He Smiled Between Two Armies
On Janmashtami, the life of a man who had every reason to be bitter and never once was.
There is a song from 1988 that most people now find embarrassing.
Bobby McFerrin made it with no instruments at all, every sound on the record produced by his own throat and chest and hands, and for one summer the entire planet whistled it. Then it turned. Somewhere in the decades since, its title became the sentence you say to a person you have stopped listening to. It is what a boss says at the end of a bad quarter. It is what a relative says to a woman who has just told him something true. The words now arrive with a faint smell of denial about them, and when a friend sent me the song again last week I felt that flinch myself.
Then I put it down and I thought about a man who was born in a prison cell.
His mother was in chains when she delivered him. So was his father. This was not a metaphor about the human condition, it was an actual cell with an actual door, in Mathura, in the middle of a monsoon night, and the reason they were in it was that his mother’s brother had been told by a voice that her eighth child would kill him.
So the uncle took no chances. As each child came, he took it and killed it. He did this six times. Six infants, one after another, in front of the woman who bore them, and she stayed in that cell and bore another.
The seventh was moved in the womb to another woman in another village. The eighth was born at midnight, and the guards fell asleep, and the chains opened, and the father picked up his newborn in a basket and walked out of the prison into a river in flood.
That is the beginning. A man carrying a baby through a river that is on the rise at night, with a king behind him who wants the child dead, wading towards a village where a woman he has never met has just given birth to a daughter, so that the two infants can be swapped before dawn and the girl can be killed instead.
Hold that image, because everything I want to say to you today sits on top of it. This is the childhood that produced the most cheerful figure in the whole of our literature.
The one who was always smiling
They raised him in Gokul and then in Vrindavan, among cowherds, and I do not know of a happier stretch in any tradition anywhere.
He lovingly stole butter. The stories are absurd about how much butter he stole, and the women of the village kept coming to his foster mother to complain about it, and every one of those complaints has been sung for a thousand years by people in the northern plains of the Indian continent. There is a whole aesthetic in this country built on the theft of dairy products by a small dark boy.
His mother tied him to a grinding stone once, out of exasperation. He is worshipped under that name. Damodara, the one with a rope around his belly. There is no version of that story in which he sulks.
And the entire time, understand, they were sending assassins.
A woman with poison on her breast, sent to nurse him. A whirlwind that lifted him off the ground. A cart. A serpent in the river so venomous that the water above it was black and the birds flying over it dropped. He was a child. These arrived at intervals through his whole childhood, and the village lived with the knowledge that a king a few hours away wanted this particular boy dead and was willing to spend anything to have it done.
What the village remembers is not the fear. What the village remembers is the flute.
He played in the evenings when the cattle were coming home and the light had gone orange, and the accounts of it are frankly ridiculous, and I love them for it. Women left their cooking. Women left their houses at midnight and walked into the forest toward the sound. The cows stopped chewing with the grass still in their mouths. The river is said to have stopped moving to listen.
Nobody in those accounts ever asks him what the tune means. He never explains it. He plays it into the dark of a place where somebody is always coming to kill him, and the whole village walks out to stand in it.
He left when he was about eleven.
A chariot came from Mathura with an invitation that was really a summons, and he understood exactly what it was, and he got in.
The women ran after the chariot. They ran until they could not run, and then they stood in the road, and the accounts say they stood there long after the dust had settled, and one of them fell where she stood.
He did not come back. Not the next year and not the year after. He lived to be a hundred and twenty-five and became a king in one city and then a king in another and never once returned to the only place on earth where he had been loved for nothing.
And the flute went quiet. There is no account of him playing it again. Not in Mathura, not in the sea-city he built later, not in the war. Whatever that instrument was for, it belonged to a field full of cows and a girl he did not marry, and it ended when the chariot turned the corner.
He was eleven.
Seventeen sieges and a name meant as an insult
In Mathura he killed the uncle, which took an afternoon, and then discovered what most people discover after a victory, which is that the trouble does not end, it changes form. It changes its context.
The dead king had married the daughters of a much larger king, and that larger king now had a grievance and an army. He brought it seventeen times. Seventeen. Read that number slowly, because it is not a figure of speech, it is a siege count, and each one of those seventeen meant a city on rations and men on walls and a young man in his twenties working out how to keep several hundred thousand people alive one more season.
On the eighteenth approach, with a second army arriving from the opposite direction, he did the thing that heroes in epics are not supposed to do.
He left.
He picked up the entire population, every clan, and moved them across the country to a strip of coast in the west, and built a city standing in the sea, because a city in the sea cannot be surrounded.
