The King Who Hung Between Worlds

The sages told the Pandavas of King Trishanku, who wished to climb to heaven without dying, and so came to hang forever between the earth and the sky, neither here nor there - a warning that has given his name to every soul caught between two states.

Trishanku was a king of the ancient solar line, the house of Ikshvaku, a good and able ruler. But he was seized by a strange and prideful desire that no king had ever fulfilled. He wished to ascend to heaven - not after death, as the righteous do, their souls rising to the higher worlds - but bodily, in his own living flesh, to walk into the heaven of the gods while still a mortal man. It was a thing against the whole order of nature, for the body belongs to the earth and only the soul may rise; but Trishanku would not be content with anything less. He resolved to find a way to carry his mortal body, just as it was, up into the realm of the gods.

Trishanku went first to his family's priest and preceptor, the great sage Vasishtha, and asked him to perform a sacrifice powerful enough to send him bodily to heaven. But Vasishtha refused.

"What you ask cannot be done, O King," the sage told him. "It is against the very nature of things. A mortal cannot enter heaven in his earthly body; the body must be left behind. No sacrifice can carry living flesh into the realm of the gods. Put this desire aside; it is impossible, and it is not right to attempt it."

Trishanku was bitterly disappointed, but he would not give up his dream. If Vasishtha would not help him, he thought, then perhaps Vasishtha's sons would. So he went to the hundred sons of Vasishtha, who were themselves accomplished sages, and asked them to do what their father had refused - to send him to heaven in his body. But this only made things worse.

The sons of Vasishtha were deeply offended that Trishanku, having been refused by their father, the greatest of sages, should come to them as though they would overrule their own father's judgment and accomplish what he had declared impossible and improper. They took it as an insult both to their father and to the order of things.

"You have been told by our father that this cannot and should not be done," they said in anger, "and yet you come to us to defy him. For your arrogance and your disrespect, be cursed: you shall lose your kingly form and become a chandala, an outcaste, the lowest of the low."

And at their word the curse fell upon Trishanku. His royal beauty was stripped from him; his body was transformed into the coarse, dark, disfigured shape of an outcaste, hung with the marks of the lowest station. His ornaments turned to iron, his fine garments to rags. The king who had wished to rise to heaven was cast down instead into the most despised condition on earth, shunned by all, abandoned even by his own ministers and people, who no longer knew him. Disfigured, rejected, and miserable, Trishanku had nowhere left to turn - until he thought of the one sage in all the world who might take up a cause against Vasishtha.

Trishanku made his way, in his wretched outcaste form, to the hermitage of the sage Vishvamitra - the mighty ascetic who had once been a king himself, and who was the great rival of Vasishtha, ever eager to prove his own power equal or superior to that of his old adversary. Trishanku told the sage his whole sad story: his desire for heaven, Vasishtha's refusal, the cruel curse of Vasishtha's sons, and his ruin.

Vishvamitra was moved with pity for the fallen king - and stirred, too, by the chance to accomplish what the house of Vasishtha had declared impossible. Here was an opportunity to display the full might of his own penance, and to do what his great rival would not. "Do not fear, King," Vishvamitra said. "You came to me for refuge, and I will not turn you away. What Vasishtha refused you, I shall grant. By the power of my own penance, I will send you to heaven in your very body, just as you have desired - and let all the worlds see what the tapas of Vishvamitra can do."

First, by his power, he restored to Trishanku something of his form; and then he summoned a great gathering of sages and prepared an enormous sacrifice, pouring into it the whole accumulated force of his ages of austerity, for the single purpose of lifting a living man bodily into heaven.

Vishvamitra performed the great sacrifice, and at its climax he called upon the whole power of his penance and commanded Trishanku to rise. And by the force of the sage's tapas - a power so great it could compel even the order of nature - the impossible began to happen. Trishanku, in his living mortal body, began to lift up from the earth.

Up he rose, off the ground, into the air, climbing higher and higher into the sky before the astonished eyes of the assembled sages, ascending bodily toward the heaven of the gods exactly as he had longed to do. No mortal had ever done such a thing; it was against all nature; and yet the penance of Vishvamitra was lifting him, flesh and bone, straight up toward the gates of paradise. Trishanku's heart soared with him - at last his impossible dream was coming true, and he would walk living into heaven.

