Bhagavatam · Rahugana and Jadabharata

That morning the Ganga’s water was ash-gray, and Parikshit watched the current a long time. Then he turned to Shukadeva and asked, “Bhagavan, yesterday you spoke of that Bharata who was snared by his love for a deer and became a deer himself, and who then, in the next birth, stayed a fool by deliberate choice. Inside me a king still sits, one who takes himself for the doer. What did that Bharata do next? Did his silence ever come to serve anyone?”

A calm light came into Shukadeva’s eyes. “It did, Rajan. This same Jadabharata was found one day carrying a king’s palanquin, and out of that very haulage came the teaching that made the lord of Sindhu forget his throne.”

Shukadeva began.

Rahugana was king of the twin territories of Sindhu and Sauvira. He had strength, he had a trained mind, he had sat at the feet of sages and studied the shastras, and above all of that he carried a quieter conviction: that he already knew. In those days he had set out for the darshan of Kapila. Kapila was held to be Hari himself, come down into the world to hand men the knowledge of the Self, the master of yoga and the teacher of teachers, and the king meant to lay a single question at his feet, the one that no book had ever settled for him: what, in this whole moving world, is a man’s true refuge.

The king rode the palanquin. The bearers, carrying it on their shoulders, were moving along the bank of the Ikshumati, the river of the sugarcane country. The air held the sweet damp of the cane fields, and the bearers’ breathing was heavy.

On the way the bearers began to tire, and one shoulder fell short. The foreman needed another carrier, and fast, and his eye was already sweeping the riverbank for one, as if the road had been arranged in advance to place a man there.

The edge of a forest lay close by. There a sturdy, well-built man stood, hair grown into mats, body smeared with earth, yet the arms strong, the shoulders broad.

“Seize him,” said the foreman. “The body is stout. Young and thick-limbed. Fit to haul a load like an ox or a donkey.”

It was Jadabharata.

They caught him by force and set him under the palanquin pole to work without a wage, the way a poor man is pressed into a king’s unpaid labor. He asked neither who, nor why. A soul of the highest dignity took a humiliation he had done nothing to earn, and did not flinch.

Jadabharata raised no objection. He took the pole onto his shoulder.

But one thing set him apart from the other bearers. As he walked, he watched the ground before placing each foot.

In every creature he saw the one consciousness he saw in himself, so he had no wish to crush an ant or any small living thing. Before lifting a foot he would scan the earth an arrow’s length ahead, about three feet of ground, to see whether anything that breathed lay in the way.

So at every step his feet hesitated, came down aslant, then steadied and moved on.

And the palanquin lurched.

The king felt a jolt, and then another.

“You bearers! Walk properly. Why do you carry my palanquin pitching up and down like this?”

Jadabharata said nothing. He simply kept to that same gait, just as unhurried.

The other bearers grew afraid the king might punish them. With folded hands they said, “Maharaj, this is no negligence of ours. We are carrying the palanquin correctly, by your own rule and measure. This new bearer has only just been put to the pole. He does not walk quickly. With him we cannot keep the palanquin level.”

Even so the king’s temper fell on Jadabharata. He had sat with sages, yet the old Kshatriya heat rose in him and the rajas in his mind clouded his judgment, and he came at the sage the way a proud man comes, with a smooth and cutting tongue. “Poor fellow,” he said, in mock concern. “You must be worn out. It seems you have hauled this palanquin the whole long way single-handed, hour after hour, and not one of these companions of yours has lent a shoulder. And you are neither so stout nor so iron-framed as you looked, and age is on you besides.” Jadabharata, who had long since stopped saying “I” or “mine” of the body he wore, took the mockery in silence and carried on.

At last the king had the palanquin halted and stepped down. The vein on his forehead had gone taut.

“What is this? Are you dead while still breathing? You slight me and defy my command. It seems you are negligence itself. As Yamaraja punishes offenders, so will I now administer your cure, and then your senses will find their place.”

And then, for the first time, Jadabharata opened his lips.

What he said stands among the most quiet and deep utterances of the Bhagavata.

“O Rajan,” said Jadabharata, and his voice carried neither anger nor fear, “whom are you scolding?”

“You just mocked me for being tired. Look closely and the mockery turns out to be plain truth. If there is a burden anywhere, it lies on the body that carries it. If there is a road, it belongs to the feet that walk it. Stoutness too is a word about this flesh. The one who only watches, the atman, has no load on him, no distance to cover, and no thickness or thinness to speak of.”

“Look where all of it gathers. Fat and lean, sickness of the body and worry of the mind, hunger and thirst, fear and quarrel, wanting and aging, sleep and craving, the pride and rage that come out of the little word ‘I’, and grief on top of them, every one of these visits the man who has decided he is the body. None of them so much as brushes the Self. And wherever there is change there is death folded quietly inside life, for whatever takes a shape and shifts must have had a beginning and must have an end.”

“You say, do not rock my palanquin. Your palanquin? The very body you are seated in, when was even that yours? This kingdom, this land of Sindhu, all of it is left with you for a short while, the way a stranger sets down his goods beside you on the road and walks on. Command and obedience hold firm only where master and servant are fixed for good. Between us there is nothing fixed, only custom and the turn of the day. So tell me first who is the ruler here and who the ruled, and then give your orders.”

