In the city of Lanka, Ravana the ten-headed king walked through his garden at dawn, and a gardener bowed before him with cupped hands full of jasmine.

"Maharaja, the first flowers of the season. The temple priests asked if they might offer them at sunrise."

Ravana plucked the jasmine from the man's hands and crushed it idly between his fingers. "Offer them to whom?" he said. "There is no one up there to receive them. The world is a heap of things, gardener: no truth holds it up, no god looks down on it. It all came together by accident, like dust blown into a pile. Why pretend it means anything?"

The gardener did not know what to say.

"Listen," Ravana went on, and his ten faces all smiled at once. "If nothing is sacred, then nothing is forbidden. There is no real right and no real wrong — only what I want and what I do not want. That is the only truth I believe in: my own desire. Everything else is a story weak people tell each other."

He swept his arm across the garden. "These flowers, this city, those stars — they are mine to use however I please, because they belong to no one and mean nothing." And believing this, he saw no reason not to take whatever caught his eye, no reason to keep a promise, no reason to spare anyone. If the world was empty, then kindness was just a waste of time.

Far away, a small monkey-messenger named Hanuman would one day enter that same garden, and he would treat a single blade of grass as something worthy of care, because he believed the very opposite: that the world is full, full of meaning, watched over, woven through with truth.

"Notice," Krishna said to Arjuna, "where the selfish view begins. Not with a cruel act but with a cruel idea: that nothing matters. Once a person decides the world is empty and only wanting is real, every unkind thing becomes easy. Guard the idea, and the acts take care of themselves."