The Guest Who Laughed

Bhishma had just finished the history of the worm, who had climbed out of a cart-track and through a Kshatriya's body into the status of a Brahmana and from there into the region of Brahman himself, all of it by doing what Vyasa told him to do. Do not mourn for the men who fell on this field, the old man had said at the end of it. They spent their lives the way that creature spent his.

Yudhishthira had listened to the whole of it, and what he took away from it was a question about the currency.

"Which amongst these three is superior," he said, "viz., knowledge, penances, and gifts? I ask thee, O foremost of righteous persons. Do tell me this, O grandsire."

It is the question underneath the entire Anushasana. The three are the only things a man can actually spend. Knowledge is what he learns and holds. Penance is what he burns off himself. Gift is what he hands to another person and does not get back. Every teaching the grandsire had given since the coronation could be sorted into one of the three heaps, and the king wanted to know which heap was worth the most, because he was a man who had been given a kingdom he did not want by killing people he did want, and he was still trying to find out what could be done with what was left.

Bhishma did not answer it in his own voice. He almost never did.

"In this connection," he said, "is cited the old narrative of the conversation between Maitreya and the Island-born Krishna."

The Island-born Krishna is Vyasa. He is called that because he was born on an island in the Yamuna, dark-skinned, to a fisherman's daughter, and he is the man who fathered Dhritarashtra and Pandu and Vidura and then wrote down what their children did to each other. He is the one figure in the epic who is inside it and above it at once.

And once, said Bhishma, he went walking over the world in disguise, and came to a house in Baranasi, and was fed.

Baranasi is the city on the Ganga that the site elsewhere calls Varanasi, or Kashi, the oldest place of learning in the country, and the man Vyasa went to see there was Maitreya, who belonged by birth to a race of Munis.

That clause about birth is not decoration. It is going to be half the argument. Maitreya came of a line of sages, he had the lineage and the Vedic learning and the vows that go with it, and he knew what he had. He was, Bhishma says, a worshipper of acts: a man who believed that what you do and what you are born into are the things that make you.

Vyasa came to his door in disguise, which is to say that Maitreya did not know he was entertaining the author of the world.

He did what a householder does. He gave the stranger a seat. He worshipped him with due rites, the water and the honey and the words, all of it performed properly for a wandering ascetic whose name he had not been told. Then he fed him with excellent food, and the text pauses over that food long enough to say what kind it was: very wholesome, and productive of every kind of gratification. A good meal, given away by a man who lived on very little, to somebody who had walked in off the road.

Having eaten it, the high-souled Krishna became exceedingly delighted.

And as he sat there, he laughed aloud.

Consider the position that leaves the host in. He has emptied his stores for a guest, he has said the correct words over him, and the guest has finished the food and is now sitting in his house laughing out loud at nothing that anybody else can see. There is no polite reading of it. An ascetic does not laugh at a meal.

Maitreya was too well brought up to be offended and too intelligent to pretend he had not noticed. So he asked.

"Tell me, O righteous-souled one, what the reason is of thy laughter," said Maitreya. "Thou art an ascetic, endued with capacity to control thy emotions. Great joy, it seems, has come over thee."

That is the whole of the complaint, and it is put as a compliment. You are a man who governs himself. Something has got past your guard. What was it.

Then he asked the real question, and he asked it kneeling.

"Saluting thee, and worshipping thee with bent head, I ask thee this, viz., what the puissance is of my penances and what the high blessedness is that is thine."

He wanted to be told what his own austerities were worth. Not in general. His, the ones he had performed, measured against the man in front of him. And having asked it, he answered it himself, out loud, in the most exposed sentence in the episode.

"The acts I do are different from those which thou doest. Thou art already emancipated though still owning life-breaths. I, however, am not yet freed. For all that I think that there is not much difference between thee and me. I am again, distinguished by birth."

Read the movement in that. He begins by granting everything. You are free while still alive, which is the highest thing that can be said of anybody. I am not free. Then, having said it, he cannot leave it there, and he adds that there is not much difference between the two of them anyway, and then, in case that was not clear enough, that he has the better birth.

It is the most human moment in the Anushasana Parva. A learned man has just given away his dinner to a stranger, and what he wants in return is a ruling that his life has counted for something, and he cannot help supplying the ruling himself while he waits.

Vyasa, who had been laughing a moment before, took the question seriously. He did not correct the pride. He explained the laugh.

"This wonder that has filled me hath arisen from an ordinance that looks like a hyperbole," Vyasa said, "and from its paradoxical statement for the comprehension of the people. The declaration of the Vedas seems to be untrue. But why should the Vedas say an untruth?"

