Mahabharata · Chapter 35 · Part 4 of 7 · Adhyatma, Parashara, Vasishtha and Janaka

About 130 minutes · in 4 sittings

What adhyatma is, Yudhishthira’s first question and Bhishma’s answer

Bhishma lay on his bed of arrows with the Pandava king seated beside him, and the long instruction went on. Yudhishthira had already heard from him how a king rules, and what a king may do when calamity leaves him no clean choice. Now his questions turned inward, away from thrones and treasuries, toward whatever it is that sits behind a man’s eyes and does the knowing. “Grandfather,” he said, “tell me what adhyatma is where a man is concerned, and tell me where it arises.”

Bhishma answered, “With the science of adhyatma to help him a man can come to know everything, and no other knowledge stands above it. It is the account of what a living creature is made of, and of the one inside him who watches. I will explain it to you, son, as far as my own understanding reaches. Listen to me closely.

“Begin with what everything is made of. Earth, wind, space, water, and light for the fifth: these are the great elements, and every creature has its beginning in them and its end. The body of a living being, the fine body as much as the coarse one, is what the qualities of these five come to when they combine. Those qualities start into existence again and again, and again and again they sink back into the cause they first came from, the supreme Self. Out of the five every creature is made, and into the five every creature dissolves, over and over, the way waves without number lift from the ocean and settle back into the water that raised them. Think of a tortoise as well. It pushes its legs out and draws them in again, and in the same way the endless multitude of creatures comes out of these five fixed elements and goes back into them.

“Sound comes from space. Everything dense belongs to earth. Life is from wind, taste is from water, and form, they say, is the property of light. The whole universe, whatever in it moves and whatever stands still, is these five existing together in different proportions. When destruction comes, the countless kinds of creatures resolve into the five, and when creation begins once more they rise out of the same five. The Creator places these five elements in every creature, in whatever measure he judges right for it.

“Take them one at a time. Sound, the ears, and every hollow in the body have space for their source. Taste, the tongue, and all that is moist or juicy are counted as the properties of water. Form, the eye, and the fire in the belly that digests our food share the nature of light. Smell, the organ that smells, and the body itself belong to earth. Life, touch, and action are the properties of wind. There you have what each of the five primal elements gives.

“When he had made these, the Supreme Deity joined six more things to them. Three are the gunas, the states called sattva, rajas, and tamas. Then comes time, then the awareness each organ has of its own work, and the mind makes the sixth. And what we call the intellect, the buddhi, lives inside everything you can see of a man from the soles of his feet up to the crown of his head.

“A man has five senses of knowledge. The mind is the sixth, the intellect is called the seventh, and the eighth is the kshetrajna, the knower of the field, who is the Self. You learn what each of them is, the senses and the one who acts through them, by watching what each one does. Sattva, rajas, and tamas need the senses to take shape in. The senses exist only to seize the impressions of their own objects. The mind’s work is to doubt, and the intellect’s work is to settle the doubt. The knower of the field, they say, does nothing at all and only witnesses what the others do. Five things steer the intellect: sattva, rajas, tamas, time, and the acts a creature has already done. The intellect is the senses, and it is those five as well, and where the intellect is missing, the senses and the mind and all five of them cease to be.

A key to reading this, the frame of adhyatma: the five great elements, earth, wind, space, water and light, are the stuff of every body. To them the Supreme Deity joins six more: the three gunas, time, the awareness each organ has of its own work, and the mind. Inside a man Bhishma then counts eight: five senses of knowledge that seize their objects, the mind that doubts, the intellect that decides, and the knower of the field, the Self, who does nothing and witnesses all of it. Keep hold of that last pair, the intellect and the Self. Everything Bhishma says next depends on which of the two makes the gunas and which of the two only sees them.

“What the intellect sees with is called the eye. When it hears, it goes by the name of the ear. When it smells it becomes the sense of smell, when it tastes the things that can be tasted it is called the tongue, and when it feels what can be touched it becomes the sense of touch. It is the one intellect all along, changing shape often and in many ways. When it wants something, it becomes the mind. The five senses and the mind, each a separate footing for the intellect to stand on, are the intellect’s own creations, and together they are called the indriyas. When they are stained, the intellect is stained with them.

“The intellect that lives in a creature exists in three states. At one time it has joy, at another it gives itself to grief, and at another it rests in a condition that is neither pleasure nor pain. Those three states are its very substance, and it turns through them one after another. As the lord of rivers, the heaving ocean, always keeps within his shores, so the intellect, bound up with its three states, stays within the mind and the senses. When rajas wakes, the intellect is changed into rajas. A rush of delight, joy, gladness, happiness, a heart at ease: these, however they are roused, are the properties of sattva. Heartburn, grief, sorrow, discontent, and an unforgiving temper, arising from one cause or another, are what rajas produces. Ignorance, attachment and error, heedlessness, stupor and terror, meanness, dejection, sleep, and the habit of putting things off are the properties of tamas when some cause brings them on.

“So whatever state arises in body or mind that is bound up with joy, put it down to sattva. Whatever is heavy with sorrow and disagreeable to you, know that it comes from rajas, and turn your attention to it before any act begins from it, so that you can keep clear of it. Whatever in body or mind is full of error or stupor, whatever cannot be thought through and stays a mystery, know that tamas has a hand in it. I have now shown you that the things of this world live in the intellect. A man becomes wise by knowing that much. What other sign of wisdom could there be?

“Now learn the difference between two subtle things, the intellect and the Self. One of them, the intellect, creates the gunas. The other, the Self, creates nothing. By nature they are distinct, and yet they are always found together. A fish is a different thing from the water it lives in, and still the fish and the water have to exist together. The gunas cannot know the Self. The Self knows them. Ignorant people suppose the Self to be joined to the gunas the way a quality is joined to the thing that has it. They are mistaken, because the Self is in truth only a witness of everything, and it does not act. The intellect has nothing it rests on and is made of no stuff of its own. What we call life arises when the effects of the gunas come together, and other causes, apart from the gunas the intellect produces, make the intellect that lives in the body. Nobody can lay hold of the gunas as they really are. The intellect creates them, as I said, and the Self looks on. This union of the intellect and the Self has no beginning and no end. The intellect inside us takes in everything through the senses, which are themselves lifeless and take in nothing. The senses are lamps: they throw light so that another may find what he is looking for, and they see nothing of it themselves.

“That is how the three are made, the senses, the intellect, and the Self. A man who knows it should live cheerfully and give way neither to grief nor to joy, and of such a man people say that pride has no hold on him. The intellect creates the gunas because it is its nature to, exactly as a spider spins thread because that is a spider’s nature. Think of the gunas as the threads the spider spins. Some hold that when the gunas are destroyed they do not stop existing. They only pass out of sight, and whatever has passed beyond the reach of the senses can still be affirmed by inference. Others say that with destruction the gunas are finished. Work that knot loose with your own thought and reflection until no doubt is left, and then put sorrow down and live in happiness. This earth is a river in flood with the waters of delusion. Men who do not know where its bottom lies suffer when they fall into it, and a man suffers in the same way when he slips from his union with the intellect. Those who know adhyatma and have fortitude are never brought to that pain, because they can cross to the far bank. Knowledge is the raft that carries them. The terrors that frighten men who lack knowledge never come to them. Among the righteous, none reaches an end higher than another, and in that they are all equal. As for the man of knowledge, whatever he did in earlier days, and whatever grave wrong he may still do, he destroys both, and knowledge is the only tool he needs for it. Once knowledge has come to him he stops two evils together: he no longer condemns the wrong that other men do, and he no longer does wrong himself under the pull of attachment.”

The gist: Bhishma opens the law of liberation with adhyatma. A body is five elements combined, and the senses, the mind and the intellect work inside it. Behind them sits the Self, the knower of the field, who acts in nothing and witnesses everything. The intellect spins the three gunas out of itself as a spider spins thread, and it shows as joy, as grief, or as stupor according to which of them is awake. Whoever keeps the spinner and the witness apart in his mind has the raft of knowledge under him, and the flooded river cannot hold him.

How grief and the fear of death are stopped, Narada and Samanga

Yudhishthira said, “Every living creature goes in fear of two things, sorrow and death. Tell me, Grandfather, how a man can keep the two of them from coming.”

Bhishma said, “There is an old story told on this very point, Yudhishthira. It is the talk that Narada, the sage who moves among the gods, once had with Samanga.”

Narada had said to Samanga, “Other men greet their elders with a bend of the head. You lay yourself full length on the ground until your chest touches the earth. You look to me like a man crossing the river of life with nothing to carry him except his own two arms. I never see you grieve, and you are cheerful beyond the ordinary. I cannot find the smallest anxiety in you. You are always content and always happy, and you seem to play your way through the world like a child.”

Samanga answered, “You give every man his due honor, Narada, so hear the reason. I know the truth about the past, the present, and the future, and so my spirits never sink. I know how acts begin in this world, how their fruits arrive, and how many different shapes those fruits take, and so I never give way to sorrow. Look around you. The unlettered live. The destitute live, and so do the prosperous, the blind, the simpletons and the madmen, and so do we. Each of them lives by the strength of what he did in lives before this one. The gods themselves, who know no disease, are what they are through their past acts. The strong and the weak alike live by what they have done. It is fitting, then, that you should think well of us.

“The owners of thousands live, and the owners of hundreds. Men buried in sorrow go on living. See, we are alive as well. And since we do not give way to grief, Narada, what can the practice of religious duties or the keeping of rites do for us or against us? No joy and no sorrow lasts without end, and so neither can shake us. The thing for which men are called wise, the very root of wisdom, is senses that are free of error. It is the senses that fall into error and into grief. A man whose senses can be fooled has not reached wisdom, whatever else he has reached. The pride such a man takes in himself is only one more form of the error he lives under, and for the man of error there is neither this world nor the next.

“Remember that griefs do not last forever and that happiness cannot be had all the time. A man like me would never take up worldly life, with its turns of fortune and its painful incidents. He would not care for the things people long to enjoy, and he would give no thought to the happiness they might bring or to the griefs that arrive along with them. A man who can rest on his own self does not covet what others own. He does not brood over gains he has not made. Great wealth coming to him does not delight him, and wealth leaving him does not make him grieve.

“Friends cannot rescue a man from sorrow in the world to come. Wealth cannot, nor high birth, nor learning in the scriptures, nor mantras, nor energy. Conduct alone brings him to happiness there. The understanding of a man who knows nothing of yoga can never be pointed toward liberation, and a man without yoga never has happiness. Patience, and the resolve to throw sorrow off: where you see those two, happiness is on its way. Whatever is agreeable leads to pleasure. Pleasure brings on pride, and pride gives birth to sorrow. That is why I keep away from all of it. Grief, fear, and pride, which numb the heart, and pleasure and pain along with them, I look upon as a witness with no stake in them, for the plain reason that this body of mine is alive and moves about.

“I have thrown away wealth and pleasure, and thirst and error with them, and I wander the earth free of grief and of every anxiety of the heart. Like a man who has drunk the nectar of the gods, I have no fear, here or hereafter, of death, or of wrongdoing, or of greed, or of anything of their kind. I won this knowledge as the fruit of austerities that were hard and that nothing can undo. And that, Narada, is why grief, even when it reaches me, has no power to hurt me.”

The gist: Samanga’s answer to Narada is that he knows how acts ripen. Every creature, from the madman to the gods, lives on what it did before. Joy and sorrow both run out, and it is the senses that are deceived. So he keeps his senses clear, wants nothing that belongs to another, has let wealth and pleasure go, and watches grief, fear and pride as a witness watches. Sorrow still arrives, and it finds nothing in him to take hold of.

What benefits a man sunk in doubt, Galava and Narada

Yudhishthira asked, “Grandfather, think of a man who does not know the truths of the scriptures, who lives in doubt the whole time, and who keeps away from self-restraint and the other disciplines that lead to knowledge of the Self. What is good for a man like that?”

Bhishma said, “To honor his teacher, to wait with reverence on the old, and to listen to the scriptures when able Brahmins recite them: these are said to be the highest good for such a man. An old story is told here too, the conversation between Galava and the celestial sage Narada.

“Galava wanted to know what was truly good for him, and he went to Narada, who was free of error and of weariness, learned in the scriptures, content in his knowledge, the full master of his senses, with his soul given to yoga. ‘The qualities that make a man respected in the world,’ he said, ‘live in you for good. I can see that. You are free of error, so it falls to you to clear the doubts of men like me, who are still subject to error and do not know the truths of the world. We do not know what we ought to do. The scriptures pull a man toward knowledge and toward the work of rites at one and the same time, and you must speak to us about that. The different ashramas approve different ways of living. “This is the good,” the scriptures tell us, and then, “This other is the good.” I watch the followers of the four ashramas, each urged on by his own texts and each fully satisfied with what those texts lay down, traveling in their separate directions. I see that we are just as content with ours. And I cannot tell what is truly good. If the scriptures all spoke with one voice, the real good would stand in plain view. They are many, and so it is wrapped in mystery, and to me the whole matter looks tangled past sorting. Speak to me about it. I have come to you for this. Teach me.’

A key to reading this, the four ashramas: Galava’s word is ashrama, which ordinarily means one of the four stations a life passes through, each with a rule of its own. The old commentator on this passage reads it here as the four chief creeds of the time, each proclaiming its own road as the good. On either reading Galava’s trouble is the same. Every station, or every school, names a different good and is content with it, and he cannot tell which of them is the real one.

“Narada said, ‘The ashramas are four, child. Every one of them serves the purpose it was designed for, and the duties they teach are different duties. Learn them first from teachers who are fit to teach them, Galava, and then think them over. You will find that what is proclaimed in praise of each differs from the rest in its form, parts from them in its matter, and contradicts them in the practices it asks for. Looked at with a coarse eye, none of the ashramas will plainly give up what it really intends, which is knowledge of the Self. Others, whose sight is fine, see the highest end of all of them.

“‘Now for the good about which there is no doubt. To do good to your friends, to hold your enemies down, and to win the three aims together, dharma, wealth, and pleasure: the wise have declared this the highest excellence. To abstain from sinful acts, to be steady in a righteous disposition, and to behave well toward those who are good and pious: this is excellence, beyond doubt. To be mild with all creatures, sincere in your dealings, and sweet in your words: this is excellence, beyond doubt. To share what you have fairly among the gods, the ancestors, and guests, and to stand by your servants: this is excellence, beyond doubt. To speak the truth is excellent. Knowing what the truth is, though, is very hard, and I say that truth is whatever does the greatest good to living creatures.

