Bhagavatam · The Allegory of Puranjana

Parikshit stayed quiet a while, then said, “Bhagavan, my days are down to a counted few now, and I can feel this body I spent a whole life calling ‘I’ loosening its hold on me. Explain to me the bond between the atman and this body. Explain it so a dying man can follow it.”

Shukadeva smiled. “Rajan, this same question once rose in the mind of a king who lived long ago, Prachinabarhi. He had given his whole reign over to ritual. Blades of kusha grass lay strewn across the earth in every direction, and animals died by the thousand at his altars while he stood counting the merit as it piled up. Devarshi Narada came and sat down beside him and asked a plain question: what exactly did the king hope to win from all this killing, since real welfare is the ending of sorrow, and no sacrifice on earth can hand a man that. Then, instead of arguing the point, Narada told him a story built as an allegory. Listen to it the way that king heard it.”

Narada’s voice was calm.

“There was a man named Puranjana, a king of wide renown. He had a friend as well, Avijnata, the Unknown, called so because no one could ever make out what he did or where he came and went, though he never once left Puranjana’s side. In Puranjana’s heart sat a single craving: to find a place of his own somewhere, a home where he could settle and enjoy himself to the full.”

“He ranged over the whole earth looking for it. City after city he studied and turned away from, judging every one of them unfit to give him the pleasures he was after, until a kind of weariness settled over him. Then one day, on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, in Bharatavarsha, the land of action, he came upon a city such as he had never seen before.”

“That city had nine gates. A high wall ringed it, with groves and watchtowers and moats and arched gateways, and it stood packed with mansions whose turrets were worked in gold, silver, and steel. The floors inside were laid with sapphire, crystal, cat’s-eye, pearl, emerald, and ruby, so that the whole place glowed like Bhogavati, the jeweled city of the serpents under the earth. There were assembly halls and crossroads and broad highways, markets and gambling houses and rest houses, banners lifting from their staffs, and terraces built of coral.”

“Of the nine gates, seven were set high in the walls and two low. Five of them opened toward the east, one toward the south, one toward the north, and the last two, the lower pair, toward the west.”

“Outside the walls lay a park full of celestial trees and flowering creepers, its lotus ponds loud with the noise of water birds and bees. The animals there lived at peace, none preying on another, gentle as forest hermits, and the notes of the cuckoos seemed to call every passer-by inside.”

“Puranjana said to himself: this place is good, here I will live. And he walked in through the gate.”

“A young woman came strolling toward him, as though chance had carried her there. Ten attendants walked with her, and each of the ten was himself the husband of a hundred wives. A serpent with five hoods went before her and guarded her on every side. She was sixteen years old, able to take on any shape she pleased, and she was out searching for a husband.”

“Puranjana stopped where he stood. For a moment he wondered whether she was some goddess walking the forest in secret. Then he asked, ‘Who are you? Whose daughter are you? And whose city is this?’”

“She looked at him. ‘I do not know who I am, nor who my father was, nor who built this city where I live. I know only that I am here, and that I have no companion of my own. These ten are my friends, and while I sleep this serpent stays awake and keeps the city. Stay. Let the two of us make our home here together, and I will lay every pleasure you could wish for in front of you, for a hundred years.’”

“Puranjana liked what he heard, and he said yes.”

“So the two of them set up house in that city. A hundred years went by inside it. Whatever Puranjani said became law for Puranjana. When she laughed, he laughed; when she wept, he wept; when she ate, he ate; when she rose to walk, he walked. Whatever she did, he did after her, the way a tame monkey copies the woman who keeps it.”

“They had eleven hundred sons and one hundred ten daughters, and then grandchildren, and their children after them, until Puranjana’s line had spread across the whole country of Panchala.”

“He set himself up as lord of the entire city. Every lane, every gate, every breath in the place seemed to rest in his hand, or so it looked to him. He was content, and it never once crossed his mind that any of it could end.”

“Half his life was spent before he felt a single day of it go.”

“Then one day a cloud of dust rose over the walls. A king of the Gandharvas had marched on the city, Chandavega by name. Three hundred sixty Gandharva warriors came with him, and three hundred sixty Gandharva women, half of them fair and half of them dark, and circling the city by turns, the whole host began to strip it bare.”

“The five-hooded serpent held them off alone. For a hundred years he stood at the gates and fought all seven hundred twenty of them single-handed.”

“But one serpent cannot hold every wall at once. Puranjana watched his one guardian, Prajagara, the ever-wakeful, wearing thin, and a heavy dread for his kingdom and his city came over him. Yet he lived so far under the woman’s spell that the true shape of the danger never quite reached him.”

“In those same days a daughter of Time was wandering the three worlds in search of a husband. She was so grim to look upon that no one would have her, and the world had fixed a name on her, Durbhaga, the ill-fated. She was Kalakanya, the girl people call Jara, old age itself, the bride nobody wants.”

