The Knowledge Not Earned

As the Pandavas traveled among the holy hermitages in their exile, the sage Lomasha brought them to a quiet place where, he said, a proud young brahmin had once learned a hard lesson about how true knowledge is won.

"There was a young man named Yavakri," said Lomasha, "the son of a sage, who burned to become learned in the sacred Vedas. But he did not wish to earn his learning the way it has always been earned - by humble service to a teacher, by years of patient study at a master's feet. He thought that too slow and too lowly for a man of his gifts. So he resolved to wring the knowledge straight out of the gods by sheer force of penance, and to make himself a great scholar without ever sitting before a guru. Hear what came of it, son of Pandu, for there is a warning in it for every proud and impatient heart."

In a certain forest there dwelt two friends, both great sages. One was named Bharadvaja, and the other Raibhya. Raibhya was deeply learned and had two able sons, and his household was honored and visited by many. Bharadvaja, his friend, was a man of intense penance but of simpler learning, and he had a single son - Yavakri.

As Yavakri grew, he saw that his father, for all his austerity, was not honored and sought-after as Raibhya and his learned sons were. The brahmins came to Raibhya's door, not to his father's. This galled the young man. He brooded over it until it became a wound, and he resolved that he would make himself so learned that no one could overlook him - more learned than Raibhya and his sons, more learned than anyone. But he would not do it by study under a teacher. He was too proud for that. He would compel the gods themselves to pour the whole of the Vedas into his mind, by the sheer terrible force of his penance.

So Yavakri went into the forest and kindled great fires and gave himself to austerities of fearful severity. He fasted and stood in the heat and held to his disciplines without mercy on his own body, and his single demand, fixed in his heart, was that the gods should grant him the entire knowledge of the Vedas directly, without his ever having to learn it from a human teacher.

So intense and so prolonged was his penance that its heat began to scorch the heavens and trouble Indra, the king of the gods. At last Indra himself came down to the young man, to reason with him before his austerities grew dangerous.

"Stop this, Yavakri," said Indra. "What you are attempting is against the proper order of things. The Vedas are not to be seized by force, like plunder. Knowledge is acquired by study, with discipline and patience, at the feet of a worthy teacher, over long years. That is the only true way, and there is good reason for it. Go and find a guru and learn as all the wise have learned. Do not try to tear the sacred knowledge out of heaven by penance."

But Yavakri would not listen. "I will not crawl to a teacher and spend my youth in service," he said. "I have the power to compel what I want, and I will use it. If you will not grant me the Vedas, king of the gods, I will only redouble my penance - I will cut off my own limbs and offer them into the fire, until you are forced to yield." And he went back to his austerities more fiercely than before, mortifying his body, determined to wrest the prize from heaven by threat and self-torture.

Indra saw that the young man could not be turned by words, and that his obstinacy might do real harm. So the king of the gods resolved to teach him, by a small humbling lesson, the folly of trying to take a shortcut to greatness. He came again, this time disguised as an aged, withered brahmin, and sat down on the bank of the holy river Ganga near where Yavakri performed his penance, and there he began, with great labor, to do a strange and hopeless thing.

The disguised Indra, in the form of the old brahmin, was throwing handful after handful of sand into the rushing river Ganga, scooping up sand from the bank and casting it into the current, as though he meant to build a dam across the great river and bridge it with sand.

Yavakri watched this for a while in disbelief, and at last his scorn got the better of him. "Old man," he called, "what foolishness is this? You are throwing handfuls of sand into the Ganga to make a dam. The river will sweep every grain away as fast as you can throw it. You can never bridge so mighty a river with mere handfuls of sand. You are wasting your labor on an impossible thing. Stop this senseless toil."

The old brahmin looked up calmly. "I am only doing," he said, "exactly what you are doing. You wish to master the whole vast ocean of the Vedas, not by the steady, proper labor of study under a teacher, but by flinging penance at heaven in great handfuls and hoping to dam up all of knowledge at a stroke. My handfuls of sand against the Ganga are no more foolish than your penance against the order of learning. If you mock my dam, you must mock your own purpose, for they are the same."

The lesson of the sand should have humbled Yavakri, but his pride was too hard, and he only persisted the more violently, threatening to feed his own body into the fire. At last Indra, unwilling to let the young man destroy himself, relented and granted his wish - but the gift came with a warning that already carried the seed of its danger.

Indra gave Yavakri the knowledge of the Vedas he had demanded, pouring it into his mind without the labor of study, and granted him certain powers besides. But knowledge taken so, without the long discipline that should accompany it, is a perilous thing. For learning earned slowly under a teacher shapes not only the mind but the character - it teaches humility, restraint, and the right use of what one knows. Yavakri received the knowledge but none of the character. He came away a learned man but an unwise one, swollen with pride at his new powers, with no discipline to govern them.

And Indra knew it. "You have what you demanded," the god said, "but you have taken it the wrong way, and it will not serve you as you think. Knowledge without the wisdom to wield it is a danger to its owner." And so it proved.

Puffed up with his new learning and his powers, Yavakri grew insolent and reckless. He wandered about displaying his knowledge and lording it over others, and at last his arrogance led him into a grave and shameful act: he forced his attentions upon the daughter-in-law of the sage Raibhya, the wife of one of Raibhya's sons, dishonoring her against her will.

This was exactly the kind of ruin that Indra had foreseen - a man with great power and no character, using his gifts to take whatever his pride and appetite desired. He had the knowledge of the Vedas in his head, but the long discipline that would have made him good, and made him safe to himself and others, he had refused to undergo. And now his wrongdoing had injured the household of a sage far greater than he, a sage who had earned his powers the hard way, and who would not let the offense pass.

When the sage Raibhya learned how Yavakri had dishonored his son's wife, his wrath was terrible. From his own penance - the penance earned through long and disciplined years - he brought forth a fierce being, a rakshasa, to avenge the wrong. And this avenger, born of true and disciplined power, hunted down the proud young man whose power had been merely seized.

Yavakri fled, but his shortcut-gotten gifts could not save him. The protections he relied upon failed at the crucial moment - for he had grown careless, as the undisciplined do - and the avenging being struck him down and killed him. So the young man who had refused to learn humbly under a teacher, who had wrung knowledge from heaven by force and used it to harm the innocent, was destroyed in the end by the very righteous power he had scorned to earn. All his stolen learning could not preserve him, because he had never gained the wisdom and restraint that alone make knowledge safe.

Lomasha finished the tale, and its meaning lay plain before the Pandavas.

"There is the danger, son of Pandu, of seeking greatness by the wrong road. Yavakri wanted the fruit of learning without its labor. He wanted to be wise without becoming wise - to have the knowledge of the Vedas poured into him at a stroke, without the long, humbling discipline of study under a teacher that shapes a man's character along with his mind. And he got exactly what he asked for: knowledge without wisdom, power without restraint. It made him arrogant, it led him into wrongdoing, and in the end it destroyed him.

"Remember the old brahmin and his handfuls of sand against the Ganga. Some things cannot be seized in great impatient handfuls; they can only be built up grain by grain, by patient and humble labor. True knowledge is one of these, and so is true greatness. The shortcut that skips the discipline skips the very thing that would have made the prize worth having - and safe to hold."

And the Pandavas, who were themselves learning patience and humility the hard way through the slow years of their exile, took the warning to heart.