And the world gave him a name for it. Ranchhod. The one who ran away from the fight.
It was an insult. It was meant as one. There is a temple in Gujarat today where that word is carved over the door and millions of people say it as a prayer, and I find that one of the most beautiful facts in Indian religion. A man walked away from a battle he could probably have won because winning it would have cost him his people, and he wore the mockery for three thousand years without ever once, in any text I have read, defending himself.
Years later, at a great sacrifice with every king in the subcontinent in the hall, he was given the seat of first honour, and a man stood up and objected.
What followed is possibly the most detailed public insult in our literature. He is a cowherd. He has no lineage. He was born in a jail. He is a thief of butter and a seducer of other men’s wives. He ran from a war and hid in the water. He is not a king, this is not his chair, and every man here should be ashamed.
Krishna had promised this man’s mother, long before, that he would forgive her son a hundred offences.
So he sat and he counted.
He let a man take him apart in front of every ruler alive, in specific detail, most of it true, and he kept the tally quietly and did not interrupt and did not lose his composure. The chakra came out on the hundred and first. Not the eightieth, when it began to sting. Not the ninety-ninth, when it would have been so easy. That is krodha held on a leash for a hundred counts, which is a harder practice than never feeling it.
And at that very sacrifice, when the great tasks were divided among the greatest men present, he had asked for the job of washing the guests’ feet and clearing away their leavings, and taken it, and done it.
There is a scene from those Dwarka years I think about more than any other. A man he had studied with as a boy, now desperately poor, walked for days to ask him for help, and could not bring himself to ask, and had a fistful of beaten rice tied in a rag that his wife had borrowed from a neighbour to send along. He was announced at the gate of a palace of gold. The king came out running, took him inside, sat him down, found the rag, and ate the rice. And asked for more.
The chariot
Then the family war came, and he was in the middle of it because both sides were his blood.
He went to the enemy court himself, as an envoy, to try to stop it. He did not go in demanding a kingdom. He went in asking for five villages. Five, for five brothers, out of an empire.
He was refused land the size of the point of a needle.
And then, having refused him, they tried to arrest him in open court.
He walked out. He told his cousins the answer was no. And when the war came he took a vow to lift no weapon, and spent eighteen days as a driver, holding the reins of another man’s chariot, and every account of that war has him in that position, at the front, unarmed, with the arrows coming.
On the first morning, before any of it began, his friend broke.
Arjuna, the greatest archer of the age, looked across at the assembled cousins and teachers and grandfathers he was about to kill, and his hands shook and his mouth went dry and his bow slipped and he sat down in the chariot and said he could not do it.
And the text records, in two words, what Krishna did before he answered.
Prahasann iva. Smiling, as it were.
He smiled. Between two armies, on the morning of the war that would end his world and kill almost everyone either of them knew, with his closest friend collapsed on the floor of the chariot, the first thing he did was smile.
A shallow reading makes that cruelty. I read it the other way. If Krishna had let his own face show what the situation deserved, if his jaw had set and his eyes had gone flat, there would have been two broken men in that chariot and nothing would have been spoken at all. One steady face was the only thing holding that morning together.
Your face, he says elsewhere, is public property. Whatever the strong man does, everyone else copies. The people who live with you read your face every morning before they are awake enough to defend themselves against it.
The curse, and the reeds
The war was won and it cost him everything.
A mother standing among the bodies of a hundred sons looked at him and cursed him. Thirty-six years, she said. Your people will die the way mine have died, killing each other, and you will die alone.
He accepted it without argument. He said he had known.
And thirty-six years later it arrived, in the most ordinary way imaginable, which is the detail that undoes me.
Some years before, a group of visiting sages had been mocked by the young men of his own clan, boys with too much money and nothing to fear, and the sages had said a thing in anger that turned out to be load-bearing. An iron club would be born, and it would destroy the race. When the club appeared, the old king had it ground into powder and thrown into the sea. The powder washed ashore and came up as coarse reed grass along the beach. One lump of iron would not grind. That was thrown in too, and a fish swallowed it, and a hunter found it in the fish, and beat it into an arrowhead, and put it away, and forgot about it.
Thirty-six years later the clan came to that beach on a pilgrimage and began to drink.
Somebody said something about the war. Old accusations came up, the way they do at family gatherings when the drinking has gone on too long, and weapons were not permitted at that place, so they tore the reeds out of the sand.
The reeds turned to iron in their hands.
By evening the entire people he had carried out of Mathura and housed in a golden city had beaten each other to death on the sand. His sons. His grandsons. His brother walked into the sea.
