chapters 4 and 5

Chapter 4

Maitreyi saw a commotion among the ascetics as she was returning home from the river. She chanced to hear the name Shakalya whispered by several of them with subdued consternation. Sensing something amiss, she decided to approach one of them and inquire about what had happened.

“Shakalya died suddenly yesterday.”

“Where and how?”

“You would lose your peace of mind, Mother!”

“Never bother about my state of mind, tell me.”

“He died at an unholy place, and at an inauspicious moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yes, Mother, please do not ask me how it happened.”

“But why? I must know!”

“Because I have not understood the meaning of all that has happened... Shakalya was one of the sages who had challenged Yajnyawalkya at Janaka's court.”

“What has that to do with his death?”

“Shakalya was bent on making Yajnyawalkya the butt of ridicule. You know those brahmins who gather at Janaka's court; Shakalya was the leader of those discontented souls who are ever on the lookout for an opportunity to discomfiture Yajnyawalkya.That day Shakalya's dilettantism was all too obvious, as was his intention to disparage and embarrass Yajnyawalkya. The debate between them touched the most sensitive point when Shakalya asked those two questions.”

“What were they?”

“I do not know what Shakalya was aiming at with them!”

“Go on; perhaps I will know.”

'Shakalya forced Yajnyawalkya to classify the phenomenal universe. Yajnyawalkya pointed out that there is only one God, the vital force: Prana: out of which we have created several gods with names, forms, activities, attributes and powers.Shakalya could not refute this.Shakalya worships the 'Body'. He confronted Yajnyawalkya with the vision of the god he worshiped in the form of the 'Body’, and challenged Yajnyawalkya to recognize its essence.. Yajnyawalkya recognized it to be the fluid of life generated by the body. Shakalya expected Yajnyawalkya to be a naive pedantic who had never known what Shakalya knew about life.”

“What was it?”

“I cannot name it in your presence, Mother!”

“I know what you mean. It was the pleasures of the body, lust to be precise!”

“You named it right, Mother. Shakalya then challenged Yajnyawalkya to name the deity of lust, little expecting Yajnyawalkya to see through his cynical overtures. Shakalya rejoiced in his success at having made Yajnyawalkya tread the path of the multitudes as he forced Yajnyawalkya to acknowledge the truth of carnal pleasures, and asked Yajnyawalkya to name the deity of carnal pleasures. Yajnyawalkya, without wincing, named it.”

“How? What did he say?”

“Woman!” he said. And thereafter the debate followed its usual scholastic pattern. But this was the point at which all of us could see through Shakalya's lewd intentions.”Maitreyi listened, wondering how to relate all this to Shakalya's mysterious death. But she decided not to interrupt, and allowed Shwetaketu to unwind.

"Yajnyawalkya could scarcely contain his disgust. The discussion trailed into meaningless traps of mere arguments until Shakalya asked impudently whether the source of our intellect was outside the Self."

Maitreyi felt, she could see what had transpired between Shakalya, who had willfully carved his identity in the flesh, and Yajnyawalkya, who equally willfully, was bent upon giving the lie to the claims of flesh. Maitreyi could not define the conflict, but her keen perception projected the polarity of the visions perceived by the two men. At one end was the refusal to rise above flesh, at the other end was an equally staunch avowal of spirit. She gazed at the awe-struck eyes of Shwetaketu as he continued. He seemed to stare at an apparition as he went on.

“And then Yajnyawalkya looked around at the assembly. He found the audience smirking with wicked delight. He thundered at Shakalya : “You do not understand that these cowards are using you as a pair of tongs to burn the charcoals which they dare not touch with their own hands. But hear O fool; you shall die at an unholy place at an inauspicious moment and even your bones shall not reach home.”

Maitreyi shuddered.

“He died exactly like that; and what is more, robbers seized his bones too, as they were being carried to his home by his disciples for funeral rites, mistaking them for some treasure.”

“Does Yajnyawalkya know all this?”

“The news has just arrived, and the disciples are still wondering if it is true.”

Maitreyi remained silent for an interval that seemed to be interminably long for Shwetaketu.Then she turned to look at him full in the face and spoke in a voice that silenced all trepidation,

“Hold it back from Yajnyawalkya’s knowledge.”

Then mustering courage she asked,“Where did he die?”

“He was killed in a drunken brawl at the place of a disreputable woman.”

Maitreyi thought she saw it all. Her mind was at peace now. She said to Shwetaketu,

“Yajnyawalkya did not utter a curse as you fear he did. He simply saw what was to come.”

