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Narada has worked out what he needs, and the worry has walked out of the palace with him. A city a hundred yojanas wide has risen on his road, finer than Vishnu’s own. In it a king’s daughter is holding a svayamvara, the choosing of her own husband. Countless kings have come for it. The sage has seen the girl. He has read in her marks that whoever weds her will be immortal, unconquered on any field of battle, and served by all that moves and all that stands still. He has kept the marks in his heart and told her father a few things of his own making. Japa and tapas can do nothing at this time. He needs great beauty, a large and splendid form, at the sight of which the princess will be charmed and will then give the victory garland. The thought that opens this episode is his next one: he will ask the Lord for beauty, and let the Lord be his helper. The helper he has chosen is the one who, before the city rose on his road, considered in his own mind. He saw the sprout of a great tree of pride in the sage’s heart. He resolved to tear it up at once, the good of his servants being his vow.
What he asks for is the Lord’s own form, and what he is promised is his highest good. After the promise come a svayamvara ground, kings on their seats, two of Shiva’s ganas in brahmin guise who sit down in the sage’s company and know everything. A garland that goes past him, a face seen in water, and a road. Two curses are spoken, one on the ganas at the water and, on the road, one on the Lord. He takes the second on his head with gladness and only then draws his maya back. Shiva is telling this to Parvati, going on from the causes of the descent he began in the last episode. The curse of Narada’s he named there, the cause of a descent in one kalpa, is the one this episode comes to.
A sage, the Lord, a princess, and two ganas
The main figures in this episode
- Narada the sage who asks the Lord for beauty, goes to the svayamvara proud of his form, hears a taunt he cannot make out. He is passed over with the garland and sees his face in the water. He curses two ganas and then the Lord himself, begs that curse false, and leaves singing Rama’s virtues.
- Vishnu the Lord, gracious when he appears to the sage and when he comes in a king’s body. He is a treasury of grace when he gives the sage his ugliness and when he draws back his maya. He promises the sage his highest good, and keeps the promise in a form the sage did not ask for.
- The princess unnamed in this episode, the one person in the assembly who sees the sage’s monkey face, and the one who carries the garland. The last episode gave her name, Vishvamohini, and said she was the Lord’s maya herself.
- Shiva’s two ganas his attendants, in brahmin guise, who know the whole secret, taunt the sage so that he hears, send him to a mirror. They flee in fear and are cursed to become night-walkers. Their names are not given.
- Lakshmi at the Lord’s side on the road with the princess, named in the sage’s accusation as what the Lord took for himself at the churning of the sea. She is gone when the maya goes.
A request with the answer already inside it
The sage thought it out in his own mind. “I will ask the Lord for beauty.” The trouble with that came in the same thought: “The going will take very long.” There was a choosing at hand and no time for a journey. Then the way around the trouble: “No one wishes me well as the Lord does. At this moment let him be my helper.” So the journey was given up, and the asking took its place. At that moment he made entreaties of many kinds, and the Lord, fond of sport and gracious, appeared. At the sight of him the sage’s eyes were cooled, and in his heart he rejoiced: the work will be done.
In great distress he told his story, and the plea came out of the telling. “Have mercy, and be my helper. Give me your own form, Lord. In no other way can I get her.” The her is the princess, the commentary says. The sage did not name her. Then the last of it: “In whatever way my good may come, do that quickly, master. I am your servant.” He had asked for two things, a form, and, in his last sentence, his good. The Lord looked at the vast strength of his own maya, the maya that had built a city on a sage’s road and was itself the king’s daughter in it. He laughed in his heart. Then he spoke. “Narada, hear. In whatever way your highest good will come, that we will do and nothing else. Our word is never false.” The answer took up the sage’s last sentence in nearly his own words and left the form out.
The physician refuses the wrong food
The Lord answered with a physician. “A sick man, distraught with disease, asks for the wrong food, and the physician does not give it. Hear, yogi sage: in this way I have resolved on your good.” The rule carried its own refusal inside it, and the sage was told which of the two he was. He had just called himself the Lord’s servant. The Lord’s word for him, as he refused him, was yogi sage. So saying, the Lord vanished.
Under the sway of maya the sage had grown so dull that he did not understand the Lord’s words. They were hidden words. The commentary reads that word the other way, as plain speech. He went at once to where the svayamvara ground had been laid, the ground on which the princess would choose her husband.
