Bhishma: the Law of Liberation and the Law of Distress

About 210 minutes · in 6 sittings

From his bed of arrows, the grandfather Bhishma had already taught Yudhishthira how a king rules and how a king survives a bad year. Now his voice crossed the last border and entered the country where a king’s duty and the road to release are strung on a single thread. Yudhishthira sat close, his hands folded, and the questions he brought were no longer about armies or treasuries. They were about grief, and about what a man should want when he knows how little time he has. Bhishma answered the way he always answered, with old stories: a Brahmin who talked a king out of mourning, a boy who out-argued his learned father, a poor man whose two young bulls were carried off on a camel’s neck, a jackal who turned out to be Indra, and then the long conversation on the summit of Kailasa in which the sage Bhrigu told Bharadvaja how the world was made, where the four orders came from, how a life is meant to be lived in four stages, what right conduct looks like at the table and on the road, what the inner Self is, and how the mind is trained to be still. This first part carries the story that far, through the rungs of meditation, and the parts that follow take up the path of the reciters, the debate of Manu and Brihaspati, and the form of Narayana. We stay near and tell it to you exactly as Vyasa told it.

The beginning of the parva of liberation: the medicine of grief and the tale of Senajit

Yudhishthira had listened to the whole of the law of kings and the whole of the law for a time of calamity, and when the old man paused he asked for the rest. “You have taught me what a ruler owes and what a man may do when everything around him is falling,” he said. “Now tell me the highest duties, the ones that belong to the people who live in the four stages of a life.”

Bhishma said, “Dharma has many doors, and no one who keeps it goes unrewarded. For every stage of life its duties are laid down, and the fruit of most of them is invisible; it waits for a man in the world to come. There is one exception. The fruit of tapas turned toward the soul, the hearing and the pondering and the long inward attention, is paid out in this very world. And whatever a man sets his heart on, that thing and nothing else looks to him like the greatest of all gains. When he reflects properly, with a heart cleaned by the reflecting, he comes to see that the things of this world are worth about as much as straw, and at that moment his attachment to them falls away of its own accord. The world is built with defects in it. Since that is how it is made, every man with any intelligence should work for the release of his own soul.”

Yudhishthira’s next question came from closer to home. “When a man loses his wealth,” he asked, “or when his wife dies, or his son, or his father, with what frame of mind is he supposed to kill his grief?”

Bhishma said, “When wealth is gone or a wife or a son or a father is dead, a man says to himself, ‘This is a great sorrow,’ and he is right. Then he must take up reflection and use it to kill the sorrow. There is an old story about that, the speech a Brahmin friend made when he came to the court of King Senajit and found the king burned out with mourning for a dead son. The Brahmin looked at that dejected ruler and said, ‘Why are you stupefied? You have stopped thinking. You are yourself a thing to be grieved over, so why do you grieve for anyone else? A few days from now others will grieve for you, and in their turn others will grieve for them. You, I, and every one of these people who wait on you are going back to the place we all came from.’

“Senajit asked him, ‘What is the understanding, what is the tapas, what is the concentration, what is the knowledge, what is the learning, that lets you say this and not be overpowered by sorrow?’ The Brahmin said, ‘Look at all creatures, the high, the middling, and the low. Each is tangled in grief by its own acts. I do not count even myself as mine. Or say it the other way: I count the whole world as mine, and everything I see is as much mine as it is anyone else’s. Grief cannot reach me through that thought, and having taken it up I yield neither to joy nor to sorrow. Two pieces of wood float on the ocean; they come together for a while and then they part. That is exactly how living creatures meet. Sons, grandsons, kinsmen, relatives are all pieces of driftwood, and one should never grow fond of them, because parting from them is certain.

“‘Your son came from a region nobody can see. He has gone back to it and become invisible again. He did not know you, and you did not know him. So who are you, and for whom are you grieving? Grief grows out of the disease called desire, and happiness is what the cure of that disease feels like. Out of joy itself sorrow springs, and so sorrow comes again and again; sorrow follows joy and joy follows sorrow, and the two of them turn for every human being on a wheel. After happiness, sorrow has come to you. You will have happiness again. No one suffers forever and no one is happy forever. The body is the place where both of them live; whatever an embodied creature does with its body, it pays for in that body, and life and the body spring up together and perish together. Men of uncleansed souls, tied to the world by all its cords, wash away like embankments of sand in a river. Sorrow after sorrow, born of ignorance, presses them the way an oil-press presses seeds, and the press is the round of rebirth. A man does a hundred wrong things for the sake of his wife and his household, and then he suffers for them alone, here and in the next world. Everyone who is attached to children and wives and kin sinks into the mire of grief like an old elephant that has lost its strength sinking in a swamp, and the loss of wealth or a son or a kinsman burns like a forest fire. Yet all of this, joy and grief, existence and its end, hangs on destiny. The man with friends and the man without them, the man with enemies and the man without, the wise and the fool, each gets his happiness from destiny and from nowhere else. Friends are not what make a man happy. Enemies are not what make him miserable. Wisdom does not bring in wealth and wealth does not bring in happiness; among the intelligent and the brave and the foolish and the timid, the learned and the weak and the strong, happiness comes to the one for whom it was ordained. Among the calf, the cowherd who owns her, and the thief, the cow belongs to whoever drinks her milk. Whatever comes, pleasant or unpleasant, is to be taken with an unconquered heart. A thousand occasions for sorrow and a hundred for fear come every day to the man of ignorance and folly; they do not come to the man who has understanding.

“‘Whatever thing a man looks at and thinks “this is mine” becomes a source of grief and heartburn for him, and whatever desirable thing he gives up becomes a source of happiness. The man who chases his desires is destroyed in the chase. Neither the pleasure the senses give nor the great felicity a man may enjoy in heaven comes to a sixteenth part of the joy that rises when all desires have been destroyed. The acts of a former life come home to the wise and the foolish, the brave and the timid, all alike. Anger is born in the heart and grows strong there, and the wise call that anger, living in a man’s body, by the name of Death. When a man draws in all his desires the way a tortoise draws in its limbs, then his soul, which lights itself, turns and looks into itself. He who knows the supreme Self from which everything springs and into which everything disappears, grief cannot touch. When a man fears no one and no one fears him, when there is neither desire nor hatred in him, he has reached the state of Brahman. The thirst that fools cannot put down, that does not wear out with old age, that is counted a fatal disease, he who can put it down has found the only happiness there is.’

“In this connection people also recite the verses of Pingala, about how she won lasting merit at a moment that could hardly have been worse for it. Pingala was a fallen woman, a courtesan. She went one night to the place where she was to meet her lover, and by some accident he did not come. There, at the height of that particular misery, standing alone at the appointed spot, she found peace of soul.

“Pingala said, ‘For so many years I have lived beside that dear Self in whom there is nothing except peace, and lived out of my mind the whole time. Death has been at my door and I never once went to that essence of purity. Now I will cover this house that stands on one pillar and opens through nine doors, and cover it with knowledge. What woman looks on the supreme Soul as her beloved, even when he is standing right beside her? I am awake now. I have been shaken out of the sleep of ignorance. Desire has no more hold on me. Human lovers, who are hell wearing a body, will not cheat me again by coming to me with lust. Out of what was bad, something good has come, by destiny or by the acts of an earlier life. I have thrown off every wish for the things of the world. I hold my senses. A person freed of desire and hope sleeps in felicity; freedom from every hope and desire is felicity itself. Having driven off hope and desire, Pingala sleeps in felicity.’ With these words of the learned Brahmin, and others like them, King Senajit was convinced. He put down his grief, and he was happy.”

A key to reading this (the parva of liberation, the figure of Pingala): Here begins the third part of the Shanti Parva, the parva of liberation (Mokshadharma), where Bhishma’s subject turns from statecraft to release, detachment, and self-knowledge. Pingala is a courtesan waiting at a tryst for a lover who never arrives, and the night of that disappointment is the night she turns from the outer lover to the inner one, the Self. The house she speaks of, standing on a single pillar and opening through nine doors, is her own body: the backbone is the pillar, and the eyes, ears, nostrils, and the other openings are the nine doors.

The gist: The medicine for grief is the knowledge that meeting and parting, joy and sorrow, turn on a wheel and hang on destiny, and that the thought “this is mine” is the root of the ache. Senajit hears it from a Brahmin friend and stops mourning his son; Pingala, stood up by her lover, finds the same peace on her own.

The talk of father and son: death’s pursuit and immortality through truth

Yudhishthira said, “Time is passing, and it destroys everything that was ever made; it waits for no one. Tell me what good thing a man should be seeking while it passes.”

Bhishma said, “There is an old story about that too, a conversation between a father and his son. A certain Brahmin who had given his life to the study of the Vedas had a son so intelligent that the boy was simply called Medhavi, the intelligent one. The boy understood the truths of the dharma of release, and he understood the affairs of the world as well, and one day he went to his father, who was deep in his recitation, and put a question to him. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘the span of a human life goes by so fast. What is a wise man supposed to do with it? Tell me the course of duties I should follow, and do not leave out what each of them is worth, because once I have heard you I mean to keep them.’

“The father gave him the answer every Brahmin father gave. ‘First, my son, keep the vow of the student and study the Vedas. Then wish for children, so that your ancestors are rescued. Then set up your sacred fire and perform the prescribed sacrifices with the proper rites. And at the last, go into the forest and give yourself to contemplation.’

“The son said, ‘The world is surrounded on every side. It is under attack, and things nobody can resist are falling on it with deadly consequences. How can you say those words so calmly?’ The father was startled. ‘How is the world under attack? What surrounds it? What are these things that fall on it and cannot be resisted? Why are you frightening me like this?’ The son said, ‘Death is what attacks the world. Old age is what surrounds it. And the things that keep coming and going, that nobody can resist, are the nights, and every one of them takes a little more out of the life a man was allotted. Once I know that Death waits for no one and walks steadily toward every creature, how can I pass my time without putting on knowledge as my armor?

