The Brahmanas and the Kapas

Bhishma lay on the bed of arrows at Kurukshetra, and the story he was giving Yudhishthira that day was a story with another story folded inside it, and the inner one had been running for a long while without either of its speakers giving way.

The man being argued with was Arjuna Kartavirya, the thousand-armed king of the Haihayas, who had once declared in his own hall that there was nothing in the world above a kshatriya. The god of wind had heard him say it. Vayu had been answering him ever since, and the form the answer took was a procession of brahmanas, each one produced like a piece of evidence.

Atri, who had seen Surya and Soma shot through with the arrows of the Danavas in a dark battle, and who had become the sun and the moon himself, out of penance, until the darkness lifted and the enemies of the gods burned.

Chyavana, who had wanted the twin Aswins admitted to the Soma and had been refused by Indra, and who had answered the refusal by pouring libations on a fire until an Asura came up out of it named Mada, with a thousand teeth in a mouth a hundred yojanas wide, one cheek on the earth and the other against the sky. The gods had found themselves standing inside that mouth like fish swimming into a leviathan, and Indra had bowed his head to a hermit in order to get out of it.

Each time, the wind had finished the same way. Shall I go on? Or will you say anything in reply? Is there a kshatriya higher than this brahmana?

"Hearing these words of the god of wind," said Bhishma, "Arjuna remained silent."

He had nothing to say. So the wind, who had all the time there is, began again.

"When the denizens of heaven, with Indra at their head, found themselves within the mouth of the Asura Mada," the wind said, "at that time Chyavana took away from them the earth."

That is the sentence the whole episode turns on, and it is worth reading slowly, because it names a second theft while the first is still in progress. The gods were inside the mouth. They were bargaining for their lives with a rishi who had made the thing that had swallowed them. And while they stood there with the tongue under their feet, negotiating, Chyavana quietly took the earth out from under them as well.

Heaven they had already lost. That had not been Chyavana's doing. Heaven had been taken from them by the Kapas.

The epic says almost nothing about who the Kapas were, and what little is said about them will come, when it comes, out of the mouth of one of their own messengers. Here they are only a fact and a disaster. They had driven the gods out of the sky and settled in it, and now the gods had no sky and no earth, and there is nowhere else. A god without the earth has no altar, and a god without an altar has no share of any sacrifice, and a god with no share of any sacrifice is a name that men are gradually going to stop saying.

Deprived previously of heaven and now shorn of the earth also, the gods became very cheerless. That is Vayu's phrase for it, and it is a mild phrase for a company of immortals with no address left in the universe.

Indeed, those high-souled ones, afflicted with grief, then threw themselves unreservedly upon the Grandsire's protection.

They went to Brahma. There was nobody above him to go to afterwards.

"O thou that art adored by all creatures of the universe," the gods said, "the earth has been taken away from us by Chyavana, while we have been deprived of heaven by the Kapas, O puissant one!"

It is a complaint with a request hidden in it. They had come to the Grandsire expecting, one assumes, that he would deal with a rishi and a hostile race in the way that such things are usually dealt with from above.

Brahma did nothing of the kind. He sent them downstairs.

"Ye denizens of heaven," he said, "do you, with Indra at your head, repair quickly and seek the protection of the Brahmanas. By gratifying them you will succeed in regaining both the regions as before."

Not fight for the regions. Not petition for them. Gratify the brahmanas, and the regions come back. The Creator's answer to the loss of heaven and earth together was to tell the gods to go and put themselves at the feet of men who owned nothing, and the reason the wind is telling this to a king with a thousand arms is that a king with a thousand arms will not have thought of it.

So they went. Thus instructed by the Grandsire, the deities repaired to the Brahmanas and became suppliants for their protection, which is the sentence in this whole cycle that Arjuna Kartavirya was least equipped to hear. Indra, who had bowed his head once already in this story, bowed it a second time, and this time to no one in particular. To brahmanas. To the class.

