Vyasa had come back to his ashrama wanting a son, and wanting him the way fire comes, out of the arani, the two sticks churned together, with no womb in his making. He was churning for the sacrificial fire when the apsara Ghritachi passed before him, dark-eyed and lovely, and the sight threw him into confusion. This daughter of the gods, he thought, is not for one such as me; what am I to do now? Ghritachi saw his trouble and feared a curse, and in her fright she took the form of a shuki, a female parrot, and flew away. Vyasa stared after the bird in wonder, and desire, which had entered him at the first sight of her, spread through every limb, and his mind filled with amazement. He tried with all his firmness to hold that mind, and it would not be held; what was to be had already taken it. So while he went on churning for fire, his seed fell on the arani, and he paid the falling no attention and churned on. Out of that arani was born Shuka, a boy of lovely form, like Vyasa himself, and he shone there as fire blazes up when ghee is poured into the homa. Vyasa looked at the son and thought, “What is this!” and wondered whether the boon Shiva had once granted him had taken this shape. The child born of the arani’s womb blazed with his own radiance like a second fire.
Vyasa carried the boy down from the mountain in great joy, divine in body, splendid as a second garhapatya fire, and bathed him in the water of the Ganga. Flowers rained from the sky onto the infant. Vyasa performed the jatakarma and the other rites of birth, and the gods sounded their drums and the apsaras danced; Vishvavasu, Narada, Tumburu and all the kings of the gandharvas came longing to see the child and sang for gladness, and gods and vidyadharas praised the son of Vyasa born of the arani. In that moment a divine danda, a kamandalu and a black antelope skin fell from the sky to the earth for him. The infant grew big as soon as he was born, and Vyasa, who knew the Vedic rule, performed his upanayana; and the Vedas, with their secrets and their compendia, came and stood before the boy just as they stood in his father. Because Vyasa had seen Ghritachi in the form of a shuki at the churning of the arani, he named the boy Shuka. Shukadeva took Brihaspati for his acharya and kept the vow of brahmacharya in the guru’s house, studied all the Vedas with their secrets and compendia and the dharmashastras, gave his guru-dakshina, and came home to his father.
The refusal to marry
Vyasa rose quickly when he saw Shuka come, embraced him again and again, smelled his head, asked after his welfare and his studies, and kept him in his holy ashrama. Then he began to think of Shuka’s marriage, and one day he spoke of a certain muni’s daughter, a beautiful girl. “You have studied the Vedas and all the dharmashastras. Now marry, live as a householder, and worship the gods and the pitaras. Son, take a beautiful wife and free me of my debt. A man without a son has no good course and never reaches heaven. By hard tapas I obtained a son like you, born of no womb; you are like a god, so protect your father.” Shukadeva answered without heat. “Vedavyasa, what are you saying? Teach me, your disciple, the knowledge of what is real, and I will obey your command.” Vyasa said that he had obtained this son by a hundred years of tapas done in great suffering and by the worship of Shiva; he would ask some king for wealth and put it in Shuka’s hands. Then the dispassionate Shukadeva spoke. “Father, tell me what happiness in this human world is free of calamity. The wise refuse the name of happiness to anything mixed with sorrow. Take a wife and I come under her control; what happiness is there for a dependent man? A man bound in a noose of iron or of wood may perhaps get free, and one caught in the bond of son and wife never gets free. This body is full of excrement and urine, and so is a woman’s; what wise man would wish to love it? I am not born of a womb; how then should my mind be on womb-born pleasure? I have studied the Vedas with their limbs and seen that they are full of violence and drive a man onto the road of works. I was given Brihaspati for a guru, and he too is sunk in the ocean of household life; a diseased physician treating another man’s disease, that is what a householder guru is to a man who wants moksha. So I bowed to him and came to you. Protect me by teaching me tattva-jnana, for I am very afraid of this serpent, samsara.” Nothing in the world was stranger, he went on, than that a man bound in son and wife and house should be called a pandita. “Because it seizes a man and binds him it is called griha. Where is happiness in such a house of bondage? Father, that is why I am afraid.” Vyasa answered him. “The house is no prison, and it is no cause of bondage. One who is free in mind becomes free even in the householder stage.” The man who earns his wealth by just means, performs the rites, does shraddha and yajna, speaks the truth and keeps himself pure is freed while he lives in a house; the brahmachari, the sannyasi and the vanaprastha all come to the householder’s door after midday, and he feeds them; no stage greater than his has been seen or heard of, and Vasishtha and the other acharyas took refuge in it. The knowers of dharma have said that one goes from one ashrama to the next: satisfy the gods, the pitaras and your dependents, father a son and set him in the householder stage, then leave for the forest, and when vanaprastha is complete, take sannyasa. The senses make a man drunk, Vyasa said, and to conquer them a man should marry and keep a house, and afterwards, in old age, do tapas. Vishvamitra did the hardest tapas for three thousand years without food, and at the sight of Menaka he was deluded, and from his seed the beautiful Shakuntala was born. Vyasa’s own father Parashara saw the dark daughter of a fisherman and, struck by Kama’s arrow, took her on the boat itself. Brahma saw his own daughter and ran after her senseless with desire until Shiva stopped him. “So accept my word, which is for your good: marry a girl of good family and follow the eternal Vedic path.”
