The Road to Emancipation

Bhishma had just finished telling the king how a man becomes sinful and how he becomes righteous, and he had closed it with an instruction rather than a doctrine. Adhere to virtue in all situations, son of Kunti. Eternal is the success of him that adheres to righteousness.

It was the kind of ending that is meant to end a session. The brothers were sitting on the ground around the arrows, the afternoon was going, and a king who had been listening for weeks might have been expected to take the blessing and let the old man rest.

Yudhishthira had noticed a word instead.

"Thou hast said, O grandsire, that Emancipation is to be won by means and not otherwise," he said. "I desire to hear duly what those means are."

It is worth seeing what he had caught. Bhishma had described a man who gradually abandons sinful acts, betakes himself to Renunciation, and at last attains to Emancipation by the well-known means, and the phrase had gone past in a sentence that was mostly about something else. Well-known to whom. Yudhishthira had spent his whole life being told that a thing was well known, and had learned to ask.

Bhishma answered the question with a compliment first, and the compliment is a piece of character description sharper than anything in the war books.

"O thou of great wisdom, this enquiry that thou hast addressed to me, and that is connected with a subtle topic, is really worthy of thee, since thou, O sinless one, always seekest to accomplish all thy objects by the application of means."

That is what the grandsire had observed about this particular grandson over a lifetime. Not that he was pious, though he was. Not that he was brave. That when Yudhishthira wanted a thing he asked how it was done, and then did that, step by step, in order, and would not be put off with the assurance that good men somehow arrive.

So he had asked how a man gets out.

Bhishma did not begin with the list. He began with a potter.

"That state of mind which is present when one sets oneself to make an earthen jar for one's use," Bhishma said, "disappears after the jar has been completed."

A man wants water carried. He goes for clay, and treads it, and turns it, and dries it, and fires it, and every hour of that work is held together by one thing, which is the jar he does not yet have. When the jar is standing there full, the thing that held the work together is gone. Nobody keeps wanting a jar he owns.

"After the same manner, that cause which urges persons who regard virtue as the root of advancement and prosperity ceases to operate with them that seek to achieve Emancipation."

This is the hinge of the whole discourse and it is easy to walk past. Virtue, in the ordinary sense that Bhishma had been teaching for weeks, is a way of getting things. It gets sons, wealth, a good name, heaven, and a term of residence among the gods with the length of the term stated. It is the clay and the wheel. The man who wants those things is urged along by wanting them, exactly as the potter is urged along by the jar, and the urging is not a fault in him. It is what makes him work.

But the man who is after Emancipation is not carrying water. There is no jar at the end of it. So the thing that drives every other kind of good man cannot drive him, and if he tries to run on it he will find that it has quietly stopped operating, the way the want of a jar stops when the jar is made.

Then Bhishma gave the geography of it, which is blunter still.

"That path which leads to the Eastern Ocean is not the path by which one can go to the Western Ocean."

Both roads are real. Both end at water. A man walking east is not lost, and nobody on the eastern road is doing anything wrong, and every mile of it takes him further from the other sea.

"There is only one path that leads to Emancipation. Listen to me as I discourse on it to thee in detail."

What followed was not a description of the road. It was an inventory of removals, each one naming the thing that has to go and the single instrument that takes it out, and the pairings are the whole teaching. A man who is told only to be good is being told nothing. A man who is told which tool lifts which weight can begin in the morning.

"One should, by practising forgiveness, exterminate wrath, and by abandoning all purposes, root out desire."

Not by abandoning objects. By abandoning purposes. Desire does not live in the thing wanted, which is only clay and cloth, but in the plan that has been built around it, and a man who gives away the thing and keeps the plan has given away nothing.

"By practising the quality of Sattwa one should conquer sleep. By heedfulness one should keep off fear, and by contemplation of the Soul one should conquer breath."

"Desire, aversion, and lust, one should dispel by patience; error, ignorance, and doubt, by study of truth. By pursuit after knowledge one should avoid insouciance and inquiry after things of no interest."

That last is a small and merciless line. Idle curiosity and idle indifference are treated as one disorder with one remedy, because both are what a mind does when it has nothing serious in front of it, and the cure for both is to give it something serious.

"By frugal and easily digestible fare one should drive off all disorders and diseases."

The road to Brahma goes through the kitchen. Bhishma puts diet in the same list as forgiveness and patience, at the same rank, with no apology for the descent, because a man whose stomach is at war with him is not going to conquer anything else that afternoon.

"By contentment one should dispel greed and stupefaction of judgment, and all worldly concerns should be avoided by a knowledge of the truth."

Greed and stupefaction of judgment are named together, and the pairing is the accusation. The man who cannot stop acquiring is not merely acquisitive. He has stopped being able to see straight, and the two failures arrive as one and are put down by one thing.

The list went on, and in the second half of it certain instruments begin to come round a second time, which is worth marking, because a catalogue that repeats itself is telling you where its weight lies.

