The Freedom of a King

What mark of freedom, Sulabhā went on, is there in one who still deals in enemies and friends and neutrals, in victory and treaties and war? In one who does not see things evenly, the dear and the hateful, the weak and the strong, what mark of freedom is there? If you think yourself free when you are not, your friends should cure you of it, as a madman is cured with medicines.

Hear the subtle places where attachment hides. A king who rules the whole earth under one parasol lives in one city, in one house, sleeps in one bed, and half of that bed belongs to his queen. So it is with his food and clothes and all his pleasures. A king is never his own master. In peace and war, in his pleasures, in council with his ministers, where is his freedom? When he wants to sleep, men with business keep him awake; when he has gone to bed, they wake him. Bathe, eat, drink, make the offering, sacrifice, speak, listen: others make him do it all. People come to him begging all day long, and he cannot give, for he must guard his treasury; if he gives, the treasury empties, and if he does not, he makes enemies. He fears even those who serve him. His kingdom has many enemies, and he counts the nights.

Every man is a king in his own house, every householder rules and pardons like a king. Sons, wives, self, treasury, friends: all these are shared with others. A country is ruined, a city burned, the chief elephant dead, and the king grieves as if they were his own, through false knowledge. Who would take up a kingdom, so little joy and so much sorrow, and still find peace?

You call this city and this kingdom yours. A kingdom has seven limbs, the king and his ministers, the city, the realm, the army, the treasury and the allies, standing together like the three staves of a triple staff, and none is greater than another. I could speak of the sorrows of kingship by the hundred and the thousand.

I have no attachment even to my own body; how could I to another's? You have no right to speak so to one who is free like me. Surely you heard the whole of freedom from Pañcaśikha, with its means and its secret teachings. Then how, if you stand free of every bond, are you attached again to the parasol and the rest? I think you heard it and did not hear it, or heard something that only sounded like it. Or else you still hold to the names and labels of the world, and you are bound, like any common man, by attachment and by restraint.