The Boy Who Questioned Death

Among the tales of the search for the deepest knowledge, the sages told the Pandavas of a boy named Nachiketa, who went to the house of Death itself and came back with the secret of what does not die.

Nachiketa was the young son of a sage named Vajashravasa, a man who wished to gain merit by performing a great sacrifice in which a giver is meant to give away all that he possesses. But when the time came to make his offerings, the father's heart was small. Instead of giving his best, he gave away only his worthless cattle - old cows that could no longer eat or drink or give milk or bear calves, cows that were of no use to anyone. He kept his good wealth and offered only what he no longer wanted, and called it sacrifice.

Nachiketa, though only a boy, was devoted to truth and dharma, and the sight of his father's hollow generosity troubled him deeply. He understood that a sacrifice made with such grudging, worthless gifts would bring no real merit, but rather the opposite, and out of love for his father he wished to wake him to what he was doing.

Reasoning that a true sacrifice means giving away what one holds most dear, and that his father's dearest possession was his own son, Nachiketa came to his father and asked a simple, piercing question.

"Father," he said, "to whom will you give me?"

The father, busy and distracted, ignored him. But the boy was in earnest, and he asked again, and a third time: "Father, to whom will you give me? To whom will you give me?"

At the third asking, the father, irritated beyond patience by the child's persistence in the middle of his rituals, snapped out in anger the words he did not mean: "I give you to Death! I give you to Yama, the Lord of the Dead!"

The words were spoken in a flash of temper, carelessly, as men say things they do not intend. But they had been spoken, and Nachiketa was a boy who believed that a word, once given, must be honored - even a word spoken in anger, even by a father who already regretted it. To him, his father's utterance was now a vow that bound them both, and he resolved to fulfill it.

Nachiketa went to his father and told him gently that he would go, as he had been given, to the house of Death. The father, horrified at what his hasty words had done, tried to take them back, begging the boy to stay, saying he had not meant it. But Nachiketa would not let his father become a man who broke his word.

"What is said must be kept, father," the boy answered. "You have given me to Yama, and to Yama I must go. Do not grieve, and do not make your word a lie. Look at those who have gone before and those who will come after: like grain a mortal ripens, like grain he is born again. All flesh passes. Let me go and keep your word, and there is no harm in it."

And so, calm and unafraid, the boy set out alone for the abode of Yama, the Lord of the Dead - the one journey that every creature must someday make, undertaken now by a child, willingly, to keep his father's truth. He came at last to the house of Death. But Yama was not at home. The Lord of the Dead had gone away upon his terrible business, and would not return for three days.

So Nachiketa waited. He sat down at the threshold of the house of Death, and there he remained for three full days and three nights, taking no food and no water, a guest at the door of Yama with no host to receive him. He did not complain, and he did not leave. He simply waited, patient and unmoving, at the door of Death, for the master of the house to return.

When Yama at last came back, his attendants were dismayed, and they hurried to warn him. "Lord," they said, "a brahmin guest has been waiting at your door for three days and nights, unfed and unwelcomed. This is a grave matter. A brahmin guest is like a fire that enters a house; if he is neglected and his hopes and expectations are dashed, he can burn away all the merit and good fortune of the household that failed to honor him. You must make amends to this boy at once, for the breach of hospitality is serious."

Yama, the upholder of order and law, knew the gravity of having let a guest wait so long unhonored. He came to Nachiketa, received him with courtesy, and at once set about making amends in the proper way.

"Brahmin boy," said Yama, "you have waited at my door three nights without food, a guest unhonored, and that is a fault in me. To make amends, I grant you three boons - one for each of the three nights you waited. Ask of me three things, whatever you wish, and they shall be yours."

Nachiketa was glad, for he had questions in his heart that only the Lord of Death could answer. He considered, and then he made his first request - and it was not for himself.

"For my first boon," he said, "let this be granted: that my father's anger toward me be gone; that when I return to him, he be at peace and free of grief and worry, and welcome me gladly, knowing me again, his temper cooled. Let my father not be tormented over what he did, but be calm and content."