“‘To give up pride, to put down heedlessness, to be content, and to live by your own self alone: these are said to make up the highest excellence. To study the Vedas and their branches by the settled rules, and every inquiry a man pursues for the sake of knowledge: these too, beyond doubt, are excellent. A man who wants what is excellent must never enjoy sound, form, taste, touch, and smell to excess, and he must never enjoy them for their own sake. He should give up wandering at night and sleeping by day, idleness, trickery, and arrogance. He should give up both extremes with the things of the senses, the excess of indulgence and the refusal of all indulgence whatever.

“‘Never try to raise yourself by running others down. Seek distinction by your merits alone, and seek it over men who are themselves distinguished, never over your inferiors. Men with no real merit, full of admiration for themselves, belittle men of real merit by announcing their own virtues and their own wealth. Swollen with their own importance, and with nobody stepping in to show them what they are, they come to believe themselves better than men of true distinction. The man of real wisdom and real merit wins great fame by two abstentions: he does not speak ill of others, and he does not praise himself. Flowers shed a pure, sweet fragrance and never trumpet their own excellence. The blazing sun scatters his splendor across the sky in perfect silence. In the same way those men shine in the world with a great name who use their intelligence to drop these faults and others like them, and who do not proclaim their own virtues. A fool cannot make himself shine by spreading his own praise about. A man of real merit and learning becomes known even if he is hidden in a pit. Evil words die out however loud the voice that speaks them. Good words blaze through the world however softly they are said. The sun shows his fiery form in the sun-stone, and in the same way the heap of words with little sense in them that vain fools pour out shows only what is in their hearts. This is why men seek wisdom of many kinds, and of everything a man can acquire, it seems to me that wisdom is worth the most.

“‘Do not speak until you are asked, and do not speak when you are asked in the wrong way. Even with intelligence and knowledge, a man should sit silent like a simpleton until he is asked, and asked properly. Seek to live among honest people who are devoted to dharma and to giving, and who keep the duties of their own order. A man who wants what is excellent should never live where the duties of the several orders have fallen into confusion. A man may be seen to live who does no work for his bread and is well content with whatever comes to him without effort. Living among the righteous, he gains pure righteousness. Living among the sinful, he is stained with sin in the same way. The touch of water, of fire, or of the moon’s rays gives the feeling of cold or of heat at once, and the impressions of virtue and vice are just as quick to produce happiness or misery.

A key to reading this, the vighasa-eater: vighasa is the food that is left when everyone else in the house has been fed. Those who eat it, the good and pious in the old commentator’s reading, eat to fill the stomach and take no notice of the flavors of what is set before them. Those who eat with care, sorting one flavor from another, are to be known as men still tied by the bonds of action. Narada sets the two eaters side by side at this point in his counsel, between the company a man should keep and the places he should leave.

“‘The righteous man should leave a place where a Brahmin teaches duties to disciples who want knowledge of the Self reasoned out for them, and who do not ask for it with reverence. Who, though, would leave a spot where disciples and teachers behave toward one another, in every particular, as the scriptures lay down? What learned man who hopes to be treated with respect will live where people spread tales of the faults of the learned, tales with nothing under them to stand on? And who would not leave, as he would throw off a garment whose hem has caught fire, a place where greedy men are trying to break down the fences of virtue? Stay and live among good people of righteous disposition, in the place where humble men practice the duties of religion without fear. Do not live where men practice those duties for the sake of wealth and worldly advantage, because the people of that place are all to be counted sinful. Where the inhabitants take to sinful work to earn their living, get away with all speed, as you would from a room with a snake in it. And from the very beginning give up the kind of act that stretches a man out, as it were, on a bed of thorns, and that clothes him in the desires left by the deeds of his past lives.

“‘The righteous man should leave a kingdom where the king and the king’s officers wield equal authority, and where they are in the habit of eating before they have fed their own relatives who come as guests. Live in the country where Brahmins who know the scriptures are fed first, where they are always devoted to the proper keeping of their religious duties, and where they are busy teaching disciples and officiating at the sacrifices of others. Live without hesitation in the country where the sacred calls of Svaha, Svadha, and Vashat go up at the rites duly and without a break. Leave, as you would leave poisoned meat, the kingdom where you see Brahmins driven to unholy practices because the lack of a livelihood is torturing them. With a contented heart, counting every wish as already granted, a righteous man should live in the country whose people give gladly before they are even asked.

“‘Live and move among good men devoted to righteous acts, in the country where punishment falls on the wicked and where respect and kind treatment are the portion of those whose souls are subdued and clean. Live without hesitation in the country whose king is devoted to virtue and rules it virtuously, a king who has prosperity and has cast off desire, and where heavy punishment is dealt to those who turn their anger on self-controlled men, those who act wickedly toward the righteous, those given to violence, and those who are greedy. Kings of that temper bring prosperity back to the people of their kingdoms at the very moment it is about to leave them. There, son. You asked, and I have told you what is good and excellent. As for what is good for the Self, it stands so high that nobody can describe it. The man who, to earn his living during his stay in this world, conducts himself in the way I have described, and who gives his soul to the good of all creatures, will find his excellences many and great through keeping the duties laid down for him.’”

The gist: Narada leaves the quarrel of the scriptures unsettled. He tells Galava to learn each ashrama from a fit teacher and think it over, and then he names the goods nobody doubts: help for friends, a check on enemies, dharma, wealth and pleasure together, truth that benefits creatures, mildness, pride given up, wisdom above every other gain. The rest of his counsel is about where to live, because a man takes righteousness or sin from the people around him. He says which teacher’s circle to leave, which town to flee like a room with a snake in it, and which king’s country to settle in.

A king’s conduct and the longing for moksha, Arishtanemi and Sagara

Yudhishthira asked, “Grandfather, how should a king like me carry himself in this world if he keeps the highest prize, liberation, in view the whole time? And what qualities must he always have, so that he can be free of attachments?”

Bhishma said, “For that I will tell you the old account that Arishtanemi gave to Sagara, when King Sagara came to him for counsel.

“Sagara said, ‘What is the good a man can do that will let him enjoy happiness here? How does a man keep clear of grief and agitation? I want to know all of it.’

“Arishtanemi was of Tarkshya’s line and knew every scripture, and he judged the king in front of him fit in every way to be taught. So he answered. ‘The happiness of liberation is the true happiness in this world. The ignorant man does not know it, attached as he is to his children and his animals, with his wealth and his grain about him. An understanding fastened to worldly things and a mind sick with thirst are two patients no skill can treat. The ignorant man, bound in the chains of affection, cannot win liberation. I am going to tell you now all the bonds that grow out of the affections. Listen with care, for a man who has knowledge can hear of them with profit.

“‘Father your children at the proper time. Marry them off when they have grown into young men, and once you have made sure they can earn their own living, free yourself of every attachment and roam about in happiness. When you see the wife you cherished grown old and wrapped up in the son she bore, leave her in good time, keeping your eyes on the highest prize. Whether a son comes to you or not, once you have spent the first years of your life duly enjoying with your senses the things made for them, free yourself of attachments and roam about in happiness. You have indulged the senses, so now put down the wish to indulge them further. Then go free, content with whatever comes without effort and without planning for it, and look with an equal eye on all creatures and all things. That, son, is the short of it. Hear me now and I will tell you at length why liberation is worth the winning.

“‘Those who live in this world free of attachment and fear come to happiness. Those who are attached to worldly things meet destruction, and there is no doubt of it. Worms and ants are busy gathering food, as men are, and they are seen to die in the search. If you want liberation, never spend your thoughts on your relatives, asking yourself how they will live without you. A living creature is born by himself, grows by himself, and comes by himself to happiness and misery and death. In this world people eat and are clothed and come into possessions that their parents earned, or that they earned themselves, and all of it is the result of the acts of past lives, for nothing can be had in this life that the past has not prepared. Every creature on earth lives under the protection of his own acts and gets his food as it is allotted by him who assigns the fruit of acts. A man is only a lump of clay, and he depends at every moment on forces outside himself. Being so infirm himself, what sound reason can he have for thinking it is he who protects and feeds his relatives?

“‘When death carries your relatives off before your eyes, in spite of everything you do to save them, that alone ought to wake you. While they still live, and before your duty of feeding and protecting them is done, you may die yourself and leave them behind. And once death has taken them out of this world, you cannot know what becomes of them there, whether they meet happiness or misery. That too ought to wake you. Your relatives keep themselves in this world by the fruit of their own acts whether you live or die. Think on that, and do what is for your own good. Once this is understood, who in the world can be called anyone’s? Set your heart, then, on liberation, and listen to what else I have to say.

“‘That man of firm soul is surely free who has conquered hunger and thirst and the other states of the body like them, and who has conquered anger, greed, and error. That man is always free who does not lose himself, through folly, in dice and drink and concubines and the hunt. The man who is honestly grieved that he must eat every day and every night to keep alive is said to know the faults of life. The man who has thought it through and regards his repeated births as owing to nothing except union with women is held to be free of attachments. And that man is surely free who truly knows how living creatures are born, how they are destroyed, and how they exert themselves.

“‘That man becomes free who, with millions upon millions of carts loaded with grain in front of him, counts only a handful as worth taking to support his life, and who sees no difference between a shed of bamboo and reeds and a palace. That man becomes free who sees the world as it is, beaten down by death and disease and famine. One who sees it so finds contentment, and one who fails to see it so meets destruction. The man who is content with only a little is counted free. The man who sees the world as eaters and things eaten, and himself as neither, and whom pleasure and pain, the children of illusion, never touch, is counted free. A soft bed on a fine bedstead and the hard ground are equal to him. Fine shali rice and coarse, thick rice are equal to him. Linen and cloth woven of grass are equal to him, silk and tree bark are the same in his eyes, and he sees no difference between a clean sheepskin and unclean leather. That man is free. He is free who looks on this world as the five elements in combination and lives in it with that thought kept foremost. He is wholly free for whom pleasure and pain are equal and gain and loss are level, who makes no difference between victory and defeat, to whom liking and disliking are the same, and who does not change under fear or anxiety.

“‘He is free who regards his body, with all its imperfections, as a mass of blood, urine, and excrement, and of disorders and diseases. He becomes free who always remembers that this body, when age overtakes it, is attacked by wrinkles and white hair, by leanness and a pale color and a bent back. He is free who remembers that the same body will lose its manhood, that its sight will weaken and its hearing fail and its strength go. He is free who knows that the very rishis, the gods, and the asuras are beings who must leave their own spheres for other regions. He becomes free who knows that kings in their thousands, kings of great power, have departed from this earth. He becomes free who knows that in this world things are always hard to come by, that pain is plentiful, and that supporting relatives is never done without pain. Seeing how many are the faults of children and of other men, who would not revere liberation? The man who has been woken by the scriptures and by what he has seen of the world, and who finds every human concern to be without substance, becomes free.

“‘Keep these words of mine in mind and conduct yourself like a man already free, whether it is the life of a householder you mean to lead, or whether you go after liberation itself, and do not let your understanding be confused.’ Sagara listened to every word with attention. He gained the qualities that lead to liberation, and with them to help him he went on ruling his subjects.”

A key to reading this, Sagara: Sagara is a reigning king when he asks his question, and he is a reigning king when the answer is finished. Arishtanemi’s last sentence leaves him the choice between the householder’s life and the open pursuit of liberation, and asks one thing of him in either: that he live as a man already free. Bhishma is answering a king who has just asked how a king should carry himself with liberation in view, and he ends the story with Sagara back among his subjects, ruling them with those qualities to help him.

The gist: Arishtanemi’s road to liberation runs through a household. Raise the children, see them married and able to earn, enjoy what the first years of life are for, and then let go. No man keeps his relatives alive: each creature is born, fed, and carried off by its own acts, and every death in the family ought to wake the living. The free man takes a handful from a million carts, sleeps on the ground as he would on a bed, sees his body as blood and disease, and remembers the thousands of kings who are gone. Sagara takes the lesson and keeps his kingdom.

How Ushanas came to be called Shukra, Kubera’s wealth, Mahadeva’s anger, and a journey through the belly

Yudhishthira said, “Grandfather, one curiosity never leaves my mind, and I want to hear the whole of it from you. The celestial sage Ushanas, whom they also call Kavi: why did he give himself to doing what pleased the asuras and displeased the gods? Why did he work to wear down the strength of the gods? Why were the Danavas forever at war with them? Ushanas had the splendor of an immortal. How did he come by the name Shukra, and how did he rise to such excellence? And with all his power, why can he never travel to the center of the sky? I want to understand every part of this.”

Bhishma said, “Listen with attention, and I will tell it as it actually happened, as I have heard it and understood it. Ushanas of Bhrigu’s line was firm in his vows and honored by everyone, and he had sufficient cause for setting himself against the gods.

“Kubera, the royal chief of the Yakshas and the Rakshasas, is lord of the treasury of Indra, who is master of the universe. Ushanas was a great ascetic whose yoga had come to full success, and he turned it on the treasurer of the gods. He entered Kubera’s own person by yoga, took from the lord of treasures his freedom to act, so that Kubera could do only what the one inside him directed, and robbed him of all his wealth. Kubera saw his riches gone and was deeply displeased. Anxious, and angry as well, he went to Mahadeva.

A sub-tale: Kubera laid the matter before Shiva, whose energy has no measure, who is fierce and gentle both and wears many forms. “Ushanas made himself spirit by yoga and entered my body,” he said. “He took my freedom from me and carried off all my wealth, and then by yoga he left my body again.” Maheshvara, supreme in the powers of yoga, heard him and filled with rage. His eyes turned the red of blood. He took up his lance and stood waiting, ready to strike Ushanas down.

“With the lance raised, the great god began to call out, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ Ushanas, a long way off, read Mahadeva’s purpose by his own yoga and kept silent. He understood how angry Maheshvara was, and how far the god’s yoga surpassed his, and he weighed three courses: to go to Maheshvara, to run, or to stay where he was. Then he gathered the force of his severe austerities, fixed his thought on Mahadeva, and set himself down on the very point of Mahadeva’s lance.

“Rudra, who carries the bow, understood that Ushanas was sitting on the point of his lance, an ascetic whose austerities had succeeded and who had turned himself into the form of pure knowledge, and he found that a lance cannot be thrown at one who is perched on its tip. So he bent the weapon with his hand. From the moment the fierce-armed Mahadeva bent his lance into the curve of a bow, that weapon has been called the Pinaka. The bending brought Bhargava, the son of Bhrigu’s line, down onto the palm of the god’s hand. The lord of Uma looked at him there and opened his mouth. He threw Bhargava in and swallowed him at once, and Ushanas, passing into the stomach of Maheshvara, began to wander about inside it.”

A key to reading this, the name and the weapon: Ushanas goes by three names in this story. Kavi is one, Bhargava marks him as a descendant of Bhrigu, and Shukra is the name the story is about to account for. The Pinaka is the bow that Rudra carries. The tale makes it out of a lance, and the old derivation of the word says the same thing: pani is the hand, and anamayat means that he bent it.

