Bhagavatam · The Prachetas

Dusk was settling over the bank of the Ganga. Parikshit looked out at the water, where the light lay trembling, and turned to Shukadeva.

“Bhagavan, yesterday you told me of Puranjana, the city with nine gates. I heard it, and lay awake all night with the thought that the body will be left behind in any case. But one question stays with me. When a bhakta calls on Bhagavan with no desire at all, wanting only darshan, what does Bhagavan give him? And after that darshan, what use remains for whatever is left of that bhakta’s life?”

Shukadeva was silent a while. Then he said, “Rajan, I will answer you with the story of ten brothers. They stood in the water at the edge of the sea, and they asked for nothing. Listen.”

There was a king named Prachinabarhi, who had strewn the whole earth with eastward-pointing blades of sacred grass and taken his name from it. Through his queen Satadruti, a daughter of the god who presides over the ocean, ten sons were born to him, and the world knew them by one name, the Prachetas. They were of one mind in all things, all ten schooled in the same code of conduct, and they moved through their days like a single hand with ten fingers.

One day their father called them near. “The line must go forward; children must be born. But before any of that, find the Lord. Without his grace no creation ever holds.”

The ten brothers bowed their heads and set out toward the west, their minds already fixed on the austerity to come. After a long way they came upon a lake so wide it seemed a sea, its water clear as the mind of a settled soul, its surface bright with lilies and lotuses and loud with swans and cranes. There they walked into the water and stood, all ten together, giving up even food.

And the tapas began.

They slowed the breath, fixed the mind on a single point, and closed their eyes.

Days passed, then months, then years.

They went hungry. Their bodies dried until the skin drew tight over bone, and their matted hair grew down to their shoulders. And no one so much as opened an eyelid.

Then a radiance spread over that lonely water, bright as molten gold, and out of the lake itself Lord Shiva rose, his whole retinue about him. His throat was dark, the line of the moon lay on his brow, three eyes were open in his face, and in those eyes was the compassion that steadies even the dissolution of worlds. Gandharvas and Kinnaras came singing his glory as he came.

The ten brothers opened their eyes, trembled to find him before them, and laid their foreheads on the ground.

Shiva looked on them with a father’s tenderness. “You are the sons of Vedisad,” he said, “and I know the errand your father set you. I have not come on any errand of my own. I have come only to pour my grace on you, for there is no one dearer to me than the soul who has taken refuge, plainly and wholly, in Lord Vasudeva. The man who keeps to his own duty may climb, life after life, as high as the seat of Brahma. The man who gives himself entirely to the Lord goes straight, the moment the body falls, to the abode beyond all matter, the abode that even I, as Rudra, reach only when my term of office ends. You are already his; that is why you are mine.”

“Hear this hymn,” he went on. “It is holy, and it carries whoever keeps it all the way to the far shore.” And there, in the echo of the water, he sang the praise of Shri Hari, the song that men would afterward call the Rudra Gita.

He sang the Lord under name after name, form after form. He bowed to Vasudeva, from whose navel the lotus of the worlds had opened; to Sankarshana, who swallows the universe in fire at the end of things; to Pradyumna, from whom all knowledge flows; to Aniruddha, who governs the mind. He hailed that same Lord as the sun that lights every quarter, as the fire that carries every offering, as the moon that feeds the gods and the fathers, as the water that quenches all that breathes, as the earth that bears every body, as the wind that holds the three worlds together, as the very ether in which sound and space are born. He praised him as Krishna, the most ancient Person, lord of both the path of knowledge and the path of action. And on the brothers’ behalf he begged for the one thing worth begging: a sight of that dark and gracious form, and the company of those whose sins have been washed away in the stream of the Lord’s story, people who carry no likes and no dislikes and no fear of any creature at all. “Let that be your gift to us,” he sang.

“Keep repeating it,” Shiva told them, “with a still mind and your work laid at his feet. Brahma himself gave this hymn to me and to my brothers at the first dawn of creation, and it was by this hymn that we threw off our ignorance and were able to bring the worlds to birth. When the time ripens, the very Lord whose praise I sing will stand before you in person.” With that, Shiva vanished on the spot, and the brothers stood gazing at the water where he had been.

The Prachetas set the hymn in their hearts and closed their eyes once more. This time their lips kept moving, slow and steady, on the name of Shri Hari. Ten thousand years passed this way, the ten of them standing motionless in the water while the world turned on without them.

And one day, from beyond that long silence, a voice came.

The ten opened their eyes. Before them stood Shri Hari, the one whose name they had carried through ten thousand years. He rode on the shoulders of Garuda like a dark cloud settled on a peak of gold, robed in yellow, the Kaustubha gem at his throat throwing back the light. Eight long arms circled him, a weapon living in every hand, and among those arms swayed a forest garland whose splendor rivaled Lakshmi’s own. On his face was the tender smile that gives the weary their rest.

Their eyes brimmed over. One brother said in a shaking voice, “Prabhu. You have truly come.”

“Ask,” said Shri Hari, and his merciful gaze went over them all. “Your love for one another has pleased me, this vow you have kept as one. Choose any boon you like.” And before they could speak, he began to grant. “Whoever calls you to mind at dusk will love his brothers as his own self and wish every living thing well. Whoever praises me at morning and evening with the hymn Rudra taught you will have a clear and shining mind, and whatever his heart holds besides. And because you took up your father’s charge with a glad heart, your fame will travel through all the worlds. A son will be born to you who will not fall short of Brahma himself, and his children will fill the three worlds.”

