Wenceslas: the true story
A seasonal tale
Dear Readers,
Last year, I shared a Christmas-week short story that many of you loved. This year, I’ve written another, just for you! At around 5,000 words, it’s perfect for a cozy moment—snuggled up with your fur babies and a warm drink. Let it transport you from the festive frenzy to a very different time and place: Bohemia, 900 BCE.
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If my articles and stories have brought you insight, encouragement, or wisdom throughout the year—if you’ve felt inspired by the teachings I pass on from my lamas—and if you are currently a free subscriber, please consider upgrading to paid, even if for only a month, to read Wenceslas. A single $7 subscription can help bring hope to those in need.
Writing this newsletter is a labour of love. It takes countless hours of thinking, researching, and crafting content—most of which I share freely. Offering the Dharma is one of my goals. Practicing compassion authentically and impactfully is just as vital. Together, we can do both.
Next week, I’ll share an update on what our virtual community has achieved this year. I can’t wait to celebrate the impact we’ve made—together.
My heartfelt thanks for being part of our journey.
Warmest wishes for the festive season,
David
Wenceslas: the true story
Bored King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of …. which feast was it, exactly? There were so many at this time of the year. Gazing from the castle window, he thought how the dark winter months felt like an interminable season of banquets. Week after week, sitting at a different dining table, he’d take in the same flushed, gorging faces of Bohemian nobility. The fortress may be different but he’d have to listen to the same tiresome grievances, tedious anecdotes and unfunny jokes. Tales he’d heard a hundred times before. And no doubt would have to endure all over again at luncheon today.
Mid-fifties, stocky and bearded, Wenceslas had the reputation of being a solid monarch. Reliable. Stalwart. A good man in a crisis. He was also known for a curious quirk. A streak of unconventionality that his fellow nobles, when emboldened by drink, would tease him about: Wenceslas was known to help out commoners. Truly, it was most extraordinary thing!
Once, on his way to a jousting tournament in a neighbouring dutchy, his coach was rolling past a heavily pregnant woman lying at the side of the road apparently in the first pangs of labour. Wenceslas had the coach stop, climbed out, and insisted his staff take the woman to a midwife in the next town, even though it meant missing half a day of the tournament.
There were feasts, ceremonies and grand occasions when King Wenceslas’s delay and sometimes complete absence was acknowledged with raised eyebrows and sardonic grins. Sure enough, in the hours that followed, a royal messenger would arrive with apologies that some community crisis had unavoidably detained His Majesty.
Gazing into the winter landscape today, Wenceslas noted how the snow lay deep and crisp and even. It didn’t look, he thought unhappily, like there was going to be any such reprieve today.
He sometimes asked himself why he couldn’t take the same pleasure in feasting and gossiping as his fellow nobles. He enjoyed earthly indulgences as much as anyone. And there were moments, every few weeks, during meetings on political strategy or military machinations when he’d briefly feel a sense of purpose.
But for the rest, his whole existence felt tedious and repetitive - the playing out of endless variations on the same well-worn themes. Having spent the first half of adulthood waiting for something to happen, a signal that life - at last! - was about to begin, he had spent his later years reconciling himself to the fact that it was never going to.
“Over there, sir!” his Chamberlain, Patrik, cried gleefully from the other side of the chamber.
“What?” Responding to the urgent tone, Wenceslas stepped closer to the window.
“A poor man, sir,” the Chamberlain pointed. “Gathering winter fuel.”
“Good God, so it is!” his face lit up.
Patrik was among the small coterie who knew the king’s true feelings about feasting with nobles. And, more to the point, what His Majesty would much rather be doing.
“Shall I summon a page?”
“A page?” the king looked confused.
“To bring flesh and wine and pine logs, sir? So you can take them thither?”
“What the devil are you talking about, man?” demanded Wenceslas. “Send someone to invite the fellow in. Usual set up.”
“Very good sir,” replied Patrik, chastened.
A short while later, Wenceslas made his way down a circular staircase to the castle kitchen, which was a cavernous stone chamber dominated by a massive hearth in which a large fire was blazing. On benches and tables ranged about the room, the Head Cook was supervising the activities of a dozen spit turners, bakers, scullions and pantry keepers. All of them were familiar with ‘the usual set up’ as Wenceslas put it – just as they were sworn to secrecy.
