The Honest Merchant

When Yudhishthira asked how a man should truly live to be righteous - whether by great penances and renunciation, or in some other way - the sages told him the story of Jajali the ascetic and Tuladhara the merchant, which answers exactly that question, and overturns the way most people would answer it.

There was once a brahmin named Jajali, who gave himself to penance of the most extreme severity. He went deep into the wilderness, lived on roots and air, wore rags and then bark and then nothing, and subjected his body to every austerity, until he had become a great ascetic, gaunt and matted, famed for the harshness of his discipline. He stood for immense periods in meditation, utterly still, mastering his body until it scarcely seemed to live at all.

So motionless did Jajali become in his penance that the creatures of the forest ceased to fear him and took him for a part of the landscape, like a tree or a stone. A pair of small birds came and built their nest in his thick matted hair, weaving it into his locks as they would into a branch.

And Jajali, to prove the perfection of his self-control, did not move. He stood unmoving while the birds built their nest in his hair; he stood unmoving while the mother laid her eggs; he stood unmoving through the long days while the eggs were warmed and hatched; he stood unmoving while the little chicks grew, and were fed, and fledged; and he did not stir until at last the young birds spread their wings and flew away from the nest in his hair, and the nest was empty. Through all of it - weeks upon weeks - the ascetic held himself perfectly still, so that no movement of his should disturb the birds that had trusted his hair for a home.

It was a feat of self-mastery few could match, and Jajali knew it.

When the birds had flown and his great feat was complete, Jajali was filled with pride in his own righteousness. He clapped his hands and exclaimed aloud that surely, by such penance and such perfect self-control, he had become the most virtuous man in all the world. "I have achieved the highest righteousness!" he cried. "There is no one anywhere as virtuous as I am!"

But a voice answered him out of the air - a heavenly voice - and what it said struck the proud ascetic to the heart. "Do not say so, Jajali," the voice told him. "You are not equal in righteousness to Tuladhara. Tuladhara is greater in virtue than you - and even he would not speak the boasting words you have just spoken."

Jajali was astonished and not a little offended. "Tuladhara?" he said. "Who is this Tuladhara, that he should be called more righteous than I, who have done such penance?" And the voice told him: Tuladhara was a merchant, a tradesman, a shopkeeper who lived in the great city of Varanasi and sold goods for a living - a man of the common world, who had never done any extreme penance at all. That a mere shopkeeper, weighing out goods in a city market, should be more righteous than a great forest ascetic was a thing Jajali could not believe. He resolved to go and see this merchant for himself.

So Jajali left his forest and traveled to the great and holy city of Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganga, and made his way through its crowded streets to the shop of the merchant Tuladhara. He found, as he had been told, an ordinary tradesman's establishment, where goods of all kinds were weighed out and sold - herbs and seeds and wares - and behind the scales stood Tuladhara, a plain and modest man going about his daily business of buying and selling. His very name, Tuladhara, meant 'the holder of the balance,' the scale-bearer, after his trade.

The proud ascetic looked at this ordinary shopkeeper with doubt and a little disdain, wondering how such a man could possibly be called more righteous than himself. But before Jajali could even introduce himself or explain why he had come, the merchant Tuladhara greeted him warmly by name and began to speak - and what he said amazed the ascetic.

"Welcome, Jajali," said Tuladhara. "I know why you have come, and I know what you have done. I know of your great penance in the forest - how you stood so still that birds built their nest in your matted hair, and how you did not move until the little ones had grown and flown away. I know of the pride you took in it, and of the voice that sent you to me. All of this I know, though no one has told me."

Jajali was struck dumb, for he had told no one any of this, and yet the merchant knew it all - the very thing the proud ascetic had supposed only a great penance like his own could grant. He understood at once that this plain shopkeeper possessed a clear inner sight that his own austerities had not given him, and his disdain began to give way to wonder. "How do you know these things," he asked, "you who have done no penance and live by trade in a market? And how is it that a merchant is called more righteous than an ascetic? Teach me, for I do not understand." And Tuladhara, setting aside his scales, taught the great ascetic the true nature of righteousness.

