The Devotees of Mahadeva

Bhishma lay where he had lain since the fourteenth day of the war ended, on a bed that Arjuna's arrows had made for him, and Yudhishthira had asked him a hard question: whether any mortal creature had ever truly come to know Mahadeva, since even the gods, by Upamanyu's own telling, could not sound the beginning, middle, or end of him.

"There is an answer to that," Bhishma said, "and Krishna gave it to me once, in words I have kept."

He told it as Krishna had told it. Long before, on the breast of Mount Meru, Krishna had practised the sternest penances a man can practise, wanting a son, and the hymn he had recited through all of it was one that the rishi Upamanyu had taught him: the thousand and eight names of the great Deity, carried down through a chain of teachers from Brahma himself to Tandi, and from Tandi at last into Krishna's own mouth. Krishna had recited that hymn for Yudhishthira in full, every name of it, and when he had finished he did not simply stop.

"Do thou also recite this hymn, my son," he said, "and let Maheswara be gratified with thee. Through it I obtained the fruition of all my wishes. Thou shalt obtain the same."

It was Krishna Dvaipayana, the Island-born, who spoke next and told Yudhishthira to make the hymn his own daily practice. And in that same gathering, seated near enough to be heard, were rishis who did not need to be told what the hymn could do, because each of them had already been given something by the God it praised. Krishna, who knew their histories, named them one after another, and let each speak in his own words of what Mahadeva had done for him.

"Hear them as I heard them," Bhishma said to Yudhishthira. "There is no better proof of what devotion buys than the men who have already spent it and been paid."

The first to speak was Kapila, the rishi who had given the world the Sankhya, the philosophy that sets out to know the soul by first learning to tell it apart from everything it is not. He was honoured by the gods themselves for it, and he did not dress his testimony up.

"I adored Bhava with great devotion for many lives together," he said. "The illustrious Deity at last became gratified with me, and gave me knowledge that is capable of aiding the acquirer in getting over rebirth."

That was the whole of it. No battle, no curse, no long ordeal to narrate, only lifetimes of unwavering worship set against a single gift so large it needed no embellishment: the science by which a man learns to separate his self from his body, his mind, his senses, and the world those senses report to him, until nothing is left in the reckoning that death can touch.

After him came Charusirsha, a rishi known also as the son of Alamvana, a dear friend of Sakra's and a man filled, the record says, with compassion. His penance had been plainer to describe.

"I, in former days, repaired to the mountains of Gokarna," he said, "and sat myself to practise severe penances for a hundred years."

For a hundred years of stillness on that mountain, Mahadeva gave him a hundred sons. Not born of a woman, none of them, but given whole, each one already possessed of a restrained soul, conversant with righteousness, splendid, free of disease and sorrow, and granted a hundred thousand years of life apiece. Where Kapila had asked to be freed from the wheel of birth and death altogether, Charusirsha had been given a wheel of his own, a hundred lives running in parallel for a hundred thousand years each, none of them touched by grief. Two men, on two mountains, and two entirely different ideas of what a great gift looks like.

Then Valmiki spoke, and what he had to confess was not a penance chosen but a sin that had descended on him out of nowhere.

"Once upon a time, in course of a dialectical disputation," he said, "certain ascetics that were possessors of the homa fire denounced me as one guilty of Brahmanicide. As soon as they had denounced me as such, the sin of Brahmanicide possessed me."

It is worth sitting with how strange that sentence is. He had not killed a Brahmana. He had argued with a circle of ascetics, and lost or won the argument in some way the record does not preserve, and been called a murderer of Brahmanas by men who had the standing to make the charge stick, and the charge itself, spoken aloud by men of that authority, was enough to fasten the sin onto him as though he had actually done the thing. Reputation and reality had briefly become the same substance.

"I then, for cleansing myself, sought the protection of the sinless Isana who is irresistible in energy," Valmiki said. "I become cleansed of all my sins."

Isana is one more name for the Deity whose thousand and eight names had just been recited in full, the destroyer of the triple city of the Asuras, and it was that Deity who answered him, not with a ritual to perform or a period of austerity to complete, but with a single sentence.

"Thy fame shall be great in the world."

Valmiki did not explain what he understood by that promise, and the assembly did not ask him to. He had come to Mahadeva carrying a name that other men had ruined for him in an afternoon, and he had gone away carrying a different name, one that the Deity himself had set a value on, and left it there.

Two more spoke in quick succession after Valmiki, and between them they showed how far the God's mercy could be made to stretch.

Jamadagni's son rose first, shining, the record says, like the sun in the midst of that gathering of rishis. His crime was heavier than Valmiki's, and he did not soften it.

"I was afflicted with the sin, O eldest son of Pandu, of Brahmanicide, for having slain my brothers who were all learned Brahmanas," he said. "For purifying myself, I sought the protection of Mahadeva. I hymned the praises of the great Deity by reciting his names."

