Bhagavatam · The Grief of Chitraketu

On the bank of the Ganga the afternoon had already begun to fade. Parikshit sat silent a long while, then turned to the sage Shukadeva.

“Bhagavan, yesterday you spoke of Vritrasura, the one the world named a demon, who at the hour of his death spoke like a perfected saint. One thing has stayed lodged in me. You said he had been someone else, in an older birth. I have only a few days left now, and I keep turning it over. By what road does a man ever come to wear the body of a demon? Who was he before?”

A soft tenderness came into Shukadeva’s eyes. “Rajan, he was a king. A very great king, and a greater devotee still. His story opens in love, and turns on a curse. His name was Chitraketu. Listen.”

In the country of Shurasena, the tract of land that lies about the city of Mathura, ruled a king named Chitraketu. He was a chakravartin, an emperor over the whole earth, and the earth yielded him whatever he desired. He had ten million queens, and he was himself a man well able to father children. Beauty, generosity, youth, high birth, learning, sovereignty, wealth, he had all of it.

Yet not one womb among them all had borne him a child.

The court stayed full, the storehouses stayed full, and inside the palace sat an emptiness that had no cure. The whole earth lay under his hand, riches of every kind waited on him, and none of it could reach the place where the ache was. So a private worry walked with the emperor wherever he went.

One day the sage Angira, a son of Brahma, wandering at his own will through the many worlds, came by chance to Chitraketu’s palace. The king rose and honored him in the proper way, with water for his welcome and a seat of respect. When the sage had been made comfortable, the emperor folded his hands and sat down on the bare ground beside him, and said nothing.

Angira was watching. Here was a king of deep humility, and across his face trembled the shadow of some inner worry.

“Rajan,” the sage said, “your subjects, your ministers, your army, your treasury, is all of it well? A king is wrapped in these seven limbs of his rule the way the soul is wrapped in its seven sheaths, and when they thrive, he thrives.” Then he paused, and looked straight into the king’s eyes. “But I can see that you yourself are not at peace. Some unmet longing has drawn a line across your face. This discontent, has another laid it on you, or is it your own?”

Chitraketu bowed his head and for a long while said nothing. Then, very low, he spoke. “Bhagavan, I have been given the empire of the earth, I have been given every splendor. But a man faint with hunger and thirst finds rest in nothing except food and water. I have no child. My forefathers and I both grieve, in the fear that no son will remain to offer the pinda that sustains them. Lift me out of this dark pit.”

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The sage’s heart went out to him. He could see that the craving for a son sat so deep in this man that any word of wisdom would fall on soil too dry to hold it. Let the longing be answered first. The rest could wait.

So he performed a yajna, a fire offering fit for the god Tvashta, and the sacred remnant of that offering he gave to Kritadyuti, the eldest and the finest of all the king’s queens. Then he said, “Rajan, a son will be born to you from this queen’s womb. But hear the whole of it. He will bring you joy, and he will bring you grief.”

With that the sage went his way. The king had heard the second half of the sentence, and having heard it, let it slide off him, the way a thirsty man pays no heed to the color of the water he is handed.

Kritadyuti ate the consecrated food and conceived, as the Krittika once conceived a son through the god of fire. Like the moon through the bright fortnight, the child in her grew fuller by the day, and when the months were full a beautiful son was born. A wave of joy ran through the whole land of Shurasena.

There is no measuring Chitraketu’s joy. He bathed, had the brahmins pronounce their blessings, had the birth-rites of his son performed, and gave away in charity gold and silver, cloth and fine ornaments, villages, horses, elephants, and six arbuda of cows, six hundred million in all. As a raincloud pours on everything below it without preference, so the king poured himself out on everyone alike.

But something came with the joy. As a pauper who lays hold of a little money after long hardship only clings to it the harder, so the king’s love for this hard-won son drew tighter by the day. Kritadyuti’s love needed no explaining. It was a mother’s.

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There were other queens in that palace. Co-wives. Not one of their wombs had come to fruit.

The king now sank so far into his doting on the one child that his heart slid away from the rest of the women. They had already carried the sorrow of their childlessness, and now the sorrow of his neglect was laid over it. They began to reproach themselves, and to smolder quietly within.

Among themselves they said, “Sisters, a woman with no son is fortune’s most abandoned creature. A co-wife who has a son treats her like a serving girl. Worse, even her own husband stops counting her as a wife. And what real sorrow does a serving girl carry? She at least earns respect by her service. We have been dragged below even that.”

The envy grew heavier by the day, and one day it curdled into hatred. Hatred killed their judgment and filled them with cruelty, until they could no longer bear the sight of their husband’s love for that child. And one day, quietly, they fed the little boy poison.

