Half a Life for Love

Among the oldest tales preserved in the great epic, told among the sages in the early days, is the story of Ruru and Pramadvara - a story of a love strong enough to give away half a life, and of how that same love, turned to vengeance, had to be taught again the higher law of mercy.

There was a young brahmin named Ruru, of the line of Bhrigu, ardent and devoted. And there was a maiden named Pramadvara, born of an apsara and a gandharva and raised in the hermitage of a forest sage - a girl of such grace and beauty that she seemed to belong half to heaven. Ruru and Pramadvara loved each other, and it was arranged that they should be wed, and a day was fixed for the marriage. The two young people lived in the happiness of those who are betrothed and certain of their future, counting the days to their wedding, with no shadow upon them and no thought that anything could come between them.

But fate, which loves to strike at the very edge of joy, had set a small and deadly thing in their path.

A few days before the wedding, Pramadvara was wandering with her companions through the hermitage grounds, light-hearted and absorbed in the happiness of the coming celebration. As she walked, not watching her step, she trod by accident upon a snake that lay hidden in the grass.

The serpent, trodden on, did what its nature bade it do: it struck. It sank its fangs into the girl, and its venom ran swift and sure through her body. Pramadvara fell, and in a little while, despite all that her companions and the sages of the hermitage could do, she died - the bright, beloved girl, on the very threshold of her wedding, stilled by the bite of a snake she had never meant to harm and never even seen.

She lay upon the ground as if asleep, her beauty undimmed even in death, and the whole hermitage was plunged from the joy of a coming wedding into the blackest grief. And word was carried to Ruru, who was away, that his bride was dead.

When Ruru heard that Pramadvara was dead, his grief was beyond all bearing. He came and looked upon her where she lay, lovely and lifeless, and something in him broke. He could not accept it. He would not accept it. He left the hermitage and went out alone into the deep forest, and there he wept and raved and lamented, crying out against the cruelty of a fate that would take his bride on the eve of their wedding.

He railed at the heavens. He recounted, to the empty trees, his own piety, his austerities, his devotion, his gifts to the gods and the brahmins, and he demanded of the powers above why, if there was any justice, his goodness could not buy back the one life he could not live without. "If I have ever given anything, if I have ever kept a vow or honored a god or spoken the truth," he cried, "let the merit of all of it bring my beloved back to life. I do not want to live in a world that does not have her in it."

So bitter and so unrelenting was his grief, and so great the merit he was willing to spend, that the gods took notice of him, and one of the celestials was sent down to answer the weeping young brahmin in the forest.

A messenger of the gods appeared before Ruru in the forest and spoke to him gently. "Your grief has been heard, Ruru, and the gods are moved by it. But what is dead cannot simply be willed back to life; the order of things does not allow it. Yet there is one path open to you, if your love is as great as your sorrow.

"Pramadvara's allotted span of life was cut short; she died before her time. The gods will permit her to rise and live again, and to live out a full life with you - on one condition. You must give to her the half of your own remaining years. Let half of all the life that is left to you be taken from your span and added to hers, and she will be restored, and the two of you will live out your days together, each on half of what would have been yours alone. Will you give half your life for hers?"

Ruru did not hesitate for the space of a single breath. "Take it," he said. "Take half my life, take more if you will. What is half a life to me, or a whole one, without her? Give her my years gladly, and let her live."

The gods accepted Ruru's offer, and the Lord of the Dead consented to the exchange. Half of all the years that remained to Ruru were taken from him and granted to Pramadvara, and at once the breath returned to her body and the warmth to her limbs, and the beautiful girl who had lain dead upon the ground rose up alive, as though waking from a deep sleep, restored to her grieving lover by the gift of his own years.

The grief of the hermitage turned in an instant back to joy. Ruru and Pramadvara were married at last, as they had longed to be, and they lived together in great happiness - each, in truth, on half a single shared span of life, for their two lives were now woven of the years that had been Ruru's alone. It is one of the purest images of love in all the old tales: a young man who, asked what his bride's life was worth, answered without a moment's pause that it was worth the half of his own, and gave it gladly.

And if the story had ended there, it would have been only beautiful. But grief, even healed grief, can leave a hard residue behind, and in Ruru it had left a seed of anger that now began to grow.

