The Sage Who Grew Thin

"Grandfather," said Yudhishthira, "a man loses everything as he ages. His teeth go, his eyes go, his hair goes, his friends go before him into the fire. Why is it that wanting does not go? I have watched old men on the last morning of their lives arranging what they would own tomorrow."

"Because wanting is the one thing in a man that was never young," said Bhishma, "and so it has nothing to grow out of. There was a king who learned this from a sage so thin that the king mistook him at first for a bundle of sticks left standing. His name was Viradyumna, and I will tell it as it was told to me."

The old man shifted on the arrows, and began.

Viradyumna ruled well and was known for it, and he had one son, Bhuridyumna, born late and loved past reason. The boy went into the forest after the deer as boys do and did not come back out of it. The king sent riders, and the riders found the horse and did not find the child. Then the king stopped sending riders and went himself.

He searched a year. He went through the woods that lie beyond Naimisharanya, where the hermits keep the long sacrifice and have no news of the world because they want none, and he asked at every fire he came to, and every fire told him gently that they had not seen the boy and that grief was a fuel like any other. He wore out horses. He wore out the men who came with him, and sent them home, and went on alone with his hair unbound and the dust of a year on him, less a king now than a man walking.

Deep in the forest, where the trees closed over the path and the path stopped pretending to be a path, he came to a hermitage.

There was one man sitting in it, and the king stood a long moment before he was certain he was looking at a man.

The ascetic was called Tanu. He was thin past what the king had believed a living body could be. The cords of his neck stood out like the ropes of a tent. Every rib could be counted from ten paces, and the veins lay along his arms like creepers on a dead branch, and yet his eye was clear and his back was straight and there was no sickness anywhere in the way he sat. He was not dying. He had simply been reduced.

Viradyumna made his obeisance and gave his name and his lineage, and sat where he was asked to sit, and for some while he did not ask what he wanted to ask, because he had been raised carefully. Then he asked it.

"Holy one, forgive me. I have ruled a country through a famine and I have walked through villages where the grain had been gone for three months, and I have seen men worn down by fever until their mothers could not name them. I have never seen a body like yours. You are not starved and you are not ill. What has done this to you?"

Tanu did not seem offended. He looked at the king for a while, the way a man looks at a debt he is about to forgive.

"You have come here to ask about your son," he said, "and instead you have asked a better question, though you do not know it yet. Sit. I will answer the one you asked."

"Was it penance?" said the king.

"Penance makes men lean," said Tanu. "It does not make them this. No, king. What you are looking at was not done by fasting. It was done by hoping."

"There is nothing in this world so thin as hope," said Tanu, "and I will show you a thing thinner still.

"Long ago I was young and I was poor and I had a thing I needed done, and I did what a man in that condition does. I went to a great house. I stood at a gate that was made higher than it needed to be so that men would feel small under it, and I waited while the servants asked who I was and went away and came back and asked again. I was given a seat that was not quite a seat. I made my request, and it was heard with a face arranged to look attentive, and the answer came dressed up in so much courtesy that I had walked half a day before I understood that it had been no.

"I did not weep and I did not curse him. But something went out of me on that road and did not come back. And I did it again, king. That is the part worth your attention. I went to another door, and another. Each time the hope carried me there whole and something less than whole came back.

"Hope is thin, king, thin as a thread of water. But hear the thinner thing. The hope that a suppliant fastens on a mean man is thinner than that, thinner than any thread, and I am thinner than my own hope was, because I outlived it and it left me its shape. This body is not the record of what I ate. It is the record of what I expected."

The king sat with that. He had refused men at his own gate, courteously, with a face arranged to look attentive, and he found that he could remember two of their faces exactly.

"Understand what makes it possible to be worn away like this," said Tanu, "and you will understand why nobody escapes it by getting older. Everything else in a man ages. The teeth loosen, the eye clouds, the ear goes soft, the hair whitens, the legs begin to negotiate with the stairs. Desire alone does not age. It is exactly as young in a man of eighty as it was in him at twenty, and it will send an old body to a rich man's door on the last morning of its life. That is the enemy, and it lives inside the gate.

"But there are men who feed it and men who starve it, and since you are a king and men come to you, you should know which one you are. There is the man who refuses with a laugh, and makes the asking into a story he can tell later. There is the man who says come tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and holds a suppliant a year on the price of a word he has already decided not to say. There is the man who gives while looking somewhere else, so that the gift arrives with a wound wrapped around it. There is the man who gives and then tells the town what he gave. Those four eat men. A hundred grains of rice given by such a hand cost more flesh than they replace.

"And there is the man who says no at once, plainly, kindly, with his eyes on the man he is refusing, and sends him away with the truth in his hand and his whole day still in front of him. That man has refused nobody. He has only declined, which is a different act. Be that one, king, if you cannot be generous. It is cheaper than generosity and it is nearly as good."

Then Tanu was quiet, and when he spoke again his voice had changed, and Viradyumna understood, too late for ceremony, that he had been sitting in front of a power and not merely an old man.

"You have not asked me for anything," said the sage. "You have been here since morning and your son has been in every sentence you did not say. That is the only kind of hope I have ever been able to answer. Go to the edge of the clearing."

The king went, on legs that had walked a year, and Bhuridyumna was standing in the light there, whole, unharmed, older by the length of a season and not by the length of the search, blinking as men blink who have been somewhere they cannot afterward describe. The king took hold of his son and did not let go for a long while, and when he turned to make his gratitude into words the hermitage was as it had been, and the ascetic was sitting in it, and it was clear that no words were wanted.

"Now hear what the king carried home," said Bhishma, "because it was not the boy. Tanu did not teach him to find better doors. There is no such teaching. The rich have always been unevenly generous and always will be, and a man who plans to be sustained by them is planning to be thin. He taught him to carry less to the door. Hope less, and no refusal can take anything off you; hope everything, and even a kind refusal takes something.

"You asked me why wanting does not grow old, Yudhishthira. It does not. But it can be fed less. That is the whole of the cure, and there is no other one, and every man who has gone looking for another has come back looking like Tanu."