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.

At Indraprastha, Arjuna walked with Krishna in the great assembly hall where the two of them had spent the peaceful months since the war. 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 embraced him, but there was displeasure in his voice. "It grieves me that you let it go. 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."

So the two of them sat down together in that hall.

Krishna told it as it had been told to him, by a brahmana who had once come to him from the world of Brahma.

There was once a brahmana named Kashyapa. He was not the great rishi whose name the world borrows; he was a man of austerities, rich in dharma, who had come to the edge of what study and sacrifice could tell him. He had watched liars grow fat while honest men went hungry, and the arithmetic of it would not come out.

Then he heard of a siddha: one of the perfected ones, who go where they will through the worlds and vanish at will, who sit and talk with the invisible siddhas as with friends. Kashyapa sought him out and knew him for what he was. He went down in the dust and took hold of his feet, and served him as a disciple serves a teacher until the siddha was pleased with him.

"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 doer of evil there is hell, where a man hangs head downward and is cooked, unable even to speak, and it is very hard to climb out of it. For the doer of good there are shining worlds, like the stars in the discs of the sun and moon. But those are measured too, which is the harder thing to hear: when the merit is spent, he falls from them again, and even in heaven there is high and low, and envy of a brighter neighbour. 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. Good and bad deeds are never destroyed. As one body follows another, their fruits ripen in it, the way a heavy-bearing tree gives much fruit, sweet from a good mind and bitter from an evil one. Driven by desire and anger, the self enters a womb again, and the round goes on, and ages go by in that fashion and are not remembered.

"But this world, where it is born again, is the field of action, the one place where deeds are not only reaped but done. 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.

"The seed enters the womb, and the body that grows there is made of deeds, good and bad. Into it the self enters, subtle and unmanifest, clinging to nothing: as molten iron poured into a mould takes the shape of an image, as fire enters a lump of iron and heats it through. And as a lamp lights a room, it lights every limb, and the limbs begin to stir, and the child has consciousness.

"And it suffers. A man's joints are crushed and he is soaked in the wet, both when he goes into the womb and when he comes out of it. That pain is the same as the pain of dying, and all creatures dread both."

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 great hall was quiet.

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

"I have," said Krishna. "This is the very thing you heard on your chariot, by another road. It is a great secret even among the gods, and a confused mind will not hold it. But anyone who takes it up, whatever his birth, reaches the highest end, and a man who practises it steadily for six months will find it plain to him."