Trishanku

They walked south, and the road told its own slow story as it went. The tended fields of Ayodhyā thinned and gave way to scrubland, and the scrubland to the first real forest, where the trees closed overhead and the light came down green and broken. The boys had never been so far from home. They walked behind the sage in a kind of wonder, and to pass the miles Vishvāmitra told them stories, as travellers have always done, and his stories were not idle ones. Each carried a lesson folded inside it, the way a fruit carries its seed.

One evening, as they camped, Rāma asked about a strange thing he had seen in the southern sky: a cluster of stars that seemed to hang apart from the rest, in a quarter of the heavens where no such stars should be. Vishvāmitra smiled, though there was something rueful in the smile, and said, "That is the heaven of Trishanku. There is a story in it, and it is a story about pride, mine as much as his. Listen."

Long ago, he said, there was a king named Trishanku, and Trishanku conceived a desire that no man before him had dared to hold. He wished to ascend to heaven, the paradise of the gods, not after death as a bodiless soul, as the righteous do, but living, in his own body of flesh and bone. It was an unnatural wish, and he must have known it, but the wish had taken hold of him and would not let go.

He went first to Vasishṭha, the wise, and asked him to perform the sacrifice that would lift him bodily into the sky. Vasishṭha refused, and refused kindly, explaining what should not have needed explaining: that the body belongs to the earth and the soul to heaven, and that to carry the one into the place of the other is to tear the order of the cosmos across its grain. Some doors are shut not out of cruelty but out of wisdom, and a man who batters at them proves only that he does not understand what lies behind them.

But Trishanku would not hear it. Refused by the father, he went to the sons, Vasishṭha’s own children, and pressed his unnatural demand on them. They were angry that he had gone over their father’s judgment, and in their anger they cursed him, and it was a terrible curse: that he should lose his beauty and his kingship and fall to the condition of a low outcaste, despised by all. And so it happened. Trishanku woke the next day disfigured and reviled, driven from his own palace, a king made a beggar by the force of his own obstinacy.

Here we might pause and feel the justice and the sadness of it together. Trishanku’s fault was not that he aimed high. To aim high is no sin. His fault was that he would not accept a limit, even when the wise told him plainly that the limit was real and was for his own good. There is a kind of ambition that is really only vanity wearing ambition’s clothes, and it is known by this sign: it cannot bear to be told no.

Broken and desperate, Trishanku came at last to Vishvāmitra. "And here," the sage told the boys, "is where the story becomes mine, and I do not tell my part with pride." For Vishvāmitra, hearing the tale, did not counsel the king to accept his fate. Instead he took the whole matter as a personal challenge, a test of his own hard-won powers against the judgment of Vasishṭha and the very will of the gods. His pride answered the king’s pride and made a compact with it. "I will do what Vasishṭha would not," he declared.

"I will send you to heaven in your living body, and let the three worlds see what my penances have earned."

He raised a great sacrifice, and poured into it the whole store of merit he had gathered through a lifetime of austerity, and by the sheer force of it he lifted Trishanku off the earth. The king rose, living, into the sky, up and up toward the gates of heaven, exactly as he had dreamed.

But at the threshold stood Indra, king of the gods, and Indra would not have him. "Go back, fool," the god said, "to the earth you were born for. No curse- ridden mortal enters here in the body." And with a word he flung Trishanku back, and the king fell, tumbling head-downward out of the sky, screaming Vishvāmitra’s name as he dropped.

And now the two prides met head-on, the god’s and the sage’s, with the poor king falling between them. Vishvāmitra, enraged that his power should be so publicly defied, threw up his hand and by his ascetic force arrested Trishanku’s fall in the middle of the air, so that the king hung there, halfway between heaven and earth, belonging to neither. Then, his fury still mounting, the sage began to build.

He would make a second heaven, he declared, a whole parallel cosmos in the southern sky, with its own stars, its own constellations, its own gods if need be, and he would set Trishanku in the middle of it as its king. And he had the power to do it, and he began to do it, and heaven watched in alarm as a rival heaven took shape beneath it.

It went nearly to catastrophe. The gods, seeing that Vishvāmitra in his wrath might truly unmake and remake the order of the worlds, came to him and struck a bargain to cool his rage: Trishanku might keep his place in the sky, and the stars Vishvāmitra had made might remain, but they would hang inverted, the king dangling head-downward for all time, a permanent monument to a wish that should never have been granted.

"And there he hangs still," Vishvāmitra finished, nodding at the strange cluster in the south. "Do you see the lesson, both of you? Trishanku wanted what he should not have had, and would not be told no. That was one folly. But mine was the greater. He was only a king, blinded by a single desire. I was a sage, who should have known better, and I let my pride pick up his quarrel and carry it to the edge of ruin. Power is a dangerous thing to hold when your temper is not yet mastered.

I could bend the heavens, and could not yet bend myself, and the second is the harder conquest and the more important one."

The boys were quiet. It is a rare and valuable thing to hear a great man name his own faults plainly, without excuse, and offer them to the young as a warning rather than hiding them as a shame. Rāma would remember it. In the years to come he would hold enormous power in his own hands, power to destroy armies and shake kingdoms, and he would remember that the sage who could build a heaven had counted his own unmastered pride the most dangerous thing he ever carried.

The fire burned low. Somewhere in the dark a night-bird called. And above them, in the strange southern quarter of the sky, the inverted heaven of Trishanku hung as it had hung for ages, and would hang for ages more, holding up its small sad lesson to whoever cared to look.