so that he could return to his practice. So, scarcely turning his head, his hands moving faster than the eye could follow, he loosed a swift volley of arrows. Seven shafts flew, one after another, in the time it takes to draw a single breath.

The dog yelped and then fell silent, but it was not harmed. Eklavya had filled its open, barking mouth with arrows, packing them in so that the jaws were held wide and the barking stopped, yet not one arrow had pierced the flesh and not a drop of blood was drawn. The poor creature, its mouth bristling like a strange flower, turned and bolted back the way it had come, running until it found the hunting party of the princes.

The Pandavas saw the dog come stumbling out of the trees, and they stopped and stared. None of them had ever seen anything like it. The animal's mouth was filled with arrows, every shaft set with such delicate precision that the jaws were locked open without a single wound, without one bead of blood.

The brothers gathered around, marveling and uneasy. Such shooting was not merely skillful. It was beyond skill. It spoke of an archer who could place seven arrows into a moving target's open mouth by sound and instinct alone, harming nothing. They knew of no one in all of Hastinapura, no prince and no soldier, who could do such a thing.

Arjuna in particular went pale. From his earliest days at Drona's school Arjuna had been the most devoted of all the students, and he had been promised, in turn, that no archer would ever be his equal. It was the dream of his life. Now he looked at the arrows in the dog's mouth and felt the cold touch of a fear he had never known.

"Who could have done this?" he said. "There is no one I know of, not one man, with skill enough for such a shot. And yet here is the proof of him, here in our own hunting ground. Master, I beg you, let us find him."

Drona said little, but his old eyes were troubled. He too had recognized at once that this was the work of a master archer, and a master he had not trained. Together the princes followed the dog's trail back through the trees, deeper and deeper into the wood, until the undergrowth opened before them into a quiet clearing beside a stream.

In the clearing they found him. A young man dark of skin and matted of hair, dressed in the hides of the forest people, his body filthy with dust, stood drawing his bow with a speed and grace that stopped them all in their tracks. Behind him, ringed with wildflowers, rose a crude statue of clay, and the princes did not at first understand what it was.

The young archer saw them coming and lowered his bow. The instant his eyes fell on Drona, his whole bearing changed. He dropped to the ground in joyful prostration and pressed his face into the earth.

"Acharya!" Eklavya cried. "You have come! You have come at last to the place where your student labors!"

Drona stared at him, not comprehending. "Who are you, that you call me your master? I have never taught you."

Eklavya rose, his face alight. "Do you not remember, great one? I came to your school in the city. I begged you to teach me, and you sent me away because I was born a Nishada. But I could not give up the dream you yourself had planted in me. So I made your image, and before it I have practiced all these years. In my heart you have always been my guru. Everything I am, every arrow I have learned to loose, I owe to you. I am your disciple, Acharya, taught by your likeness in clay."

Drona looked from the young man to the statue and back again, and a great unease settled over him. Here before him stood living proof of a devotion almost beyond belief, and proof, too, of a skill that he could not deny. He turned his head and saw Arjuna standing rigid, white-faced, watching, and he remembered the promise he had made long ago.

Drona stood torn between two truths, and the conflict in him was sharp. On one side was the boy he had wronged, a disciple of such pure devotion that he had built a god from river clay and worshiped it into mastery. To send such a one away unrewarded a second time would be a cruelty.

But on the other side stood Arjuna, and behind Arjuna a vow. Long ago Drona had taken Arjuna's hand and promised him that he would make him the foremost archer in all the world, that no bowman living would ever surpass him. Arjuna had given Drona his whole heart in return, had served him above all the other students, had asked for nothing but the chance to be the best. And now, here in this forest clearing, that promise was in danger of breaking. For this ragged hunter, untaught by any living hand, had already grown greater with the bow than Arjuna could ever be.

Drona understood that the world he served, the world of kings and castes and the great war he could already sense gathering on the horizon, would turn upon the question of who held supremacy in arms. He had chosen his side long ago. He could not now let a forest archer, however worthy, eclipse the prince he had sworn to raise above all others.

