The Naga Who Pulls the Sun

'Grandsire,' Yudhishthira said to Bhishma, who lay still upon his bed of arrows as the days of his waiting stretched on, 'you have taught me the duties of a king, but there is another question that will not leave me. Among all the ways a man might live - as a householder, an ascetic, a hermit in the forest, a wanderer with nothing - which is truly the highest? I have heard sages praise each one in turn, and I no longer know which to believe.'

Bhishma's breath came slowly, but his voice, when it came, was steady. 'You are not the first to ask that question in exactly that way, Yudhishthira, nor will you be the last. There is an old story of a brahmana who asked it too, and who could not rest until he found an answer worth trusting. His restlessness carried him at last to the forest of Naimisha, to the banks of the river Gomati, where a wise and virtuous naga named Padmanabha was said to live.'

'What made this naga wise enough to answer such a question?'

'That is part of the wonder,' Bhishma said. 'Padmanabha was no ordinary serpent of the depths. By an ancient arrangement among the great nagas, he took his turn, once in his long span of years, harnessed to the chariot of Surya himself, drawing the sun across the sky. A creature who has pulled the sun's own chariot has seen more of the world in a single day than most beings see in a lifetime. It was to this naga's hermitage that the brahmana came, seeking his answer - and finding, at first, that the naga himself was not there to give it.'

The brahmana arrived at the hermitage on the Gomati's bank tired from long travel and full of the question that had driven him there, only to find the dwelling occupied by a single figure - a woman of serene bearing who received him with every courtesy due a guest, offering water for his feet and a seat in the shade before he had even spoken his purpose.

'I have come seeking Padmanabha,' the brahmana said, once he had rested enough to speak. 'I am told he can answer a question that has followed me across many countries and many teachers: what is the highest way of life a man may choose?'

The woman, who was the naga's wife, listened gravely and then explained why her husband could not answer him that day, nor perhaps for some time yet. 'Among the great nagas there is an ancient duty,' she said, 'by which each in turn is yoked to the chariot of Surya and draws the sun in its circuit around the world. It is Padmanabha's season for that service now. He left many days ago to take up the harness, and he will not return until his turn is finished and another naga has relieved him of it. I cannot say precisely when that will be, only that it is not yet.'

The brahmana's face fell, for he had come a long way already and had hoped his search might end here. But the woman, seeing his weariness, added gently, 'You are welcome to wait in this hermitage until he comes. It is no small thing you have asked, and I do not think you will find it answered more truly anywhere else. Rest here. Eat what we have to give. My husband, when he returns from the sun's own road, will not turn away a guest who has waited for him with such patience.'

And so, with nowhere better to seek his answer, the brahmana resolved to stay.

The days that followed tested the brahmana in a way his long travels had not. He had expected to arrive, ask his question, and receive his answer - the ordinary shape of a pilgrim's errand. Instead he found himself settled into a stranger's hermitage with no way of knowing whether the naga's return was near or far off, and nothing to do but wait.

He kept himself to a strict discipline through those uncounted days, fasting more often than he ate, bathing in the cold Gomati each morning, and passing the hours in quiet reflection on the very question that had brought him there, turning it over the way a man turns a stone looking for the vein of gold he is certain runs through it. The naga's wife tended to him without complaint, bringing what simple food the hermitage could offer, never once suggesting that his welcome was wearing thin though the wait stretched on and on.

There were nights when the brahmana's resolve nearly broke, when the hunger of fasting and the ache of uncertainty made him wonder whether he had wasted his journey chasing an answer that might never come. But each time that doubt rose in him, he set it aside and returned to his vigil, for he had already tried the answers of many other teachers and found each one incomplete, and something told him that a creature who had drawn the sun's own chariot across the sky might see the question with an honesty no earthbound sage could match.

So he waited, patient where he might have been impatient, humble as a guest in another's house, and in that very waiting - though he did not yet know it - he was already practicing something of the answer he sought.

At last, after his long turn in the harness, Padmanabha returned to his hermitage on the Gomati, and found there a brahmana who had waited through the whole of his absence without complaint. The naga was moved by such patience and greeted his guest not as an intruder but as one who had already shown, in his waiting alone, a discipline worth honoring.

When the brahmana at last put his question to him - what is the highest way of life a man may choose - Padmanabha did not answer at once with a doctrine, but with a story of his own circuit, for he said the answer had found him on the road itself, in a place he had not expected it.

'I have drawn the sun's chariot across the whole width of the world, brahmana,' he said, 'and I have seen kings in their glittering courts and ascetics in their famous austerities, and none of them struck me as deeply as one figure I passed on my circuit - a gleaner, unknown and unnamed by any of the great teachers, who lived by the humblest of vows. He gathered no more than the grain left behind after the harvesters had taken their share, the scattered ears any householder would have forgotten, and from that alone he fed himself and whatever guest chanced to come to him. He asked the world for nothing it would miss, and gave to it, without hesitation, whatever little he had.'

'And what became of him?' the brahmana asked, leaning forward.

'I watched him from the sun's own chariot,' Padmanabha said, 'and I tell you he entered that light like a second sun rising to meet the first, so pure had his poverty made him. I have never forgotten it, in all my circuits since.'

The brahmana sat a long while in silence after Padmanabha finished, turning the naga's answer over with the same patience he had used through all his days of waiting. He had come to Naimisha expecting to be told of some rare and difficult austerity, some feat of fasting or renunciation beyond ordinary reach, the sort of thing famous sages were praised for in every hermitage he had visited. Instead he had been shown a gleaner who owned nothing, sought nothing, and had for that very reason outshone kings and ascetics alike in the eyes of a creature that pulled the sun.

'Then the highest way,' the brahmana said slowly, 'is not the way that asks the most of the world, but the way that asks the least of it, and gives back the most.'

'That is closer to it than most men come in a lifetime of asking,' Padmanabha answered.

From that day the brahmana took up the same humble discipline for himself, content to gather only what others had left behind, no longer restless in his search, for he had found in the poorest of practices an answer richer than any he had sought from wealth or fame.

On his bed of arrows, Bhishma let the story settle before he spoke again to Yudhishthira. 'You asked me which way of life is highest, and I will not pretend the sages agree on a single answer. But remember this brahmana's long wait by the Gomati, and what he found at the end of it. The world often teaches us to measure a life by what it commands or possesses. This story measures it instead by how little it takes and how much it is nonetheless willing to give. A king may rule the earth, Yudhishthira, but he does not thereby outshine a gleaner content with what the harvest left behind. Remember that, when your crown feels heavier than it should.'