The Sage and the Birds in the Fire

The sages told the Pandavas a tender tale set within the great burning of the Khandava forest - the tale of the sage Mandapala and his little birds, and of the parental love and the divine mercy that saved four tiny chicks in the heart of a world on fire.

There was a sage named Mandapala, who had practiced great austerities and lived all his life in celibacy and penance, devoting himself wholly to the spiritual path. But when at last he died and sought to enter the highest heavenly worlds, he found them closed to him. He learned that despite all his penance, he could not attain the highest regions, because he had left one great debt unpaid: he had no children. For a man owes a debt to his ancestors to continue the line and to perform the rites for them, and this debt of offspring Mandapala had never paid. Without children, even his great penance could not open to him the highest heaven.

Learning that he must have children, and wishing to beget them quickly and in numbers, Mandapala considered which creatures bred the most swiftly and abundantly, and he chose the birds. So he took the form of a male bird - a sharnga bird - and sought out a female bird named Jarita, and with her he had four little sons: four bird-chicks who were, in truth, great sages reborn in the bodies of birds, wise and holy even as nestlings. Jarita made a nest in the Khandava forest and there she tended her four featherless chicks with a mother's devotion, feeding and sheltering them, while they were yet too young to fly.

But Mandapala, restless and unsettled, did not stay with Jarita and his sons. He left them, the chicks still tiny in the nest, and went off with another female bird named Lapita, abandoning the mother and the four children to fend for themselves. So Jarita was left alone to raise her four helpless chicks - and it was then, with the chicks still unable to fly, that the great fire came.

It was at this time that the great burning of the Khandava forest began - the vast conflagration in which the fire-god Agni, aided by Krishna and Arjuna, consumed the whole forest in flames. The fire swept through the Khandava, roaring and devouring everything in its path, an inferno that spared nothing, rushing across the forest in a wall of flame.

And the fire came toward the nest where Jarita and her four tiny chicks dwelt. Jarita saw the flames approaching, the whole forest ablaze and the fire bearing down upon her little ones - and her four chicks were still too young to fly, still featherless nestlings who could not escape on their own. She was caught in the most dreadful situation a parent can face: her children in mortal danger, and no way, it seemed, to save them all.

Jarita was torn by an unbearable anguish. She could not carry all four of her chicks to safety at once - she had not the strength, and there was no time. She might have snatched up one and flown, saving herself and one child - but she could not bear to choose one and abandon the other three to the flames, nor could she bring herself to leave any of them. Frantic, grieving, she clung to her four little ones, unwilling to save herself while they perished, unable to save them all.

But the four chicks, wise beyond their tender age, spoke to their mother with a love and a clarity that broke her heart. 'Mother,' they said, 'do not stay and die here with us. Fly away and save yourself. If you die with us, all is lost - both you and we are gone. But if you live, you may have other children, and our line will go on, and you will be saved. Do not throw away your own life trying to save ours when you cannot. Leave us, dear mother, and live; we will face the fire and take our chance. It is better that you survive than that we all perish together.' So the little chicks, out of love, urged their own mother to abandon them and save herself - thinking of her life before their own, even as she thought of theirs before her own.

Far away, the sage Mandapala - though he had abandoned Jarita and his sons - was seized with anxiety for the children he had left behind, when he learned that the Khandava forest, where his chicks lay in their nest, was burning. For all that he had left them, he was their father still, and he could not bear the thought of his little sons perishing in the flames.

So Mandapala did the one thing he could do from afar: he prayed to Agni, the fire-god himself, who was even then consuming the forest. He called upon Agni and reminded the fire-god of services he had rendered him in the past, of the offerings and the honor he had given him, and he begged Agni, in return, to spare his four little sons in their nest - to let the fire pass them by and leave them unharmed amid the burning. He pleaded for the children he had left, asking the very fire that was devouring the forest to show mercy to his helpless chicks.

As the wall of flame bore down upon their nest, the four little chicks - who were, after all, great sages reborn, learned in the sacred lore even as nestlings - did not panic, but turned to face the fire with the only power they had: their devotion and their wisdom. They lifted up their small voices together and hymned Agni, the fire-god, with sacred praises, honoring him with the reverence due to a great deity, praising his glory and his power, and through that praise commending themselves to his mercy.

So there in the heart of the burning forest, with the flames almost upon them, the four tiny birds sang a hymn of praise to the very fire that was about to consume them - meeting their death, if death it was to be, not with terror but with reverence and devotion, honoring the god in his terrible form even as he came to devour them. And their devotion, joined to their father's plea, rose up to Agni in the midst of his burning.

And Agni, the fire-god, honored both the plea of Mandapala and the devotion of the four little chicks. As the great fire swept toward their nest, it did not consume them. The flames parted and passed around the nest, leaving the four chicks untouched in the very midst of the burning forest - a small island of safety in an ocean of fire, the nest and its four little ones spared while everything around them was consumed. By the mercy of Agni, won by a father's prayer and the children's own devotion, the helpless chicks lived, when all the forest burned.

When the fire had passed, Jarita - who in her anguish had been driven from the nest, fearing her children dead - hurried back, weeping, certain she would find only ashes. And instead she found her four little sons alive and whole, miraculously spared, sitting safe in their unburnt nest amid the blackened forest. Her grief turned to overwhelming joy, and she gathered her surviving children to her, scarcely able to believe that they had been saved.

Mandapala too came at last to the nest, to see whether his sons had survived. But Jarita, though glad her children lived, received him coldly, and reproached him for having abandoned her and the chicks in the first place, leaving her alone to face the fire with their helpless children while he went off with another. The reunion was a troubled one, the mother's hurt not easily soothed; yet the family had survived, the four sage-chicks safe, and the line of Mandapala continued.

The sages drew the lessons of the tale for the Pandavas. "See, in this small story set within the great fire, the depth of parental love and the love of children for their parents: the mother who would not save herself while her children were in danger, and the children who, out of love, urged their mother to live even at the cost of their own lives - each thinking of the other before the self. There is no love in the world more selfless than this mutual love of parent and child, each ready to perish for the other. And see how that love, joined to devotion, drew down the mercy of even the all-consuming fire: that a father's prayer and the children's own reverent devotion turned aside the flames, so that the innocent and the devoted were spared in the very heart of destruction. The Lord, and his powers, spare the devoted even amid the burning of the world; and there is no refuge for the helpless like devotion and the love that puts another before oneself."

And the Pandavas, who knew well the love of parents and children and the perils of fire and war, took to heart the tender tale of the four little birds who were spared in the burning of the Khandava.