Before you begin
Seven days earlier, a king had sat down on this bank of the Ganga to fast, to listen, and to die. Over those seven days, from the mouth of that muni who felt the whole moving and unmoving world as his own atman and looked on every creature, king or serpent, with an equal eye, the entire Bhagavata had come down onto this ground. Now the light of the seventh evening lay long across the water. Vyasa’s son, Shri Shukadeva, who had walked to this bank unsent and unasked, had reached the last thread of the katha. And at the very end he turned to the one thing the king most needed to carry across the threshold that was now only hours away, and he gave it to him plainly.
“Give up, king, that notion fit for a brute, the notion that you are going to die. A body is born at its hour out of what did not exist a moment before, and having been born it perishes. You are not that. You were never born the way the body was born, and you will not die the way it dies, nor will you rise again and again the way a tree rises from a seed and a new seed from the tree. You stand as separate from all of it as fire stands from the wood it feeds on. In a dream a man may watch his own head struck from his shoulders and wake with it still on him, because the one who watched the beheading was never the one beheaded. In that same way a person looks on at the death of his body, while the one who is looking, the atman, remains beyond killing and birth. When a clay pot breaks, the space that was held inside it does not break with the clay; it is the same open sky it always was. So it is when the body falls away. The self that has come to know itself stands one with Brahman, exactly as it stood before.”
“A lamp holds its flame only so long as oil and vessel and wick and fire stay together. Let one of them fail and the light is gone, though fire itself has not died. By the turning of the three gunas a body rises and ceases, and the whole wheel of birth and death turns on a single mistake, the taking of the body for the self. Pull that root up. The atman is self-luminous, past the gross body and the subtle one alike, the support of all that is, unmoving, everywhere at once, without end, and matchless as the sky. Rest your mind on Lord Vasudeva. Know that you yourself are Brahman, the ground on which everything stands and the goal toward which everything moves, and Takshaka’s fangs, your body, and this whole universe will cease to appear anywhere apart from you. Sent though he is by a Brahmin’s curse, the serpent has no power to burn the one who knows this. I have told you all of it now, everything you asked me of Shri Hari, the Soul of the world. What more would you have me say?”
When he had spoken, the gathering went quiet along the whole bank, and in it there was only the sound of the water.
Parikshit, the rajarshi who had taken refuge in Bhagavan and was kept safe by him alone, had listened to that whole teaching with deep attention. His life itself had been the Lord’s gift. While he still lay in his mother’s womb, the fire of the brahmastra had come hunting him there, and the unborn child had watched a Being the size of a thumb, clad in yellow robes that shone like lightning, circle him with a blazing mace and put that fire out. He grew up searching every face he met for the One he had seen then, and for that searching the world named him Parikshit. Now, at the end of a search that had begun before his birth, he bowed his head slowly, slid a little forward on his seat to come nearer the feet of the great muni, joined his palms, and spoke.
“Bhagavan, you are compassion given a body. In your supreme grace you have described for me the form and the lilas of Shri Hari, the true Lord who is beginningless, endless, and one unchanging essence. By your grace I am now wholly blessed, and all that I was ever born to do stands done.”
Shukadeva looked at him and said nothing. Parikshit went on.
“The creatures of the world are empty of the knowledge of their own good and of the truth that lies beyond it, great muni, and they burn in a wildfire of sorrows of every kind. That mahatmas like you, steeped in Bhagavan, should show them grace is nothing new and nothing to wonder at. For those like you it is only natural. But what happened with me, how am I to speak of it? A man with seven days left asked you a question, and at every step of your answer you told me the lilas of the very One in whose singing the great atmarama munis, content within themselves, lose themselves.”
“Bhagavan, you have brought me face to face with that fearless ground, the oneness of Brahman and the atman. I stand established now in that very Brahman whose nature is the highest peace. And I have no fear left of Takshaka, nor of any other instrument death may choose to send, nor even of deaths arriving in rank upon rank. I have become free of fear itself.”
“Now give me your leave. Let me close my speech. Let me fall silent. And whatever small residues of desire still lie crouched somewhere within me, let me wipe those away too, dissolve this mind of mine past the senses into that Paramatman, and release my life-breath into it. I have come to rest in the knowledge and the realization you have given me, great muni. My ignorance is destroyed at the root. You have granted me the darshan of the Lord’s supremely blessed form.”
Shukadeva stayed silent a while, and the river filled the silence. Then he gave the king the leave for which Parikshit had joined his palms, the leave to let everything go.
Vyasa’s son Shukadeva rose. The renunciant mahatmas seated all around, the mendicants, King Parikshit, every one of them bowed to him and honored him. And just as he had come, without any show, without a farewell, he rose with those mendicants and walked away. He had stayed seven days in one place for the sake of one dying listener, and now the feet that had once come to rest on this bank turned back toward the open road.