Yudhishthira asked, “How could Ushanas move about inside the stomach of that god of surpassing intelligence? And what did the god do while the Brahmin was inside him?”

Bhishma said, “In those ancient days, when he had swallowed Ushanas, Mahadeva, who is severe in his vows, went down into the waters and stayed there like a stake of wood that nothing moves, for millions of years, sunk in the meditation of yoga. When those austerities, the hardest there are, were finished, he rose out of the great lake. Brahma, the eternal, the first god of the gods, came to him then and asked how his austerities had gone and whether all was well with him. The god whose emblem is the bull answered, ‘My austerities have been well practiced.’ And Shankara, whose soul is beyond conceiving, who is vast in intelligence and always given to the religion of truth, saw that Ushanas, inside his stomach, had grown greater through those same austerities. The yogi within him was now rich twice over, with the wealth of that penance and with the wealth he had taken from Kubera, and he shone with great energy through all three worlds.

“After that Mahadeva, the soul of yoga, with the Pinaka in his hand, gave himself to meditation once more. Ushanas was filled with anxiety and went on wandering in the great god’s stomach. He wanted a way out, and from where he was he began to sing the god’s praises. Rudra had stopped every outlet and would not let him leave. Again and again the great ascetic called out from inside Mahadeva’s stomach, ‘Show me your kindness!’ At last Mahadeva said to him, ‘Go out through my urethra.’ Every other opening of his body he had closed.

“Shut in on every side and unable to find the outlet he had been told of, the ascetic wandered this way and that, burning the whole time with Mahadeva’s energy. At last he found it and came out through it. That is how he came to be called Shukra, and that same fact is why, in all his wandering, he can never reach the central point of the sky. Bhava saw him come out of his stomach blazing with energy, and anger filled him, and he stood with his lance raised in his hand. Then the goddess Uma stepped in. She forbade her husband, the angry lord of all creatures, to kill the Brahmin, and because she kept her lord from carrying out his purpose, the ascetic Ushanas became from that day the son of the goddess.

“The goddess said, ‘This Brahmin no longer deserves to die at your hands. He has become my son. One who comes out of your stomach is not to be slaughtered by you.’

“Her words quieted him. Bhava smiled, and he said it more than once: ‘Let this one go wherever he likes.’ The great ascetic Ushanas, a being of high intelligence, bowed to Mahadeva, the giver of boons, and to his wife the goddess Uma, and went away to the place he chose. That, Yudhishthira, is the story of Bhargava that you asked me for.”

A key to reading this, the sense of ‘Shukra’: the story gives one cause for two things. Ushanas left Mahadeva’s body by the single passage the god had left open, and for that he is called Shukra. For the same reason, Bhishma says, he cannot reach the central point of the sky. Ushanas is held to be the planet Venus, and that is what Yudhishthira had in view when he asked why so bright a being never travels to the middle of the heavens. He goes into the god as a thief with Kubera’s wealth on him and comes out as the son of the goddess, with her protection over him.

The gist: Ushanas used yoga to enter Kubera and strip him of his wealth. Kubera complained to Shiva, and Shiva raised his lance. Ushanas settled on its point, the god bent the lance with his hand into the bow called Pinaka and swallowed him, and then stood in the waters in yoga for millions of years while the ascetic inside him grew in power. Let out at last by the one passage left open, Ushanas took the name Shukra and lost the middle of the sky. Uma claimed him as her son and stopped the second blow.

Where the good lies here and hereafter, Janaka and Parashara, on dharma and the fruit of karma

Yudhishthira said, “Tell me now, Grandfather, what will do us good after this. I can never have enough of your words. They are like amrita to me, the drink of the gods. What are the good acts by which a man reaches his highest benefit both here and hereafter?”

Bhishma said, “For this I will tell you what the famous King Janaka once asked of Parashara in the old days. ‘What is good for all creatures, in this world and in the next?’ the king said. ‘Tell me what everyone ought to know on that matter.’ Parashara had great ascetic merit and knew the ordinances of every order of men and every station of life, and he wished the king well. He answered him.

“Parashara said, ‘Righteousness earned by acts is the highest good in this world and in the next. The sages of old have said that nothing stands above it. By doing the duties of righteousness a man comes to be honored in heaven. And for creatures who wear a body, righteousness is found in what the scriptures ordain on the subject of acts: sacrifice to the gods, offerings poured on the sacred fire, gifts. Good men in every station of life put their faith in that righteousness and carry out the duties that belong to them.

“‘Four ways of making a living have been ordained in this world, child: for Brahmins the acceptance of gifts, for Kshatriyas the collection of taxes, for Vaishyas agriculture, and for Shudras the service of the other three orders. Wherever men live, the means of support come to them of themselves. In earning that support living creatures do acts of many kinds, virtuous and sinful, and when they are dissolved into the elements they are made of, they go to different ends. Vessels of white brass steeped in molten gold or silver take the color of the metal. In the same way a living creature, who depends entirely on the acts of his past lives, takes his color from the character of those acts. Nothing sprouts without a seed. Nobody comes to happiness without having done the acts that lead to happiness, and when a man’s body has dissolved, it is only the good acts of his earlier lives that bring him to it.

“‘The skeptic argues against this, child. “I do not see,” he says, “that anything in this world is the result of destiny, or of virtuous and sinful acts done in past lives. Inference cannot establish that destiny exists or works. The gods, the Gandharvas, and the Danavas became what they are by their own nature. People never remember, in the next life, the acts they did in the last. When a man explains some fruit that has come to him in this life, he seldom names the four kinds of acts he is supposed to have done before it. The declarations that rest on the authority of the Vedas were made to regulate how men behave in this world and to quiet their minds. They cannot be the words of men who had true wisdom.” That opinion is wrong. In reality a man gets the fruit of whatever he does, among the four kinds of acts, with the eye, the mind, the tongue, and the muscles. As the fruit of his acts, a person sometimes has happiness whole, sometimes misery whole, and sometimes the two blended together. Whether they are righteous or sinful, acts are never destroyed until their fruit has been enjoyed or endured.

“‘Sometimes, child, the happiness owed to a man’s good acts stays hidden and covered over. He is sinking in the ocean of life, and it does not show itself until his sorrows are gone. When sorrow has been used up by being endured, he begins to enjoy his good acts. And know this as well: when the fruit of good acts is exhausted, the fruit of sinful acts begins to show. Self-restraint, forgiveness, patience, energy, contentment, truthfulness, modesty, harmlessness, freedom from the evil habits called vyasana, and cleverness: these produce happiness. No creature is subject forever to the fruits of his good or his bad acts. A man of wisdom should always work to gather his mind and fix it. Nobody enjoys or endures the good and bad acts of another. A man meets the fruit of the acts he does himself and of no others. The person who throws off both happiness and misery walks one road, the road of knowledge, and those who let themselves be attached to every worldly thing tread a road that is wholly different. Do not yourself do the act that you would blame if another did it. A man who does what he condemns in others makes himself ridiculous. And these deserve pity, every one: a Kshatriya without courage, a Brahmin who will eat any kind of food, a Vaishya who puts no effort into his work, a Shudra who is idle, a learned man without good conduct, a man of high birth without righteous behavior, a Brahmin fallen from truth, a woman who is unchaste and wicked, a yogi with attachments, a man who cooks food for himself alone, an ignorant man set to give a discourse, a kingdom without a king, and a king who has no affection for his subjects and no yoga in him.’”

A key to reading this, the doubter’s (the unbeliever’s) argument: Parashara gives the skeptic his full say before he answers him. The skeptic’s case has five steps: nothing he sees is the work of destiny or of past acts, inference cannot prove destiny, gods and Danavas are what they are by their own nature, nobody remembers a former life, and the Vedic declarations are a device for keeping men orderly and calm. By destiny he means the result of the acts of past lives. Parashara’s reply is a flat denial followed by his own account: a man reaps the fruit of the four kinds of acts done with eye, mind, tongue and body, and no act is destroyed until its fruit has been enjoyed or endured.

“Parashara went on, ‘This body, with the mind inside it, is a chariot a man has been given. The horses are the things the senses run after. The man who drives on while holding those horses back with the reins of knowledge is the one to call intelligent. Worthy of high praise, too, is the homage paid to the Supreme by a man whose mind leans on nothing outside itself and who has thrown away the means of earning a living. It is homage he learned from a teacher who has himself passed beyond acts, and it never comes out of the talk of men who stand no further along the road than he does. The span of life allotted to a man is won with great difficulty. He should not shorten it by indulging the senses. He should always be working, by righteous acts, for his gradual advancement. The soul takes six different colors at different times in its existence, and he who falls from a higher color to a lower deserves blame and censure. So a man who has reached the result of good acts should conduct himself so as to avoid every act stained by rajas. A man reaches a higher color by righteous acts. The higher hue is very hard to win, and the man who cannot win it and does only sinful acts kills himself by them, sinking into hell and into a lower color.

“‘Every sinful act committed unawares or in ignorance is destroyed by austerities. A sinful act committed knowingly produces great sorrow. A man should therefore never commit acts whose only fruit is sorrow. The intelligent man will not do a sinful act even if it promises the greatest advantage, just as a man who is pure will not touch a Chandala. How miserable is the fruit I see of sinful acts! Sin twists the very sight of the sinner, and he mistakes his body and the unstable things that go with it for the Self. The fool who does not take to renunciation in this world is overcome by great grief when he leaves for the next. An undyed cloth that has become dirty can be washed clean. A cloth that has been dyed black cannot. Listen to me carefully, for it is the same with sin. The man who commits a sin knowingly and then acts righteously to make up for it has to enjoy and endure the fruits of his good acts and his bad acts separately. Those who recite the Veda maintain, on the authority of what the Vedas lay down, that every injury done in ignorance is canceled by acts of righteousness, and that a sin done consciously is never canceled by righteousness. So say the Brahmins who know their scriptures. My own view is that whatever acts are done, righteous or sinful, knowing or unknowing, remain. Acts done by the mind with full deliberation bear fruit that is gross or subtle according to what they are. Acts of great injury done in ignorance bear fruit too, without fail, even fruit that leads to hell, and the one difference is that their consequences are light in proportion to the gravity of the act. As for the doubtful or unrighteous things that gods or famous ascetics may have done, a righteous man should never do the like, and when he hears of them he should never condemn them.

“‘The man who thinks the matter over, takes the measure of his own ability, and then does righteous acts, surely obtains what is for his good. Water poured into an unbaked pot grows less and less and finally all leaks away. Water kept in a baked pot stays, and none of it is lost. In the same way acts done without the understanding’s reflection do no good, and acts done with judgment keep their excellence whole and yield happiness. Pour more water into a vessel that already holds water, and what was there increases. So all acts done with judgment, whether they are evenhanded or otherwise, only add to a man’s store of righteousness. A king should subdue his enemies and all who try to set themselves above him, and he should rule and protect his subjects properly. A man should kindle his sacred fires and pour offerings on them in sacrifices of many kinds, and when he has reached middle age or old age he should retire to the woods and live there. With self-restraint and righteous behavior, let him look on all creatures as on his own self. Let him revere those above him. By practicing truth and good conduct, a man is sure to come to happiness.’”

A sub-tale: Janaka then asked the sage where the difference of color among men of the different orders comes from. “The Shrutis say that the children a man fathers are his own self,” he said. “All the people of the earth sprang at first from Brahma and ought to have been Brahmins. Why have they taken to practices that Brahmins do not follow?” Parashara granted that the child is the father over again. The division into orders of different color, he said, came about through falling away from austerity, since good soil and good seed give worthy offspring and poorer soil or seed gives poorer. When the Lord of all creatures set about creating the worlds, some creatures sprang from his mouth, some from his arms, some from his thighs, and some from his feet: the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the wealthy order of Vaishyas, and the serving order of Shudras. Only these four were created. All the others, he said, came from their intermixture, and he named them: the Kshatriyas called Atirathas, and the Ambashthas, Ugras, Vaidehas, Shvapakas, Pukkasas, Tenas, Nishadas, Sutas, Magadhas, Ayogas, Karanas, Vratyas, and Chandalas. Janaka pressed him. If all came from Brahma alone, how had so many races arisen, and how had men of mixed and impure birth become Brahmins through austerity? Parashara answered that the standing of men who had cleansed their souls by austerity could not be touched by a low birth. Great rishis fathered children in whatever wombs they chose and made rishis of them by ascetic power. He counted off his own grandfather Vasishtha, Rishyashringa, Kashyapa, Veda, Tandya, Kripa, Kakshivat, Kamatha, Yavakrita, Drona, Ayu, Matanga, Datta, Drupada, and Matsya as men who reached their positions by austerity. In the beginning there were only four gotras, those of Angiras, Kashyapa, Vasishtha, and Bhrigu, and the many that came later took their names from the austerities of their founders.

“Janaka asked, ‘Tell me the special duties of the several orders, and tell me the duties they hold in common. You know everything.’ Parashara said, ‘To accept gifts, to officiate at the sacrifices of others, and to teach pupils are the special duties of Brahmins. To protect the other orders is proper for the Kshatriya. Agriculture, the rearing of cattle, and trade are the work of Vaishyas, and the service of the three twice-born orders is the work of Shudras. Now hear the duties common to all four: compassion, harmlessness, heedfulness, giving others what is due to them, the shraddha rites for dead ancestors, hospitality to guests, truthfulness, the subduing of anger, contentment with one’s own wedded wives, purity within and without, freedom from malice, knowledge of the Self, and renunciation. Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas are the three twice-born orders, and all have an equal right to these duties. When they take up duties other than their own they come to grief, just as they rise and earn great merit by modeling themselves on some righteous man of their own order who keeps his duties. The Shudra never falls, and he is not entitled to the rites of the second birth. The course of duties that flows from the Vedas is not his. He is free, though, to practice the thirteen duties that are common to all. Brahmins learned in the Vedas regard such a Shudra as the equal of Brahma himself, Janaka. I look on him as the shining Vishnu of the universe, the first one in all the worlds. Men of the lowest order who want to root out the evil passions may follow the conduct of the good, and they may earn great merit by performing every rite that leads to advancement, leaving out the mantras the other orders recite. Wherever they adopt the behavior of the good they come to happiness, here and hereafter.’ Janaka said, ‘Is a man stained by his acts, or is he stained by the order into which he is born? A doubt has risen in my mind. Clear it for me.’ Parashara said, ‘Both acts and birth are sources of demerit, without doubt. Hear how they differ. A man who is stained by birth and commits no sin keeps clear of sin in spite of his birth. A man of higher birth who does blameworthy acts is stained by those acts. Of the two, then, it is acts that stain a man more.’ Janaka asked one thing more: ‘What righteous acts are there in this world that do no injury to any other creature?’ Parashara said, ‘Those who set their household fires aside and cut themselves loose from every worldly attachment are freed from all anxieties. They climb step by step along the road of yoga until they see the stage of highest happiness. With faith and humility, always self-restrained, keen in intelligence, abstaining from all acts, they come to a happiness that has no end. And men of every order who do righteous acts properly, speak the truth, and keep from unrighteousness in this world, go up to heaven. Of that there is no doubt.’ All this,” Bhishma said, “the sage told the ruler of the Videhas in the old days, for the king’s good.”

