The Python's Questions

In the later years of their forest exile, the Pandavas dwelt for a time high in the wooded slopes of Mount Gandhamadana, that holy mountain in the far north where the air was thin and cold and the woods were full of strange beasts and stranger sages. There they lived simply, the brothers hunting for the household and guarding Draupadi, and the days passed in quiet hardship.

Mighty Bhima, strongest of the five, often ranged far ahead of the others in his hunting, for no beast of the forest frightened him and his arm had never met its match. He had slain demons and uprooted trees and carried his brothers on his back across flooded rivers. In all his life he had never met a creature he could not overpower. That was about to change, and the lesson would come not to his arms but, strangely, to his elder brother's wisdom.

One day Bhima went hunting alone, deep into the mountain forest, striding through the thickets with his usual fearless ease. As he passed through a narrow place among the rocks, a vast shape stirred in the shadows - a python of monstrous size, its body thick as the trunk of an old tree, its mouth like a cavern. Before Bhima could so much as cry out, the great serpent struck and wound its coils around him, pinning his arms to his sides and crushing him in a grip beyond anything he had ever felt.

Bhima, who had killed Bakasura and Hidimba and Kirmira with his bare hands, who had never failed to break free of any hold, now strained with all his enormous strength against the serpent's coils - and could not move them an inch. His great muscles bunched and heaved; he twisted and pushed and fought; and the python held him as easily as a child holds a doll. For the first time in his life, the strongest of the Pandavas was utterly helpless.

"What manner of serpent is this," Bhima gasped, "that can hold Bhima as if I were a babe? My strength is nothing against it."

Then, to Bhima's astonishment, the python spoke, in a voice deep and sorrowful and strangely noble for so dreadful a creature.

"Long have I hungered, mortal," it said, "and providence has sent you to me as my food. You are caught, and you cannot escape, for a power greater than your strength holds you in my coils. But before I devour you, tell me - who are you, that you are so mighty and yet so easily taken?"

Bhima, half-crushed, answered with what dignity he could. "I am Bhimasena, second of the five sons of Pandu, brother to Yudhishthira the king of dharma. But tell me in turn - what are you? No common serpent could hold me so. There is something more in you than a beast. Who and what are you, and how did you come to such a fate, lying here in these high cold woods to trap and eat the unwary?"

And the great python, holding its captive fast, began to tell the strange and bitter story of how it had come to be what it was.

"Once," said the python, "I was no serpent, but a man - and not merely a man, but one of the greatest kings the earth has known. I am Nahusha, your own ancestor, of the line from which your house descends. So righteous and so mighty was I in my reign that when the throne of heaven fell vacant, the gods themselves raised me up to be Indra, the king of the gods, and I ruled in heaven in his place.

"But the seat of the king of the gods is a dangerous height, and it undid me. Power swelled my pride until it choked my wisdom. I grew arrogant and overbearing. I desired even the queen of heaven, and when I went to claim her I had the seven great sages, the rishis, harnessed to my palanquin to carry me like beasts of burden. As they bore me, impatient, I kicked the sage Agastya to make him hurry - struck a holy man with my foot. And Agastya, thus insulted, pronounced upon me a terrible curse: that I should fall from heaven and become a python upon the earth, crawling in the dust I had despised.

"Down I came, out of the sky, into the body you see, to crawl and hunt in these lonely mountains. So pride cast me from the very throne of the gods into the belly of a snake. Remember it, son of Pandu: there is no fall so far as the fall of the proud."

"Yet even Agastya, in his mercy," the python went on, "set a limit to my curse. He told me that I would be freed from this serpent's body, and restored to the higher worlds, on the day that a man came to me who could answer truly the questions I would put to him about dharma and the nature of things. Until then I must remain a python, devouring what came to me. For ages I have waited. Many have I caught, but none could answer me, and so the curse held.

"Now you are caught, Bhima, and by the law of my hunger you are mine to eat. But I am bound by Agastya's word as well. So hear me: I will release you, and spare your life, if one can answer my questions. You are a man of strength, not of learning - can you answer? Or will your wisdom prove as helpless in my coils as your arms have proved?"

Bhima, for all his might, was no master of the subtle questions of dharma, and he knew it. He feared not for his own life, but he saw that his ignorance might be the death of him, and he grieved that all his strength counted for nothing here. He could only hope that his brother would come.

Back at the hermitage, evil omens had begun to trouble Yudhishthira - sudden ill signs, a darkening of the heart, the sense that something had gone wrong. When Bhima did not return from his hunting as the day wore on, the eldest Pandava grew certain that his brother was in danger, and he set out alone into the forest to find him, following the track of Bhima's great footprints up into the wild high places of the mountain.