Shukadeva would not have it. “Father, I will never accept the householder’s stage; like a snare that traps beasts and birds, it is bondage for every man.” Where was happiness seen among people anxious about wealth and grain? Even Indra was not as happy as a beggar who wants nothing; Brahma was not happy, and Vishnu with lovely Lakshmi beside him was not happy, for he must suffer war after war with the daityas; Shankara too, he had heard, was always unhappy, doing tapas without pause and still having to fight. There was sorrow in birth, in old age, in death, and again in a womb full of excrement and urine, and greater than all of it the sorrow of craving and greed, and greater still the sorrow of begging; to live on another’s support was a death by day and by night. The belly alone could be filled with leaves and roots; it was in feeding wife and sons and grandsons that a man bore hardship on hardship. So let his father teach him the science of knowledge and the science of yoga, and a means to destroy karma in all three of its fruits, sanchita, prarabdha and kriyamana. “A woman sucks a man’s blood like a leech, and the fool, deluded by her charming gestures, does not see it. By union she takes his vigor, by clever speech his wealth and his mind; who is a greater thief? In my view only a fool marries, to destroy the happiness of his sleep.” Vyasa heard his son’s reasoned words and fell into great worry. What shall I do now, he thought, and tears of sorrow ran from his eyes, his body trembled and his mind sank. Shukadeva looked at his father, wretched and shaking, and was amazed. How strong maya is, he said, that it deludes even my father, the author of the Vedanta-darshana, the speaker of the Puranas, the divider of the Vedas; the Pauranikas say he is born of a portion of Vishnu, and today he sinks in an ocean of grief like a merchant whose ship has broken at sea, and sheds tears like an ordinary man. I will go for refuge to that Devi Mahamaya who deludes the whole world, and Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesha with it. Who is Vyasa? Who am I? Where did the feeling of father and son come from in this body of five elements? Then, remembering the Adishakti Bhagavati, the one cause of all causes, Shukadeva spoke to his grieving father. “Son of Parashara, you yourself give knowledge to all; why do you grieve like an ignorant common man? Now I am your son, and who knows who I was in a former birth, and who you were? Food removes hunger; the sight of a son does not. Water removes thirst; the sight of a son does not. I am your son; tell me what I should do for you. Long ago a Brahmin named Ajigarta sold his son Shunahshepa to King Harishchandra for money, as the animal for the sacrifice. If wealth alone is the store of happiness, then gather wealth, and I am your son; what shall I do for your happiness? Give me by your wisdom the knowledge that frees me from the great fear of dwelling in the womb. The thought ‘I am bound’ does not leave my mind.” So his son spoke, calm and eager for sannyasa, and Vyasa answered him.
