The King Who Became a Sage

The sages told the Pandavas of Vishvamitra, who began as a mighty king and made himself, through ages of struggle against his own nature, into one of the greatest sages the world has known - the only man, it was said, to climb by sheer will from the warrior caste into the highest rank of the seers.

In the beginning Vishvamitra was a great king named Kaushika, ruler of a wide kingdom, mighty in arms, proud of his power. One day, returning from a hunt with his whole army, weary and hungry, he came upon the forest hermitage of the sage Vasishtha. Vasishtha received the king and his entire host with perfect hospitality, and invited them all to stay and dine. Vishvamitra was amazed, for he had brought a vast army, far too many to feed from the simple stores of a forest ashram. "How can you feast so many, holy one," he asked, "out of a hermitage?" Vasishtha only smiled, and called for his cow.

Vasishtha possessed a wondrous cow named Nandini, a daughter of the divine wish-granting cow of heaven. Nandini could produce, at her owner's wish, anything that was desired. At Vasishtha's request, she poured forth a feast such as the world had never seen - rivers of milk and curds, mountains of rice and sweets, every delicacy and every drink, in endless abundance, enough and more for the king and his whole enormous army, every soldier filled and satisfied.

King Vishvamitra was astonished and delighted by the feast - and then, as he understood the source of it, delight turned to covetousness. He saw that this single cow was a treasure beyond any in his kingdom, a thing that could feed armies, enrich a realm, make its owner the master of any need. A cow like this, he thought, belonged not in a forest hermitage but in the hands of a king, where her power could serve a whole nation. He resolved that he must have her.

Vishvamitra went to Vasishtha and asked to buy the cow Nandini, offering in exchange great wealth - thousands of ordinary cows, gold, jewels, even a part of his kingdom. But Vasishtha refused. "This cow is not for sale at any price," he said. "She is needed here for the rites and the hospitality of the hermitage, and for the offerings to the gods and the ancestors. I cannot part with her for all the wealth in your kingdom."

The king's pride was stung by the refusal. Accustomed to having whatever he wanted, and reasoning that a king's power entitled him to a treasure that a mere hermit was, in his eyes, wasting, Vishvamitra resolved to take the cow by force. He ordered his soldiers to seize Nandini and drag her away to his kingdom.

But as his men laid hands on her and began to haul her off, the cow lifted her head and looked to her master, Vasishtha, with grieving eyes, as if to ask whether she was to be abandoned. And in that moment the king was about to learn that there are powers in the world that armies cannot overcome.

Vasishtha, though wronged, did not strike back in anger. He only said to the cow, "If the king will take you by force, then defend yourself." And at his word, the divine cow Nandini bristled with power, and from her body she brought forth armies.

Out of the cow poured rank upon rank of fierce warriors - whole hosts of fighters of every kind, fully armed, springing into being to defend her. They fell upon Vishvamitra's soldiers and scattered them, routing the king's great army utterly, driving them back in confusion and defeat, though the sage himself never lifted a weapon. The cow's defenders overwhelmed the king's trained host as though they were children.

Vishvamitra stood amid the ruin of his army, defeated not by a rival king, not by a greater force of arms, but by the spiritual power of a single peaceful sage and his cow. His thousand soldiers and his royal might had been brushed aside like dust. The proud king had met, for the first time, a power against which all his kingly strength was nothing.

The defeat changed Vishvamitra utterly. Standing humbled before the power of Vasishtha, he understood at last a truth that overturned his whole life: that the might of a king, the strength of arms and the force of an army, was a small and brittle thing compared to the spiritual power, the brahma-tejas, that a great sage gathered through penance and self-mastery. "Fie upon a kshatriya's strength!" he cried. "The real power is the power of the brahmin, the power of the spirit. That is the only power worth having."

And Vishvamitra made an extraordinary resolve. He would not rest until he had won that higher power for himself - until he too had become a brahmin sage, the equal of Vasishtha. He gave up his throne and his kingdom and all the pomp of his royal life, walked away from the warrior's world entirely, and went into the wilderness to undertake the long, hard penance by which alone such spiritual power is gained.

