The Debt Penance Could Not Pay

The story of the emaciated sage and the king who had lost his son was finished, and hope had been driven out of it, and Yudhishthira did not move from where he was sitting.

"Like one that drinks nectar," he said, "I am never satiated with listening to thee as thou speakest. As a person possessing a knowledge of self is never satiated with meditation, even so I am never satiated with hearing thee. Do thou, therefore, O grandsire, discourse once more upon morality. I am never satiated with drinking the nectar of thy discourse upon morality."

It is worth noticing what the king does not ask for. He does not ask another question. He asks Bhishma to keep speaking, on the same subject, without narrowing it, the way a man asks for one more cup of something he knows he will not finish. Everything that has been said on that field for days has been said by a man lying on a bed of arrows with his death postponed, and the son of Kunti has begun to want the sound of it more than he wants the answers in it.

Bhishma gave him what he asked for, and he gave it in the form he always used, which is to say he reached back for something older than himself.

"In this connection," he said, "is cited the old narrative of the discourse between Gotama and the illustrious Yama."

Two names, and both of them carry weight. Gotama is a rishi of the ancient line, one of those Brahmanas whose austerities are measured in ages rather than in seasons. Yama is the Regent of the world, the royal Dharma, the god who takes the dead and judges them and who is called by both names because in the reckoning of that tradition the taking and the judging are one office.

What follows is a conversation between a man who had not yet died and the god who would eventually come for him. It is very short. Krishna was sitting within hearing, and the brothers, and nobody interrupted.

"Gotama owned a wide retreat on the Paripatra hills," Bhishma said. "Listen to me as to how many years he dwelt in that abode."

The invitation is unusual. Bhishma does not often stop a narrative before it has started in order to make the king pay attention to a number, and he does it here because the number is the whole foundation of what comes after.

"For sixty thousand years that sage underwent ascetic austerities in that asylum."

The Paripatra range runs along the western reach of the old world, dry hills with forest in the folds of them, the kind of country a man goes into when he has decided that he is finished with being seen. Gotama had a wide retreat there. Not a hut and not a cave: an asylum with room in it, the establishment of a rishi who has been in one place long enough for the place to take his shape.

And he had been in it for sixty thousand years, and for all of them he had been engaged in austerities.

It is easy to let a figure like that slide past as decoration. It should not be allowed to. The point of it is that by the time this story opens, Gotama has done everything a man can do by way of penance. Whatever it is that austerity buys, he has bought it many times over. He is not a seeker at the beginning of a road. He is a man who has been standing at the end of the road for longer than kingdoms last, and who has, at some point in all those thousands of years, come up against a question that penance by itself does not answer.

He had not gone anywhere to ask it. He had stayed on his hill and gone on with the severest of his austerities, and the answer came to him, because one day the traffic went the other way.

"One day, the Regent of the world, Yama, O tiger among men, repaired to that great sage of cleansed soul while he was engaged in the severest austerities."

Death came up the hill.

He did not send for the sage and he did not summon him at the end of a life. He walked into another man's hermitage in the middle of the working day, uninvited, while the fire was burning and the vows were being kept, and stood there. Yama beheld the great ascetic Gotama of rigid penances. That is all the text says of the looking, and it is the god who does it first.

Then the sage understood who his visitor was.

He did not have to be told. A rishi of sixty thousand years knows the Regent of the world by sight, and the recognition produced in him exactly the reaction the tradition would want and no more. He speedily saluted him. Then he sat with joined hands in an attentive attitude, waiting for his commands.

That posture is the hinge of the scene. Gotama assumed that Death had come with an errand for him. He put his palms together and sat down and made himself available, as a man does before a superior who has arrived without explanation, and he waited to be told what was wanted.

And the royal Dharma, beholding that bull among Brahmanas, duly saluted him in return, and asked him what he was to do for him.

Read the exchange again in order. The sage salutes. The god salutes back. The god asks the sage what service he can perform for him. Between the two of them there is no question of who has come for whom, and the god of death, standing in front of a man he will one day take, addresses him as one who has come to be useful.

Gotama had waited sixty thousand years for somebody worth asking. He asked.

"By doing what acts," said Gotama, "does one liberate one's self from the debt one owes to one's mother and father? How also does one succeed in winning regions of pure bliss that are so difficult of attainment?"

Two questions, and the first of them is the one the whole story is built to carry.

He did not ask what happens after death, which he might reasonably have asked of that particular visitor. He did not ask about the judgement, or about the regions of punishment, or about the hour of his own end. He asked about a debt, and he named the creditors, and they were his mother and his father.

The word is exact and it is not a figure of speech. In the reckoning of the old teaching a man is born owing, and the debts are counted and named, and the one owed to the parents who made the body he is standing in is among the first of them. A debt is not gratitude. Gratitude is a feeling and it can be genuine and change nothing. A debt is an amount, and it is outstanding until it has been discharged, and until then the man who carries it is not a free man however much penance he has performed.

That is the trouble Gotama had brought out of his hermitage. Sixty thousand years of austerities on the Paripatra hills, the severest that could be undertaken, and he was still standing in front of the ledger with an entry on it that penance had not cleared, and he had begun to suspect that penance was not the instrument that cleared it.

And the second question follows from the first, because he asks how a man wins the regions of pure bliss that are so difficult of attainment, and he asks it in the same breath. Not two subjects. One. He wanted to know whether the debt and the destination were connected, and whether a man could arrive anywhere at all while he still owed the people who made him.

Yama did not tell him a story and did not put him off. He gave him the account in four items.

"Devoting one's self to the duty of truth, and practising purity and penances, one should ceaselessly worship one's mother and father."

Truth first, as the duty a man is devoted to rather than a rule he keeps. Then purity. Then penances, which Gotama already had in a quantity nobody else on earth possessed, and which the god lists all the same, in third place, as one ingredient among others. And all three of them are put to work in the service of the fourth thing, which is the answer proper: one should ceaselessly worship one's mother and father.

Ceaselessly. Not once, not at the funeral, not on the days appointed for it. The debt is not discharged by an act; it is discharged by a practice that does not stop, and the truth and the purity and the austerities are what a man brings to that practice so that it is worth something when he offers it.

"One should also perform Horse-sacrifices with presents in profusion unto the Brahmanas."

The Horse-sacrifice is the greatest of the public rites, the one a king spends a kingdom on, and Yama attaches to it the clause that matters more than the horse: presents in profusion unto the Brahmanas. The gift is the part that counts. A great rite performed cheaply is a cheap rite.

"By such acts," said Yama, "one wins many regions of felicity of wonderful aspect."

That is the end of the discourse. The god of death answered the question he was asked, in the order it was asked, and said nothing about death at all.

And Bhishma, on the arrows, left it there without drawing a moral out of it, in front of a king who had come out of a war that had emptied a whole generation of fathers and sons, and whose own mother was still living, and who was never satiated.