Bhagavatam · The Long Sleep of Muchukunda

The evening wind on the Ganga had gone still. Parikshit looked toward the muni Shukadeva and said, very softly, “Bhagavan, my days are numbered now, and my nights pass without sleep. I keep asking myself where all this running of so many lifetimes finally comes to rest. Was there ever a man who grew tired and asked for nothing but rest, and found Shri Hari inside that very rest?”

A faint smile came into Shukadeva’s eyes, as though some very old, very dear memory had returned to him.

“Rajan, there was a king, Muchukunda. Son of the emperor Mandhata, himself the son of Yuvanashva, and the pride of the Ikshvaku line of the sun. True to his word, unbeaten in battle, and a great devotee of the brahmanas. At the close of his life he asked for one thing that no other king had ever asked before him. But listen, without knowing what kind of weariness lay behind that request, you will never taste his liberation.”

It was the Satya-yuga then. Between the devas and the asuras ran an unbroken chain of wars, one dying down as another lifted its head. Once Indra and the other devas grew terrified of the asuras, and to save themselves they came to Muchukunda’s door, because there were boons that only the strength of a mortal’s arm could cut through.

“O Rajan,” they said, “take up the command of our army. You alone can hold these asuras back.”

Muchukunda bowed his head and mounted the chariot. He left behind his kingdom, safe and without a rival, left his queens, his sons, every comfort of the throne, and fought on the side of the devas for a very, very long time, long even on the scale of an age.

Then one day the devas found their commander in Kartikeya, the son of Shiva whom they call Guha, and the strength of the asuras began to break. That day Muchukunda’s chariot came to a halt, and once it halted, his heart had no wish to move it again.

The devas came before him. “O crown of warriors, rest now. You bore great toil and hardship in our defense, you gave up even your kingdom. Your sons, your queens, your kinsmen, your ministers, and all the people of your time have long since passed into the jaws of Kala. The Time-Spirit is mightier than the mighty, Rajan, and drives created beings before him the way a herdsman drives his herd. Ask us for anything you wish except kaivalya, the moksha of final release, for the power to grant moksha rests in the imperishable Bhagavan Vishnu alone.”

Muchukunda was silent a moment. This was the king who had broken the ranks of asura armies with a single war cry, whose bowstring’s twang had made the hearts of the danavas shudder. Now, with the whole treasure of creation lying open before him, his greatest wish was of another kind altogether. The weight of thousands of years of fighting had settled into his bones. Sleep had stolen the strength of all his senses and left them useless. His eyes were heavy, as though someone had packed the dust of ages into them.

“I need only one thing, deva.”

“Say it, Rajan.”

“Let me sleep. To my heart’s content, with no one calling me.”

The devas stopped short. A king before whom the boons of all three worlds stood with folded hands, and he was asking for sleep. “Sleep? Nothing more?”

“What else would I want? My eyelids are falling under their own weight. I have seen the pleasure of being called a god among men, I have seen kingship, I have seen my wars. Those I called my own, Kala carried off, and I never even got the news. I have no wish now to hear the call of any of it. Only one long, deep sleep, where no one wakes me.”

The devas granted the boon, and added, “So be it, Rajan. And hear this, while you sleep, if some fool thoughtlessly wakes you in the middle, the instant your gaze falls on him he will be burned to ashes.”

Muchukunda went down into a lonely cave on a mountain far from any people. The light of the outside world fell away behind him, and within was a cold, thick silence in which there was only the sound of his own breath. There he lay down, and the moment his eyelids closed it was as if some entire age had been drawn over him like a blanket.

He slept on. In the world above, days and nights came and went, the seasons turned, but inside the cave time did not move.

The Satya-yuga passed, the Treta came and went, the Dvapara too began to wane. The names of mountains changed, cities were settled and then laid waste. Muchukunda’s eyelid did not so much as stir.

Meanwhile, at the far end of the Dvapara, Shri Hari had come down into the Yadu line at Mathura and was moving through his lila in the body of Krishna. He had already killed the tyrant Kamsa and set the old king Ugrasena back on his throne. But a killing has its consequences, and this one reached all the way into Magadha.

Kamsa’s two widowed queens, Asti and Prapti, went home to their father, and their father was Jarasandha, emperor of Magadha, the most feared arm on the earth in that age. He heard how his son-in-law had died, and grief in him hardened into a cold vow: he would wipe the Yadavas from the face of the world. He raised an army of twenty-three akshauhinis, a whole ocean of foot and horse and elephant and chariot, and threw it around Mathura on every side.

Krishna and Balarama went out to meet him, and the ocean broke against them. Balarama caught Jarasandha up in his arms the way one lion takes another, and could have finished him then. Krishna stayed his brother’s hand. Kill this one man now, he reasoned, and the evil coiled inside him would only scatter across the earth and grow again under a hundred smaller names. Let him live, and he will keep gathering that evil into one place, army after army, until the whole weight of it can be lifted at once. So Jarasandha was let go, and he went back to Magadha in shame, and he came again.

