The Procession of Indras

The sages told the Pandavas of how Indra, the king of the gods, was cured of his pride by a boy, a column of ants, and a glimpse of the true vastness of time - one of the deepest of all the old teachings on humility.

After Indra had slain the great demon Vritra and freed the waters and reclaimed his throne, he grew proud of his victory and his power. He resolved to build himself a palace worthy of the king of the gods, a dwelling of unequalled magnificence, and he summoned Vishvakarma, the divine architect, the craftsman of the gods, and commanded him to raise such a palace as the worlds had never seen.

Vishvakarma set to work and built a palace of marvelous beauty. But when it was done, Indra was not satisfied. He demanded it be made grander - larger halls, higher towers, more gardens and pools and wonders. Vishvakarma extended it, and still Indra wanted more. Again and again the architect enlarged and beautified the palace to the king's command, and again and again Indra found it not grand enough, and demanded yet more, his ambition swelling without limit, never content, always craving a greater glory for his own dwelling.

Vishvakarma, the divine architect, was driven to despair. Whatever he built, however magnificent, Indra demanded more, and there seemed no end to the king's swelling ambition; the palace could never be finished, for it could never be grand enough. The exhausted craftsman saw that he would be enslaved to Indra's endless pride forever, never able to complete his task.

So Vishvakarma went secretly to the creator, Brahma, and begged to be released from this impossible labor, telling him of Indra's insatiable demands. Brahma, seeing that the trouble was the king's own runaway pride, took the matter to the supreme Lord Vishnu, the preserver, the one who could cure such a thing at its root. And Vishnu agreed to deal with Indra's pride himself - not by force or rebuke, but by opening the proud king's eyes to the truth of his own smallness against the vastness of eternity. He would teach the lesson gently, as a riddle, and let the king learn it for himself.

Vishnu came to Indra's half-built, ever-growing palace in the form of a beautiful young brahmin boy, radiant and serene. Indra, flattered to receive so lovely a young visitor, welcomed him and asked his errand. The boy said he had heard of the king's wonderful palace and had come to see it, and he praised its magnificence.

And then the boy said, with a gentle smile, a thing that seemed at first only a courtesy but carried a strange weight: "Truly it is a magnificent palace. No Indra before you ever succeeded in building such a one."

Indra was puzzled, and a little amused, and a little uneasy. "No Indra before me?" he said. "What do you mean, child? Have there been other Indras before me - other kings of the gods? I am Indra. Were there others?"

The boy laughed softly. "Other Indras?" he said. "O King, there have been Indras beyond all counting. I have seen them come and go. Shall I tell you of the Indras that have been?" And the king, half-disbelieving, half-afraid, asked him to go on.

Then the boy unfolded before Indra the true vastness of time, and as he spoke the king's pride began to shrink within him.

"Each Indra," the boy said, "reigns as king of the gods for the span of his age - and that span, long as it seems, is but a single day in the life of the creator Brahma. And when that age ends, the Indra dies, and another rises to take his place, and reigns his age, and dies, and is followed by another, and another, without end. There have been so many Indras, one after another down the ages, that no one could ever count them.

"And beyond the Indras are the Brahmas. For when many ages of Indras have passed, the Brahma of that creation also dies, and the whole universe dissolves, and is born again under a new Brahma, with new Indras to follow - and this too has happened, and will happen, beyond all reckoning. Universe follows universe; creation follows dissolution; Brahmas beyond number have arisen and passed away, each with its own uncountable succession of Indras. Against this vastness, O King, what is one Indra, and what is one palace, however grand? You are one wave in an ocean of ages, one Indra among Indras as countless as the grains of sand on a riverbank or the drops of rain that fall in all the storms of all the worlds."

Indra listened, and the magnificence of his palace, and his pride in it, began to seem very small.

As the boy spoke, a long column of ants came marching across the floor of the great hall - a line of them, thousands upon thousands, crawling in a wide procession from one side of the chamber to the other. The boy saw them, and he paused in his telling, and he laughed - a soft, knowing laugh.

Indra was struck by the laughter. "Why do you laugh, child?" he asked. "What is there in a line of ants to laugh at?"

