The Perfected One at the Door

The war was some weeks past its ending, and Hastinapura had begun again to eat and to sleep. Yudhishthira sat on a throne he had not wanted, in a hall where the pillars still smelled of the oil used to clean them. The widows of the city had stopped crying aloud and started crying quietly, which is worse. Preparations had begun for the horse sacrifice, and the animal was not yet chosen.

Arjuna walked with Krishna in the garden behind the inner court. For a long while he said nothing. Then he said, "Krishna, at Kurukshetra you drove my chariot into the space between the two armies, and when I put down my bow you spoke to me. I heard it. I acted on it. And now, out of my own foolishness, I have lost it. Not one verse of it stays. Say it to me again."

Krishna laughed, and there was no unkindness in the laugh, but there was no promise in it either. "You ask a hard thing. I was then established in yoga, and I spoke out of that state, and what was spoken belonged to it. I cannot recite it back to you as a merchant reads out a ledger. A thing said once from that height is not said again from level ground."

Arjuna's face closed. Krishna put a hand on his shoulder.

"But I will not send you away empty. There is an old conversation, older than either of us, that carries the same freight by a different road. Two men on a road: a questioner, and one who had finished questioning. Hear it, and see whether what you lost was ever a thing you could keep in a pocket."

Yudhishthira had come out onto the terrace above them and stood listening. When Krishna glanced up, the king said only, "Speak where I can hear it also." So the three of them went out through the gate and down to the river.

They sat on the bank of the Ganga where the water ran shallow over stones, and Krishna told it as it had been told to him.

There was once a brahmana named Kashyapa. He was not the great rishi whose name the world borrows, nor the Kashyapa who lay down at a cremation ground to die and was argued out of it by a jackal; he was only a man of learning who had worn himself thin against the world. He had studied. He had sacrificed at the proper seasons. He had raised sons and buried some of them. He had watched liars grow fat while honest men went hungry, and the arithmetic of it would not come out, and there came a morning when he could not find the reason to get up.

Walking on a road in that condition, he saw a siddha coming toward him: one of the perfected ones, who go where they will through the worlds, whom no wall stops, nor water, nor the boundary between one order of being and another. Kashyapa knew him for what he was. He went down in the dust of the road and took hold of his feet.

"What do you want?" the siddha said. "Speak. A man who catches at feet wants something."

"I want to know what I am walking through," Kashyapa said. "I have done everything the books told me to do and I am not consoled. Where does a man go when this body is put down? How does he come back? An act committed in the dark, alone, and forgotten by morning - how does that find him again forty years later? How does it know the road? And do not comfort me. I have been comforted before, and it did not hold past the next bad night."

The siddha looked at him a while, standing in the road. Then he said, "Sit down. What you are asking for is not comfort. It is a map. I will give you the map, and you may do with it what you can."

"Nothing is wasted," the siddha said, "and nothing is lost. That is the first thing, and it cuts both ways. The self does not die and it does not stay. When the body fails, the vital breaths gather themselves in, and the self departs carrying out exactly what it brought in, the way a man leaving a house carries out his own goods and not his neighbor's.

"For the cruel there are the hells. They are not eternal. They are measured, which is the harder thing to hear, because a measure implies a reckoning that is exact. A man who took pleasure in the fear of creatures weaker than himself is set down where fear is the whole of the weather, and he stays there until the amount is served out. A man who lied, and knew that he lied, and made his living in the gap between his tongue and the truth, goes where nothing he is told can be trusted. There is nobody standing over him with an iron. The deed already had that shape. It was always going to fold back on itself in that way. Punishment is only the name we give to an act arriving home.

"When the measure is served the self rises out of it, and it does not rise clean. It rises heavy, and weight must go somewhere, and so it enters the wombs of animals and takes whatever birth its weight allows. A worm turning in wet earth. A moth going into the lamp. A dog at the edge of a village that men throw stones at for sport. It passes through thousands of these as a sleeping man is carried through the rooms of a house, learning almost nothing, because those bodies have no room in them for learning. Ages go by in that fashion and are not remembered.

"And then the weight is worn down at last, and the self comes up into a human womb. That is the door. Understand me. Of the whole structure, that is the only door that opens from the inside."

The siddha spoke then of the womb itself, and Kashyapa listened with his hands in his lap like a boy at a lesson.

"In the first month it is a mixture only, without parts. In the second the parts are marked out. In the third the limbs declare themselves; in the fourth the flesh and the blood; in the fifth the hair and the nails. And in the sixth, memory arrives and sits down inside it, and it knows. It knows the entire road it has walked. It lies curled in the heat and the wet, pressed on every side, unable to move a finger, and it remembers every birth it has had and what each one cost, and it begins to make promises. Let me only get out of this, it says, and I will not go back down. I will hold to conduct. I will not do again the things that put me here.

"Then it is born. The wind of the world strikes it, and it forgets. That is the mercy and the whole difficulty together, and there is no separating them. Not one child in a thousand carries the promise out through the door."

Kashyapa said, "And the act? You have not told me how the act finds the man."

"Because it does not find him. He carries it. Desire raises the act; the act ripens; the ripening is the next body; and the next body is assembled precisely to receive what that act has to give, as a lock is cut to fit a key already made. No god sits over a ledger. The man is the ledger. This is why you have stood watching the wicked prosper and called the world unjust. You were reading the middle of a sentence and taking it for the end of it."

Kashyapa was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "It is larger than I thought, and worse."

"It is exactly as large as it is," the siddha said. "Now ask me the other half."

"Then tell me the way up," Kashyapa said.

"Conduct," said the siddha. "Not death. Men imagine that dying does the work for them, that the fire on the ghat burns off what they have been. It burns a body. The road up is made of conduct and of nothing else: harmlessness toward every creature that breathes, truth without exceptions held back for emergencies, giving that does not calculate its return, patience with what cannot be altered, and the steady quiet in which the self can be looked at without flinching. A man who practices these is not waiting to be rescued. He is already climbing, this morning, in this body. Each birth then stands above the one before it, until there is a birth that needs no successor, and the self, having nothing left to carry out, does not depart at all, because there is nowhere left that it is not."

"That is all?"

"That is all. I told you there would be no comfort in it. You will notice that there is also no cruelty."

Krishna stopped speaking, and the Ganga went on over the stones.

Arjuna sat with his forearms across his knees. At last he said, "You have not told me what you told me on the field."

"No," said Krishna. "I have told you where you are standing. The other you will find again yourself, on some day when you are not looking for it, and it will be worth more then than anything I could repeat to you now."

Yudhishthira had not moved at all. He said, quietly, "I sent eighteen armies into the fire. I have not slept a whole night since."

"Then take the part that was meant for you," Krishna said. "Not one of them has been annihilated. Every man you grieve for is somewhere on that road, and so is Duryodhana, and so are you, and the road runs upward for anyone willing to walk it. That is not a small thing to be told. Now go up and release the horse, and let a sacrifice do what a sacrifice can do."