His mind moved to the one path that custom left open to him. A student owed his teacher guru-dakshina, the gift of gratitude given at the end of instruction. Eklavya had claimed Drona as his teacher. By that claim, Eklavya owed him a teacher's fee. And there was one fee Drona could ask that would settle the matter forever. He drew a slow breath, and his face grew very still.

"If you truly hold me to be your guru," Drona said, "and if all your skill was learned in my name, then you owe me guru-dakshina, the fee a student gives his teacher. Will you give it?"

"Anything, Acharya," Eklavya answered without a heartbeat's pause, his eyes shining. "There is nothing I would not give you. Only name it, and it is yours."

Drona was silent for a long moment. When at last he spoke, his voice was low and steady. "Then give me the thumb of your right hand."

The clearing went utterly still. The princes drew in their breath. Arjuna stared. Even the birds seemed to hush. To take an archer's right thumb was to take his art itself, for without that thumb no man can draw a bowstring as a master draws it. Drona was not asking for a gift. He was asking Eklavya to surrender, with his own hand, the whole purpose of his life.

And Eklavya did not hesitate. His face never fell. There was no flash of anger in his eyes, no plea for mercy, no bitter word about all the lonely years now made worthless. He saw only his guru asking, and a student's duty to give. With a glad heart, as though he were offering a garland and not the ruin of his dream, Eklavya drew his hunting knife. He pressed it to the base of his right thumb and, smiling, cut the thumb away. Then he knelt and laid it, bleeding, at the feet of the clay master and the living one.

"It is yours, Acharya," he said softly. "As you have asked, so I have given."

When Eklavya took up his bow again, the loss was plain at once. Without the thumb of his right hand he could no longer draw and loose as he had before. He learned, in time, to shoot with his remaining fingers, and he remained a formidable warrior, for the will in him was unbroken. But the matchless speed and impossible precision that had filled a dog's mouth with arrows and turned a forest hermit into the finest archer alive, that was gone, given away in a single unflinching stroke.

Drona had what he had come for. The promise to Arjuna stood. With Eklavya's supremacy removed, no living bowman now surpassed the Pandava prince, and Arjuna would go on to become the great archer of the age, the hero of the war that was still to come. The acharya turned and led his students back through the forest toward the city, and behind him the clearing fell quiet again.

Arjuna himself walked home with his fear lifted but his heart unsettled. He had wanted to be the greatest, and now he would be, but he had seen the price paid for it by another man's hand, and the sight did not leave him. He had learned that supremacy in the world of men is not always won cleanly, and that the proud places of kings are built sometimes upon the silent sacrifice of those the world refuses to count.

As for Eklavya, he stayed in his forest. He bowed once more before the image of clay he had made, the master who had asked everything of him, and he did not curse his fate. He had given his guru the fee that was demanded, and in his own eyes his honor was whole.

Of all the tales told in the long history of the Mahabharata, few have cut deeper into the hearts of those who hear them than the story of Eklavya and his thumb. It is a story that refuses to settle into a single, easy meaning, and that is part of its enduring power.

There is wonder in it, the wonder of a boy who was told he could not learn and who taught himself to surpass princes, with no master but a figure of clay and the fierce devotion of his own heart. There is sorrow in it, the sorrow of a gift so great that the world feared it and demanded that it be destroyed. And there is a hard truth in it about the order of that ancient world, which closed its great schools to those born outside the noble lines and then took even the self-won mastery of such a one when it threatened the place of the highborn.

Drona's act has troubled hearers for thousands of years. He was a great teacher and a man bound by his word, yet he asked of an innocent the cruelest of fees to protect a promise. Eklavya's answer has moved them just as long, for in giving up his thumb without a murmur he showed a purity of devotion that no severed finger could diminish. He lost the art of the bow. He did not lose his greatness.

In the end Eklavya gave Arjuna the supremacy that the world insisted upon. But to the world itself he gave something larger and more lasting, an image of a devotion so complete that it would be remembered and retold long after the kings and their wars had crumbled into dust. The princes are honored in the chronicles for their victories. Eklavya, the rejected forest boy, is honored for his heart.