The Judge Who Was Saraswati

The young sannyasin walked into the house of Mandana Mishra in the middle of a rite.

Mandana was in his courtyard at Mahishmati with a water pot in his hands, washing the feet of two guests whom his penance had brought from very far away: Vyasa, who arranged the Vedas, and Jaimini, who wrote the rules of the rites. He looked up and saw a shaven head and an ochre robe in his doorway. Mandana had no patience with renunciates.

"Who let a sannyasin into a house of sacrifice?" he said.

What followed, the text says, was a violent duel of words, and it was the two sages who ended it. A challenge had been given, they told the householder, and a scholar does not answer a challenge with his temper. Mandana took a breath.

"Tomorrow, then," he said. "On one condition. Whoever loses becomes the other's disciple. If I lose, I take up your bowl. If you lose, you put yours down." He turned to his guests. "And the two of you will judge."

The sages looked at each other and declined. "There is someone in this house who can judge better than we can," said one. "Your wife."

Her name was Ubhaya Bharati, and the people of that house already said quietly that she was Saraswati, come down in a human birth. The next morning she came into the hall with two garlands of fresh flowers and put one round each man's neck.

"I will not count your arguments," she said. "The flowers will. Debate as long as you please. The man whose garland withers has lost." Then she sat down and said nothing more.

Shankara opened. "There is one truth, and it is Brahman. The world is what ignorance makes of it, the way a shell on the sand is taken for silver until it is picked up."

Mandana answered. "The Veda gives rites, and the rites are the authority. A man is freed by what he does, not by what he thinks he has seen through."

So it went, day after day. One account counts seventeen. She came each morning and listened, served both men their meals, and never once said who was ahead. Then one morning Mandana's garland hung brown and dry against his chest, and the sannyasin's was as fresh as when she had tied it. She said only what the flowers had said: the visitor's arguments had overcome her husband's.

Mandana kept his word and took the robe. And it was she who sealed it: she came out with alms and put food into two bowls, the stranger's and her husband's, so that the whole household saw that its master was now a man who begged.

Then she turned to the winner.

"You have beaten half of him," she said. "A wife is the other half of a man. Until I am defeated, you cannot say that Mandana Mishra is."

She debated him herself. In the Vedas he could not be moved, and in the shastras he could not be moved, so she went to the one place she knew he had never been. He had been celibate since boyhood. She asked him about the life of householders.

"Give me a month," said Shankara.

She gave it. He went away and learned what he had to learn, and when the month was over he came back, and she and Mandana received him with joy and gave him the seat of honour.

"Defeat before you is no disgrace," she said. "When the sun rises the moon and the stars lose their light, and nobody blames them. I know what you are. You are Sadashiva, with a man's body on, and all knowledge is yours. I have done what I came to do. Permit me to go home."

He knew her then.

"You are Saraswati," he said. "Brahma's consort. Shiva's sister. Stay in the world a little longer. I will build you temples, at Rishyasringagiri before any other place, and live in them, so that people can come to you."

She agreed, and she was gone. Mandana followed Shankara under a new name, Sureshvara, and the hill of Rishyasringa became Sringeri, where she lives.

Far to the north, in the valley of Kashmir, stood the temple of Sharada, and in it a throne that was a test. Four doors led to it, one facing each quarter of the land, and a door could be opened only by a scholar from the quarter it faced. The east had opened its door, and the west, and the north. The south had not. Nobody from the south had ever come and won.

Then a southerner came, a sannyasin with a shaven head. The common people of the valley welcomed him. The scholars did not. They stood in his way at the southern door, school after school: the logicians of Nyaya, the Buddhists, the white-clad Jains, and the followers of Jaimini, whose rites he had argued over once before in a householder's courtyard. He took them one by one. Each put its questions, each heard his answers, and each stepped aside.

He set his foot on the step of the throne. Then a voice spoke, and it was not a scholar's. It was the goddess's own.

"Knowing everything is not enough," said Sharada. "The one who sits here must be pure as well as learned. You have lived in a king's palace, in the palace of Amaruka. Can a man who lived there call himself pure?"

The hall was silent. Shankara did not look away.

"This body has done no wrong," he said. "What was done in another man's body is his. Another's sins cannot stain me."

She considered it, the way a judge does. Then she accepted it, and he went up and sat on the throne of omniscience, and the southern door of Sharada's temple stood open at last.

The Pandits of Kashmir say the goddess of that temple is three in one: Sharada, who is learning; Saraswati, who is knowledge; and Vagdevi, who is speech, the power that puts knowledge into words. The script of the valley was named for her, and the valley itself was once called Sharada's country.