The gist: Parashara teaches Janaka that righteousness earned by acts is the highest good, and that acts keep. They color the soul as molten gold colors brass, nothing sprouts without a seed, no man eats the fruit of another’s deeds, and no act is destroyed until its fruit is used up. The skeptic who denies it is given his say and told he is wrong. A man should drive the chariot of the body with the reins of knowledge, act with judgment so that his merit holds like water in a baked pot, and know that a sin done knowingly is a cloth dyed black. On birth, Parashara’s answer is that acts stain a man more than the order he is born into.

Vasishtha’s teaching: how the soul comes to think itself bound

Yudhishthira’s next question came with a plea inside it. “What is the thing called undeteriorating, which a man reaches and never comes back from? And what is the thing called deteriorating, from which he must return once more? I ask so that I may truly understand the difference between the two. The Brahmins who know the Vedas call you an ocean of knowledge, Grandfather, and so do the rishis and the ascetics. You have very few days left to live. When the sun turns from his southern road to his northern you will go to your high end, and when you have left us, from whom shall we hear what is good for us? You are the lamp of the Kuru line, burning always with the light of knowledge. I want to hear this from you. Your words are sweet as nectar, and the more I listen the more I want to know.” Bhishma answered with an old account, the talk between Vasishtha and King Karala of Janaka’s line. The great rishi, whom they also call Maitravaruni, was seated at his ease, bright as the sun, a master of the knowledge that concerns the Self and settled in every conclusion of that science. King Karala came up to him with joined hands and spoke humbly, in words well pronounced and sweet, with nothing of the disputant in them. “I want to hear,” he said, “of the supreme and eternal Brahman, which the wise reach and do not return from. I want to know also what is called destructible, and That into which this universe goes when it is destroyed. What is it that men call indestructible, auspicious, beneficial, and free of every evil?”

“Hear,” said Vasishtha, “how this universe is destroyed, and hear of That which never has been destroyed and never will be. Twelve thousand years, by the measure of the gods, make a yuga. Four such yugas taken a thousand times make a kalpa, and a kalpa is one day of Brahma. His night is as long. When Brahma himself comes to his end, Shambhu wakes, whose soul is formless and in whom the powers of yoga, the power to become minute, the power to become light, and the rest, are inborn. He creates once more the first and eldest of all creatures, vast in size, infinite in deeds, having form, the one who is the universe. That Shambhu is also called Ishana, the lord of everything. He is pure light and beyond all decay. His hands and feet reach in every direction, his eyes and head and mouth are everywhere, his ears are in every place, and he stands covering the whole universe. The eldest-born being is called Hiranyagarbha. He is called the Understanding, and in the yoga scriptures the Great, and Virinchi, and the Unborn. The Sankhya scriptures give him many names and hold that infinity is his soul. He has many forms and is the soul of the universe, and he is held to be one and indestructible. He made the three worlds without help from any quarter and covers them, and because his forms are so many he is said to have the universe for his form. Changing himself, he creates himself by himself. He first creates ahankara, the sense of I, and the great being called Prajapati who has it. The Manifest is created from the Unmanifest, and the learned call that the creation of knowledge. The creation of mahat and of ahankara by Hiranyagarbha is the creation of ignorance. The creation of the subtle elements out of ahankara is the third. The fourth flows from the third by change, and it takes in wind and light and space and water and earth, with their properties of sound, touch, form, taste, and smell. Those ten arose together. The fifth creation comes from the combination of the elements: the ear, the skin, the eyes, the tongue, and the nose, with speech, the two hands, the two legs, the lower duct, and the organs of generation. The first five are the organs of knowledge and the last five the organs of action, and all of them arose at one time along with the mind. These are the twenty-four principles that exist in the forms of all living creatures, and Brahmins who understand them properly and see into the truth never have to give way to sorrow. In the three worlds every embodied creature has a combination of them, called a body. Gods have it, and men and Danavas, Yakshas and spirits, Gandharvas and Kinnaras and great snakes, Charanas and Pishachas, celestial rishis and Rakshasas. Biting flies have it, and worms, gnats, vermin born of filth, rats, and dogs. Shvapakas, Chaineyas, Chandalas, and Pukkasas have it, and elephants, horses, asses, tigers, trees, and cattle. Whatever other creatures exist in water, in space, or on earth have it, and we have heard of no other place where creatures exist. All of these belong to the Manifest, and all of them are seen to be destroyed day after day. That is why every creature produced by the union of the twenty-four is said to be destructible. Since the universe, made of the Manifest and the Unmanifest, meets destruction, it is called destructible, and the very being called mahat, the eldest-born, is always given as an instance of it. Beyond the twenty-four is the twenty-fifth, called Vishnu. Having no attributes, he is no principle, though the wise have called him one because he pervades them all. Prakriti, the twenty-fourth, is said to preside over everything that has sprung from her. The twenty-fifth is formless and cannot be said to preside. Eternal consciousness has no attributes and no form, and by union with prakriti it takes on every form. Joined with prakriti, who has birth and death for her marks, it takes on birth and death, becomes a thing that can be perceived, and is clothed in attributes it does not have. Through forgetfulness, and through waiting on ignorance, it joins itself to sattva, rajas, and tamas and is identified with creatures of every order. Three colors there are in all, white, red, and dark, and all three belong to prakriti. Through tamas a creature goes to hell, through rajas it reaches the human state and stays in it, and through sattva it rises to the worlds of the gods and shares their great happiness. In this way, the wise say, the twenty-fifth, akshara, the indestructible, is changed by union with unmanifest prakriti into kshara, the destructible. By knowledge the indestructible is shown again in its true nature.

“So it is through his own forgetfulness that the Self follows ignorance and takes thousands of bodies, one after another. Joined to this guna or that and driven by its power, he is born thousands of times among the lower orders of being, and sometimes among the gods themselves. From the human state he goes to heaven, from heaven he comes back to the human state, and from the human state he sinks into hell for many long years. The worm that makes a cocoon shuts itself in completely, on every side, with threads it spins out of itself. The Self does the same. He is in truth beyond every guna, and he wraps himself in gunas on every side. He is beyond happiness and misery, and this is how he makes himself subject to both. He is beyond all disease, and he takes himself to be suffering from headache, from sore eyes and toothache and affections of the throat, from dropsy of the belly, burning thirst, swollen glands, cholera, vitiligo, leprosy, burns, asthma, consumption, epilepsy, and whatever other diseases are seen in the bodies of embodied creatures. In error he counts himself born among thousands of creatures of the lower orders and now and then among the gods, and he endures misery and enjoys the fruits of his good deeds. Wrapped in ignorance he sees himself dressed in white cloth, or in the full dress of four pieces. He sees himself lying on the floor, or with hands and feet drawn in like a frog’s, or sitting upright in the posture of meditation, or clad in rags, or lying and sitting under the open sky, or inside mansions of brick and stone, or on rough stones, on ashes, on bare rock, on bare earth, on beds, on battlefields, in water, in mire, on wooden planks. Hoping for the fruit of it, he sees himself wearing a scant cloth of grass, or stark naked, or robed in silk, in the skin of the black antelope, in flax, in sheepskin, in tiger skin or lion skin, in hemp, in birch bark, in cloth made from thorny plants, in the thread that worms weave, in torn rags, and in more kinds of cloth than can be listed. He sees himself wearing ornaments and gems. He sees himself eating once at intervals of a night, or once at the same hour each day, or at the fourth or the sixth or the eighth hour, or once in six nights or seven or eight, or once in ten days or twelve, or once in a month. He sees himself eating only roots, or only fruits, or living on air or on water alone, on cakes of sesame husk, on curds, on cow dung, on the urine of the cow, on potherbs, flowers, moss, raw food, fallen leaves, or fruit that has dropped and lies scattered on the ground, all in the hope of ascetic success. He sees himself keeping the Chandrayana fast by the rule, and other vows, and following the duties of the four stations of life, and failing in them, and following the lesser stations that fall under the four, and even the practices that mark the wicked and sinful. He sees himself enjoying secluded places: the pleasant shade of mountains, the cool beside springs and fountains, lonely riverbanks, hidden forests, spots sacred to the gods, lakes and waters far from the haunts of men, and solitary mountain caves that give the shelter a house gives. He sees himself reciting hidden mantras of different kinds, keeping vows and rules, practicing austerities, and performing sacrifices and rites of many sorts. He sees himself going the way of traders and merchants, following the practices of Brahmins and Kshatriyas and Vaishyas and Shudras, and making gifts to the destitute, the blind, and the helpless. Wrapped in ignorance, the Self takes on sattva and rajas and tamas, and righteousness and wealth and pleasure. Under the sway of prakriti he undergoes change himself, performs all these things, and believes he is what he performs. He sees himself uttering the sacred Svaha, Svadha, and Vashat and bowing to those he counts his superiors, officiating at the sacrifices of others, teaching pupils, giving gifts and accepting them, sacrificing and studying the scriptures, and doing every act and rite of that kind. He sees himself concerned in birth and death, in disputes and in slaughter. All of this, the learned say, is the path of acts, good and bad.

“It is the goddess Prakriti who brings about birth and death. When the hour of universal destruction approaches, the supreme Self draws in everything that exists and every quality, and then exists alone, like the sun at evening drawing in all his rays. When the hour of creation comes he makes them again and spreads them out, as the sun at morning sheds his rays abroad. In just this way the Self, for the sake of play, again and again regards himself as clothed in all these conditions, which are his own forms and qualities, countless in number and pleasing to him. So the Self, who is in truth beyond the three gunas, becomes attached to the path of acts. Once he is on that path he takes particular acts to have particular characters and to lead to particular ends. The whole of this universe has been blinded by prakriti, and everything in it has been overwhelmed, through her, by rajas and tamas. Because the Self is wrapped in prakriti, the pairs of opposites that bring happiness and woe keep coming around. Because of this ignorance the jiva, the soul living in a body, takes these sorrows for his own and imagines them hunting him. He imagines he must somehow get across them, and go to the worlds of the gods to enjoy the happiness that waits for his good acts. ‘I must secure my happiness,’ the soul thinks. ‘If I keep doing good acts I may be happy until this life closes, and happy in all my lives to come. Yet the evil I do in this life may bring me sorrow without end. The human state is full of misery, for from it a man sinks into hell. From hell it will be many long years before I can return to the human state. From the human state I shall reach the state of the gods, and from that height I shall have to come back to the human state again, and from there sink into hell once more.’ One who always regards this compound of the elements and the senses, with the reflection of chit in it, as having the character of the Self, has to wander again and again among gods and men and sink into hell. Wrapped always in the idea of mine, the soul must make that round of births, millions upon millions of them, in forms that are every one liable to death. It is prakriti that causes acts loaded with good and bad fruit, and it is prakriti that enjoys and endures that fruit in the three worlds. The state of the lower creatures, of men, and of the gods, these three fields, are to be known as rising in prakriti. Prakriti is said to have no attributes, and her existence is affirmed only from her acts, beginning with mahat. In the same way purusha, the Self, has no attributes, and his existence is affirmed from the acts the body does when it receives his reflection. The Self is subject to no change of any kind and is the active principle that sets prakriti moving. Yet when he enters a body joined to the senses of knowledge and the senses of action, he regards every act of those senses as his own. The five senses of knowledge, beginning with the ear, and the five of action, beginning with speech, join with sattva, rajas, and tamas and busy themselves with countless objects. The soul imagines that it is he who does the acts of his life and that the senses belong to him, though in truth he has no senses. He has no body, and he imagines he has one. He has no attributes, and he regards himself as having them. He is beyond time, and he imagines himself under time’s control. He has no understanding, and thinks himself endowed with it. He stands beyond the twenty-four principles and counts himself among them. He is deathless and thinks he is liable to death, motionless and thinks he moves. He has no material case and thinks he has one. He is unborn and regards himself as born. He is beyond austerities and regards himself as engaged in them. He has no end to strive for and regards himself as bound for ends of many kinds. He is beyond fear and regards himself as afraid. He is indestructible and regards himself as destructible. Wrapped in ignorance, this is how the Self thinks of himself.”

A key to reading this (the concept): Vasishtha counts by number, and the numbers come back throughout his teaching. Unmanifest prakriti, mahat, ahankara, which is the sense of I, and the five subtle essences of sound, form, touch, taste and smell make eight, and these eight are called prakriti. Their modifications are sixteen: the five gross elements, the ten senses of knowledge and of action, and the mind. Eight and sixteen make the twenty-four principles, and every body, from a god’s to a gnat’s, is a combination of them. The twenty-fifth stands beyond them. It is the Self, which Vasishtha here calls Vishnu. Further on he speaks of a twenty-sixth, the supreme Self, pure knowledge without a second, which knows the twenty-fifth and the twenty-fourth alike.

Vasishtha went on, “It is in this way, through his own ignorance and through keeping company with others who are wrapped in ignorance, that the soul comes to millions upon millions of births, every one of which ends in dissolution. Changed into chit wrapped in ignorance, he takes up millions of dwellings among the lower creatures, among men, and among the gods, and each of them is bound to end in destruction. Through ignorance the soul, like the moon, has to wax and wane thousands and thousands of times. This is truly the nature of the soul when ignorance is on him.

“Know that the moon has in truth sixteen full portions. Only fifteen of them grow and shrink. The sixteenth, the portion that stays unseen and appears on the night of the new moon, remains constant. The soul is made like the moon and has sixteen full portions too. Only fifteen of them appear and disappear: prakriti with the reflection of chit upon her, the ten senses of knowledge and action, and the four inner faculties. The sixteenth, chit in its purity, undergoes no change. Wrapped in ignorance, the soul takes birth again and again in those fifteen portions, and again and again the primal essence joins itself to the eternal and unchanging portion of the soul.

“That sixteenth portion is subtle. It should be known as Soma, eternal and unchanging. The senses never hold it up, and it is by it that the senses are held up. Because these sixteen portions are the cause of the birth of creatures, no creature can be born without them. They are called prakriti. The destruction of the soul’s liability to be joined with prakriti is what is called liberation. The mahat-soul, which is the twenty-fifth, has to take on that body of sixteen portions called the Unmanifest again and again, for as long as he looks on it as his. The Self is in truth pure. Because he does not know That which is stainless and pure, and because he gives himself to what is a compound of pure and impure, he becomes impure. Through his devotion to ignorance, the soul, whose mark is knowledge, is joined to ignorance over and over. He is free of every kind of error, and through his devotion to the three gunas of prakriti he comes to be endowed with those gunas.”

