Ashtāvakra's Triumph

In the forest of Mithilā, Lomasha told the Pāṇḍavas the story of the young sage Ashtāvakra, and it is a story that overturns the world's way of judging a soul by its outward form.

Ashtāvakra had been born with eight deformities twisting his body, the fruit of a curse his own scholarly father Kahoḍa had laid upon him when, still in the womb, the unborn child had presumed to correct his father's faulty recitation of the Vedas. So Ashtāvakra came into the world bent and broken in body; but within that broken frame lived an intellect of peerless clarity, a mind that was a perfect mirror of the highest wisdom.

At the age of twelve, Ashtāvakra journeyed to the court of King Janaka to challenge the proud court scholar Vandin, who had defeated many learned men in debate and drowned the losers in the ocean, and among them Ashtāvakra's own father. And as the boy approached, the king's men commanded the deformed child to make way; and Ashtāvakra rebuked them with a dignity beyond his years: even a king must make way for the deformed, the blind, for women, and for those who carry the light of the Vedas.

And when the assembled scholars of the court laughed at his twisted limbs, Ashtāvakra answered them with words that cut to the very heart of the matter: I thought this was an assembly of scholars, but I see it is a gathering of cobblers, who judge a man by his skin rather than by his soul.

And then, in a profound debate on the nature of the One and the Many, Ashtāvakra silenced the mighty Vandin, proving his absolute mastery of the deepest philosophy; and Vandin, defeated, revealed himself as the son of the god Varuṇa, and restored to life all the scholars he had drowned. So the boy triumphed, and won back his father, and the whole story stands as a rebuke to the shallow judgment of the world.

For the world saw a broken and deformed body and assumed a lesser soul; and the soul within was greater than any straight-limbed scholar in that hall. The eternal self, the story tells us, is wholly unaffected by the shape or the soundness of the body it wears; the body is a vehicle, and a deformed vehicle may carry a perfect soul, as a plain vessel may hold the finest wine.

To judge a man by his skin, as Ashtāvakra said, is the trade of cobblers; the wise look through the outer form to the soul within, which no deformity can touch and no beauty can improve.