Bhava was gratified. He gave the man a battle-axe and other celestial weapons, and he told him plainly what the gift meant. "Thou shalt be freed from sin, and thou shalt be invincible in battle. Death himself shall not succeed in overcoming thee, for thou shalt be freed from disease." A killer of his own kin walked away armed and unkillable, because he had asked to be forgiven, and had asked correctly.

Vishvamitra's confession was smaller and stranger for being smaller. He had not sinned at all.

"I was formerly a Kshatriya," he said. "I paid my adorations to Bhava with the desire of becoming a Brahmana. Through the grace of that great Deity I succeeded in obtaining the high status of a Brahmana that is so difficult to obtain."

No curse had touched him and no crime weighed on him. He had simply wanted to be born again into a different order of men without waiting for another birth to do it, and Mahadeva had let him. Between the two of them, brother-slayer and king, the assembly had just heard the God erase the two hardest lines a man can be asked to cross in that world: the line a murderer cannot walk back across, and the line a birth is supposed to fix forever. Neither line had held.

The rishi Asita-Devala spoke next, and his history was the shortest of all, though what it implied was not small.

"In former days, O son of Kunti, through the curse of Sakra," he said, "all my merit due to the acts of righteousness I had performed was destroyed."

Sakra is Indra, king of the gods, and a curse from Indra was not a thing an ordinary ascetic could expect to survive intact. Merit in that world is not a reputation or a feeling. It is a substance, accumulated act by act across years of discipline, the one possession a rishi carries out of this life and into the next, and Indra had reached into Asita-Devala's store of it and burned it down to nothing, for a reason the rishi did not name and perhaps did not need to.

"The puissant Mahadeva it was who kindly gave me back that merit," Asita-Devala said, "together with great fame and a long life."

Notice what did not happen. Mahadeva did not quarrel with Indra over the curse, did not declare it unjust, did not undo the act of cursing itself. He simply restored what the curse had taken, as if the years Asita-Devala had spent earning it were an account that could be recopied from memory once the ledger was burned. And he added interest: fame the rishi had not had before, and years beyond what the merit alone would have bought him. A god had taken everything a man owned in the unseen world, and another God had made good the loss and paid him besides.

The assembly around Bhishma's bed took note of that, for it meant that even the highest of the gods could be answered by a devotion greater than his anger.

Then the illustrious Gritsamada spoke, a rishi who resembled Vrihaspati himself in splendour and who counted Sakra among his dear friends, and his history was the longest of all of them, because it had a villain in it.

"The inconceivable Sakra had, in days of yore, performed a sacrifice extending over a thousand years," he said. "While that sacrifice was going on, I was engaged by Sakra in reciting the Samans."

A thousand-year sacrifice needs a thousand years of correct chanting, and somewhere inside that enormous span, Gritsamada made a mistake. Varishtha, the son of the Manu who had sprung from Brahma's own eyes, was present at the rite, and he heard the error and did not let it pass.

"O foremost of regenerate persons, the Rathantara is not being recited properly by thee," Varishtha said. "O best of Brahmanas, cease to earn demerit by reading so faultily."

That alone would have been correction enough. But Varishtha was wrathful, and wrath, once it has an opening, does not stop at the first sentence.

"Be thou an animal divested of intelligence," he said, "subject to grief, ever filled with fear, and a denizen of trackless forests destitute of both wind and water and abandoned by other animals. Do thou thus pass ten thousand years, with eighteen hundred years in addition. That forest in which thou shalt have to pass this period will be destitute of all holy trees, and will besides be the haunt of Rurus and lions. Verily, thou shalt have to become a cruel deer plunged in excess of grief."

He said it, and it happened. Gritsamada, mid-syllable in the recitation of a sacrifice he had been trusted with, became a deer.

"As soon as he had said these words, O son of Pritha," Gritsamada told the gathering, "I immediately became transformed into a deer."

There is no description of what came next, no years counted out in the forest that Varishtha had promised him, no lions named. Gritsamada does not dwell on the sentence itself. What he tells Yudhishthira instead is the single thing he did about it.

"I then sought the protection of Maheswara."

An animal without intelligence, by the terms of the curse, should not have been capable of that. A creature divested of understanding cannot form the thought of seeking a god's protection, cannot direct devotion anywhere at all. But Gritsamada's devotion had not been divested along with the rest of him, or Mahadeva reached past the curse to find what was still there. However it happened, the great Deity answered him, not by lifting the curse, but by making the curse survivable, and then some.

"Thou shalt be freed from disease of every kind," Maheswara told him, "and besides, immortality shall be thine. Grief shall never afflict thee. Thy friendship with Indra shall remain unchanged, and let the sacrifices of both Indra and thyself increase."