At last he came to the narrow place among the rocks, and there he saw a sight to stop his heart: his mighty brother Bhima, the strongest man alive, wrapped helpless in the coils of an enormous python, unable to move, awaiting death. Yudhishthira did not rush in blindly. He saw at once that this was no ordinary serpent, and that brute force - even Bhima's - had already failed. He approached and spoke courteously to the great snake, asking what it was, and why it held his brother, and what might win his release.

The python told Yudhishthira all that it had told Bhima - that it was the fallen king Nahusha, cursed by Agastya, and that it would free its captive only if its questions on dharma were answered. "Answer me truly," it said, "and your brother lives. Fail, and I devour him before your eyes."

"Ask, then," said Yudhishthira calmly, "and I will answer as well as I am able."

"Tell me first," said the serpent, "who is a true brahmin? And what is the thing that ought above all to be known?"

Yudhishthira answered without hesitation. "A true brahmin, in my understanding, is not made by birth alone. He is one in whom truthfulness, generosity, patience, good conduct, gentleness, self-control, and compassion are found. A man of low birth in whom these qualities shine is a brahmin in truth; and a man of high birth in whom they are absent is no brahmin, whatever his lineage. For conduct, not the accident of birth, is the real mark of the twice-born. And the thing that ought above all to be known is the Supreme - that highest reality, beyond pleasure and pain, beyond birth and death, in the knowledge of which all sorrow ends."

The python pressed him further, for the matter of birth and worth was the very knot of his own questioning. "But if conduct is found equally in a man of low birth and a man of high," it asked, "then what use is birth at all? And if good conduct can be found anywhere, in any station, how shall we say what truly makes a man noble?"

Yudhishthira answered steadily. "Birth is hard to determine with certainty, O serpent, for the lines of men are mixed and tangled past all untangling, and none can swear with surety what blood runs in his veins. Therefore the wise hold conduct, not pedigree, to be the true and reliable mark of worth. Where right conduct is, there is nobility, in whatever body it is housed; and where it is absent, the highest birth is an empty title. The deer is born a deer and the tiger a tiger, but a man becomes noble or base by what he does. It is character that ennobles, and character alone."

Question after question the python asked - of dharma and its subtleties, of the soul, of what is worth knowing and what brings true happiness - and to each Yudhishthira gave an answer so clear and so true that the great serpent could find no fault in any of them. The wisdom that all of Bhima's strength could not supply, Yudhishthira poured out freely, and the long-cursed king listened, and was satisfied.

When the last question had been answered, the python loosened its coils and let Bhima go, and the mighty Pandava staggered free, bruised and humbled, his life given back to him not by his own famous strength but by his brother's wisdom.

And then a wonder occurred. The vast serpent's body began to shimmer and shed its shape. Up out of the python form rose Nahusha in his ancient royal splendor, freed at last from the long curse of Agastya, his thousands of years of crawling penance ended in this hour by the true answers of his own descendant. The fallen king stood radiant, a being of light, released.

"You have freed me, Yudhishthira," he said, "son of my own line. By your wisdom the curse is spent, and I may return now to the higher worlds I lost through my pride. Blessings upon you and your brothers. And carry this with you: I was the king of the gods, and I fell to the dust as a snake because I let power make me proud and cruel, because I struck a holy man and forgot the humility that even kings must keep. Be ever humble, ever just, and never let fortune harden your heart, lest you fall as I fell." And with that he rose into the sky and was gone, ascending to heaven in a chariot of light.

The two brothers walked back down the mountain together in the falling dusk, and both of them had been changed by the day. Bhima, who had never in his life met a hold he could not break, had learned that there are powers in the world that no strength of arm can master, and that even he might one day be saved only by something other than his might. He looked at his quiet elder brother with a new and deeper respect.

And Yudhishthira carried away the warning the fallen king had given with his own ruined story: that Nahusha had been the greatest of men, lifted to the very throne of heaven, and had thrown it all away through arrogance and the abuse of power - cast from the sky into the body of a snake by a single proud, cruel act. It was a lesson the king of dharma would remember when his own fortunes rose again: that the higher one is raised, the farther there is to fall, and that humility and justice are the only safe footing on the heights.

They returned to Draupadi and their brothers and told the tale, and the family marveled that strength had been saved by wisdom, and that a hunting trip on a cold mountain had freed a cursed king from a serpent's body after the long passage of ages.