He came seventeen times. Seventeen times he wound twenty-three akshauhinis around Mathura, and seventeen times the Yadavas, shielded by Krishna, ground his host to nothing and let him walk away with his life. The people of Mathura had learned to live with siege the way a coast learns to live with storms.

The eighteenth was still gathering when a stranger threat came out of the west. There was a yavana king named Kalayavana, a barbarian sovereign with no rival among men, drunk on the pride of his own strength. The sage Narada, whose errands are never simple, had come to him and named the mightiest warriors on earth, the Yadavas, as men fit to stand against him, and for such a man that was provocation enough. He marched on Mathura at the head of thirty million mlechchhas and shut the city in.

Krishna weighed it and saw the trap closing from two sides at once. Kalayavana was at the wall today; Jarasandha would be at it tomorrow, or the day after. If both armies caught the Yadavas in the open together, his kinsmen would be cut down or dragged off to Magadha in chains. So before he answered the barbarian at all, he moved to set his people beyond reach. He had Vishvakarma, the architect of the gods, raise a fortress in the western sea, and inside it a city twelve yojanas across, a marvel of streets and quadrangles and gardens of celestial trees, gateways of crystal, domes of gold that touched the sky, floors of emerald. Indra sent down his own hall of assembly, the Sudharma, and the Parijata tree; Varuna sent white horses swift as thought; Kubera sent his eight treasures. Then, by the power of his yoga, Krishna carried every soul of Mathura across the water into that sea-girt city. Men would come to call it Dwaraka. With his people safe behind its walls, he turned back alone to deal with the barbarian at the gate.

Shri Krishna came out through the city’s main gate on foot, carrying no weapon at all, a garland of lotuses swaying at his chest. His dark body was as lovely to behold as the moon rising in the east, and over it the sheen of silken pitambara was a thing apart. On his chest the mark of Shrivatsa, at his throat the blaze of the Kaustubha gem, four long arms, and eyes soft and red at the corners like lotuses freshly opened. In his ears the makara-shaped earrings glinted.

The instant he saw him, a certainty settled inside Kalayavana. “This man is Vasudeva. Every sign Narada named, the Shrivatsa on the chest, the four arms, the lotus eyes, the vanamala at the throat, and beauty carried to its very limit, all of it meets in him. And look, he comes on foot without any weapon. Then I too will fight him without a weapon.” Thinking this, he ran after Krishna.

Krishna, at his lila, kept running ahead as if in great fear. This fleeing of the field was itself a lila, for he had to choose another’s hand for the killing of Kalayavana. The Lord whom even yogis find hard to reach, Kalayavana kept believing at every step that now he had him, now. Yet that hand always stayed one stride ahead. In this way he drew Kalayavana far off, all the way to a cave in a lonely mountain.

As he ran, Kalayavana now and then flung a taunt from behind, “Ho there, brother! You were born in the far-famed Yadu line, and this fleeing of the fight does not become you.” But his evil was not yet full, and so he could not lay hold of Krishna.

Krishna went inside the cave of that mountain and took his place in the darkness of one corner.

Panting, Kalayavana pushed into the cave after him. Within was a thick darkness. There he saw a different man altogether, sunk in deep sleep.

Seeing him, Kalayavana’s mind flared with irritation. “Look at this, he has dragged me all this way, and now he lies here playing the holy man asleep, as if he knew nothing at all!”

His chest was working like a bellows, drops of sweat on his brow, and his throat had gone dry with rage. He poured all his contempt into a single kick. His foot came down on the body of the sleeping king.

The sleep of thousands of years, which had run from the Satya-yuga to the end of the Dvapara in one single turn, trembled at that one jolt.

First something moved beneath the eyelids. Then Muchukunda’s chest drew a long, quivering breath, the first full breath after ages. The fingers of his hand slowly opened. Into the cave’s thick silence, where until now there had been only the sound of his own breath, there had crept the panting breath of a stranger and the smell of sweat. Muchukunda did not yet even rightly remember who he was, where he was. Only this much rose from within, someone was here, someone touched me, someone dared to break this endless sleep of mine.

Very slowly he opened his eyes. His eyelids were set fast with the ages, like the leaves of a door shut for years swinging open. And after ages his first gaze, still half open, still recognizing nothing, fell on Kalayavana standing beside him.

For one instant nothing happened. Then fire broke out from inside Kalayavana’s own body. No weapon, no flame came from outside, all the pride of his strength, all his arrogance, began to burn within his own flesh. His mouth stayed open, not even a scream came out, and in a moment he was a single heap of ash. A sharp, burnt smell filled the cave, and then the same old silence returned.

Muchukunda started up, sitting bolt upright. “What has happened here?”

Then the memory of ages returned, that boon given by the devas, that whoever woke him in the middle of his sleep would be burned to ashes the instant his gaze fell on him.

He stood and looked all around in the darkness of the cave.

