Bhagavatam · Bharata and the Deer

The Ganga was running a little slower that afternoon. Parikshit looked at Shukadeva and stayed quiet a while, as if weighing something in his mind.

“Bhagavan,” he said softly, “I have only a few days left now. And I keep wondering. A man who has done tapas his whole life, who has walked away from his throne, can even his foot slip at the very end? Does detachment ever stay unfinished?”

Shukadeva was silent a few moments. Then he said, “Rajan, there was once a king named Bharata, eldest son of Rishabhadeva. Men had known this land as Ajanabha until then; from his name it came to be called Bharata. Hear his katha, and the question you have brought will end by asking itself of you.”

Rishabhadeva, before he took to the woods, set Bharata over the earth, and the kingdom came to him. He married Panchajani, daughter of Vishwarupa, and five sons were born to them: Sumati, Rashtrabhrit, Sudarshana, Avarana, and Dhumraketu.

For years he ruled by dharma. The people stayed content, the treasury stayed full, the borders stayed quiet. Through yajnas conducted by the ritviks, the hota, the adhvaryu, the udgata, and the brahma, he went on worshipping Shri Hari Vasudeva alone with full faith, and deep inside him that love kept growing.

Ten million years passed this way. Then he understood that the store of merit that had earned him his royal fortune was nearly spent. And so, as his father had done before him, he divided the kingdom among his sons and took the road to the forest. There was no complaint in his mind, and no urge to look back.

On the bank of the Gandaki river, at Pulaha’s ashram, he built himself a small hut. The Gandaki was a holy water, hallowed on every side by round, wheel-marked pebbles, the shalagrama stones in which Shri Hari lets his devotees find him. Bharata’s days began to pass on roots, tubers, tulsi leaves, and river water, his nights in the remembrance of Shri Hari.

Many years went by like this. The mind grew steadily one-pointed, the breath slow, the world falling away behind him. There were mornings when the love in him rose so high that the hair stood up along his arms, his eyes filled, and he forgot even the worship his own hands were performing. It felt as if only a little distance remained.

One morning he had come down into the Gandaki for his bath and his rites, and afterward he settled on the bank and sat the better part of three muhurtas repeating the single syllable Om. The water was cold, birds were calling overhead, the grass on the bank still heavy with dew.

Just then a doe came down alone to the river to drink. She was pregnant, her belly heavy, her gait tired. She had barely lowered her mouth to the water.

When, from deep in the forest, a lion’s roar went up.

The doe froze where she stood. She was a timid creature by nature, and the fear of the lion undid her; in a single leap, heavy belly and all, her thirst still unquenched, she tried to clear the river.

In that very leap a tiny fawn slipped from her womb and fell into the water. And the doe, worn out by the birth she had not finished and the long leap and the terror, cut off now from her herd, stumbled into a cave on the far bank and gave up her life there.

The fawn began to drift with the current, so small that the water was spinning him about like a toy.

Bharata saw it all. Moved to pity for the helpless, motherless thing, he waded forward and lifted the drifting fawn in both palms.

He was cold, soaked through, and so thin that he seemed no more than a single trembling breath cupped in the hand. The mother was nowhere, the bank stood empty, and overhead that lion’s roar still hung in the air.

Bharata stood holding him a while. Then he carried the motherless creature to his hut, the way a man takes in a friend, as if he were his own kin.

He arranged for his food and drink, wrapped him in dry leaves to keep him warm, and sat beside him through the night.

And the fawn lived.

Bharata had told himself: let me watch over him just for today; in the morning I will leave him in the forest, where his own kind are.

But in the morning the fawn rose on wobbling legs and came straight toward him, and his guileless, trusting eyes settled on his face.

“All right,” Bharata said softly. “One more day.”

A day became a week, the week a month, the month a year. The fawn grew, and stayed close by Bharata’s side. He began to live sunk in worry over him, guarding him from tigers and other beasts, feeding him, scratching and soothing him.

And quietly, without his knowing it, the direction of his remembrance began to turn. His yama, his niyama, his worship of Bhagavan, the disciplines he had built his life on, began to drop away one by one.

Now when he sat for meditation, the moment his eyes closed it was the fawn who came and stood in his mind, in Shri Hari’s place. Midway through sadhana the mind would wander off: “Where can he have gone? What if he has strayed across some wolf, some jackal?”

When he had to go into the forest for kusha grass, flowers, firewood, roots, and fruit, he took the fawn along, for fear of wolves and dogs. If its own innocence left it stuck somewhere on the path, he lifted it onto his shoulder and carried it. At night he lay down beside it, lest it catch a chill. Now he gathered it into his lap, now he held it to his chest and caressed it. Even in the middle of a rite he would get up again and again just to look at it, and finding it safe he would bless it, “May you be well on every side, my darling.”

The detachment he had spent years building began to melt, quietly, before the guileless eyes of one small deer.

Sometimes he would check himself: “Bharata, what are you doing? You gave up your own sons, which is the hardest parting a man knows, and now you have tied yourself in the moha of a fawn that is not even of your kind?”

But the very next instant there would be a rustle, and his mind would be pulled back that way. When the deer was out of sight, he grew as agitated as a miser whose fortune has been carried off.

Years passed like this. The deer grew, sometimes wandering far from the ashram to graze, and Bharata stayed restless within until it came back. Even then he would be asking blessings for it: “Son, may well-being follow you everywhere.”

Then one day Bharata’s body began its decline. From within, he sensed that the hour of parting had come.

Even in that final hour it was the deer he called to his side. It sat close, grief-stricken like a son, and Bharata lay gazing at its face, and gazing at it still, the breath slipped away.