Read that last clause again. The friend who had presided over the sacrifice where Gritsamada was cursed, whose own guest Varishtha had been, lost nothing from the arrangement. Their friendship was to remain unchanged, as though the deer standing in a lion-haunted forest bore his old friend no grudge for what had happened under his roof.

"There is none equal to me in learning," Gritsamada said, closing his account, and no one in that gathering disputed it. He had gone into a curse meant to strip him of intelligence, and come out the other side of it still able to say, without being contradicted, that his learning had no equal on earth.

Garga spoke after him, and his account was gratitude without complaint, a man naming a debt paid rather than a wound healed.

"O son of Pandu," he said, "gratified with me in consequence of mental sacrifice which I had performed, the great God bestowed upon me, on the banks of the sacred stream Saraswati, that wonderful science, viz., the knowledge of Time with its four and sixty branches."

A mental sacrifice, offered without fire or fee, on the banks of a river that itself does not flow visibly through most of the land it waters. In return, the God gave him the science by which the movements of the sky are read against the doings of the earth: the reckoning of years and seasons, the counting of when a rite should begin and when it must end, the branch of learning that tells a king or a priest that this hour is auspicious and that one is not. It was the discipline every other rishi in that gathering had leaned on without ever having to master it themselves, because Garga's science already told them when their own sacrifices should be lit.

He was given more besides. "He also bestowed upon me a thousand sons," Garga said, "all possessed of equal merit and fully conversant with the Vedas." And their years, his own included, were stretched to ten million, so that a science built on the counting of time was given to a family that time itself would take an unusually long while to catch.

Where Charusirsha had asked for a hundred sons across a hundred years of penance, Garga had been given a thousand for a sacrifice that cost him nothing but the discipline of his own mind, and it was hard, hearing the two accounts back to back, to say which rishi's devotion Mahadeva had weighed the more precious.

The last to speak was the youngest history in that assembly, and it belonged to Galava, who had been, not long before by the reckoning of such lives, simply a student.

"Formerly I studied at the feet of my preceptor Vishvamitra," Galava said. "Obtaining his permission I set out for home with the object of seeing my father."

It should have been a happy errand. It was not, because his mother had fallen into grief in his absence, and that grief had reached him before he could reach her with the truth of his return.

"My mother, having become a widow, was filled with sorrow and weeping bitterly," Galava said, "and said unto me, Alas, thy father will never see his son who, adorned with Vedic knowledge, has been permitted by his preceptor to come home."

A young man walking home with everything he had earned at his teacher's feet, told before he arrived that the one person he most wanted to show it to was already gone. Galava does not describe the walk after that. He describes only what he did with the despair it left him.

"I then paid my adoration with a rapt soul to Maheswara," he said, "who, gratified with me, showed himself to me and said, Thy sire, thy mother, and thyself, O son, shall all be freed from death. Go quickly and enter thy abode; thou shalt behold thy sire there."

He went. And there, coming out from his own homa fire with kusha grass and fallen fruits still in his hands, having already washed and eaten, was his father, alive, unhurried, exactly where a father should be found.

"Embracing me he smelt my head," Galava said, "and said, By good luck, O son, art thou seen by me. Thou hast come back, having acquired knowledge from the preceptor."

Of everything spoken in that gathering, it was the smallest miracle, and to the men listening, perhaps the one that needed no explaining at all.

"Hearing these marvellous and most wonderful feats of the illustrious Mahadeva recited by the ascetics," the story goes, "the son of Pandu became amazed."

He had reason to be. In the space of one gathering he had heard a philosopher freed from rebirth, a hermit given a hundred sons without a wife, a poet cleared of a murder he never committed, a brother-slayer armed and made deathless, a king remade into a Brahmana, a rishi's stolen merit restored with interest, a man cursed into a deer who kept every ounce of his own learning, an astronomer given a thousand sons and ten million years, and a frightened student who arrived home to find his father exactly where he had been told he would be. Different men, different faults, different mountains and rivers and forests, and one God answering every one of them out of the same well.

Krishna spoke once more before it closed. "Those sinful men that are stained with unrighteous deeds do not succeed in attaining to Isana," he said. "It is only those regenerate persons who are of cleansed souls that succeed in attaining to the Supreme Deity. Even if a person lives in the enjoyment of every pleasure and luxury, yet if he be devoted to the Supreme Deity, he comes to be regarded as the equal of forest recluses of cleansed souls. Even this is my settled conviction, that those men who devote themselves to Mahadeva become certainly emancipated from rebirth."

Bhishma let the words rest a while on the bed of arrows before he spoke again to Yudhishthira.

"That is the whole of what Krishna told me," he said, "and it is the whole of what those rishis proved without meaning to prove anything: that the size of the sin, or the size of the sorrow, makes no difference to the size of the mercy. Kapila asked for the end of rebirth and got it. Galava asked only to see his father's face again, and got that too. Mahadeva did not weigh one request as larger than the other."