"My way is very simple," said Tuladhara, "and there is no great mystery in it. I am a merchant, and I buy and sell as merchants do. But I conduct my whole trade, and my whole life, by one principle: honesty, and harm to none.

"I use true and honest weights upon my scales - I never cheat a buyer or a seller by so much as a grain. I deal fairly with everyone who comes to me, the rich and the poor alike, asking a just price and no more, deceiving no one, taking advantage of no one's need or ignorance. I do not hoard goods to drive up their price; I do not lie about my wares; I do not grasp after wealth beyond what I need to live simply. I treat all my customers as I would wish to be treated, with the same fairness and kindness to all, making no distinction between one person and another.

"This honesty in the small daily dealings of an ordinary life - the true weight, the fair price, the word that can be trusted, the refusal to cheat or to grasp - this, Jajali, is a righteousness as real as any won in the forest, and it is practiced not for a season of penance but every single day, in every transaction, among other people, where it is far harder to keep."

"But the heart of my way," Tuladhara went on, "is something deeper still: harmlessness to all living creatures, and the treating of all beings as equal to oneself. This is the highest dharma, higher than any sacrifice or penance - that one should wish no harm to any living thing, and should look upon the lives of all creatures, even the smallest, with the same care one has for one's own.

"I try to live so that I injure no being. I deal in goods that cause no creature to suffer; I have no part in cruelty, in the killing of animals, in any livelihood that is built upon the pain and death of the helpless. I regard the fear and the longing for life in every creature as no different from my own, and I would not, for my own gain or comfort, cause to any being the suffering I would not wish for myself. To be a friend to all creatures, to frighten none and harm none, to wish well to all and ill to none - this is the conduct that purifies a person, far more than standing on one leg in a forest. The man who is harmless to all, honest in all his dealings, and equal in his heart toward every living thing, has reached the true height of righteousness, though he never leave his shop or his home."

And Tuladhara spoke at length, in this way, of the great law of non-injury and of an honest, harmless, contented life as the truest and highest dharma - higher than the spectacular austerities that the world admires.

Jajali listened, and as he listened his pride fell away from him entirely. He understood now why a heavenly voice had named this plain merchant more righteous than himself. His own penance, for all its severity, had been performed for his own sake, to win merit and greatness for himself, and it had filled him with pride; it had been a spectacular feat, but a self-regarding one, that harmed no one but helped no one either, and left his heart full of the very vanity that righteousness should dissolve.

But Tuladhara's quiet way - honest in every dealing, harmless to every creature, equal in kindness toward all beings, practiced every day in the ordinary world - asked for no admiration and won no fame, and yet it was a purer and higher righteousness than all of Jajali's austerities, because it was selfless, and it touched and spared the lives of others, and it was woven into the whole fabric of a life lived among other beings rather than performed alone for show.

The great ascetic bowed before the merchant, humbled and enlightened, and thanked him for the teaching that all his years in the forest had not given him. He went away a wiser man, knowing at last that the highest dharma is not the dramatic penance that the world praises, but the honest, harmless, selfless conduct of an ordinary life lived in kindness toward all.

The sages drew the lesson for Yudhishthira, and it is one the tradition returns to again and again.

"The world admires the spectacular - the great penance, the dramatic renunciation, the holy man who does astonishing feats of austerity. And Jajali had done such feats, and was proud of them, and believed they made him the most righteous of men. But a heavenly voice sent him to learn from a shopkeeper, that he might understand where righteousness truly lives.

"It lives not in spectacular display but in ordinary honesty and ordinary kindness, practiced faithfully every day among other people: in the true weight on the scale, the fair price, the trustworthy word, the refusal to cheat or to grasp; and above all in harmlessness to every living creature, and in treating the life of every being as one treats one's own. This humble, daily, selfless righteousness - which wins no fame and asks no admiration - is higher in the eyes of heaven than the most astonishing penance performed for one's own glory. Do not measure virtue by how impressive it looks, son of Kunti, but by how honest and how harmless and how selfless it is. The merchant at his scales may be holier than the ascetic in his forest."

And Yudhishthira, who would one day have to rule and trade and judge among ordinary people, took to heart that the highest path lay not in fleeing the world for dramatic penance, but in living within it with perfect honesty and harmlessness toward all.