Upamanyu

In the oldest layer of the epic, before kings and dice, stand the schoolroom tales, and the sternest of them belongs to the sage Dhaumya and his three disciples: Aruni, who would one day stop a breach in a dike with his own body; Veda, patient as the earth; and Upamanyu. Dhaumya's method was ancient and severe: he taught almost nothing in words. He gave his students impossible duties and subtracted their comforts one by one, watching to see what remained of each boy when everything removable had been removed. What remained, he held, was the only part of a man that knowledge could be poured into without leaking.

To Upamanyu the teacher gave the cattle. All day the boy walked the herds through the forest and brought them home at dusk, bowing to his teacher each evening; and Dhaumya, observing him, noticed that his disciple was thriving. The boy was round-cheeked and bright with health. "Upamanyu," said the teacher, "what are you living on?" "I beg alms, master, and eat what I am given." "A student does not consume his alms without offering them to his teacher first," said Dhaumya, and from that day the boy carried his begged food home and handed all of it over, and the teacher kept all of it, and watched.

Upamanyu stayed sleek. "What are you living on now?" asked Dhaumya. "Master, I beg a second round of alms after giving you the first." "That is greed toward the householders, who owe one alms a day. Stop it." Upamanyu stopped, and drove the cattle, and still did not waste. "And now?" "I drink the milk of the cows, master." "The cows are mine; the milk was never offered you." The boy bowed and gave up the milk, and lived, next, on the froth the suckling calves flung from their mouths, until the teacher forbade the froth too, reasoning that the kind calves were flinging extra out of pity and being robbed thereby. Now every food in the forest had been fenced off by an order, and the boy, perfectly obedient and perfectly starving, walked the herds on an empty stomach through the long hot days.

Hunger, at last, closed the boy's judgment. In the shadeless afternoon he came to an arka tree, whose broad leaves have a bitter milky sap, and ate them. The sap of the arka is caustic; it took his eyes. Blind, alone, somewhere in the forest with the cattle wandering from him, Upamanyu groped from trunk to trunk after the sound of his herd, missed his footing, and went down into an old dry well, and could not climb out. The sun set on the ashram, and the cattle came home by themselves, and behind them came no one.

Dhaumya counted the returned herd and stood a long time at the gate in the dusk. "Upamanyu is not with the cattle," he said, "and I have forbidden him every food there is. I have perhaps gone to the edge of what a teacher may do." He took Veda and torches and went into the night forest calling his student's name, hour after hour, and at last, from somewhere below the world, a small voice answered: "Here, master. In the well. I am blind. I ate the leaves of an arka tree, and I have fallen." The teacher knelt at the rim and looked down into the dark he had, in his sternness, dug, and his voice when he called down again was not stern. "Praise the Ashvins, my son. The twin physicians of the gods can restore your eyes. Praise them; they answer the desperate."

Down in the dark, the blind boy folded his hands and prayed to the Ashvins, hymning the twin horsemen, the dawn-riders, healers of the maimed - and the twins came, bright even to eyeless sockets, standing in the well as though wells were doorways. "We are pleased with your hymn," they said. "Here is a cake. Eat it, and be restored." And Upamanyu, holding in his two hands the food of the gods, at the end of days of hunger and at the bottom of a pit his obedience had led him into, answered: "I may not, lords. I eat nothing that has not first been offered to my teacher."

The Ashvins pressed him, smiling, physicians testing a pulse: "Your own teacher, in his day, ate the cake we gave him without offering it to his teacher. Do as your master did." "My master's dealings with his master are my master's," said the boy at the bottom of the well. "I beg your pardon, lords: I cannot eat it."

Then the twins gave him the true prize, of which the cake had been only the examination. "Your teacher's discipline was iron and your faith is finer than his," they said. "Rise. Your eyes are restored - and more: teeth of gold, and fortune, and this besides: the Vedas will shine in you of themselves, and all the branches of knowledge, unstudied, as lamps are lit from a lamp." And Upamanyu climbed out of the well seeing - seeing the night forest, the torches, and his old teacher's face at the rim, wet with what sternness had turned into. He bowed to Dhaumya and reported himself returned, with the cattle's number complete.

Dhaumya laid his hands on the boy and confirmed with his own blessing everything the Ashvins had granted: knowledge entire, prosperity, and a name that the reciters of the epic would set at its very threshold. For the tale of Upamanyu is told in the Mahabharata's opening book, among the first stories a hearer meets, and its placement is its meaning: before the epic will show you kings gambling away kingdoms and teachers demanding thumbs, it shows you what teaching and studenthood are at their uttermost - a master who strips his student down to pure faith, a student whose faith holds at the bottom of a blind well, and the moment the ordeal ends, when the taker-away is discovered to have been, all along, the giver. Those who begin the epic here know ever after how to weigh every guru in it, Drona not least.