“‘Each night that passes cuts down the time a man has left, so a wise man counts a day that taught him nothing as a day wasted. Who could be happy with death walking toward him, any more than a fish is happy in shallow water? Death comes to a man before his wishes are satisfied. It carries him off while he is gathering flowers with his heart set on something else, the way a tigress carries off a ram. So do this very day whatever is for your good, and do not let that death reach you unready, because Death drags its victims away before their work is finished. Tomorrow’s work should be done today, and the afternoon’s work in the morning. Death does not stop to check whether a man has finished. Who knows whether it will come to him this very day? A man should take up virtue while he is still young, because life is passing; if he practices it, he has fame here and felicity afterward. Blinded by ignorance, a man labors for sons and wives, piles up acts good and bad and feeds them, and Death takes him in the middle of it the way a tiger takes a sleeping deer, before he has plucked the flowers he wanted, before he has had what he was reaching for, while he is still saying to himself, this is done, this is to do, this is half done. Death carries off the farmer from his field, the merchant from his shop, the householder from his house, before any of them has the fruit of his labor. It carries off the weak and the strong, the brave and the timid, the fool and the learned, and none of them has finished. Death, old age, disease, and sorrow of every kind are all living in your body right now. How do you go on as if you were perfectly well?

“‘From the moment a creature is born, old age and death are following it to destroy it; everything that moves and everything that stands still is in their hands. The attachment a man feels for living among other men, in a village or a town, is called the very mouth of Death, and the forest is the fold inside which the senses can be penned. So the scriptures say. That attachment to village life is a cord that binds a man tight; the good break the cord and go free, and the wicked never manage it. Whoever harms no living creature in thought, word, or deed is never harmed by the things that destroy life and property. Nothing can stand against the messengers of Death, disease and old age, when they advance, except Truth, which eats up untruth. In Truth is immortality. For that reason a man should keep the vow of Truth, give himself to union with Truth, take Truth for his Veda, and with his senses held in, conquer the Destroyer by Truth.

“‘Immortality and death are both planted in the body. A man comes to death through ignorance and loss of judgment; he reaches immortality through Truth. So I will keep from harming anyone and seek Truth. I will cross over desire and anger, look on pleasure and pain with the same eye, and having found peace, I will avoid death like someone who cannot die. When the season comes in which the sun turns north, I will hold my senses and set myself to the sacrifice of peace, the sacrifice of Brahman, the sacrifice of the mind, and the sacrifice of work. How could a man like me worship his Maker with sacrifices that involve cruelty to animals, or sacrifices of the body, the kind only Pishachas perform, the kind whose fruits pass away? The man whose words and thoughts and tapas and renunciation and meditation all rest on Brahman wins the highest good. There is no eye like knowledge, no tapas like Truth, no sorrow like attachment, and no happiness like renunciation. I have sprung from Brahman through Brahman. I will devote myself to Brahman, childless as I am, and I will return to Brahman. I do not need a son to rescue me. A Brahmin has no wealth like the state of being alone, the state from which he can see everything with an equal eye, along with truthfulness, good conduct, patience, harmlessness, simplicity, and the giving up of every visible rite and sacrifice. What use is wealth to you, Father, or kinsmen, or wives, when you will have to die? Look for the Self, which is hidden in a cave. Where are your grandfathers now, and where is your own father?’ The Brahmin listened to his son and gave himself to the dharma of Truth. Bhishma looked at Yudhishthira. ‘Conduct yourself the way that father did,’ he said, ‘after he had heard his son.’”

The gist: A father lays out the four stages of a Brahmin’s life in their proper order, and his son answers that death and old age are already in the room and the nights are counting down, so the work of one’s good has to be done today. His road is harmlessness, the vow of Truth, and the restraint of the senses, because in Truth is immortality. Bhishma tells Yudhishthira to do what the father did: listen, and act on it.

Sampaka and Manki: the happiness of poverty and renunciation

Yudhishthira asked, “The rich and the poor live by different practices and different rites. Where does happiness come to each of them from, and where does misery, and how?”

Bhishma said, “On this people recite what Sampaka sang, a man who had won peace and worked out his own release. Once, at Hastinapura, a Brahmin told me those verses. He was a miserable-looking man with a bad wife, bad clothes, and hunger in his face, and he lived under the vow of renunciation, and this is what he sang: ‘From the day of his birth, sorrows and joys of every kind overtake a man who is born on this earth. If he could lay both of them at the door of destiny, he would not feel glad when happiness came or wretched when sorrow did. Your mind is free of desire and still you carry a heavy load; you have not gone after your own good. Is it that you cannot control your mind? If you leave your home and everything you value and simply go, you will taste real happiness. A man stripped of everything sleeps in happiness and wakes in happiness. In this world complete poverty is happiness. It is a healthy regimen, a source of blessings, and freedom from danger. This road has no enemies on it, and the man who is still full of desire cannot find it, while the man who is free of desire finds it easily.

“‘I have looked over every part of the three worlds and I have seen no one to match a poor man of pure conduct who is attached to nothing. I weighed poverty and sovereignty in a balance, and poverty came down heavier, and its merits were greater. The difference between them is this: the king with all his wealth is agitated by anxiety day and night and seems to be sitting inside the very jaws of death, while the poor man, stripped of wealth and therefore of hope, and free, cannot be got at by fire or enemy or death or thieves. The gods themselves applaud a man like that, who wanders where he pleases, lies down on the bare ground with his arm for a pillow, and is at peace. The rich man is stained by anger and greed. He casts sideways looks and says dry things. He is sinful, his face is always dark with frowns, he bites his lip and lets fly harsh words. If such a man offered to give away the whole world, who would want even to look at him? Prosperity, kept close, stupefies a man of weak judgment and blows his judgment away the way the wind blows the autumn clouds. It makes him think, I am handsome, I am rich, I am high-born, everything I try succeeds, I am no ordinary man. Drunk on those thoughts he wastes the wealth his fathers stored, and when he is reduced to want he decides that taking other people’s property is no crime, and once he crosses that line the rulers of men hunt him down the way sportsmen shoot a deer they have spotted in the woods. Without renunciation there is no happiness. Without renunciation there is no highest good. Without renunciation there is no easy sleep. So renounce everything and make happiness your own.’ That is what a Brahmin told me at Hastinapura, long ago, about the song of Sampaka. It is why I hold renunciation to be the first of all things.”

Yudhishthira asked, “Suppose a man wants to give and to sacrifice and cannot find the wealth to do it, and the thirst for wealth takes hold of him. What is he to do for happiness?” Bhishma said, “The man who looks with the same eye on joy and sorrow, honor and insult, who never exerts himself to gratify a desire for things, who speaks the truth, who is free of every attachment, and who has no wish to act, that man is happy. The ancients say these five are the means to perfect peace and to release. They are called heaven. They are called dharma. They are the highest happiness there is.

“Now hear what Manki sang when he had shaken off his attachments. Manki wanted wealth, and again and again he found himself disappointed. At last, with the little that was left of his property, he bought a pair of young bulls and a yoke to train them to the plow. One day the two of them were yoked and taken out to the fields for training, and they shied at a camel that was lying down across the road. They bolted straight at it and fell across its neck. The camel, furious at the weight, rose and ran, and it was fast; and there hung Manki’s two helpless animals, one on each side of its neck, rising and falling as it pounded away over the uneven ground. Manki watched them go, and he could see they were as good as dead. What he said, standing in the road, was this: ‘If wealth is not ordained by destiny, then not even a clever man can get it, however carefully and confidently he works and however skillfully he does everything the work requires. I tried in every way, with all my devotion, to earn wealth. Look at what destiny has done to the property I had! My bulls are being carried off, bobbing up and down, as the camel runs. It looks like an accident, the way the crow lands on the palmyra tree just as the ripe fruit falls, and yet there they hang on the camel’s neck like a pair of jewels, and it is nothing except destiny at work. Effort is useless against what chance decides. Or, if you insist that effort counts for something, dig a little deeper and you will find destiny at the bottom of it.

“‘So whoever wants happiness should give up every attachment. The man without attachments, who no longer wants to earn anything, sleeps well. Shuka said it well when he left his father’s house for the great forest with nothing: between the man who gets everything he wishes for and the man who throws every wish away, the one who throws them away is the greater, because nobody has ever reached the end of wanting. Only a man without knowledge or judgment is greedy to protect his body and his life. Hold back from every wish to act. My greedy soul, take up peace and let go of your attachments! You have been cheated again and again; how is it that you are still not free of them? If I am not something you mean to destroy, if I am someone you would rather play with, then do not push me toward greed, my wealth-hungry soul. You have lost your hoarded wealth over and over. When will you finally free yourself from wanting it? Shame on my folly, that I have become your toy! That is how a man becomes a slave. Nobody born on this earth ever reached the end of desire, and nobody yet to be born will reach it either. I have cast off every act and I am awake now. Desire, your heart must be made of adamant, since a hundred blows have not broken it into a hundred pieces. I know you, Desire, and I know everything you love. I know your root: you grow out of resolve. So I will avoid resolve, and you will be destroyed roots and all. The wish for wealth never brings happiness. Get it, and the anxiety is enormous; lose it after getting it, and it feels like death; and the getting itself is never sure, since wealth cannot be had even by handing over one’s own person. Once it is in hand, no measure of it satisfies, and like the sweet water of the Ganga it only sharpens the thirst. Wealth is my destruction, and I am awake. Leave me, Desire! Let the desire that has been living in this body of mine, this bundle of five elements, go wherever it likes and be happy there. And all of you that are not the soul, you passions that run after desire and greed, I have no joy in you either; I abandon you all and take refuge in the quality of goodness. Seeing every creature in my own body and my own mind, giving my reason to yoga, my life to the words of the wise, and my soul to Brahman, I will walk through the world happily, attached to nothing and touched by no calamity, so that you can never plunge me into sorrow again. I forgive whoever slanders me. I will not injure even when injured. If someone speaks to me out of hatred, I will let the words go and answer him kindly. Content, my senses at ease, I will live on whatever comes to me. Like a man walking into a cool lake in the hot season, I have entered Brahman and stopped working and put down grief, and pure happiness has come to me. The felicity of a wish satisfied, and even the purer felicity of heaven, do not come to a sixteenth part of what rises when every thirst is abandoned. I have killed desire, that bitter enemy that makes a seventh with the body and its elements, and I have entered the immortal city of Brahman, and I will pass my days there as happily as a king.’ On that understanding Manki cut himself loose, threw away every desire, and reached Brahman, the home of the highest felicity. It was the loss of two bulls that brought him to immortality, and it was because he cut desire out by the roots.”