For King Wenceslas’s guilty pleasure, one which must not emerge even into the weak and watery winter light of day, was that he preferred the company of commoners to his fellow nobles. Not all commoners, of course. Nor the same commoner, necessarily, meal after meal. But among the variety of those who found themselves ushered to the servants’ table in the castle kitchen, to share a meal with a man introduced to them as an unknown but benevolent member of the royal household, Wenceslas had enjoyed some of the most stimulating exchanges of his life.
Once, he had been told secrets about his forebears from a monk chronicler - the kind of secrets the chronicler would never have admitted to him, had he known his true identity. On a different occasion, a geomancer had described the mystical energies in the landscapes of his kingdom – energies to which the monarch himself was subject, the geomancer had claimed, even though he was quite unaware of their existence!
One old crone, an astrologer, had made the quite unbelievable prediction that Wenceslas would become the most famous of all Bohemian kings, whose praises would be sung annually around the world for the rest of time. He had been about to unmask himself to tell the woman how preposterous she was being – but the ubiquitous Patrik, seeing the look come over his master’s face, intervened at the critical moment.
During the course of such encounters, Wenceslas caught glimpses that there was more to life than the tedium with which he was all too familiar. Signals, inklings about a dimension beyond the one of which he was customarily aware. None of his fellow nobles seemed to have any such discernment - or, for that matter, interest. But what such a dimension might be and how he might gain access it were as veiled to him as the sky during a mid-winter snowstorm.
Reaching the bottom of the staircase, Wenceslas found his Chamberlain waiting.
“Well?” he asked.
“Unusual fellow,” he reported. “Foreign.”
Wenceslas felt a surge of intrigue - a little exoticism was often a good thing.
“Quiet.”
“But he speaks the language?”
“Fluently – from the little that he said.”
“Well, then,” the king nodded. “Let’s see. Tell Queen Milada-”
“-there will be a delay,” they chorused the oft-used line together.
Wenceslas found the man at the servant’s table - a lengthy stretch of polished wood in a snug corner of the kitchen. Medium in build and wiry, the visitor’s lustrous, white mane contrasted against the gold of his Mediterranean skin. Wenceslas noticed that his coat, charcoal in colour, was unusually woven about the collar with flecks of turquoise and crimson. Seated with a bowl of stew before him and head bowed, his hands were not the rough, calloused hands of a labourer, but silky smooth, and his nails perfectly manicured.
There had been times in the past that, by the time Wenceslas arrived, his visitor had already devoured a first plate of food and was noisily working his way through a second. Today, the king had the strangest of feelings as if the visitor, poised and still, was actually waiting for him.
He rose from the table as Wenceslas approached, face still downturned.
“Don’t stand on my account,” said the king. About to repeat his usual quip about just being an important nobody in the household, something made him hold back. The visitor settled on his bench seat as Wenceslas took his place opposite.
Self-contained and yet possessed of a strange lightness, the man still hadn’t met his eyes. Which made the king feel somewhat self-conscious. Glancing to where Patrik was watching his every move, he nodded towards the stovetop, signalling that a plate of food be brought to him.
“Were you looking for wood?” he asked the man, conversationally.
“Winter heath,” replied the other.
It wasn’t a response Wenceslas had heard before.
“And ivy.”
“You’re a herbalist?”
“Physician.”
Wenceslas’s eyes lit up in the same way that a fisherman’s might, on discovering that he’d just hooked an especially large and lustrous specimen. For a day that had begun so drearily, things had taken a most promising turn.
“Have you ever heard about the elixir vitae?” he asked, keeping his tone as light as possible.
The idea of a secret potion that could raise men from the dead and confer eternal life had intrigued him from the very first time he’d heard of it.
“Elixir vitae,” his visitor said now, “is the subject I have studied for most of my life.”
“Good heaven!” Wenceslas couldn’t restrain himself.
“There you go, Miroslav,” his Chamberlain plonked a bowl of stew in front of him so casually that it slopped onto the table. ‘Miroslav’ was the persona he adopted on such occasions, to throw any visitors off the scent. Wenceslas had, himself, been the one to suggest the idea – only to be irked by the way his Chamberlain embraced it with such gusto. But today, so struck was he by the revelation he’d just heard, that he barely noticed his Chamberlain’s effrontery as he waved him away so that he might listen to his visitor in peace.
