The King Who Slept in the Cave

The sages told the Pandavas of King Mucukunda, who slept for ages in a cave with a fiery glance to guard his rest, and of how Krishna used that sleeping king to destroy an enemy without lifting a weapon - a tale of cleverness over force, and of the vastness of time.

Long ago there lived a great and righteous king named Mucukunda, of the ancient solar line. In his day the gods were hard pressed in their endless war against the demons, and they had no general able to lead them. So they came to Mucukunda, mightiest of mortal warriors, and begged him to leave his kingdom and lead the armies of heaven against the demons. Mucukunda agreed, and for a very long age he fought at the head of the celestial hosts, defeating the demons again and again, guarding the gods through the long years of their war, until at last the war-god Skanda was born and took up the command of heaven's armies in his place.

The grateful gods offered Mucukunda any boon he wished, in reward for his long service. But the king, when he turned his thoughts back to the earth he had left, found that there was nothing left there for him. Time passes differently in heaven than on earth, and during the long ages he had been away fighting the demons, all that he had known - his family, his friends, his kingdom, his whole generation - had aged and died and crumbled into the dust of forgotten centuries. He had returned, in a sense, to a world that no longer held anyone he knew; all he had loved was gone, swept away by the ages while he fought in heaven.

Weary beyond all telling after the endless war, and finding the earth emptied of everything familiar, Mucukunda asked for the only thing his exhausted heart desired: sleep. Long, deep, undisturbed sleep. The gods granted it, and added to it a boon for his protection: that he might sleep in a cave for as long as he wished, undisturbed - and that whoever should dare to wake him from his sleep would, in that very instant, be burned to ashes by the fire of Mucukunda's first angry glance. So the weary king lay down in a deep, dark cave, and closed his eyes, and slept - and slept on, age after age, while the world turned on above him and forgot that he had ever been.

Ages later, in the time of Krishna, a fierce and powerful barbarian king named Kalayavana arose - a foreign warlord of immense strength, allied with Krishna's enemies. Stirred up against Krishna and eager to win glory by destroying him, Kalayavana marched upon the city of Mathura with a vast and terrible army, intent on overwhelming Krishna and the people of the city.

Krishna saw that Kalayavana's host was enormous, and that a direct battle would mean great slaughter and danger to the people of Mathura. He had no wish to spend the lives of his people in a bloody defense if there was a cleverer way. And he perceived, too, that Kalayavana himself was protected in such a way that meeting him in open combat would be costly. So Krishna resolved to defeat this dangerous enemy not by force, but by stratagem - to outwit him, and to use against him an old, sleeping power of which Kalayavana knew nothing.

So Krishna did a thing that surprised everyone, and that won him one of his names. When Kalayavana came against him, Krishna did not stand and fight. Instead he turned and fled - leaving the battlefield, running away on foot from the barbarian king, so that ever after he was called by some Ranchhod, 'the one who quit the field.' But it was no cowardice; it was the bait of a careful trap.

Kalayavana, seeing the famous Krishna flee before him, was filled with eager pride. Certain that he could catch and kill Krishna himself and win undying glory, he abandoned his army and gave chase alone, pursuing Krishna on foot, determined to run him down and slay him with his own hands. Krishna let him come close, but never quite close enough to be caught, leading the barbarian king on and on, drawing him away from his army and toward a particular dark cave in the hills - the very cave where, ages before, the weary King Mucukunda had lain down to his endless sleep.

Krishna ran into the dark mouth of the cave, and Kalayavana, close behind, followed him in.

Inside the dark cave, Krishna slipped quietly aside and hid himself in the shadows. Kalayavana, plunging in after him out of the daylight, could see little in the gloom. But there in the depths of the cave he made out the form of a man lying asleep upon the ground - and in the darkness, and in his eagerness, he took the sleeping figure for Krishna, supposing that his quarry had lain down or fallen there.

"So," thought Kalayavana, "the coward thinks to hide by lying still in the dark. Now I have him." And, furious, he strode up to the sleeping man and kicked him hard to wake him, intending to fall upon him and kill him the moment he stirred. "Get up and fight, Krishna!" he cried. "Do not think to escape me by feigning sleep!"

But the sleeping man was not Krishna. It was Mucukunda, the ancient king, woken now from his age-long sleep by the barbarian's kick - and woken, by the gods' old boon, into the very thing that boon had promised to any who dared disturb his rest.

Mucukunda opened his eyes after his ages of sleep, roused rudely by the kick of a stranger, and his first waking look fell, full of the natural anger of one so disturbed, upon Kalayavana standing over him.

And the boon of the gods did its work at once. The fire of Mucukunda's first angry glance, charged by the gods to consume whoever dared wake him, blazed out upon the barbarian king - and in that instant Kalayavana was burned utterly to ashes where he stood, consumed in a moment by the fiery look of the waking king, crumbling to a heap of cinders on the floor of the cave.

So the dangerous enemy who had marched a vast army against Krishna and chased him into the dark was destroyed - not by Krishna's hand, not by any weapon, not by the spending of a single life of Mathura, but by the ancient boon of a sleeping king, into whose fiery waking glance Krishna's stratagem had cunningly delivered him. The barbarian had killed himself, in effect, by his own eager pride, kicking awake a doom he never knew was there.

Then Mucukunda, fully awake now and bewildered, saw emerging from the shadows of the cave another figure - radiant, beautiful, glowing with a divine light: Krishna, revealing himself. Mucukunda, who had served the gods of old and knew the marks of divinity, perceived at once that this was no ordinary man but the supreme Lord himself, come in human form, and he bowed before him in worship and wonder.

Krishna spoke kindly to the ancient king. He told Mucukunda who he was, and praised his long and faithful service to the gods in ages past, and his long penance of sleep. He explained how he had used the king's fiery boon to rid himself of the dangerous Kalayavana, and he blessed Mucukunda for the part he had unknowingly played. And he told the king that his long ages of service and of sleep had purified him, that his weariness was over, and that he should now go and complete his journey - that he should perform penance and devotion and so attain, in time, the highest liberation. Mucukunda's heart, so long weary and empty, was filled now with peace and with the joy of having looked upon the Lord, and all his ancient sorrow fell away.

Mucukunda rose from the cave where he had slept for ages and walked out at last into the daylight - and into a world utterly changed from the one he had left. Everything he had known was gone, the very mountains and rivers altered, the people smaller and shorter-lived than the mighty folk of his own ancient age, his kingdom and his name long forgotten. He was a man wholly out of his own time, the last survivor of a vanished age, with nothing left to bind him to the world.

But he was at peace, for he had looked upon the Lord and been blessed and given his charge. He turned his back on the changed world that held nothing for him, and went away to the high mountains, to give his remaining time to penance and devotion, seeking the liberation Krishna had promised him.

The sages drew the lessons for the Pandavas. "See first the wisdom of Krishna, who defeated a mighty and dangerous enemy not by force and slaughter, which would have cost his people dear, but by cleverness - by a stratagem that turned the enemy's own eager pride against him and delivered him into an ancient doom, so that not one of Mathura's people need die. The wise commander wins, where he can, by wit rather than by blood, and spares his people the cost of a battle he can avoid.

"And see, once more, the vastness of time and the smallness of all our works within it - Mucukunda, who fought for the gods and slept for ages, woke to find his whole world and all he loved swept utterly away, as if it had never been. Even kingdoms and ages pass and are forgotten. Hold the things of the world lightly, knowing how swiftly the ages carry them off; and seek, as Mucukunda turned at last to seek, the one thing that does not pass."

And the Pandavas took to heart both the cleverness of their friend Krishna and the sobering vastness of the time that swallows all things.