The Woman Who Out-Argued a King

The sages told the Pandavas of Sulabha, the woman ascetic, and King Janaka of Mithila - a tale of how a wandering woman sage humbled a famous philosopher-king, and proved that true renunciation is a thing of the inner heart, not of the outward life.

King Janaka of Mithila was renowned throughout the land as a royal sage, a rajarshi - a king who claimed to have attained liberation and freedom from all bondage while yet seated upon his throne, ruling his great kingdom and living amid all its wealth and power. He prided himself on this: that he could possess a kingdom and yet be free, be in the midst of the world and yet not bound by it, a liberated soul in a king's robes. His fame for this spread far, and reached at last the ears of a woman of great learning and spiritual power named Sulabha.

Sulabha was a woman who had given herself wholly to the spiritual life - a wandering renunciate of deep learning and great yogic attainment, mistress of the scriptures and of her own mind, who roamed the land free of attachment. Hearing of King Janaka's claim to be a liberated soul while still a king, she was moved to test whether his renunciation was real or only a fine-sounding boast - whether a man surrounded by a kingdom's wealth and power had truly conquered his ego and his attachments, or only believed he had.

So Sulabha, by her yogic power, came to the court of King Janaka and presented herself before him, that she might examine his claim through discourse. And by her subtle attainment she entered into a close debate with the king, mind to mind, to discover whether his wisdom was as great as his fame proclaimed - whether the king who claimed to be free was truly free within.

But King Janaka, instead of meeting Sulabha simply as one seeker of truth meets another, reacted with a kind of pride and suspicion. He raised objections against her - not against her arguments, which he had not yet truly heard, but against her very person and presence. He questioned the propriety of a woman wandering alone as an ascetic; he suggested she had overstepped the proper bounds of her station and her order in coming so boldly to debate a king; he implied that there was something improper, even unseemly, in her entering into such close discourse with him, mixing what should be kept separate.

In short, the king who claimed to be a liberated soul, free of all distinctions and attachments, met the woman sage not with the equanimity of the truly free, but with the pride of his station and a string of objections rooted in the very distinctions of rank and gender and order that a liberated soul should have transcended. And it was precisely these objections that Sulabha would turn against him, to expose the hollowness of his claim.

Sulabha answered the king with a discourse of such depth and force that it overturned all his objections and laid bare the contradiction at the heart of his claim. 'O King,' she said, 'you claim to be a liberated soul, free of all bondage, one who sees the one Self equally in all beings and is attached to nothing. And yet, look at how you have met me. You object that I am a woman, that I am of one order and you of another, that I have crossed the bounds of rank and station in coming to you. But if you truly saw the one Self in all, and were truly free of all distinctions, why would these things trouble you at all? Why would you cling to the differences of man and woman, king and wanderer, this order and that?

'Your very objections reveal that you have not transcended these distinctions, but are still bound by them; that you still think in terms of 'I, the king' and 'you, the woman wanderer,' still attached to your rank and your station and the proprieties of the world. A truly liberated soul, who saw only the one Self everywhere, would not even notice such distinctions, let alone be troubled by them. So your objections are the proof that you are not as free as you claim. The bondage you say you have escaped still shows itself in the very way you have received me.'

Then Sulabha unfolded the heart of her teaching: that true renunciation and true freedom are inward, of the mind and the ego, and not a matter of one's outward circumstance at all.

'You take pride, O King,' she said, 'in being free while yet a king - in possessing a kingdom and all its wealth and power, and claiming to be unattached to it all. But renunciation is not measured by what one outwardly has or has not. One may give up a kingdom and flee to the forest and own nothing, and yet be inwardly full of ego and desire and attachment, and so be no renunciate at all. And one may dwell in a palace and rule a realm, and yet be truly free within, if the ego and the attachment are truly gone. It is not the throne or the forest that binds or frees, but the state of the heart.

'And the test of true inner freedom is just this: the absence of the ego, the sense of 'I' and 'mine,' and of all the distinctions it breeds. The one who is truly free has no thought of 'I am a king,' 'I am great,' 'I am liberated,' 'this is mine, that is yours, I am of this rank, you of that.' All such thoughts are the ego still clinging. But you, O King, in claiming your liberation, take pride in it as your own - 'I am the liberated king' - and in meeting me you cling to the distinctions of your station; and this very pride and these very distinctions show that the ego is not yet gone, and so the freedom is not yet complete. True renunciation has renounced even the sense of being a renunciate; it has let go even of the 'I' that would claim to be free.'

King Janaka was silenced. Sulabha's discourse was so deep, so clear, and so unanswerable that the king, for all his fame and his learning, could find nothing to say against it. He saw that she was right: that his objections to her had indeed revealed his lingering pride and his attachment to his station; that his claim to be a liberated king had carried within it a subtle ego - a pride in his own liberation - that was itself a bondage; and that true freedom was a thing far more inward and far more complete than he had supposed.

The king who had begun by raising objections against the woman sage, presuming to put her in her place, ended humbled and instructed by her, his proud claim shown to be incomplete, his lingering attachments exposed, and his understanding of renunciation deepened and corrected. The wandering woman whose very presence he had questioned had proved herself the greater in wisdom, and had taught the famous philosopher-king a lesson he had not known he needed. Janaka, to his credit, received the correction, his pride giving way before the plain truth of her words.

There was, in Sulabha's victory, a further teaching that the sages were careful to draw out: the equality of the Self in all beings, regardless of rank or gender or station. For the king's objections had rested on distinctions - that she was a woman, that she was of a lower station than a king, that she had overstepped her bounds. And Sulabha had swept all these distinctions aside as irrelevant to the truth: for the Self, the eternal reality, is the same in all beings, in the woman and the man, in the wanderer and the king, in the high and the low alike. To one who sees the truth, there is no superior and no inferior, no fit and unfit by birth or sex or station; there is only the one Self, equally present in all.

And so a woman, a wandering ascetic, presuming to debate a famous king, had proved by the depth of her wisdom that the distinctions he leaned upon were nothing before the truth - that wisdom and freedom are not the property of any rank or sex, but belong to whoever attains them; and that a woman sage might surpass a king in the very thing the king most prided himself upon. The truth knows no rank and no gender; it belongs to the one who realizes it, whoever and whatever they are.

The sages drew the lessons of the tale for the Pandavas.

'See, first, the deepest truth about renunciation and freedom: that they are inward, of the mind and the ego, not of the outward life. It is not the throne or the forest, the wealth or the poverty, that binds or frees a soul, but the presence or absence within of the ego, the sense of 'I' and 'mine,' and the distinctions it breeds. One may be free in a palace and bound in a hermitage; what matters is whether the ego is truly gone. And the subtlest bondage of all is spiritual pride - the ego that takes pride in its own liberation, that says 'I am free, I am a renunciate, I am great in wisdom.' True renunciation has renounced even that; it has let go even of the 'I' that would claim to be free.

'See, too, the danger of the pride that clings to rank and station even in one who claims to be free. Janaka thought himself liberated, and yet his attachment to his kingship and his objections to a humble woman wanderer revealed that the ego still ruled him. And see, in Sulabha, that wisdom and freedom know no rank and no gender: that a wandering woman might surpass a famous king in the very thing he most prided himself upon, for the Self is equal in all, and the truth belongs to whoever realizes it, whoever they are. Be humble, then, in your claims to wisdom; cling to no distinction of station; and seek the freedom that is inward, that has let go even of the self that would boast of being free.'

And the Pandavas, some of whom were kings and would be kings again, took to heart the teaching that true freedom is inward and humble, and that the truth belongs to whoever attains it, of whatever rank or sex.