The gist: The Self is beyond qualities, disease, time and death. Entering a body, it takes every act and condition of that body for its own, and so spins itself into prakriti as the worm spins itself into a cocoon: the garment, the fast, the rite and the birth are all taken for self. That is the bondage. The moon shows what is left untouched. Fifteen of its portions wax and wane, and the sixteenth stays constant. In the soul that sixteenth is pure consciousness, and liberation is the end of its being joined to the other fifteen.

Janaka’s question: if prakriti and purusha are joined forever, what can moksha mean?

Janaka said, “It has been said that the relation between the indestructible and the destructible, between purusha and prakriti, is like the relation between male and female. Without a male a female can never conceive. Without a female a male can never create form. Through their union, each depending on the qualities of the other, the forms of living creatures are seen to flow, and it is so in every order of being. Through the union of the two in the season of conception, each leaning on the qualities of the other, forms come forth. I will tell you the signs of it. Hear what belongs to the father and what belongs to the mother. Bones, sinews, and marrow, we know, come from the father. Skin, flesh, and blood, we hear, come from the mother. This is what may be read in the Vedas and in other scriptures. What is read there is accepted as authority, and the authority of the Vedas, and of the scriptures that do not contradict them, is eternal.

“If prakriti and purusha are always joined in this way, each opposing the other and each depending on the other’s qualities, then I do not see that liberation can exist. You have the sight of the spirit, and you see all things as if they stood before your eyes. If there is any direct evidence that liberation exists, tell me of it. We long for liberation. We wish to reach That which is auspicious, bodiless, untouched by old age, eternal, beyond the reach of the senses, and with nothing above it.”

Vasishtha said, “What you say of the signs given in the Vedas and the other scriptures is so, and you take those signs in the way they ought to be taken. What you carry in your understanding, though, is only the texts. You do not truly know what the texts mean. A man who holds in his mind the bare words of the Vedas and the scriptures, without their true sense, holds them to no purpose. One who keeps the contents of a work in memory without grasping its meaning is said to carry a useless burden, and one who knows the true meaning of a treatise is said to have studied it to some purpose. Asked what a text means, a man ought to give the meaning he has reached by careful study. The dull man who refuses to explain the meaning of texts before a gathering of the learned never succeeds in explaining it correctly. An ignorant man who sets out to explain the true meaning of treatises earns ridicule, and even men who have knowledge of the Self earn it on such occasions, if what they try to explain was never won by study.

“Listen now to how the question of liberation has been explained, teacher to disciple, from the old days, among the great men who know the Sankhya and the Yoga systems. What the yogis see is exactly what the Sankhyas strive to reach. He who sees Sankhya and Yoga as one and the same is the man of intelligence. Skin, flesh, blood, fat, bile, marrow, and sinews, and the senses of knowledge and of action you spoke of, exist. Objects flow from objects, and senses from senses. A body is got from a body as a seed is got from a seed. The Supreme Being has no senses, no seed, no matter, and no body. He must then be without any attribute at all, and being so, how can he have attributes of any kind?

“Space and the other attributes arise from sattva, rajas, and tamas and disappear into them in the end. So the attributes arise from prakriti. Skin, flesh, blood, fat, bile, marrow, bones, and sinews, these eight that are made of prakriti, may sometimes be produced by the male seed alone. The soul in the body and the universe are both said to partake of prakriti with her three gunas. The supreme Self is different from both. The seasons have no forms of their own, and yet we infer them from the fruits and flowers that appear. In the same way prakriti, though formless, is inferred from mahat and the other attributes that spring from her. And in the same way the supreme Self, bare of every attribute and perfectly stainless, is inferred from the presence of consciousness in the body.

“That Self is without beginning and without destruction, without end, the overseer of all things, and auspicious. Only because it identifies itself with the body and the other attributes does it come to be taken as having attributes. Those who truly understand attributes know that only things which have attributes can have them, and that That which is beyond all attributes can have none. When the soul conquers every attribute born of prakriti, attributes it took on in error, then and only then does it see the supreme Self. Only the highest rishis who know the Sankhya and the Yoga systems know that supreme Self. Sankhyas, yogis, and the believers of every other system say of it that it is beyond the understanding, and that it is the knower, having the highest wisdom because it has cast off all sense of identity with prakriti. They say that it is beyond ignorance and error, that it is unmanifest, beyond all attributes, and called the Supreme. They say that it ordains all things, is eternal and unchanging, and overrules prakriti and every attribute born of her, and that, standing beyond the twenty-four principles, it makes the twenty-fifth. When men of knowledge who fear birth, the several conditions of living consciousness, and death come to know the Unmanifest, they come to understand the supreme Self in the same moment. An intelligent man holds the oneness of the soul with the supreme Self to be in keeping with the scriptures and perfectly correct, and the man without intelligence looks on the two as different. That is the distinction between them. The marks of kshara and akshara, the destructible and the indestructible, have now been told to you. Akshara is oneness, and manyness is said to be kshara. When a man begins to study the twenty-five principles and understands them properly, he sees that the oneness of the Self agrees with the scriptures and that its manyness is what they oppose. The wise have said that the count of principles is twenty-five. That which is beyond the principles is beyond that number and makes the twenty-sixth. To study created things, twenty-five in number, by their groups, is to study the principles. Beyond these is That which is eternal.”

A key to reading this (the concept): Kshara is the destructible and akshara the indestructible. Vasishtha joins a second pair to them: kshara is manyness and akshara is oneness. The intelligent man holds the soul and the supreme Self to be one, and counts that the teaching of scripture. The man without intelligence sees two. The twenty-five principles can be studied group by group, and what stands beyond their number is the twenty-sixth, the eternal.

The gist: Janaka argues from the body: father and mother, bone and flesh, each needing the other as purusha and prakriti need each other, and so no room left for liberation. Vasishtha tells him he has the texts by heart and has missed their meaning. Bodies come from bodies and senses from senses, yet the supreme Self has neither, and it can be known only by inference, as a season is known by its fruit. The soul sees it when it has conquered the attributes it took on in error. Kshara is the many, akshara is the one, and beyond the count of twenty-five stands the twenty-sixth.

The practice of Yoga: dhyana, breath-control, and samadhi

Janaka said, “You have told me that oneness is the mark of akshara, the indestructible, and that manyness is the mark of kshara, the destructible. I have not clearly understood the nature of the two, and doubts are still lurking in my mind. Ignorant men look on the Self as many, and men of knowledge and wisdom hold it to be one and the same. My own understanding is very dull, and I cannot see how all this comes about. The reasons you gave for the oneness and the manyness of akshara and kshara I have almost forgotten already, so restless is my mind. I want to hear you speak again of that oneness and manyness, of the one who knows and of what is without knowledge, of the soul, of knowledge and ignorance, of akshara and kshara, and of the Sankhya and the Yoga systems, in detail, each by itself, and according to the truth.”

Vasishtha said, “I will tell you what you ask. First, though, hear me set out the practices of yoga by themselves. Contemplation is the obligatory practice of yogis and their highest power. Those who know yoga say it is of two kinds: the concentration of the mind, and pranayama, the regulation of the breath. Pranayama is said to have substance, and concentration of the mind to be without it. Except for the three times when he passes urine, passes stool, and eats, a man should give the whole of his time to contemplation.

“Let the intelligent man make himself pure and draw his senses back from their objects with the help of the mind. Then, by the twenty-two ways of sending the breath of life upward through the body, let him join the soul to That which stands beyond the twenty-fourth principle, which the wise hold to dwell in every part of the body and to be beyond decay and destruction. By those twenty-two methods, we have heard, the Self can always be known. This practice of yoga belongs to the man whose mind is never touched by evil passions, and to no other.

“Free of all attachments, sparing in his food, with every sense subdued, he should fix his mind on the Self during the first part of the night and the last, after he has stilled the working of the senses, quieted the mind by the understanding, and taken a posture as motionless as a block of stone. When men of knowledge who know the rules of yoga become as fixed as a stake of wood and as immovable as a mountain, then they are said to be in yoga. When a man does not hear, or smell, or taste, or see; when he is conscious of no touch; when his mind is perfectly free of every purpose; when he is conscious of nothing and holds no thought; when he has become like a piece of wood, then the wise say he is in perfect yoga.

“At such a time he shines like a lamp burning where there is no wind. At such a time he is freed even from his subtle form and perfectly united with Brahman. One who has come so far no longer has to rise or to fall among the lower orders of being. When the knower, the known, and knowledge have become completely one, then the yogi is said to see the supreme Self. In yoga the supreme Self shows itself in the yogi’s heart like a blazing fire, or like the bright sun, or like the flash of lightning in the sky.

“That supreme Self is unborn and is the essence of nectar. Brahmins of great soul who have intelligence and wisdom and know the Vedas see it, subtler than the subtle and greater than the great. It lives in all creatures and they do not see it. It is the creator of the worlds, and it is seen only by a person rich in intelligence, with the lamp of the mind to help him. It dwells on the far shore of thick darkness, beyond even him who is called Ishvara, the Lord. Those who know the Vedas and know all things call it the dispeller of darkness, stainless, beyond darkness, without attributes and with them. This is what is called the yoga of the yogis. What other sign of yoga is there? By such practices yogis come to see the supreme Self that is beyond destruction and decay.”

A key to reading this (the terms): Vasishtha’s contemplation has two parts. Pranayama, the regulation of the breath, is the one he says has substance, because it is performed with the help of a mantra repeated in the mind. Concentration of the mind is without substance, being made with no such help. The twenty-two ways are the stages by which the breath of life is sent from the toe of the foot to the crown of the head. In perfect yoga the knower, the thing known, and knowledge have become one.

The order of Sankhya: the unfolding of creation and the reverse order of dissolution

Vasishtha went on, “So much, in detail, for the science of yoga. Now I will speak of the Sankhya philosophy, by which the supreme Self is seen through the gradual destruction of errors. The Sankhyas, whose system is built on prakriti, say that prakriti, the Unmanifest, comes first. From prakriti, they say, the second principle is produced, which is called mahat. From mahat, we have heard, flows the third, ahankara. The Sankhyas, who are blessed with sight of the Self, say that from ahankara flow the five subtle essences of sound, form, touch, taste, and smell. All these eight they call prakriti. The modifications of the eight are sixteen: the five gross elements of space, light, earth, water, and wind, and the ten senses of action and of knowledge together with the mind. Wise men who follow the Sankhya path and know all its ordinances regard these twenty-four principles as taking in the whole range of Sankhya inquiry.

“Whatever is produced is merged again in what produced it. Created by the supreme Self one after another, these principles are destroyed in the reverse order. At every new creation the gunas start into existence in the forward order, and when destruction comes each merges into its parent in the reverse order, like the waves of the ocean disappearing into the ocean that gave them birth. That is how the creation and the destruction of prakriti take place. The Supreme Being is all that remains when universal destruction comes, and it is he who takes on many forms when creation starts into life. So men of knowledge have determined.

“It is prakriti who causes the presiding purusha to take on manyness in this way and to go back to oneness. Prakriti herself bears the same marks. One who fully knows the principles knows that she too takes on manyness and oneness, for when destruction comes she returns to unity and when creation flows she takes on diversity of form. The Self makes prakriti, who holds the principles of growth, take on her many forms. Prakriti is called the kshetra, the field. Beyond the twenty-four principles is the Self, which is great, and it presides over that prakriti, that field. For this reason the leading ascetics say that the Self is the Presider, and we have heard that he is so called because he presides over every field. And because he knows that unmanifest field, he is also called kshetrajna, the knower of the field. And because the Self enters the unmanifest field, which is the body, he is called purusha.

“The field is a thing quite different from the knower of the field. The field is unmanifest. The Self, which is beyond the twenty-four principles, is called the knower. Knowledge and the object known are different from each other. Knowledge, again, has been said to be unmanifest, and the object of knowledge is the Self that is beyond the twenty-four. The Unmanifest is called the field, and sattva, and also Ishvara, the Lord, while purusha, the twenty-fifth, has nothing above it and is called a principle only by convention. That much is the account of the Sankhya philosophy. The Sankhyas merge all the grosser principles into chit and see the supreme Self. Rightly studying the twenty-four principles along with prakriti, and determining their true nature, they succeed in seeing That which is beyond the twenty-four. The soul is in reality that very Self which is beyond prakriti and beyond the twenty-four. When he comes to know that supreme Self by parting himself from prakriti, he becomes one with it. Those who know this philosophy come to tranquility and have direct knowledge of Brahman. Those who reach that state never come back to this world when their bodies have dissolved, and those who are said to be liberated in this life have power, and the happiness of samadhi that no words reach, and changelessness, because they have come to the nature of the indestructible. Those who see this universe as many are said to see wrongly. They are blind to Brahman, and they have to come back into the world again and again and take up bodies. Those who know all that I have said come to know everything, and when they pass from this body they are no longer under the control of any physical frame. All things are said to be the outcome of the Unmanifest. The Self, which is the twenty-fifth, is beyond all things, and those who know the Self have no fear of returning to the world.”

The gist: Vasishtha gives two roads and treats them as one. Yoga is contemplation, by regulating the breath and by concentrating the mind, pursued until a man sits like a block of wood and shines like a lamp out of the wind, and knower, known and knowledge are one. Sankhya counts: eight principles called prakriti, sixteen modifications, twenty-four in all, each merging back into its parent in reverse order when destruction comes. The field is one thing and the knower of the field another, and the one who knows himself to be the knower does not return.

Vidya and avidya, and the soul’s waking

Vasishtha went on, “So far I have spoken to you of the Sankhya philosophy. Now hear what vidya, knowledge, is, and what avidya, ignorance, is, one after the other. The learned say that prakriti, who is charged with creation and destruction, is called avidya, and that purusha, who is free of creation and destruction and stands beyond the twenty-four principles, is called vidya. Hear first what is vidya within each successive pair of things, as the Sankhya philosophy sets it out. Between the senses of knowledge and the senses of action, the senses of knowledge are vidya. Between the senses of knowledge and their objects, the senses are vidya, as we have heard. Between the objects of the senses and the mind, the wise have said the mind is vidya. Between the mind and the five subtle essences, the five subtle essences are vidya. Between the five subtle essences and ahankara, ahankara is vidya. Between ahankara and mahat, mahat is vidya. Between all the principles that begin with mahat, and prakriti, it is prakriti, unmanifest and supreme, that is called vidya. Between prakriti and that Supreme which is called Vidhi, the latter is to be known as vidya. Beyond prakriti is the twenty-fifth, purusha, who should be known as vidya. Of all knowledge, the object of knowledge has been said to be the Unmanifest. Again, knowledge has been said to be unmanifest and its object to be that which is beyond the twenty-four. And again, knowledge has been said to be unmanifest and the knower to be that which is beyond the twenty-four. That is the true meaning of vidya and avidya.