The Devi Bhagavata and the road to Mithila
“Son, read the Shrimad Devi Bhagavata Purana that I have composed. It is a holy Purana, equal to the Veda, and it is not too long: twelve skandhas, with the five marks of a Purana, and in my view the ornament of all Puranas. By the mere hearing of it true knowledge of the real and the unreal arises.” And Vyasa told him where it had come from. Once, at the great dissolution, Vishnu lay as a child on a banyan leaf, and he was thinking: by what conscious being, for what purpose, out of what substance have I been made in a child’s form? To that child Balamukunda the Adishakti Bhagavati spoke the knowledge that gives everything its meaning, in half a shloka: sarvam khalv idam evaham, nanyad asti sanatanam. All this is I alone; there is no other eternal. Vishnu wondered who had uttered that true word, and he held it in his heart and repeated it again and again, lying anxious on the leaf. Then Bhagavati Mahalakshmi appeared before him, four-armed, bearing conch, discus, mace and lotus, lovely-faced and gently smiling, with twenty-one shaktis of like splendor standing armed and adorned on every side of her, Rati and Bhuti, Buddhi and Mati, Kirti, Smriti, Dhriti, Shraddha, Medha and the rest, down to Lajja, Jrimbha and Tandra. Vishnu saw them standing without support on the boundless ocean of dissolution and was amazed. Where had these goddesses come from, and where had a banyan risen in this single ocean, and who had made him a lovely child and set him here? Was this his mother, or some maya hard to cross? The Devi smiled. “Vishnu, why are you amazed? By the maya of the Mahashakti you have been born again and again at every creation and dissolution, and you have forgotten me. That Parashakti is nirguna; you and I are saguna. Know me as the sattviki shakti.” From his navel-lotus, she told him, Brahma would be born to create with rajas, and from between Brahma’s brows Rudra, to destroy with tamas at the end of the kalpa. “For this I have come to you. I always live near you; I dwell in your heart.” Vishnu asked her who had spoken the half-shloka he had heard a little while ago, which he remembered again and again as a poor man thinks of wealth. Mahalakshmi laughed sweetly. “Shauri, I am the saguna, four-armed Bhagavati; that one is the abode of all the gunas and nirguna besides, and it was said by her. Know it as the Shrimad Devi Bhagavata, the essence of all the Vedas. Keep it always in your mind and never forget it; nothing in the three worlds is more worth knowing.” Vishnu held it in his heart forever as the best of mantras. Some days later Brahma, born of his navel-lotus and afraid of daityas, came to him for refuge, and Vishnu, after a terrible fight, killed Madhu and Kaitabha and began the japa of that half-shloka. Brahma asked him whose japa this was, and Vishnu told him: the shakti that is cause and effect in both of them is Bhagavati Shiva, the eternal supreme Vidya, of whose conscious shakti he and Brahma and the whole world are born. “What she said in half a shloka is the real Shrimad Devi Bhagavata, and at the start of the Dvapara age it will be expanded again.” So Brahma, seated on Vishnu’s navel-lotus, compiled that Bhagavata and told it to his son Narada, and long ago Narada gave it to Vyasa, who expanded it into twelve skandhas and completed it. “Read it,” Vyasa said. “Take its eighteen thousand shlokas to heart. It holds the essence of tattva-jnana, it has the slaying of Vritrasura and many tales within tales, and it carries a man across the ocean of becoming. My disciple here, born of Lomaharshana, will study it with you.” That disciple was Suta himself, who was telling all this to the sages, and he studied the whole samhita in due form. Shukadeva studied the Bhagavata too and went on living in Vyasa’s ashrama, and like Narada, that other son of Brahma, he could find no peace there. He lived alone, agitated in mind, looking like a man indifferent to everything; he neither ate much nor fasted.
Vyasa saw his son brooding, and asked him what he was always brooding on, like a poor man in debt, while his father still lived. “If my teaching gives you no peace, go to Mithila, which King Janaka rules. That Videha king is jivanmukta and an ocean of truth; he will destroy your delusion. Ask him truly the secret of varnashrama-dharma.” Shukadeva said that this raised a doubt in him. “Is it not hypocrisy? Jivanmukta, and videha, without a body, and he rules with joy? That is as impossible as a barren woman having a son.” How could enjoyment enjoyed be non-enjoyment, and action done be non-action? If the king’s tongue knew sweet from bitter, what freedom was that? And were the good man and the thief equal in his kingdom? Shukadeva had never seen such a king, and he longed to see this one, who lived in the world like a lotus leaf in water. He fell at his father’s feet. “I ask your leave. How does King Janaka rule without danda? If the people had no fear of punishment, they would not follow dharma. It sounds to me like a man saying, ‘This mother of mine is barren.’” Vyasa held his desireless son hard. “May it be well with you; Shuka, live long. Give me your true word that you will come back to this ashrama of mine. I live happily only seeing your lotus face, and without you I am sad. Son, you are my very breath.” Shukadeva bowed to his father, circled him, and set off like an arrow loosed from a bow. On the way he saw prosperous lands, ascetics at tapas, yogis at their practice, Vaishnavas, Pashupatas, Shaivas, Shaktas, worshipers of the sun and followers of many faiths, and he marveled. He crossed Mount Meru in about two years and the Himalaya in one, and came to Mithila, rich and content and of good conduct. At the city gate the gatekeeper stopped him and asked who he was, where he had come from and what his business was. Shukadeva said nothing. He went back out of