The Feast Shibi Cooked

Vaisampayana said that while the sons of Pandu were living in the Kamyaka forest, the rishi Markandeya sat with them, and that the talk went on for days.

Markandeya was the oldest living thing in that clearing and possibly on the earth. He had outlasted floods. He had watched dynasties come up out of nothing and go back into it, and when he told a story about a king he was not repeating something he had been told. He had generally been standing there.

He had already given them the story of Shibi and the birds. Indra and Agni had come down in feathers to try the king of the Usinaras, one as a hawk and one as a dove, and the dove had fallen trembling into the king's lap, and Shibi had cut the flesh from his own right thigh and weighed it, and cut again, and cut from every part of himself, and at the last had climbed into the scale entire rather than hand over a creature that had asked him for shelter. The Pandavas had heard that out. Yudhishthira, who was living in a forest because he had gambled away a kingdom and who thought about the conduct of kings the way a sick man thinks about health, wanted more.

"Tell us again," he said, "of the great good fortune of kings."

He did not ask for a story about war, or about wealth, or about the winning back of what had been taken. He asked what it was that made a king fortunate, and he asked it sitting on the ground in a borrowed forest with his brothers around him and his wife beside him and nothing of his own left except the question.

Markandeya began somewhere that seemed at first to have nothing to do with Shibi at all. He began with a sacrifice, and a chariot, and four men riding home from it in the pleasant temper of hosts whose guests have gone.

There came unto the horse-sacrifice of king Ashtaka, of Viswamitra's race, many kings, said Markandeya. And there came unto that sacrifice the three brothers also of that king: Pratardana, and Vasumanas, and Shibi the son of Usinara.

Four brothers, then, each with his own kingdom and his own reputation, gathered at the greatest rite a king can perform, and all four of them men whose names were spoken well of. When the sacrifice was completed, Ashtaka was proceeding on his car along with his brothers, and on the road they beheld Narada coming that way.

Narada goes everywhere. He is the celestial rishi who arrives in the middle of things, stays in a man's house for a few days, watches what is done there, and carries what he has seen to the next house and the next world. Kings were glad to see him and had reason to be careful of him, and generally only understood the second part afterwards.

They saluted him and said, "Ride thou on this car with us."

And Narada said, "So be it," and mounted.

So there were five on the chariot, four kings and a rishi, going home from a completed sacrifice on a good road, and one of the kings, having gratified the holy one with proper attention, said what men in that mood say.

"O Holy One, I desire to ask thee something."

"Ask," said the rishi.

"All four of us are blessed with long lives and have indeed every virtue. We shall, therefore, be permitted to go to a certain heaven and dwell there for a long period. Who amongst us, however, shall fall down first?"

It was asked lightly. It was the question of a man who is quite sure of the premise and is only curious about the arithmetic, and he asked it of the one passenger on that car who had been keeping accounts.

"This Ashtaka," said Narada, "shall first come down.

"For what cause?" asked the enquirer.

"I lived some days in the abode of Ashtaka," said Narada. "He carried me one day on his car out of the town, and there I beheld thousands of kine distinguished from one another by difference of hue. And beholding those kine I asked Ashtaka whose they were."

And Ashtaka had answered: I have given away these kine.

That was all. The cattle had in fact been given, and the merit could not be unearned. But the king had put his own generosity into the sentence where the answer belonged, and by that answer he gave expression to his own praise. It is for this that Ashtaka shall have to come down.

Then one of them enquired again: "Three of us will stay in heaven. Amongst us three, who shall fall first?"

"Pratardana," said the rishi, and was asked again for what cause.

Narada had stayed in that house too, and on the road a brahmana had asked Pratardana for a horse. The king said, "After returning, I will give thee one." The brahmana said, "Let it be given to me soon." So the king unyoked the steed from the right-hand wheel and gave it.

Another came, and got the left wheel horse. Another came, and got the left front horse, unyoked where it stood. A fourth came, was told to wait, would not, and got the last horse the king had.