A sub-tale: The tale of Manki turns on the old argument between fate and effort. Two bulls swinging from a camel’s neck is a strange, almost comic disaster, and Manki reads it as the exact picture of where effort ends; he even names the fallacy of the crow and the palmyra fruit, in which a fruit that fell because it was ripe is blamed on the bird that happened to land. He then talks to Desire as if it were an enemy standing in the road, and works out its genealogy: desire grows from resolve, so cut the resolve and the whole tree falls. Manki also quotes Shuka, the son of Vyasa, on the day Shuka walked out of his father’s house for the forest with nothing.

The gist: Sampaka weighs poverty against a throne and finds poverty heavier, because the poor man has nothing left to fear. Manki, watching his last two bulls carried off on a camel’s neck, concludes that wealth lies with destiny, tracks desire to its root in resolve, cuts the root, and enters Brahman. Bhishma names five things as the way to the highest happiness: the equal eye, no striving after things, truthfulness, freedom from attachment, and no wish to act.

Janaka, Bodhya, and the python-sage: the six teachers of detachment

Bhishma said, “On this same subject people recite the verses of Janaka, the king of the Videhas, who had found peace of soul while still on his throne. What that king said was: ‘My wealth is without limit, and at the same time I have nothing. If the whole of Mithila went up in flames, nothing of mine would burn.’ And on the same theme, freedom from attachment, there is the speech of Bodhya. Once the royal son of Nahusha, Yayati, went to the sage Bodhya, who had reached peace by abandoning desire and who knew the scriptures through and through, and the king asked him, ‘You have great wisdom. Teach me peace. What is the understanding you rest on, that lets you wander the world with a quiet soul, taking part in nothing?’

“Bodhya said, ‘I live by the teachings of others; I do not teach anyone myself. But I will point out the signs my conduct was shaped by, and you can catch their spirit by thinking them over. I have six teachers: Pingala, the osprey, the snake, the bee in the forest, the maker of arrows, and the maiden.’ Bhishma told Yudhishthira what each of those teachers taught. Hope is a powerful thing; it shakes the heart. To be free of hope is the highest felicity, and Pingala, who brought her hope down to no expectation at all, sleeps in peace. An osprey seen with meat in its beak is attacked and killed by the other birds that found none, and a certain osprey, by giving up meat altogether, found happiness. To build a house for oneself produces sorrow and nothing else; the snake moves into a hole another creature dug and lives there in felicity. Ascetics live happily on what they beg, injuring no creature, the way bees live in the forest.

“There was a maker of arrows so absorbed in his work that he never noticed the king passing at his side; that is the teacher of concentration. And where many people gather there is quarreling, and where even two live together there is talk, so Bodhya wanders alone, like the bangle of sea-shell on the wrist of the maiden in the story. That maiden, in her father’s house, wanted to feed a company of Brahmins in secret, and while she was taking grain from the storeroom the shell bangles on her wrists began to clink against one another. Afraid the noise would give her away, she broke them off until only one was left on each hand, and one bangle makes no sound.

Yudhishthira asked, “You know the ways of men. By what conduct does a man get through this world free of grief, and how should he act here so that he reaches a good end?” Bhishma said, “On this there is the old story of the talk between Prahlada and the sage Ajagara. Prahlada was a king of great intelligence, and one day he questioned a wandering Brahmin, a man of great intelligence himself, with a cleansed and quiet soul. Prahlada said, ‘You are free of desire. Your soul is clean, you are humble and restrained, you have no wish to act, no malice, your speech is agreeable, and you carry dignity and intelligence and wisdom, and yet you live as simply as a child. You never covet a gain and never grieve at a loss. You are always content, and you do not seem to notice anything in the world at all. While every other creature is carried away in the current of desire and passion, you are perfectly indifferent to everything that has to do with dharma, wealth, and pleasure. Nothing agitates you. You disregard the objects of the senses and move like a soul already freed, witnessing everything and taking part in nothing. What is your wisdom, sage? What is your learning, and what is your conduct, that all this is possible? Tell me, and tell me now, if you think it will do me good.’

“That Brahmin, who knew the duties of the world as well as anyone, answered him in sweet words that carried weight. ‘Look, Prahlada. The birth of creatures, their growth, their decay, and their death can be traced to no cause that anyone can understand. That is why I indulge in neither joy nor sorrow. Every tendency to act that exists in the universe flows from the very nature of the creature it lives in; everything depends on its own nature, and so nothing delights me. Look again: every union carries in it the aptitude for parting, and every acquisition is certain to end in loss, so I never set my heart on acquiring anything. Everything that has qualities is certain to be destroyed. What is left for a man to do, once he knows how things begin and how they end? Of all the things born in the ocean, large and small, I can see the end. I can see the death, plain enough, of everything that moves and everything that stands on the land. Death comes in its season even to the strongest creatures that range the sky on wings. And I see that the lights in the firmament, large and small, come down when their time is up. Seeing every created thing, even the ones that possess knowledge, subject to death in this way, and holding all of them to be of one nature, I sleep in peace with no anxiety in my heart.

“‘If a big meal comes to me without trouble, I have no scruple about enjoying it; and I pass many days together without eating anything. Sometimes people feed me the costliest dishes in profusion, sometimes a little, sometimes less than that, and sometimes I get no food at all. Sometimes I eat a fraction of a grain, sometimes the dry sesame cakes left after the oil has been pressed out, sometimes rice and food of the richest kind. Sometimes I sleep on a raised bed of the best make, sometimes on the bare ground, sometimes inside a fine mansion. I am dressed sometimes in rags, sometimes in sackcloth, sometimes in cloth of fine weave, sometimes in deerskin, sometimes in the costliest robes. Any enjoyment consistent with virtue that reaches me without effort, I never refuse, and I never strive for anything that is hard to get. The strict vow I have adopted is called Ajagara, the vow of the python, after the great snake that lies where it is and eats what comes near and goes hungry when nothing does. That vow can secure immortality. It is auspicious and free of grief, incomparable and pure, in keeping with the counsel of the wise, and disapproved of by fools, who never follow it. I keep it with a pure heart, and my mind never wavers from it. Greedy men chase every kind of wealth and sink into sorrow when the chase fails; I have watched people in distress take shelter with good men and bad men alike just to get money. Seeing by the light of truth that happiness and misery, loss and gain, attachment and renunciation, death and life are all ordained by destiny, I keep this vow with a pure heart. Learned men of great intelligence, eager to advertise their own feats, have said this and that on this subject while building their own theories and running down everyone else’s, and it is a subject argument cannot settle. Fools do not understand this vow. I see it as the destroyer of ignorance, as immortality, as a cure for evils of every kind, and I walk among men with every fault subdued and every thirst put out.’ The man of high soul, Bhishma said, who frees himself from attachment and puts away fear, greed, folly, and anger, and keeps this vow of the python, or plays at it, if you want to call it a game, passes his days in great delight.”

A key to reading this (the python-vow, the six teachers): The python-vow (ajagara-vrata) takes its name from the big snake that lies still in one place, eats whatever comes within reach, and goes without when nothing does; the vow is effortless contentment, taking what arrives and striving for nothing. Janaka of Videha rules a kingdom and is attached to none of it, and his saying that nothing of his would burn if Mithila burned is the emblem of that detachment. Bodhya’s six teachers are lessons read off nature and daily life: the giving up of hope, from Pingala; the danger of holding on to anything, from the osprey; a home that is not one’s own, from the snake; harmless begging, from the bee; concentration, from the arrow-maker; and solitude, from the maiden who broke her bangles down to one on each wrist so they would stop clinking.

The gist: Janaka is unattached while he rules; Bodhya learns detachment from six teachers, most of them animals; and the python-sage teaches Prahlada the dharma of effortless contentment, which takes pleasure and pain, plenty and want, with the same mind.

Indra and Kashyapa: the teaching of contentment in the guise of a jackal

Yudhishthira asked, “Kinsmen, acts, wealth, or wisdom: which of these should a man make his refuge? I am asking you; answer me.” Bhishma said, “Wisdom is the refuge of creatures. Wisdom is counted the highest of acquisitions, the highest felicity in the world, and heaven itself in the estimation of the good. It was through wisdom that Bali, Prahlada, Namuchi, and Manki, when they lost their prosperity on earth, found felicity. What is there higher than wisdom? On this there is the old story of the talk between Indra and Kashyapa.

“There was once a prosperous Vaishya, a rich man enjoying his riches and proud of them, who was driving his chariot carelessly and knocked down a young man named Kashyapa, a rishi’s son of strict vows who had given himself to tapas. Kashyapa lay on the ground in terrible pain, and the pain turned to anger, and in his despair he came to a decision. ‘I will throw away my life,’ he said. ‘A poor man has no use for life in this world.’ He lay there silent and shaken, his energy gone, close to death, and at that moment Indra arrived on the scene in the form of a jackal and spoke to him. ‘Every lesser creature wants to be born human,’ the jackal said. ‘Among humans, everyone wants to be a Brahmin. You are a human being, Kashyapa. Among human beings you are a Brahmin. Among Brahmins you are one who knows the Vedas. You have been given what is almost impossible to get, and it does not become you to throw your life away out of folly. Every worldly gain comes with pride in it; the scriptures say so, and they are right. You look like the picture of contentment, and in deciding to kill yourself you are acting out of greed.

“‘Ah, they are the successful ones, the creatures that have hands! I want the state of the creatures that have hands. We covet hands the way you covet riches. There is no possession more valuable than a pair of hands. Look at me. I cannot pull out this thorn that has gone into my body, and I cannot crush these insects and worms that are biting me and tormenting me. Creatures that have been given two hands with ten fingers can scratch off or crush the worms that bite them. They can build themselves shelter against rain and cold and heat. They can have good clothes and good food and comfortable beds and fine houses. Lying on this same earth, the creatures with hands make use of cows and other animals, load them and hitch them to their vehicles, and bring them under their control by a hundred means. The creatures without tongues, the helpless ones, the ones with little strength, the ones without hands, bear every kind of misery there is. By good luck, ascetic, you are none of those. By good luck you are not a jackal, or a worm, or a mouse, or a frog, or an animal of any other miserable order. With that much gain in hand, Kashyapa, you should be content. And how happy you should feel at the thought that among living creatures you are a Brahmin, the highest kind!