He was laughing at a text. Somewhere in the scriptures there is a promise about gifts so extravagant that a reasonable man reads it and assumes it has been inflated for the benefit of simple people, and Vyasa had just watched the promise come true across a plate of food, and the collision of the two things had gone through him as delight.

Then he named the ordinance.

"It has been said that there are three tracks which constitute the best vows of a man. One should never injure. One should always tell the truth. And one should make gifts. The Rishis of old announced this, following the declarations of the Vedas. These injunctions were heard in days of old. They should certainly be followed by us even in our times."

Three tracks, and nothing else on the list. Not sacrifice, not learning, not the disciplines that Maitreya had spent his life on. Do no harm, speak the truth, give.

"Even a small gift, made under the circumstances laid down, produces great fruits. Unto a thirsty man thou hast given a little water with a sincere heart."

And then the sentence that is the point of the visit, and the reason there is a story here at all.

"Thyself thirsty and hungry, thou hast, by giving me such food, conquered many high regions of felicity, O puissant one, as one does by many sacrifices."

Maitreya had not eaten. That is the detail the text drops in without underlining it. The excellent and wholesome food had been set in front of the guest by a man who was hungry, and who had gone hungry so that it could be set there, and the guest had known it while he was eating.

"I am exceedingly delighted with thy very sacred gift," said Vyasa, "as also with thy penances. Thy puissance is that of Righteousness. Thy appearance is that of Righteousness. The fragrance of Righteousness is about thee."

Having praised the man, Vyasa went on to rank the act, and the ranking is put with a bluntness that is unusual even for him.

"Superior to ablutions in sacred waters, superior to the accomplishment of all Vedic vows, is gift. Indeed, O Brahmana, gift is more auspicious than all sacred acts. All those rites laid down in the Vedas which thou applaudest do not come up to gift, for gift, without doubt, is as I hold, fraught with very superior merit."

He was standing in Baranasi when he said it, a few streets from the river where men come from the whole of the country to wash off what they have done. Nothing you can do in that water, he said, is worth what you did in your kitchen.

"The track that has been made by those men who make gifts is the track that is trodden by the wise. They who make gifts are regarded as givers of even the life-breaths. As the Vedas when well-studied, as the restraining of the senses, as a life of universal Renunciation, even so is gift."

Then he sorted the whole of humanity into three groups, and the sorting is worth having in full, because it is short and it leaves very little room to stand outside it.

Some men are righteous. Those are the ones devoted to sacrifices, to gifts, and to penances.

Some are sinful. Those are the ones who injure other creatures and are unfriendly to them, and with them are counted the men who appropriate what belongs to others, and these certainly fall into Hell and meet with misery.

And some are neither. The man devoted to Brahma is not reckoned either way, and his sins are never regarded as sins. So too the man who simply performs the duties laid down for him: for that, he is neither righteous nor sinful. All the other acts that men do are indifferent.

So the great mass of what a person does in a lifetime does not register at all. Only three things put a man on the righteous side of the ledger, and only two things put him on the other, and one of the two is taking what is not his.

"Do thou sport and grow and rejoice and make gifts and perform sacrifices," Vyasa finished. "Neither men of knowledge nor those endued with penances will then be able to get the better of thee."

Which was an answer to the question Maitreya had asked, and Maitreya had noticed that it was.

"O thou of great wisdom, without doubt it is as thou hast said," Maitreya answered. "O puissant one, with thy permission I desire to say something."

"Whatever thou wishest to say, O Maitreya, do thou say," said Vyasa, "for I wish to hear thee."

That exchange is the hinge of the episode. This is not a sage instructing a pupil. It is two learned men who disagree, and the elder has just invited the younger to argue back, and the younger does.

"Thy words on the subject of Gift are faultless and pure," said Maitreya. "Without doubt, thy soul has been cleansed by knowledge and penances."

The concession carries the whole objection inside it. You praise gift. But look at what made you the man whose praise is worth having. Knowledge and penances. As for us, said Maitreya, we acquire prosperity through only a sight of personages like thee.

Then he set out his case.

"Penances, knowledge of the Vedas, and birth in a pure race. These are the causes of the status which one acquires of a Brahmana. When one has these three attributes, then does he come to be called a regenerate person. If the Brahmana be gratified, the Pitris and the deities are also gratified. There is nothing superior to a Brahmana possessed of Vedic lore. Without the Brahmana, all would be darkness. Nothing would be known. The four orders would not exist. The distinction between Righteousness and Unrighteousness, Truth and Falsehood, would cease."