The ten brothers looked at one another. No desire for themselves stirred in any of them, yet all folded their palms and said, “Prabhu, your pleasure is everything to us; past it we want nothing. When the tree of paradise stands within reach, what bee goes hunting elsewhere? Still, one boon we do ask. For as long as your maya keeps us wandering this world under our own karma, birth after birth let us keep the company of your loving bhaktas. In their midst your stories are sung and the thirst for pleasure dies, and no fear of any creature is left in the heart. Give us that much, and it is enough.”

Shri Hari smiled. “So be it. The love you hold for one another, and this affection you bear me, please me greatly. Now finish the charge your father laid on you. Taste the pleasures of earth and of heaven, carry your line forward through children, and keep me in your talk and your work. A house where every act is offered to me and every hour is spent in speaking of me is no bondage at all. And at the last, when steady love of me has burned every craving out of your hearts, you will turn from these pleasures of your own accord and rise to my supreme abode.” The brothers’ eyes had not had their fill of him, and they did not want him to go; but he said again, “Be it so,” and returned to his own abode.

The ten brothers came up out of the water, and could not recognize the world outside.

In ten thousand years of samadhi they had never felt how the time passed. Trees had risen so tall and so thick over the whole earth that they seemed to be barring the road to heaven itself, and no ray of sun reached the ground. Forest in every direction, and beneath the forest, a hidden earth.

No room was left for people to settle, no open ground for a plow.

The Prachetas remembered the charge their father had given. In forest this dense there could be no settling, no raising of children. Anger rose in them, the gathered heat of thousands of years of tapas, and like Kalagnirudra at the dissolution of the worlds they turned it loose.

From one mouth they released fire, from another a furious wind. Fire and wind together fell upon the trees. The crack of splitting wood, the smell of scorching leaves, and a curtain of smoke spread to every horizon.

The forest went up in flame.

Then through that smoke a cool light came down, and Soma, the moon, king of every herb and tree, stood before them. It was his own realm the brothers were burning, this green world he had nursed since it first drew breath.

“Stop,” he said, and the ten held their fire. “This does not become you. You are set over all created things, meant to help them thrive, and here you stand at war with the helpless trees. The Lord himself raised these trees and plants to be food for the gods and the fathers and every mouth that lives. The rooted feed the footed; the still feed the moving; the whole ladder of the living leans on them. Your father charged you to father children, and so did the Lord; how does it become you to burn the world down instead? Walk the road your fathers and grandfathers walked, and put this anger away. The Lord sits in the heart of every creature as its inmost ruler. Look on all this creation as his house, and you will have worshipped him truly. Add nothing more to what is already ash. Let the trees that still stand come under your protection.”

“But we have to make the earth fit to live on,” said one brother. “That is our father’s charge, and our children too will settle on this same earth.”

“That charge will be met by making. Wrath only burns it down.” And Soma told them of a maiden he had brought. Long ago the sage Kandu had begotten her upon the apsara Pramloca, and the nymph, called back to heaven, had left the infant behind. The trees had taken the crying child for their own, and Soma himself had put his nectar-dripping finger to her mouth and fed her. Now the trees that had survived the fire, still trembling, came forward and set her in the brothers’ keeping. Her body was soft as a new shoot, leaves were tangled in her hair, and when she walked the scent of the forest flowed behind her.

“This is Marisha, raised by the trees,” said Soma. “Marry her, all of you together. The children born of her will fill this earth again.”

The Prachetas hesitated. “One maiden, and we are ten brothers?”

“Yes,” said Soma gently. “You will all be her husbands together, and no quarrel will ever cross that threshold; the Lord himself has allowed it.” Then, having calmed them and given them the girl, the moon returned to his own sky.

The ten bowed their heads and accepted.

The marriage took place.

Marisha bore them one son, Daksha. He was Prajapati Daksha come again, the same Daksha who had let his old body fall after slighting the great Lord Shiva, and had now taken birth here afresh. Even as a child he outshone every shining thing around him, and they named him Daksha, the deft one, for his mastery of the rites. In time Brahma would set him at the head of all the lords of creation, and in time he would be the father of Sati.

The charge laid on the Prachetas was complete. For a million divine years after that they lived the householder’s life and all its pleasures, their strength never failing, keeping the Lord in their speech as he had asked. Then, when all those years had run and clear sight woke in them at last, they remembered his parting words. They left Marisha in their son’s care and went out to the western shore of the sea, to the very spot where the sage Jajali had once come to God, and there they sat down to the one enquiry that ends all enquiries, the search for the Self that lives in everything.

It was there that Narada found them, breath and mind and speech and sight all stilled, their whole attention resting on the changeless. They rose and fell at his feet, washed them, and seated him, and then they said, “Holy one, your coming is our good fortune. What Shiva taught us, and what the Lord himself told us, we have half forgotten in the long comfort of our house. Light the lamp of wisdom in us again, so we may cross this hard sea of birth and death.”

And Narada, whose mind had entered the Lord long before, taught them. “Only that birth is worth anything,” he said, “only those deeds, that span of days, that mind, that speech, by which a man reaches Shri Hari, the Self of all. What is high birth worth, or learning, or austerity, or fine speech, or a quick and piercing intellect, or yoga, or renunciation, or the whole study of the Vedas, if none of it is turned to his service? To know the Self is the last and highest of all gains, and the Self of every living being is the Lord himself. Water the root, and the trunk and the boughs and the least leaf are fed. Sustain the one life with food, and every sense is nourished. Worship the one deathless Lord, and you have worshipped all. As the rain rises from the sun and falls and returns to the sun, as bodies rise from the earth and go back to the earth, so this whole moving and unmoving world comes out of Shri Hari and goes home to him.”

When he had said this, and much more in praise of the Lord, Narada returned to Brahma’s abode. And the Prachetas, having heard those praises from his own mouth and holding the Lord’s feet in their hearts, went at last to the realm from which no one returns.