Bhagavatam · The Deliverance of Ajamila

Parikshit folded his hands and looked at Shukadeva.

“Bhagavan, one thing has settled deep inside me. My days are numbered now, and there is much in my life I did not set right. My mind keeps asking how a single last moment can undo the errors of so many years. Does the Name truly hold such power that it can carry even a drowning man across?”

Shukadeva was quiet for a while. Then that faint glow came over his face, the one that appeared whenever the talk turned to Hari.

“Rajan, men try to buy back their wrongs with penance. A fast, a gift, a river bath, a pilgrimage counted off like coins. Penance has its use. Yet a man who has not mastered himself will sin, atone, and sin again, the way an elephant walks out of the river it has just bathed in and throws dust over its own back. The stain returns because the root was never touched. Two things reach the root. One is knowledge of the self, which burns away the ignorance a sin grows from. The surer one is love of the Lord, the single road with no fear anywhere along it. A man who has once set his mind on the feet of Hari never so much as sees the noose of Yama, even in a dream.”

“So hear this, and keep it close. In the city of Kanyakubja, the one you now call Kannauj, there once lived a brahmin named Ajamila. Hear how he lived and how he died, and you will see for yourself that the Name waits for no one’s worthiness.”

In his youth Ajamila was a master of the shastras, a home of good character and right conduct. Celibate, humble, master of his senses, devoted to truth, and pure. The inner meaning of the mantras lived in him. He poured oblations into the sacred fire and served his guru, his guests, and his elders. He wished the good of every creature and never went looking for faults in anyone’s virtues.

One day, at his father’s bidding, he went to the forest, and was returning with fruit and flowers, kindling, and kusha grass. On the way his eyes fell on a couple. A dissolute shudra, drunk and reeling, and with him one of his serving women. She too was heavy with wine, her eyes swimming, her clothes half undone, laughing and singing without a care. The shudra had his arm around her and was courting her.

In that single moment something inside Ajamila tilted. The shastras were still in him, and now this fire was in him too. He fought with all his patience and learning to hold his mind back, and the mind would not be held. The fire won.

He came home, and he came home changed. The thought of that woman circled his mind and would not leave. Within a few days he had set aside his high-born wedded wife, a brahmin girl still in the prime of her youth, and brought the serving woman into his house.

The people of Kannauj began to murmur behind their hands. The pandit’s son, the one who knew the mantras, now living with that wayward woman. None of it touched Ajamila at all.

To feed that woman’s household he let go of every boundary the shastra had taught him. Sometimes he waylaid travelers, bound them, and robbed them; sometimes he emptied a man’s purse at dice; this one’s wealth he took by fraud, that one’s by theft. When fair means and foul both fell short, he did not spare even the lives of helpless creatures. He handed his father’s whole estate over to her, and by this contemptible trade he kept the household fed.

The years rolled on. Ten sons were born. Each was given some ordinary name.

But the youngest of them all he named “Narayana.”

Why, he himself did not know. Perhaps somewhere within him a trace of his forefathers’ samskara had survived, and had anchored itself in that one name.

The youngest boy was dearer to him than breath, the light of an old father’s eyes.

He trailed the child all day long. The boy’s lisping talk and small games left him unable to contain his delight. “Narayana, come here. Narayana, eat now. Narayana, go to sleep.” From morning to evening that one name lived on his tongue.

He had no inkling whose name he was repeating day and night.

In this way eighty-eight years went by.

Ajamila grew old, then ill. His breath began to fail. Lying on his bed, counting out his last days, his mind still turned around that boy Narayana.

And then three figures stood before him. The Yamadutas.

Their mouths were crooked and twisted, the hair on their bodies stood bristling, their forms terrible past bearing. They took hold of his subtle body and began to draw it out from within his heart.

Ajamila’s eyes flew wide. His throat went dry. His breath seemed to jam in his chest.

In that panic his gaze fell on the doorway. There, a little way off, his youngest son was playing. Narayana.

Out of sheer terror, the way a drowning man cries out for anything to hold, he called his son in a long, loud voice. He was calling the child, only the child, the boy he wanted to see one last time.

“Narayana!”

The son did not hear. He stayed lost in his game.

But one thing happened at once.

With that one cry, a light came into the room that had not been there before. Four beings stood where there had been none. They were young and shining, robed in yellow silk, crowned, hung with lotus garlands and earrings that held their own light; their eyes were long and calm as lotus petals, and each of them had four arms, one holding a conch, another a discus. The dark of the sickroom fell back before them. They had heard, in a dying man’s cry, the name of their own master, Bhagavan Narayana, and they had come at speed.

The Vishnudutas stepped between Ajamila and the noose and stopped it by force, just as the Yamadutas were drawing the life out of his heart.

“Stop. This man is ours now. Your right to take him from here has ended.”

The Yamadutas drew back, startled. In all their long service no soul had been lifted out of their hands. “Who are you,” they said, “to overrule the command of Yama himself? Whose messengers are you, and where have you come from? You are like no gods we have ever seen. Why do you stand in our way?”