And having built that, he brought it round to gift, and the image he used to do it is the best thing he says.

"On a well-tilled field, an abundant harvest can be reaped. Even so, one may reap great merit by making gifts unto a Brahmana possessed of great learning. If there were no Brahmanas endued with Vedic lore and good conduct for accepting gifts, the wealth possessed by wealthy people would be useless."

That is the argument, and it is a real one. A gift is not a self-contained good. It is a seed, and a seed is worth what the ground is worth. Somebody has to have spent a life on penance and study for there to be anywhere fit to put the gift, and a man who praises the sowing while ignoring the field has not thought it through.

Maitreya then followed his own argument into the place where it cuts against him, which is the mark of a man who means it.

"The ignorant Brahmana, by eating the food that is offered to him, destroys what he eats," he said, "for it produces no merit to him who gives it. The food that is eaten also destroys the eater, for the eater incurs sin by eating what is offered to him."

The transaction can fail from either end. A gift laid on bad ground is not a small good. It is nothing at all, and worse than nothing, because two people are damaged by it. That ought to be properly termed an eatable, he said, which is given away to a deserving man. In all other cases the giver has thrown his gift away and the receiver is ruined for having improperly accepted it.

Then he pressed it further, into a claim about what learning actually is.

"The Brahmana possessed of learning becomes the subjugator of the food that he eats. Having eaten it, he begets other food."

The learned man converts what he is given back into something the world can eat. The teaching, the rite, the counsel he gives out afterwards, that is the second harvest, and it is why feeding him was not merely charity.

And the ignorant man who eats what is offered to him loses his right to the children he begets, for they become the possession of the man whose food enabled him to beget them. Even this, said Maitreya, is the subtle fault that attaches to persons eating other people's food when they have not the power to win that food themselves. Take what you have not earned the standing to take, and something of what you make afterwards is not yours.

Then he set the scales level, and it is the fairest sentence in his speech.

"The merit which the giver acquires by making the gift is equal to what the taker acquires by accepting the food. Both the giver and the acceptor depend equally upon each other. Even this is what the Rishis have said."

Men of pure lineage, devoted to penance, who make gifts and study the Vedas, are worthy of the most reverent worship. "It is those good men that have chalked out the path by treading on which one does not become stupefied. It is those men that are the leaders of others to heaven. They are the men who bear on their shoulders the burden of sacrifices and live for eternity."

Vyasa did not defend his position. He conceded the point and then went past it.

"By good luck, thou art endued with knowledge. By good luck, thy understanding is of this kind. That personal beauty and youth and prosperity do not succeed in overwhelming thee is due to good luck."

Then: "Listen to me as I discourse to thee upon what is even superior in efficacy to gift."

The man who had just called gift more auspicious than all sacred acts now said there was something above it, and named the thing his host had been defending.

"Penances are sacred. Penances are the means by which one may acquire the Vedas and heaven also. It is by penances that one destroys one's sins and all else that is evil."

And then the list, which is the least comfortable thing in the section and the reason it exists. The man who drinks alcohol. The man who takes by force what belongs to others. The man guilty of foeticide. The man who violates the bed of his preceptor. All four cross over with the aid of penances, and are cleansed. There is no crime named there that penance cannot take off a man, which is precisely what a gift cannot do for him.

"One possessed of all knowledge and, therefore, having true vision, and an ascetic of whatever kind, are equal. One should always bow unto these two."

So the ruling, when it came, refused the ranking that had been asked for. Bow to the knower. Bow to the ascetic. And as for the giver: those men who are adored by all themselves adore him who makes gifts, and wherever the giver goes, he hears himself praised.

Then, to the young man in front of him, the smallest instruction of the evening.

"Do thou take instructions from me regarding those duties which thou shouldst first follow, the duties, viz., of householders. In that house in which the husband is gratified with his wedded wife, and the wife gratified with her husband, all auspicious results ensue. As filth is washed away from the body with water, as darkness is dispelled by the splendour of fire, even so is sin washed off by gifts and penances."

Water and fire, gift and penance, named in one breath at the end of an argument about which of them stood higher.

"Bless thee, O Maitreya, let mansions be thine. I depart hence in peace. Do thou keep in mind what I have said. Thou shalt then be able to reap many advantages."

Maitreya walked round his illustrious guest and bowed his head to him, and joined his hands, and said, "Let blessing be to thee also, O holy one."

He still did not know who had eaten his dinner.