Kritadyuti knew nothing of it. She thought the child was sleeping. She glanced over now and then from a distance and went about her work through the palace. When a long time had passed she said to the nurse, “Bring me my little one, good woman. He has slept his fill.”

The nurse went to the child, bent down, and looked. The pupils of his eyes had rolled up and back. Breath and sense and life had already gone out of that small body.

“I am undone,” she cried, and dropped where she stood, and beat her breast with both hands, and wailed aloud.

Kritadyuti came running at the sound. And she saw that her little child was suddenly, wholly dead.

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The queen fainted and fell beside him. Her hair came loose, her garment slipped into disarray. When she came to, she wept like a kurari bird whose mate has been taken. The saffron and sandal painted on her breast ran wet with tears. The flowers braided into her hair loosened and fell one by one, and she had no presence of mind to gather them.

“O Maker of the world,” she cried out, “what kind of maker works against his own making? The old go on living and the young die. If this backwards order is simply your nature, or, worse, your deliberate cleverness, then you are the standing enemy of every living thing.”

Then she turned to the small still body, as if it could still be reached. “And you, my darling, you must not leave a helpless woman so. Look at your father there, burning alive with grief. With you to lead us we could have crossed the dark country of the sonless with ease. Do not walk off so far in the company of cruel Death. Rise, child. Your little playmates are calling you out to romp with them. You have slept so long. You must be hungry by now. Take my breast, drink, and lift this grief from all of us who are your own.” But no sweet answering word came, and she understood that she would not hear his voice again.

The men and women of the royal house came running and broke into weeping. Even the murderous queens came and put on a false show of tears.

Word reached Chitraketu, and grief pushed a darkness across his eyes. With his ministers and his priests around him, stumbling and falling on the way, he came to where the child lay, and fainted, and went down at its feet. His breath came in long heavy pulls. Tears crowded his throat until it closed, and he could not bring out a single word.

Husband and wife wept so long and so hard that from the ministers down to the last serving girl the whole city went numb. This had been their only child, and he had come to them through such hardship.

Then the great sage Angira came again to that city, and this time the divine sage Narada came with him.

The king lay beside his dead son like a second corpse. The two sages saw the emperor slipping out of his senses under the weight of his grief, with no one near who could steady him.

Angira spoke. “King of kings, this boy you grieve for so terribly, what was he to you in this birth, and in the births before it? And you, what were you to him? And in the births still to come, what will the two of you be to each other?”

“As grains of sand are carried together and carried apart by the running of a stream, Rajan, so in the current of time are living beings brought together and drawn apart. As one seed sometimes springs from another and sometimes does not, so, moved by the Lord’s maya, one being is born from another and one being ceases in another. You, and we, and all these creatures gathered here at this moment, we were not here before we were born, and we will not be here after we die. Even now, in the way you take us to be, we are not quite real.”

The king kept listening. The tears still came, but the gale that had been tearing everything loose inside him began, a little, to drop.

He lifted his ruined face and looked at the two of them for a long moment. “Who are you,” he said slowly, “that you come to me in the plain dress of wandering ascetics, with no wish of your own left in this world? I know that great souls walk the earth in disguise, sometimes playing the madman, only to wake sleepers like me. Have you come to me that way?”

“I am Angira,” the sage said, “the same who gave you your son when you begged for one. And this is Narada, born of Brahma himself.” He let that settle. “Hear me now, king. When I first came to your house, it was the highest wisdom I meant to place in your hands. But your whole heart was set on a son, and nothing else could get in, and so I gave you the son and held the rest back. Now you have learned in your own body what those who are blessed with sons come to learn. A wife, a house, wealth, power, the pleasures of the senses, the glory of a throne, lands and armies and treasuries and ministers and friends, all of it looks solid, and all of it is a city glimpsed in the clouds, a shape thrown up in a dream. It is put together for a while and then it is gone, and while it lasts it is a well of grief and fear. The man who leans his whole weight on it is leaning on smoke.”

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Then Narada did one thing more.

By the strength of his yoga he called the soul of the dead child back for the space of a breath, into a subtle form the grieving parents could see, and bid it speak. “Jivatman, may it go well with you. Look how your mother and father, your own people, are torn apart at losing you. Come back into this body of yours. Live out the years that are left among your kin. Take your seat one day upon the throne.”

The voice that answered from that small form was not the voice of any child.

“Devarshi, I have been driven by my own deeds through gods and men, through beasts and birds, through more wombs than I could ever count. In which of all those lives were these two my mother and father? Turn by turn, across the births, every soul becomes every other soul’s brother, its grandchild, its enemy, its friend, its stranger, its foe. As a piece of gold or silver passes from one trader’s hand to the next, the soul passes from one womb to the next, and calls each one home only for as long as it stays there.”