the gate and stood there like a post, and after a while, amazed, he stood there laughing, and still said nothing. The gatekeeper pressed him: in this city a man entered only by the king’s order, and no one of unknown family and character entered at all. Shukadeva said, “The purpose I came for is fulfilled by your words alone. I came to see the city of Videha, and here even entry is hard. I have been cheated by my own father. What blame is there on anyone else? Where is Mount Sumeru and where is this Mithila! I came on foot, and what fruit have I got for the labor? Prarabdha has cheated me.” The gatekeeper felt that this was some wise and excellent Brahmin, and told him to go wherever his business lay. “Stopping you was my offense. Forgive it, for forgiveness is the strength of the free.” Shukadeva said, “There is no fault of yours in this; a servant must obey his master’s order. There is no fault of the king’s either, for the wise should know their thieves and their enemies. The fault is wholly mine; to go uninvited to another’s house lowers a man.” Then the gatekeeper asked him what happiness is, and what sorrow, and who is an enemy and who a friend. Shukadeva answered first like a scholar, in divisions: men are of two kinds, the ragi and the viragi; the dispassionate are known, unknown or middling; the attached are foolish or clever; cleverness is born of shastra or of intellect; intellect is yukta or ayukta. The gatekeeper said he had not understood, and asked him to explain again as it truly is. So Shukadeva told it plainly. The attached man’s happiness comes by getting wealth, sons, wife, honor and victory; whoever obstructs it he thinks an enemy, and whoever increases it, a friend. The dispassionate man’s happiness comes only from solitude, contemplation of the self and study of Vedanta. “The learned man seeking his welfare has many enemies, kama, krodha, pramada and the rest; and a man’s true friend is contentment alone. There is no other in the three worlds.” The gatekeeper took him for a wise Brahmin and let him in. Shukadeva went on through the great city, its shops full of goods, its merchants given to greed, delusion and quarrels, and came to the palace gate, where he was stopped again, and stood like a piece of wood, treating sun and shade alike. After a while the king’s minister himself came with folded hands and brought him into another chamber, showed him a lovely garden of divine trees laden with flowers, honored him, ordered the women who served the king, skilled in dance and song and expert in the shastra of love, to serve him, and left. The courtesans fed him with foods suited to the place and the hour, and the lovely women of the inner apartments showed him the garden of the antahpura. He was young, handsome, radiant, a second Kamadeva, and they were all enchanted; and pure-souled Shukadeva, son of the arani, regarded them as his mother, neither glad nor sorry. They spread him a bed with soft and costly coverings. He washed his hands and feet, took kusha in his hand, performed the evening sandhya, and was absorbed in meditation on the Lord. He meditated for one prahara, then lay down; after two praharas of sleep he rose, and in the fourth prahara he was again in meditation; then he bathed, finished the morning rites, and entered samadhi again.
King Janaka’s teaching
King Janaka heard that Shukadeva had come, and the pure-souled king went to him with his purohita before him and his ministers behind, gave him a fine seat, honored him in due form, gave him a milk-giving cow and asked after his welfare. Then Janaka put his question to the guest seated at ease and calm in mind: he desired nothing, so for what purpose had he come to the king’s house? Shukadeva told him. “My father Vyasa told me to marry, for of all the ashramas the householder’s is best. I took the command of my father and guru for bondage and did not accept it. He explained that the householder’s stage is no bondage, and still I did not accept it. Seeing my mind full of doubt, he said, ‘Go to Mithila and do not grieve. The royal sage Janaka lives there, a sacrificer and a jivanmukta king, famed in the world as Videha, who rules without a thorn. Though he rules, he is not bound in maya’s net; why then are you afraid, you who live in the forest? See that king and give up the delusion rising in your mind. Marry; or else go and ask him, and he will resolve your doubt, and then come back quickly to me.’ At his command I have come to you. I long for moksha; tell me what is right for me. Of tapas, tirtha, vows, yajna, svadhyaya, pilgrimage and knowledge, which is the direct means of moksha?”
Janaka told him what a Brahmin on the path of moksha should do. After the upanayana he lives first in the guru’s house to study the Veda and the shastra; having studied the Veda and the Vedanta there and given his guru-dakshina, he comes home, marries, and lives as a householder with his wife. He earns his wealth justly, stays always content and expects nothing from anyone; free of sin, performing the agnihotra and the other rites, he speaks the truth and is pure in mind, word and deed. When sons and grandsons are born he goes in time to the vanaprastha stage; there, conquering by tapas the six enemies, kama, krodha, lobha, mada, moha and matsarya, he hands the care of his wife to his son and takes all the fires into himself; and when peace has come from the enjoyment of worldly things and a pure vairagya has arisen in his heart, he takes refuge in the fourth stage. “Only the dispassionate has the right to sannyasa, and no one else. This Vedic word is wholly true, and such is my view. Shukadeva, the Vedas name forty-eight samskaras in all; the great souls give forty to the householder, and eight, shama, dama and the rest, to the seeker of liberation. One goes in order from one ashrama to the next. That is the command of the cultivated.”
