Bhagavatam · The Discontent of Vyasa

The Ganga flowed very slowly that morning, as if it too were listening. Parikshit watched the water a long while, then turned to Shukadeva.

“Bhagavan, I lay awake thinking last night. This Bhagavata you are reciting to me, where did it come from? Who first composed it, and what restlessness put the pen in his hand? I have six days left, and I can count them. I want to know the beginning from which this amrita first sprang.”

Shukadeva stayed silent a while. His fingers moved in a rhythm on his knee, then stopped. Then he spoke.

“Rajan, this story belongs to my father. To the very man who divided the Veda into four and who composed this whole granth now falling on your ears. But first know this: even when he had composed it all, his heart was not content.”

It was the third age, the Dvapara. Son of Parashara, born of Satyavati, an amsha of Shri Hari himself. He had bathed in the Sarasvati at first light and sat down in a lonely place, and with the eye that reads what has been and what is still to come he watched the age thinning out. The seasons of duty were sliding into one another and losing their edges. The strength was going out of things. People were turning irreverent, slack, dull of mind, short of years. So he turned that far-seeing gaze inward and searched for what might still carry every kind of person, of every class and every stage of life, across to their own good. And he saw where it lay: the fire sacrifice is what makes a person clean, and the sacrifice stands only for as long as the sacred word is spoken over it.

A full offering takes four kinds of priest. One to call down the gods, one to raise the altar and pour the oblation and feed the fire, one to chant, and one to watch over the whole rite and set right any slip in it. Each leans on his own portion of the sacred word. So he cut the one Veda into four, Rik, Yajuh, Sama, Atharva, one for each office, the work that would make every later age call him Vyasa, the divider. And he placed each part in a disciple’s hands, the way a father hands each of his four sons one corner of the house. The Rik went to Paila, the Sama to Jaimini, the Yajuh to Vaishampayana, the Atharva to Sumantu, son of Daruna. And the Itihasa-Purana, which the wise call the fifth Veda, he gave to Romaharshana, father of the very Suta from whose voice this story would later flow. From these rishis the branches divided again and again, and through disciple and disciple’s disciple the countless branches of the Veda spread on and on. He had done it for the slow of wit as much as anyone, so that those who could not hold the whole might at least keep a part.

Even so, something remained. Women, shudras, and those born twice-born yet shut out of Vedic study had no right to hear the Veda, and for this they kept slipping off the path of welfare. Vyasa could not bear the sight. The tender, compassionate heart in him spoke: someone must take their hand too. And he composed the Mahabharata, the great itihasa, so that those who could never reach the Veda’s language might touch their own dharma and duty through a story.

Kings, rishis, war, statecraft, moksha, he poured all of it in. Through the Mahabharata he opened out the meaning of the Veda, so that even women and shudras could come to know their own dharma.

And then, when everything was composed, when the moment came to set down the pen, something rose inside him for which he could find no name.

He was sitting on the holy bank of the Sarasvati. The sun was just lifting past the water, its redness scattered across the river. A solitary, clean place, where he had bathed in the river’s water, sipped the achaman, and settled down. But his mind was like water on which the wind allows no stillness, even for a moment.

He was filled with brahmatejas, the radiance earned by discipline. This he knew. He had kept brahmacharya and the other vows without guile, honored the Vedas, his elders, and the sacred fires, and obeyed their word. And still one corner of the heart lay unfulfilled, as if the platter were laid, every dish served, and one bowl in the middle had gone untouched.

He asked himself, within his own mind: “I kept my vows without guile, honored the Veda and my gurus. Through the Mahabharata I opened out the Veda’s very meaning, so that women and shudras too might know their dharma. Though I am full of brahmatejas and equal to any task, why does my heart feel like one whose desire went unfulfilled? Which bowl is it that stands unfilled?”

Then something like an answer flickered inside him. Surely he had so far left mostly untold those dharmas that carry a person to the Lord, the very dharmas dear to the paramahamsas and dear to the Lord himself. But before the thought could fully open, something else happened.

Just then a string of the veena sounded in the air.

From far off, then near. Narada.

He came like that, unannounced, pacing the three worlds, yet always at the exact hour when someone’s inside stood emptiest. Vyasa sprang to his feet. He worshipped that devarshi, honored by the gods themselves, with full rite, offered him a seat, and bowed at his feet. Yet even as he performed the worship his eyes stayed lowered, like a disciple standing before his guru, though this was the same Vyasa who had only just divided the Veda into four.