The assembly, and what no one saw
The ground was full. The kings sat each on his own seat, in full array, with their companies about them, the countless kings who had come to the city for the choosing. The sage went in among them and sat down. His mind was glad, and the gladness had one sentence in it, said to no one: “My form is very fine. Leaving me, she will not choose another even by mistake.”
For the sage’s good, the good he had been promised, the Lord had given him an ugliness past describing. No one on that ground could see that doing. A sage had come among the kings, and the kings on their seats and the companies about them bowed their heads to him, knowing him as Narada.
Two ganas who knew everything
Two of Shiva’s ganas, his attendants, were there, and they knew the whole secret. In brahmin guise they went about the assembly, watching, and the commentary says what they watched: the whole lila. They were fond of sport, the two of them too, as the Lord had been fond of sport when he appeared to the sage. As the sage himself had been, in the last episode, on his way into the city.
In the company where the sage had gone and sat down, his heart swollen with pride of form, these two ganas of Shiva sat down as well. In their brahmin guise no one made out their move. Then the sport began. They spoke their taunts so that Narada would hear them. “The Lord has given him fine beauty! Seeing his charm the princess will be smitten, and knowing him hari she will choose him above all.” Beauty was the word the sage had used in his own mind when he set out to ask. Now it came back to him from the two in brahmin guise in his own company. And one more word turned the taunt: hari, which is a name of the Lord and, as the commentary hears it here, a word for a monkey.
The sage was in delusion, his mind in another’s hands, maya’s in the commentary’s reading, and the ganas laughed with great relish. Though he heard their odd words, he could not make them out, his intellect steeped in confusion. The commentary adds that he took them for his own praise. It was the second thing he had heard and failed to understand: first the Lord’s words at the moment of the promise, now these.
The one who saw it
No one saw that special doing. In the whole of that assembly one pair of eyes saw the form the sage was wearing, and they were the princess’s: a monkey’s face, a fearsome body. At the sight anger rose in her heart.
Then the princess set out with her companions and moved among the kings like a royal swan, the victory garland in her hands. She was going round and looking at all the kings as she went. The side where Narada sat, puffed up, she did not look at even by mistake. The garland went round to all the kings and did not come to him. Again and again the sage rose up from his seat and fretted, and seeing his state Shiva’s ganas smiled.
The garland, and the taunt of the mirror
Taking a king’s body, the Lord went there, gracious in this as when he appeared to the sage, and the princess, glad, put the victory garland on him. Vishnu, Lakshmi’s home, took the bride away, and the whole company of kings was left in despair.
The sage was in great distress, his wit lost in delusion, as if a jewel had slipped from a knot. A jewel in a knot is a jewel tied up safe, and this one was out of the knot and gone. The commentary names what undid him: the sight of the princess gone. Then Shiva’s ganas said, smiling: “Go and look at your face in a mirror.”
Where the laughing stops
So saying, the two fled in great fear, and they were gone before he had looked. The sage peered into the water and saw his face in it. What the water gave back was the guise the Lord had given him for his good, the monkey’s face and the fearsome body the princess had seen. At the sight of his guise his anger grew greatly, and he gave the two a very hard curse. “Go and become night-walkers, you two deceivers and sinners. You laughed at us: take the fruit of it. Laugh at some sage again.” The curse names what they are to become and the ground for it, their laughing. Its last words hand the laughing back to them, which the commentary renders: now go and mock some sage again. The laughing had stopped.
The same face in the water, and the same anger
He looked in the water again, and this time he found his own form there, the one the commentary calls his real one. The face was back. Even so, contentment did not come to his heart. His lips trembled, there was anger in his mind, and at once he set off to Vishnu, Lakshmi’s lord.
What he would do when he got there he said in his mind, as the commentary has it: “I will give a curse, or go and die. He has made the world laugh at me.” On the road itself he met Vishnu, and with him were Lakshmi and that same princess, the bride who had been taken from the ground. The Lord spoke sweet words: “Sage, where are you going, like one distraught?” At the words great anger rose in him. Under the sway of maya there was no sense in his mind.
