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.

"Imagine," said Vidura, "a certain brahmin who finds himself lost and wandering in a vast and trackless forest. The forest is dense and dark and full of dangers, and it stretches away on every side with no path and no end. This forest, brother, is the world itself - this whole round of existence into which we are born, tangled and bewildering, with no clear way through.

"All through that forest prowl fierce beasts of prey - lions and tigers and creatures with terrible jaws - hunting the lost traveler from every direction. These are the diseases and the sorrows and the calamities that stalk every living being, ready to fall upon us at any moment. And striding through the wood is a fearsome woman of monstrous form, her arms outstretched, hemming the traveler in wherever he turns. She is old age and decay, who closes in upon all that lives and lets nothing escape her.

"The brahmin, terrified by the beasts and the dreadful woman, runs this way and that, looking for any refuge, any way out. But there is none. Wherever he turns, the way is barred, and the hunters draw nearer."

"In his desperate flight," Vidura went on, "the brahmin stumbles, without seeing it, into a deep hidden pit, a well overgrown and concealed by creepers and grass. He falls - but as he falls, by chance his foot catches in the tangle of vines that grow down into the well, and he is caught there, hanging upside down in the darkness, swinging between the mouth of the pit above and its depths below, snared in the creepers like a fruit hung from a branch.

"And his situation, brother, is now more dreadful than before. For below him, at the very bottom of the well, coiled and waiting, is a huge and mighty serpent, its mouth open, ready to devour him the instant he should fall. That serpent is death itself, waiting at the end for every creature, patient and certain.

"And above him, at the mouth of the well, stands a great elephant, dark and enormous, with six faces and twelve feet, and it guards the only way out. That elephant is the year, with its six seasons and its twelve months, treading the rim of the world, blocking all escape. So the traveler hangs, the beasts of disease prowling the forest above, the woman of old age reaching for him, the serpent of death gaping below, and the elephant of time barring the only exit. There is no way up and no way down."

"As if this were not enough," said Vidura, "there is worse. The clump of creepers from which the brahmin hangs, the single slender thing that holds him up over the serpent's mouth, is being steadily gnawed away. At its roots there are rats - one white and one black - and they take it in turns, ceaselessly, to nibble through the strands of the vine.

"Those two rats, brother, are the bright day and the dark night, and their gnawing is the passage of time that wears away, moment by moment, the lifespan of every living creature. The thread that holds the traveler over death is being chewed thinner with every day and every night that passes, and it will not hold forever. Each turn of light and dark cuts a little more of it away, and there is nothing the hanging man can do to stop them.

"So there he hangs: the forest of the world around him, the beasts of disease prowling it, the hag of old age stretching out her arms, the elephant of the year guarding the rim, the serpent of death waiting below, and the white and black rats of day and night eating through the very cord of his life. This, brother, is the true and exact condition of every soul caught in the round of birth and death. This is where all of us hang."

"And now," said Vidura, "comes the strangest part of all, and the part that holds the whole meaning of the tale. In the branches of a tree that overhangs the mouth of the well there is a honeycomb, and from that comb, now and then, a few drops of honey fall, trickling down into the pit, onto the face and lips of the hanging man.

"And the brahmin - hanging upside down over the serpent of death, the rats gnawing through his last support, the elephant and the beasts and the hag all around him, with no possible escape and his end drawing nearer with every breath - the brahmin, when he tastes those few drops of honey on his tongue, forgets all of it. The sweetness so delights him that he thinks of nothing but the honey. He cranes and reaches for the next drop, and the next, hungry for more, and in the pleasure of those tiny falling drops he loses all his terror, all his urgency, all thought of his desperate state.

"Those drops of honey, brother, are the small pleasures of the senses - the brief sweetnesses of wealth and comfort and desire that life lets fall to us now and then. And such is their power that, for the sake of them, a creature hanging over the jaws of death will forget death entirely, and cling to his place in the pit, and even long to stay there, asking only for a little more honey."

