The Adhwaryu and the Yati

Vaishampayana was telling Janamejaya about the days after the war, when the fires of the dead had burned out and Krishna, before going home to Dwaraka, spent an afternoon in the palace at Indraprastha with Arjuna.

Arjuna asked him for the teaching again. What was said to him between the two armies had gone out of his head, he admitted, and he wanted it once more.

Krishna was not pleased to be asked. He said that he had spoken those words in a condition of yoga he could not enter again by wishing, and that to say them over exactly was beyond him now. What he could give instead was an old discourse he had once heard, held between a brahmana who had mastered his senses and the wife who questioned him.

The brahmana had begun by describing what he no longer did.

"I do not smell scents. I do not perceive tastes. I do not see colours. I do not touch. I do not likewise hear the diverse sounds that arise. Nor do I entertain purposes of any kind."

It was not that his nose and tongue had stopped. It was that he had stopped claiming them. It is Nature, he said, that desires the objects it likes, and Nature that hates the objects it dislikes, and desire and aversion rise in a living body the way the upward and the downward life-winds rise in it, without being invited and without being owned. Separate from these there is another thing, and the Yogins look for it in the body and find it.

"Dwelling in that," he said, "I am never attached to anything through desire and wrath, and decrepitude and death. There is no taint on my natures, as there is no taint of a drop of water on the leaves of the lotus."

Actions are still performed. The enjoyments simply do not fasten on to them, he said, any more than the assembled rays of the sun fasten on to the sky they cross.

His wife had been asking him plain questions all through this, the way one asks about a country never seen. Where is that forest. What are its trees. How far. Instead of another description, he offered her a story.

"In this connection," the brahmana said, "is recited an ancient story of a discourse between an Adhwaryu and a Yati. Do thou hear it, O glorious lady."

An adhwaryu is the priest of the working hands. He measures the ground, sets the posts, handles the vessels, and it is his office to deal with the victim. A yati has no fire of his own to tend, no house, and nothing to sacrifice with.

The animal had been sprinkled with water.

That is the moment the story chooses, and it is chosen with care. The sprinkling is not the killing. It is the consecration, the point at which a goat that was an animal a minute ago becomes a victim, and everything after it is only procedure. The adhwaryu was seated at his work. The rite was moving.

And a yati, passing through, stopped and looked at it and said four words in censure.

"This is destruction of life."

He did not argue. He named the thing. Whatever else was going on in that enclosure, an animal that was alive was about to not be, and the man arranging it was sitting right there.

The adhwaryu answered him without heat, and his answer is the oldest defence there is.

"This goat will not be destroyed. The animal meets with great good, if the Vedic declaration on this subject be true."

Then he laid out how the goat would be dispersed rather than ended, part by part, each part going home.

"That part of this animal which is of earth will go to earth. That part of this one which is born of water will enter into water. His eye will enter the sun. His ear will enter the different points of the horizon. His life-winds will enter the sky."

It is a beautiful account and it is not a dodge. The priest believed it. A body is a loan made out of the five elements, and at a properly conducted sacrifice the loan is called in cleanly, with mantras spoken over it, and the creature that walked in is not extinguished but returned, and returned better placed than it was. Under that reading the sprinkling of water was a kindness and the knife was a door.

And then he added the sentence that gave away where he was standing.

"I who adhere to the scriptures incur no fault."

Not: the goat is unharmed, therefore nobody is harmed. But: I am covered. The text says so, I am doing what the text says, and whatever is happening on that grass in front of us, it is not being charged to me.

The yati had been listening for exactly that.

"If thou beholdest such good to the goat in this dissociation with his life-winds," the yati said, "then this sacrifice is for the goat. What need hast thou for it?"

There is the whole of it in two sentences, and every later argument about sacrifice is a footnote to them.

The priest had just finished explaining that the animal was the winner here. His eye goes to the sun. His ear goes to the quarters of the sky. He is dissolved into the elements with the proper words said, which is a better end than any goat comes to in a field. Very well, said the yati. Then the goat is the one being enriched, and the merit of the rite belongs to him, and there is nothing in it for you. Take your hands off it.

The priest could not say yes to that, because the sacrifice was being performed for the sacrificer and everyone present knew it. The goat's excellent destination was an argument produced to answer an objection, not a reason anybody had brought the goat.

Then the yati did something sharper than argument. He proposed a procedure.

"Let the brother, father, mother, and friend of this goat give thee their approval in this. Taking him to them, do thou consult them. This goat is especially dependent. It behoveth thee to see them who can give their consent in this. After hearing their consent, the matter will become fit for consideration."

Go and ask his family.

If this is a gift, then somebody is giving it, and the one thing certain about the goat is that he is not the one. He is especially dependent, the yati said, which is the exact and unsentimental word. He is owned. He was led here on a rope by a man who bought him. He has no standing to refuse and no voice to refuse with, and a benefit that is conferred on a creature who cannot decline it is not a benefit, it is a disposal.

So take him back to the herd, said the yati, and put the proposal to his mother, and see what she says, and when you have her word we will sit down again and discuss whether this is fit to consider.

He knew there was no such consent to be had anywhere in the world. That was the point of sending him to look for it.