The Chamberlain turned, back toward them, observing the bustle of the kitchen.
The physician still wasn’t looking up. And he had yet to eat so much as a morsel of the food set before him.
For Wenceslas, the glow his visitor radiated so effortlessly was all the more enthralling given what he’d just said. “Does the elixir actually exist?” he wanted to know. “Is there some recipe, some formula that can bring a person back from the dead?”
“Not only back from the dead,” his visitor responded, surprisingly forthright. “It also confers the power of a king!”
As he said the word ‘king’, the physician looked up for the first time – and Wenceslas found himself staring into a hazel green gaze of remarkable vitality. Potent, mesmerising, a focus that conveyed powerful insight, the king had no doubt that he was in the presence of a most extraordinary being.
He also sensed that it wasn’t by chance that the two of them were sitting at the table, here and now. He may have thought that it was he who had initiated the meeting. Or, to be precise, his Chamberlain. But intuition was telling him that another, quite different dynamic was at play.
“If the elixir is real,” Wenceslas wanted to know, “if it confers eternal life and bestows the power of a king, why isn’t the world filled with such kings and queens?”
“There may be more of those than we know,” the physician held the king’s unwavering attention. “As I have come to discover.”
“Tell me about it!’ demanded Wenceslas, forgetting himself for a moment. “I want to know it everything!”
“Are you completely sure?” the other asked, pausing. “Because you see, while the elixir is real, it exists in a different way from what we imagine.”
“I am quite sure!”
“Sometimes knowledge can be a burden. What I tell you may make you have a feeling of obligation.”
As king, Wenceslas knew such burdens all too well! But he was resolute. “Tell me,” he asked the man beseechingly. Before using a word that didn’t often pass his lips. “Please.”
“Very well,” a hint of humour played about the face of his visitor as he nodded towards the food set before the king, in the same way that Wenceslas himself used to indicate that those gathered about his own table may begin eating. “It so happened that a rare and precious text came into the hands of my former employer.”
“Who was?” the king was curious.
“The Byzantine Emperor. Leo the VI.”
If such a thing were possible, this name's mention made Wenceslas even more captive to his visitor. The reputation of Leo the Wise was known throughout Francia (Europe), Asia and Bharat (India). The idea that his visitor had been in the household of such a fabled leader was scarcely imaginable!
The physician described how he had been summoned by the Emperor. On the desk before the grand, immaculately attired leader was a manuscript of great antiquity, with sturdy metal clasps, it’s cover studded with precious jewels and adorned with elaborate gold filigree. The Emperor told him that the manuscript had come into his possession quite by chance – and that within its illuminated pages was the recipe for an elixir that could raise the dead and grant them eternal life. Rare and sacred herbs must be gathered from the foothills of the Himalaya mountains to prepare this most prized of all potions. The physician was to travel there forthwith.
Which was how the physician, protected by a group of the Byzantine Empire’s most fearsome warriors, and leading a retinue bearing gifts of gold and precious jewels, made the arduous journey. It took eighteen months to travel through Anatolia and Bagdhad, across forbidding deserts and over raging rivers, following the Silk Road through harsh mountain passes before eventually arriving in the Himalayan kingdom.
Once in the soaring mountains, they paid obeisance to the local king, made their offerings, and told him of their purpose. The king willingly offered the support of his own medicine men and herbalists: if the fabled elixir could be created, its secret formula was to be shared between them.
With high hopes and great vigour, sacred herbs were collected. Once combined, there was a sense of monumental anticipation when the moment came for the physician to apply drops of the rare potion into the mouth of a recently deceased woman, as well as under her eyelids and into her ears.
None of it to any avail.
Conferring with local herbalists, a revised version of the formula was attempted. The directions in the manuscript turned out to be maddeningly imprecise. Were leaves of plants to be used, or their roots or flowers? Were they to be ground to paste, or dried or distilled? Even the names of botanicals could be interpreted in different ways.
And so began a period of trial and error. Time and again, over a period that stretched from one year to two, the physician and his team worked earnestly towards a fresh moment of truth, sprinkling, then dousing the recently-dead with successive versions of elixir vitae. Each time hoping that this was the one! The fabled version. But the outcome remained the same.