Chapter 5

Artabhaga dissociated himself from the sages who had gathered at the assembly held in Janaka's court. He walked away from the din of the mantras until he was well out of their range.He wanted to come back and sit by himself where he and Yajnyawalkya had sat on the previous day.

His brow contracted with anguish as he remembered Yajnyawalkya's awesome denunciation of Shakalya. Artabhaga always fought shy of appearing in assemblies. Since childhood he had been a withdrawn person. He had grown up under the supervision of a father who had ceaselessly quarreled with the world, and this precocious child had silently borne the brunt of his father's frustrations until his young heart learnt the art of endurance without wearing out. Artabhaga had no quarrel with the world. Before he could get fairly acquainted with the world, he had lost his mother. Thereafter there was nothing the world could give him or take away from him.

He had watched the proceedings of the assembly as he would watch the rituals of sacrifice, with a lack of concern that was neither contemptuous nor apathetic. He knew that the debate was a self-confessed mockery of the issues that were beyond all that man could hope to achieve with the instrument of logic. What, however, interested him was the spectacle of mighty intellects warring with each other.

A strident male voice interrupted Artabhaga's communion with himself. Someone was making an announcement. All the brahmins who had participated in the debate were going to be honored with gifts. Artabhaga did not move, but watched with interest all the brahmins who had earlier dispersed to form groups and now made a beeline to the end of the pandall where gifts were to be distributed. He was glad that no one remembered him in this clamor. He had no desire to join them. It was a sacrifice performed to satisfy a mighty king's hunger for knowledge. And hungry brahmins offered their self-hood so that the king may find fulfillment of all his desires.

Then why did he come all the way to Videha? It was neither the lure of gold nor was it an ambition to prove himself to the world. There was a deep sense of restlessness in him, the restlessness of a man who wandered, not in search of peace, but simply because nothing held him.

Artabhaga receded further backward where he was sitting under the shade of a huge banyan tree. Evening shadows were closing in fast. A little while ago the ground around him displayed a network of shadows that seemed to bounce with the movement of branches and leaves. Pebbles, stones boulders, had seemed to shine as if from a light within. Then, for sometime, everything seemed to have acquired a tangible reality and density, with their shadows pointing in one direction. Now, very soon, night will sweep them all. Artabhaga's eyes followed those shadows. Strange, he thought, that the shadows which gave such vibrant reality to objects, were harbingers of their extinction, after all.

In that hour of twilight, the memory of Shakalya and Yajnyawalkya's wordy combat assumed a different dimension for Artabhaga. No one knew when the seemingly stylized rhetoric gave way to the undercurrent of antipathy, but Artabhaga had demurred its existence before that seething current became manifest.

Yajnyawalkya had always been an enigma to Artabhaga till yesterday. He had studied Yajnyawalkya's injunctions on rituals and his code of conduct for the householder, with amused indifference.But the Yajnyawalkya as was revealed to him at the assembly was strikingly different from Yajnyawalkya the preceptor who had laid down rules for ordinary life in his famous injunctions for the householder. What he saw was far beyond his expectations. He regarded with amusement and awe, this man who seemed to mock all rules and ride over them all at will. He discovered in Yajnyawalkya a giant who had stooped low and allowed the midgets around him to stand on his shoulders to afford them a glimpse of what he saw; but the moment he realized that they expected him to stoop all along, hurled them to the ground where they belonged and stood above them in his full height.

But Yajnyawalkya unfettered was also the Yajnyawalkya who was impervious to the pieties conjoined on him. Artabhaga remembered his own state of mind as he had ventured forward to ask questions. Now as he looked back, he realized that he could not recall when and how he and Yajnyawalkya had ceased to regard each other as adversaries. In a somber flash of vision, Artabhaga thought of a vast desert, intractable and endless, and a man pacing it all alone. That was Yajnyawalkya, relentlessly marching ahead, existing in himself alone, with nothing behind to detain him and nothing ahead to delude him.

Artabhaga listened to the evening hymns recited by the young disciples. It was time to go and join his companions. The gateways to the west of the city would close soon after the last of the cow-herds had entered in. There was a place for all inside the four walls of the city. Yes! There had to be a place for all; there has to be night so that we all may come back, each one to his own abode. Inside the four walls of a home, inside the four walls of a city, inside the walls of a state, there is a space for everyone. That was what the sound of the hymns seemed to affirm. As Artabhaga arose, he saw that someone was about to cross his path. The person seemed not to heed anything around him. Artabhaga instinctively flinched back, startled by the blind fury in the man's movement. For a moment, Artabhaga drew a little backward to allow the man to pass. For a brief moment, the man's face came into light. Artabhaga was astonished to see- it was Shakalya.