In one corner stood a youth. Dark like a monsoon cloud, the Shrivatsa on his chest and the Kaustubha gem at his throat scattering their light, four arms, and to one side a Vaijayanti garland swaying down to his knees. His lotus face was open with a great gladness, on his lips a loving smile, and in the look of his eyes such tenderness that the cave’s thick darkness was melting of itself before the radiance of that face, the way a lamp set in the dark drives it away.

Muchukunda was a man of great intelligence and steadiness, and even so, seeing that form of light he was struck with wonder, dazzled somewhat by its brilliance. For a long while he could not even look that way. Then, trembling, he asked.

“Who are you? In this fierce forest full of thorns, in this mountain cave, why do you walk on feet soft as lotuses? Surely you are the embodied splendor of all the splendid, or Agni himself? Or are you the sun, the moon, Indra king of the devas, or some other guardian of the worlds? I believe you are one of the three, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shankara, the Purushottama, for as a lamp takes away the dark, so with the light of your body you drive the darkness from this cave, and from my mind as well. We are kshatriyas of the Ikshvaku line, and I am sprung from Mandhata, called Muchukunda. Tell us, if it please you, of your birth and your deeds and your name.”

That youth answered in a voice deep as a cloud, laughing as he spoke. “Rajan, my births, my deeds, and my names are in the thousands, without end, so many that even I cannot count them. A man might sooner count the grains of dust on the earth than reckon them all. But in this birth, prayed for long ago by Brahma to lift the burden of the earth and to end the demons who had become its weight, I have taken avatar in the Yadu line, in the house of Vasudeva. People call me Vasudeva. Until now I have slain Kalanemi, who was born as Kamsa, and Pralamba, and many another asura who hated the good. And this was Kalayavana, who at my own prompting was burned to ash the moment your keen gaze fell on him.”

“It is to show you grace that I have come into this cave. You worshipped me greatly long ago, and I am bhakta-vatsala, tender toward those who love me. Ask, Rajan, ask whatever your heart desires. For one who comes into my refuge, nothing is ever left to grieve over.”

Within Muchukunda the words of old Garga, the elder, heard ages before, woke again, that in the twenty-eighth turn of the Dvapara Bhagavan Narayana himself would come down into the Yadu line, and that Muchukunda would be given the rare grace of seeing him and speaking with him. He knew now that this was he. His hands joined of themselves, and his eyes brimmed. But when he opened his mouth to ask, in place of words there first flowed out an old wound.

“Prabhu! I was a king, gone drunk on the fortune of my throne. I took this dying body itself for my true self, and stayed caught in greed and delusion for prince, queen, treasure, and land. Ringed by the fourfold army of chariots, elephants, horses, and foot, I roamed here and there over the earth, hailed as a god among men, and all the while I had forgotten that you were Time itself, standing behind me. As a snake, its tongue flickering with hunger, seizes a careless mouse, so did Kala carry off heedless me in a single turn. The very body I preened over was one day to be left as worms, dung, and ash. My six enemies, the five senses and the one mind, never once fell quiet, and the thirst for their objects grew by day and by night. Not for a single moment did I find peace.”

“This is how it goes, Prabhu, for the creature blinded by your maya. He will not turn to you. He clings to a house that is a well of misery and calls it his happiness, like a beast that has fallen into a pit grown over with grass and cannot climb back out. Only when the long round of births and deaths is nearly run does he stumble at last into the company of the holy, and only there, in that company, does love for you finally take root. Giver of refuge! Now I have come to the shelter of your lotus feet, which are without fear, without death, without grief. Sole lord of all the worlds! Paramatman! Protect me, who have surrendered to you.”

Krishna smiled again. “Sovereign among kings! Your mind, your resolve, is pure and of the highest order. See, I held out to you again and again the lure of a boon, and still your intelligence did not fall under the sway of desire. This is the very mark of those who love me and nothing else, that their minds cannot be turned by the world’s enjoyments, however sweet they look. Other men may throttle the mind with breath and hard discipline, and still it breaks loose again, because the thirst beneath it was never quenched. Yours is quenched.”

He stepped forward and laid his hand on Muchukunda’s head. In that touch the weariness of ages seemed to melt and flow away.

“Now fix your mind on me and wander the earth as you please. My pure bhakti will stay in you always. The many creatures you killed in the hunt and elsewhere while keeping to a kshatriya’s dharma, wash that sin away now with tapas, worshipping me with a mind held to one point. Then in your very next birth you will be a brahmana, a true friend and well-wisher of every creature, and then you will attain me, the pure Paramatma who is awareness solid and entire.”

Muchukunda walked around Bhagavan in reverence, bowed to him, and came out of the cave, into the sunlight for the first time after ages.

His body was the same, but every single thing outside had changed. Men, animals, creepers, and trees had all grown much smaller than before. From this he understood that the Kali-yuga had come. And still there was in his heart no complaint, no unrest, only one unshakable peace. He set off toward the north, on the road to the Gandhamadana mountain, where the Badarikashrama of Nara-Narayana stood, and there, doing tapas in quietness, his mind at rest in that same Shri Hari, he went on toward the one whose darshan had been waiting for him on the far side of his sleep.