I Am No Crane

The sage Mārkaṇḍeya comforted the Pāṇḍavas with the story of Kaushika, and it is one of the most quietly revolutionary stories in the whole epic, for it locates true holiness not in the forest or the temple but in the faithful doing of ordinary duty.

Kaushika was a proud ascetic who had won great yogic power through his penances. One day, as he sat in meditation beneath a tree, a crane perched above befouled his head with its droppings; and Kaushika looked up in anger, and the mere burning glance of his wrath struck the bird dead on the instant. And seeing the power of his own anger, Kaushika was not chastened but made vain, proud that his glance could kill.

Later, going to a house to beg for alms, Kaushika stood at the door and waited; and the housewife within, busy at that moment dutifully serving her sick husband, kept him waiting a long while. And when at last she came, Kaushika rebuked her harshly for keeping a holy brāhmaṇa waiting. But the housewife only smiled and said: be not angry, O sage; I am no crane, to be killed by your violent thoughts; your rage can do no harm to a woman who is devoted to her duty.

And Kaushika was stunned, for how could she know of the crane, which no human eye had seen?

And the housewife told him: go to Mithilā, and be instructed in the secret of duty by Dharmavyādha, a butcher. And Kaushika went, astonished, and was more astonished still to find that the wise teacher he had been sent to was a common butcher, selling meat in a busy shop in the marketplace.

And this butcher taught the proud ascetic the deepest lesson: that the highest spiritual perfection is not won by outward austerity, nor by the pride of penance, nor by fleeing the world to a forest, but by the sincere, humble, ego-free performance of one's own duty in the place where one is set, whatever that place may be.

The butcher at his trade, honestly and without ego, doing the duty of his birth and serving those around him; the housewife serving her husband and her household; these had reached a holiness that the proud forest-ascetic with his death-dealing glance had not, for all his power. And Kaushika, humbled, went home to serve his own aged parents, and so turned his raw penance at last into true and living virtue.

This is one of the great teachings of the whole tradition, and the story frames it in the shloka the tradition sets beside it: that we have a right to our action but not to its fruits, that we must do our duty for its own sake without grasping at its rewards. The housewife and the butcher had learned exactly this: to do the duty before them, faithfully, without ego, without grasping, and in that faithful doing they had found a holiness that the ambitious ascetic, hungry for spiritual power and proud of what he had won, had entirely missed.

Holiness, the story tells us, is not somewhere else, in the forest or the temple or the height of penance; it is here, in the faithful doing of the ordinary duty that lies before us, done without pride and without greed for its fruits.