Rishyashringa's Innocence

The pilgrimage carried the Pāṇḍavas through the valleys of Anga, and there Lomasha told them the tale of the sage Rishyashringa, the story of an innocence so complete that it had never known the world at all, the same story, in another telling, that opens the tale of Rāma, and it carries here the same tender and difficult lesson.

Rishyashringa had been born and raised in absolute isolation by his father, Vibhāṇḍaka, deep in the forest, and had never in his life seen a woman, nor indeed any human being but his own father. His heart was a clean and untouched slate, wholly ignorant of the desires and the divisions of the world, pure with the purity of one who has never been tempted because he has never met temptation.

And when a terrible famine struck the kingdom of Anga, its king, Romapāda, was told that the rains would return only if the pure and innocent Rishyashringa set foot in the land. So the king sent a company of beautiful courtesans, who built a lovely floating garden upon a boat and moored it near Vibhāṇḍaka's hermitage; and in the father's absence they approached the young sage, and embraced him, and fed him sweet things, all under the guise of the hospitality of one hermitage to another.

And Rishyashringa, in his complete innocence, took these soft and lovely visitors for a new kind of hermit, wonderful shining ascetics with strange soft features, and was captivated, and eagerly boarded their floating garden to visit their hermitage; and the moment he was drawn into the kingdom of Anga, the rains came pouring down and saved the land.

And here the story draws a lesson about innocence that is worth weighing, for it is not the simple lesson we might expect. Innocence, it tells us, beautiful as it is, is not the same as virtue, and is not enough by itself; for an innocence that has never been tested, that owes its purity only to never having met temptation, is a fragile thing, easily led, as Rishyashringa was led, by the first cunning that comes to it.

True spiritual stability is not the innocence of the one who has been kept from the world, but the mature and conscious detachment of the one who has met the world, its temptations and its snares, and has learned to stand steady within it. Isolation from temptation is not mastery of temptation; and the goal is not to be kept forever in a sheltered grove, untested and therefore untried, but to develop the inner strength that can meet the world and not be swept away by it.

Rishyashringa's innocence was lovely, and it served the kingdom's need; but the story gently marks that it was innocence still untempered into virtue, and that the tempering can only come through the very friction with the world that the sheltered grove had spared him.