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STORIES · THE MAHĀBHĀRATA · Vana
Śyena-Kapotīya (Śibi)
Classical
The story comes up as Lomasa walks Yudhishthira and his brothers through the sacred places of the north. Rivers and shrines go past: the Saraswati vanishing into the earth at Vinasana, a place where the sage Vasishtha threw himself in grief into the Vipasa river and rose free of his bonds, a holy spot where Siva may appear with Uma at the end of each age. Then Lomasa reaches the place where King Usinara held a sacrifice so great that it made him greater than Indra. In the version I read the king's name is Usinara, though the epic elsewhere knows him as Sibi's father or as Sibi. Indra and Agni, curious about him, came to test him.
Indra took the form of a hawk and Agni of a pigeon. The pigeon, fleeing the hawk, dropped onto the king's thigh and begged for protection. Usinara gave it. Then the hawk arrived and made its case, and it was not a stupid one. The pigeon, it said, was its food, and by sheltering it the king was making the hawk starve and defeating his own purpose of virtue. The king answered that abandoning someone who has come for refuge is as sinful as killing a Brahmin or slaughtering a cow.
The hawk did not give way. Everything alive depends on food, he said, and without it he would die, and his wife and children with him. To protect one pigeon was to sacrifice many lives, and a virtue that conflicts with another is not true virtue. The king did what a decent person does when two good claims clash: he looked for another way. He offered other food, an ox, a boar, a deer, a buffalo, even a rich province. The hawk refused all of it, saying hawks eat pigeons by nature. The king would not give up the pigeon under any circumstances.
So the hawk named a price. If the king cut off flesh from his own body equal in weight to the pigeon, the hawk would be satisfied. The king agreed. He cut flesh from himself and set it on a scale opposite the pigeon. The pigeon was heavier. He cut more, and the pigeon was still heavier. He kept cutting and adding, until no flesh was left to cut, and at the end he climbed onto the scale himself.
The hawk then showed himself as Indra, and the pigeon as Agni. They had come to test his merit, they said. Indra gave him a boon: his glory would last as long as people spoke of him, and he would dwell in the holy regions. Indra went up to heaven and the king ascended after him in a shining form.
It is a tidy story, and its force is in the argument rather than the miracle. The hawk's case is lawful and sympathetic. The king's promise is fixed. Neither moves, and the way through is for the person with the power to pay the whole cost himself. That is a picture of what the epic expects of a ruler: not cleverness about who is right, but willingness to carry the price of his own word.
Told by Lomaśa → Pāṇḍavas
Bound to
Kapota twin
Where this comes from
- CE · Mahabharata, Critical Edition 3.130-131 3.130-131
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Vana Parva, page headed Section CXXX (Lomasa on the tirthas; Usinara's sacrifice; the dove and hawk arrive)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Vana Parva, no section number shown (the hawk's case; the scale; the revelation)