Pushkara, the First Ford

The Kamyaka forest held no lake like the one the Pandavas would hear of that day, only the green shade of its trees, the smoke of the brahmanas' fires, and five brothers and Draupadi waiting, anxious, for word of Arjuna, who had gone to the heavens for weapons. Then the devarshi Narada came among them, radiant as a blazing fire, and when he had accepted their homage he asked Yudhishthira what he could give him. Yudhishthira asked for only one thing: to know what merit a man gains who circles the earth and visits all its sacred fords.

'Listen to what Bhishma once heard from Pulastya,' Narada said. He told how Bhishma, keeping a vow for his father on the banks of the Ganga, had been visited by that great sage and had asked him the same question, and how Pulastya, after naming who could receive the fruit of the fords at all, had named one lake in the west before every other. 'There is in the world of men a ford of the god of gods,' Narada recited, 'famous in the three worlds, and it is called Pushkara. The grandfather Brahma dwells there always, worshipped by gods and demons alike, and at the three twilights ten thousand crores of fords are gathered in that one water. The Adityas, the Vasus, the Rudras and the Maruts, the gandharvas and the apsaras, are always present there.'

Yudhishthira looked out at the ordinary forest stream beside the hermitage, herons stalking its shallows, a brahmana filling a clay jar at its edge, and tried to picture the invisible court the sage described keeping watch over a lake he had never seen. 'Here I see herons,' he said, 'and a man with a water jar.'

'That is because you are not asked to see them,' Narada answered. 'You are asked to bathe as though they watch, which asks more of the mind than seeing ever would.'

In Pulastya's telling, Pushkara was the origin of all the fords, as Madhusudana is the origin of all the gods, and so it stood first on the long list. It seemed to Yudhishthira that it stood first not only for its grandeur but because it taught the discipline every later ford would only repeat. A king who had lost his kingdom at dice sat in a forest hermitage and listened, uncertain, for the first time, of what exactly a pilgrim was meant to wash away.

As the afternoon wore on and the light through the Kamyaka trees turned the color of hammered copper, Narada went on reciting what Pulastya had promised anyone who came to Pushkara with a mind held in check. The merit was not measured in ordinary units. Whatever sins a man or woman had gathered since birth, the teaching said, were destroyed by bathing there; twelve years lived purely by its shore won the fruit of every sacrifice and the world of Brahma; a single night there at the full moon of Kartika was the equal of a hundred years of tending the sacred fire. A single immersion with worship of the gods and ancestors, the teaching said, brought ten times the merit of a horse sacrifice, and the fruits of the costliest sacrifices, gold and ghee and hired priests and all, were declared inferior to it.

Yudhishthira, who had once ruled a hall where such sacrifices were performed in earnest, found the number difficult to hold in his mind at all, and said so. 'A sacrifice has a cost I can count,' he said. 'The cattle given, the priests fed, the years it takes to gather what is offered. This lake asks nothing but that I step into it. How can the two be weighed on the same scale?'

'They cannot,' Narada said, 'and that is why Pulastya did not begin with the numbers.' Before he had named a single ford, the sage had set down who would receive their fruit at all: the man whose hands, feet and mind were controlled, who was content and pure, who took no gifts and had restrained his pride; the man without deceit and without anger, truthful, firm in his vows, who looked on all beings as his own self. The numbers were real, Narada said, but they were promised to that man, and a pilgrim who heard only the numbers had heard only half the teaching.

Yudhishthira found himself troubled less by the number's size than by how easily a man might come to love the counting more than the water.

At the end, Narada came to the last words Pulastya had spoken to Bhishma, and it was these, not the impossible numbers, that Yudhishthira would carry with him through all the years of wandering. The teaching that promised such merit for an honest bath ended by closing the door on anyone who was not honest.

'One who keeps no vows, who has not cleansed his soul, who is impure or a thief, cannot bathe in these fords,' Narada recited, 'nor can a man whose mind is crooked.' He let the words rest. 'Such a man may step into the water and go under a hundred times. But the ford the teaching speaks of is not reached by his body, and whatever he brought, he carries home unaltered.'

Yudhishthira asked whether that meant the merit was simply forfeited to such a man, and Narada reminded him how Pulastya had begun: the fruit of the fords belongs to the one who has restrained his pride. 'A man who thinks himself made holy by the distance he has walked has not restrained it,' Narada said. 'He has only carried his pride a very long way, and it has kept him from what the distance was meant to earn him.'

Brahma's presence at the lake, attending it at every hour as Narada had described, became in this light not a promise but a kind of witness that made the deflation exact rather than approximate. It was not that the water judged unevenly. It was that the water did not judge at all, and offered exactly as much as a pilgrim's own honesty allowed it to offer, no more, regardless of how far he had come to ask.

It was Yudhishthira, turning the teaching over as Narada spoke, who arrived at the question the sages who composed it had clearly meant a listener to reach. 'If the water gives nothing to a crooked mind that pride cannot spoil,' he said to Narada, 'then what of the man who owns no crooked mind and no pride, but also owns no means to travel here at all? Is he simply denied what a wealthier fool receives by accident of the road?'

'No,' Narada said. 'The teaching begins with him. Sacrifices need wealth, and the poor cannot perform them, so the fords were given as the poor man's equal of the sacrifice. And the man who cannot come at all, but joins his hands and remembers Pushkara morning and evening, or only longs for it in his mind, is said to be cleansed and to gain the fruit of bathing in every ford. The ford exists for those who can reach it. It was never meant to be the only door.'

Yudhishthira found this the most startling claim of the whole doctrine, more startling than the impossible numbers had been. A kingdom's worth of stone steps and holy water, attended by gods at every hour of the day, and the teaching itself insisted that a farmer who never left his fields could reach its fruit with nothing but a disciplined, remembering mind. He said as much, and Narada agreed that this was exactly the point, and that it was stated so plainly precisely so that no pilgrim walking this road could mistake the walking itself for the virtue.

Narada took his leave and vanished as suddenly as he had come, telling Yudhishthira before he went that the sage Lomasha would come to lead them along the road of fords. In the days that followed, seeing the brothers still anxious for Arjuna, their priest Dhaumya named for them the sacred places of the four directions, and when he came to the west he named the grandfather's holy lake, Pushkara, beloved of hermits and siddhas, and repeated the verse Prajapati himself had sung of it: that one who longs to go to Pushkara even in his mind is freed of every sin. Yudhishthira thought of the numbers Narada had recited, and of the same teaching's quiet insistence that those numbers meant nothing to a crooked heart, and that a poor man at home could reach them by remembering the ford with a disciplined mind.

He understood, then, why the teaching had chosen to open its long chain of holy fords with a lesson built to undercut itself. If Pushkara had simply promised merit and left the promise standing, a pilgrim might have spent a lifetime chasing water after water, each one grander than the last, mistaking the collection of fords for the collection of virtue. Instead the very first ford of the teaching taught him that the water was never the point, that pride could empty a lake of its worth as easily as vice could, and that the man who could never come at all could still reach its fruit by remembering it.

When Lomasha came at last and the Pandavas set out, their road did not lead west at all. It led east, to the Naimisha forest and the Gomati, to Prayaga and the Ganga, and Pushkara stayed far behind them, a lake Yudhishthira never reached except in his mind. Perhaps that was the truest way to keep its lesson. Understanding a thing and living inside it are not the same labor, and the whole long road of fords still lay ahead of him; but the first ford had already given him what it had to give, whole, without his ever setting foot on its steps.