“She had not always been refused. Long before, the royal sage Puru, youngest son of Yayati, had taken her on, and in return she had handed him a kingdom. And once,” Narada said, and here a faint smile crossed his face, “she came to me. I was sworn to lifelong celibacy, and I turned her away, and the refusal stung her so deeply that she laid a curse on me: never again would I rest for long in any single place. That is the reason you find me forever on the road, Rajan, drifting from one world to the next. It was I who then told her where to go.”

“At my word she went to the lord of the Yavanas, a king named Bhaya, Fear, the appointed agent of death, and offered herself to him as a wife. He smiled and told her the truth. ‘The world will never welcome you, for you are inauspicious to every creature. So move through it unseen. Take the whole of creation for your husband instead, and touch each one in turn. Be a sister to me. Here is my elder brother, Prajvara, the fever that comes in two forms, the cold and the burning. Ride with the two of us and my army, and between us we will unmake the world.’ So the Yavana king took old age for a sister, gave her his brother the fever, and set out with his terrible host to range through all the worlds.”

“One day the whole army fell on Puranjana’s city. Kalakanya threw her siege around it, the Yavana soldiers poured in through the nine gates, and the breaking of the city began. Whatever she so much as touched lost all its beauty on the instant.”

“Puranjana panicked. The city cracked, one brick after another. His sons and grandsons, his servants and ministers turned against him; Puranjani herself lost her wits; and the whole city, overrun now by the enemies of Panchala, was defiled. He could find no way out of the ruin.”

“Just then Prajvara, the Yavana king’s elder brother, set the entire city alight to please him. The city began to burn, and its guardian serpent, drained of every last strength by the Gandharvas and its coils gone slack, writhed to escape, the way a snake twists out of the hollow of a burning tree. Cornered at the gate by the enemy, the old guard wept.”

“Even then Puranjana could not loosen his grip of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ on the body and the house. He thought only of his sons and grandsons, his daughters-in-law and sons-in-law, his servants, his home, his treasury. When I am gone, he kept asking himself, how will they go on living? They will founder like passengers in a boat that splits open in the middle of the sea. The Yavana king bound him like an animal at the sacrificial post and dragged him away, and through all that terror his old friend Avijnata never once came into his mind. The very animals he had slaughtered at his own sacrifices rose against him now, axes in their hands, remembering his cruelty, and hacked at him in fury, and he fell into a darkness that had no floor.”

“At the last moment his heart was fixed on Puranjani alone, and because a mind takes the shape of its final thought, he was born next as a woman in the flesh, a lovely daughter in the house of the king of Vidarbha, carrying no memory that the same story had already run its full course in him once before.”

“When the girl came of marrying age, Malayadhvaja, king of the Pandyas, beat every rival prince on the field of battle and won her as the prize of his valor. She bore him a daughter first, whom the sage Agastya would later marry, and after her seven sons, who grew up to become the seven kings of the Dravida country; the descendants of those seven, a hundred million to each, would go on to hold this earth for an age of the world and beyond it. In the end Malayadhvaja divided the land among his sons and went away to Mount Kulachala to worship the Lord, and Vaidarbhi left every comfort behind and followed him, the way moonlight follows the moon.”

“There Malayadhvaja mastered every pair of opposites, heat and cold, honor and insult, pleasure and pain, and with Sri Hari Himself lit as a teacher within his heart, he saw the Self at last as the silent witness of the mind, standing clear of the body the way a man in a dream sees himself apart from his own severed limbs. He knew himself as one with Brahman, and one day he let the body fall. Vaidarbhi, not knowing her husband had already crossed to the far shore, went on tending his feet; and when she felt no warmth left in them, she began to wail like a doe torn from her herd, and she built a pyre and made ready to burn upon it with him.”

“At that very hour her old friend Avijnata came and stood beside her, this time in the form of a brahmin who knew the Self. He spoke gently to the weeping woman. ‘Who are you? Whose daughter? And this sleeping man you grieve over, who is he? Does no memory of yourself come back to you? I am that friend of yours, the one you once lived beside as a swan on Lake Manasa, thousands of years, the two of us needing no shelter at all. Hungry for enjoyment, you left me and came down to this earth, and here you found a city of nine gates that some woman had built, and you walked in and lost yourself inside it.’”

“‘Hear me now. You are not the daughter of the king of Vidarbha, and this dead man is not your husband, and you were never truly the man Puranjana who fancied himself lord of the nine-gated city. Every bit of it was an illusion I laid over you. Once you took yourself for a man; now you take yourself for a woman; you are neither one. You and I are two swans, and always have been. I am you, and you are no one other than me. The wise have never found the smallest difference between us. What looks like a difference is only the difference between a man and his own face in a mirror, or in the dark of another’s eye.’ At those words the swan of Lake Manasa woke, and remembered itself, and the long forgetting that had begun the day it left its friend came to its end.”

