Matanga's Austerity

The bed of arrows had become, in these last weeks, less a deathbed than a second court, for the field around Bhishma still smelled of ash and the ministers of the new reign still came to him daily for judgments no one else living could give. The sun crossed him morning to evening like a slow clock counting down a debt not yet called due, and Kurukshetra dried its blood by inches beneath him.

Yudhishthira came again on a morning when the camp behind him was arguing, as camps of the newly victorious always argue, about which men among the allies deserved which honors, and whose blood was too low for which seat. He had listened to the arguing longer than he wanted to and had come away troubled by something none of the arguers had said aloud.

"Grandfather," he said, "I am asked to seat men by their birth and I do not know, in my heart, whether birth is the true measure at all. If a man is born low and lives high - if he burns himself clean through discipline and worship and the hardest striving a life can hold - can he not simply become what his birth denied him? Can striving not unmake what birth has set?"

Bhishma was silent long enough that Yudhishthira thought the pain had taken him again. Then: "There is an old story, king, that answers you more honestly than any rule of mine could, and I warn you before I tell it that its honesty will not comfort you. It is the story of a man named Matanga, who asked your very question with his whole life, and received his answer from a god."

"Matanga was raised in a brahmin's house believing himself a brahmin's son, and lived the years of a brahmin's training - the Vedas learned by ear, the fire tended, the thread worn across his chest as a mark of a birth twice given, once by the body and once by the sacred rite. He was proud of it in the way young men are proud of things they have never had to question, which is to say completely."

"One day, sent by his father to gather what was needed for a sacrifice, he drove out in a cart drawn by a young ass, and when the young animal dragged the cart off toward its mother, he struck it again and again on the nose. And the she-ass, its mother - for the old tales allow beasts to speak the truths men will not speak to each other - comforted her foal where Matanga could hear, saying plainly that no true brahmin's hand would fall so cruelly, for brahmins are gentle by the very nature their birth confers, and that his hand betrayed a nature no thread could hide: the one driving was a chandala, got upon a brahmin woman by a shudra barber. Matanga leapt down from the cart and demanded to know how his mother was stained, and the she-ass told him."

"Matanga turned back home without the things for the sacrifice. When his father asked why he had returned with his task undone, he answered that no one of uncertain or lowly birth could be well, that a she-ass more than human had told him his mother was a brahmin but his father a shudra, and that he must now torment himself with the greatest austerities."

"The world he had lived in until that morning had not changed, but he had. The thread stayed on his chest, but it had become, in a single day, a lie he felt he wore in public."

"A lesser man breaks under such a fall, Yudhishthira, or spends his life pretending it did not happen. Matanga did neither. He walked into the forest with a fury turned inward, and he made a vow that the sages who tell this story still repeat with something like dread: he would burn his way into the brahminhood the world had refused him. Not earn it by favor, not beg it by service - burn for it, in tapas so total it would force the three worlds to notice."

"He stood on one foot for years at a time until the foot forgot the ground. He fed on air and smoke and the little rain that reached his open mouth, until his body was less a body than a standing coal, banked and glowing and utterly still. He stood on one foot for a hundred years, and then, the story says, a thousand, and at last on his toes for a hundred more at Gaya, until he was nothing but skin, veins and bone."

"The heat of that austerity did not stay contained to the small clearing where he stood. It rose, the way great tapas always rises, until the seats of the gods themselves grew warm and uncomfortable, until Indra, lord of the thunderbolt, felt his own throne begin to shake with the force of one broken man's want. No king, however powerful, can long ignore a fire built with that much patience behind it, and Indra came down from heaven to see for himself what mortal was burning hard enough to trouble a god's sleep."

"Indra found a man scarcely recognizable as flesh, and, moved by the force of the austerity if not yet by its cause, offered what gods offer when they wish to end a tapas cheaply - a boon, freely given, before the asking could grow more dangerous still. Matanga did not hesitate. He asked to be made a brahmin."

"Indra refused, gently at first, the way one refuses a request one hopes will simply be forgotten, and told him to ask for any other boon. Matanga held his tapas. Indra came again and again across the long years, each time warning that the pursuit would destroy him and bidding him name something else. Each time Matanga asked for the one thing: to be made a brahmin. When at last, wasted to bone at Gaya, he fell, Indra came down and caught him as he fell."

"It was here that Indra gave the answer the story is truly told to deliver, and gave it, the old telling insists, with something closer to sorrow than to refusal's usual coldness. 'What you ask, Matanga, is the one boon no tapas can purchase, in this life or in ten thousand like it. A river does not become a mountain by wanting hard enough, however long or however honestly it wants. Birth sets a channel, and the fiercest striving of a single lifetime does not cut a new one. Your fire has purified you until there is scarcely a fleck of the old anger left in you - I see that, and I do not dismiss it. But it has not, and it will not, unmake the womb you were born from. That gate does not open for austerity. It has never opened for austerity, for any man, in any age.'"

Matanga's fire did not go out at the refusal, though the old tellings say something in him went very quiet. He told Indra he was already like a dead man being struck again, asked why men born brahmins so often failed to keep that station while he, self-restrained, non-violent and without possessions, could not have it, and grieved that his mother's fault had fixed his fate.

Then he asked for other things: to move as he pleased like a bird through the skies, to enjoy what he wished, to be honored by brahmins and kshatriyas alike, and to have a fame that would not decay. What Indra granted was a strange and particular honor: he would be famous as a god of metre, a chhandodeva, and would be worshiped by women. Then Indra vanished, and Matanga gave up his life and reached a high place - honored, in his way, and never one of the twice-born.

"I will not soften this story for you, Yudhishthira, by pretending it ends kindly. Hold both of its truths at once, because the tradition holds both and will not let either go. The first truth is iron: birth is a gate that austerity in a single life does not open, and not even a god who admired Matanga without reservation would open it for him. The second truth is the sting the story cannot quite hide beneath the first - that Matanga's greatness was real, entire, undeniable even to Indra's own mouth, and the door stayed shut on it regardless. Indra's own words were that the station of a brahmin is supreme and is not won by striving. Yet do not forget what it cost."

"You will hear elsewhere, from the teaching that remembers the sage Bhrigu, that conduct makes the brahmin and not birth at all - and I will not pretend to you that the two teachings sit comfortably side by side, king, because they do not. Dharma has rooms in it the sages themselves still dispute. You are not given the office of settling which room is correct. You are given only the office of ruling in them - and where a room is disputed, rule it, always, with the extra gentleness owed to a question no one living has finished answering."