The physician wished to avoid disappointing his Emperor with all his heart. The elixir had become his single preoccupation for more years than any other quest in his life. But it seemed he would have no other option than to return home, thwarted. Members of the Byzantine retinue were, by this time, heartily fed up with life in the freezing mountains. Even the local herbalists who initially had been so enthused had, one by one, had given up, disillusioned by the quixotic endeavour.
The physician himself was about to concede defeat when he was told of a Mahasiddha, a holy man, who had once pursued elixir vitae with similar vigour. The sage had travelled even as far as Cathay (China) in search of the elusive essence. As it happened, this same man had recently emerged from a 12-year solitary meditation retreat and was to be found only one valley hence.
The physician went to visit him the great sage. Despite his skeletal appearance and hair growing to his waist, the Mahasiddha had a rare quality of luminosity about him. His whole being seemed to glow. As the physician told him about his years of tireless endeavour trying to create the much-fabled elixir, the radiance he felt emanating from the yogi seemed to burn only the brighter.
“We are on the same mission!” proclaimed the holy man. “Avoiding death and living with complete sovereignty. Isn’t that the shared wish of you and I and your Emperor?”
Taking in the Mahasiddha’s emaciated, tattered figure, and the bare austerity of his cave, it struck the physician that, in appearances at least, the man before him could hardly be less like his resplendent patron. But the truth of what he said was undeniable.
“The great masters of the past knew that their books would fall into the hands of the uninitiated,” the sage told him. “So, they used cipher so that only those with sufficient virtue can understand.”
“Do you think that I have sufficient virtue?” asked the physician.
“You have sacrificed much in the service of others, have you not?” said the great yogi. “You have saved lives. If you lacked virtue, you would never have heard of me.”
The physician was studying him closely when the Mahasiddha leaned forward and told him in a voice so soft that it was almost a whisper, “Like you, I spent years studying literally what was intended figuratively.”
The physician took a while to process this. “Figuratively raising people from the dead?” he mused after a while. “Figuratively bestowing on them the power of kings?”
“Quite so,” confirmed the Mahasiddha, allowing time for the revelation to sink in.
“For many people,” he continued after a pause, “life feels like an endless round of duties. Chores to be performed. Things to be done, foisted upon them, that seem to dominate their waking hours. Figuratively, such people are so very far from being vitally alive, from inhabiting each moment with gratitude that they might just as well be dead.”
As the physician repeated the Mahasiddha’s words, Wenceslas shifted on his seat.
“When our lives consist only of doing what we believe others expect of us. When we are caught up in negative mental habits, self-fulfilling prophecies and unhappy convictions that grind deeper and deeper with each passing year. When we are not truly living but merely enduring—why seek eternal life? Why crave more of something that brings so little fulfillment?”
“These ideas,” the physician responded after some time, “these ideals of uncommon attainment. They are all very well for a holy man like yourself to ponder. But what of ordinary men and women who must work their whole lives to provide for their families? Who must labour in harsh conditions merely to survive?”
“They,” the Mahasiddha fixed him with sparkling eyes, “are the exactly the ones who benefit most when they discover that they possess the power of kings.”
“They do?”
“When they come to understand the simple secret that how we experience reality is a choice. Reality is the creation of our own minds, a creation over which we, and we alone, have power. Each one of us truly is the sovereign of our own mind, our reality. But we must recognise this, understand it and seize it by the reigns if we are to direct it.”
Moment by moment, the physician’s understanding was deepening. Even so, he needed the yogi’s help understanding the recipe that was now so familiar. “The soaring Himalaya mountains described in the book?” he asked. “And the sacred plants growing on them. Are we to take such things literally or are they figurative too?”
“They, too, are a precious metaphor,” replied the holy man. “An analogy. The Himalaya mountains are symbols for those people who have high realisations, great wisdom. The sages, yogis and Mahasiddhas of our time. The medicinal plants are their teachings. And just as a physical elixir must be consumed and become part of us if it is to have any effect, so too we must embody the insights of our teachers to awaken from death-like sleep. Medicine cannot help if you only study the ingredients and dosage instructions. It must be absorbed to heal.”
“And we absorb these teachings, how?” prompted the physician.
“By listening, thinking and meditating,” replied the Mahasiddha.
