The Unanswerable Riddle, and the Silence That Wins

A father and son wed a mother and daughter, and the kinship of their children has no answer at all. For the first time the king cannot speak, and his silence is the very thing that wins the game, and his life.

The Betaal's last riddle has no answer: a father marries a daughter and a son marries a mother, and the kinship of their children cannot be untangled. The king, unable to solve it, walks on in silence, and that silence finally wins the long game. The Betaal then reveals the treachery of the mendicant who sent him, the king turns the trap on its author, and the whole night's wisdom is gathered at last. You judge first, then the king does, one final time.

The Burning Ground

Twenty-four times the corpse had hung in the tree, and twenty-four times the king had climbed for it, carried it, answered its riddle, and lost it again to the branch. And still Vikramaditya had not given up. In the last dark before dawn he climbed once more, cut the corpse down, bound it, shouldered it, and walked. The Vetala settled behind his ear and said: you are the most patient of all men, king. Let me tell you one last tale.

The Last Tale

There was a king named Dharma, and when he died, his queen Candravati and their daughter Lavanyavati fled into the forest to escape their enemies. Deep in the trees, a hunter named Chandasimha and his son Simhaparakrama came upon their footprints in the earth, and followed them, and found the two women. The men resolved to take them as wives, and they chose by the footprints they had followed, thinking the smaller feet must belong to the younger woman. But they judged wrongly, and chose the wrong way about. The son, Simhaparakrama, married the mother, Candravati. And the father, Chandasimha, married the daughter, Lavanyavati. And in time each of the two couples had children of their own.

The Betaal's Riddle

"So, king," said the Vetala. "The father married the daughter; the son married the mother. Each pair has had children. Now tell me this: what relation do the children of the father and the daughter bear to the children of the son and the mother? Untangle their kinship, if you can.

Answer, if you know. You know the rules."

You Be the Judge

Stop here, and try it, exactly as the king did. Follow the threads. The son's wife is the mother of the father's wife; so the son is, in a way, grandfather to his own father's children, and the father is son-in-law to his own son. Follow it further and the lines cross, and double back, and knot into one another until there is no single name left for what any of these children are to any other. This is not a riddle with a hidden answer you have failed to see. It is a riddle with no answer at all.

The Silence That Wins

Vikramaditya turned it over in his mind, and over again, chasing every thread to the place where it tangled. And at last he understood something that no answer could ever have taught him: that this question had none. The kinship folded back on itself past all untangling; no single relation could be named, because the children were, impossibly, many things to one another at once.

And so, for the first time in the whole long night, the king said nothing. He walked on in silence.

Remember now the rules that had bound him all night. If he answered a riddle, the corpse flew back to its tree, and all his labour was undone. But if he knew the answer and hid it, keeping a truth locked behind his lips, his head would burst into a hundred pieces. All night he had been caught between the two: forced to answer in order to live, and losing the corpse every time he did. He could never win, because he always knew.

The last riddle broke the trap, precisely because he did not know. There was no answer to hide, so his silence concealed nothing, and his head was safe. And because he offered no answer, the corpse stayed on his shoulder at last. His silence was the one move in the entire game that kept both his life and his burden. And the Vetala, far from angry, was delighted. The king does not know how to answer this, it said, and so, for once, he has not answered, and I am well pleased.

The wisdom that had solved twenty-four riddles met, at the summit, the one thing greater than a good answer: the knowledge of when there is none, and the courage to hold silence before it.

The Mendicant's Trap

Then the Vetala, pleased with the king's endurance and his honesty, told him the truth it had been guarding all along.

"King, the mendicant Kshantishila, who sent you to fetch me, means to kill you. Each day he flattered you and gave you a fruit, and in every fruit, had you split it open, was a hidden jewel; that was the bait. He wants you to carry me to him so that he may offer you up as a sacrifice over this corpse, and by your death seize for himself the sovereignty of the Vidyadharas, the sky-faring race. All night I have been throwing you back to the tree, making you climb and carry and climb again, not to torment you, but to delay you, and to see whether you were worthy to be saved. You are.

"So hear me. When you bring me to him, he will ask you to bow down before the deity in the full prostration, laying your whole body flat upon the ground. That bow is to be the moment of your death. Do not make it. Say to him instead: I am a king, and I have never learned to make so humble a bow; show me first, and I will do exactly as you do. And when he throws himself down to show you, in that very instant, strike off his head."

And it happened just so. The king carried the corpse to Kshantishila, who received him with false delight and led him to the shrine and bade him make the great prostration. I do not know how, said the king; show me. And the moment the mendicant flung himself face down upon the earth to demonstrate, Vikramaditya drew his sword and struck, and the treachery was ended. The gods honoured the king who had earned it honestly, and the sovereignty of the sky-faring Vidyadharas, which Kshantishila had been willing to murder for, passed instead to Vikramaditya, who had refused to be murdered for it. And the twenty-five tales of the Vetala, the four and twenty riddles and the silence that ended them, passed into legend, and are told to this day.

The Dharma

Look back now over the whole long night, for the last tale casts its light backward across all the others. In every tale before this one, the king's wisdom was to answer: to look past the tangled surface of a case and find the one true principle beneath it. Whose wife, whose fault, whose sacrifice, whose son, again and again he refused the easy or the obvious reading and reasoned his way down to the essence. That is nyaya, the discipline of just reasoning, and it is the spine of the whole cycle. Do not judge by appearances; find the principle; name the truth.

And then, at the very end, the cycle turns and teaches the thing that completes all reasoning: that the wise also know the limits of their reasoning. The greatest mind is not the one that has an answer for everything. It is the one that can tell a hard question from an impossible one, and, before the truly unanswerable, has the humility and the courage to fall silent rather than force a false answer. The Upanishad says that the deepest truth is unknown to those who think they know it, and known to those humble enough to admit that they do not. The king who had answered everything won, in the end, by not answering.

Two more things the night leaves in your hands. The first is the plain power of steadfastness. The king won nothing by cleverness alone; he won because he climbed that tree four and twenty times and would not give up, carrying the same burden back up the same hill again and again. Almost everything worth having is won that way, by the refusal to stop. And the second is discernment about those who flatter you. Kshantishila's daily gift, with its hidden jewel, looked like generosity and was a hook; his humble little ritual was to be a killing. When someone who has been strangely generous to you asks you, at last, to lower your guard, to bow, to sign, to close your eyes, remember the king's answer: you first, show me. The one who means you harm rarely survives being asked to go first.

In Your World

You will spend most of your life, and rightly, trying to find answers; the king spent his whole night at it. But keep a place in your wisdom for the harder thing this last tale guards. Learn to tell the questions that have answers from the ones that do not. Some knots are meant to be untied, and you should labour at them with everything you have. And some are not, and the labour of forcing them only draws them tighter, and splits your own head in the trying. Before the genuinely unanswerable, the loss that has no why, the paradox with no resolution, the choice where every road costs something you can never get back, the wise response is not a forced and false answer. It is an honest silence, and the steadiness to walk on carrying the question unanswered.

And carry the whole night with you, not only its end. Tale after tale, it taught you to look past the surface of a thing to the principle beneath; and at the last, it taught you the rarer wisdom that knows when there is no principle to find, and meets that emptiness, as the king finally did, in silence.