The king watched him go. Then his eyes turned back inward.
Parikshit now sat alone. The outward guru had gone, and every external support had fallen away. And in that very aloneness he did the thing he had been hearing about for seven days. By his own atman he joined his own inner being to the contemplation of that Paramatman, and sank into meditation.
His body stayed seated there. On the bank of the Ganga he had already spread kusha grass, the sharp sacred grass of every rite, its tips pointing east, and had sat down on it facing north, toward the one star in the sky that never moves, the star that had once been a boy named Dhruva in a katha he had heard on this very bank. Attachment and doubt had fallen away long before. Now he grew so still in the oneness of Brahman and the atman that even his breathing came to rest. To anyone watching from nearby he seemed a dry stump of a tree, motionless and breathless. The light that burned within him was visible to no one outside.
The row of rishis was silent. The air itself seemed to have stopped moving. On the whole bank there was only that one seated figure and the ceaseless flowing sound of the water.
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Meanwhile, out on the road, another creature was moving toward its destination.
Takshaka. King of the serpents, whose venom carried fire in it. The seven days were almost run, and he was on his way to bite King Parikshit, sent by a curse a boy had spoken. Shringi was that boy, the young son of the sage Samika. He had learned how the king, hunting and half dead with thirst, had come upon his father sunk so deep in meditation that no word could reach him, and how, stung by that silence, the king had lifted a dead snake on the tip of his bow and hung it about the old sage’s shoulders. In a child’s flash of fury Shringi had called down doom on the crowned head of the age: that on the seventh day from then, Takshaka would come and bite him. Samika had grieved to hear what his son had loosed upon the world, a king’s death for a moment’s discourtesy. The king had only bowed his head, taken the curse as the Lord’s own hand, given up his throne on the spot, and come to this bank to fast and to listen. Now the seventh day had nearly burned down to its end, and the serpent the curse had named was on the road.
On the road he met a Brahmin named Kashyapa. This Brahmin was highly skilled in the treatment of snake venom, skilled enough to draw even a naga king’s fire out of living flesh. He too was heading for the river, with the thought that once the king was bitten he would undo the poison by his art and earn a reward worthy of saving an emperor.
Takshaka stopped short. He recognized this Brahmin, and understood in the same breath what this Brahmin’s art could do to a curse. Then he did something no snake would do, the move of a cunning courtier. He offered Kashyapa a great heap of wealth and, coaxing him with sweet words, turned him back from there, never letting him come within sight of the king at all. The one man who could have drawn the poison out took the wealth and turned down his own road.
Now no one was left between Takshaka and the king.
Takshaka could take any form he wished. He hid his hoods and his coils and put on the guise of a Brahmin, one more pilgrim among the many drawn to a king’s last hours. In this disguise, blending in with the others, he reached the very bank where the king sat in meditation.
The king knew nothing of it. And had he known, what difference would it have made now. Long before Takshaka’s bite, Parikshit was already established in Brahman. The one who had dwelt in the body that was to be bitten had gone beyond it long ago, out past the reach of any fang in the three worlds.
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Then came the hour for which the seven days had been counted.
Takshaka bit the king.
The fire of the venom in his fangs spread through Parikshit’s body in an instant. And before the eyes of all, right there on the bank, the body of that rajarshi who had become one with Brahman blazed up and burned at once to ash. There was no pyre to build, no procession, no farewell. What had once been the body of an emperor of the whole earth was a handful of ash on the seat of kusha grass.
But the one who sat within, this fire could not so much as touch him.
For he had already gone where no poison reaches. Shukadeva’s word held to the letter: the king had not so much as seen the serpent at his feet. The question he had cried out seven days before, asking what a dying man should hear and what he should do, had now become its own answer in the hour of his own end. His mind rested wholly upon Bhagavan, not a single grain of it anywhere else, and with that resting mind Parikshit attained the supreme goal.
Takshaka was only a door, the door the king had always been going to pass through; the serpent had never truly done the killing, and which door it happened to be, fang or fire or fever, had by now stopped being any question for the king.
On the earth, in the sky, and in every direction at once, a cry of “haay, haay” went up together. What broke from every throat was wonder, the gasp that escapes unbidden at the sight of a passing like this one, a king burning to ash with no flicker of fear on his stilled face, and there was no grief in it for the king. Gods, asuras, and human beings, every one of them, stood struck dumb at the sight of Parikshit’s going.
Then in the sky the drums of the gods sounded of their own accord, though no hand had struck them. The gandharvas and apsaras began to sing. And the gods, crying “sadhu, sadhu,” rained down flowers from above, onto the ash and onto the moving water.
When the news reached King Janamejaya at Hastinapura that Takshaka had bitten his father and burned him to ash where he sat, the young king’s heart filled with rage.