“‘These worms are biting me. I have no hands to drive them off. Look at my misery! And still I do not throw away my life, because that is a very sinful act, and because I would fall into an even more wretched order of being. This existence as a jackal that I have now is fairly tolerable. Miserable as it is, there are many orders of existence below it that are more miserable still. Some kinds of creatures are happier by birth than others, who are born to great woe, and I have never seen any order of being that could be called perfectly happy. A human being who gets rich next wants to be a king. A king next wants to be a god. A god wants to be the chief of the gods. You will never be a king, since you were born a Brahmin, and you will never be a god either, since a Brahmin already stands equal to one or above; and if by some means you did become a god, you would want the chiefdom of the gods, and in no condition would you be content. Contentment does not come from getting what one wanted. Thirst is never put out however much water there is; the thirst for getting blazes up with each new getting the way a fire blazes when fresh sticks are thrown on.

“‘There is grief in you, and joy lives in you too; happiness and misery both make their home in you, so why give in to the grief? The very springs of every desire and act, the understanding and the senses, should be shut up like birds in a cage. There can be no cutting off of a second head, or a third hand; what does not exist can produce no fear. A man who has never known the enjoyment a thing gives never wants that thing. Desires grow out of the actual experience of touch, of sight, of hearing. You have no idea what the wine called Varuni tastes like, or the meat of the birds called Ladwaka, and there is no drink and no food more delicious. You have no idea of any of the other superior food and drink that exists among men, Kashyapa, because you have never tasted it. So there is no doubt about it: to not taste and to not see should be the vow of a man who wants happiness. Creatures with hands, no question, grow strong and earn wealth. Men are reduced by other men to servitude, and their own kind afflict them again and again with death and imprisonment and other tortures, and even so they laugh and play and enjoy themselves. Others, with strong arms and knowledge and great energy of mind, follow low, sinful, miserable professions and try to trade them for something more dignified, and find themselves bound by the acts of a former life and the force of destiny. The vilest man of the Pukkasa or Chandala orders never wants to throw his life away; he is quite content with the birth he was given. Look at the illusion in that. Look at the men of your own order who have no arms, or are struck with palsy, or are eaten by other diseases, and count yourself very happy and very well supplied. If this twice-born body of yours stays whole and free of disease and every limb is sound, you are sure never to be reproached among men. It would not become you, Brahmin, to throw your life away even if some true charge attached to you, one that could get you cast out of your caste. Rise, and practice virtue. It is not right to throw a life away. If you listen to me and believe me, you will win the highest reward the Vedic dharma has to give. Set yourself to Vedic study, keep your sacred fire, keep truth and self-restraint and charity, and never boast yourself over another. Those who study the Vedas until they can perform sacrifices for themselves and for others have no cause for regret and nothing to fear.

“‘In my former life I had a great deal of useless learning. I was always looking for reasons and had very little faith. I slandered the Vedas. I had none of the four aims of life and I gave myself to the science of argument that rests on what the eye can see and the hand can touch. I spoke in plausible reasons. In assemblies I always spoke of reasons and never of faith, and I talked down the declarations of the scriptures, and I addressed Brahmins in a domineering voice. I was an unbeliever, skeptical of everything, ignorant and proud of my learning. This jackal’s status I have in this life is the consequence of those sins. If after hundreds of days and nights I, a jackal, can get back the status of a human being, I will pass my life in contentment, heedful of the true aims of existence, busy with sacrifices and gifts. I will know what should be known and avoid what should be avoided.’

“At that the ascetic Kashyapa got to his feet. ‘You are certainly possessed of knowledge and great intelligence,’ he said. ‘I am astonished by all of this.’ Then his sight widened with knowledge, and the Brahmin saw that the creature who had been speaking to him was Indra, chief of the gods and lord of Shachi. Kashyapa worshiped the god who rides the finest of horses, and with the god’s permission he went home.”

A sub-tale: The teaching of Indra in a jackal’s skin runs in reverse: the king of the gods, calling himself a low creature, reminds a Brahmin of the price of the human birth he is about to throw away. The jackal keeps coming back to hands, because what we count as nothing, since it came so easily (hands, a human body, a Brahmin’s birth, the ability to pull out a thorn), is the very thing other creatures would give anything for. And the jackal’s own past life, the sharp arguer who mocked the Vedas and bullied Brahmins in assemblies, is a warning that bare cleverness without faith leads to a fall.

The gist: To a Brahmin who means to kill himself over poverty, Indra in a jackal’s shape teaches contentment: human birth is rare, craving is never satisfied, and wisdom, with faith behind it, is the highest refuge. The jackal’s low birth is the fruit of his own former pride in argument.

The certainty of the fruit of action: past deeds that follow like a shadow

Yudhishthira asked, “Do gifts, sacrifices, tapas, and dutiful service to one’s teachers produce wisdom and high felicity?” Bhishma said, “If the mind is taken over by desire and anger and the other evil passions, it runs toward sin, and a man whose acts are stained by sin has to live in painful regions. Sinful men are born into poverty and suffer, again and again, the pangs of famine, grief, fear, and death. Those whose acts are virtuous, who have faith and hold their senses, are born into wealth and go, again and again, from festival to festival and from heaven to happiness. Unbelievers are sent in chains into regions cut off by wild beasts and elephants and full of snakes and robbers, and the less said of them the better. Those who reverence gods and guests, who are liberal, who love good and honest men, go by their charity along the happy road that belongs to cleansed souls. Those with no reverence for virtue are as worthless among men as the seedless grains in a field of corn or the gnat among birds.

“What was ordained by the acts of a past life pursues the doer however hard he tries to leave it behind. It sleeps when he sleeps. It does whatever he does. Like his shadow it rests when he rests, walks when he walks, and acts when he acts. Whatever a man does, he will certainly get the fruit of it. Death is dragging every creature toward the order of existence it has earned and toward the enjoyment or the suffering that was ordained for it, and the acts of a past life ripen at their own proper hour, the way flowers and fruit never fail to come in their season without any outside effort at all. Once the consequences of past acts have been used up, honor and disgrace, gain and loss, decay and growth stop coming to a man; and then it begins again.

“A creature still in its mother’s womb is already enjoying or suffering what its own acts ordained for it. In whatever period of life a man does a good or a bad act, in childhood or youth or old age, its consequence is sure to visit him in his next life at exactly that same period. A calf recognizes its mother and goes to her in the middle of a thousand cows, and the acts of a past life recognize their doer in his new life in just that way. A dirty cloth washed in water comes out clean, and men burning in repentance win endless happiness through the proper tapas. Those who can take up residence in the woods and perform austerities for a long time wash themselves of their sins and get what they set their hearts on. Nobody can mark the track of birds in the sky or of fish in the water, and nobody can mark the track of people whose souls have been cleansed by knowledge. There is no need for more eloquence, or for more talk of sinful acts. Let a man, with proper judgment and in the way that suits him best, do what is for his own good. That is how wisdom and high felicity are won.”

The gist: Past action follows a man like a shadow and pays out its fruit at its own hour, from the womb onward, and in the next life at the same period of life in which the act was done. Repentance and proper tapas wash sins away, and the soul cleansed by knowledge leaves no track behind it.

The talk of Bhrigu and Bharadvaja: the origin of creation and the five elements

Yudhishthira asked, “From what was this universe of moving and unmoving things created, and where does it go when the destruction sets in? Who made this world, with its oceans and its sky and its mountains and its clouds, its lands and its fire and its wind? How were all things first created? Where did the division into separate orders of beings come from, and their purity and impurity, and the rules about virtue and vice? What kind of thing is the life inside a living creature? And where do the dead go? Tell me everything about this world and the other one.”

Bhishma said, “On this people recite the sacred words that Bhrigu spoke in answer to the questions of Bharadvaja. Bharadvaja found the great rishi Bhrigu seated on the summit of Kailasa, blazing with energy and splendor, and he asked him exactly what you have asked me, in almost the same words: who made the world, how creatures were first created, where the orders came from, what life is, where the dead go. And Bhrigu, who was like Brahma himself, answered him. ‘There is a first Being,’ Bhrigu said, ‘whom the great rishis know by the name of Manasa. He has no beginning and no end. No weapon can pierce him; he does not decay and he does not die. He is called the Unmanifest. He is eternal, undecaying, unchanging, and through him creatures are born and through him they die. He first created a divine Being called Mahat, the Great, and Mahat created Consciousness, and Consciousness created Space, the holder of everything that exists. From Space was born Water, and from Water were born Fire and Wind, and from the union of Fire and Wind the Earth was born. Then the self-born Manasa created a divine Lotus, heavy with energy, and out of that Lotus sprang Brahma, who is an ocean of the Veda. The scriptures say that the moment he was born, that divine Being said, “I am He,” and for that reason he is called Consciousness; all created things are his body and he is their maker.

“‘These five elements that we see are that Brahma of great energy. The mountains are his bones. The earth is his fat and flesh. The oceans are his blood, space is his stomach, the wind is his breath, fire is his energy, the rivers are his arteries and veins, and Agni and Soma, the sun and the moon, are his two eyes. The sky above is his head. The earth is his two feet, and the points of the horizon, cardinal and subsidiary, are his arms. He cannot be known, and even the perfected ascetics cannot conceive his soul. The divine Being who pervades the whole universe is also called Ananta, the Infinite. He lives in Consciousness, and no one with an uncleansed soul can know him. You asked, and I have told you of him who created Consciousness to call every created thing into being, and from whom this universe has sprung.’

“Bharadvaja asked, ‘What is the extent of the sky, of the points of the horizon, of the surface of the earth, of the wind? Tell me the truth and settle my doubts.’ Bhrigu said, ‘The sky you see above you is infinite. It is the home of the perfected and of divine beings; it is delightful, it is made of many regions, and its limits cannot be found. The sun and the moon cannot see, above or below, past the reach of their own rays, and where their rays do not reach there are lights that shine by themselves, with a splendor like the sun’s or a fire’s, and even those lights, famous as their brilliance is, do not see the edge of the sky, because there is no edge to see. This Space that the gods themselves cannot measure is full of blazing self-luminous worlds, one above another. Past the limits of the land are oceans of water. Past the water is darkness. Past the darkness is water again, and past that, fire. Downward, past the nether regions, is water; past the water is the region that belongs to the great snakes; past that is sky once more, and past the sky, water again, and so water and sky alternate without end. Those are the limits of the divinity that water represents. The gods themselves cannot find the limits of fire and wind and water; the nature of fire, wind, water, and land is like the nature of space, and only want of true knowledge makes us distinguish them. Sages read in the scriptures the limits laid down for the three worlds and the ocean, but who can set limits to what the eye cannot grasp and the foot cannot reach? And if the sky, the road of the gods and the perfected, could somehow be measured, still no one could set a limit to the limitless one who bears the name of the Infinite, the noble Manasa, whose form is sometimes drawn in and sometimes spread out. Who except one equal to him could take his measure? From the Lotus I spoke of, Brahma was created first, the omniscient lord, with a form, made of righteousness, the creator of everything that moves and everything that does not.’ Bharadvaja saw a difficulty. ‘If Brahma sprang from the Lotus, then the Lotus is the first-born and Brahma is second. Why is Brahma called the first?’ Bhrigu said, ‘The Lotus is the earth. It was created to give a seat to that form of Manasa which became Brahma. Sumeru, which reaches up to heaven itself, became the pericarp of that Lotus, and the Lord of the universe, staying inside it, created all the worlds.’

