The Jackal and the Ape

By this point in the Anushasana Parva the questions had narrowed to a very fine point. Bhishma lay on the bed of arrows on the field at Kurukshetra, waiting for the sun to turn north, and Yudhishthira came to him every day with the king's own difficulties. They had been through the merit of gifts at length: what should be given, and to whom, and at what hour, and what each gift is worth to the man who makes it. On this morning the king turned the whole subject over and asked about its shadow side.

"O grandsire, O thou of great splendour," Yudhishthira said, "what do those men become who, through stupefaction of intellect, do not make gifts unto Brahmanas after having promised to make those gifts? O thou that art the foremost of all righteous persons, do tell me what the duties are in this respect. Indeed, what becomes the end of those wicked wights that do not give after having promised to give."

Notice the phrase he chose for the offence. Stupefaction of intellect. He was not asking about a man who refuses, or a miser who never opens his mouth in the first place. He was asking about the ordinary case, the one everybody has been on one side of or the other: a man says he will give, and means it while he is saying it, and then the day passes and the month passes and the thing is not given, and nobody ever raises the matter again.

It is a small sin, if it is a sin at all. There is no theft in it and no violence and no lie told outright. Yudhishthira wanted to know what it costs.

Bhishma told him, and the answer was not small.

"The person that, after having promised, does not give," Bhishma said, "be it little or much, has the mortification to see his hopes in every direction become fruitless, like the hopes of a eunuch in respect of progeny."

Be it little or much. The size of the promise is struck out of the reckoning at once. A man who has promised a herd and given nothing stands exactly where a man stands who promised a measure of grain and gave nothing, because what is being weighed is not the property but the word.

Then the grandsire set out the extent of the damage, and it is worth following clause by clause, because he does not stop where a listener expects him to stop.

"Whatever good acts such a person does between the day of his birth and that of his death, O Bharata, whatever libations he pours on the sacrificial fire, whatever gifts he makes, O chief of Bharata's race, and whatever penances he performs, all become fruitless."

Every item in that list is a thing a man does correctly. The libations are poured on the right fire at the right hour. The gifts, the ones he did make, went to the right hands. The penances were real, and cost him what penances cost. And the whole account is emptied out by the one gift that was spoken of and never handed over. Not reduced. Not deferred. Made fruitless, the way a field that is sown and tended and watered can still yield nothing at all.

Bhishma was careful to say that this was not his private severity. "They that are conversant with the scriptures declare this as their opinion, arriving at it, O chief of the Bharatas, with the aid of a well-ordered understanding."

And because the men who settled that verdict were not in the business of leaving a man without a road back, they also fixed the price of the road. Persons conversant with the scriptures are of opinion that such a man may be cleansed by giving away a thousand horses with ears of a dark hue.

A thousand horses, of one particular marking, to wipe out one gift that was promised and withheld. That is the exchange rate. Then Bhishma said that in this connection there was an old narrative, and that it was a conversation between a jackal and an ape.

While both were human beings, O scorcher of foes, they were intimate friends.

That is the first thing said about them, and it is said before anything else is said, so that everything which follows will be read against it. They were not two strangers who happened to meet. They were two men who had known each other in the way that men know each other over a long life, who had eaten in each other's houses and been trusted with each other's business, and whatever each of them did wrong, he did while the other was alive and near him and probably knew nothing about it.

Then they died, as friends do, and the friendship did not end so much as change its footing entirely.

After death one of them became a jackal and the other an ape.

Bhishma does not say how long afterwards this was, or in what country, and the story does not require it. What it requires is the place. One of them was in a crematorium, which is to say the burning ground at the edge of the settled land, where the fires are lit and let go out and the ash is left where it falls, and where the animals that live on what men leave behind come in at dusk and are not driven off because nobody wants to walk there.

That is where the jackal was, and he was eating. The text names the meal without softening it. He was eating an animal carcase, putrid, in the middle of the burning ground, and that was not a misfortune of one evening but his ordinary fare and his ordinary table.

The ape came upon him there.

And here the story does the thing that makes it a story and not a warning. The ape recognised him. He remembered his own former birth as a human being, and he remembered his friend's, and he stood at the edge of the ash looking at an animal with its mouth in a carcase and knew perfectly well who it was.

The ape spoke first, and he did not soften it either.

"Verily, what terrible sin didst thou perpetrate in thy former birth," he said, "in consequence of which thou art obliged in this birth to feed in a crematorium upon such repulsive fare as the putrid carcase of an animal?"

It is a hard sentence to say to a friend. But consider the position the ape was speaking from. He had the whole of the previous life in his head, the two of them as men, and he could not find in it anything that would account for what he was looking at. Men who end in the burning ground eating carrion have done something. Murder, perhaps. Betrayal of a trust. Some cruelty carried on for years. The ape was asking his friend to name the atrocity he had somehow managed to conceal from him for a lifetime.

The jackal lifted his head and told him.

"Having promised to give unto a Brahmana, I did not make him the gift."

That was the whole of it. No violence, no theft, no perjury sworn in a hall. A Brahmana had been told that something would be given to him. He went away expecting it. The thing was never sent, and the man who had spoken went on with his life and, one assumes, forgot the matter within the year, as everybody forgets such things.

"It is for that sin, O ape, that I have fallen into this wretched order of existence," the jackal said. "It is for that reason that, when hungry, I am obliged to eat such food."

Read the last clause again, because it is the exact shape of the punishment. He is not merely a jackal. He is a jackal who gets hungry. The appetite is left in working order so that it can drive him, every evening of his life, to the one place and the one meal, and what compels him to the carcase is nothing more exotic than the ordinary need to eat that any creature has.