“Just to be completely clear,” the physician was working out how he was going to break this news to the Emperor. “The elixir formula cannot raise someone from physical death or confer eternal life for this body?”
“Because its gift is so much greater,” replied the holy man. “We waken up from believing that this physical body, this particular life, is who we are. We are liberated from such a pitifully narrow, limited, short-sighted view of ourselves. When we do that, we live as different beings. Kings and Queens of our broader, more magnificent reality!”
After his first meeting with the Mahasiddha, the physician wrote a full report, that was carried home by several of the Byzantine retinue. While awaiting a reply from the Emperor, he became a disciple of the yogi’s, following his instructions fully and without reserve.
After many months, he received word from the Emperor to continue his practices until he mastered them, a process that took him the better part of seven years. Each season he would write another dispatch, detailing the lessons he had received, and the meditations he had practiced, so that the Emperor could follow them too.
The day came when the Rishi said his lessons were over. The physician had all he needed to sustain his own practice – and to teach others. After an emotional farewell, the physician made the journey back to the capital of the Byzantine Empire, one all the more arduous given that so much time had passed since his outbound journey.
By the time he arrived home, the Emperor was on his deathbed.
“No elixir vitae” the great man observed wryly, his familiar features, now shrunken and pallid against his pillow. “But something better. Thanks to the Mahasiddha,” he took this physician’s hand for a moment, “we have both discovered that whatever happens to the body, consciousness continues, subtle, boundless and blissful. Death is merely the end of an idea we briefly had about ourselves. Like a character who changes during a dream.”
They were the last words spoken by Emperor Leo the Wise. They were also how the physician ended his tale.
Attending to his words in a state of such deep concentration that he seemed almost to be in a trance, when Wenceslas finally spoke, his words seemed to emerge from a different world.
“Only those with sufficient virtue can understand the truth of elixir vitae?” he murmured, honing in on what the Mahasiddha had told the physician. “You had such virtue. But what about me?”
“You have helped many people have you not?” asked the physician. “You’ve fed the poor and helped the sick.”
They were well beyond the point of pretence, Wenceslas recognised. But whatever the physician may know of his history of apparent kindliness, he couldn’t be aware of the king’s motives.
“My actions have not always been purely unselfish,” he felt the need to admit.
His visitor’s green gaze was unwavering. “That’s how we all begin. But never forget, virtue has ten times the power of non-virtue.”
After a further pause Wenceslas murmured, “I could repeat the story, just as you told me, to my fellow nobles. I could tell them exactly what you told me …” He was trying to understand the need for goodness. “They could attend to my every word. So,” he shrugged. “Why is virtue needed?”
“They might listen,” the physician agreed. “But would they hear? Would my story mean anything to them, or would they understand it merely as an admission that elixir vitae doesn’t physically exist?”
“Ah,” Wenceslas nodded.
“There is an old saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears? Well, you may have lived next door to a teacher your whole life. You could live in the midst of many wise ones. But until your mind is ripe, open, receptive to wisdom,” he shrugged, “you can listen to all the wisdom in the world and not hear a word of it.”
“This is the result of virtue?” Wenceslas confirmed.
The other nodded.
“And are you willing to teach me what the great yogi taught you?” The king entreated him. “Is that why you are here?”
“It is both a privilege and a joy to share this wisdom with anyone with the virtue to understand it,” he said. And was Wenceslas imagining, or was there a challenge in the gleam of the physician’s eyes? A throwing-down-of-the-gauntlet to Wenceslas to create even greater virtue?
A flurry of activity at the door distracted all in the kitchen as Queen Milada, a stranger to these parts, appeared at the door. Amid bowing and curtseying, her gaze swept the room before settling on her husband.
“If we don’t leave soon,” she glanced about him quizzically, “we’ll be very late for the feast of Stephen.” Such reminders were by no means unusual, but she’d never burst in when her husband was incognito, so to speak. Right now she beheld Wenceslas as if he were slightly unhinged.
“I have just been speaking-” he felt the need to explain, turning behind him towards … an empty seat. The bench previously occupied by the physician was vacant. Void. The bowl of stew remained untouched as if his visitor had never been there. Wenceslas glanced queryingly to his Chamberlain. Patrik, whose back had been turned on the two men while they were deep in discussion, shrugged unhelpfully.