“Bharadvaja asked him how the mighty Brahma inside Meru had made all these different things, and Bhrigu said that the great Manasa, in his form as Brahma, made them by an act of will, and that to protect the creatures he made water first, since water is the life of every creature and the thing that makes it grow, and the whole universe is pervaded by it; earth and mountains and clouds and everything that has a form are transformations of water, made by its solidifying. Bharadvaja asked, ‘Then how did water come to be? How did fire and wind? How was the earth created? I have great doubts about these.’ Bhrigu answered with what the rishis themselves had once been told. ‘In the very ancient time called the Brahma-kalpa,’ he said, ‘the great rishis of the twice-born order gathered together and felt this same doubt about how the universe was created. They stopped speaking. They sat unmoving in contemplation, gave up all food, lived on air alone, and stayed like that for a thousand celestial years. At the end of that time words as sacred as the Vedas reached the ears of every one of them at the same instant, a voice out of the sky, and this is what it said. In the beginning there was only infinite Space, perfectly still, without sun or moon or stars or wind, as if asleep. Then water came into being, like something darker inside the darkness. From the pressure of the water, wind arose. An empty vessel with no hole in it seems at first to have no sound, and then, when it is filled with water, the air appears and makes a great noise; in the same way, when infinite Space was filled with water, the wind rose with a great noise and pushed up through the water. That wind, born of the pressure of the ocean of water, is still moving; it came out into open Space and its motion has never stopped. Then the friction of wind on water produced fire, mighty and blazing, with its flames pointed upward, and that fire drove out the darkness that had covered Space. Helped by the wind, the fire drew Space and Water together, and combining with the wind it solidified; and as it fell from the sky, the liquid part of the fire solidified again and became what is called the earth. The earth, in which everything is born, is the origin of every taste, every scent, every liquid, and every animal.’

“Bharadvaja asked, ‘Brahma created thousands of kinds of creatures. Why is it that only these five elements, which he created first and which fill the universe, have come to be called the great creatures, as if the name belonged to them alone?’ Bhrigu said, ‘Everything that belongs to the category of the infinite or the vast is called great, and that is why these five are called the great creatures. Activity is wind. The sound that is heard is space. The heat inside a body is fire. The liquid juices in it are water. The solid matter, flesh and bone, is earth. The bodies of living creatures are made of these five, and so is everything that moves and everything that stands still. The five senses share in them as well: the ear has the properties of space, the nose of earth, the tongue of water, touch of wind, and the eyes of light, which is fire.’

“Bharadvaja was not satisfied. ‘If everything that moves and everything that stays still is made of these five elements, why are they invisible in the things that stay still? Trees have no heat that anyone can see. They do not move. They are made of dense matter. They do not hear, they do not see, they cannot smell or taste, they have no sense of touch. How can they be compounds of the five elements? It looks to me as if there is no liquid in them, no heat, no earth, no wind, and no empty space, so they cannot be made of the five.’ Bhrigu took the tree apart for him. ‘Dense as they are, trees have space inside them, no doubt about it; the putting forth of flowers and fruit is always going on in them. They have heat, which is why leaf and bark and fruit and flower droop and sicken and dry, and that shows they have the sense of touch. At the sound of wind and fire and thunder their fruit and flowers drop, and sound is perceived through the ear, so trees have ears and do hear. A creeper winds around a tree and finds its way all around it; a blind thing cannot find its way, so trees have sight. Trees recover their vigor and put out flowers in response to smells, good and bad, and to the sacred perfume of the various incenses, so plainly they have scent. They drink water by their roots, they catch diseases of many kinds, and those diseases are cured by different treatments, which shows they have taste. As a man sucks up water through a bent lotus stalk, trees drink through their roots with the help of the wind. They feel pleasure and pain, and they grow back when they are cut or lopped. From all of this I see that trees are alive. They are not inanimate. Fire and wind digest the water they take up, and according to how much they take up the tree grows and grows moist.’

“Then Bhrigu turned to the bodies of moving things, where the same five elements occur in different proportions, and where the elements are what lets the bodies move. Skin, flesh, bone, marrow, and the arteries and veins that run together through a body are earth. Energy, anger, the eyes, the inner heat, and the heat that digests food are the five fires in every embodied creature. The ears, the nostrils, the mouth, the heart, and the stomach are the five spaces. Phlegm, bile, sweat, fat, and blood are the five waters. And there are five winds: by the breath called prana a creature moves; by vyana it puts out strength for action; apana moves downward; samana lives within the heart; and by udana a man belches and speaks, because it pierces up through the lungs and the throat and the mouth. These five winds make an embodied creature live and move. Scent, touch, taste, vision, and sound are the properties of everything that moves and everything that stands still, Bhrigu said, and he counted them out: nine kinds of scent resting on earth, six tastes belonging to water, sixteen kinds of form belonging to light, eleven properties of the wind, and for space one property only, sound, whose seven kinds are the seven notes, Shadja, Rishabha, Gandhara, Madhyama, Panchama, Dhaivata, and Nishada. Every sound that is heard from drums small and large, from conches and clouds and chariots and living and lifeless things, is included in those seven. Water, fire, and wind are always awake in the bodies of living creatures; they are the roots of the body, and they live in it pervading the five breaths.”

A key to reading this (the five elements, the five life-breaths): The five elements (panchabhuta) are space, wind, fire (which is also light), water, and earth; the whole material world and the body are made of them, and the five senses are tied to them one by one. The five life-breaths (pancha-prana) are the five winds of the body as Bhrigu describes them: prana, which lives in the head with the body’s heat and drives all its exertion; apana, the downward wind that carries out urine and feces; samana, which lives in the heart and circulates the heat through the whole system; udana, the wind by which a man belches and speaks; and vyana, which lives in all the joints and puts out strength for action. Bhrigu also places the heat that digests food in the region of the navel, between apana and prana, working with those two breaths. The whole account unfolds step by step from the unmanifest Manasa through Mahat and Consciousness to the five elements, and then into the body.

The gist: Bhrigu teaches that from the unmanifest Manasa came, in order, Mahat, Consciousness, and then space, wind, fire, water, and earth; that Brahma appeared on a lotus which is the earth itself, with Sumeru for its pericarp; and that the rishis of the Brahma-kalpa heard the order of creation from a voice in the sky. The five great elements are the very body of Brahma, and every being, trees included, is made of them and is alive, with the five senses and the five life-breaths.

The living being and the body: the nature of the soul beyond death

Bharadvaja raised the hardest doubt of all, the one a materialist would raise. “If it is the wind that keeps us alive, and the wind that makes us move and exert ourselves, and the wind that makes us breathe and speak, then life seems to be worth very little. If the body’s heat that digests our food is a kind of fire, and that fire is what dissolves what we eat, then again life seems worth little. When an animal dies, the thing called its life is never seen leaving it. Only the breath leaves, and the inner heat goes out. If life were nothing except wind, it could be seen like the outer sea of air, and when it left the body it would simply mix with that air, the way a cup of water thrown into a well or a lamp flame thrown into a blazing fire loses its separate existence in the moment it enters something of its own kind. How can we say there is any life in this animal body made of the five elements? If one element goes, the union of the other four dissolves. The water dries up if food is not taken. The air disappears if the breath is held. The space disappears if the excretions stop. The fire goes out if no food goes in. The earth breaks in pieces under disease and wounds. When only one of the five is afflicted, the union falls apart, and the five go off in five directions. When the body, which is a union of the elements, has come apart into its five ingredients, where does life go? What does it know then? What does it hear? What does it say? This cow given to a holy Brahmin will rescue me in the other world, they say; but the animal that is given dies. Whom will that cow rescue? The taker of the cow and the giver are both subject to death and both are extinguished here. How will they meet again? How does the man who has been eaten by birds, or smashed by a fall from a mountaintop, or burned in a fire, get his life back? The root of a tree that has been cut down does not grow up again. Only the seeds put out sprouts. Where is the person who died and then came back? Only seeds were created in the beginning. The whole universe is seed following seed, and those who die, die and are gone.”

Bhrigu answered, “There is no destruction of the living creature, or of a gift, or of any of our other acts. The creature that dies only goes into another form. The body alone dissolves. The living creature depends on the body and is still not destroyed when the body is destroyed; it is simply not seen after the physical frame is gone, in the same way that fire is not seen after the fuel that lit it is used up.” Bharadvaja pressed him. “If the living creature is like fire, I submit that fire itself is not seen after the fuel is used up. When the supply of fuel stops, the fire goes out, and as far as I know it is annihilated. Surely a thing should be counted destroyed when it no longer acts, no longer gives any proof of its existence, and no longer occupies any space.” Bhrigu said, “It is true that when the fuel is used up the fire is no longer seen. It mixes with space, because there is no longer any visible object for it to live in, and so we can no longer perceive it. In the same way, the creature that leaves the body lives on in space and cannot be seen because it is so subtle, exactly like the fire. It is fire, heat, that sustains the breaths, prana and the rest, and you should know that heat as life, as the living agent. When the breath is suppressed, the heat that sustained it is put out; when the heat goes out of the physical frame, the frame loses animation, falls, and turns into earth, which is its final destination.