The accusation on the road
Narada answered. “You cannot bear to see another’s prosperity. Your envy and deceit are great. Churning the sea you drove Shiva mad, and, prompting the gods, made him drink poison.” Then he reckoned the shares of that churning. “Wine to the asuras, poison to Shiva, and for yourself Lakshmi and the lovely jewel. Selfish, crooked, your dealings are always deceit.” The jewel the commentary names as the Kaustubha. Three shares are counted. The one who has just lost a bride charges the Lord with taking Lakshmi for himself, with Lakshmi at the Lord’s side on the road as he says it.
The speech goes on, and these are its words. “Supremely free, no one over your head, you do whatever pleases your mind. The good you make bad and the bad good. You hold no wonder or joy in your heart. Cheating and cheating everyone, you have grown practiced, utterly fearless, your mind always eager. Good and bad karma do not bind you. Till now no one has set you right.” One of the charges is that he holds no wonder or joy in his heart. When the curse comes, the Lord will take it on his head glad at heart.
The second curse, the one Shiva had named
“Now you have given your gift to a good house. You will get the fruit of your own doing.” The gift to a good house is an idiom, and the commentary opens it: this time you have meddled with a strong man like me. “The body in which you deceived me, take that same body: this is my curse.” The body in which he was deceived was a king’s, the one the Lord took to come to the ground. “You made my form a monkey’s. Monkeys will be your helpers. You did me great harm. You will suffer in separation from a woman.”
This is the curse Shiva named to Parvati before this story began, when he gave her the causes of the descent. Once Narada gave a curse, and for it, in one kalpa, there was a descent. Here it is in the sage’s own order: the body, the monkeys, the separation. The accusation is finished, and the curse with it. The Lord’s answer comes next.
The curse on his head, and the maya drawn back
Taking the curse on his head, glad at heart, the Lord made many entreaties to the sage, and then he drew back the might of his own maya. So the curse was taken while the one who gave it was still inside the maya, with Lakshmi and the princess still at the Lord’s side.
When the Lord removed his maya, neither Lakshmi nor the princess was there. Then the sage, greatly afraid, seized the Lord’s feet. “Protect me, you who take away the pain of those who come for refuge.” “Let my curse be false, gracious one.” The Lord said: “My wish.” Two words. The commentary fills them out: all of this came of my wish. The sage who asked that his curse be false had been told at the start that the Lord’s word is never false. The sage’s next question was about his own words. “I have said many evil words. How will my sins be erased?”
The name of the one whose ganas he cursed
“Go and repeat Shiva’s hundred names. At once there will be rest in your heart. No one is as dear to me as Shiva. Do not let go of this trust even by mistake. He on whom Shiva does not bestow grace does not gain my bhakti, sage. Holding this in your heart, go and wander the earth. Now maya will not come near you.” The answer to the evil words is a name, and the name is Shiva’s. The two the sage cursed first were Shiva’s ganas. The Shiva he said the Lord had driven mad at the churning is the one whose hundred names he is sent to repeat.
Having reassured the sage in many ways, which the commentary glosses as giving him heart, the Lord then vanished. Narada went to Satyaloka, the world the commentary names as Brahma’s, singing Rama‘s virtues.
The wound inside
The face came back and the anger stayed. What went down the road with him he said in his mind, that the world had been made to laugh at him. The one he went to, to curse or to die, was the one he had called, at the start, the well-wisher no one equals.
He asked for the Lord’s own form, and in his last sentence for his good. The good is what he got: an ugliness no one saw but the princess, a seat he kept rising from. A garland that went to a king’s body, and the one he had called his well-wisher going off with the bride. The one who made him ugly is a treasury of grace, and the one who came in a king’s body came gracious.
Twice what the Lord feels stays in his heart: the laugh when he saw the vast strength of his own maya, and the gladness with which he took the curse. Twice the sage’s resolve is in his mind: to ask the Lord for beauty, and, where the commentary places it, to curse him or die. The two curses were taken in two ways. The two who got the first had fled in fear before it was spoken. The one who got the second took it on his head, glad at heart, entreated the giver, and, when the giver begged that it be false, called it his wish. The laughing in this episode began in the Lord’s heart, before any gana laughed. The episode ends with a sage going to Satyaloka singing the virtues of Rama.
The same story, elsewhere: the Shiva Purana: Narada’s Pride.
Source: the Gita Press edition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, Balkand, doha 132 to 138, read with Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s Hindi commentary.