"It is granted," said Yama. "Your father will be free of all anger and anxiety toward you, and will welcome you with love when you return, and sleep peacefully. Ask your second boon."

For his second boon, Nachiketa asked for sacred knowledge - the knowledge of a particular holy fire-rite, the fire-altar by which a person crosses beyond hunger and thirst and grief and gains the world of heaven, the realm where there is no fear, not even the fear of death and old age, where the blessed dwell free of sorrow.

"Tell me of that fire," said Nachiketa, "the fire that leads to the heavenly world. I am ready to learn it."

Yama was pleased, for it was a worthy request, and he taught the boy fully the secret of that fire-altar - how it is built, what stones it requires, how it is kindled and arranged. Nachiketa listened and grasped it all perfectly, repeating it back without flaw. So delighted was Yama with the boy's quick and complete understanding that he granted him a further gift: he declared that from then on that very fire-rite would be called the Nachiketa fire, named forever after the boy who had learned it so well, that his name might endure with the sacred knowledge.

Then Yama said, "You have your second boon and an extra one besides. Now ask your third."

Then Nachiketa asked the great question, the one he had truly come for - the deepest question that any being can ask, and the one most fitting to ask of Death himself.

"When a person dies," said the boy, "there is this doubt: some say the soul still exists, and some say it does not. What is the truth? Does anything of us survive death, or are we simply ended? Teach me this. Tell me the secret of what lies beyond death - the truth about the Self that does or does not endure. This is my third boon."

Yama was startled, and reluctant. This was the one question he did not wish to answer, for it touched the most subtle and hidden of all truths. He tried to turn the boy aside. "Do not press me on this," he said. "Even the gods of old were puzzled by this question; it is subtle beyond easy telling. Ask me something else. Ask for anything else at all, and it is yours."

And to tempt the boy away from his question, Yama offered him the whole treasury of the world.

"Choose sons and grandsons who will live a hundred years," Yama said. "Choose cattle and horses and elephants and gold, vast lands, a long life for yourself. Choose any pleasure that is hard to win in the mortal world; I will give you lovely women with chariots and music, attendants such as men cannot obtain. Only do not ask me about death."

But Nachiketa was not to be moved. "All these pleasures, O Death, are fleeting," he answered. "They wear out the vigor of the senses; and even the longest life is short before you. Keep your horses and your dancing and your gold; keep your long life. What use is wealth to me when I have seen you, who must take it all in the end? What use is long life, when you stand before me? No - I will have no boon but the one I asked. Tell me the truth about what survives death. That alone I choose."

Then Yama, delighted, knew he had found a rare and worthy student, for the boy had passed the truest test of all. "There are two paths," Yama told him, "the path of the pleasant and the path of the good - the preya and the shreya. The pleasant is what gratifies the senses now; the good is what leads to lasting welfare, though it is harder. The fool chooses the pleasant and is lost; the wise choose the good. You, Nachiketa, have set aside all the pleasant things I offered, all the objects of desire that drown most men, and chosen the good. Therefore you are fit to be taught."

And so the Lord of Death taught the boy the supreme knowledge - the secret of the Self that does not die. He taught him that within the body, beyond the senses and the mind, there dwells the Atman, the true Self, which is unborn and undying, which was not born and will never die, which slays not and is not slain. The body perishes, Yama said, but the Self that wears it is eternal; smaller than the small and greater than the great, it abides in the heart of every creature, beyond time, beyond change, beyond death itself. The one who knows this Self as deathless is freed from the fear of death, for he knows that what he truly is can never be killed.

Death cannot touch the deathless, Yama taught; and the one who realizes the imperishable Self within is liberated from the whole round of dying and being born. He showed Nachiketa the way of turning the mind inward, away from the fleeting objects of the senses, to know that changeless reality - and so to cross beyond grief and death entirely.

Nachiketa received the teaching fully and was made free. Having gone to the very house of Death and asked Death himself the deepest of all questions, the boy returned with the highest of all knowledge - the knowledge of what in us cannot die - and attained the supreme peace. So the child who kept his father's careless word won, at Death's own door, the secret of immortality.