“The breath that is in everything that moves and everything that does not mixes with space, and the heat in them follows the breath, so those three, space and air and fire, mingle together, and the other two, water and earth, stay together in the form of earth. Where there is space there is wind, and where there is wind there is fire; they are formless, and they take a form only in embodied creatures.” Bharadvaja asked, “If heat and wind and earth and space and water are all in the bodies of living creatures, what are the marks of the living agent itself? I want to know the nature of the life in these bodies of five elements, engaged in the five acts, with the five senses and animated. When the body dissolves, this union of flesh and blood and fat and sinew and bone, the living agent is nowhere to be seen. And if the body is empty of what is called life, then who or what is it that feels misery when bodily or mental pain arrives? The living agent hears what is said with the help of the ears, and yet when the mind is elsewhere the same agent hears nothing; so it seems the living agent serves no purpose. The eye, working together with the mind, sees a whole scene, and when the mind is elsewhere the eye sees nothing that lies in front of it. And under sleep the agent neither sees nor smells nor hears nor speaks nor touches nor tastes. Who or what, then, feels joy, gets angry, gives way to sorrow, and suffers? What is it that wishes, thinks, feels aversion, and speaks?”

Bhrigu said, “The mind is made of the five elements too, in common with the body, so it is of no account in the acts you have named. Only the one inner Soul sustains the body. It is the Soul that perceives smell, taste, sound, touch, form, and the other properties of the outer world. That Soul, pervading every limb, is the witness of the mind with its five attributes, inside the body of five elements. It is the Soul that feels pleasure and pain, and when the Soul is separated from it the body feels them no longer. When there is no more perception of form or of touch, when there is no heat left in the fire that lives in the body, when that animal heat goes out, then the body, abandoned by the Soul, is destroyed. The whole universe is made of water. Water is the form of every embodied creature, and in that water is the Soul, which shows itself in the mind. That Soul is the creator Brahma, who exists in all things. When the Soul takes on the common attributes it is called kshetrajna, the knower of the field; when it is freed from them it is called paramatman, the supreme Soul. Know that Soul. It wishes every creature well. It lives in the body like a drop of water on a lotus. Know that which is called kshetrajna, and know its goodwill toward everything.

“Darkness, passion, and goodness are the attributes of the living agent. The learned say the Soul has consciousness and exists with the attributes of life; it exerts itself and makes everything else exert, and those who know the Soul say it is different from life. It is the supreme Soul that created the seven worlds and set them going. When the body dissolves there is no destruction of the living agent. Men without intelligence say that it dies, and that is untrue. All the living agent does is go from one body into another. What people call death is only the dissolution of the body. That is how the Soul, wrapped in one form after another, moves from form to form, unseen and unnoticed by anyone. Those who possess true knowledge see the Soul with a keen and subtle intelligence. The man of wisdom who eats little, whose heart is cleaned of all sin, who gives himself to meditation, sees his Soul by the help of his Soul every night, before sleep and after it. With a contented heart, and having given up every act good and bad, a man can win infinite happiness by resting on his own Soul. The king of fiery light who lives inside the mind is called the living agent, and from that lord of everything this creation has sprung. That is the conclusion of the inquiry into the origin of creatures and the Soul.”

A key to reading this (kshetrajna and paramatma): The kshetrajna is the knower of the field, the field being the body: the Soul as it lives joined to a body and a mind and clothed in the three attributes. The paramatma is the same Soul stripped of those attributes, pure and pervading everything. Bhrigu answers the materialist’s objection with the figure of fire: when the fuel is gone the fire is no longer seen, and yet it has only mixed with space; to become invisible is a different thing from being destroyed. In his account the mind is an instrument made of the same five elements as the body, the Soul is the witness that actually feels pleasure and pain, and what people call death is the body coming apart while the Soul moves on into another form.

The gist: To Bharadvaja’s doubt that the dissolution of the body is the end of everything, Bhrigu answers with fire: the living creature is not destroyed when the body is; it becomes subtle, lives on unseen in space, and takes another body. The one who feels and knows is the witness Soul, with the mind as its instrument. Joined to the attributes, that Soul is the kshetrajna; free of them, the paramatma.

The origin of the orders: by act and quality

Bhrigu said, “Brahma first created a few Brahmins, who came to be called Prajapatis, lords of creation. They were made out of the energy of that first-born Being, and their splendor was the splendor of fire or the sun. Then the mighty Lord created Truth, Duty, Tapas, the eternal Vedas, every kind of pious act, and Purity, so that creatures could practice them and reach heaven. After that the gods and the Danavas were created, the Gandharvas, the Daityas, the Asuras, the great snakes, the Yakshas, the Rakshasas, the serpents, the Pishachas, and human beings with their four divisions, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, and every other order of creature that exists. The complexion the Brahmins received was white; the Kshatriyas’ was red; the Vaishyas’ was yellow; and the one given to the Shudras was black.”

Bharadvaja objected at once. “If the four orders are distinguished only by color, then it seems to me all four have run together. Lust, anger, fear, greed, grief, anxiety, hunger, and toil have hold of every man alike. How are men to be told apart by attributes? Every man’s body gives off sweat, urine, feces, phlegm, bile, and blood. How can men be sorted into classes? The moving creatures are numberless and the species of unmoving ones cannot be counted. How can things of such enormous variety be put into classes at all?”

Bhrigu said, “There is really no distinction between the orders. In the beginning the whole world was Brahmins. Brahma created men equal, and it is by their acts that they have been sorted into different orders. Those who became fond of desire and pleasure, who took on severity and anger, who had courage and forgot the duties of piety and worship, those Brahmins of the attribute of passion became Kshatriyas. Those who neglected the duties laid down for them, who carried goodness and passion mixed together and took up cattle-keeping and farming, became Vaishyas. Those who grew fond of untruth and of injuring other creatures, who were greedy, who did any kind of work for a living and fell away from purity of conduct, and so were wedded to the attribute of darkness, became Shudras. Separated by those occupations, Brahmins fell out of their own order and became members of the other three.

“So all four orders have always had the right to perform every pious duty and every sacrifice. Brahma created the four equal in the beginning and laid down for all of them the words of the Veda. It was through greed alone that so many fell away and were taken over by ignorance. The Brahmins who stay devoted to the scriptures about Brahman, who keep their vows and their restraints, can grasp the conception of Brahman, and their tapas never goes for nothing. Those among them who cannot understand that every created thing is the supreme Brahman are not Brahmins at all; they fall away into the lower orders, and losing the light of knowledge and giving themselves to unrestrained conduct, they are born as Pishachas and Rakshasas and Pretas and as members of the various Mlechchha peoples. The great rishis who first sprang into life by Brahma’s will afterward created, by their tapas, men devoted to the duties laid down for them and attached to the rites of the eternal Vedas. And the other creation, the one that is eternal and undecaying, that rests on Brahman and sprang from the first God and takes its refuge in yoga, is a creation of the mind.”

Bharadvaja asked, “By what acts does a man become a Brahmin? By what acts a Kshatriya? By what acts a Vaishya or a Shudra?” Bhrigu said, “A man is called a Brahmin who has been sanctified by the birth rite and the other sacraments, who is pure in his conduct, who studies the Vedas, who is given to the six well-known acts (the baths at morning and evening, the silent recitation of mantras, the libations on the sacred fire, the worship of the gods, the duties of hospitality toward guests, and the offering of food to the Vishvedevas), who keeps every pious observance, who never eats without first offering the food to gods and guests, who is full of reverence for his teacher, and who is always devoted to vows and to truth. He is a Brahmin in whom there are truth, gifts, abstention from injuring others, compassion, modesty, benevolence, and tapas. The man who follows the profession of battle, who studies the Vedas, who makes gifts to Brahmins, and who takes wealth from the people he protects is called a Kshatriya. The man who earns his name by the keeping of cattle, who is employed in farming and in the getting of wealth, who is pure in conduct and studies the Vedas, is called a Vaishya. And the man who takes pleasure in eating every kind of food, who does every kind of work, who is impure in his conduct, who does not study the Vedas, and whose habits are unclean, is said to be a Shudra.

“If those marks are found in a Shudra and are missing in a Brahmin, then that Shudra is no Shudra and that Brahmin is no Brahmin. By every means greed and anger must be held down; that, along with self-restraint, is the highest fruit of knowledge. Those two passions appear in order to wreck a man’s highest good, and they should be resisted with the whole heart. A man should guard his prosperity from his own anger, his tapas from his pride, his knowledge from honor and disgrace, and his soul from error. The intelligent man who does every act without wanting its fruit, whose whole wealth exists to be given away, and who performs the daily homa is the real renouncer. A man should be a friend to every creature and injure none. He should refuse to accept gifts, and by his own intelligence make himself the complete master of his passions. He should live in his own soul, where no grief can reach, and then he has no fear here and reaches a fearless region afterward. He should live devoted to tapas with every passion held, keep the vow of silence, hold his soul concentrated on itself, aim to conquer the senses no one has conquered, and stay unattached in the middle of attachments. Everything the senses can perceive is called the manifest. What is unmanifest, beyond the reach of the senses, and can be found only by the senses made subtle, is what a man should try to know; and without faith he will never reach that subtle sense, so he should hold himself in faith. The mind should be joined to the breath, and the breath held within Brahman. By cutting loose from every attachment a man can be absorbed into Brahman, and there is no need to attend to anything else. A Brahmin reaches Brahman easily by the road of renunciation. The marks of a Brahmin are purity, good conduct, and compassion toward every creature.”

A sub-tale: This is the most radical stretch of Bhrigu’s teaching. He begins by giving the four orders four colors, white, red, yellow, and black, and Bharadvaja objects that every man sweats and hungers and bleeds alike; at that, Bhrigu himself turns and says that there is really no distinction between the orders, that the whole world was Brahmins in the beginning, and that men were sorted into orders by their acts. By that reasoning conduct and attribute decide the order a man belongs to, so that a Shudra with a Brahmin’s marks is no Shudra, and a Brahmin with a Shudra’s marks is no Brahmin. The Mahabharata sets this passage beside its own sterner accounts of the orders and leaves the tension standing between them.

The gist: Bhrigu first speaks of the orders as divided by color, then, pressed by Bharadvaja, grants that there is no distinction at the root: in the beginning all were Brahmins, and the orders arose from acts and attributes. Conduct is the test of an order, and the true Brahmin is the one in whom there are truth, gifts, harmlessness, compassion, modesty, benevolence, and tapas.