And a man of a hundred and twenty-five, having buried everything he had ever built, went and sat under a tree, with one foot laid across his knee and the sole turned up.
The hunter saw movement through the leaves and thought it was a deer, and reached for the one arrow he had been carrying for years without knowing why.
When he came close and saw what he had done, he fell apart.
The man he had shot did not curse him. He comforted him. He told him it was alright, that it was always going to happen this way, that he should not be afraid, and he sent the man away safely before he left his body.
He spent the last conscious minutes of a hundred and twenty-five years consoling his own killer.
Why this matters to you
We treat cheerfulness as a temperament. Some people have it and some do not. It gets filed under personality, like a preference for sweet over salt, and a man who is heavy every morning is understood to have been dealt that hand and we work around him.
Our tradition files it somewhere else completely.
When Krishna lists the austerities, the tapas, he gives three kinds. Austerity of the body, which is cleanliness and continence and not injuring. Austerity of speech, which is words that are true and kind (and, not or) and do not agitate the person hearing them. And then austerity of the mind, and the very first item on that list, ahead of silence, ahead of self-restraint, ahead of purity of nature, is manah prasada.
Serenity of mind. Cheerfulness. The clearness that water arrives at when whatever was stirred up in it has been allowed to settle. This is Sattva described as a daily obligation rather than a mood, and it is the measure the Niranjan Index reads back to a person at the end of a day.
He puts it among the austerities. Alongside fasting (Upavasa). Alongside celibacy. Alongside the disciplines that people respect precisely because they are hard and have to be done again tomorrow whether or not they worked today.
That is the claim, and I think it is the most useful thing this festival has to offer anybody. A cheerful face is not a gift of the nervous system that some people happened to receive. It is a practice. It is difficult. It is difficult in exactly the way austerity is difficult, and the man the whole country is celebrating tonight did it every single day of a life that gave him no reason to.
McFerrin opens his record by telling you he has written a small song and inviting you to learn it exactly as it stands.
Krishna wrote one too. It was not called a treatise or a discourse. It calls itself a song, which is what gita means, seven hundred verses spoken in a chariot between two armies while a million men stood waiting, and at the end of it he says that whoever learns this conversation has worshipped him.
And his song finishes on two syllables. After everything, after the whole architecture of it, the last real instruction he gives is: let go of all your supports, come to me, and
ma shucah.
Do not grieve. Do not worry.
But I do not think that is his song, and I would not have said this a month ago.
His song was the flute. A hollow reed, emptied out and then wounded with holes burned into it, because that is the only way a reed makes a sound. He played it in a field at the end of the day, in a village where somebody was always coming to kill him, and people walked out of their houses at midnight into the dark to stand in it, and he never explained it to anybody, and he put it down at eleven and never picked it up again.
Reeds run all the way through this life. A reed made the music of his childhood. Reeds killed his clan on a beach. A reed shaft carried the arrow that found his foot.
So here is his song, as far as I can hear it.
A man can be born in a cell, hunted from the day he arrives, torn out of the one place he was happy before his voice broke, besieged seventeen times, forced to abandon a city, called a coward for the rest of history, insulted in open court by a man he had promised not to kill, refused five villages, cursed by a grieving mother, and made to watch his own children kill each other on a beach.
And he can still be the one whose face everybody else looks at to find out whether things are going to be alright.
That is the tune. He put it in a reed, and then in a chariot, and finally in the way he spoke to a frightened hunter under a tree at the end.
We are still being asked to learn it. Note for note.
Happy Janmashtami.
The only miracle in the world is you standing on your own two feet.
Hari Om Tat Sat.
Arjun is a 30-year practitioner in the Bihar School of Yoga tradition. He founded OMJOOMSUH in 2022 as a for-profit wellness platform rooted in the Vedic sciences.
Related
Manah Prasad · Sattva · Upavasa · Shadripus · Krodha · Sadhana · Four Dharmas · Sanatan Dharma · The Chakyar Could Insult the King · Of All The Things, He Chose That One · The Self that Must Win
Sources
- Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2 (prahasann iva), chapter 17 (the threefold tapas, and manah prasada as the first austerity of the mind), chapter 18 (ma shucah).
- Srimad Bhagavatam, books 10 and 11, for the Vrindavan years, the move to Dwarka, the Yadava destruction and the hunter.
- Mahabharata, Sabha Parva (the Rajasuya and the hundred offences), Udyoga Parva (the embassy and the five villages), Bhishma Parva (the chariot).