A man had raised an expectation in someone and left it unfed. He was now the thing that is fed last, on what is left over, in the place where the leavings are.

Then the jackal put the same question back across the ash, and it was fair that he should, because the ape was standing there in a body that also had to be explained.

"What sin didst thou commit," the jackal said, "for which thou hast become an ape?"

The ape answered without any defence at all.

"In my former life I used to appropriate the fruits belonging to Brahmanas. Hence have I become an ape."

The two confessions stand side by side, and they are the same offence approached from opposite ends. One man kept back what he had promised to a Brahmana. The other took what was already a Brahmana's. Between them they cover the whole ground: what is owed and not handed over, and what is not owed and helped oneself to. Neither of them killed anybody. Neither of them is described as having been a wicked man in any other respect. And one of them is a scavenger in a burning ground and the other is a creature in the branches with his hands full of somebody else's fruit for the rest of his natural life, which is a joke the universe appears to have made deliberately, since an ape is exactly the animal that lives by taking fruit that was grown by others.

He had been given the perfect body for the habit he could not break. That is the fruit of acts, rendered as plainly as the epic ever renders it.

And then the ape, who had been an intelligent man and had lost nothing of it, drew the lesson out for his friend and for anybody listening.

"Hence it is clear that one possessed of intelligence and learning should never appropriate what belongs to Brahmanas. Verily, as one should abstain from this, one should avoid also all disputes with Brahmanas. Having promised, one should certainly make the promised gift unto them."

Three rules, in the order in which he had learned them the hard way. Do not take what is theirs. Do not quarrel with them. And what you have said you will give, give.

The conversation ends there. Bhishma does not say what became of the two of them afterwards, whether they served out those bodies and rose again or stayed where they were. The tale was told to be overheard, not to be finished.

Coming back off the story, Bhishma did something he did not always trouble to do. He named where he had got it.

"I heard this, O king, from my preceptor while he was engaged in discoursing upon the subject of Brahmanas. I heard this from that righteous person when he recited the old and sacred declaration on this topic. I heard this from Krishna also, O king, while he was engaged in discoursing, O son of Pandu, upon Brahmanas."

Twice from his teacher, once from Krishna, who was sitting somewhere within hearing while the old man said it. An aged Kuru on a bed of arrows, giving his authorities like a man who expects to be checked.

Then he set out the teaching itself, and it comes in short flat statements with nothing decorative in them.

The property of a Brahmana should never be appropriated. They should always be let alone. Poor, or miserly, or young in years, they should never be disregarded.

That middle clause is the one that costs something. It is easy to honour a Brahmana who is learned and old and impressive to look at. Bhishma names the three cases in which a man will privately decide that the rule does not apply: the one who has nothing, the one who is grasping about what he has, and the one who is too young to have earned anything yet. None of the three, he says, may be disregarded. "The Brahmanas have always taught me this. Having promised to make them a gift, the gift should be made. A superior Brahmana should never be disappointed in the matter of his expectations."

And then the image that the whole section has been walking toward.

"A Brahmana, O king, in whom an expectation has been raised, has been said to be like a blazing fire. That man upon whom a Brahmana with raised expectations casts his eye is sure, O monarch, to be consumed, even as a heap of straw is capable of being consumed by a blazing fire."

The raising of the expectation is the act that lights it. Not the refusal, which may never be spoken, and not any curse, which is never mentioned here. A man makes his promise and walks away, and behind him he has left something burning, and he is the straw.

Having shown the king what an unfed expectation does, Bhishma turned the image over and showed him what a satisfied one does.

"When the Brahmana, gratified with honours and gifts by the king, addresses the king in delightful and affectionate words, he becomes, O Bharata, a source of great benefit to the king, for he continues to live in the kingdom like a physician combating against diverse ills of the body."

A physician, and living in the kingdom. Not a treasure locked away and not a weapon kept for emergencies, but somebody resident, whose work is against the ordinary ills that come to a body and a realm continually and have to be met continually.

Bhishma then listed what such a man holds up, and the list is not abstract. By his puissance and his good wishes he maintains the sons and grandsons of the king, the animals, the relatives, the ministers and the other officers, the city and the provinces. It runs outward from the household to the frontier. "Even such is the energy, so great, of the Brahmana," he said, "like unto that of the thousand-rayed Surya himself, on the Earth."

So the choice put before Yudhishthira was between two fires. The same man, in the same kingdom, is either the blaze that burns the straw or the sun that keeps the fields.

"Therefore, O Yudhishthira, if one wishes to attain to a respectable or happy order of being in one's next birth, one should, having passed the promise to a Brahmana, certainly keep it by actually making the gift to him. By making gifts to a Brahmana one is sure to attain to the highest heaven. Verily, the making of gifts is the highest of acts that one can achieve."

And he gave the reason underneath all the others, which is not about the giver at all.

"By the gifts one makes to a Brahmana, the deities and the pitris are supported."

The gods above and the fathers below are fed through that hand. A promise withheld does not stop at the man who made it. It stops a supply.

"Hence one possessed of knowledge should ever make gifts unto the Brahmanas. O chief of the Bharatas, the Brahmana is regarded as the highest object unto whom gifts should be made. At no time should a Brahmana be received without being properly worshipped."

That was the end of it. Somewhere off in the world a jackal was going down to the burning ground for his supper, and an ape was in a tree with fruit he had not grown, and the two of them had once sat together as men and discussed everything except this.