Truth and Falsehood, Happiness and Sorrow

Bhrigu went on. Truth is Brahman, he said; truth is tapas; it is truth that creates every creature and truth that holds the whole universe up, and it is with the help of truth that a man goes to heaven. Untruth is only another form of darkness, and darkness is what leads downward; those who are afflicted by darkness and covered in it never see the lighted regions of heaven. It has been said that heaven is light and hell is darkness, and the creatures who live in the universe can reach either one. In this world too, truth and untruth lead to opposite courses of conduct and opposite marks, as righteousness and unrighteousness do, and light and darkness, and pleasure and pain. Among these, what is truth is righteousness, what is righteousness is light, and what is light is happiness; and in the same way what is untruth is unrighteousness, what is unrighteousness is darkness, and what is darkness is sorrow. The wise, seeing that the world of the living is overwhelmed by sorrow of body and of mind, and by a happiness that is sure to end in misery, never let themselves be stupefied by it, and the wise man works to rescue himself from sorrow. The happiness of living creatures is unstable, here and hereafter; the happiness of those overwhelmed by darkness vanishes like the splendor of the moon when Rahu takes hold of it. Happiness is of two kinds, bodily and mental, and both the visible and the invisible fruits of action are laid down in the Vedas for the sake of it.

Then Bhrigu set down a principle that startled his listener: there is nothing more important than happiness. Happiness is desirable, and among the fruits of the three aims of life it stands first. It is an attribute of the Soul. Both virtue and wealth are sought for its sake, and virtue is its root and its origin. Every act there is has happiness for its end.

Bharadvaja could not accept this, and he said so. “You say happiness is the highest object. I do not understand that. This attribute of the soul that you call so desirable is not sought by the rishis, who are held to be engaged in something that promises a higher reward. It is heard that the creator of the three worlds, mighty Brahma himself, lives alone under the vow of celibacy and never gives himself to the happiness that comes from satisfying desire. And the divine master of the universe, the lord of Uma, burned Kama, the god of desire, out of existence. So we say that happiness is not acceptable to people of high mind, and it does not look like a high attribute of the Soul either. I cannot put faith in what you have said, that there is nothing higher than happiness. That our acts have two kinds of consequence, happiness from good acts and sorrow from sinful ones, is only a saying that goes around in the world.”

Bhrigu answered him with the darkness he had already named. From untruth, he said, springs darkness. Those overwhelmed by darkness pursue only unrighteousness, mastered by anger and greed and malice and falsehood and the rest, and they get no happiness here or hereafter. They are worn down by disease and pain and trouble of every kind, tortured by death and imprisonment and other griefs like them, and by the sorrows that ride on hunger and thirst and toil; their bodies ache under rain and wind and burning heat and hard cold, and their minds under lost wealth and separation from friends, and under old age and death. The ones these bodily and mental afflictions do not touch are the ones who know what happiness is. In heaven none of these evils is found. Delicious breezes blow there and the fragrance never fades; there is no hunger in heaven, no thirst, no old age, no sin. This world holds both happiness and misery. Hell holds only misery. Therefore happiness is the highest object there is to win. The earth is the mother of all creatures, and females share her nature; the male animal is like Prajapati himself, and the vital seed is the creative energy. So Brahma ordained in the old days that creation should go on, and each creature, shaped by its own acts, gets its happiness or its misery.

A key to reading this (the concept): The happiness Bhrigu is defending is an attribute of the Soul, the health that grows out of dharma and truth, and he places it above the pleasures of the senses, which he has just called a happiness that is sure to end in misery. Bharadvaja hears the word and thinks of Kama and of the pleasure of satisfied desire; Bhrigu is speaking of the lasting welfare of the soul, the thing heaven is full of and hell is empty of. The two men are using one word for two things, and the argument turns on that.

Bharadvaja asked what the consequence of a gift is said to be, and of righteousness, and of conduct, and of tapas well performed, and of the study and recitation of the Vedas, and of libations poured on the fire. Bhrigu answered him in brief. By pouring libations on the sacred fire, sin is burned away. By the study of the Vedas a man gains blessed tranquility. By gifts he gets pleasure and things to enjoy. By tapas he wins heaven. And a gift is of two kinds, a gift for the other world and a gift for this one: whatever is given to the good goes with the giver into the other world, and whatever is given to those who are not good bears its consequences here, and the consequences of gifts are commensurate with the gifts themselves. Bharadvaja asked which course of duties should be performed by whom, what the marks of duty are, and how many kinds of duty there are, and Bhrigu told him that the wise men who practice the duties laid down for them win heaven as their reward, and that people who do otherwise are guilty of folly.

The gist: Truth is Brahman, righteousness, light, and happiness; untruth is darkness, unrighteousness, and grief. True happiness is an attribute of the Soul and virtue is its root. Libations burn sin, Vedic study brings peace, gifts bring enjoyment, and tapas brings heaven; and a gift given to the good follows the giver into the next world, while a gift to the unworthy pays out here.

The Four Ashramas of Life

Bharadvaja asked about the four modes of life that Brahma had laid down long ago, and about the practices ordained for each of them. Bhrigu said that in the old days the divine Brahma, for the good of the world and the protection of righteousness, marked out four modes of life. The first of them, in order of time, is residence in the house of the teacher. Whoever is in this mode should have his soul cleansed by purity of conduct, by the Vedic rites, and by restraints and vows and humility. He should worship the twilights at morning and evening, and the sun, and his own sacred fire, and the gods. He should throw off procrastination and idleness. He should cleanse his soul by saluting his teacher, by studying the Vedas, and by listening to what his teacher tells him. He should bathe three times a day, morning, noon, and evening; live in celibacy; tend his sacred fire; serve his teacher dutifully; go out every day on his round of begging to support himself; and hand over to his teacher, without grudging, everything the begging brought in. Whatever his teacher’s commands point to, he should do willingly, and he should be ready to receive whatever Vedic instruction the teacher chooses to give him as a favor, since a student never asks. There is a verse on the subject: the Brahmin who gets his Veda by waiting reverently on his teacher reaches heaven and has every one of his wishes fulfilled.

The domestic mode of life is called the second in point of time, and Bhrigu laid out its pious acts and its marks. It is ordained for those who have finished their residence in the teacher’s house and come home, who are of pious conduct, and who want the fruits of a virtuous life with a wife at their side. In it virtue, wealth, and pleasure can all be had, and so it suits the cultivation of all three. The householder should get his wealth by acts no one can reproach, or by the recitation of the Vedas, which has a high efficacy of its own, or by the means the twice-born rishis use, gleaning the fallen grains after the owner has taken his crop, or from the produce of mountains and mines, or from what is offered at sacrifices and at the close of vows and observances and in gifts to the gods. This mode of life is counted the root of all the others, because the students in their teachers’ houses, the beggars, and everyone else living under the vows and restraints they have pledged draw from it the means they live on, the offerings they make to the ancestors and the gods, in short their whole support. The forest-dwellers too, passing through on their way to the sacred fords, are honored at the householder’s door: he stands up for them, goes forward to meet them, speaks sweet and sincere words, gives according to his means, offers the best seat and bed he has and excellent food. On this there is a verse: a guest who turns away from a house with his expectations unmet is supposed to carry off the householder’s merit and leave all his own misdeeds behind him.

In the domestic mode the gods are pleased by sacrifices and the other rites, the ancestors by the rites for the dead, the rishis by the cultivation of Vedic knowledge, by listening to teachers and by committing the scriptures to memory, and, last, the Creator by the begetting of children. On this there are two verses. A man in this mode should speak to every creature in words that breathe affection and are pleasant to hear; to give pain, to mortify, and to speak harshly are all blameworthy, and insult, arrogance, and deceit should be avoided as well. And abstention from injury, truth, and freedom from anger produce the merit of tapas in all four modes of life. What is allowed in the domestic mode is this: the use and enjoyment of flower garlands, ornaments, robes, perfumed oils and unguents; the pleasures of dancing and of music, sung and played, and every sight the eye delights in; food and drink of every kind, whether swallowed, lapped, drunk, or sucked; and the pleasures of sport and amusement of every sort, and the gratification of desire. The man who in this mode seeks the three aims of life together with the great end that lies beyond the three attributes enjoys great happiness here and at last reaches the end reserved for the virtuous and the well taught. And even the householder who keeps his mode of life by picking up fallen grains from the cracks of the fields, and who has given up sensual pleasure and attachment to action, does not find heaven hard to reach.

The third mode of life is called the forest life. Those who lead it store up no wealth and no goods. Generally these pious and good men, living on what is fit to eat and busy with the study of the Vedas, wander the earth to visit the sacred fords and see many different realms. The fourth mode, Bhrigu said, he would describe next, with the whole way of the forest-dwellers and of the wanderers who have given up everything.

A key to reading this (the four ashramas): Brahmacharya is the student’s years in the teacher’s house; garhasthya is the householder’s life; vanaprastha is the forest life; and sannyasa, which Bhrigu calls the way of the parivrajaka, is the life of the wanderer who has renounced everything. Bhrigu calls the householder the root of them all, because the student, the beggar, and the man under vows all eat from his hand.

The gist: Brahma laid out the four modes of life to protect righteousness. The student serves his teacher and hands over all he begs; the householder, who may enjoy garlands and music and every kind of food, is the root that feeds the other three; and abstention from injury, truth, and freedom from anger earn the merit of tapas in every mode alike.

The Vanaprastha, the Parivrajaka, and That Land of the North

Bhrigu described the conduct of the forest-dwellers in detail. Forest recluses in search of virtue go to sacred waters and rivers and springs, and they do their tapas in lonely woods full of deer and buffalo and boar and tigers and wild elephants. They give up every kind of robe and food and enjoyment that people in society have a taste for, and live sparingly on wild herbs and fruit and roots and leaves of many kinds. The bare ground is their seat. They lie down on the bare earth, or on rock, pebbles, gravel, sand, or ash. They cover their limbs with grass and animal skins and the bark of trees. They never shave their heads or beards or trim their nails. They bathe at the regular hours, pour their libations on the ground and on the sacred fire at the proper time without fail, and take no rest until the day’s gathering of fuel for the homa fire and of sacred grass and flowers is done and the altars have been swept and rubbed clean. They bear cold and heat, rain and wind without giving them a thought, so the skin of their bodies cracks all over, and under the rites and vows and observances they lay on themselves their flesh and blood and skin and bone waste away. With great patience and fortitude they live, always practicing the quality of goodness. The man who holds his soul in check and keeps this course of duties, which the twice-born rishis ordained in the beginning, burns away all his sins like a fire and wins blessed worlds that are very hard to reach.

