1East of the great river plain, where the Ganges turns toward the sea, there was a rough country called Ladha. The soil was thin and red. The villages were far apart, and each one feared the next. It was said in the cities of the plain that even the dogs of Ladha hated strangers. This was true, for they were raised to it.
2In one of those villages lived a man named Kanha, who kept the dogs. He had eleven of them, lean and yellow, and they obeyed his whistle and no one else's. When a stranger came down the path, Kanha loosed the dogs, and the stranger went away faster than he had come.
3There was a second thing that everyone knew about Kanha. When he was a boy, his elder brother had been killed in a quarrel over a strayed cow, by a man from the village across the ridge. That man had since died of a fever, in his bed, which Kanha counted a theft. But the man had left a son.
4The son was named Dhira, and he was nine years old when his father died. Kanha had sworn before the whole village that when the boy was grown enough for his death to be a man's death, he would pay his brother's blood with it. The oath sat in Kanha like a stone in a shoe, and he had walked on it so long that he no longer knew how he would walk without it.
5In the cold season of a certain year, the children came running. A stranger was on the path.
6Kanha came out and looked. The man was tall and very thin. He wore nothing at all, not a cloth, not a thread. He carried no bowl and no bag. And he carried no stick, which was the strangest thing, for every wanderer who crossed Ladha carried a long staff for the dogs. He walked slowly, with his eyes on the ground a little way ahead of his feet, as a man walks who has dropped something small and precious and is looking for it.
7"A naked beggar," said the headman. "He will bring bad luck or lice. Loose them."
8Kanha whistled, and the dogs went down the path like yellow arrows.
9Now a man set on by dogs does one of three things. He runs, and then the dogs pull him down from behind. Or he fights, and then they circle him and take him from all sides. Or he climbs something and screams. Kanha had seen all three many times. He had never seen a fourth.
10The stranger stopped. He stood with his feet together and his arms hanging straight at his sides, and he did not move. He did not lift a hand to guard his face. He did not cry out. The dogs reached him and tore at his legs, and he stood. The children shouted the word that sets dogs on, and threw clods of red earth, and one clod struck him on the mouth. He stood. Blood ran down his shin onto the path. He looked at the dogs. Kanha was near enough to see his face, and there was pain in it. But there was no anger in it anywhere, and no fear.
11And the dogs grew confused. A dog knows what to do with what runs and with what strikes. This thing did neither. One by one they stopped tearing and stood off, whining, with their tails low, and looked back at Kanha for a command.
12Kanha did not whistle. He found he could not. He was watching the man's feet.
13For the stranger had begun to walk again, slowly, bleeding. Across the path in front of him ran a line of black ants, carrying their white eggs from one hole to another. The man stopped. He looked for the narrowest place in the line. Then he stepped over it with great care, the way a mother steps over a sleeping child, and went on into the village and through it and out the other side. No one gave him food. He asked for none.
14That night Kanha did not sleep. He was a man who understood hurting and being hurt; it was the whole of his trade. He could not find where to put what he had seen. A man who would not lift his hand against eleven dogs had turned his foot aside for an ant.
15Before dawn he took his spear and his best dog and followed.
16He told himself he followed to make sure the man left the country. He followed three days. He kept to the trees and watched, and here is what he saw.
17He saw him come to a pool and wait a long time before he drank, looking into the water, until Kanha understood that he was waiting for the small swimming things to move away from the place where he would put his hands.
18He saw a cowherd leave his oxen grazing near where the man stood in thought, and come back to find them strayed. The cowherd beat the naked man across the back with a rope. The man bore it. An hour later the oxen came home by themselves, and the man was already walking on, slowly, looking at the ground before his feet.
19On the third night Kanha could bear it no longer. He came out of the trees. The man was standing under a sal tree at the edge of a field with the cold stars over him.
20"I am the one who set the dogs on you," said Kanha.
21The man looked at him. He did not speak. Kanha learned afterward that in those years he seldom did.
22"You could have brought a stick. You could have run. Why did you let them?" The man said nothing, and Kanha grew angry, which was what he always did when he did not understand. "You stepped over the ants. I saw you. What is an ant to you? What is my dog to you? What am I?"
23The man looked at him steadily. Then he looked, for one moment, at the spear in Kanha's hand, and then at the dog, which had lain down at Kanha's feet and put its chin on its paws. There was no judgment in the look. It was the way you look at a thing in order to see it. Then he turned his eyes back to the dark field, and Kanha knew that he had been answered, though he could not have said what the answer was.
24Now hear what the oath did.
25Dhira, the son of the killer, came to his fourteenth year. He was tall for it. He herded his dead father's cattle alone on the ridge, and at night he slept beside them at a small fire. The village said to Kanha: he is grown enough. Kanha's mother said it. His dead brother's widow said it, without words, each time she put food before him.
26So on a moonless night Kanha took his spear and his best dog and climbed the ridge.
27The fire had burned low. The boy lay asleep on his side with one arm over his head. Kanha stood above him. It would be one push, and it would be over, and the stone would be out of his shoe at last. He set his feet. He lifted the spear.