The Vishnudutas laughed, a sound with no mockery in it, and answered in a voice that rolled like far thunder. “If you truly serve Yama, then tell us first what dharma is, and how it is known. Tell us how punishment is measured, and on whom it falls, on every soul that acts, or only some.”

The Yamadutas answered as they had been taught. “Dharma is what the Veda commands, and adharma is what the Veda forbids. And the Veda is no made thing. It is the very breath of Bhagavan Narayana, risen from him without effort, so its word is his word. Every deed a man does is seen. The sun and the fire, the sky and the air and the moon, the two twilights, the day and the night, the eight directions, the water and the earth, Time itself, and Dharma the lord of the reckoning, all of them stand witness to what a creature does. By their evidence a wrong is known for a wrong, and every embodied soul answers for its acts in the exact measure it performed them. This man was weighed on that scale.”

And they set out the life you have already heard: the learned brahmin who saw a drunken shudra fondling his woman on a forest path and lost himself, who cast off a faithful young wife, emptied his father’s house, and lived by robbery and fraud into his old age. “His account is black from the first year to the last,” they said. “He has done no true penance. Our orders are to carry him to Dharmaraja, where punishment will burn him clean.”

The four heard them out. Then they answered, and there was grief in it. “What a sorrow, that unrighteousness should walk into the very court of those who know dharma. If the keepers of the law strike a man who has not earned the rod, where is the rest of the world to go for shelter? The common man watches what his betters do and does the same. He lays his head in their lap and sleeps, trusting them to know right from wrong.”

“Now hear what you have overlooked. This man has not balanced the wrongs of one life alone. In his last helpless breath he spoke the name of Hari, and that one name has answered for the sins of millions of lifetimes behind him. He cried out ‘Narayana,’ four syllables, meaning only to call his boy, and even that much was enough. That name is the whole atonement for every kind of sinner there is: the thief, the drinker, the man who betrays a friend, the killer of a brahmin, the one who defiles his teacher’s bed, and any other you could name. For the moment the name leaves a man’s tongue, the Lord’s own mind turns toward the one who spoke it.”

“You put your trust in fasting and penance and charity to wash a man clean. They lift the sin from the surface. The seed of it stays buried, and from that seed the same sin grows again, which is why a man atones and falls and atones once more. The name of Hari, and service at his feet, burn the seed as well. Nothing else reaches it.”

“And the name asks nothing of the one who speaks it. Said as a hint, said in jest, dropped as the refrain of a song, thrown out even in scorn, it destroys sin all the same. A man who calls some name of the Lord without meaning to, because he has stumbled, or been bitten by a snake, or gone hot with fever, or broken a bone, is beyond the reach of hell from that instant. Fire does not ask whether the hand that lit it knew it would burn. It takes the fuel the same, whether a wise man strikes the spark or a child who has no notion what fire is. A strong medicine heals the man who swallowed it by chance exactly as it heals the man who knew what he was taking. The name works like that. It worked in this man, though he never knew what he held.”

“So do not drag him down the wrong road. He has spoken the Lord’s name, whole and aloud, at the hour of his death. He is not yours.”

Ajamila lay on his bed and heard all of it. Each word sank further into him. In all his years it had never once crossed his mind that the name he had been calling so carelessly, up and down the house, carried a force like this.

The Yamadutas had nothing to set against it. They let go their hold, turned back to Dharmaraja, and laid the whole account before him exactly as it had happened.

Free of the noose and free of fear, Ajamila was himself again. He bowed his head to the four, and as the tears came, so did an understanding he had never had before.

The name he had called for years, for a child, had been all along the name of that same Shri Hari he had turned away from in his youth. Without meaning it, without a flicker of devotion, he had said “Narayana” more times than he could count. And that unknowing repetition had turned him back today from the door of death.

Now the memory of his sins came over him, and with it a deep remorse. “What a slave of my senses I have been. I abandoned a faithful, innocent wife, left my old and austere parents with no one to lean on, and pressed the mark of disgrace onto my own line. And still the Lord’s most auspicious name came to my tongue, and I was carried across.”

The Lord’s attendants watched him, and the moment he seemed ready to say something more, they vanished where they stood.

Ajamila’s illness left him. He sat up.

This time the change held. He left it all behind, house and sons, the woman, everything, and set out for the place where the Ganga comes down onto the plains, the town men now call Haridwar. Seated in the Lord’s shrine on the river bank, he took to the path of yoga. He drew his senses back from the world and gathered them into his mind, and he fixed the mind on the Lord who is pure consciousness. The name that had lived on his tongue his whole life now, for the first time, settled into his heart as well.

Before long, there on the bank of the Ganga, he let his body go. In that same instant the four stood before him again. This time they carried no noose. Ajamila took on a form like theirs, and seated among them on a golden vimana he rose through the sky to Vaikuntha, the abode of Bhagavan Lakshmipati, the husband of Sri.