The King Who Never Lied

When the divine sage Narada once visited Yudhishthira and described to him the glittering assembly hall of Indra, king of the gods, where the spirits of the greatest kings of old gather in glory, Yudhishthira asked him a question. "Of all the countless righteous kings who have ruled the earth," he said, "how many dwell there in Indra's heaven?"

And Narada answered that one king above all others was honored there, set apart for a single supreme virtue. "There is a king named Harishchandra," said Narada, "who dwells in splendor in the world of Indra, revered above other monarchs. And do you know why? Not for his conquests, nor for his wealth, though he had both. He is honored above all the kings of the earth because in his whole life he never once told a lie, and never once broke a promise, though to keep his truth he was made to lose everything a man can lose. Let me tell you, son of Kunti, what truthfulness cost King Harishchandra, and what it won him."

Harishchandra was a great and just emperor, ruler of a prosperous kingdom, famed throughout the world for his generosity and above all for his absolute truthfulness. It was said of him that his word, once given, was more certain than the rising of the sun, and that no power on earth or in heaven could make him speak a falsehood or break a vow.

This very perfection drew a testing upon him. The mighty sage Vishvamitra, whether to prove the king's truth or to break it, came to claim from Harishchandra a promise the king had made - that he would give the sage whatever he asked. And Vishvamitra asked for everything. He asked for Harishchandra's entire kingdom, his wealth, his throne, all his lands and treasures, the whole of his empire.

Harishchandra did not hesitate. He had given his word, and his word was sacred. Without a murmur of protest, he handed over his kingdom, his palace, his riches, and his crown to the sage, and stepped down from his throne a beggar, keeping back nothing - for to keep back anything, or to plead, would have been to fall short of the promise he had made.

But the testing was not over. When Harishchandra had given away his whole kingdom, Vishvamitra demanded one thing more: the dakshina, the sacrificial fee that custom required a giver to add to any great gift, as the completion of the offering. The king must now pay the sage a fee of gold on top of the kingdom he had already surrendered.

Harishchandra had nothing left. He had given away everything he owned; there was not a coin remaining to him. Yet he had promised the fee, and a promise was a promise. He could not say, "I have no more," and consider himself released, for to him the truth of his word outweighed even the impossibility of keeping it. He asked only for a little time to find the means to pay, and Vishvamitra granted him a short period - but pressed him hard, following him, demanding the fee, allowing him no rest until it was paid.

So the king who had owned an empire set out, with his faithful wife Shaibya and his young son Rohitashva, stripped of everything, to find by some means the gold he had promised - bound by his own truth to pay a debt he had no way to pay.

Harishchandra came at last to the holy city of Kashi, hoping to find some way to raise the fee. But he had no trade, no wealth, no means - nothing to sell but the only things left to him: the labor and persons of himself and his family. And so, to keep his word to the sage, the former emperor was brought to the most terrible extremity a man can know.

First he sold his beloved wife Shaibya and his little son Rohitashva into servitude - a wrenching, heartbreaking parting, the queen who had shared his throne now bound to serve in a stranger's house, the prince who should have inherited an empire now a servant's boy. The price they fetched, the king handed over toward the sage's fee. And still it was not enough.

Through all of it Harishchandra did not lie, did not break faith, did not curse his fate or beg to be released from his promise. He bore the unbearable in silence, because his word had been given, and to him a word was worth more than a kingdom, more than wealth, more even than the comfort of his own family.

Even the price of his wife and son did not complete the fee, and so Harishchandra did the last thing left to him: he sold himself. He sold his own person into the service of a chandala, a keeper of the cremation ground, the man who tends the fires where the dead are burned - among the lowliest and most shunned of all occupations.

So the emperor who had ruled the world became a servant at the burning ground of Kashi. His task was to keep watch over the cremation fires, and to collect the fee owed for each body that was burned there, handing over his master's share. Day and night he labored among the funeral pyres, in the smoke and the ash and the ceaseless grief of others, surrounded by death, an outcast and a servant, he who had been a great king.

And still - this is the wonder of him - he did not break. He did his lowly duty faithfully and honestly. He collected the fees exactly as required and kept back nothing. He told no lie and shirked no task. Stripped of his throne, his wealth, his family, and his very dignity, Harishchandra held fast to the one thing no one could take from him unless he surrendered it himself: his truth.