But it was not a thing to be won quickly, nor by a man still ruled by his old kingly pride and temper. The road from king to sage would prove longer and harder than any conquest, and it would be fought not against rival armies but against the enemy hardest of all to defeat: himself.

Vishvamitra threw himself into austerities of tremendous severity, and by them he rose, step by step, through the ranks of the holy. In time he was acknowledged a Rajarshi, a royal sage; but that was not enough for him, for he sought the highest rank of all. He pressed on with ever fiercer penance, and rose to be called a Maharshi, a great sage. Yet still the supreme title, Brahmarishi - the rank held by Vasishtha - was withheld from him.

And the reason was always the same. Again and again, just as Vishvamitra's penance had built up a great store of spiritual power, his old kingly temper would flare - some insult, some obstacle, some rival - and in a burst of anger he would curse, or destroy, or lash out, and in that single fit of rage the whole accumulated merit of years would be burned away in an instant, and he would have to begin again. His learning and his power grew vast; but his pride and his temper, the legacy of the proud king he had been, kept tripping him at the threshold of the highest attainment. He could conquer kingdoms and even bend the elements, but he could not yet conquer the anger in his own heart, and until he did, the supreme rank would not be his.

There came another test, subtler than anger. As Vishvamitra's penance grew so powerful that it began to alarm even the gods, Indra, king of heaven, sought to break it, and sent down the heavenly nymph Menaka, most beautiful of the apsaras, to seduce the sage and shatter his austerity with desire.

Menaka came to where Vishvamitra performed his penance, and by her beauty and her grace she drew the great ascetic out of his deep meditation. For a time the sage, his discipline overcome by love, lived with her and forgot his penance entirely, and to them was born a daughter - the child who would be called Shakuntala, and who would one day be the mother of the emperor Bharata, from whom the whole line descends. But when at last Vishvamitra came to himself and saw how his desire had robbed him of years of penance, he was filled with remorse and resolve. He parted from Menaka, leaving the infant Shakuntala to be raised in a hermitage, and turned back to his discipline - now wiser, having learned that desire, no less than anger, could undo all his striving, and that to win the highest he must master that too.

Now Vishvamitra understood what the true labor was. It was not penance alone, nor power, nor knowledge - all of which he had in abundance. It was the conquest of his own anger and desire and pride, the mastery of the self that no austerity could give him unless he chose it directly. So he set himself, with the same fierce will he had once turned upon kingdoms, to govern his own heart.

He undertook penances harder than any before, and this time he held his temper through every provocation. When he was insulted, he did not curse. When he was tempted, he did not yield. When his pride was wounded, he did not lash out. Slowly, painfully, across an immense span of years, he wore down the kingly fire in himself and became truly serene, truly self-mastered - a sage not only in power but in peace.

And at the last, when he had conquered the enemy within, the highest rank could no longer be denied him. It is said that Vasishtha himself - the very sage he had once tried to rob, the rival he had striven against for an age - at last acknowledged him, and called him by the title he had given his whole long life to win: Brahmarishi, the highest of seers. Vishvamitra wept, for the word he had hungered for above all things was spoken at last, and spoken by the one man whose acknowledgment alone could complete it. The king had become, by the conquest of himself, the equal of the greatest of sages.

The sages who told the tale always drew the same lesson from it, and they drew it now for the Pandavas.

"Consider what Vishvamitra accomplished, son of Pandu. He conquered kingdoms; he gathered spiritual powers great enough to alarm the gods; he gained vast learning and could bend the very elements. And yet none of that was enough to make him a Brahmarishi. For a whole age the highest rank was denied him - not for any lack of strength or knowledge, but because he had not yet conquered the one thing hardest to conquer: the anger and pride and desire in his own heart. Every time his temper flared, the labor of years was burned to nothing in an instant.

"He won the highest only when he ceased to fight the world and began to master himself - when he learned to bear insult without rage and temptation without yielding. The greatest victory, the tale teaches, is not over enemies or kingdoms but over one's own nature, and it is the slowest and hardest victory of all. A king became a sage not by penance alone, but by conquering the king's pride within him."

And the Pandavas, whose own long trial was teaching them daily to master their anger at their enemies and their grief at their losses, took the lesson of Vishvamitra deeply to heart.