The boy was ten years old, and he was standing at the door of Death.

His name was Nachiketa. His father, Vajashravasa, had performed a great sacrifice — giving away all his possessions to the priests, as the scriptures required. But Nachiketa had watched the gifts leave the house and noticed something. The cows his father gave were old, dry, half-blind — creatures who had already given all their milk and eaten their last green grass. His father was giving away what he no longer wanted and calling it generosity.

"Father," Nachiketa asked, with the terrible honesty that only children possess, "to whom will you give me?"

He asked three times. The third time, his father snapped: "I give you to Death."

Perhaps he did not mean it. Perhaps he meant it for one red second and regretted it the next. But words spoken in a sacrifice have weight, and this one carried Nachiketa straight to the house of Yama, the lord of death.

Yama was not home. Nachiketa waited at his door for three days and three nights, without food, without water, without shelter. When Yama returned, he was horrified — a child, a Brahmin's son, had been kept waiting as a guest — and offered Nachiketa three boons to make amends.

The first boon: "Let my father's anger cool. Let him welcome me back without grief." Yama granted it.

The second boon: "Teach me the fire-ritual that leads to heaven." Yama taught him, and was so pleased with the boy's sharp mind that he named the ritual after him.

Then the third boon. And here Nachiketa asked the question that shook the three worlds:

"When a person dies, some say they still exist. Others say they do not. Teach me the truth."

Yama froze. He offered the boy kingdoms, gold, immortal maidens, a hundred years of music. "Ask anything else," he begged.

"You can keep all of it," Nachiketa said. "These things end. Even a hundred years end. Pleasures wear out the senses the way fire wears out fuel. I came to the door of Death, and I want Death's own answer: what happens to the Self when the body falls?"

Yama looked at the boy for a long time. Then he smiled — the slow, grave smile of someone who has been waiting an eternity for this question.

"The Self is never born and never dies," Yama said. "It does not come from anywhere and it does not become anything. It is unborn, eternal, ever-present, primeval. When the body is slain, the Self is not slain."

Birth is certain for the born; death is certain for the living. They are two doors in the same wall, and the Self walks through both without being touched by either. Nachiketa understood. He had walked to the house of Death and found, inside it, the one thing that Death could not claim.