“‘I have told you this truth in a roundabout way, Rajan,’ Narada added, ‘because the Lord who made all of it loves to keep Himself unknown.’”

“And so that soul wandered on, birth after birth. Each time a new body, a new name, a new city. But the story within stayed the same each time: a city, a companion, children, and at the end the same cloud of dust rising over the walls.”

Narada let the story rest there. Prachinabarhi went on gazing at him.

“Do you follow it, Rajan?”

The king shook his head slowly. “No, Munivar. I have heard the story, but the secret in it has not opened for me. I am too tangled in my rituals to see it plain. Only the wise catch a thing like this.”

Narada smiled faintly.

“Then listen. Puranjana is you. Puranjana is every living being. He is the soul, and the soul is a builder of cities: it raises itself a fort of a body to live in, a body with one foot or two, with four or with many or with none at all, whatever the birth. When this soul set out hungry for every pleasure, it looked over all the forms there are and settled on the human body, with its two hands, two feet, and nine gates, as the finest house of enjoyment of them all. Puranjani, the woman who did not know her own origin, is your intelligence, your buddhi. The soul weds itself to her, calls her judgment its own, and through her it reaches out and draws the whole world in.”

“The city is this body, and the nine gates are its nine openings, the doors through which you take the world inside. Five of them face the east, at the front of the head: the two eyes, the two nostrils, and the mouth. The right ear is the gate to the south, the left ear the gate to the north. And the two lower gates, facing west, are the organs of generation and of excretion. Two of these gates carry old names, Pitrhu and Devahu, the calling of the fathers and the calling of the gods, because through the ear a man takes in the scriptures of action on the one hand and the scriptures of stillness on the other, and by them sets his feet on the road of the fathers or the road of the gods. There are two more doors besides, that open onto no view at all, the hands and the feet; they see nothing, they only work and carry you about.”

“The ten attendants are the ten senses, five that gather knowledge and five that act, and the hundred wives of each are the numberless small hungers and habits that each sense throws off. Over the ten stands an eleventh, their commander, the mind, and the innermost chamber of the city, the room the mind keeps drawing you back into, is the heart. That serpent of five hoods is the fivefold breath of life, the prana; it seems to be holding the whole city up, and all the while it is quietly spending the city away from within. That is why its name is Prajagara, the one who never sleeps. And the friend Avijnata, the one Puranjana could never place, is the Paramatma seated inside you, the Lord Himself, unknown only because He never announces His name or His work. He was there before the first brick, and He stays past the last.”

“Think of the same body one more way, as a chariot. The senses are its horses; your good and bad deeds are its two wheels; the three gunas are the banners flying over it; the five breaths are its harness-cords; the mind is the single rein, and the intelligence is the charioteer who holds it. In that chariot the soul goes tearing after a mirage of pleasures across the ground, and the killing of the animals in the story is nothing but this reckless chasing of the five senses’ delights.”

“The country of Panchala, where the city stands, is the five kinds of sense-objects that hem the body in on every side. And Chandavega, the Gandharva king, is Time. His three hundred sixty warriors are the three hundred sixty days of the year, and his three hundred sixty women are its nights, and turn by turn they carry off a little more of your life.”

“Every year Time marches his army against your city. And every year one quiet brick after another slips out of the wall, and you never notice a single one of them go.”

“Kalakanya is old age, Jara. Bhaya, the Yavana king who took her for a sister, is death and the fear of death; his troops are the aches of the mind and the sicknesses of the body; and Prajvara, his brother, is the fever that burns and the fever that chills. One day the three of them stand at your gate, and no wall ever raised has held them out. And whatever picture fills the mind in that last hour becomes the seed of the next birth. Puranjana died with his mind full of a woman, and so a woman he became.”

For a while the king sat with his breath held.

“Then what is the way out of this wheel, Munivar?”

“There is one way,” Narada said. “Go on living inside the city, rule it even, but stop taking yourself to be the city. You are the one seated within, watching all of it happen: the witness. Do not graze like the deer in its meadow of flowers, ears full of the humming of bees, blind to the wolves closing in ahead and the hunter’s arrow already drawn behind. The wolves are your days and your nights; the hunter is death, and his arrow is trained on your heart even now. The day you truly know yourself as the witness, Time will still carry off your city, and he will not be able to lay a hand on you. And in the one whose devotion to Lord Vasudeva has grown firm and unshakable, whose ears never tire of the Lord’s story, this whole round of birth and death simply comes apart, the way a dream comes apart the moment you wake.”

The king bowed his head, and for a long time said nothing.