A short time later, the royal coach was on its way to a neighbouring castle, one whose owner was renowned as the most boring duke in the whole of Bohemia. By his queen’s side, Wenceslas was not quite as miserable as usual on such occasions. In truth, he wasn’t miserable at all. He was still reeling from that morning’s encounter. Still struggling to absorb the physician’s life-changing revelations. What he had learned had been so very unexpected, comprehensive, and utterly transformational that he didn’t think he’d ever see anything in quite the same way again.
Nor could he wait for the physician to return.
Later that night after the feast, Queen Milada having taken to bed somewhat tipsily following the day’s feasting, Wenceslas gazed out his turret window, thinking deeply on all that the physician had said. From time to time, a flurry of snow brushing against the window would rouse him from his thoughts, and he’d look across the snowscape on which the moon shone brightly. The frost, he noted, was cruel.
Which was when he spotted a movement.
“Patrik?” he called with some excitement. His Chamberlain, weary from the lateness of the hour, couldn’t wait for His Majesty to go to bed.
“A poor man. Gathering winter fuel.”
The two of them peered into the darkness.
“So it seems.” responded the Chamberlain.
“Fetch me a page. One with a boot size smaller than mine. Bring flesh and wine and pine logs so we can take them thither.” Wenceslas was recalling what the physician had taught: only those with sufficient virtue can understand. He needed virtue, he now sensed instinctively - and a lot of it - if his green-gazed visitor was to return in the near future.
“Very good, sir.” The Chamberlain headed towards the door.
“Um, Patrik!” The king called out curiously, on a whim. “As the sovereign of your own mind, the king of your own reality, what do you most yearn for at this moment?”
It was the subject that Wenceslas had been pondering before catching sight of the peasant. Now he wondered whether his Chamberlain might pick rapture over inner peace, or abundance over benevolent kinship with others.
“Sleep,” replied Patrik, without hesitation.
“Well, then” Wenceslas replied with a certain chagrin. “To bed you shall go as soon as we’ve departed.”
“Thank you, sir,” Patrik was greatly relieved.
“And you need only attend to me an hour later than usual tomorrow morning.”
“Are you quite sure, sir?”
“And every morning thereafter. I am taking up meditation.”
“A most wise and improving practice,” Patrik congratulated him heartily. Whatever weird flight of fancy it was that the king had taken to, if it meant an hour’s lie in every morning, he was to be encouraged mightily!
A short while later, King Wenceslas and his page set out into the night. Wenceslas had run mercy missions of this kind before, but not so strongly motivated. Never with the overriding wish to do good, to serve others. But after his most remarkable encounter with the physician, and through him with the Mahasiddha, Wenceslas was in no doubt that virtue was about a lot more than being upright and honourable. Doing good wasn’t a cause that had no effect.
Virtue has ten times the power of non-virtue, weren’t those the words of the Mahasiddha? Virtue, Wenceslas was now quite certain, is the cause not merely to listen to wisdom but to hear it. And wisdom, once embodied, is the real elixir, the true cause of deathless and the power of a monarch.
It was being wisely selfish that led him step by step through the snow in the direction of the distant commoner. Enlightened self-interest that drove him forward. And was it his imagination, or on that moonlit night was there a play of green light in the sky, like an errant eddy of the aurora borealis – a fleeting but illuminating reassurance of existential change. Not the thing he had spent the first half of his adult life waiting to happen, some dramatic change in his material fortunes. But a more significant, subtle inner transformation. King Wenceslas had, at last, found true purpose! His real life was about to begin.
Photo: The Statue of King Wenceslas (real name, Vaclav the Good) - one of the most famous statues in Czech Republic, in Wenceslas Square, Prague.
You can read more about the historical ‘King Wenceslas’ here.
And a quick question please:
It’s always a joy to read your writings David! What a lovely and inspiring way to start my day. My heartfelt THANK YOU.
Thank you so much for the tale of King Wenceslas. I was born in Prague but came to Canada 76 years ago. I have seen the statue in your post and also wonder if the magical picture of the castle at the beginning, could be of Karlstien Castle? In a rather barbaric age when power often translated into violence King Wenceslas stands out as an enlightened monarch. Thank you David for a very seasonal story. Daniela