Then fate dealt Harishchandra the cruelest blow of all. His little son Rohitashva, serving in the house where he had been sold, went one day into a garden to gather flowers and was bitten by a venomous snake, and died.

His mother Shaibya, the former queen, now a bond-servant, was given leave to carry her dead child to the cremation ground to perform his last rites. Wild with grief, alone, in the dead of night, she came bearing the small body of her son to the burning ground of Kashi - the very place where her husband now labored, though she did not know it, and he did not at first know her, so changed were they both by sorrow and servitude.

There, in the smoke and darkness, the broken queen laid down the body of the prince who should one day have ruled an empire, and prepared to give him to the fire. And the keeper of the burning ground, whose duty it was to collect the fee for every cremation, came forward in the dark to do his office - not yet seeing whose child it was, nor whose hands had carried it there.

As they spoke in the darkness, the man and the woman knew each other at last - and the full horror of their situation broke upon them. The keeper of the burning ground was Harishchandra himself; the grieving mother was his own wife Shaibya; and the dead child between them was their own son Rohitashva.

Here was the king's truth tested to the very edge of what a human heart can bear. For Harishchandra was bound, as the servant of the cremation ground, to collect the fee for every body burned there - and he could not, by his duty and his word to his master, allow even his own son to be cremated without that fee being paid. His wife had nothing; she was a penniless slave. To demand the fee from his own grieving wife for the burning of their own dead child was a thing too cruel to imagine - and yet his bond and his truth required it of him.

He wept, but he did not waver. He told his wife, in anguish, that even now, even here, even for their own son, the law and his duty must be kept, and the fee must be paid; he could not make an exception, even for himself, even for this, without breaking the truth he had held to through everything. Shaibya, having nothing else, offered the only thing she had - a piece of the cloth she wore - to pay the fee. And the king prepared, in unspeakable grief but unbroken truth, to do his duty.

At that final, unbearable moment - when the king, having lost his kingdom, his wealth, his freedom, his wife to servitude, and now his only son, still would not lie nor break his word nor spare even himself the keeping of his duty - the testing reached its end. For the whole long ordeal had been a trial of his truthfulness, and he had passed it utterly, holding to truth through losses that would have broken any other man into falsehood.

The gods themselves appeared at the cremation ground, and the sage Vishvamitra with them, and the heavens opened. They revealed that all of it - the demand for the kingdom, the impossible fee, the descent into servitude, the very death of his son - had been a great trial set to test whether Harishchandra's fabled truthfulness could survive total ruin. And it had. There was no falsehood in him to be found, no broken promise, no failure of his word, though he had been stripped of everything and brought to the edge of the worst grief a parent can know.

The gods praised him as the most truthful of all the kings who had ever lived. His son Rohitashva was restored to life, rising whole from the place of the dead. His kingdom and his throne and his wealth were given back to him. His wife was restored to her queenly place. Everything he had lost in keeping his truth was returned to him many times over.

Harishchandra was offered, for his unequalled truthfulness, a place in heaven itself - the highest of rewards. And in keeping with his character, even this he is said to have weighed by the measure of others, unwilling to ascend alone while those who loved and served him remained below; such was the goodness of the man. But in the end he was raised up, and given the honored place that Narada had spoken of: a seat in the very assembly of Indra, set above other kings.

This was why, Narada told Yudhishthira, of all the righteous monarchs of the earth, Harishchandra dwelt in the highest glory among the gods. Not for the size of his empire, nor the gold of his treasury, nor the reach of his conquests - all of which he had given up without a backward look - but for the one virtue he never surrendered even when everything else was torn from him: his absolute, unbreakable truth.

Narada finished the tale, and Yudhishthira - who was himself called the King of Dharma, famed above all for his own truthfulness - sat in deep thought, for he had heard in the story a measure held up against his own life.

"That, son of Kunti," said Narada, "is what truth can cost, and what it is worth. Harishchandra gave up his kingdom, his riches, his freedom, his wife, and very nearly his son, rather than speak a single lie or break a single promise. The world would have called him a fool to hold his word above all those things. But the gods called him the greatest of kings and gave him the highest seat in heaven. For wealth and kingdoms and even life itself are passing things that are lost in the end no matter how we cling to them; but a man's truth, once kept through every trial, is a thing that outlasts the world and lifts him above it."

And Yudhishthira carried the tale with him through all his own trials, when his own truthfulness would be tested almost as sorely, and remembered the king who would not lie though it cost him everything, and was repaid by heaven a thousandfold.