The Sacrifice That Was Stopped

Vasishtha had a hundred sons in the morning of his life and none of them by the end of it. The eldest, Shakti, was devoured by a king who had been cursed into the shape and appetite of a man-eater, and the curse itself had been arranged by Vishvamitra out of an old rivalry over a hermitage and a cow (that whole ruin is told elsewhere). The others followed. A rival's spite, worked through a king's mouth, emptied the house of the most patient brahmin alive.

What the tradition remembers of him afterward is not a curse. It is a man walking away from his own hermitage looking for a way to die, and being refused by every means he tried. He bound himself and went into a river, and the water untied the ropes and set him on the bank. He went into fire, and the fire would not take hold of him. He threw himself from a height of the mountains and landed on stone as though on cotton. The world would not let the teacher of the Ikshvakus out of it.

He was coming back along that road, having failed even at grief, when he heard the Veda being recited behind him, faultlessly, in the pauses and stresses of the six limbs of learning, in a voice he did not know.

He turned. There was no one on the road but Adrishyanti, the widow of his eldest son, and she was carrying a child.

'Who is speaking?' he said.

'Your son's son,' she said. 'He is not born. He has been reciting for some time.'

Vasishtha stood on the road and listened to Shakti's unborn child chanting what Shakti had taught him without ever having seen him, and he gave up on dying. There was a line after all, and the line would need somebody to teach it.

The boy was born and named Parashara, and he was raised in the hermitage by the old man, and for the first years of his life he believed the old man was his father. There was no lie involved. Nobody had told him otherwise, and a grandfather who has buried a hundred sons does not volunteer the subject.

He found out the ordinary way, from a slip. He called Vasishtha father in his mother's hearing, and Adrishyanti wept, and a child asks why.

So she told him, and she told it whole, because half of it would have been worse. His father Shakti had met a king on a narrow road and had not stepped aside for him, holding that the road belongs to the brahmin before it belongs to the throne. The king struck him with a whip. Shakti cursed him to become an eater of men, and Vishvamitra, watching, saw an opening and drove a rakshasa into the king to make the curse bite at once. The first man the king ate was Shakti. Then he came back for the brothers, one after another, until the hermitage was hollow.

Parashara heard all of this at an age when nothing yet stands between a fact and the will.

'Then I know what to do,' he said.

He did not go looking for the king, who was by then only a used instrument, nor for Vishvamitra, who had a hermitage full of austerity to hide behind. He went after the kind. A rakshasa had been put into the king; a rakshasa's mouth had closed on his father. Very well: he would take the fire he had been taught to build for the gods and he would build one that no rakshasa anywhere in the three worlds could stand outside of.

And Vasishtha, who had heard every word of the telling, did not forbid him.

The sacrifice Parashara kindled was not one of the rites laid down for the seasons. It was built the way the great rites are built, with the same measured ground and the same fed flames, but its declared object was the extinction of a race.

He sat down at the fire and made the offering, and the offering worked. Rakshasas began to come out of the air and the caves and the far quarters of the world, unable to stay away, dragged toward that fire the way iron is dragged, and they fell into it and burned. They came old and they came young. They came in the shapes they had been wearing when the pull found them.

The ones who had done the thing he was avenging did not come, because they were already dead, or because they had never been more than a spirit driven into a cursed king by another man's malice. What came instead were the ones who happened to be that kind. Rakshasas who had never seen a hermitage. Rakshasas who had eaten nothing but what the forest gave them. Mothers, and creatures too young to have done anything at all, falling into a boy's fire in a Himalayan clearing for a killing they had not committed and could not have prevented.

Parashara sat in the smoke with his face going dark from the smearing of it, feeding the fire and saying the words, and looking, the tradition says, like the fire at the end of an age.

And his grandfather sat nearby and watched.

Vasishtha did not raise a hand. He, of all men living, could have quenched that rite with a syllable. But the fire had been lit for his hundred sons, and there is a silence that a bereaved man keeps because he is not certain, in the first years, that he wants it put out.

It was Pulastya who came. He was one of the mind-born sages of the beginning of things, and he was also the ancestor of the rakshasas, which is to say that the creatures falling into the fire were his descendants exactly as Parashara was Vasishtha's. He came and stood at the edge of the sacrificial ground with his own line burning in front of him, and he did not curse the boy.

'Child,' he said, 'whose crime is being paid here?'

Parashara went on with the offering and did not look up.

'You know what was done to your father,' Pulastya said. 'I know it too. It was done by one rakshasa, driven into a king who had been cursed, by a man who is not a rakshasa at all. Name me the one in that fire who held the knife. You cannot, because you are not aiming at the guilty. You are aiming at a kind. And you are the son of a house that the whole world uses to define patience. Sinless beings are dying in front of me, and your grandfather is sitting there, and neither of you has said the word that stops it.'

Then Vasishtha spoke, and it mattered that he spoke second.

'He is right,' the old man said. 'And I will tell you the thing I have never told you, since you are old enough to hear it. My sons did not die because rakshasas exist. They died by deeds of their own from lives you never saw, and the king and the spirit and Vishvamitra were only the road those deeds walked in on. Anger eats the austerity of the man who keeps it, and it eats it before it ever reaches the one he is angry at. Forbearance is not one of a brahmin's virtues, child. It is the whole of his greatness. I lost a hundred and I am telling you this. If it were not true I would have burned the world myself, and I had the strength to do it.'

Parashara stopped.

He stopped for the reason that is the whole point of the story: not because a stranger had told him that mercy was admirable, but because the two men with the best standing in the three worlds to demand blood had both refused to take it. One had lost a hundred sons and one was watching his descendants burn, and neither of them wanted what was being done for them.

But a rite begun cannot simply be abandoned, and an anger that large does not evaporate because the argument against it has been won. So Parashara did what his kind has always done with a fire it will not use: he found it a place. He took the unfinished sacrifice, still burning, still hungry, and cast it into the great forest on the northern side of Himavat, above the passes, where nothing keeps a hermitage and no rite is ever performed.

It is still there. It falls on the rakshasas of that empty country, and when there are none it eats the trees, and when there are no trees it eats the stones, and it burns on the parva days without anyone to feed it.

The boy who set it down went on to become one of the great compilers and reciters of the tradition, and years later, ferried across the Yamuna by a fisherman's daughter, he fathered on her the child who would divide the Veda into four and set down the Bharata itself. It is worth saying plainly, because most people meet him only in that later scene: the Parashara who is Vyasa's father is this one, the orphan who nearly burned a race and was talked out of it in time.

The voice that speaks the epic came from a man who had been shown, before he was grown, exactly what it costs to answer a killing with a category.