The last thought that stayed in his mind was this: “My deer.”

And the remembrance of the final hour becomes the next destination. In whatever feeling the breath departs, into that very form the jiva falls. So Bharata’s next birth was as a deer.

But this was no ordinary deer. By the power of his lifelong worship, every detail of the birth before stayed alive in its memory. It knew that on the outside it was only an animal, and that within, the awareness of a rajarshi was still awake.

Knowing why he had come to wear a deer’s body, he lived in deep remorse. “How did I let this happen,” he would say to himself. “I had shaken off every attachment. I had come away strong-willed into a lonely and holy forest, my mind given wholly to Vasudeva, the Self of all selves, my every hour spent in hearing his names, singing his praises, worshipping him. And after all of it, in no time at all, my mind slipped away after one small fawn. What a fool I was.” In that deer form he stayed among the other deer and never merged into them. This time he bound himself to no one. Silent, watchful, he simply waited for the body to run its course.

At the last, leaving Kalanjara mountain, the land of his deer-birth, he returned to that same Pulaha’s ashram, the Shalagrama tirtha beloved of the calm-natured munis. There, keeping half his body immersed in the water of the Gandaki, in due time that deer-body too fell away.

This time the birth came in a worthy brahmin house of the line of the sage Angiras. He came as one of a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, born to the younger of the brahmin’s two wives, with nine older half-brothers by the first wife. And this time Bharata chose an altogether different road.

By the Lord’s grace he carried the memory of that whole chain of births, and with it the fear of falling one more time through some fresh affection. So he wrapped himself in the look of a madman. From birth he seemed dull, almost inert. He spoke to no one, answered no one’s questions, entered no quarrel. His mother and father took the boy to be feeble-minded.

People began to call him Jadabharata: that mute, sluggish Bharata.

He kept the awareness within him hidden by deliberate choice, so that no one would pay him honor and no new bond would form, all the while holding his mind fast to the feet of Shri Hari.

His father, though, loved the child and would not give up on him. He performed for the boy every samskara in its turn, up to the return from a teacher’s house, gave him the sacred thread, and set himself to teach him cleanliness, the daily disciplines, and the Vedas. But whatever the father taught, the boy did backwards, there in front of his eyes. In four full months the father managed to lodge in him only the Gayatri, and even that came out broken and out of tune. Before he could see his son grow into a learned man, death took the brahmin quietly in his own home. His younger wife gave the twins into the care of the elder co-wife and followed her husband onto his pyre.

His half-brothers knew nothing of what lived inside him. They held the three Vedas of ritual to be the whole of knowledge, judged the boy a dunce, and let his lessons drop. They set him to mending the ridges of the fields, having decided he was good for nothing else.

He would lie at the edge of some field, or out in the forest, keeping nothing, storing nothing. Broken rice, oil-cake, husk, the charred scrapings from the bottom of a pot, whatever dry scrap came his way, he ate it like amrita, and stayed sunk within in Shri Hari. Through cold, heat, rain, and storm he lay out bare like a bull, his sacred thread black with dirt, and his brahmic radiance stayed hidden like a precious gem buried in dust. Men who could not see his worth called him a dwija in mockery, a brahmin in name only.

It was while he lay one night guarding a field, watching for deer and boar from a little shed raised above the crop, that death came looking for him a second time. In a settlement not far off, the chief of a band of robbers had set his heart on a son, and to buy one he meant to give the goddess Bhadra Kali the life of a man. The victim he had marked out slipped his guard in the dark and fled, and the chief’s men, beating the countryside for the runaway, came instead upon Jadabharata at his post.

Here was a grown man, whole and unblemished in every limb, exactly what their rite required. Certain now that their master would have his wish, they bound the sage with a rope and led him off, well satisfied, to the shrine of the goddess Chandika.

There they made him ready in their own fashion. They bathed him, wrapped him in fresh cloth, hung ornaments and a garland on him, marked his forehead and smeared him with sandal, and fed him well. Then they set him down before the image of Bhadra Kali with his head bowed, laid out with every observance their custom kept for an animal offering, with incense and lamps and flowers and parched grain, with drums of clay and wood, and loud singing all around him.

The robber who served the chief as priest lifted a sword, terrible and keen, consecrated with a mantra to Bhadra Kali, meaning to slake the goddess with the hot blood of a man. Through all of it Jadabharata sat unmoved. He had become one with the deathless Self; he wished no creature harm and counted every living thing a friend, and he did not so much as flinch as the blade came up.

The sword never fell. That these men, drunk on the pride of their plunder, should dare to butcher a brahmin who had become one with the Infinite was a thing the goddess would not bear. Out of her own image Bhadra Kali broke forth in the flesh, her body a terror to look on, blazing with the very brahmic fire of the man they had meant to kill.

Her brows arched, her eyes rolled red, her face swelled into a thing that might have ended the world. She laughed one huge and dreadful laugh, sprang down from the altar, and with the same sword they had whetted for the sage struck the heads from the robbers one after another. The hot blood ran from their necks and she drank it, she and her train together, and drunk on it she sang and danced and tossed their severed heads about like balls.

A blow lifted against a soul who has taken shelter at the feet of the Lord comes back, whole and entire, upon the one who lifts it.

Jadabharata rose from that altar untouched and went back to his fields and his silence as though nothing had passed. And so he lived on, season after season, a bull of a man in a dirty rag, content to let the world think him an idiot, until the day the palanquin-bearers of Rahugana, king of Sindhu and Sauvira, came up one man short by the Ikshumati river and yoked this dull-seeming laborer under their load. In what passed over that palanquin, Jadabharata’s true form was at last to come to light. But that, Rajan, is the next katha.