The Song of Parashara

'Grandfather,' Yudhishthira said, 'you have given me the duty of a king twice over, and I am one man who happens to be a king. Give me now what you would give a man who is not one. What is a person supposed to do with the life he was handed, if he was handed no throne, no learning and no birth worth boasting of?'

'Then hear Parashara,' Bhishma said, 'who was the father of Vyasa, and who answered exactly that for a king of Videha without softening one word of it.'

The king found him on the bank of the Ganga, where the sage kept a fire and a stretch of trodden sand and very little else. He did not begin with praise, which Parashara would have let pass, or with a riddle, which he would not.

'Holy one,' the king said, 'men come into my court every day arguing about birth. The brahmana tells me his merit is his by right of the mouth he came out of. The shudra tells me he was defeated before he was born and asks me what the point of trying is. One of them is lying to me and I no longer know which. Tell me what a man is actually supposed to do with the life handed to him.'

Parashara did not open with a hymn. 'Then you have asked about acts,' he said, 'and I will answer about acts, because nothing else in this world ripens. Understand the word. A birth is a beginning. A beginning is not a harvest. No man is eaten by the seed he grew from; he is eaten by the fruit, and the fruit grows on what he did with his hands and his mouth and his hours.

'A high birth is a good field. A field is not a crop. Leave it and it will produce weeds with perfect dignity, and the weeds will be as high-born as the man who neglected them.'

'You ask which of the two men in your court is lying,' Parashara said. 'Both are, and they are telling the same lie in opposite directions. The first says his birth has already done his work for him. The second says his birth has made his work pointless. Neither of them intends to do anything this afternoon, and that is the only thing the two positions have in common.

'There are four orders and there are four roads, and they arrive at one summit. The brahmana climbs by study, by restraint, by teaching what he has learned without selling it. The kshatriya climbs by protection, by never turning his back, by holding a scale steady when both pans hold men he knows. The vaishya climbs by honest increase, by cattle and fields and trade conducted without a false weight in the house. The shudra climbs by service given fully and without resentment, which is a harder discipline than any of the other three will ever admit.

'Now look at the mountain, king. It has one top. The four roads do not lead to four different heavens, one grand and three shabby. They meet. A man who has walked his own road all the way arrives beside a man who walked another, and no one at that height asks which path either of them came by.'

'And the man who wishes he had been given a different road?' the king asked.

'He stands still and calls his standing still a misfortune,' Parashara said. 'The road you were set on is the one under your feet. Its whole virtue is that it is under your feet. A man who spends his life admiring the brahmana's road while his own cattle starve has not honored study; he has merely found a respectable way to neglect his work. What is done well, in the place a man was actually set, carries him. What is done badly in a place he envied would not.'

'Take two men,' Parashara said. 'The first is entitled to a great rite and performs it carelessly, with his mind on the fee and the guests and how the thing will be reported. The second has no right to any rite at all and sweeps a courtyard, or carries water uphill for a household not his own, and does it completely, with attention, and without keeping an account of what he is owed for it.

'The second man is ahead. Not equal. Ahead. A rite neglected is a debt entered in the ledger; service given whole is a payment made. Any accounting that says otherwise is being kept by someone who benefits from the arithmetic.

'And do not tell me that the small work is small. There is no smallness in an act. There is only whether the man was present in it. The scale weighs attention, and attention is available to every order without exception, which is precisely why the summit can be reached from four directions.'

The king, who had a treasury and a bad conscience about it, asked what wealth did to a man on such a road.

'Wealth is not an obstacle,' Parashara said, 'and I will not flatter you by pretending I said something braver. Wealth honestly got and freely given away is no obstacle whatever. It is a road in its own right, and a hard one, because it is walked in full view of everything a man could keep instead.

'The two questions are how it came in and how it goes out. Money taken by a false weight, by a bribe, by squeezing a man who could not refuse, is poison however piously it is later spent, and the gift does not clean the getting. Money honestly earned and then held in a locked room does nothing at all; it simply sits there being a reason to worry. But wealth well got and well released feeds people and does not stick to the hands it passed through. A householder who does that is not behind the ascetic in the forest. He is doing in public what the ascetic does in private.'

'Now I will tell you the highest austerity,' Parashara said, 'and you will be disappointed, because it cannot be watched.

'Men come to this bank and stand in cold water until their lips go grey. They fast until the ribs show and the wife counts the days. They sit between four fires in the hot months and let the sun be the fifth. All of it is real, and none of it is the highest. There is no austerity equal to abstaining from injury.

'Not injuring is not a rest from effort; it is the effort itself, and unlike the fasts it never ends and nobody applauds it. Consider what it asks. Not to strike a man who has earned striking. Not to answer an insult with the sentence you have already composed. Not to ruin a rival when the ruining would be lawful and easy and admired. Not to keep the servant's small mistake in the mind where it can be produced later. The man in the water is cold for a season. The man who will not injure is at work every hour he is awake, for as long as he lives, and can show you nothing for it.'

'And the sacrifices?' the king said. 'The sacrifices are our whole tradition.'

'A sacrifice performed by a man who injures at home is a fine building with the foundation left out,' Parashara said. 'Keep the sacrifices. Do not let them stand in for the thing they were meant to train.

'Then consider the hour that settles it. A man dies and everything is stripped from him in the same instant: the body first, then the house, the herds, the fields, the sons who will hold his hand and then go back to their own lives. His caste does not travel. His learning, if he only recited it, does not travel. Nothing crosses with him but what he did, good and bad, and it crosses whole. That is the entire ledger. Everything else you are protecting is on the wrong side of the river.'

'One thing more,' Parashara said, 'because you have not asked it and every man in your court needs it. What is a man to do who has already done harm?

'Repent, and repentance works. I am exact about this. Not the performance of repentance, which is only a man arranging his face. Real repentance is threefold: he confesses the act without dressing it, he grieves that he did it and not merely that it was found out, and he does not do it again. A man who completes all three is not the man who did the deed. The deed remains in the account, but its root is cut, and a cut root does not send up the same tree next season. This is why no man is finished. Nobody's ledger closes while he is still breathing.

'And now the man I have no comfort for. He is the one who says everything is fate. He says the harvest is written, so why plant; the outcome is set, so why exert. He is often clever and he can always quote something. But note what he actually does, which is nothing, and note when he says it, which is only ever before the work and never after a success.

'Fate and effort pull the same cart. Effort without fate sometimes fails. Fate without effort produces nothing at all, ever. The seed does not sprout on the shelf because the rain is scheduled. So a man who counts on destiny has already made himself the one thing destiny cannot use, which is a man with his hands empty and his mind made up.'

'Then say it plainly,' the king said, 'so I can repeat it in my court tomorrow.'

'Conduct outranks birth,' Parashara said. 'No exception, no qualification, no softening for the men who will be offended by it. Acts ripen. Births do not.'

Bhishma let it stand as it was. 'He said it to a king,' he added, 'in front of the king's own attendants, and no one has improved on it since. Say it in your court, Yudhishthira, and do not add the softening. It has survived this long without one.'