The Gift of Cows

Bhishma lay on the bed of arrows with the plain of Kurukshetra grey around him, and Yudhishthira, who was to rule a country that had buried most of its ploughmen, asked him the question of a man making a list. Of all the gifts a man can give, he said, which one outweighs the rest?

Bhishma did not hesitate.

"The cow," he said. "Give land and you have given a thing that must be worked before it feeds anyone. Give gold and you have given a thing that must be spent before it feeds anyone, and once spent it is gone. Give a cow and you have given a fire that burns without fuel. She feeds the man you gave her to, and she goes on feeding him, and at the end of her years she has left daughters behind her who will feed his sons. There is no other gift that grows after it leaves your hand."

"Then it is the first of gifts because it is the largest," said Yudhishthira.

"It is the first of gifts because it is the most alive," said Bhishma. "Gold does not know who owns it. A cow does. She learns the voice of the woman who milks her, and she comes when that voice calls her, and she frets when it is gone. When you give a cow you are not transferring property. You are placing a living creature into a household and asking that household to be worthy of her, and the household knows it. That is why go-dana is counted the greatest of the gifts, and that is why it is the one most easily done badly."

The old man shifted a little against the arrows, which was as close as he came, in those weeks, to settling in to teach.

"Sit," he said. "You are going to give cattle, and on a scale no king before you has needed to. Let me tell you what the gift is, what it demands of the one who makes it, and what it will tell you about your own kingdom afterward."

"Count what a cow is," said Bhishma, "and count it honestly, not as a poet counts it.

"She is milk, first: milk in the morning and milk in the evening, which is food that arrives without harvest and without slaughter, food that a household takes while leaving the source of it standing. From that milk come curds, butter, and ghee, and ghee is two things at once, for it feeds the family and it feeds the fire on which every rite of that family depends. A house with a cow can perform its sacrifices. A house without one is borrowing to be pious.

"She is the plough, second, or rather her sons are, and no man eats grain in this country who has not first been given a bullock by somebody. The ox before the plough is the whole of agriculture. Take the cattle out of a district and the fields go back to grass in three seasons, and the people go to the forest and eat what the forest gives, and after that they are not farmers any more and will not easily become farmers again.

"She is fuel, third. Her dung dried into cakes heats the pot in villages where there is no wood to spare, and her dung spread on a field returns to it what the crop took out, so that the same acre feeds a family for generations instead of exhausting itself in ten years.

"She is medicine, fourth, in ways the physicians will tell you at length and I will not.

"And she is the one form of wealth that feeds without being spent. Every other estate a man holds shrinks as he uses it. The granary empties. The purse thins. The gold ring goes to the moneylender and does not come back. But a cow eats grass that nobody planted and turns it into food that a child can live on, and does it again tomorrow, and does it again for years, and leaves a heifer behind her when she goes. That is not a possession. That is an estate that walks."

"Then any cow given to any man is a great gift," said Yudhishthira.

"No," said Bhishma, "and this is where kings and merchants both go wrong. The gift has conditions, and they are not ceremonial.

"Let the cow be sound. A lame cow, a dry cow, a sick cow given away to be rid of the trouble of her is not a gift at all, it is a disposal, and the man who calls it charity has cheated twice, once in the byre and once in his own accounting. Give the animal you would have kept.

"Let her go with her calf. A cow separated from her calf grieves, and gives less, and the household that receives her receives a problem. Give the pair, and you have given a herd that has already begun.

"Let her go to one who will keep her. Look at the man. Has he grass? Has he a shed and hands enough to milk her twice a day? Will he keep her, or will he walk her to the market on the fourth day and drink the price of her? A cow given to a man who sells her has fed nobody, and the merit of it evaporates with the sale.

"And now what the giver must hold. Give nothing you took from another man's need. A cow lifted from a poor household and bestowed in public on a fat temple is theft wearing a garland, and the gods keep better books than the priests do. Recall the case of Nriga, who gave away a cow that was not his to give and lay a long age as a lizard in a dry well for it, and remember that he was not a wicked king but a careless one, which is a warning aimed straight at men like us.

"And give without an audience in your mind. If you are counting who is watching, the cow has already been spent on your reputation, and there is nothing left of her for merit."

"There is a reciprocity at the heart of this that you should understand," Bhishma went on, "because it is not the reciprocity of a bargain.

"When you give a man a cow, count what you have actually handed him. Milk in the morning for his children. Ghee for his fire. Curds through a hard month when the grain runs out and the family would otherwise have thinned and sickened and buried somebody. You have given him days. Not metaphor, Yudhishthira, arithmetic: there are children alive at the end of a bad year who would not have been alive without that animal, and there are old men who saw another winter because of her. The tradition says the giver of a cow gives years of life, and it means exactly that.

"Now count what comes back. Nothing that a treasury can hold. The man you gave her to will speak of you at his fire. His wife will say your name over the churn. When the calf is born they will remember where the mother came from. That gratitude is not payment and you must never solicit it, but it is real, and it is the return: the merit of a gift is finished by the gratitude of the one who received it, the way a circuit is finished by its far end. A gift that nobody was glad of is only a subtraction.

"This is why the givers of cattle are remembered by name in the old lists, long after their forts have fallen and their treasuries have been carted away by other men. The forts held nothing that could thank anybody. The cows did.

"And note the direction of it. The giver becomes richer in the only ledger that follows him out of this world, and he becomes richer by the receiver's happiness, not by his own. There is no arrangement in dharma more elegant than that, and none more easily ruined by wanting to be thanked."

"Last," said Bhishma, "the cow is the gentle test of a kingdom, and you may use her as an instrument of government.

"Ride out into your country when the mourning is over. Do not look at the walls, and do not ask the ministers for figures. Look at the cattle. Are they fed, or are their ribs standing out through the hide? Do they graze on the common land without a boy set to guard them with a spear? Does a widow with two cows still have two cows in the spring? Is a herd safe on the road between one village and the next?

"Where the cows are safe and fed, you will find, almost without exception, that the rest of dharma is standing too. It is not magic. A district where cattle are not stolen is a district where theft is punished. A district where cattle are not starved is a district where the common grazing has not been swallowed by the strong. A district where a poor woman's cow is left alone is a district where the poor are left alone. The cattle cannot lie to you and cannot be arranged for your inspection in an afternoon, and that makes them the truest report you will ever receive on your own government.

"So here is my practical word to you, and I would have you remember it when the priests and the architects come to you with plans, as they will come within the year. You are inheriting a starved country. The fields have gone to weed, the ploughmen are ash, and the byres in a hundred villages are empty.

"Seed the villages with cattle before you gild a single temple. The gods do not need your gold; they were rich before you were born. But a village given twenty cows will have grain again in three years, and children who grow straight, and fire for its own rites without begging ghee from the palace. Build the herds first. The temples will follow, and they will be built by people who can afford them."