“You say you will administer my cure. Cure of whom? I abide in my own state, and to the world I look drunk, or mad, or dull as a stone. And if I truly am dull and heedless, then to school me is to grind again what has already been ground to flour.”

“So the one you mean to punish, who is he? And the one who has decided he is the punisher, who is that? Know these two first, Rajan, and then scold.”

Rahugana’s breath seemed to stop for a moment.

A bearer, from under the palanquin pole, was saying this.

The king came down onto the earth then and there, careless of the dust. The intoxication of kingship left him altogether, and laying his head at Jadabharata’s feet, he begged forgiveness for his offense.

“Who are you, Munivar? You wear the yajnopavita, the sacred thread of the twice-born. Are you one of the avadhutas, of the line of Dattatreya? Whose son are you, where were you born, and how have your feet come to grace this road? I do not fear the thunderbolt of Indra, or the trident of Shiva, or the rod of Yama, or the weapons of fire and sun and wind and Kubera. One thing alone terrifies me, and that is to have shown contempt to a brahmin. I was on my way to ask Bhagavan Kapila the one question that will not let me sleep, what a man’s true refuge is in this world. And now I wonder. Could you be Kapila himself, walking the roads unknown to see how the world fares?”

A faint smile came to Jadabharata’s lips.

“In a former birth I was a king named Bharata. Turned away from the pleasures of this world and the next alike, I stayed absorbed in the worship of Bhagavan. Even so, by growing attached to one orphaned fawn I fell from the highest aim, and in the next birth I had to become a deer. But the memory of what I had been, kept alive by the worship of Sri Krishna, did not leave me even inside that animal’s body. So in this birth I keep to myself, and I let everyone take me for a fool, wandering unattached and shy of company, so that no crowd and no fondness can ever bind me again.”

It all came back to Rahugana. He had heard the katha of Bharata the rishi, the king who had renounced everything.

The king rose, then bowed again at Jadabharata’s feet.

“Forgive me, Munivar. I was blind with my own pride. And still one knot holds in me. I am a man trained in argument, and it tells me the world cannot be wholly empty. When a pot sits on the fire the water in it heats, and the heat of the water softens the rice, grain and inner grain, and none of that passing of heat is unreal. Just so, it seems to me, the tiredness of the body must somehow reach the soul that wears it.”

“Rise, Rajan. And sit beside me.”

Rahugana sat down, right there in the dust of the road, forgetting king and bearer both.

And Jadabharata gave him the teaching that spreads through the Bhagavata as a full episode in its own right.

He began with the mind. As long as a man’s mind stays under the sway of sattva, rajas, or tamas, he said, it keeps the jiva harnessed to good and evil karma and never lets go. This same mind, taking on name after name and form after form, lifts the jiva into a higher birth or drops it into a lower one. It is the mind that holds the whole game open. While it runs, the waking world and the dream world go on rising and being seen. Still it, and both fall quiet. This is why the wise call the mind the single cause of a man’s bondage and, just as truly, the single door to his freedom. A mind soaked in the craving for things burns like a lamp fed on ghee-soaked wick, throwing up a flame crowned with soot. Loosen its hold on things and the same flame comes back to its clean, unsmoking light. And through it all the Lord, forever untouched, only watches these waves of the mind heave up and sink back, the way breath moves in and out of every living thing and quietly steers it. Vasudeva has entered this whole world as the witness seated in each heart, and a man goes on circling in birth after birth until, with the lamp of wisdom, he burns off this delusion and puts down the six inner enemies, craving, anger, greed, delusion, arrogance, and envy.

“O Rajan,” Jadabharata went on, “today you are lord of Sindhu. It is only a garment. Count how many such garments the atman has slipped on and shrugged off. One day another man will carry this palanquin, and you will be in some other land, some other birth. Look at what actually moves along this road. A lump of earth shaped into feet, ankles, shanks, knees, thighs, waist, chest, neck, and shoulders, and men give it a name and call it a bearer. On one of its shoulders rides a frame of wood, the palanquin, and inside it sits another lump of the same earth, and on that one men have hung the title king of Sauvira. You fastened yourself to that title and began calling yourself ruler of the Sindhus, blind with pride. And to carry it you pressed these people, poor men already ground down by want and fit only to be pitied, into hauling you for no wage at all, and then you called yourself their protector. In the gathering of those who see clearly, a man who does that cuts a sorry figure.”

“So what will you gain by hauling this load of ‘I’? The kshetrajna, the knower seated in the field of the body, is one and the same in all, in that tired bearer, in that ant underfoot. Whatever the eye lands on, thick or thin, small or great, moving or still, is a weaving of maya that goes by many names, and consciousness alone is real, one, seamless, with no inside and no outside. You do not come to it by austerities, or fire-rites, or gifts to the needy, or the study of the Vedas, or the worship of water and fire and sun. You come to it only when the dust of a holy man’s feet has touched you, in the company where his story is told and the noise of the world is shut out. This mind of yours is your one powerful enemy. Stay awake, and cut it down with the weapon of worship at the feet of the guru and of Hari. Then no one will stand high and no one low.”

Rahugana bowed his head. His eyelids grew wet, and the tears fell on the dust, pitting it with small hollows.

He rose from that spot and let go his hold on throne and kingdom. The wrong notion that ignorance had planted in him, that he was this body, fell away like a coat set down.

The man who had set out that morning as a king returned as a seeker, and the man he had ordered seized as a bearer stood revealed as his guru.