Bhagavatam · The Renunciation of Rishabhadeva

The Ganga flowed very slowly that morning, as if it too had paused to listen. Parikshit watched the first sunlight fall on the water and turned to Shukadeva.

“Bhagavan, I have been a king all my life. The crown, the throne, the deference of my people, all of it lives in my very breath. Now six days remain, and I find this weight of being king will not come off. Has there ever been a man who lifted it all off with his own hands and flung it aside, with nothing forcing him?”

Shukadeva stayed silent a while. Then into his voice came the stillness that belongs to deep water.

“Rajan, there has. And he was an avatar of Bhagavan himself, standing far past any ordinary man. His name was Rishabhadeva. Listen.”

King Nabhi, of the line of Priyavrata, and his queen Merudevi had grown old without a child. So they set up a great sacrifice and worshipped Vishnu, the Yajna-purusha who presides over every rite, with a single steady heart. In the middle of the offering the Lord did what no ritual can compel. He showed himself. He stood before them robed in tawny silk, four arms holding the conch and the discus, the mace and the lotus, the Srivatsa curl bright on his chest and the Kaustubha gem at his throat, and the whole hall went still. The priests, who had come only to serve the fire, found themselves standing before the master of the fire, and they could think of nothing greater to ask than one thing: let a son like this be born to Nabhi.

The Lord smiled at the size of the request. “I have no equal but myself,” he told them. “There is no son like me to be given anywhere, because there is no one like me. Yet the word of brahmins must never fall to the ground. So I will come myself. I will be born of Nabhi, with a part of my own being.” Then he was gone, and the promise took root in Merudevi. In time she bore him, and from the first day the soles of his feet carried the marks that belong to the Lord alone, the thunderbolt and the goad and the rest, as if someone deep within had recognized him already and set him apart.

The boy resembled no other child. In his eyes was a settled stillness, as if a lamp burned inside him that no wind could reach. Day by day the signs of a great soul deepened in him: an even regard that weighed all beings alike, a quiet mastery of the senses, a distance from the pull of pleasure. The ministers, the brahmins, the common people, even the gods began to wish that he and no other should hold the rule of the earth. Seeing his well-made body, his strength, his splendor, his fame, and his valor, Maharaja Nabhi gave him a name: Rishabha, the foremost.

He was the Lord himself, free by his own nature and full of a bliss to which nothing could be added, and still he lived the life of an ordinary man to the letter, so that ordinary people would have something to follow. As king he stood immovable in justice and open-handed in giving, and under him the land grew so honest that no one coveted another’s field or another’s gold; the one thing that kept increasing among his people was their love for him. Once Indra, envious, held back the rain from Rishabha’s country. Rishabha, the master of every yoga, only laughed at the pettiness of it, and by his own yogamaya sent such rain across his land of Ajanabha that no one ever knew Indra had turned away.

When the time came, Maharaja Nabhi placed the kingdom in the hands of this finest of sons and went with Queen Merudevi to Visala, in the retreat of Badarikashrama. There he sank into a tapas so gentle it troubled no living thing, and into a stillness so deep that, worshipping Bhagavan as Nara and Narayana, he passed one day into that very form, the way a drop of water slips into water and is not found again.

Rishabhadeva, for his part, lived first in his teacher’s house, and when his teachers released him he married Jayanti, the bride given by Indra, king of the gods, and kept the whole measure of the householder’s dharma. A hundred sons were born to him, each one cast in his own likeness. The eldest and the greatest was Bharata, an adept in yoga while still a prince, and it is from this Bharata that the land came in time to be called Bharatavarsha. After him came nine more, Kushavarta, Ilavarta, Brahmavarta, Malaya, Ketu, Bhadrasena, Indrasprik, Vidarbha, and Kikata, and these nine stood at the head of the ninety younger brothers. Of those ninety, nine, Kavi, Hari, Antariksha, Prabuddha, Pippalayana, Avirhotra, Drumila, Chamasa, and Karabhajana, grew into great lovers of Bhagavan and became teachers of the way of devotion, and their words are set down later in this same Bhagavata. The other eighty-one, obedient to their father and steeped in the Vedas and the fire-rites, were purified by their own conduct and came to be counted as brahmins.

