The Word That Meant Two Things

'Grandsire,' said Yudhishthira, 'you have told me a king must speak the truth. But a king is also asked to please those he depends on, and the two do not always point the same way. What happens to a man who bends one word for the sake of the room he is standing in?'

'There is a king for that question,' Bhishma said. 'His name was Vasu, and he ruled Chedi from the city on the Shuktimati, and men called him Uparichara, which means the one who goes above, because he did not travel as you and I travel.

'He had been a great conqueror in his youth and then had put down his weapons entirely and gone into the forest to practice austerities, and he did it so thoroughly that Indra grew alarmed, the way Indra always does, and came to him with an argument. Do not burn yourself away, the king of the gods told him. Heaven is not short of ascetics. The earth is short of just kings. Go back and rule, and hold the balance of dharma steady down there, and you will keep my friendship as long as you keep it.

'And he gave Vasu two gifts. The first was a garland of unfading lotuses that turned aside every weapon. The second was a chariot of crystal that went through the air, and no man born of woman had ever been given such a thing before. So Vasu ruled Chedi from the sky. He looked down on his own kingdom, on the fields and the ferries and the smoke of the towns, and he came down among his people when he chose and went up again when he chose, and he was famous everywhere as a king who could be seen going overhead.

'It was on one of those crossings that a fisherman's net was to bring him a daughter and a son out of a river, and from that daughter came Satyavati, and from Satyavati came the line that put me on this bed of arrows. But that is another day of his life, and you know it already. This is the day he lost the chariot.'

'The trouble began, as such troubles do, over a word in a rule,' Bhishma said. 'The injunction says that a man shall sacrifice with aja. Three letters. Nobody disputed the sentence. They disputed the word.

'The gods said what everyone in the villages says. Aja is a goat. It has always meant a goat. The rite requires the beast, the beast is bound to the post, the fire receives it and the giver receives the fruit of it, and the whole world has understood this for as long as there have been altars. Change the meaning and you change the rite, and a rite that has been changed is no rite at all.

'The rishis said no. Aja means that which is not born, and by long usage in our texts it means the grain that has been kept three years and cannot sprout again, the seed with no birth left in it. That is what the rule intends. The offering was meant to be the dead seed and not the living animal. Ours is a discipline of non-injury before it is anything else, and no man who has taken the vow of harmlessness can stand at an altar with a knife and call it worship.

'They argued a long time. You should understand that neither side was lying. The word truly carries both senses, and both sides could quote for it, and the sages were as certain of their reading as the gods were of theirs, which is exactly the condition in which learned men stop hearing one another. Voices rose in that assembly the way they rise in any assembly, and at last, because the argument could not settle itself, they went looking for a settlement outside it.

'Let us take an arbitrator, someone said. Let us take the first person who comes past this place, and let both sides be bound by whatever he says, and let there be an end to it.'

'They had barely agreed on it,' said Bhishma, 'when a shadow went over the ground where they were standing, and everyone looked up. It was the crystal chariot, and Vasu in it, going about the ordinary business of a king who inspects his country from above.

'Both parties called out to him at once, and he brought the chariot down and stepped out onto the grass, and the gods and the sages came around him from either side, and he understood immediately that he had walked into something he could not walk back out of.

'They put the question to him plainly. Of the word aja in the rule of sacrifice: does it mean the goat, or does it mean the seed that will not sprout? Say which, and we will abide by it.

'Now hear the part that damns him, Yudhishthira, because if you do not hear it you will think this a story about an unlucky man. Vasu knew the answer. He had been taught in the old way. He had sat with those very sages, or with their teachers, and the reading they defended was the reading he had been given as a boy and had never doubted. There was no confusion in his mind at all.

'And he looked at the two crowds on either side of him and he did the arithmetic that ruins men in high places. On his left stood the sages, who had nothing to give him. On his right stood the gods, and among them the one whose friendship had given him the garland he wore and the chariot he had just stepped down from, and the throne he would be going back to that evening.

'He asked one question before he ruled, and it was the wrong question. He did not ask what the word means. He asked, in his own mind, which of these two do I answer to.'

'He turned toward the gods,' Bhishma said, 'and he gave his judgment in the flat voice men use when they have decided not to examine what they are saying.

'The word is aja, he said, and aja is the goat. The rule intends the animal. Sacrifice with the goat, as the celestials have said, and let this be the end of the dispute.

'The sages did not shout. That is the detail I want you to keep. They did not argue with him and they did not appeal, because there was nothing left to appeal to. A man who will not stand on the plain sense of the text he was taught has taken away the ground everyone was standing on, and the only thing left to do with him is to observe what he has become.

'You know what those seeds are, one of them said. You were taught it in the same words we were. You have spoken not for the truth but for the ones who feed you, and you have done it from the sky, where we let you go because we believed you were carrying dharma up there with you. Then fall. Since you have given up the higher meaning, give up the higher place. Go down out of the air and into a hole in the earth.

'The curse took him before he could finish answering. The witnesses said the last word of his own sentence was still in his mouth when the crystal chariot went dark under him and the sky simply stopped holding him. He came down past the tops of the trees and past the level of the ground and into a fissure in the earth that closed over him, and where the shadow of the chariot had been on the grass a moment before there was nothing but sunlight.

'And Chedi had no king that evening, and the assembly broke up in silence, and both parties went home having won nothing at all.'

'He did not die down there,' Bhishma said. 'That would have been a lighter sentence than the one he received.

'He lay in the hole in the earth with the rock above him and no light and no way up, and he had nothing to eat and nothing to drink, and what kept him alive was air. That is not a figure of speech. The lord Narayana, whose worshipper Vasu had been all his life without ever making a display of it, sent him the wind for food, and the wind came down into that pit and sustained him, and he lived.

'And what he did with the years he was given down there is the reason we still say his name with respect. He did not curse the sages. He did not send up petitions to Indra, who had let him fall and had not come after him. He praised. He lay in the dark and recited the names of the imperishable one, morning and evening as he had recited them on his throne, with no assembly to admire him and no crystal chariot to be seen in, and he went on doing it for as long as it took.

'It took a long time. Then Narayana had enough of it and gave an order, and the great bird Garuda went into the earth after him and took him up on his back and set him down in the open air again, and Vasu rose past the world he had ruled and went to the region of Brahma and did not come back.

'So do not tell me the story ends well, and do not tell me it ends badly. Both are true.'

Yudhishthira sat with it for a while. 'He was only trying to keep the peace,' he said. 'Between the gods and the sages. Someone had to.'

'He was trying to keep his chariot,' said Bhishma. 'A judge who reads the room instead of the text loses the sky, and he had further to fall than most. Remember that when they put the crown on you and the whole court agrees with you at once.'