“Listen now to all that has been said of the indestructible and the destructible. Both the soul and prakriti have been called indestructible, and both have been called destructible. I will give you the reason as I have understood it. Both prakriti and the soul are without beginning and without end, and both are held to be supreme in the work of creation. Men of knowledge say that both are to be called principles. Because creation and destruction, repeated without end, are her attributes, the Unmanifest is called indestructible. She is changed over and over for the purpose of creating the principles. And because the principles that begin with mahat are produced by purusha as well, and because purusha and the Unmanifest depend on each other, purusha, the twenty-fifth, is also called the field, and so indestructible too.

“When the yogi draws in all the principles and merges them into the unmanifest Self, the twenty-fifth too disappears into it along with them. When each principle has merged into its parent, the one that remains is prakriti. And when the knower of the field also, son, is merged into the cause that produced him, then prakriti with all the principles in her becomes kshara, the destructible, and, parted from all the principles, comes to be without attributes. So it is, we have heard, that the knower of the field, when his knowledge of the field disappears, becomes by his nature bare of attributes. When he becomes kshara he takes on attributes. When he comes to his own real nature he understands that he is in truth without them.

“By casting off prakriti and beginning to see that he is different from her, the intelligent knower of the field comes to be regarded as pure and stainless. When the soul ceases to exist in union with prakriti, he becomes one with Brahman. When he exists joined to prakriti, he seems to be different from Brahman. When the soul shows no affection for prakriti and her principles, he sees the Supreme, and having once seen him has no wish to fall from that happiness. When the knowledge of truth dawns on him, the soul begins to lament. ‘How foolishly I have acted,’ he says, ‘falling through ignorance into this frame made of prakriti, like a fish caught in a net! Through ignorance I have gone from body to body, as a fish goes from water to water thinking that water is the only element it can live in. A fish knows nothing else than water to be its own, and I have never known anything else than children and wives to be mine. Shame on me, that through ignorance I have gone from body to body again and again, forgetting the supreme Self! The supreme Self alone is my friend, and I am capable of friendship with him. Whatever my nature and whoever I may be, I am able to be like him and to become one with him. I see my likeness to him. I am like him. He is stainless, and it is plain that I am of the same nature.

“‘Through ignorance and stupor I became joined to lifeless prakriti. I am in truth without attachments, and I have passed all this long time attached to her. She had me subdued for so long, and I never knew it. The forms prakriti takes are many, high, middling, and low. How shall I live in those forms? How shall I live together with her? It was only my ignorance that sent me to her company. Now I will be fixed, in Sankhya or in yoga, and I will keep her company no longer. Having passed so long with her, I ought to think that I was deceived by her all that time, for I am in truth free of change, and how could I keep company with one who is subject to change? She cannot be held to answer for this. The fault is mine, since I turned away from the supreme Self and attached myself to her of my own accord. Through that attachment I, who am in truth formless, had to live in form after form. Formless by nature, I took on forms through my sense of mine, and was insulted and distressed through it. Through my sense of mine in what prakriti produces, I am forced to be born in one order of being after another. I am in truth without any sense of mine, and by affecting it, what evil acts I have committed in those orders, while I lived in them with a soul that had lost all knowledge! I have nothing more to do with her whose essence is ahankara, who divides herself into many fragments and tries to join me to them. Only now have I been woken. I have understood that I am by nature without any sense of mine and without that ahankara which creates the forms of prakriti that wrap me round. I cast off the sense of mine that I have always had toward her, and I cast off prakriti herself, and I will take refuge in him who is auspicious. I will be joined with him and never again with lifeless prakriti. To be joined with him is for my good. I have no likeness of nature to prakriti.’ When the twenty-fifth comes in this way to understand the Supreme, he is able to cast off the destructible and become one with what is indestructible and is the essence of everything auspicious. The soul is without attributes in his true nature and in reality unmanifest, and he becomes clothed in what is manifest and takes on attributes. When he sees That which is without attributes and is the origin of the Unmanifest, Karala, he becomes the same. I have now told you the marks of the indestructible and the destructible, as far as my knowledge goes and as the scriptures set them out. The science taught in the Sankhya treatises is the same as what is laid down in the yoga scriptures. The knowledge the Sankhyas preach can wake anyone, and it is set out very clearly in their scriptures for the good of disciples. The learned say this Sankhya system is very wide, and yogis hold it in great regard, as they hold the Vedas. The Sankhya system admits no principle beyond the twenty-fifth. The yoga philosophy says that Brahman, which is the essence of knowledge without a second, becomes the soul only when it is wrapped in ignorance, and so the yoga scriptures speak of both Brahman and the soul.”

The gist: Prakriti, who creates and destroys, is avidya, and purusha beyond the twenty-four is vidya. In each pair up the ladder, senses and objects, mind, subtle essences, ahankara, mahat, prakriti, the higher is the knowledge of the lower. When the soul wakes it speaks its own indictment: a fish in a net, wandering from water to water, taking children and wives for its own. It clears prakriti of blame, takes the fault on itself, drops the sense of mine, and takes refuge in the supreme Self, whose nature it finds to be its own.

The awakened and the unawakened: the twenty-sixth principle, and to whom this knowledge should be given

Vasishtha said, “Hear me now on the buddha and the abuddha, the awakened one, who is the supreme Self, and the unawakened, who is the soul, and on how the gunas of sattva, rajas, and tamas are dealt out. The supreme Self takes on many forms and, becoming the soul, regards all those forms as real. Because he identifies himself with those changes, the soul fails to understand the supreme Self, for he carries the gunas, and creates, and draws back into himself what he creates. Without a pause, for the sake of play, the soul goes through change after change, and because he is able to understand the working of the Unmanifest, he is called budhyamana, the one who comprehends.

“The Unmanifest, prakriti, can never at any time comprehend Brahman, which is in truth without attributes even when it shows itself with them. That is why prakriti is called the unintelligent. The Shrutis declare that if prakriti ever does come to know the twenty-fifth, she then becomes one with the soul who is joined to her. The supreme Self, which is forever unjoined and stands beyond the twenty-fifth, she can never comprehend. Through his attachment to prakriti, the soul, who is unmanifest and in his real nature subject to no change, comes to be called the unawakened, the ignorant. Because the twenty-fifth can comprehend the Unmanifest, he is called budhyamana. He cannot readily comprehend the twenty-sixth, which is stainless, which is knowledge without a second, which is immeasurable and eternal. The twenty-sixth, for its part, knows both the soul and prakriti, the twenty-fifth and the twenty-fourth. Only men of wisdom come to know that Brahman, which is unmanifest, which is present in its own nature in all that is seen and unseen, and which, son, is the one independent essence in the universe.

“When the soul takes himself for something other than he truly is, when he counts himself fat or lean, fair or dark, a Brahmin or a Shudra, it is then that he fails to know the supreme Self, and himself, and the prakriti he is joined to. When he comes to understand prakriti and to know that she is something different from him, he is said to be restored to his true nature, and he reaches that high understanding, pure and stainless, which is concerned with Brahman. When the soul reaches that understanding, he reaches the pure knowledge that is called the twenty-sixth. He then casts off the Unmanifest, prakriti, who is charged with creation and destruction. When he knows prakriti, who is unintelligent and subject to the action of sattva, rajas, and tamas, he becomes bare of gunas himself. By understanding the Unmanifest in this way he gains the nature of the supreme Self. The learned say that when he is freed from sattva, rajas, and tamas and joined in nature with the supreme Self, the soul becomes one with that Self. The supreme Self is called tattva, a principle, and also not-tattva, and it is beyond decay and destruction. The Self has the manifest principles, the body, for its resting place, and yet it cannot be said to have taken on their nature. The wise say that with the soul there are twenty-five principles in all. The Self, son, is not to be thought of as possessing any of the principles, mahat and the rest. It has intelligence and is beyond the principles, and it quickly casts off even that principle which is the mark of the awakened one. When the soul comes to regard himself as the twenty-sixth, which is free of decay and destruction, then without doubt, by his own force, he reaches likeness to the twenty-sixth. Though he is awakened by the twenty-sixth, which is pure intelligence, the soul still falls under ignorance, and this, as the Shrutis and the Sankhya scriptures explain, is the cause of his many forms. When the soul, who has both consciousness and unintelligent prakriti, loses all sense of a separate self, he loses his manyness and takes back his oneness. The soul is found joined to happiness and misery and is seldom free of the sense of self. When he reaches likeness to the supreme Self, which the understanding cannot reach, he is freed from virtue and vice. When he reaches the twenty-sixth, which is unborn and powerful and unattached to anything, and comprehends it thoroughly, he gains power himself and casts off the Unmanifest entirely, and from then on the twenty-four principles seem to him without substance and of no value.

“I have told you, according to the Shrutis and according to the truth, the nature of the unintelligent prakriti, of the soul, and of that pure knowledge which is the supreme Self. With the scriptures to guide you, manyness and oneness are to be understood in this way. The difference between the gnat and the udumbara fig it lives in, or between the fish and the water, shows the difference between the soul and the supreme Self. So their manyness and their oneness are understood. This is what is called liberation: this knowledge of oneself as something distinct from unintelligent, unmanifest prakriti. The twenty-fifth, who lives in the bodies of living creatures, is to be set free by being made to know the Unmanifest, the supreme Self that is beyond the understanding. In this way only can he reach liberation, and by no other means. That is certain.

“He is really different from the field he lives in for the time, and through his union with it he takes on the nature of that field. Joined with what is pure, he becomes pure. Joined with the intelligent, he becomes intelligent. By joining with one who is liberated, he becomes liberated. By joining with one who is free of every attachment, he becomes free of all attachments. By joining with one who strives for liberation, he takes on the nature of his companion and strives for it himself. By joining with one of pure deeds, he becomes pure, and of pure deeds, and blazing with light. By joining with one whose soul is unstained, his own soul becomes unstained. By joining with the one independent Self, he becomes one and independent, and by joining with one who depends on his own Self alone, he takes that nature and comes to independence.

“All this that I have told you is perfectly true. I have spoken to you candidly of the eternal, stainless, primeval Brahman. You may impart this high knowledge, which can wake the soul, to a person who does not know the Vedas, provided he is humble and keenly wishes to gain the knowledge of Brahman. It should never be given to one who is wedded to falsehood, to one who is cunning or a rogue, to one without strength of mind, to one of crooked understanding, to one who is jealous of men of knowledge, or to one who gives pain to others. Hear who may safely be given it. It should be given to one who has faith, to one who has merit, to one who always keeps from speaking ill of others, to one devoted to austerities from the purest motives, to one who has knowledge and wisdom, to one who knows the sacrifices and other rites laid down in the Vedas, to one of a forgiving disposition, to one inclined to take compassion on all creatures and do them good, to one who is fond of living in privacy and solitude, to one who is fond of discharging every act the scriptures lay down, to one who is averse to quarrels and disputes, to one of great learning, to one with wisdom, to one who has forgiveness and self-restraint and tranquility of soul. It should never be given to one who lacks these qualifications. It has been said that when this knowledge is given to one who is no fit vessel for it, no good can come of the giving. To a man who keeps no vows and restraints it should never be given, even if he offers in exchange the whole earth full of gems and wealth of every kind. To one who has conquered his senses, it should be given without doubt.

“Karala, let fear be yours no longer, since today you have heard all this from me concerning the high Brahman. I have spoken to you duly of the high and holy Brahman, which is without beginning or middle or end and which can dispel every kind of grief. Look on Brahman, the sight of which dispels both birth and death, which is full of auspiciousness and removes all fear, and having gained this essence of all knowledge, cast off all error and stupor today. I had this knowledge from the eternal Hiranyagarbha himself, who gave it to me because I had taken care to please him. Asked by you today, I have given you the knowledge of the eternal Brahman just as I had it from my teacher. This high knowledge, the refuge of all who understand liberation, has come to you exactly as I had it from Brahma himself.”

Bhishma said, “So I have told you of the high Brahman as the great rishi Vasishtha told it to King Karala of Janaka’s line, that Brahman from which the twenty-fifth, once he reaches it, never has to return. The soul comes back into the world again and again because he does not truly know the supreme Self, which is beyond decay and death. When he gains that high knowledge he comes back no more. I heard it from the celestial rishi, son, and I have given it to you, a knowledge that leads to the highest good. Vasishtha had it from Hiranyagarbha. Narada had it from Vasishtha, and from Narada I received this knowledge, which is one with the eternal Brahman. Now that you have heard it, a discourse of high meaning and well spoken, give way to grief no longer. The man who knows kshara and akshara is freed from fear, and it is the man without this knowledge who has cause to fear. Through ignorance of Brahman the man of foolish soul comes back into this world again and again. Leaving this life, he has to be born in thousands upon thousands of orders of being, every one of which has death at its end, now in the world of the gods, now among men, now among the lower creatures. If in the course of time he crosses the ocean of ignorance he is sunk in, he escapes rebirth altogether and becomes one with the supreme Self. That ocean is terrible. It has no bottom, and it is called the Unmanifest. Day after day, Yudhishthira, creatures are seen to fall into it and sink. You have been freed from that eternal and limitless ocean of ignorance, and so you are free of rajas and of tamas as well.”

The gist: The twenty-sixth knows the soul and prakriti both, and the soul, the twenty-fifth, does not readily know it. The soul can comprehend prakriti, which is why he is called budhyamana, and when he knows her as other than himself he puts her off and comes to the likeness of the twenty-sixth, as the gnat is other than the fig it lives in. He takes the nature of whatever he joins: the pure makes him pure, and the free makes him free. Vasishtha ends by naming who may be given this knowledge and who may never have it at any price, and Bhishma gives its line of descent: Hiranyagarbha, Vasishtha, Narada, himself.

A sub-tale: a sage of Bhrigu’s line teaches King Vasuman dharma

A sub-tale: Bhishma told Yudhishthira of another king of Janaka’s line, named Vasuman. He was ranging an uninhabited forest after deer when he saw a rishi of Bhrigu’s line, a Brahmin of the highest standing, seated at his ease. The king bowed his head to him, sat down near him, and with the sage’s leave asked his question. “A man has an unstable body and is the slave of his desires. What does such a man the most good, here and hereafter?” The king had honored him properly, and the rishi, a man of great soul and ascetic merit, gave him an answer that did him great good.