"Now consider," said Vidura. "If a kindly being were to come to the edge of that well and offer the hanging man a way out - to lift him free of the creepers and the serpent and the rats, and set him safe upon clear ground - what should the man do? Surely he should cry out, take the offered hand, and escape that horror with all the speed he could.

"And yet the wise have observed a strange thing: that the man in the well most often will not go. So bewitched is he by the drops of honey, so unwilling to give up the next small taste of sweetness, that even when escape is offered him he says, 'Wait - let me have one more drop first.' He clings to the very pit that is killing him, for the sake of the trickle of honey, and lets the chance of freedom pass. That is the folly of the soul attached to the pleasures of the world.

"This, brother, is the picture of our life - of all life. We hang over death; time eats our days; age and disease close in; and still we busy ourselves reaching for the next sweet drop, the next pleasure, the next gain, and forget entirely the danger we are in and the freedom we might seek. This is the human condition, seen truly."

Vidura then drew the parable together, naming each part plainly so that the blind old king could hold the whole of it in his mind.

"The forest is the round of worldly existence. The wild beasts that prowl it are our diseases and afflictions. The fearsome woman reaching out her arms is old age, who decays the body. The well into which the traveler falls is the body itself, in which the soul is trapped. The serpent at the bottom is death, who waits for all. The clump of creepers from which he hangs is the hope of life, the love of living, by which we cling on. The great six-faced elephant treading the rim is the year, with its seasons and months. The black and white rats gnawing the creeper are the nights and days, eating away our span. And the drops of honey are the little pleasures of the senses, for the sake of which, deluded, we forget our peril and refuse to seek release.

"The wise man, brother, knowing all this, does not despair, and neither does he lose himself in the honey. He sees his true situation clearly - and so he turns his mind, even as he hangs there, toward the one thing that can truly free him: toward dharma, toward the Supreme, toward liberation from the well itself. He tastes what sweetness life offers without being enslaved by it, and he keeps his eyes on the way out."

The blind old king sat silent, turning the terrible little story over in his darkened mind. Vidura had not told it only as cold philosophy. He had told it to a man who had spent his whole life reaching for the honey - clinging to his throne, indulging his sons, grasping at the sweetness of power and possession - and who had refused, again and again, the hands that offered him a wiser way, until the gnawing rats of time had cut the cord and the serpent had swallowed everything he loved.

Vidura was telling his brother, as gently as such a thing could be told, that his grief was the grief of the man in the well: the natural end of a life spent grasping at small sweetnesses while ignoring the great danger and the great escape. And he was telling him, too, that even now it was not too late - that even a man who has lost everything to his own attachment can, in the time that remains to him, lift his eyes from the honey, see his true condition, and turn at last toward the freedom he had refused so long.

It was the counsel of a lifetime, offered once more, when at last the proud king might be broken enough to hear it.

The parable of the man in the well has outlived the war and the kingdom and the kings who heard it, because it shows us to ourselves so exactly. We are all of us hanging in the pit. The forest of the world is around us; age reaches for us; the seasons tread the rim; the days and nights gnaw quietly at the cord of our years; and at the bottom death waits with an open mouth. None of this is in doubt, and none of it can be argued away.

And yet, like the brahmin, we spend our hanging chiefly in reaching for the honey - the next pleasure, the next acquisition, the next small sweetness - and in the taste of it we forget, hour by hour, both our danger and our chance. The story does not tell us that the honey is poison, or that we must hate our lives. It tells us only to remember where we are while we taste it: to keep our eyes open, to hold the sweetness lightly, and never to grow so lost in the next drop that we wave away the hand that could lift us out.

That was the gift Vidura gave his grieving brother, and through him gives to anyone who hears the tale: not despair, and not denial, but clear sight. See the well for what it is. Taste the honey without being its slave. And keep turning, always, toward the way out.