And the brahmanas, hearing them out, asked the only question that mattered.

"Whom shall we subjugate?"

They did not ask what would be given to them for it. They asked for a name.

"Do ye subjugate the Kapas," the deities said.

"Bringing them down on the earth first," the brahmanas said, "we shall speedily subjugate them."

That is the entire plan of the war, stated in one line before a single weapon is lifted, and it is not a plan that any army could have carried out. The Kapas were in heaven. Nothing that stands on the ground can reach a race that has taken the sky. So the brahmanas proposed to bring them down to the ground and fight them there, and the means by which they proposed to do it was a sacrifice.

After this, the Brahmanas commenced a rite having for its object the destruction of the Kapas.

That is all the description the fire is given at this point. Men sat down on the earth, laid a fire, and began to recite, and the rite had a purpose that was named out loud, and the purpose was the destruction of a people who at that hour were in possession of heaven and had no reason to think anyone on earth could touch them.

The Kapas heard about it at once, which tells us something about them. They were not a people who ignored what was happening in the world below. They knew what a rite of that kind was and they knew what it would do, and they did not answer it with an army.

They sent a diplomat.

As soon as this was heard of by the Kapas, they immediately despatched a messenger of theirs, named Dhanin, unto those Brahmanas.

Dhanin came down and found them where they were working. He did not shout across a battlefield. He came to them as they sat on the earth, in the middle of the ceremony that was being conducted for the purpose of killing everyone he represented, and he stood there and delivered his message.

It is the longest speech in the episode, and it is not a threat.

"The Kapas are even like you all," Dhanin began. "They are not inferior to any of you. Hence, what will be the effect of these rites which you seem to be bent upon achieving?"

Then he set out the case, item by item, and every item is a claim to be judged by the standard the men in front of him lived by.

All of them are well conversant with the Vedas and possessed of wisdom. All of them are mindful of sacrifices. All of them have Truth for their vow, and for these reasons all of them are regarded as equal to great Rishis.

The goddess of Prosperity sports among them, and they, in their turn, support her with reverence. Lakshmi is at home in that people, and they do not merely enjoy her, they hold her up.

They never indulge in acts of fruitless congress with their wives. They never eat the flesh of such animals as have not been killed in sacrifices. They pour libations on the blazing sacrificial fire every day, and are obedient to the behests of their preceptors and seniors.

All of them are of souls under perfect control, and never take any food without dividing it duly among their children.

They always proceed on cars and other vehicles together, without any one of them riding his own vehicle while the others journey on foot. That is a small rule and it is the most human item on the list. Whatever else the Kapas were, they did not let one man ride while his companions walked.

They never indulge in acts of congress with their spouses when the latter are in the midst of their functional period. They all act in such a way as to attain to regions of felicity hereafter, and indeed, they are always righteous in their deeds.

When women quick with child or old men have not eaten, they never eat anything themselves.

They never indulge in play or sports of any kind in the forenoon. They never sleep during the day.

"When the Kapas have these and many other virtues and accomplishments," Dhanin finished, "why, indeed, would you seek to subjugate them? You should abstain from the endeavour. Verily, by such abstention ye would achieve what is for your good."

The brahmanas heard the whole of it, and the answer they gave is four sentences long and does not contest a word of it.

"Oh, we shall subjugate the Kapas! In this matter, we are one with the deities. Hence, the Kapas deserve slaughter at your hands. As regards Dhanin, he should return whence he came."

Not one item of the catalogue is denied. Nobody says that the Kapas eat unsacrificed flesh, or neglect their fires, or let their old people go hungry, or lie. The virtues stand, all of them, exactly as the messenger stated them, and the reply steps over the whole list without touching it.

What the brahmanas say instead is that they have taken a side. In this matter we are one with the deities. The gods had come to them as suppliants and had been received, and being received is not a thing that gets reconsidered when the other party turns out to be respectable. The Kapas had driven the gods out of heaven. Whatever else the Kapas were, they were the party who had emptied the sky of the beings that sacrifice is offered to, and men whose whole life is the pouring of libations cannot be neutral about that.