The rishi said, “If you want what pleases your mind, here and hereafter, then hold your senses in and do nothing that any creature finds disagreeable. Righteousness is the benefit of the good, and righteousness is their refuge. From righteousness the three worlds have flowed, with everything in them that moves and that stands still. You are greedy for every pleasant thing. How is it that you have not yet had your fill of the objects of desire? You see the honey, man of little understanding, as the honey gatherer on the mountainside sees it with his eyes on the bees, and you are blind to the fall beneath it. A man who wants the fruits of knowledge must set himself to gain knowledge, and in the same way a man who wants the fruits of righteousness must set himself to gain righteousness.

“If a wicked man, wishing for virtue, tries to do an act that is pure and stainless, he cannot bring it off. If a good man, moved by the wish to earn virtue, tries to do an act that is even difficult, it becomes easy for him. If a man living in the woods acts so as to enjoy all the pleasures of life among men in towns, people come to look on him as a townsman, whatever he calls himself. And if a man living in a town acts so as to enjoy the happiness that belongs to the forest recluse, people come to look on him as a forest recluse.

“Determine the merits of the religion of acts and of the religion of abstention from acts, and then, with your senses gathered, give yourself to the practices of righteousness that belong to thought, to word, and to deed. Judge the fitness of time and place, purify yourself by vows and cleansing rites, and when good people ask it of you, make large gifts to them without malice. Wealth should be earned by righteous means and given away to those who deserve it. Give with anger put aside, and having given, never grieve over the gift and never proclaim it with your own mouth. The Brahmin who is full of compassion, who keeps to candor, and whose birth is pure has been held a fit person to receive gifts. A man is said to be pure in birth when he is born of a mother who has only one husband and who belongs to the same order as her husband. Such a Brahmin, knowing the three Vedas, Rig, Yajus, and Saman, a man of learning who duly keeps the six duties, which are to sacrifice on his own account, to officiate at the sacrifices of others, to learn, to teach, to give gifts, and to receive them, has been held deserving of gifts.

“Righteousness becomes unrighteousness, and unrighteousness becomes righteousness, according to the character of the doer, of the time, and of the place. Sin is cast off like the dirt on the body, a little with a little effort and more when the effort is greater. A man who has purged his bowels should take ghee, which then works on his system to the greatest good. In the same way, when a man has cleansed himself of all faults and sets himself to gain righteousness, that righteousness yields the highest happiness in the next world. Good thoughts and evil thoughts exist in the minds of all creatures. The mind should be drawn away from the evil ones and always directed toward the good. A man should always revere the practices of his own order. Strive, therefore, to act in such a way that you come to have faith in the practices of yours.

“Your soul is impatient, so take up the practice of patience. Your understanding is foolish, so seek intelligence. You are without tranquility, so seek to be tranquil, and without wisdom, so seek to act wisely. He who moves in the company of the righteous succeeds, by his own energy, in gaining the means to what is good for him in this world and the next. The root of that good is firmness that does not waver. The royal sage Mahabhisha fell from heaven for want of that firmness. Yayati, when his merits were exhausted and he was thrown down from heaven for his boasting, won back the worlds of happiness through his firmness. You are sure to reach great intelligence, and what is for your highest good, by paying court to virtuous and learned people who have ascetic merit.” King Vasuman had a good disposition. He heard the sage out, drew his mind back from the pursuit of desire, and set it on the gaining of righteousness.

The gist: A king out hunting asks a forest sage what does a man the most good, and gets conduct for an answer: restrain the senses, harm no creature, earn by right means, give to the deserving without anger or boasting, turn the mind from its evil thoughts toward its good ones, and keep the practices of one’s own order. The root of all of it is firmness. Mahabhisha fell from heaven for lack of it, and Yayati climbed back by it.

Yajnavalkya and Janaka: the counting of the principles and the ninefold creation

Yudhishthira said, “Grandfather, speak to me now of that which is free of duty and its opposite, free of every doubt, beyond birth and death and beyond virtue and sin, which is auspicious, which is eternal fearlessness, which is eternal and indestructible and unchanging, which is always pure, and which is forever free of the toil of exertion.” Bhishma said, “For that I will recite to you the old account of what passed between Yajnavalkya and Janaka. Once the famous King Daivarati of Janaka’s line, who understood the bearing of every question, put this one to Yajnavalkya, the great rishi.”

“How many kinds of senses are there?” Janaka said. “How many kinds of prakriti are there? What is the Unmanifest, the highest Brahman? What is higher than Brahman? What is birth, and what is death? What are the limits of age? I ask for your grace, and you must speak to me on all of this. I am ignorant, and you are an ocean of knowledge. That is why I ask. I want to hear you on every one of these subjects.” Yajnavalkya said, “Hear what I have to say in answer. I will give you the high knowledge that yogis value, and above all the knowledge the Sankhyas possess. Nothing is unknown to you, and still you ask me. One who is asked should answer, though. That is the eternal practice. Eight principles are called prakriti, and sixteen are called modifications. Of the manifest there are seven. These are the views of those who know the science of adhyatma.

“The Unmanifest, which is original prakriti, and mahat, ahankara, and the five subtle elements of earth, wind, space, water, and light: these eight go by the name of prakriti. Now hear the count of those called modifications. They are the ear, the skin, the eye, the tongue, and the nose; and sound, touch, form, taste, and smell; and speech, the two arms, the two feet, the lower duct of the body, and the organs of pleasure. Among these, the ten that begin with sound, which have their origin in the five great principles, are called vishesha. The five senses of knowledge are called savishesha, Janaka. Those who know the science of adhyatma count the mind as the sixteenth. This agrees with your own views, and with the views of other learned men who know the truths about the principles.

“From the Unmanifest springs the mahat-soul. The learned call this the first creation, the one that relates to pradhana, which is prakriti. From mahat ahankara is produced. This has been called the second creation, which has the understanding for its essence. From ahankara has sprung the mind, which is the essence of sound and the other properties of space and the rest. This is the third creation, said to relate to ahankara. From the mind have sprung the five great elements. Know this for the fourth creation, called mental. Those who know the elements say that sound, touch, form, taste, and smell are the fifth creation, which relates to the great elements. The creation of the ear, the skin, the eye, the tongue, and the nose is the sixth, held to have multiplicity of thought for its essence. The senses that come after the ear and the others, the senses of action, arise next, and this is called the seventh creation, relating to the senses of knowledge. Then come prana, the breath that rises upward, and the breaths that move across. This is the eighth creation, called arjava, the straight. Then come the breaths that run across the lower parts of the body and apana, the breath that moves downward. This is the ninth, also called arjava. These nine kinds of creation, and these principles, twenty-four in number, I have declared to you as the scriptures lay them down. After this, hear me tell the spans of time that the learned assign to these principles.”

A key to reading this (the lineage): Daivarati is a king of Janaka’s line, and Yajnavalkya addresses him as ruler of Mithila. Bhishma calls him famous and says he understood the bearing of every question, and Yajnavalkya tells him to his face that nothing is unknown to him. The king asks all the same, calling himself ignorant and the sage an ocean of knowledge, and the sage answers because one who is asked should answer. What he promises to teach is the knowledge the yogis value and the Sankhyas possess.

The durations of the principles and the dissolution of the world

Yajnavalkya said, “Hear me on the span of time that belongs to the Unmanifest, the Supreme Purusha. Ten thousand kalpas are said to make a single day of his, and his night is as long. When his night is over he wakes, and first he creates the herbs and plants that are the sustenance of all embodied creatures. Then he creates Brahma, who springs from a golden egg. That Brahma, we have heard, is the form of all created things. He lived inside the egg for one whole year, and then the great ascetic Brahma, who is also called Prajapati, the lord of creatures, came out of it and created the whole earth and the heaven above. Then, as it is read in the Vedas, the Lord set the sky between heaven and earth, which were parted from each other. Seven thousand five hundred kalpas measure the day of Brahma, and those who know the science of adhyatma say his night is of equal length.

“Brahma, who is called mahat, then creates ahankara, which is called bhuta and has an excellent essence. Before he made any physical body out of the great elements, mahat, by the power of his austerities, created four others who are called his sons. They, we have heard, are the fathers of the first fathers. We have heard also that the senses of knowledge and the four inner faculties sprang from the five great elements, which are called the pitris, the fathers, and that the whole universe of moving and unmoving beings has been filled with those elements. Ahankara, who is powerful, created the five bhutas: earth, wind, space, water, and light for the fifth. This ahankara, a great being from whom the third creation springs, has five thousand kalpas for his night, and his day is as long.

“Sound, touch, form, taste, and smell are the five called vishesha, and they belong to the five great bhutas. All creatures are pervaded by these five without a break. Because of them they desire one another’s company and become subject to one another, and they challenge and outdo one another. Led on by those unchanging and seductive principles, creatures kill one another and wander through this world, entering one order of being after another. Three thousand kalpas are the length of their day, and their night is the same.

“The mind roves over all things, led on by the senses. The senses perceive nothing. It is the mind that perceives through them. The eye sees forms when the mind helps it and never by itself, and when the mind is distracted the eye fails to perceive even what is fully before it. People commonly say that the senses perceive. That is untrue, for it is the mind that perceives through the senses. When the activity of the mind ceases, the activity of the senses ceases, and the ceasing of the one is the ceasing of the other. So the senses are to be regarded as under the rule of the mind, which is called the lord of them all. These are all the twenty bhutas in the universe.”

Yajnavalkya said, “I have told you, one after another, the order in which the principles are created, their full number, and how long each endures. Hear now of their destruction. Hear how Brahma, who is eternal and undecaying, without beginning and without end, again and again creates and destroys all created things. When his day is over and night comes, he wishes to sleep. At that hour the unmanifest and holy one urges on the being called Maharudra, who knows his own great powers. Urged by the Unmanifest, that being takes the form of the sun with his hundreds of thousands of rays and divides himself into twelve parts, each like a blazing fire. Then, losing no time, he burns up with his energy the four kinds of created beings: those born from the womb, those born from eggs, those born of filth, and the plants. In the time it takes an eye to close, everything that moves and everything that stands still is destroyed, and the earth is left on every side as bare as a tortoise shell.

“When he has burned everything on the face of the earth, Rudra, whose might has no measure, quickly fills the bare earth with water of great force. Then he creates the fire of the yuga’s end, which dries that water up. The water goes, and the great element of fire burns on fiercely. Then comes the mighty wind, of force beyond measuring, in his eight forms, and quickly swallows that blazing fire with its seven flames, the fire that is one with the heat in every creature. Having swallowed the fire, the wind courses in every direction, upward, downward, and across. Then space, which has no measure, swallows that wind. Then the mind cheerfully swallows space. Then ahankara, the lord of all creatures and the soul of everything, swallows the mind. Ahankara in his turn is swallowed by the mahat-soul, who knows the past, the present, and the future. And the mahat-soul, the universe, is swallowed by Shambhu, the lord of all things, in whom the yoga powers of becoming minute, becoming light, reaching anything, and the rest are inborn, and who is held to be the supreme and pure light that does not change. His hands and feet reach to every part. His eyes and head and face are everywhere, his ears reach every place, and he stands covering all things. He is the heart of all creatures, and his measure is a digit of the thumb. That infinite and supreme Self, the lord of all, swallows up the universe in this way. After this what remains is the undecaying and the unchanging, the one without defect of any kind, who is the creator of the past, the present, and the future, and who is perfectly faultless. I have now told you duly of destruction. Next I will speak of adhyatma, adhibhuta, and adhidaivata.”

A key to reading this (the numbers): Yajnavalkya gives each principle a day and a night of equal length, counted in kalpas: ten thousand kalpas for the Unmanifest, seven thousand five hundred for Brahma, five thousand for ahankara, and three thousand for the five called vishesha. The spans grow shorter at each step down from the Unmanifest. Vasishtha, earlier, measured by another rule: twelve thousand years of the gods to a yuga, four yugas taken a thousand times to a kalpa, and one kalpa to a single day of Brahma.

The gist: Yajnavalkya lays out the order of creation with the span of each principle, and then runs it backward. At the end of Brahma’s day Maharudra, as a sun in twelve parts, burns every creature and leaves the earth bare. Water covers it, fire dries the water, wind swallows fire, space swallows wind, mind swallows space, ahankara swallows mind, mahat swallows ahankara, and Shambhu swallows mahat. What is left is the undecaying and the unchanging.

Adhyatma, adhibhuta, and adhidaivata; and the marks of the three gunas

Yajnavalkya said, “The Brahmins who know the principles speak of every organ under three heads: the organ itself, which is adhyatma, what it does or deals with, which is adhibhuta, and the deity that presides over it, which is adhidaivata. The two feet are adhyatma, the act of walking is adhibhuta, and Vishnu is the adhidaivata of those limbs. The lower duct is adhyatma, its work of throwing out waste is adhibhuta, and Mitra is its adhidaivata. The organ of generation is adhyatma, its pleasure is adhibhuta, and Prajapati is its adhidaivata. The hands are adhyatma, their work in the form of acts is adhibhuta, and Indra is their adhidaivata. The organs of speech are adhyatma, the words they utter are adhibhuta, and Agni is their adhidaivata. The eye is adhyatma, form is its adhibhuta, and Surya, the sun, is its adhidaivata. The ear is adhyatma, sound is adhibhuta, and the quarters of the horizon are its adhidaivata. The tongue is adhyatma, taste is its adhibhuta, and water is its adhidaivata. The sense of smell is adhyatma, odor is its adhibhuta, and earth is its adhidaivata. The skin is adhyatma, touch is its adhibhuta, and the wind is its adhidaivata.

“The mind has been called adhyatma, what the mind is busy with is adhibhuta, and Chandramas, the moon, is its adhidaivata. Ahankara is adhyatma, the conviction of being one with prakriti is its adhibhuta, and mahat, which is buddhi, is its adhidaivata. Buddhi is adhyatma, what is to be understood is its adhibhuta, and the kshetrajna, the knower of the field, is its adhidaivata. So I have set out for you truly, since you know the original principles so well, one detail at a time, the power of the Supreme to show himself in different forms in the beginning, the middle, and the end.

“Prakriti, cheerfully and of her own accord, as if for play, changes herself and so produces thousands upon thousands of combinations of her original transformations, which are called the gunas. Men can light thousands of lamps from a single lamp. In the same way prakriti, by changing, multiplies into thousands of existing things the three gunas of purusha, sattva, rajas, and tamas.

“Patience, joy, prosperity, satisfaction, brightness of every faculty, happiness, purity, health, contentment, faith, generosity, compassion, forgiveness, firmness, benevolence, equanimity, truth, the discharge of obligations, mildness, modesty, calmness, outward purity, simplicity, the keeping of obligatory practices, dispassion, fearlessness of heart, disregard for whether good or evil appears and for acts that are past, taking things only when they come as gifts, absence of greed, regard for the interests of others, and compassion for all creatures: these have been called the qualities that go with sattva.

