The Man in the Well

When the great war was over and the field of Kurukshetra lay heaped with the dead, the blind old king Dhritarashtra was drowned in grief. All his hundred sons were slain; the dynasty he had clung to and schemed for lay in ruins; and the blindness that had been his all his life now seemed only the outward sign of a deeper blindness that had let him love his cruel sons more than justice, and so destroy his whole house.

In his sorrow the old king turned, as he often did, to his half-brother Vidura - the wisest and most righteous man in all Hastinapura, born of a servant-woman, who had counseled justice all his life and been ignored. Vidura had warned Dhritarashtra again and again, through all the long years, that his indulgence of Duryodhana would end in catastrophe; and now the catastrophe had come exactly as Vidura foretold.

"Brother," the old king said, "my heart is breaking. Everything is lost. Tell me something that will let me bear this." And Vidura, full of compassion even for the brother whose folly had caused so much ruin, answered him not with reproach but with a story - a small and terrible parable that holds, in a single image, the whole condition of a soul lost in the world.