Ruru had his bride again, but he could not forget how nearly he had lost her, nor what had so nearly destroyed his life: a snake, hidden in the grass. The memory of that serpent and its bite festered in him until it hardened into a settled hatred, not of that one snake only, but of all snakes everywhere.

So Ruru made a grim vow. He swore that he would kill every serpent he ever came upon, of whatever kind, wherever he found it, in revenge for the one that had so nearly taken Pramadvara. And he kept his vow with a terrible thoroughness. He took to carrying a weapon wherever he went, and whenever he saw a snake - venomous or harmless, dangerous or fleeing, it made no difference to him - he struck it down and killed it. He roamed the forests and the fields dealing death to serpents without pause and without mercy, his love for his wife curdled into a relentless war upon a whole kind of creature, most of whom had never done him any harm at all.

For a long while he went on so, until one day he came upon a snake that would change his mind.

One day Ruru came upon an old snake of a harmless kind - a dundubha, a non-venomous water-snake that injures no one - lying in his path. By his vow he raised his weapon to kill it, as he had killed so many.

But the snake spoke to him, in a clear and reasoning voice. "Stop, brahmin," it said. "I have done you no wrong. I am not even of the kind that bites; I carry no venom and have never harmed a living thing. Why would you kill me? You are a brahmin, a man whose first and highest law is non-injury, ahimsa. The dharma of one such as you is to protect all creatures, not to slaughter them. Vengeance is not your path; mercy is. Why have you taken up the cruel work of killing every snake you meet, when most of us, like me, are guilty of nothing?"

Ruru, his weapon still raised, answered hotly out of his old grief. "A snake killed my beloved on the eve of our wedding," he said, "and nearly destroyed my life. I have sworn to kill every serpent I find, in revenge. That is why you must die."

The snake answered him with patience. "Consider what you are doing. The snake that bit your bride did as its nature compelled it; it was trodden upon and struck in fear, as any creature might. To avenge that one act by slaughtering thousands of innocent creatures who never harmed you is not justice - it is only the spreading of more harm, and it is far beneath the dharma of a brahmin. The highest duty of your kind is harmlessness and forgiveness. The man who returns injury for injury without end only multiplies the suffering of the world."

Then the snake revealed who it truly was. "Know, too, that I am no mere serpent. I was once a sage like yourself, named Sahasrapat, and I was cursed long ago into this snake's body for a thoughtless act - for I once frightened a fellow brahmin with a toy snake in jest, and he, startled and offended, cursed me to become a snake until a certain time. I have lived out that curse in this lowly form, learning patience. So even the creature you were about to kill is no enemy, but a brother brahmin in disguise. How many of those you have slain, do you suppose, were guiltless? How much of your vengeance fell upon the innocent?"

And the snake reminded him that snakes too have their place, and that even the great race of serpents would one day be spared from destruction by the mercy of a single wise being - the sage Astika, who would step forward at the great snake sacrifice and halt the slaughter of the serpents by an appeal to dharma. Vengeance, the snake said, was never the answer; it was forgiveness and restraint that the wise had always chosen.

Ruru lowered his weapon. The snake's words had reached him, and the sage in serpent-form, his curse now at its end, cast off the snake's body and stood revealed as a brahmin once more, and blessed Ruru before departing to his own realm.

Ruru gave up his vow of vengeance from that day. He saw that his grief, however deep, had led him into a long and needless cruelty, and that the love which had made him give half his life for Pramadvara had curdled, through anger, into a war upon the innocent. He laid down his weapon against the snakes and took up again the true law of his kind, the law of non-injury and forgiveness, and lived out the rest of his shared years with his wife in peace.

So the tale holds two truths in its two halves, and they balance each other. In the first half it shows us the heights that love will climb: a young man who gave half his own life, without a heartbeat's hesitation, to bring his beloved back from death. And in the second half it shows us the trap that even such a love can fall into: how grief turns easily to vengeance, and vengeance falls upon the innocent, and how the higher law is always mercy. To give everything for love is noble; but to forgive, even the creature that has wronged us, is nobler still. That was the lesson Ruru learned, and the snake that taught it to him was a sage in disguise.