“The count of the qualities that go with rajas is this: pride in personal beauty, the assertion of lordship, war, unwillingness to give, absence of compassion, the enjoying and enduring of happiness and misery, pleasure in speaking ill of others, indulgence in quarrels and disputes of every kind, arrogance, discourtesy, anxiety, indulgence in hostilities, sorrow, taking what belongs to others, shamelessness, crookedness, disunion, roughness, lust, anger, pride, the assertion of superiority, malice, and slander. Now for the gathering of qualities that springs from tamas. They are stupefaction of judgment, the darkening of every faculty, darkness, and blind darkness. By darkness is meant death, and by blind darkness is meant anger. Besides these, the marks of tamas are greediness for every kind of food, an appetite for food and drink that never stops, pleasure in scents and robes, in sports, in beds and seats, in sleeping by day, in slander, and in every act that comes of heedlessness, pleasure taken out of ignorance in dancing and in music played and sung, and aversion to every kind of religion.”

A key to reading this (the concept): Sattva, rajas and tamas are the three gunas of prakriti, and they are present in everything in the universe. Yajnavalkya gives each a list of marks, sattva by patience, joy and compassion, rajas by pride, quarrel and lust, tamas by stupor, appetite and aversion to religion. Then he gives each a place: sattva high, rajas in the middle, tamas low. A being joined with sattva alone goes to the worlds of the gods, one joined with sattva and rajas is born among men, and one joined with rajas and tamas is born in the orders between.

The motion of the gunas, and Janaka’s deep question: why is prakriti inert and purusha conscious?

Yajnavalkya said, “These three, sattva, rajas, and tamas, are the gunas of prakriti. They attach to all things in the universe and are always in them. The unmanifest purusha, who has the six attributes of yoga, changes himself by himself into hundreds and thousands and millions upon millions of forms by taking up these three. Those who know the science of adhyatma say that sattva is given a high place in the universe, rajas a middle one, and tamas a low one. By righteousness unmixed a being reaches a high end, that of the gods and the other dwellers in heaven. By righteousness mixed with sin it reaches the human state. By sin unmixed it sinks to a vile end.

“Hear me now on the mixtures of the three. Rajas is sometimes seen with sattva. Tamas also exists with rajas. Sattva may be seen with tamas. And sattva, rajas, and tamas may be seen all together and in equal proportions, and they make up the Unmanifest, prakriti. When the unmanifest purusha is joined with sattva alone, he reaches the worlds of the gods. Joined with sattva and rajas, he is born among human beings. Joined with rajas and tamas, he is born among the intermediate orders of being. Joined with all three, he comes to the human state. Those great souls who pass beyond both righteousness and sin reach, it is said, the place that is eternal, unchanging, undecaying, and immortal. Men of knowledge reach births that are very high, and their place is faultless and undecaying, beyond the reach of the senses, free of ignorance, above birth and death, and full of the light that dispels every kind of darkness.

“You asked me about the nature of the Supreme who resides in the Unmanifest. I will tell you. Listen. Even when he resides in prakriti, he is said to reside in his own nature and to take on nothing of hers. Prakriti is lifeless and unintelligent. Only when purusha presides over her can she create and destroy.”

Janaka said, “Prakriti and purusha are both without beginning and without end. Both are without form. Both are undecaying, and both are beyond comprehension. How then can it be said that one of them is lifeless and unintelligent? How is the other said to be living and intelligent? And why is that other called kshetrajna, the knower of the field? You know the whole religion of liberation, and I want to hear it whole and in detail. Speak to me of the existence of purusha and his oneness, of his separateness from prakriti, of the deities that attach to the body, of the place to which embodied creatures go when they die, and of the place they may reach at last in the course of time. Tell me of the knowledge described in the Sankhya system, and of the Yoga system by itself. And speak of the signs that give warning of death. All these things are as well known to you as a myrobalan fruit lying in your hand.”

Yajnavalkya said, “That which is without attributes, son, can never be explained by giving it attributes. Still, hear me explain what has attributes and what is without them. The sages who know the truth about all the principles say that when purusha takes hold of attributes, like a crystal catching the reflection of a red flower, he is said to have attributes, and that when he is freed from attributes, like the crystal freed from the reflection, he is seen in his real nature, which is beyond them all. Unmanifest prakriti has attributes by her very nature. She cannot pass beyond them. Without intelligence by nature, she becomes attached to attributes. Unmanifest prakriti cannot know anything, and purusha, by his nature, has knowledge. ‘There is nothing higher than myself’: this is what purusha is always conscious of. For this reason the Unmanifest, though by nature lifeless and unintelligent, becomes living and intelligent through her union with purusha, who is eternal and indestructible.

“When purusha, through ignorance, joins himself to attributes again and again, he fails to understand his own real nature, and so he fails to reach liberation. Because he is lord over the principles that flow from prakriti, he is said to share the nature of those principles. Because he is the agent in creation, he is said to have the attribute of creation. Because he is the agent in yoga, he is said to have the attribute of yoga. For his lordship over the particular principles known as prakriti, he is said to have the nature of prakriti. For his agency in creating the seeds of all unmoving things, he is said to share the nature of those seeds. And because he causes the several principles to start into life, he is said to be subject to decay and destruction, as they are. Yet because he is the witness of everything, and because there is nothing else than he, and also for his sense of identity with prakriti, the ascetics who have won success, who know adhyatma and are free of every fever, regard him as existing by himself without a second, unchanging, unmanifest in the form of cause, and unstable and manifest in the form of effects. This is what we have heard.

“Those Sankhyas, however, who rely on knowledge alone and on compassion for all creatures say that it is prakriti who is one and that the purushas are many. In truth purusha is different from prakriti, which, unstable as she is, appears stable. A blade of reed is different from its outer sheath, and purusha is different from prakriti in the same way. The worm that lies inside the udumbara fig is to be known as different from the fig. It exists with the fig, and it is no part of the fig. The fish is distinct from the water it lives in, and the water is distinct from the fish. They exist together, and the fish is never soaked by the water. The fire held in an earthen pan is distinct from the pan, and the pan is distinct from the fire it holds. The fire exists in the pan and with it, and is no part of it. The lotus leaf that floats on a stretch of water is distinct from the water it floats on, and its being there with the water does not make it a portion of the water. Ordinary people never correctly understand how these things exist forever in and with the others. Those who see prakriti and purusha in any other light are said to have a vision that is wrong, and it is certain that they must sink again and again into terrible hell. I have now told you the philosophy of the Sankhyas, that excellent science by which all things have been correctly determined. Determining the nature of purusha and prakriti in this way, the Sankhyas reach liberation. I have told you also the systems of those others who know the great principles of the universe. Now I will speak to you of the science of the yogis.”

The gist: Janaka’s question is how two things that are equally without beginning, end or form can differ, one lifeless and one living. Yajnavalkya answers with the crystal: it shows red while the flower is near and is clear when the flower is gone, and purusha has attributes only in that way. Prakriti knows nothing and seems to live because purusha is joined to her. The reed and its sheath, the worm in the fig, the fish in water, the fire in the pan and the lotus leaf on the pond are all together and are never part of each other, and to know purusha and prakriti so is liberation.

The science of the yogis and the marks of samadhi

Yajnavalkya said, “I have spoken of the science of the Sankhyas. Hear me now speak truly of the science of the yogis, as I have heard it and seen it. There is no knowledge to compare with that of the Sankhyas, and there is no power to compare with that of yoga. The two ordain the same practices, and both are held able to lead to liberation. Men who lack intelligence regard the Sankhya and the Yoga systems as different. We look on them as one and the same, and that is the conclusion we have come to after study and reflection. What the yogis have in view is the very thing the Sankhyas have in view, and he who sees the two systems as one is the man who truly knows the principles that order the universe. Know that the breaths of life and the senses are the chief means for the practice of yoga. By regulating those breaths and the senses and nothing more, yogis wander everywhere at their will.

“When the gross body is destroyed, yogis in their subtle bodies, which have the eight yoga powers of becoming minute, becoming light, reaching anything, and the rest, wander over the universe and enjoy every kind of happiness in that body. The wise have said in the scriptures that yoga confers eight kinds of power. They have spoken of yoga as having eight limbs, and they have spoken of no other kind of yoga. It has been said that the practices of yogis, excellent as they are in what they bring, are of two kinds, those with attributes and those free of attributes. To concentrate the mind on the sixteen objects that are named, while regulating the breath, is one kind. To concentrate the mind so that every difference is destroyed between the one who contemplates, the thing contemplated, and the act of contemplation, with the senses subdued, is the other. The first kind of yoga is said to be the one that has attributes, and the second the one that is free of them.

“Regulation of the breath, then, is yoga with attributes. In yoga without attributes the mind, released from its workings, is to be held fixed. It is the regulation of the breath, the kind with attributes, that should be practiced first, Janaka, because if the breath is let out with no definite image held in the mind the while, the wind in the beginner’s body will increase, to his great injury. In the first watch of the night twelve ways of holding the breath are recommended. After sleep, in the last watch of the night, twelve more have been laid down. A man who is tranquil, whose senses are subdued, who lives in retirement, who takes his joy in his own self, and who fully knows the meaning of the scriptures should without doubt regulate his breath in these twenty-four ways and fix his soul on the supreme Self.

“Let him drive off the five faults of the five senses, which are sound, form, touch, taste, and smell, and drive off the conditions called pratibha and apavarga, and then fix all the senses on the mind. The mind should then be fixed on ahankara, ahankara on buddhi, and buddhi on prakriti. Merging these one into another in that order, yogis contemplate the supreme Self, which is one, which is free of rajas and stainless, unchanging and infinite and pure and without defect, who is the eternal purusha, who cannot be altered or divided, who is without decay and death, who is everlasting and beyond all lessening, and who is the unchanging Brahman.

“Hear now the marks of one who is in yoga. Every sign of glad contentment that is seen in a man sleeping in contentment is seen in the person who is in samadhi. The wise say he looks like the steady, upward flame of a lamp that is full of oil and burns in a place with no breeze. He is like a rock that even a heavy downpour from the clouds cannot move in the slightest. The din of conches and drums does not move him, nor songs, nor the sound of hundreds of instruments beaten and blown together. That is the mark of one in samadhi. A man of cool courage and determination, climbing a flight of steps with a vessel full of oil in his hands, does not spill a drop of it even if men with weapons frighten and threaten him. In the same way the yogi, when his mind has been gathered and he sees the supreme Self in samadhi, does not move in the slightest, because the working of his senses has entirely stopped.

“While he is in samadhi the yogi sees Brahman, supreme and unchanging, set like a blazing light in the midst of thick darkness. By this means, after many years, he casts off this lifeless body and reaches liberation. So the eternal Shruti declares. This is called the yoga of the yogis. What else is it? Knowing it, the wise regard themselves as having succeeded.”

Where the soul goes when it dies, and the omens that precede death

Yajnavalkya said, “Listen to me now with attention, and I will tell you the places to which those who die have to go. If the soul escapes through the feet, it is said that the man goes to the region of Vishnu. If through the calves, we have heard, he goes to the regions of the Vasus. If through the knees, he reaches the company of the gods called Sadhyas. If through the lower duct, he reaches the regions of Mitra. If through the buttocks, he returns to the earth, and if through the thighs, he goes to the region of Prajapati. If through the flanks, he reaches the regions of the Maruts, and if through the nostrils, the region of Chandramas, the moon.

“If through the arms, the man goes to the region of Indra, and if through the chest, to that of Rudra. If through the neck, he goes to the excellent region of the great ascetic known by the name of Nara. If through the mouth, he reaches the region of the Vishvedevas, and if through the ears, the region of the deities of the several points of the horizon. If through the nose, he reaches the region of the wind god, and if through the eyes, the region of Agni. If through the brows, he goes to the region of the Ashvins, and if through the forehead, to that of the pitris, the ancestors. If through the crown of the head, he reaches the region of Brahma, the first of the gods. Those, Janaka, are the places men go to according to the way their souls leave their bodies.

“Now I will tell you the warning signs, as the wise have laid them down, of those who have only one year to live. One who used to see the fixed star called Arundhati and can no longer see it, or cannot see that other star called Dhruva, the pole star, or one who sees the full moon or the flame of a burning lamp as broken toward the south, has only one year to live. Those men who can no longer see their own image reflected in the eyes of others have only one year to live. One who had luster and loses it, or had wisdom and loses it, one whose nature within and without is changed in that way, has only six months more to live. He who disregards the gods, or quarrels with Brahmins, or one who is naturally of dark complexion and turns pale, has only six months more to live.

“One who sees the disc of the moon full of holes like a spider’s web, or sees the disc of the sun with holes of the same kind, has only one week more to live. One who smells fragrant scents in a place of worship and finds them as offensive as the smell of corpses has only one week more to live. The sinking of the nose or of the ears, the discoloring of the teeth or of the eye, the loss of all consciousness, and the loss of all bodily heat are signs that point to death that very day. If a stream of tears suddenly flows from a man’s left eye without any cause that can be seen, and if vapor is seen rising from his head, that is a sure sign he will die before the day is over.

“Knowing all these warning signs, the man of cleansed soul should join his soul with the supreme Self day and night, and go on so until the day of his dissolution comes. If he does not wish to die and wants to live on in this world, he gives up all enjoyments, all scents and tastes, and lives in abstinence. He conquers death in that way, by fixing his soul on the supreme Self. The man who is blessed with knowledge of the Self practices the course of life the Sankhyas recommend and conquers death by joining his soul with the supreme Self. At last he reaches what is entirely indestructible, what is without birth, what is auspicious and unchanging and eternal and stable, and what men of uncleansed souls cannot reach.”

The gist: Yajnavalkya calls Sankhya and yoga one science. The yogi begins with the regulation of the breath, twelve ways in the first watch of the night and twelve in the last, and merges the senses into the mind, the mind into ahankara, ahankara into buddhi and buddhi into prakriti, until he sits in samadhi like a lamp flame out of the wind. The soul goes to one world or another according to the part of the body it leaves by, from the feet for Vishnu’s region to the crown of the head for Brahma’s. The signs of a year, of six months, of a week and of a single day are given so that a man can spend what is left joined to the supreme Self.

Source: the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Shanti Parva, Apaddharma and Mokshadharma sub-parvas, Sections 129 to 365; this fourth part draws on Sections 286 to 292, 297, and 303 to 318. The Gita Press Hindi edition is the controlling witness. The Sanskrit e-text and an independent complete translation were used to verify names, sequence, and principal events. Where recensions differ, this retelling follows Gita Press.