For years Rishabhadeva ruled by dharma. What people read in the shastras and forget by evening, he showed them by living it. Then one day, touring his kingdom, he came to Brahmavarta, and there, in an assembly of the foremost brahmarshis and before the eyes of his own people, he called his sons near. They were grown men, disciplined and devoted, and needed no lecture; he spoke for the world that was listening past them.

“My sons,” he said, and his voice was low, yet every word sat as if cut into stone. “This human body, here in the world of the mortal, is not handed to you so that you may wear it out chasing the pleasure of the senses. Pleasure of that kind is a thing of misery at its root, and the filth-eating pig and the dog have as much of it as any man. A body like this is meant for tapas, for the hard clean fire that burns the inner instrument clear, and out of that clearness comes the one happiness that does not end, the bliss of absorption into Brahman.”

“Serving the great is the open door to freedom; clinging to those who live only to feed the body and its appetites is the open door into hell. The truly great are the calm ones, even-minded, free of anger, gentle and pious, who hold love for Bhagavan to be the only thing worth having and want nothing from the world beyond the little it takes to keep the body upright. Every sin a man commits, he commits reaching for his senses. This body, which is not even finally real, becomes a house of suffering for the soul that takes it to be its own. The truth of the self stays hidden under ignorance until you turn and question it; and as long as the mind stays busy with wanting and doing, it ties you to a body, birth after birth. Until love for Vasudeva takes root in you, that knot in the heart does not loosen. A man calls a house his, a field his, his children and his kin and his money all his, and it is that single knot that makes him say it. Loosen it. Adore him. Endure heat and cold, honor and insult, without flinching. Look steadily for the truth of things. Keep company with those who see nothing but him, sing his name, guard the tongue, hold the breath and the senses still, live simply and alone, and tear through the veil you keep calling I. And when it is torn, put down even the effort of tearing it.”

His eyes moved over them. “A father who cannot carry his child across death is no father. A teacher who cannot do it is no teacher, and it is the same with a mother, with a husband, with any god you kneel to. So do not drive those who trust you deeper into wanting; that is only leading a blind man farther down the wrong road. And here is the whole of worship in one sentence, if you will take it: treat every creature that lives, the moving and the still alike, as a house in which I am living. Do that, and you have worshipped me.”

Then his gaze came to rest on the eldest of them all, and what he said next carried the tenderness of a tired father more than the weight of a king. “This brother of yours, Bharata, came out of the same heart you all came from, and he is the noblest among you. He will hold the kingdom. Serve him, every one of you, with no envy in it. To serve him is to serve me, and it is to hold up the people in the same act. Ask nothing for yourselves. That is my true worship.”

With that, having set Bharata over the kingdom, Rishabhadeva rose. He kept only this one body of his, and everything else he left in the house where it lay. He drew the royal garments off, and just as he had come into the world, with nothing covering him, his hair loose, he drew the ahavaniya fire of his agnihotra into his own body and walked out past the border of Brahmavarta.

And in the forest he took a road at the sight of which the world stops in its tracks.

He took up the life of an avadhuta. He took silence upon himself, and even when someone begged him to speak he would say nothing. He moved as if he were a dead thing, as if blind, deaf, mute. The man who had been an ornament to Indra and every guardian of the worlds now wandered the roads behaving like a lunatic, like a goblin, so that the god within him would catch no one’s eye.

Sometimes he passed through towns and villages; sometimes he stopped in mines, in farmers’ settlements, in army camps, in cowsheds, in herdsmen’s camps and the halting places of caravans; sometimes he roamed the mountains, the forests, and the hermitages.

