The House of a Thousand Doors

Something had gone wrong between Vasishtha and his god.

The hymns do not say what he had done. They show only a man in trouble. He shook as he walked, like a skin bag blown about by the wind. He was thirsty although water stood all around him. And he was afraid of dying. "Not yet, King Varuna," he said. "Do not send me yet to the house of clay."

He asked himself first. "When will I be close to Varuna again? What gift of mine would he take without anger?"

Then he went to the wise men and asked them what his fault was. Each of them gave him the same answer.

"Varuna is angry with you."

So Vasishtha spoke to the god himself.

"What was it, Varuna? What was the great wrong, that you would strike down a friend who sings your praise? Tell me, and I will come to you at once and bow."

No answer is recorded. He went on, and now he was searching for the fault himself.

"It was not my own will that did it. It was wine, or anger, or the dice, or carelessness. An older man leads a younger one wrong. Even sleep does not keep us from doing harm."

Then he asked for more than he had come for.

"Free us from what our fathers did, and from what we have done ourselves. Let Vasishtha go, King, the way you would untie a calf from its rope."

Then he remembered how things had been.

There had been a day when Varuna and he went aboard a boat together and steered it out to the middle of the sea. They rode over the backs of the waves, and the boat swung under them like a swing, and they were happy.

It was Varuna who had put him in that boat. Varuna had made him a seer, and a singer, on bright days when the sky was wide and the dawns were long.

He remembered more than the boat. He had gone into Varuna's own house, the high house with a thousand doors.

"Where has that friendship gone," he asked, "when the two of us went about together and there was nothing between us?"

And then he said the boldest thing in the four hymns.

"If your friend has wronged you, Varuna, he is still the friend you loved."

He did not pretend to deserve anything. He offered to serve the god like a slave, if only he could do it free of guilt. He said that this lord gives sense to the simple, and that he shows mercy even to the one who has done wrong.

He looked at what Varuna had made. The sun had a road because Varuna cut it. The rivers ran because he sent them. The wind was his breath. His watchers moved through both worlds and looked them over. Vasishtha did not ask to hide from them. He asked to be looked at kindly.

The last of the four hymns is the shortest. It has five verses, and four of them end with the same line.

"Have mercy. Spare me, mighty lord."

The fifth verse speaks for everyone. "Whatever wrong we humans do against the gods, Varuna, whatever law of yours we break without thinking, do not punish us for it."

There the hymns stop. They do not tell us whether Vasishtha got well, or whether he ever sat in that boat again. The first three all end on the same line, a prayer that the gods will keep the singers safe.

The Atharvaveda has a hymn about the same god, and no friend speaks in it. It begins with a man who thinks nobody can see him.

He is wrong. The great ruler of these worlds sees him as if from close by. A man may stand still, or walk, or creep about in secret. He may lie down or get up. Varuna knows.

Then the hymn says the thing it is remembered for. When two people sit together and whisper, King Varuna is there as the third, and he knows what they say.

There is nowhere to go. This earth belongs to King Varuna, and so does the high sky whose ends are far apart. The two oceans are his body, and yet he is inside the smallest drop of water as well. A man might run past the edge of the sky, and Varuna would still be all around him.

His messengers come down from heaven. They have a thousand eyes, and they look over the whole earth.

Everything between heaven and earth lies open to him, and everything beyond. He has counted how many times people blink. He settles all things the way a gambler throws down his dice.

Now the singer turns to what he wants. Varuna has snares, three kinds of them, seven by seven, and they stand stretched out and waiting.

"Let them catch the man who tells a lie," the singer says, "and let the man who speaks the truth walk through unharmed."

He has a certain liar in mind. "Snare him with a hundred nooses, Varuna, watcher of men. Do not let him get away." He wishes the man a swollen, hanging belly, bound round like a barrel whose hoops have burst.

The hymn ends with the singer tying the knots himself. He names the man as the son of his father and the son of his mother, and binds him with every one of the nooses.