Shukadeva asked whether a man in whom dispassion and knowledge have already arisen must still stay in the householder’s stage, or might live in the forest. Janaka said, “The senses are very strong and do not stay controlled; they breed many disorders in the mind of a man whose intellect is unripe. The net of vasanas is very hard, and it does not vanish quickly; a man should give it up by stages. Only one who sleeps in a high place falls; one who sleeps low never falls. If a man falls after taking sannyasa, he can find no other road. An ant climbs from the root of a tree onto a branch and from there, slowly, at its ease, on its own feet, it reaches the fruit; a bird, fearing obstacles, flies very fast in the sky and in the end grows tired, while the ant, resting as it goes, arrives. The mind is very strong, and no one who has not conquered the senses can conquer it; so one tries to conquer it gradually, by the order of the ashramas. The man who is calm and wise and knows the self, even living as a householder, neither rejoices nor grieves; he is even in loss and in gain. See me: I do the king’s work, and I am jivanmukta. I do all my work as I wish, and I feel no grief and no joy. As I enjoy many pleasures and do many acts and stay unattached, so you too become free.”
Then Janaka laid out the reasoning. How can the unseen atman come into the grip of this visible world? The five great elements and their qualities are what is called the seen. The atman is reached by inference and is never directly perceived; how then can that stainless, changeless atman fall into bondage? The mind alone is the cause of great happiness and of sorrow, and when the mind is pure, everything becomes pure. Bathe at every tirtha again and again, and if the mind has not become pure, all of it is wasted. The cause of bondage and of liberation is neither this body, nor the jivatma, nor these senses; the mind alone binds and frees men. The atman is always pure and free and is never bound; bondage and liberation lie within the mind, and peace comes by the mind’s peace alone. Every distinction of enemy, friend or neutral lives in the mind too, and when there is the sense of one self, that distinction does not remain; it rises only out of duality. “I, the jiva, am always Brahman”: there is no more to reflect on than this, and the sense of difference arises only when the mind is attached to objects. The chief cause of bondage is avidya, and vidya removes it; so the wise man studies both vidya and avidya, with inquiry. “How can the comfort of shade be known without sunshine?” Janaka said. “So how can vidya be known without avidya?” The gunas sport among the gunas, the elements among the elements, the senses among the objects of the senses, all by themselves; what fault of the atman is in this? For everyone’s protection the Vedas have set their limits, and without them, as with the nastikas, all dharma would be destroyed, and with dharma everything, and the traditions of conduct of every varna; so walking the Vedic path brings welfare.
Shukadeva said, “Even after hearing what you have said, my doubt remains; it does not go. In the Vedic dharmas violence abounds, and in that violence many kinds of adharma. How can such a dharma give liberation? Drinking soma, killing animals and eating meat are plainly wrong conduct. In the Sautramani yajna the taking of sura is described outright, and gambling too is prescribed, and many other vows of the kind. It is heard that long ago there was a great king named Shashabindu, very righteous, devoted to sacrifice, generous and truthful, the guardian of the bridge of dharma and the controller of those on wrong paths, and he performed many sacrifices with abundant gifts. The hides of the animals killed in them made a heap as high as the Vindhya, and when the clouds rained on it a holy river named Charmanvati began to flow. That king went to heaven, and his fame stays fixed on the earth. When such things are described in the Veda, my faith does not hold there. And if a man takes pleasure in enjoyment with a woman and grieves greatly when he does not get it, how can he be jivanmukta?”
Janaka answered him. “The violence seen in sacrifices is truly called non-violence, for only violence done through attachment is called violence; that is the verdict of the shastras. Smoke comes from fire through the contact of wet wood, and without the wood no smoke is seen in that fire. Understand the violence the Veda prescribes in the same way, as non-violence. Violence done by the attached is violence; for the unattached it is not called violence. An act done without attachment and without ego the Vedic scholars call as good as an act never done. The violence done in sacrifice by attached householders is violence, and an act done free of attachment and ego is non-violence for the self-controlled seekers of liberation.”
Source: Shrimad Devi Bhagavata Mahapurana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)