The Ocean and the Reed

The war had been over for many days, and still the field would not empty. Yudhishthira came each morning to the place where Bhishma lay on his bed of arrows, and each morning he brought a question he had turned over in the dark.

"Grandfather," he said, "you have taught me what a king owes his people, and what he owes an enemy who lays down his weapons. Teach me now what a king owes himself when he is the weaker man. Suppose the ruler across the river commands three armies for every one of mine. I have no ally within reach and no season in which to buy one. Is there anything left to me but to march out and be broken, or to kneel and be swallowed?"

"There is a third thing," said the son of Ganga, "and the proud always mistake it for the second. I will not argue it with you, because a man argued into humility is only waiting to be proud again. I will tell you instead who taught it. The teacher was the ocean, and the students were the rivers, and it is worth remembering that the lord of waters was willing to be taught by what ran into him."

Yudhishthira sat down in the churned dust beside the arrows and said nothing, which was his way of asking.

"In a season long before your fathers," Bhishma began, "the rains came as they come, and the rivers rose. Ganga rose, and Yamuna, and Sindhu and Narmada and Godavari and all their sisters, and they came down out of the hills carrying the hills' furniture with them. And the ocean, receiving what they brought, looked at it and grew curious, as the very great sometimes do when they notice a pattern they cannot explain."

"When the flood had spent itself," said Bhishma, "the lord of waters called the rivers to him, and they came, and he spoke to them courteously, for he owed them everything he was.

"'Daughters,' he said, 'I have a question, and I have carried it a long time. Every season you bring me trees. You bring me the sala and the palmyra, the kadamba and the arjuna, trees of enormous girth that ten men could not join hands around, and you bring them to me root and all, with the earth still packed in the roots and the birds' nests still in the branches. You tear them out of the bank and roll them down to me and I take them, because I take everything.

"'But there is one thing you never bring me. On those same banks, in the same mud, in the very water you travel through, grows the vetasa, the reed. It is slender. A child could close a fist around it. It has no depth of root that I can see and no weight at all. In all the ages I have received your floods I have never once received a vetasa torn up and carried down. Tell me why. Do you spare it out of affection? Is it too light for you to lift? Or has that reed some friendship with you that the great trees have failed to make?'

"The rivers looked at one another," said Bhishma, "the way students do when the master has asked a question whose answer will embarrass him. And Ganga, who is my mother and who has never been afraid of an awkward truth, answered for them all."

"'Lord of waters,' said Ganga, 'there is no affection in it, and no friendship, and the reed is certainly not too heavy for us. The answer is simpler than you will like.

"'The great trees stand where they stand. When our water comes against them they meet it. They are rooted deep and they are proud of being rooted deep, and they do not move, and because they do not move the whole force of the flood is spent on them and not past them. We wear the earth out from under them a handful at a time while they hold their posture. Then they go over, root and all, and they come to you.

"'The vetasa does not meet us. When it feels the water rising it bends. It lies down along the bank and lets the flood pass over its back, and it keeps lying down as long as the water is high, and it does not complain and it does not resist and it does not care who sees it lying there. When the water falls it stands up again in the same place it always stood, unhurt, with its root exactly where its root was. It survives us because it does not oppose us. That is the whole of it.'

"The ocean was quiet for a while," said Bhishma, "and then he said what a wise being says when he has been taught. 'Then the reed is stronger than the sala, though a child can bend the one and an elephant cannot shift the other. For strength is what is standing at the end of the season, and nothing else is strength, whatever it looked like in the middle of the flood.'"

"Now take it out of the water, king," said Bhishma, "and set it in a court, because I did not tell you a story about trees.

"A ruler whose strength is less than his enemy's should conduct himself toward that enemy exactly as the vetasa conducts itself toward the flood. Bow. Send the gifts before they are demanded. Give the words of peace, and give them early, when they still purchase something, rather than late, when they only confess. Take the lower seat at the meeting and take it without a face that argues. Let him have the ceremony, the precedence, the title, the tribute, the pleasure of your deference. All of that is branches. It grows back in a season.

"But while you bend, keep the root, and know what the root is. The root is your treasury, not your ornaments. The root is the loyalty of the farmers and the herdsmen, who will feed an army that has been beaten and will not feed a king they hate. The root is the fort you have quietly provisioned and never mentioned. The root is the men who know the enemy's country and can be sent into it as merchants. The root is your own counsel, kept in three heads and not thirty. A king who bends and keeps these has lost a season. A king who keeps his posture and loses these has lost the field, and he will lose the posture too, a month later, in a worse way.

"Then wait. Every flood spends itself. A strong king dies, or divides his sons, or turns his strength toward some other border, or lives long enough to be hated by the men he raised. When the water falls, stand up. You will find your root where you left it."

"There is one confusion I want to take out of your hands before I stop," said Bhishma, "because it kills more kings than cowardice does. Men look at the sala tree and call it strong. It is not strong. It is stiff. Those are different qualities and they wear the same coat. Stiffness is a thing you have; strength is a thing you still have afterward. The tree that would not bend was not defending anything except its opinion of itself, and it took the birds' nests down with it when it went.

"This is not the silk-cotton's error, who boasted into the wind's face and was stripped bare by morning for the boast alone. The king I am warning you about does not boast. He is grave and dutiful and he refuses to yield an inch because yielding an inch feels like a stain on his honor, and he is destroyed with his honor perfectly intact and his people perfectly ruined. Honor that is paid for by other men is not honor. It is only a purchase made with someone else's coin.

"And hear the other half, or you will learn the wrong lesson from an old man on a bed of arrows. The reed rises. It bends because the water is high and it rises because the water has fallen, and it reads the difference correctly, every time. A man who lies flat after the flood has gone is not humble. He is finished, and he has begun to call being finished a virtue. Bend by judgment, not by habit. Rise on the day you can rise, not a day later out of comfort."

Yudhishthira said, "And how does a king know that the water has fallen?"

"By keeping men on the bank who watch it," said Bhishma. "That is what ministers are for. The reed has none, and does it by feel, and the reed is only a reed. You have no such excuse."