The boy's smile grew grave. "I laughed," he said, "at the ants. Do you see this long procession of them, crossing your floor? O King, every single one of these ants was, in some former age, an Indra - a king of the gods, just as you are now. Each of them, by great merit and good deeds, rose in some past creation to the very throne you sit upon; each ruled heaven as Indra in his day, proud and glorious as you are. And then, as the long ages turned, each fell - their merit spent, sinking life after life down through the endless cycle of birth and death, rising and falling, until now they crawl here as ants across your floor. And these same ants, in ages to come, may rise again by their deeds to be Indras once more, and fall once more, on and on, without end. There they go - the former kings of heaven, marching across your hall."

While Indra sat stunned by this, a second strange visitor entered the hall: an old hermit, matted and ascetic, bearing upon his chest a curious circle of hair, with a patch in the middle where the hairs had fallen away. This hermit was the great god Shiva, come in disguise to complete the lesson. The boy greeted him, and asked him, as if in innocence, about the strange ring of hair upon his breast and the bald patch within it.

The hermit answered: "These hairs upon my chest - each one of them falls out and is lost at the death of one Indra. When an Indra dies, a hair falls; and you may see by the gap how many have already fallen. When the last of these hairs is gone, then I too shall die. And yet do not think me eternal either, for I am but one in a succession; when I pass, another will take my place, and Brahmas and worlds beyond counting will rise and fall after me as they have before. Even the longest-lived of beings is only a passing thing in the endless turning of the ages. I do not marry, and I keep no great house, and I store up nothing, for I have understood how brief and how small even the grandest life is against the vastness of time."

At these words, the last of Indra's pride fell away from him like the hermit's fallen hairs.

Indra sat humbled and shaken to the depths of his being. He had been so proud of his victory, his throne, his ever-grander palace - and now he saw it all for what it was: the brief, small striving of one Indra among Indras beyond counting, one wave in an endless ocean of ages, his magnificent palace no more lasting than an anthill, himself no more permanent than the ants crossing his floor, who had each been Indra before him.

His hunger for the grand palace simply died in him. What was the use of straining to build the most magnificent dwelling in the world, when he and his palace and his whole age would pass away and be forgotten as utterly as the countless Indras before him? His ambition, which had seemed so important, now seemed the merest vanity against the vastness he had glimpsed. He released Vishvakarma from his endless labor at once, content now with the palace as it was, his craving for ever-greater glory wholly gone.

Indeed, so deeply was he humbled that he swung to the other extreme, and resolved to abandon his throne and his kingdom altogether and become a wandering ascetic, renouncing the world he now saw to be so fleeting and so small. The boy and the hermit, their work done, vanished - revealed at last as Vishnu and Shiva, who had come to cure the king's pride.

But Indra's resolve to flee the world and become an ascetic was itself a kind of imbalance, born of the shock of his humbling, and his wise wife and his teacher Brihaspati counseled him toward a better path - the middle way. They taught him that the answer to the vanity of pride was not to abandon his duty and flee the world, but to remain king and do his work faithfully, only without the pride and the grasping ambition that had blinded him. He should rule, and act, and fulfill his station - but hold it all lightly, knowing its impermanence, neither clinging to it in pride nor fleeing it in despair. To do one's duty in the world without attachment to its fruits - that, they showed him, was the true wisdom that lay between the two extremes of grasping ambition and world-fleeing renunciation.

The sages drew the lesson for the Pandavas. "See the cure for pride, son of Pandu. Indra was puffed up with his victory and his power and his ever-grander palace, until he was shown the vastness of time - the Indras beyond counting who had risen and fallen before him, the very ants on his floor who had each been kings of heaven, the worlds upon worlds that arise and dissolve without end. Against that vastness, all pride is absurd, all grasping ambition is vanity, for we and all our works are the briefest of waves in an endless ocean of ages.

"Yet the lesson is not despair, nor the fleeing of all duty. It is the middle way: to do your work in the world faithfully and well, but to hold it lightly, without the pride that says 'I am great and my works shall last,' and without the despair that says 'all is vanity, so I will do nothing.' Remember the procession of the ants, and you will neither be puffed up by your high station nor crushed by its smallness, but will do your duty with a free and humble heart."

And the Pandavas, some of whom would one day sit again upon thrones, took to heart the procession of the ants, and the humility it teaches.