He rose until he came to the very threshold of heaven, to the gates of the realm of the gods, and there he arrived in his earthly body - the first and only mortal to ascend so. But at the gate, his triumph met the will of heaven itself.

At the gates of heaven stood Indra, the king of the gods, with all the host of heaven behind him, and they would not let Trishanku in. "What is this?" cried Indra. "A mortal, in his earthly body, comes to enter heaven - and a man under a sage's curse besides? This is against all the law of the worlds. The living do not enter here in the flesh. Heaven is not won by another's penance against nature, but earned by one's own righteousness and entered only when the body is left behind. Go back, Trishanku! You have no place here. Fall back to the earth from which you came!"

And Indra cast him out. Trishanku, who a moment before had been rising in triumph, was flung back from the gates of heaven and began to fall - tumbling down headfirst, plunging back toward the earth, his dream shattered, crying out in terror and despair as he fell. "Vishvamitra! Save me! Help me!" he cried as he plummeted down the sky, head downward, falling back toward the world he had tried to leave.

Vishvamitra, below, heard the falling king's cry, and saw the gods hurling back the man he had sworn to send to heaven, and his old pride and temper blazed up in fury. He would not let his work be undone, nor his power be mocked by Indra. "Stay!" he commanded - and by the force of his penance he halted Trishanku in mid-fall, freezing him in the sky, suspended between heaven and earth, neither rising nor falling.

And then, in his wrath and his determination to prove himself, Vishvamitra undertook a thing of staggering audacity: he resolved to build for Trishanku a whole new heaven. If the gods would not admit the king to their heaven, then Vishvamitra would make another. By the immense power of his tapas, the sage began to create, in the southern quarter of the sky, a new set of stars and constellations, a new firmament - and he declared that he would make a new Indra and a whole new company of gods to rule it, a rival heaven that would answer to him alone.

The stars he made began to shine in the southern sky, a new creation taking shape under the will of an angry sage, and the established gods looked on in alarm, for if Vishvamitra completed his work there would be two heavens and two Indras, and the order of the cosmos would be split in two.

Alarmed at the rival creation rising in the southern sky, and at the prospect of a second heaven and a second Indra, the gods came hurrying to Vishvamitra to make peace before the whole order of the cosmos was torn apart. They begged him to stop, and offered a compromise.

"Great sage," they said, "your power is beyond question; you have proved it past all doubt. But do not split the heavens in two. Let us reach an agreement. The stars and constellations you have made shall remain, shining in the southern sky forever, a lasting monument to your power. And Trishanku too shall remain among them - he shall not fall to earth, and he shall keep the heaven you have given him. But he cannot enter our heaven, for that is against the law; so let him hang there in the sky you made for him, among your new stars - though, since he was cast out of the true heaven, he must remain head downward, upside down, hanging between the worlds."

Vishvamitra, his power vindicated and his pride satisfied, agreed. And so Trishanku remained: not fallen to earth, not admitted to heaven, but fixed in the southern sky among the stars his champion had made, hanging upside down forever, suspended between the two worlds, belonging fully to neither.

The sages drew the lesson for the Pandavas, and it was a wry and rueful one.

"From that day," they said, "the condition of Trishanku has been a byword. To be in 'Trishanku's heaven' is to be caught between two states and to belong to neither - to have left one place and not been admitted to the next, to hang suspended, unable to go forward and unable to go back. The king wished to seize, in his pride, a thing against the order of nature: to take heaven in his own body, by a shortcut, without earning it the proper way. And for that overreaching he ended neither in heaven nor on earth, but stuck forever between them, upside down, a monument to the folly of trying to grasp by force or trickery what can only be reached by the right and natural path.

"His champion Vishvamitra, too, for all his stupendous power, achieved by his rivalry and temper only a half-thing - a king left hanging, a second heaven that split nothing and changed nothing. Remember Trishanku, son of Pandu, when you are tempted to reach for a thing out of its proper season, or by a way that is not the true way. The shortcut to heaven leaves a man dangling between the worlds."

And the Pandavas, learning patience in their long exile, took the warning of the king who hung upside down in the southern sky.