Whatever road he took, fools and cruel men fell in behind him, the way bees swarm a wild elephant walking through the forest. One would threaten him, one would strike him, one would pass water on him, one would spit, one would throw a clod, one would fling dung and dust, one would foul the air and laugh, one would load him with hard words and turn away in contempt.

And none of it drew even a flicker of his attention. In that body of clay which people, out of their own confusion, still called “Rishabha,” not a thread of I or mine was left in him. Standing witness to the whole show and nothing more than its witness, settled in his own atman, he wandered the earth alone. His long brown matted locks hung down over his face, his body wore its dust and grime, and even so, at the sight of that faintly smiling mouth the women of the towns felt desire stir in them, and told one another that this was surely some madman.

One day he took on a discipline harder than all of this. He adopted the way of the python. Wherever he happened to be, there he lay down; lying there he ate and drank, lying there he passed his water and his stool, and then rolled in what he had passed until his body was smeared with it. And here was the wonder: where there should have been a stench, a fragrance rose, and the wind carried that fragrance and sweetened the whole country around him for ten yojanas. In the same way he took on the manner of a bull, a deer, a crow, moving and standing and eating as they did, so that no shape of comfort or dignity was left for the world to fasten on.

Weightless like this, silence in his mouth and dust on his body, he set off toward the south. Through Konka, Venka, and Kutaka, and the lands of southern Karnataka, he came at last to the forest at the foot of Mount Kutakachala. There he picked up a piece of stone and set it in his own mouth, as if even the tongue were now to be given no further leave to speak, and in that wild guise, hair scattered, clothed in nothing but the sky, he began to roam that empty forest.

And just then the wind in the forest changed.

First it was a gust, then a gale. The thickets of dry bamboo began to grind against one another, and out of that grinding came a crack, a spark. The bamboo ground again, and the spark swallowed its first mouthful of dry leaves.

Rishabhadeva stood where he was. He did not turn his head.

The fire came from below first, hissing through the dry grass, up near his ankles. Then the bamboo began to burst, cane by cane, as if someone far away were clapping. Smoke filled the spaces between the trees, and the air grew heavy with that smell of hot ash which carries burnt wood and burnt green leaf together. The flames were red now, their tongues leaping upward, as if the fire were eating the forest lick by lick.

In all that roar there was one body that did not move. The piece of stone still lay in the mouth. The breath went on just as slow, just as even, as if it were moving in sleep. No hand rose for a shield, no foot turned to run. The heat came first to the back, then to the chest, then reached those scattered brown locks that no comb had touched in years, and strand by strand they crackled, lifted, and became ash.

Inside, no single thought arose. Not “this is the end,” not “this body was mine.” The man who had laid down kingdom, honor, insult, and even the sense of this body being his own, years before, had nothing left to give up in this hour. What the fire was burning already lay like a garment someone else had discarded, dropped here or there, which the flames were now simply picking up and carrying away.

Born of the rubbing of bamboo, that forest fire advanced licking at its own flames, and along with the whole forest it gathered into itself one body that had belonged to that forest. The smoke rose straight, without a tremor, and dissolved into the sky.

What had lived within lay past the fire’s reach, and there had never been any question of reaching it. It went back to its own abode, quietly, as if returning were simply its nature.

Shukadeva paused here a moment.

“Rajan, think of it. A king who had everything, who was Bhagavan’s own descent, stood at the end with a stone in his mouth, so still inside that forest fire that it was as if nothing there were happening at all. Flight through the sky, vanishing from sight, slipping into another man’s body, every such siddhi had come to him unasked and stood waiting on his word. He never once lifted his eyes toward a single one. A wise man does not trust even a mind that looks conquered, any more than a hunter trusts a deer he has caught; the mind is the root of lust and anger and greed and fear, and it broke the long vows of great sages before him. So Rishabhadeva let the powers stand where they were, and looked past them.”