So Dhanin was dismissed with courtesy, the way an ambassador is, and he went back up and told his people the truth in eight words.

"The Brahmanas are not disposed to do you any good."

Hearing this, all the Kapas took up their weapons and proceeded towards the Brahmanas.

They came down after all, and they came down under arms, and nobody had needed to drag them. They had been told that the rite would go forward, and a people who understood rites understood what that meant, and rather than wait in heaven to be pulled out of it they came to the earth themselves to stop the thing at its source.

Which was precisely what the brahmanas had said they would arrange.

The Brahmanas, beholding the Kapas advancing against them with the standards of their cars upraised, forthwith created certain blazing fires for the destruction of the Kapas.

That is the battle. It occupies one sentence, and it has no manoeuvres in it and no single combats and no arrows and no named champion on either side. Men sitting on the ground saw chariots coming with the standards up, and made fire, and the fire was made with the aid of Vedic mantras and it did not go out afterwards.

Those eternal fires, having effected the destruction of the Kapas, began to shine in the firmament like so many golden clouds.

They are still there. That is what eternal means in the sentence. The weapon that ended the Kapas was not put away when the work was done. It went up and hung in the sky, and anyone looking at a gold-edged cloud is looking at the residue of that afternoon.

And then comes the strangest part of the whole account, which is the part about the gods.

The gods, having assembled together in battle, slew many of the Danavas. They did not know at that time that it was the Brahmanas who had effected their destruction.

The gods were fighting too. They had assembled, they had gone in, they had cut down the enemy in front of them, and they believed the victory was theirs. They could not see the fires working. They saw only that the foe who had been unbeatable in heaven was suddenly falling under their hands on the earth, and they drew the obvious conclusion, which was that they had at last become strong enough.

They would have gone on believing it. Nobody who had done the work was going to correct them. The brahmanas had said what they would do, and had done it, and had no interest whatever in the credit.

Someone else came and told them.

Then Narada of great energy, coming there, informed the deities how their foes, the Kapas, had been really slain by the Brahmanas of mighty energy, and not by the deities themselves.

It is the office Narada holds all through the epic: he arrives at the moment when everyone has settled on a comfortable version of events, and says the other thing. Here the other thing is that the gods had won nothing. The strength they had felt in their arms had been lent to them from a fire on the ground.

Hearing these words of Narada, the denizens of heaven became highly gratified. They also applauded those regenerate allies of theirs that were possessed of great fame.

They took it well, which is not nothing. And what followed the applause is the point Vayu had been building toward for the length of a very long argument. The energy and prowess of the deities then began to increase, and, worshipped in all the worlds, they acquired also the boon of immortality.

The gods did not become immortal by winning. They became immortal after they had knelt to the brahmanas, been fought for, and admitted whose the victory was. Heaven and earth came back to them with the sacrifices, and the deathlessness that everyone assumes gods are simply born with came to them at the end of this story as a consequence of it.

After the god of wind had said these words, king Arjuna worshipped him duly, and this time he did not stay silent.

"O puissant god, always and by all means do I live for the Brahmanas! Devoted to them, I worship them always. Through the grace of Dattatreya I have obtained this might of mine. Through his grace have I been able to accomplish great feats in the world and achieve high merit. Oh, I have, with attention, heard of the achievements, O god of the wind, of the Brahmanas with all their interesting details as recited by thee truly."

The thousand-armed king had conceded the argument, and the wind gave him his charge.

"Do thou protect and cherish the Brahmanas, in the exercise of those kshatriya duties which are thine by birth. Do thou protect them even as thou protectest thy own senses."

Then, having won, the wind said one more thing, and it was not a blessing.

"There is danger to thee from the race of Bhrigu. All that, however, will take place on a distant day."