Ushanas the Bright

The days on the bed of arrows had settled into a kind of rhythm by then, grief in the mornings and teaching in the long afternoons, and Yudhishthira had taken to coming with a fresh question each time, as though he meant to empty his heart of every doubt before his grandfather's breath finally left him. On this day the question was about men rather than fortune.

"Grandfather," he said, settling near the great bed as the winter light slanted low across the plain, "I have been thinking of Shakuni, and of the counselors who stood at Duryodhana's shoulder through every wrong turn he took. They knew, some of them, that his cause was doomed and unjust, and stayed with it regardless, to its very end. Is there honor in such loyalty at all, or is it only stubbornness dressed as virtue? Should a wise counselor abandon a losing, unrighteous master, or does something in him owe that master his continued counsel even so?"

Bhishma's gaze went distant for a moment, the way it did when a question touched something he had turned over many times in his own long life of service to a throne he had not always agreed with. "You ask the question I have asked myself more than any other, Yudhishthira, lying here," he said quietly. "I will not answer it with my own case, which is too tangled with my vow to be a clean example. Instead let me tell you of Ushanas, whom the world calls Shukra, the seer who chose of his own free will to become the teacher of the asuras, the losing and unloved side of every great contest between light and its rivals, and who is honored in heaven to this day for exactly that choice."

"Ushanas was born of the sage Bhrigu's line, and from his first years he practiced austerities so fierce that even the gods took notice and grew uneasy, for a seer's tapas, gathered long enough, becomes a kind of power that no throne can safely ignore. He stood on one leg through storms. He ate nothing but air and light for years at a stretch, until his own body seemed to burn from within with the discipline he had poured into it. The other sages spoke of him with a mixture of awe and wariness, for it was never quite certain what such stored power might be turned toward, and Ushanas answered that uncertainty by turning it, deliberately, toward the side that needed it most.

"The asuras, the elder brothers of the gods in the old tellings, had no teacher of their own to match Brihaspati, who guided the devas with all of heaven's resources behind him. They were strong in arms but poor in counsel, and poor counsel had cost them battle after battle even when their strength alone should have carried the day. Ushanas came to them, this fierce and burning seer, and took up the place no one else in the three worlds would take: preceptor to the side already written down, by most tellings, as destined to lose.

"It is elsewhere on this very telling ground that the fullest tale is kept of how Ushanas won the sanjivani vidya, the knowledge that could call the slain back to breath and battle, through the strange and patient trial of his student Kacha, sent among the asuras by the gods themselves to steal what only Ushanas possessed. I will not walk that whole road again here, for it belongs to Kacha's own story. But know this much of it: that Ushanas held, for a time, the one power that could have made his students unbeatable, and even in the losing of it he did not abandon the side he had chosen to teach."

"There is another tale told of him, older still, that the Shanti Parva keeps close to its own heart, of how Ushanas came to be bound so tightly to the line of Shiva that the two are spoken of almost as one household. In the long rivalry between the gods and the asuras over the treasuries and the fortunes of the three worlds, it was Ushanas, above every other counselor on either side, who understood best where wealth truly lay hidden and how it might be gathered or denied. He guarded the asuras' fortunes with a mastery that matched anything Brihaspati could set against him, and it is said the gods came to fear his counsel more than they feared the asuras' armies, for armies can be met with armies, but a mind that sees further than yours cannot be met at all.

"In the deepest telling of this rivalry, it is said that Ushanas, in the course of his service and his austerities, was once swallowed whole, taken bodily into Shiva's own being in a trial of endurance and patience that no other seer could have survived, and dwelt there through a night that outlasted an age before Shiva released him again, remade and bound forever afterward to that god's own line, carrying the mark of it in the very name Shukra, the bright one, by which he is known even now. I tell you this part of the old story plainly and with the reverence it deserves, Yudhishthira, without pretending to unfold every mystery in it, for some tellings are meant to be received rather than explained. What matters for your question is what he did with the power and standing this trial left him."

"For it is said that after this, when Ushanas had proven himself the equal of any teacher in the three worlds and might easily have crossed over to instruct the gods instead, and been welcomed there with every honor heaven could offer, the gods themselves asked him plainly why he continued to serve the asuras at all. Their cause was the harder one, their fortunes the more often broken, their name the one spoken with less honor in the assemblies of the righteous. Why remain preceptor to the side that keeps losing, they asked him, when the winning side stands ready to receive so great a teacher?

"And Ushanas answered them in words that the sages afterward kept and repeated for exactly this reason. 'The asuras are also creatures who deserve a teacher,' he said. 'Should the losing and the unloved be abandoned by wisdom as well as by fortune, left to founder in darkness because the light has judged them unworthy of guidance? If I go where I am already welcome and easy, what have I truly given? My dharma is to counsel whoever stands as mine to counsel, not to abandon my post the moment it stops being advantageous to hold it. A teacher who follows only winning causes is not a teacher at all, but a fair-weather flatterer wearing a teacher's robe.'

"He told them, further, that his loyalty to the asuras was itself a form of austerity no less real than the tapas of his youth, a discipline of the will practiced daily against the plain temptation to cross over to easier ground. Every seer who has ever remained faithful to a difficult post, Yudhishthira, when a better offer waited elsewhere, has practiced some measure of this same austerity, whether the world named it so or not."

Bhishma let the last of that answer settle before he continued, his voice thinner now than it had been at the start of the telling but no less certain.

"The gods did not punish Ushanas for that answer, Yudhishthira, though it must have stung something in their pride to hear it. Instead they honored him for it, in time, in the way the three worlds honor things too true to resent. He was raised into the heavens as the planet the world calls bright, Shukra, Venus in the tongues that will come long after ours, and it is a strange and telling mercy that this planet, born of loyalty to the losing side, now rises each dawn over every army that has ever mustered, the devas' and the asuras' alike, the Pandavas' and the Kauravas' alike, without favor to either. Both sides, in every war the world has fought, wake to the same bright star, taught by the same teacher, whether they remember to thank him for it or not.

"Now hear the application, for you did not ask me an idle question about Shakuni. A counselor's worth, Yudhishthira, is not measured by whether the banner he stands beneath wins the field. It is measured by whether he served that banner faithfully, honestly, and without secretly hoarding his best counsel for a better offer elsewhere. Some of Duryodhana's men were merely stubborn, and stubbornness is not loyalty; it asks nothing of the will and costs nothing to keep. But wherever you find a counselor who gave his true and best wisdom to a difficult, losing, or unloved master, without holding back what he would have given a favored one, honor that in him regardless of which side he stood on, for it is the same discipline that made Ushanas bright enough to light both armies' mornings, and it is rarer than victory, and worth more.