“The sense of mine lasts only as long as the tie to the thing lasts, and not one breath longer. But the soul itself is deathless. It has no ego. It is no one’s darling and no one’s foe, no one’s kin and no one’s stranger. It is the still witness of every cause and every deed, and it is free. And so it is never truly born, and it never truly dies.”

Having said that much, the soul was gone.

And a strange stillness came down over the palace.

Chitraketu and Kritadyuti sat stunned by what they had heard. The one they had held to be their son had never, in truth, been anyone’s son at all. The cord of their affection was cut clean through, and the unbearable grief went out of them with it. They performed the last rites for the small body, and they set down the attachment that is so hard to set down, the attachment out of which grief and delusion and fear and sorrow are all born.

As for the queens who had given the poison, they could no longer raise their eyes, so heavy was the shame of what they had done. The sin of killing a child had drained the light out of them. Remembering what Angira had taught, they went down to the bank of the Yamuna, there in Mathura, and made the atonement the brahmins prescribed.

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So it was that the counsel of Angira and Narada woke the power of discernment in Chitraketu. He hauled himself up out of the deep dark well of birth and rebirth the way an elephant drags itself out of the mud of a drying pool.

He bathed in the Yamuna as the rites require and made the water offering to the departed. Then, his senses gathered in and his mouth fallen silent, he bowed his head at the feet of the two sages, both of them sons of Brahma.

Narada was well pleased. He saw a king who now held his senses in hand, a devotee of the Lord, a man who had truly taken refuge. He gave him a vidya, a mantra-hymn, and said, “King of men, hold this in a gathered mind, and within seven nights you will stand in the presence of Lord Sankarshana. In the oldest of days Shankara himself, and others of his stature, took shelter at the feet of that same Sankarshana, and reached the greatness beyond which nothing rises and nothing stands even equal.”

Having placed the vidya in his hands, Narada and Angira departed for the realm of Brahma.

For seven days the king took nothing but water, and held the practice of that vidya with his whole concentration. When the seven nights had passed, the unbroken sovereignty of the Vidyadharas came to him. And in a few days more, as the vidya went on working in him and his mind grew clearer still, he came near the feet of Shesha, of Lord Sankarshana.

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He saw.

Lord Shesha sat in the midst of a ring of the masters of perfection. His body was pale as the fiber of a lotus, and a blue garment lay across it. A crown was on his head, armlets on his arms, a girdle at his waist, bangles at his wrists. His eyes were touched with red, and over his face lay a gladness that held no trace of command in it, only the look of one who has been waiting.

At the first sight of him every sin in Chitraketu fell away, and his inward being ran clear. A flood of bhakti, of pure devotion, rose in his chest, and tears of love came drop by drop until the very footstool where the Lord’s feet rested was wet with them. Every pore of his body opened like a flower.

For a long time he could not say anything at all. Not one syllable would come.

Then his breath returned, and softly he began. “Unconquered One, the holy ones who have mastered their senses and look on all things with a level eye have conquered you. And you have conquered them in turn, with your beauty, your sweetness, your mercy. To those who worship you wanting nothing back, you give away nothing less than your own self.”

“Bhagavan, the men who are little more than beasts, who want only the feeding of their senses, leave you aside and worship Indra and the other gods, who are only sparks thrown off from your splendor. But as the servants of a royal house lose their bread when the house falls, so when those lesser gods reach their end, the pleasures they handed out end along with them.”

Lord Sankarshana was pleased. “Chitraketu, through the vidya that Narada and Angira gave you concerning me, and through the sight of me, you have come fully to your goal. It is I who stand here as all beings. I am their inmost self, and I am their maker. Those with the skill to grasp the truth of the path of yoga should know this one thing: the whole interest of the soul, its highest gain and its highest good, is only to come to know the oneness of the individual self and the Supreme.”

Having said this, before Chitraketu’s open eyes, Shri Hari, the soul of all that is, vanished from the spot.

Now Chitraketu was the lord of the Vidyadharas.

For ten thousand million years he ranged the valleys of Mount Sumeru, and in all that time the strength of his body and the power of his senses never once dimmed. Great sages and siddhas and celestial singers praised him. At his word the women of the Vidyadharas would sing beside him of the virtues and the play of the Lord.

One day he was traveling somewhere aboard the shining aircraft the Lord had given him, going where he pleased along the roads of the sky.

Then he looked down. Lord Shankara sat in an assembly of great sages, among siddhas and celestial singers, and he had drawn the goddess Parvati onto his lap and held her there with one arm.

Still up on his aircraft, and making sure the goddess would hear him, Chitraketu began to laugh out loud.

