The Song of Sampaka

"You keep asking me how a man is to be content while he owns a kingdom," said Bhishma from the bed of arrows. "I am going to answer you with a man who owned nothing whatever, and I want you to hear him out to the end, because the end is where the honesty is."

His name was Sampaka. He was a brahmin, and he had no field, no house, no store of grain, no cattle, no wife, no servant, no box with anything in it, and one cloth. Not one good cloth and one for travelling. One. When it was washed he sat in the sun until it dried. He carried a bowl because a man must eat out of something, and he did not carry it carefully, because a lost bowl is replaced by a leaf.

He came in his wandering to a great city in the west, rich from the river trade, and he sat down at the edge of a market where the grain came in, and he was noticed the way such men are noticed, which is to say not much and then all at once.

A householder of that place, a man of substance and of decent instincts, stopped in front of him and looked at the cloth and the bowl and the bare feet with the cracked heels, and said what he genuinely felt.

"Poor man," he said. "It is a hard road that brings a brahmin to this. Come to my house tonight and eat properly, and let me give you a second cloth at least."

"I will come and eat," said Sampaka, "and gladly, because I am hungry and you are offering. I will refuse the second cloth. And I want to correct you on one word before I accept anything, since it would be dishonest to take your food while letting you believe a falsehood about me."

"Which word?"

"Poor," said Sampaka. "I am not poor. I am the richest man who has walked through your gate this year, and I have never in my life met a king I would trade places with. I say that soberly. I am not a mad ascetic and I am not scolding you. It is simply an accounting, and if you feed me I will show you the accounting, and you may check every line of it against your own books."

That night, after the food, the householder showed his guest the house, because a man who has been told his accounting is worse than a beggar's will always want to show his house.

He showed him the granary, which was the best thing he had. It was raised on stone against the damp, and it was full to the roof beams, and it had cost him eleven years.

"Very good," said Sampaka. "Now tell me which of you is guarding which.

"There is a wall around it. There are two dogs, and the dogs are fed before your children in a bad year, because they must be strong. There is a watchman, and you pay him, and you also worry about him, because he is inside the wall. There is a lock, and you carry the key, and the key is now a thing you can lose. When it rains hard at night you do not sleep, because you are thinking about the roof of the granary. When the price of grain moves you feel it in your stomach. When your neighbour builds a bigger one you feel something else in your stomach, and you do not enjoy feeling it, and you feel it anyway.

"You told me you have a granary. Look again. The granary has you. It has your nights, your dogs, your watchman, your temper at dinner and the first thought that comes to you in the morning before you are properly awake. You did not acquire eleven years of grain. Eleven years of grain acquired a man to look after it, and it chose well, because you are conscientious."

The householder began to answer and stopped.

"Everything a man owns owns him back," said Sampaka, "and it takes its rent in the one coin he cannot replace, which is attention. That is the whole anatomy of the thing. Add a field and you have added a season of anxiety about rain. Add a herd and you have added a fear of disease and thieves and of the man who watches the herd. Add gold and you have added the necessity of being suspicious of people who used to be your friends. Nobody sells you that part at the time of purchase. It is included."

"But you must want things," said the householder. "Every man wants."

"I did," said Sampaka. "I want almost nothing now, and I did not achieve that by being unusually holy. I achieved it by noticing what wanting actually costs, which is a piece of arithmetic and not a virtue.

"Desire and fear are one animal with two heads. They cannot be separated, and no man has ever kept the first and got rid of the second. On the day you begin to want the field you also begin to fear the man who might buy it before you. On the day the field is yours the wanting simply turns around and becomes the fear of losing it. You have not exchanged one state for another. You have only made the animal turn its head.

"So weigh what is in your house against what is in mine. You have wealth, and you have fear, and they arrived together and they will leave together. In me neither of them dwells any longer. I put the load down on a road some years ago and walked on, and what I discovered was not holiness. It was that I had legs.

"A man carrying a heavy load on a hot road thinks about the load. That is all he thinks about. He does not see the country he is walking through, he does not hear anything, he does not have a single free thought from one town to the next, and if you asked him at the end of the day what he had seen he would say only that the road was long. Set the load down and the country comes back. It was there the whole time. It was never hidden by anything except the load.

"Weigh it honestly and you will find that everything on this earth that is called pleasure, and everything they promise in heaven besides, does not come to a sixteenth part of the ease of a man in whom the wanting has died. I am not asking you to believe that. I am telling you that I have had both, because I was not born on this road, and I have compared them, and the comparison was not close."

He left the house before dawn, as he always did, and his way out took him through the rich quarter while the city was still grey.

He passed the moneylender's door, already open, and the moneylender already at his table with a lamp, doing at that hour what he would still be doing at dusk, with a face shut like a fist.

He passed a merchant standing in his gateway looking east down the river road for a boat that was four days late, and the man's whole body was turned toward the absence of that boat.

He passed a great house with a guard at each corner, and a second wall inside the first, and behind the inner wall a light in one window where somebody was awake and counting something.

He passed carts going down to the wharf under escort, and the escort was armed, and the men in charge of the carts watched the escort.

And Sampaka walked through the middle of all of it with a bowl and one cloth and no key on him anywhere, and what he felt as he went was not triumph. It was the thing a man feels walking through a place where the sick are lying.

They were not bad men. That was the point he would make afterwards whenever he told it. They were industrious, careful, mostly honest, and each of them was carrying a weight he had assembled himself, piece by piece, with great effort, over many years, and calling the assembly of it success. Not one of them was at liberty for the length of a single morning. They could not go where they liked, or stop where they liked, or let a day go past unaccounted for.

He went out through the north gate as the sun came up. He had no plan for the day and no obligation in it. He would eat when somebody gave him food and he would not eat when nobody did, and he had found that the second happened less often than a frightened man would think, and that it was survivable when it happened.

Nothing in the city had a claim on his morning. That was his entire fortune, and he had counted it truly when he said no king held more.

"Now I will say the honest part," said Bhishma, "or the story becomes a lie that bad kings find useful.

"Sampaka was free because he chose it. That is the load-bearing word and everything rests on it. The man who has nothing because he laid it down has done something; the man who has nothing because it was taken from him, or because he was born in a house where there was never anything to lay down, has had something done to him, and he is not free, he is hungry. His children are hungry. Cold is not a teaching to him and an empty bowl is not a discipline, it is simply an empty bowl.

"So never quote Sampaka to a starving man. And above all, never let a king quote him to his own people. When a ruler sitting on a full treasury preaches contentment to men who have no grain, he is not teaching dharma. He is economising, and putting a holy name on it. If I ever hear that you have done that, I will have died badly.

"Your work is the exact opposite of Sampaka's. He was to have nothing. You are to see that nobody in your kingdom is poor except by choosing it. Fill the granaries, open them in the bad year, remit the taxes of the ruined, and keep the roads safe so that a poor man's cart arrives.

"And here is your difficulty, which I have not forgotten. You are about to be handed more wealth than any man in this land, and you did not want it, and you cannot put it down, because the treasury is not yours to renounce; it belongs to the kingdom and you are only the man standing in front of it. You will have the whole weight of the householder's granary and none of the pleasure he took in filling it.

"Then hold it as Sampaka would hold a bowl somebody had asked him to carry. Guard it well and do not once believe it is yours. Let it cost you nothing at three in the morning. Be the keeper of the storehouse, son of Kunti, and refuse to be its property."