Why Gold Is the Highest Gift

On the field at Kurukshetra, where the bed of arrows held him through the long dying, Bhishma had been speaking since morning about gifts: land and cattle, food and sesame, water and lamps and shelter. Yudhishthira, who would soon have a whole kingdom's giving to answer for, put the question that lay under all of them.

"Grandfather, I do not ask which gift is most useful to the man who takes it. I ask which gift most purifies the man who gives it. There must be one that stands above the others."

"Gold," said Bhishma. "And to understand why, you have to hear where gold came from, because it did not come out of the ground first. It came out of a fire."

In the old age of the world, he said, the gods were being beaten. There was an asura against whom no weapon they owned would hold, and Indra, who is not easily frightened, was frightened, because the gods had no commander who could stand against that adversary in the field. It had been declared that only a son of the Great God could be that commander. So the celestials went up into the Himavat, where Mahadeva was with Uma his consort, and they went the way petitioners go who know they are interrupting: quietly, and at the worst possible moment.

They came into the presence of Shiva and Uma together, and their arrival broke off what had been begun between them. The Great God rose. What had been readied was not withdrawn, for such a thing once brought forth cannot simply be put away again, and the seed of Mahadeva fell out of that union with no womb waiting to receive it and no earth able to hold it. It lay there burning. The gods, having caused this, stood on the mountain looking at a thing none of them could touch or lift or extinguish, and no one among them would go near it.

There was one of them who could carry it, and only one. Agni is himself a mouth that consumes without being consumed, and what burns everything else was, to him, simply something to be borne. At the word of the gods the Fire took up the seed of Mahadeva and carried it away off the mountain.

Even for Agni it was almost too much. The tale says he grew pale under it, that his brightness faltered as he went, that the thing he carried was heavier than the sacrifices of the whole world laid together. He came at last to the bank of the Ganga, to a thicket of reeds standing in the shallows, white with their flowering, and there he set the burden down because he could carry it no further.

What happened in that reed bed was not a smouldering. It was a blaze that turned the whole thicket into a single column of fire, and out of that blaze, in the manner told at length elsewhere, was born Skanda the war god, six-faced, already armed, who took the command of the celestial host and did in one day what Indra had not been able to do in an age.

But fire, when it has finished, always leaves something. Fire is a sorting: what cannot stand it goes up as smoke and is gone, and what can stand it stays behind in the ash. When the reeds had burned away and the god had risen out of them and gone, there remained on the ground where the blaze had been a bright residue, molten and then cooling, that had passed through the whole of that heat and had not been consumed by any part of it.

That residue is gold. It is not merely a metal that Agni is fond of. It is what Agni left when he had finished, the leavings of the fire that bore the war god, and the sages therefore call gold the body of Fire itself, walking about in the world in a hard and portable form.

"Now you see why gold stands where it stands," Bhishma said. "Every other gift is a thing you happen to own. Gold is a piece of the fire, and fire is the one witness at every rite in your life. It carried your marriage. It will carry your body. It takes the offering out of your hand and hands it upward, and it accepts nothing that is false, because falsehood does not survive burning."

The seed that Agni carried had come from Mahadeva, he said, who is the destroyer of the fault in things, and it had passed through a heat great enough to bring forth the commander of the gods. What such a fire leaves behind is not ordinary matter. When a man gives gold, he is handing over something that has already been through the burning, and the tradition holds that it burns in the giver's direction as well: it takes with it the fault attached to him, the way fire takes the impurity out of the ore and leaves the metal clean. This is why the sages say that the giver of gold gives away his own sin along with it, and why the gift is prescribed in every rite where a man's record needs to be made clean before he goes further.

Yudhishthira heard this and answered as a man answers who has been made king of a wealthy country. "Then a rich man is easily purified, grandfather, and a poor man is not. He has no gold. Is the road shut to him because his house is empty?"

"You have asked the right question," Bhishma said, "and you have asked it too early, because you are still thinking about the metal. Attend now, for what follows matters more than everything I have just told you. It is not the gold that purifies. It is the fire in the man who gives it, and the metal only shows what temperature he was at."

"Learn the manner," said Bhishma, "or the substance is wasted."

"Give without contempt. A gift handed down from above, with the face turned away or the mouth twisted, does not purify the giver, whatever weight it comes to. The receiver carries the look on your face home with him longer than he carries the metal, and what you have really given him is the knowledge that you thought yourself above him. That is not a gift. It is a fee charged for the privilege of being humiliated in front of you."

"Give to the man who has not had to ask twice. The best giving is to the one who has not had to ask at all, whom you sought out because you knew, but that is not always possible. What is always possible is this: when a man has brought himself to ask you once, do not make him do it a second time. He spent something to say it the first time that he cannot get back, and each repetition takes more of him. A gift that arrives after the third asking arrives at a man who has already been emptied out to pay for it."

"Give at the right hour. A gift comes at the season of need or it comes as a decoration. Grain given while the household is still hungry is grain. Grain given after the hunger has passed is a compliment paid to yourself."

"And do not give as a way of buying back a wrong you have already done. That is the false coin among all gifts. A man who has injured another and then loads him with gold has not repented, he has paid, and he has arranged for the injured party to be in his debt as well, which is a second injury laid quietly on top of the first. The gold does not cross that gap. Nothing crosses it but going to the man and saying what you did, without gold in your hand at all."

"So return to your poor man," Bhishma said. "He has no gold, and by the reckoning you were using a moment ago he is shut out. But the reckoning was wrong. Gold is the highest gift not because it is expensive but because of what it is: the part that came through the fire. What the poor man gives comes through a hotter fire than any rich man's treasury has ever seen, because he gives out of the little that stands between his own household and hunger, and what survives that burning is at least as clean as anything dug out of a mine."

"Weigh two men," he said. "One sends a hundred measures of gold to a rite, having counted first what it leaves him, having made sure the right people were present to see it counted, and having chosen the day so that a certain debt of his own would be forgotten in the noise. The other gives a single coin, on the day it was needed, to a man who asked once, quietly, with nothing owed between them and no one watching. The first has moved a great deal of metal. The second has given a gift. The gods, who see the fire and not the weight, have no difficulty telling them apart, and neither, Yudhishthira, will you, once you stop looking at the pile."

Yudhishthira sat with it a while. He would be a giver on a scale few kings ever reach: whole herds, whole villages, gold by the cartload at the great sacrifice that lay ahead of him, and every one of those gifts would be watched by the entire assembled world. He understood what he had just been handed. The danger in his position was never going to be that he gave too little. It was that the giving would become a performance of giving, weighed out in public, at the hour that suited him, to men who had been made to ask.

"Then I will watch the fire," he said, "and not the scale."

"Watch the fire," said Bhishma. "The scale will take care of itself."