“Well now,” he said, “here is the teacher of dharma for the whole world, the guru of every guru, the first among all living beings. And look at the state of him, seated in a crowded hall with his wife pressed against his body. A wearer of matted locks, an ascetic of that rank, the head of all who expound Brahman, and he holds a woman in his lap like any common man. Even common men, as a rule, keep to private rooms for that. And here is this great keeper of vows doing it in an open assembly.”

Lord Shankara’s mind runs too deep to sound. He heard the jibe, laughed easily, and said nothing. The others in the assembly held their peace as well.

Parvati did not hold hers.

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Chitraketu had no measure of Lord Shankara’s greatness. A thin thread of pride had worked its way into him, pride in his mastery of the senses, in his vidya, in all he had attained. Seeing that insolence, the goddess spoke in anger.

“So this is the one lord left in all the world,” she said, “fit to rule shameless wretches like us with the rod of punishment. It would seem that Brahma, and Bhrigu, and Narada, and the sons of Sanaka, and Kapila, and Manu, all these great ones, know nothing of the secret of dharma. Why else would they never stop this Lord Shiva, who so plainly tramples the bounds of dharma?”

“This low kshatriya has held the guru of the worlds in contempt, whose lotus feet Brahma and the rest hold in their meditation. He is swollen with his own importance. This fool is not fit even to stand at those feet of Shri Hari that the highest of the holy long to worship.”

Then she turned to Chitraketu. “So, you of the crooked mind, go. Take your birth in the womb of the demons. That way, my child, you will never again find the power to wrong a great soul.”

A silence fell over the assembly.

But the one who had been cursed did not tremble. He had in him, that very moment, the power to hurl a curse straight back at her, and he let it go by. He folded it away and chose instead to receive what she had given him. That choosing, more than any vidya, was the measure of what he had become.

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Chitraketu brought his aircraft down, and bowing his head, began to gentle the goddess’s anger.

“Mother Parvati, with a glad heart and both hands joined I accept your curse. When gods pronounce a thing over a mortal, it is only the early word of a fruit that was already ripening for him, according to his prarabdha, the karma he carries from before.”

“Devi, this soul is bewildered by its own ignorance, and so it wanders on and on through the wheel of the world, tasting sweetness and tasting pain in every place, in every age. The one who deals out that sweetness and that pain is neither the soul’s own self nor anyone else. Only the ignorant lay the blame on themselves, or on another.”

“This whole world is the natural running-out of the three gunas. Inside it, tell me, what is a curse and what is a blessing, what is heaven and what is hell, what is pleasure and what is pain? The Lord alone, with no one’s help, by the power of his own maya, shapes the bondage and the freedom and the joy and the sorrow of every creature. He holds no one dear and no one hateful, no one his own and no one a stranger. When there is not even attachment to pleasure in him, how could there be an anger born of attachment?”

“Devi, you whose whole life is your husband, I am not gentling you in the hope of slipping free of the curse. I ask only this, that you forgive whatever in my words struck you as unfit.”

Having so calmed Shankara and Parvati, Chitraketu mounted his aircraft before their eyes and went his way. Everyone who watched was filled with wonder. Shankara turned to Parvati. “You see, beloved, the greatness of these desireless servants of Hari. They belong wholly to Narayana, and so there is nothing anywhere they fear, and they look on heaven and hell and liberation with one and the same steady gaze. I too am the Lord’s, and that is why his mockery never once touched me.”

Shukadeva fell quiet. The waves of the Ganga were striking the bank.

For a long time Parikshit said nothing. Then, softly, “Bhagavan. So even the man who had the sight of Lord Sankarshana, whose heart had been made so pure, even he was struck by a curse. And struck by it, he was still not afraid.”

“Yes, Rajan,” said Shukadeva. “That is the very peak of the story. The man who had broken to pieces at the loss of a son did not so much as shiver at a curse. Because in the days between, he had come to know one thing. The whole game of joining and parting belongs to time, and none of it is ours. He took Parvati’s curse the way he would take one more turn of the wheel. And that knowing went with him into the next birth as well.”

“By that curse he passed into the world of the demons. He rose up out of a sacrificial fire, the Dakshinagni of the god Tvashta, that same Tvashta whose fire-rite had once given him his son. And so, Rajan, that same Chitraketu became, in his next birth, the Vritra I spoke of yesterday. That is why, even inside a demon’s body, he spoke like a saint. The demon’s body was only the outer covering, and the old devotee sat within it the whole time.”

Parikshit looked out toward the Ganga. Far off in the sky a small cloud drifted slowly, cleared the face of the sun, laid its shadow a moment on the water, and floated on toward the farther bank.