Then the king took the yoke in his own hands and began to draw the chariot himself, with a rishi sitting in it, in the sight of his people, and as he did so he said: "There is now nothing for the brahmanas."

He had given away, it is true, but he had done so with detraction. For that speech he shall have to fall down from heaven.

"Who amongst us two shall fall down?" asked the next. "Vasumanas."

At his house the brahmanas had been performing the ceremony of Swastivachana for the sake of a flowery car, and when the rite was finished the car became visible, and Narada praised it, and the king said at once: "Holy one, by thee hath this car been praised. Let this car, therefore, be thine." He came a second time in need of such a car, and admired it, and again the king said, "It is thine."

He came a third time and admired it again. And the king, exhibiting the car to the brahmanas, cast his eyes on Narada and said, "O holy one, thou hast praised the flowery car sufficiently."

He only said those words, without making him a gift of that car. For that he will fall down from heaven.

Two were left, and one of them asked the last form of the question.

"Of the one who is to go with thee, who will go and who will fall down?"

The rishi had been asked to rank four kings and had ranked three of them. The fourth was Shibi. And Narada, who had been sitting among them the whole way as the one who measures and is not measured, put himself into the scale instead.

"Shibi will go," he said. "But I will fall down."

"For what reason?"

"I am not the equal of Shibi."

Then he told them why, and the account is short, and there is nothing in it about hawks or doves or scales.

One day a brahmana came unto Shibi, and addressing him said, "O Shibi, I came to thee for food."

That is the whole of the request, and it is the ordinary request. A guest at the door who says he is hungry has the first claim there is on a householder, and the claim is heaviest when the householder is a king, and heaviest of all when the guest is a brahmana. Shibi answered as a man answers who does not intend to weigh what is being asked before agreeing to it.

"What shall I do? Let me have thy orders."

He had handed over the terms. He had not said, tell me what you would like and I shall see. He had said, command me, and I obey. It is a formula, and men use it a hundred times a year without meaning very much by it, and Shibi meant it.

And the brahmana answered: "This thy son known by the name of Vrihadgarbha should be killed. And, O king, cook him for my food."

Narada was standing there. He says so himself, and he says exactly what he did about it.

"And hearing this, I waited to see what would follow."

He did not intervene. He did not warn the king or rebuke the guest or call the thing impossible. The celestial rishi who had spent the morning grading three kings on a sentence apiece stood back in the hall of the fourth and waited, because something had begun in that room that he could not have done himself and did not want to interrupt.

And Shibi then killed his son.

The text spends no words on it. There is no scene of the king going to the boy, no speech from the mother, no plea and no consent, and the silence is not squeamishness. It is the same flat voice in which the rest of the household business of the story is recorded, and it is worse for that.

He killed him, and cooked him duly.

Duly. According to the rules, with the proper care, as food is prepared for a brahmana by a host who intends the meal to be correct in every particular. Then he placed that food in a vessel, and took the vessel upon his head, in the manner of a servant carrying a dish to a guest, and he went out to look for the man who had ordered it.

The brahmana was not where he had been left. Shibi went through his own city carrying his son on his head, asking after his guest, and while he was thus seeking, some one told him where the holy man was and what he was doing.

The brahmana thou seekest, having entered thy city, is setting fire to thy abode.

And he is also setting fire, in wrath, to thy treasury. And to thy arsenal. And to the apartments of the females. And to thy stables for horses and elephants.

Every one of those is a separate ruin. The treasury is the kingdom's ability to act. The arsenal is its ability to defend itself. The inner apartments are where the king's household lives. The stables hold the army's animals. A man had been given a meal on demand and had spent the interval burning down the four things a king exists to keep standing, and he had done it in wrath, which is to say he had done it while pretending to be angry at a host who had refused him nothing.

And Shibi heard all this, without change of colour.