Narada took the seat and smiled. It was his habit, that light smile before speaking, as if he already knew what the other was about to ask.

“Son of Parashara,” he said, “your body and your mind, are they both content with their work? This Mahabharata you have composed is a marvel. Every aim of human life, dharma and the rest, is gathered in it. The eternal Brahman-truth too you have pondered deeply and come to know. And yet, prabhu, why do you grieve over yourself like a man whose work has come to nothing?”

Vyasa bowed his head. “Devarshi, everything you have said about me is true. And even so my heart is not content. I do not know the reason. Your knowledge is fathomless, you are the mind-born son of Brahma himself, you know every hidden secret. Tell me yourself: what lack has stayed in me?”

Narada leaned the veena gently to one side. For a moment he looked into Vyasa’s eyes, the way a vaidya lays a finger on the pulse and reads the name of the illness.

“You have scarcely sung the spotless glory of the Lord,” he said, and this time he did not smile. “You expounded dharma, artha, kama, moksha, every aim of life. But the greatness of Vasudeva, by which this whole world is made pure, that song was left mostly unsung. A shastra or a knowledge that leaves the Lord unsatisfied remains incomplete.”

Vyasa stayed silent.

“Vyasa, listen,” Narada’s voice grew softer now, though the matter was hard. “Speech that carries no note of the Lord’s glory, however full of rasa, however dressed in ornament, however bound in meter, is held as unclean as the place where scraps are thrown to the crows. And a shloka in which even one name of the Lord appears, however plain its making, washes sins away. The paramahamsa bhaktas who move in the abode of Brahman never step into that dirty water, just as the swans who sport in the lotus groves of Manasarovar never do.”

He was not finished. “Turn a tongue to anything other than his deeds,” he said, “and it loses itself in the tangle of names and shapes, and begins to see difference wherever it looks. A mind in that state is a boat in a crosswind. It comes to rest nowhere. Even the cleanest knowledge, the kind that carries a man straight to release, leaves the soul only half-adorned when the love of the Lord is missing from it. And work done for a reward carries grief at both ends, grief while it waits to be done and grief when its fruit burns out. Even work done for nothing, clean of all wanting, if it was never laid at his feet, tell me what height it lifts a man to.”

“And there is one thing you did that I cannot walk past.” The voice did not rise, which made it land harder. “You set down rites of blood and gave them the name of dharma, and you laid them on men who were already leaning that way. Now the ordinary man reads your word and takes the killing for holiness, and he stops his ears against the very teaching that would have pulled him back. That is a heavy thing to have left in the world’s hands.”

Vyasa did not lift his eyes. Narada went on, gentler now. “Take a man who lets his own duty fall from his hands only to catch hold of Hari’s feet. Say he dies before that love has ripened, or slips from the path partway. Has harm ever found such a man, in any birth, anywhere? Now take the other one, who keeps every duty of his without a single flaw and never once turns toward the Lord. When it is all over, tell me what he is left holding.”

“The wise have said it plainly,” he said. “All the austerity a man burns through, all his learning, his sacrifices, the Veda spoken in its exact pitch, his hard-won sight, the wealth he gives away with an open hand, the whole of it bends toward one thing, to sing the glory of the Lord of matchless fame.” He let that settle. “This universe you have spent your life explaining is the Lord himself, and he stands clean outside it, the one from whom it rises, in whom it holds its footing, into whom it goes back down. You know this already, Vyasa. I am only laying a finger on it.”

A shadow crossed Vyasa’s face. Everything he had composed passed before his eyes in a single moment, and nowhere in all of it was that note.

“So what I have written,” he said slowly, “is scraps for the crows?”

Narada gave no direct answer. He lifted the veena back into his lap, touched one string with a finger, and let it ring, a long time, until the note sank of its own accord into silence.

“Let me tell you my own story,” he said, “from the last kalpa, from a previous birth. I was not Narada then. I was somebody’s son, and my mother was no one of rank.”

And Narada told that story. A boy, child of a servant woman who worked in a household of Vedic brahmins. Through the four months of rain, when mud and water closed the roads, some yogis had halted in that one place for their chaturmasa. The small boy was set to serve them. He spoke little, kept away from play, held his senses in check, scrubbed the vessels, carried the water, and served those sadhus as he was told. Once each day, with their leave, he ate what was left in their vessels after they had eaten. And with those leavings, Narada said, all his sins were washed away. The very scraps that people call impure made his heart clean, and the same worship those mahatmas kept, the boy began to long for too.