28The dog growled, low. The boy woke.
29He did not scream. He saw the man and the spear against the stars, and he knew at once who it was and what it was. His whole body pulled tight like a bowstring. His hand went out along the ground and closed on a stick of firewood. It was a small stick. It was no use at all against a spear. But he held it, and his eyes were wide and black, and his breath came fast.
30And Kanha, standing over him, saw the thing he had seen a hundred times in a hundred frightened faces at the edge of his village, and had never once looked at. The boy wished to live. That was all. He wished it with the whole of himself, exactly as much as Kanha wished to live, exactly as much as Kanha's brother had wished it under the other man's club. It was the same wish. There was not one kind for Kanha's people and another for the people across the ridge. He thought of the ants carrying their eggs. He thought: the naked man saw this in everything. Even in the dogs. Even in me, with the clods flying.
31And he thought a second thing, which frightened him more. He looked for his anger, the way a man feels for his knife, and he found it. But he found that he could look at it. It was not himself. It was a thing in him, old and hot, which he had fed every day for eleven years as he fed the dogs, and like the dogs it was waiting for his whistle.
32He did not whistle.
33He lowered the spear until the butt rested on the ground. "Your father killed my brother," he said.
34"I know," said the boy. His voice shook. "I have known since I was nine. I have slept with a stick in my hand every night for five years."
35Kanha had not thought of that. In all his years of carrying the oath, he had not once thought of what it was to be the one the oath was about.
36He sat down on the other side of the fire. After a while he put a branch on it. The boy did not let go of the stick, and Kanha did not ask him to. They sat until the sky turned grey, and neither spoke again, and then Kanha stood up and went down the ridge.
37The village did not forgive him quickly. He was called a coward by men who had never climbed the ridge at all. He bore it, and found that it could be borne.
38But the boy Dhira lived, and married, and had children. And the children of the two villages, who had never heard the oath sworn, began in time to use the same well.
39Many years passed. Kanha grew grey. In his fiftieth year he went west with a company of salt traders, to see the cities of the plain before he died. In the kingdom of Magadha the roads were full of talk. A teacher was staying in a grove outside the king's city. Great crowds went out to hear him: princes, potters, women as well as men. They called him the Jina, which means the Victor, and Mahavira, the Great Hero.
40"What battles did he win?" Kanha asked.
41"None," said the trader, "that anyone could see."
42Kanha went out to the grove. A great many people sat on the ground in rows. At the centre sat a man of perhaps sixty, thin, upright, wearing nothing. He was speaking in the common tongue of the fields, so that the potters could follow him as well as the princes. Kanha knew him before he was near enough to see his face. He knew him by his stillness.
43Those near Kanha told him the story. The teacher had been born Vardhamana, a chief's son, in a rich house near the city of Vaishali. At thirty he had given all of it away. For twelve years and more he had wandered and fasted and kept silence and borne whatever came. Then, on the bank of a river, under a sal tree, he had come to the end of his search. His followers say that he saw all things whole from that day.
44And what he taught, as Kanha heard it that day, was this. Every breathing thing wishes to live. None wishes to suffer. As it is with you, so it is with them, down to the smallest. Therefore harm nothing that lives, in deed or in word or in thought. And the enemy worth conquering is not across any ridge.
45One of the teacher's followers told a story which that people have told ever since. Some men who had been blind from birth were brought to an elephant. One felt the leg and said, an elephant is a pillar. One felt the ear and said, it is a fan. One felt the trunk and said, a snake. They came to blows over it. Each was right about what his hand had found. Each was wrong to say there was nothing more.
46Kanha sat in the dust at the back and wept, and was not ashamed. For he had thought, for half his life, that what happened to him on the ridge was a private weakness. He had not known it was a thing that could be taught. He had not known others had it.
47When the crowd had thinned, he went forward. He did not know the right way to greet such a man, so he said only, "I am from Ladha. I kept dogs there."
48The old teacher looked at him. It was the same look as under the sal tree thirty years before, the look that was only for seeing. A follower who sat near bent to listen, and then said to Kanha: "He says he remembers that country. He says the people there helped him, though they did not mean to. A man does not know what is in him until it has been struck."
49"Tell him," said Kanha, "that there was a boy on a ridge. Tell him the boy has grandchildren."
50It was told. The teacher bowed his head a little, as one bows to an equal. That was all. It was enough for Kanha, to the end of his days.
51He walked home by the north road. On the way he saw a thing that surprised him: other wanderers, in robes the colour of ochre, walking in a line with their bowls. The salt traders said these followed a different teacher, who had also been a chief's son and had also left a rich house, a man of the Sakya people. He taught a road between the hard way and the soft.
52"Two of them," said Kanha. "In one lifetime."
53"More than two," said the trader. "The whole plain is full of men sitting under trees and asking. It is like a fire in dry grass. No one knows who lit it."
54Kanha thought about that for many miles. He was only a keeper of dogs. But it seemed to him that no one had lit it, and that it had been lying in the grass all along.