Then the yati turned to what was actually lying on the grass.

"The life-winds of this goat have been made to return to their respective sources. Only the inanimate body remains behind. This is what I think."

He was granting the priest his own doctrine and following it to its end. Suppose it is all true. Suppose the eye has gone into the sun and the earthy part into the earth and the breath into the sky. Then what is left in front of you is not a gift and not a guest. It is a carcass. Everything that made it worth having has already been dispatched to the addresses you named.

"Of those who wish to enjoy felicity by means of the inanimate body of an animal, which is comparable with fuel," he said, "the fuel of sacrifice is after all the animal himself."

Say it plainly, then. You are burning him. You have wood on that fire and you have a goat on that fire and you are treating the second the way you treat the first, and no amount of the sun and the horizon changes what the ladle is doing.

Then he gave the rule he was standing on, and he gave it as inheritance rather than as invention.

"Abstention from cruelty is the foremost of all deities. Even this is the teaching of the elders. We know this is the proposition, namely, no slaughter of living creatures."

The foremost of all deities. Not a virtue that the gods approve of. Placed above them, ahead of every name to which an offering could be poured, so that a rite which injures in order to worship has already passed by the greatest of the powers it thinks it is serving.

He stopped short of saying the rest, and he said that he was stopping.

"If I say anything further, it will then appear that diverse kinds of faulty actions are capable of being done by thee."

He would not stand there and start counting the priest's sins. He had come to state a proposition, not to convict a man.

"Always abstaining from cruelty to all creatures is what meets with our approbation. We establish this from what is directly perceptible. We do not rely on what is beyond direct perception."

That last line is the yati's whole method. The goat's eye entering the sun is something nobody in that enclosure had ever seen. The goat struggling on the rope was in front of them.

The adhwaryu had been given his answer and he did not accept it, and the counter he made is the reason this argument was worth preserving.

"Thou enjoyest the properties of smell which belong to the earth. Thou drinkest the tastes which appertain to water. Thou seest colours which belong to lighted bodies. Thou touchest the properties which have their origin in wind. Thou hearest the sounds which have their origin in space. Thou thinkest thoughts with the mind."

He was walking the yati back through the same five elements the yati had just used against him, and turning them around.

You say the goat is earth and water and light and wind and ether. Agreed. So is everything. So is the fruit you eat and the water you drink and the air you take in and the ground you set your foot on, and if the elements are living things when they are arranged in a goat, they are living things when they are arranged in anything else.

"All these entities, thou art of opinion, have life. Thou dost not then abstain from taking life. Really, thou art engaged in slaughter."

The wandering man who owns nothing and kills nothing had been shown a bill. He breathes and something dies. He drinks and something dies. He walks and something dies under his heel, and his vow of harmlessness is a piece of bookkeeping in which the small deaths have simply not been entered.

"There can be no movement without slaughter."

That is the sentence the priest had been building towards, and it is not a debater's trick. It is true. To be alive in a body is to be consuming the world at every moment, and the man on the road is doing it as certainly as the man at the altar. The difference the yati was insisting on, between what he does and what the priest does, would have to be defended on some ground other than a clean record, because nobody has a clean record.

"Or, what dost thou think, O regenerate one?"

He asked it as a real question. He had stopped defending the goat and started asking the stranger who he was.

The yati did not deny the charge. He answered from underneath it.

"The Indestructible and the Destructible constitute the double manifestation of the soul," he said. "Of these the Indestructible is existent. The Destructible is said to be exceedingly non-existent."

Everything the priest had listed was real, and he said so: the life-wind, the tongue, the mind, the quality of goodness and the quality of passion, all of these exist and all of them act. His eating and his walking belonged to that side of the account. But the Atman stands above these forms, without a second and without expectation, and it is not the thing that eats or walks, and a man who has actually taken up residence there is not the party to the transaction that the priest supposed he was.

"As regards one that is freed from these existent objects, that transcends all pairs of opposites, that does not cherish any expectation, that is alike to all creatures, that is liberated from the idea of meum, that has subjugated his self, and that is released from all his surroundings, for him no fear exists from any source."

Alike to all creatures. That is the clause that answers the goat. The man who wants nothing from any creature is the one creature at that sacrifice with no use for the animal on the grass, and abstention from cruelty in such a man is not a ledger he keeps but simply what is left when there is nothing he needs to take.

The adhwaryu heard it and gave way, and he did it without a scrap of resentment.

"O foremost of intelligent men, one should reside with those that are good. Hearing thy opinion my understanding shines with light. O illustrious one, I come to thee, believing thee to be a god, and I say I have no fault, O regenerate one, by performing these rites with the aid of mantras."

The yati remained silent after that. He had said what he came to say, he had been heard, and he did not press for a surrender.

And the adhwaryu, said the brahmana, proceeded with the great sacrifice, freed from delusion.

That is how the old story ends, with the fire still burning and the priest still at his post and neither man walking away from the other. The Brahmanas understand Emancipation, which is exceedingly subtle, to be of this kind, and having understood it they live accordingly, directed by the Kshetrajna, the knower of the field, who beholds all topics.

Krishna gave it to Arjuna exactly so, with nothing settled and nothing softened, in place of the song he could not sing twice.