“By the grace of those mahatmas,” Narada said, and his voice now was touching something far away, “I sat by them every day and listened to the enchanting stories of Shri Krishna. With faith, line by line. And as they left, those mahatmas, tender to the lowly, in their kindness gave me the most secret knowledge that the Lord himself had given them. From that one seed this Narada has grown, Vyasa. Without the leftover prasad in that servant household, without that katha, this son of Brahma would not exist today.”

Vyasa heard all of it, with great attention, head bowed. And inside that story he found the empty bowl he had been unable to name. The leavings that had made a servant woman’s son pure outweighed all of Vyasa’s brahmatejas, because the Lord’s name was dissolved in them. And that same name had slipped out of all his shlokas.

Narada stood. He slung the veena over his shoulder. “Now sit, Vyasa. For the freeing of all beings from bondage, go down into samadhi, this time remembering the lilas of the Lord of unthinkable power. You are an amsha of Purushottama. Your sight never fails. What you have not yet seen, no one will tell you. You will see it yourself.”

The veena’s note drifted farther and farther, and a moment came when it could no longer be heard at all. Vyasa was left alone in that silence.

He went back to his own hermitage of Shamyaprasa, on the western bank of the Sarasvati, in its grove of jujube trees, the ground where the sages tended their fires. He sat down. He sipped a little water. Back straight, hands in his lap, palms upward. He closed his eyes, and by his own effort he drew the whole of his mind into one place.

This time the mind did not run.

He drew one long breath in, and as it settled into his chest, the sounds outside began falling away one by one. First the birdsong grew distant, then the river’s flowing, then the beat of his own heart. A deep hush opened inside, the kind of hush that arrives already full. In that hush his sight, washed clean by bhakti, opened toward what Narada had pointed to.

And there, past that deep silence, he beheld the Purushottama, the Primal Person from whom this entire universe arises, in whom it abides, and into whom it dissolves. He saw that this same supreme Lord wears the whole world as his form and stands wholly outside it, untouched. Beside him Vyasa saw the Lord’s own maya, and he saw that she has no standing of her own, that she leans on him for her very existence. And he saw what she does. The jiva, in its own nature clear of the three gunas, falls under her and takes itself to be made of them, calls itself doer and enjoyer, and wanders the long round of birth and death, and by her force forgets the one it came from.

Water began to flow from Vyasa’s closed eyes. He could not stop it. He understood now what amrita that empty bowl had been thirsting for. Devotion to this Lord, who lies past the reach of the senses, is the one direct way a jiva crosses back over her; and the glory of that Purushottama, whose lila carries a soul across, was the single glory he had never sung in his granths.

Every form breathed before his inner eyes, so near he could reach out and touch it. And even touched, it did not break.

Vyasa’s lips trembled. “This was it,” he said within himself, and the voice caught. “All of this was here in front of me, and I never sang it. I gave my years to dharma and right conduct. And this glory, the glory a heart loses itself in, I walked straight past.”

A long time he sat like that, eyes shut, tears flowing. Then he opened his eyes. The sun had climbed high. The river flowed as before. But the empty bowl had been filled.

He lifted the pen.

And he composed the holy katha of Shri Hari, the song of that Purushottama’s glory that Narada had pointed him toward, and he made it for ordinary people, the ones who never learn what holds them inside the round of birth and death. A song that, once it falls on the ears, wakes love for the Lord in the heart, and where that love wakes, grief and delusion and fear loosen their grip. He finished it, went back over it, and then had his son, had me, take the whole of it by heart.

Here Shukadeva paused a moment.

“Rajan, from birth I was one who had no dealings with the world, nothing to take from it, nothing to give. No taste for any object, no attachment to any face. But when my father sang this katha before me, I stopped where I stood. The one who was atmarama, at rest in the self, with no desire left, even he became bound to this one story. And Rajan, the katha that could hold someone as detached as me, that same katha is falling on your ears now, in your final days.”

On the bank of the Ganga, Parikshit stayed silent a long while. His hand had come to rest, without his noticing, on his chest, on the spot where until now the fear of Takshaka had sat, and in this hour something else was there.

“Bhagavan,” he said softly, “then that emptiness was no disease.”

Shukadeva did not answer. He said only this, and said it very calmly: “The leavings that carried a servant woman’s son across, and the emptiness that made Vyasa write this Purana, Rajan, they are two fingers of the same hand. Wherever that thirst rises in a heart, know that someone is already calling there.”

Parikshit said nothing. The morning sun trembled on the river, and one more day had slipped by.