That phrase is the pivot of the whole history, and it is not a phrase about calm. Shibi had a cooked child on his head and a burning city around him and a guest who was the cause of both, and the thing that did not happen was the thing every man in the street would have forgiven him for. He did not flinch and he did not flare.

He entered his city and found the brahmana and spoke to him.

"O holy one, the food has been cooked.

And the brahmana, hearing this, spoke not a word.

From surprise he stood with downcast looks. The man who had set four fires and given an order that no father could obey had been answered by that order being carried out, and reported to him politely, and he had nothing to say. He looked at the floor.

Shibi, seeing his guest silent, took it for the reserve of a man who has not been pressed enough, and pressed him, with a view to gratifying him.

"O holy one, eat thou this."

And the brahmana looked at Shibi for a moment.

Then he said: "Eat it thyself."

Everything up to here had been the duty of a host, terrible but nameable. What was now being ordered had no name at all. The king was being told to eat his own son, by the guest who had commanded the cooking, in the ashes of his own house, as a whim.

And Shibi said: "Let it be so."

He was cheerful about it. The text says so and does not soften it. Shibi cheerfully took the vessel down from his head and desired to eat what was in it.

And thereupon the brahmana caught hold of Shibi's hand.

He had waited until the hand was moving, until the last instant at which the thing could still be stopped, and then he stopped it.

"Thou hast conquered wrath," said the brahmana. "There is nothing that thou canst not give unto the brahmanas."

And saying this, that brahmana adored Shibi. The guest worshipped the host, in the host's ruined hall, with the host's hand still in his grip.

Then, as Shibi cast his eyes before him, he beheld his son.

Vrihadgarbha was standing there, alive, looking like a child of the gods, decked in ornaments, and a fragrance came off his body. Nothing about him suggested a boy who had been killed that morning. He had simply been given back, whole and adorned, as if the whole day had been a thing that had happened to everyone in the room except him.

And the brahmana, having accomplished all this, made himself visible. It was Vidhatri, the Ordainer, who had come in that guise to try that royal sage.

The fires, the demand, the cooking, the silence and the last order had all been the work of the one who apportions to every creature what it is to bear. He had come down to find out what Shibi was made of, and had used the only instrument that would have told him.

Then he disappeared.

What was left in the hall was a king, a living son, a burnt treasury, and a circle of counsellors who had watched the entire day and had held their tongues while a god was in the room.

They did not hold them afterwards. Being counsellors, they asked the question a council always asks, which is the practical one.

"Thou knowest everything," they said. "For what didst thou do all this?"

They were not accusing him. They were saying that he had understood, better than they did, what was being asked and what it would cost, and that a man who understood that much must have had a reason, and they wanted the reason entered into the record. If it had been done to buy a name, they could have written it down as policy. If it had been done in fear of a curse, they could have written it down as prudence.

And Shibi answered them.

"It was not for fame, nor for wealth, nor from desire of acquiring objects of enjoyment that I did all this. This course is not sinful. It is for this that I do all this. The path which is trodden by the virtuous is laudable. My heart always inclineth towards such a course."

That is the whole of his defence, and it refuses every category his ministers had ready for it. No profit, no reputation, no pleasure, and no claim to have been heroic either. Only that the road exists, that better men have walked on it, and that he finds himself inclined that way, as another man is inclined toward his dinner or his sleep.

Narada, sitting on a chariot with three doomed kings and one who was not, finished it there.

"This high instance of Shibi's blessedness I know, and I have, therefore, narrated it duly."

He had explained his own fall by it. Ashtaka had lost heaven on a sentence about his cows, and Pratardana on a sentence about his horses, and Vasumanas on a sentence that was not a gift, and Narada on the plain fact that he had stood in Shibi's hall and watched, and knew what he had watched, and knew he could not have done it.

And in the Kamyaka forest Markandeya stopped speaking, and the sons of Pandu sat where they were, having asked about the good fortune of kings and been told that it is not a possession, and that a man may be stripped of his house, his treasury and his son in a single morning and still be the only one on the chariot who is going up.