Janamejaya was wise and he was brave, yet this shape of his father’s death, a hermit’s death on a riverbank, poison in place of old age, was more than he could bear. Together with the Brahmins he began, by the proper rites, a snake sacrifice, a yajna in which every serpent in the world would be drawn as an offering into the fire pit and burned to ash.
The fire of the yajna was kindled. The mantras of the Brahmins began to resound, and by the power of those mantras great serpents were dragged in through the air one after another, against their will and against their weight, and fell into the pit and began to burn to ash.
Takshaka saw this. He saw the great serpents of the earth burning to ash one by one in the blazing fire of Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice. Then that same Takshaka, whose fangs’ fire had reduced a king to ash, began to shake with fear himself, and fled to hide in the refuge of Indra, king of the gods.
Many snakes had burned to ash, but Takshaka did not come. Janamejaya asked the Brahmins, “Why has this Takshaka, the vilest of them all, still not fallen into the fire pit?” The Brahmins said, “Rajan, at this moment Takshaka has gone and seated himself in Indra’s refuge, and Indra himself is protecting him. It is he who holds Takshaka back, and that is why he does not fall into the pit.”
Hearing this, Janamejaya told the Brahmins to drag Takshaka into the fire along with Indra himself. If heaven chose to stand between his father’s killer and the flames, heaven could come too. The Brahmins added Indra’s name to the mantra. The pulling power of that mantra was such that Indra was shaken loose from his own seat in the world of the gods. Seated in his vimana, Indra grew alarmed along with Takshaka, and his vimana began to spin in the sky. Still holding on to Takshaka, Indra, king of heaven and wielder of the thunderbolt, began himself to be dragged down toward the fire pit.
Just then Brihaspati, son of Angira, saw Indra, king of the gods, coming down out of the heavens with his vimana and Takshaka toward the fire pit. The guru of the gods, the teacher whose word even heaven weighs before acting, came to King Janamejaya and spoke.
“Narendra, to kill Takshaka, the king of serpents, is no work worthy of you. He has drunk the amrita, the deathless nectar of the gods, and so he is beyond aging and beyond death. And hear a greater thing than this, Rajan. The creatures of the world live, die, and find their course after death, each one according to his own karma. There is no giver of joy or sorrow to anyone other than karma itself.”
Janamejaya was listening, and somewhere inside him that fire which had blazed up for his father was still hunting for something it could fall upon and call justice.
“Rajan, to the eye the death of many a man seems to come through a snake, a thief, fire, lightning, hunger and thirst, disease, through no end of such instruments. But all of these are only ways of speaking. In truth every creature reaps only its own prarabdha karma, the harvest its own past has already set growing. Takshaka was only the instrument, the pretext by which your father was to go where he has gone.”
“So, Rajan, bring this sorcery-sacrifice to an end. You have burned many an innocent serpent, creatures that never came near your father. The fruit of this yajna is the killing of living beings and nothing more. Every creature in the world is reaping only its own prarabdha, and no stain of blame settles on you either. Your father has crossed to the far shore. There is no road in this fire that can bring him back from there.”
Brihaspati’s words sank into Janamejaya. The fire that had blazed up for his father came to see that it could bring no one back, that it would only go on burning snakes that had never harmed him. He honored the great rishi’s words and said, “Your command is upon my head.” And he stopped the snake sacrifice then and there, and honored Brihaspati, guru of the gods, with all the worship the rites prescribe.
The fire in the pit slowly settled. Indra’s vimana righted itself in the sky and turned back toward heaven, Takshaka slipped away safe in its shadow, and on the earth below, the ash left in the pit began to cool.
The very Takshaka whose name had been used to hold the fear of death over a king for seven days now shook with fear himself and went to hide behind Indra. And the king his venom had come to bite had gone free of all fear, having dissolved his own life-breath into the Paramatman by the strength of his own stilled mind. Beside whom fear stayed seated to the end, and from beside whom it rose and left forever, was written there in the cooling ash of that sacrifice.
Literary context
Shukadeva’s final teaching, that the Self is deathless and the body a passing thing, fills the fifth chapter of the twelfth Skandha of the Shrimad Bhagavata. Parikshit’s supreme passing, Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice, and Brihaspati’s counsel follow in the sixth. Together these two chapters bring the Shukadeva and Parikshit dialogue, and with it the inner narrative thread of the entire text, to its close, on the same riverbank where it opened. Shukadeva’s word that the one who knows himself as Brahman will not even see Takshaka’s fangs at his feet (12.5.11-12), Parikshit seating himself on the kusha grass facing north and holding even his breath still until he comes to rest in Brahman (12.6.10), and Brihaspati’s teaching that none but one’s own karma is the giver of joy or sorrow (12.6.25), are the heart of these two chapters.