Manu Answers the Teacher of the Gods

Bhishma lay upon his bed of arrows on the field of Kurukshetra, waiting for the sun to turn north before he would let go of his life, and still the questions came to him, and still he answered them. Yudhishthira, newly crowned and heavier for it, knelt beside the grandsire and asked how a man might know his own self when even the wisest disagreed about what the self was. Bhishma smiled and said that the doubt was old, older than kings, and that he would answer it the way it had first been answered, in a debate between Brihaspati, preceptor of the gods, and Manu, the first of lawgivers.

Manu, Bhishma said, was the son of Brahma, and it was Brahma who had given him the law by which the three worlds were to be governed, teaching it to him in Brahmaloka, that realm beyond death where speech grows plain because there is nothing left to hide. Manu had carried that law down to Mount Meru, and taught it there from its height, so that gods and sages who wished to understand duty climbed to him as pilgrims climb to a spring.

It was to this height that Brihaspati came, not as a pupil this time but as a tester, for even the preceptor of the gods liked to know whether a teaching would hold under pressure. He did not doubt dharma itself, only the wobbling word self that every teacher used and no one had shown him. If the five elements, earth and water and fire and air and space, combined to make a body and a mind, he said, then what was left over to call a self, and why should anyone believe in it. Manu received the challenge as a teacher receives a good question, without offense, and settled to answer it in full.

"You say mind arises from the elements," Brihaspati said, "so let it be granted. But then tell me what a mind is for, if flesh and blood and breath already do the work of living. And tell me more: you claim I can know things. Knowledge comes to me through the senses, does it not, eye and ear and tongue and skin and nose. Every one of them reports a shape, a sound, a taste, a texture, a smell. Show me, then, how I am to know anything that has none of these, a thing with no colour to be seen, no sound to be heard, nothing at all that the senses can carry to me. If such a thing existed, it would be exactly as if it did not, for no report of it could ever arrive."

Manu answered that the question mistook the messenger for the master. "The eye sees a colour and the ear hears a sound," he said, "but the eye does not know that it has seen, nor the ear that it has heard. Something behind the five gates receives what each gate brings and says, this is a colour, this is a sound, this is one thing and not another. That receiver is the mind, and behind the mind stands a knower who reads what the mind assembles, as a king reads the reports his ministers bring him without riding out to see the province himself. You ask why a mind is needed when flesh already lives: flesh grows and decays without knowing it grows and decays, the way a river runs without ever tasting itself. The mind is what turns living into knowing. And you ask how the senses could ever report what has no colour or sound: they cannot, and were never meant to. The knower is not one more object waiting for a sense to catch it. He is the one thing that cannot be seen because he is what does the seeing."

Brihaspati was not finished. "Grant me the knower, unseen behind the seeing," he said. "Here is a harder question. Two men sit at the same table before the same dish. One eats and calls it the finest meal of his life. The other eats and calls it bitter, or eats without tasting it at all, his mind elsewhere with a grief of his own. The dish has not changed. If the senses report faithfully, why do two reports differ so completely over one and the same thing?"

"Because the senses were never faithful the way you imagine," Manu said. "You picture the eye and the tongue as clean messengers carrying an unbiased account to the knower, but no report leaves the gates untouched. Desire runs ahead of the messenger and paints the dish sweet before it is tasted, because the eater wants it to be sweet. Aversion runs ahead of another messenger and paints the same dish bitter, because that eater's mind is turned toward some old sorrow and has no room left for the meal in front of him. Wanting and not-wanting are not feelings that arrive after the report. They travel with it, mixed into it, so that by the time the knower reads what the mind assembles, the colouring is already done. This is why one man's feast is another man's grief at the very same table. It is not the dish that differs. It is what each mind has already decided to want or refuse before the food ever touched the tongue."

Brihaspati pressed once more, and this time his voice had lost its edge, for he had begun to see where the answer was leading. "If desire and aversion stain every report before it arrives," he said, "then how could the knower ever be found at all? Every road to him seems to run through a mind that lies."

"Not lies," Manu said, "colours. And a colour can be washed out. A mind that chases after objects, always reaching for the next taste, the next sight, the next thing to want or refuse, never sits still long enough for its own colouring to settle and clear. But a mind can be trained to stop chasing. When the reaching quiets, when a man no longer runs after every dish and every insult and every praise, the mixture the mind has been carrying begins to still, the way muddy water clears when the jar is set down and left alone. In that stillness the reports arrive plain, no longer painted by wanting, and the knower who was always receiving them, unseen because he was never an object to be seen, becomes visible to himself in the very stillness of the instrument that had been hiding him."

Brihaspati sat with this a long moment. He had come to test whether the teaching of the self could survive a hard question, and he found instead that his hard questions had described the path to it rather than against it. "You have shown me," he said at last, "that the eye cannot see itself seeing, and the mind cannot weigh itself weighing, no more than a scale can place itself upon its own pan. What measures cannot be measured by what it measures." Manu inclined his head, for the preceptor of the gods had said in one line what the sage had taken an argument to teach.

Bhishma fell silent a moment on his bed of arrows, and Yudhishthira, who had come to the grandsire heavy with a king's doubts, saw that the old debate had been aimed at him as surely as it had once been aimed at Manu. "You ask how a man may know himself when even the wise disagree," Bhishma said. "The disagreement is only ever about the instrument, never about the hand that holds it. Your eyes will fail you, your ears will fail you, and even your mind, if you let it run always outward, chasing the next battle and the next grief, will fail you too, colouring every report with what it already wants or dreads. But nothing that can be caught by the senses was ever going to be the self, no more than the reflection in a river is the man standing on its bank."

Yudhishthira asked how, then, a king was to rule when even his own judgment might be stained by wanting. "By the same stillness Manu taught, up on that mountain where the law itself was first handed down," Bhishma answered. "Not by refusing to see or hear or judge, but by no longer chasing what each seeing and hearing and judging tempts you to want. A still mind reports the world as it is. A restless one reports only its own hunger, dressed up as the world." Yudhishthira bowed over the grandsire's hand and said nothing further, for there are teachings that ask to be carried rather than answered, and this, he understood, was one of them.