"By practising benevolence one should conquer iniquity, and by regard for all creatures one should acquire virtue."

"One should avoid expectation by the reflection that it is concerned with the future; and one should cast off wealth by abandoning desire itself."

Expectation is disarmed by naming what it is made of. It is not a thing that exists. It is an arrangement about a time that has not come, and holding it up to the light in that one respect is the whole of the remedy. And wealth is not cast off by giving it away, which any king can do in an afternoon and be no lighter for it. Wealth is cast off by abandoning desire, after which the treasury is simply furniture.

"The man of intelligence should abandon affection by recollecting that everything here is transitory. He should subdue hunger by practising Yoga."

"By practising benevolence one should keep off all ideas of self-importance, and drive off all sorts of craving by adopting contentment. By exertion one should subdue procrastination, and by certainty all kinds of doubt, by taciturnity, loquaciousness, and by courage, every kind of fear."

Benevolence has now been given twice, first against iniquity and then against self-importance, and contentment twice, first against greed and then against craving. Fear has been dealt with twice from two directions, once by heedfulness, which is what a man does before the thing arrives, and once by courage, which is what he has left when it is already in the room.

And in the middle of the metaphysics sit exertion against procrastination and silence against talking too much, which are the two items on the list that any man on earth could have been given by his mother. Bhishma does not rank them lower. They are in the same sentence as certainty and doubt.

That is the end of the inventory. It has taken perhaps a minute to recite. It is a lifetime long.

Then Bhishma turned the teaching upward, and gave the order of command in a household where every officer is under another.

"Speech and mind are to be subdued by the Understanding, and the Understanding, in its turn, is to be kept under control by the eye of knowledge. Knowledge, again, is to be controlled by acquaintance with the Soul, and finally the Soul is to be controlled by the Soul."

Every rung is held down by the rung above it, which is why arguing with your own tongue gets a man nowhere. The tongue does not answer to itself. It answers to the understanding, and the understanding answers to knowledge, and knowledge answers to acquaintance with the Soul, and then the chain runs out, because there is nothing above the Soul to hold it. So it holds itself. The Soul is to be controlled by the Soul, and there is no further instruction available, and Bhishma does not pretend there is.

He named who this last is possible for. Those that are of pure acts and endued with tranquillity of soul, the means being the subjugation of those five impediments of Yoga of which the learned speak.

Then he named the five, so that nobody could nod along without knowing them.

"By casting off desire and wrath and covetousness and fear and sleep, one should, restraining speech, practise what is favourable to Yoga."

And he named what is favourable, ten things in a row: contemplation, study, gift, truth, modesty, candour, forgiveness, purity of heart, purity in respect of food, and the subjugation of the senses.

Gift is on that list. So is food. A man practising for Emancipation is still expected to hand things to people and still expected to watch what he eats.

"By these one's energy is increased, sins are dispelled, wishes crowned with fruition, and knowledge of diverse kinds gained. When one becomes cleansed of one's sins and possessed of energy and frugal of fare and the master of one's senses, one then, having conquered both desire and wrath, seeks to attain to Brahma."

Seeks. Not reaches. After all of that, the man is only now in a condition to begin looking.

At the end Bhishma gathered the whole of it up and said the road once more, not as a list of tools now but as a description of the man who has walked it, which is the only honest way to describe a road nobody in the hearing had reached the end of.

The avoidance of ignorance, which comes by listening to and studying the scriptures. The absence of attachment, which comes of Renunciation. Freedom from desire and from wrath, which come by adopting contentment and forgiveness. The puissance that is won by Yoga. The absence of pride and haughtiness. Freedom from anxiety, which comes by the subjugation of every kind of fear. And the absence of attachment to anything like home and family.

That last one he left standing at the end of the list without softening it, in front of five brothers who had just spent eighteen days killing their cousins over a house.

"These constitute the path of Emancipation," he said. "That path is delightful, stainless, and pure."

Delightful is the word to hold. Everything named in that catalogue is a subtraction. Wrath gone, sleep gone, greed gone, expectation gone, affection gone, the treasury turned into furniture, the house no longer a claim on anybody. Read as a list it sounds like a stripping, and the grandsire, who was lying on a bed of arrows with his body failing and had every excuse to describe the road as an ordeal, called it delightful and stainless and pure and did not qualify it.

Then he added one more sentence, and it is the smallest door in the entire discourse.

"Similarly, the restraining of speech, of body, and of mind, when practised from the absence of desire, constitutes also the path of Emancipation."

Three restraints. What you say, what you do, what you think. Any man alive can begin those before nightfall, and there is no scripture to be studied first and no forest to be found first.

The whole weight of it is in the clause at the end. When practised from the absence of desire. A man can hold his tongue and hold his hands and hold his mind while wanting something, and then he is only a potter, working his clay, waiting for his jar.