Then Bhrigu turned to the conduct of those called parivrajakas, the wanderers. They free themselves from attachment to the sacred fire, to wealth, to wife and children, to robes and seats and beds and every other object of enjoyment; they break the bonds of affection and roam, looking on a clod of earth, a stone, and a piece of gold with the same eye. They never set their hearts on getting or enjoying any of the three aims of life. They look on enemies, friends, and strangers alike. They never injure, in thought, word, or deed, anything that stands still or any creature born from a womb, from an egg, from filth, or from the ground as a plant. They have no homes. They roam over hills and mountains, along the shores of rivers and seas, under the shade of trees, and among the temples of the gods. They may come into a town or a village to stay, but in a town they should not live more than five nights, and in a village never more than one. When they enter a town or village they should go, for the support of life, only to the houses of Brahmins known for liberal deeds, and they should never ask for any alms beyond what is dropped into the wooden bowls they carry. They should free themselves from lust, anger, pride, greed, delusion, miserliness, deceit, slander, vanity, and injury to any living creature. On this there are verses: the man who keeps the vow of silence and roams without giving any creature cause for fear is never given cause for fear by any creature.

Bhrigu gave a subtle image. The learned man who performs the agnihotra without kindling any outer fire, with the fire that is his own body, who pours the libations into his own mouth and onto the fire that lives within him, wins many blessed worlds, because that fire is fed with what a life of begging brings. The twice-born man who keeps this mode of life in that way, with release for its end, with a pure heart and an understanding freed from every design, reaches Brahman the way a quiet ray of light does, a light no blazing fuel feeds.

Bharadvaja had a curiosity of his own. “Beyond this region we live in,” he said, “there is a region we have heard of and never seen. I want to know all about it. Describe it to me.” Bhrigu said that to the north, on the far side of Himavat, which is sacred and has every merit, there is a region that is sacred, blessed, and greatly to be desired, and it is called the other world. The men who live there are righteous in act, pious, pure of heart, freed from greed and from errors of judgment, and subject to no affliction of any kind. With attributes like those, the region is the equal of heaven. Death comes there at the proper season, and disease never touches the people. Nobody wants another man’s wife; everyone is devoted to his own. The people do not afflict or kill one another, and they do not covet one another’s things. No sin happens there, and no doubt arises. There the fruits of every religious act can be seen. Some of the people enjoy the best seats and drink and food and live in palaces and mansions; some, wearing ornaments of gold, surround themselves with everything that can be enjoyed; some eat very little, only enough to keep body and soul together; and some, with great effort, work at holding the life-breaths.

Here, in the region we inhabit, some men are devoted to righteousness and some to deceit. Some are happy and some miserable, some poor and some rich. Here toil, and fear, and delusion, and painful hunger show themselves, and the greed for wealth, a passion that stupefies even the learned. Here every kind of opinion goes around, put about by people whose deeds are righteous or sinful, and the wise man who knows those opinions for what they are, the two kinds of them, is never stained by sin. Deceit, fraud, theft, slander, malice, oppression, injury, treachery, and untruth eat away the merit of the tapas of the man who practices them, and the learned man who avoids them finds the merit of his tapas increased. Here there is a great deal of reflection about which acts are righteous and which are not. This region we inhabit is the field of action: having done good and evil here, a man gets good for his good acts and evil for his evil ones. Here, in the old days, the very Creator, and all the gods with the rishis, performed the proper tapas, were cleansed, and reached Brahman. The northern part of the earth is highly auspicious and sacred, and those of this region who do righteous deeds or show regard for yoga are born in that region. Others are born among the intermediate species, and some, when their allotted time runs out, are lost on the earth: busy feeding on one another, stained by greed and delusion, they come back to this very region, unable to go north. The wise men who keep their vows and their celibacy and listen with veneration to their teachers come to know the ends reserved for every class of men. That, Bhrigu said, was the course of duties Brahma laid down, told in brief, and the man who knows what righteousness is in this world, and what its reverse is, is the one who can be called intelligent.

That, Bhishma said, is how Bhrigu spoke to Bharadvaja, and Bharadvaja, a man of high and virtuous soul, was filled with wonder and worshiped the great sage with veneration. So the origin of the universe had now been told to Yudhishthira in detail, and Bhishma asked him what he wished to hear next.

A key to reading this (the place): Himavat is the old name for the Himalaya. Bharadvaja asks about a region beyond the one we live in, and Bhrigu calls the land north of Himavat “the other world,” so the passage can be read two ways, as a country of the righteous somewhere past the mountains and as the world a good man goes to after death; Bhrigu’s own words, with their death that comes in season and their palaces and their people holding the breath, keep both readings open. A parivrajaka is a wanderer, the renouncer who never stays tied to a single place.

The gist: The forest-dweller reaches the blessed worlds by tapas; the parivrajaka, who owns nothing and stays nowhere, reaches Brahman by renunciation; and the man who feeds the fire within his own body with what he begs reaches Brahman like a quiet ray of light. This region we live in is the field of action, mixed of good and bad, and those with merit and yoga are born in the pure northern land beyond Himavat.

The Rules of Right Conduct

Now Yudhishthira wanted to hear the rules of conduct, since his grandfather seemed to know everything and knew duties best of all. Bhishma said that men of bad conduct, bad acts, wicked understanding, and reckless haste are what people call the wicked, and that the ones called good are known by the purity of their conduct and their practices. What followed was a long list of small rules, the daily round of a decent household in that age, and Bhishma went through them one by one.

Good men, Bhishma said, never answer the calls of nature on the high road, in a cow-pen, or in a field of standing rice. When the necessary acts are finished, a man should bathe in river water and gratify the gods with an offering of water; that is the duty of everyone. The sun should always be worshiped. No one should sleep after sunrise. The morning and evening prayers laid down in the scriptures should be said sitting, facing east in the morning and west in the evening. A man should wash the five limbs, the two feet, the two hands, and the face, and then eat in silence facing east. He should never speak ill of the food he is about to eat; he should eat food that tastes good; and when he has eaten he should wash his hands and rise. He should never go to sleep at night with wet feet. The celestial rishi Narada, Bhishma said, named these the marks of good conduct.

Every day a man should walk reverently around a sacred spot, a bull, a sacred image, a cow-pen, a place where four roads meet, a pious Brahmin, and a sacred tree. In matters of food he should make no distinction between his guests, his attendants, and his kinsmen; equality with one’s servants in that respect is applauded. Eating twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, is an ordinance of the gods, and nothing is laid down about eating in between; the man who eats by that rule earns the merit of a fast. At the hours ordained for homa the libations go on the sacred fire. The man of wisdom who never goes near another man’s wife, and goes to his own wife in her season, earns the merit of celibacy. The remnants of a Brahmin’s dish are like nectar, like the milk a mother’s breast yields; people prize them highly, and the good, by eating them, reach Brahman. The man who pounds turf to clay for altars, or cuts grass for the sacred fuel, or eats sanctified meat with his nails alone, or lives always on the remnants of Brahmins’ dishes, or acts only for the sake of a reward, is not long for this world.

Bhishma gave a gentle picture of the manners of the table. When you put food in front of a man already seated at his dish, you ask him whether it is enough. When you offer him a drink, you ask whether it will satisfy him. And when you serve sweetened milk and rice, or sugared barley gruel, or milk cooked with sesame or peas, you ask whether it has fallen well into his dish, and he is expected to answer that it has fallen copiously. After shaving, after spitting, after bathing, and after eating, people should honor Brahmins with reverence; that honor is sure to lengthen the life of a sick man. On the matter of meat Bhishma counseled restraint: a man who has given up meat under any vow should not eat it even when it has been sanctified with mantras from the Yajur Veda, and everyone should avoid the flesh along the backbone and the flesh of any animal not killed in a sacrifice. Whether at home or in a strange land, a man should never let his guest go hungry. What comes in by begging and by the other optional acts should be offered to one’s elders. A man should offer his elders a seat and salute them with respect, because by honoring one’s elders one gets long life, fame, and prosperity. He should never look at the sun at the moment it rises, and never turn his eyes on another man’s wife when she is unclothed. Going to one’s wife in her season is no sin, and it should always be done in private. The heart of all holy places and shrines is the teacher; the heart of all pure and cleansing things is fire. Every act a good and pious man does is good and praiseworthy, down to touching the hair of a cow’s tail. Whenever one person meets another, he should ask politely after him. Saluting Brahmins every morning and evening is ordained; in the temples of the gods, among cows, in the rites laid down for Brahmins, in reading the Vedas, and in eating, it is the right hand that is raised. Worshiping Brahmins morning and evening with the due rites brings great merit: the merchant’s stock grows abundant, the farmer’s yield grows, the harvests of every grain are great, and everything the senses can enjoy comes in plenty.

Bhishma spoke the moral heart of it. A man should not pass urine facing the sun, and should not look at his own excrement. He should not lie on one bed with a woman, and should not eat with her. In addressing his elders he should never use the bare pronoun “you” or take their names; the plain “you” and the taking of names are no fault with equals or with those younger. The hearts of sinful men give away the sins they have committed, and sinful men who hide their known sins from good men come to destruction. Only ignorant fools try to hide the sins they knowingly commit; other men may miss those sins, and the gods see every one of them. A sin hidden under another sin leads to new sins, and an act of merit covered by another act of merit increases the merit. The acts of a virtuous man follow one another in the track of virtue. A man without understanding never thinks about the sins he has committed, and those sins overtake the man who has fallen away from the scriptures. As Rahu comes to the moon at his appointed time, so a foolish man’s sins come to him. Things stored up in expectation are rarely enjoyed; the wise never applaud that kind of hoarding, because death waits for no one and takes its prey ready or unready.

At the end Bhishma said that the wise have declared the righteousness of every creature to be an attribute of the mind, so that a man should, in his mind, do good to all. Virtue can be practiced alone; in the practice of it a man needs no one’s help, and if he has the ordinances of the scriptures, what could a companion add? Righteousness is the origin of mankind. Righteousness is the nectar of the gods. After death, it is through righteousness that men enjoy happiness that does not end.

A key to reading this (the concept): Rahu is the being who swallows the moon at an eclipse, and he arrives at his fixed hour; the comparison Bhishma draws, a sin returning to its doer at its own appointed time, comes back again and again in the epic. The five limbs to be washed before eating are the two feet, the two hands, and the face. The rule against the bare “you” with elders reflects a courtesy of address in which a senior is spoken to in the respectful third person, never directly.

The gist: Right conduct is built of small daily rules, from bathing and the twilight prayers to how food is served and how elders are addressed. Sin hidden under sin breeds more sin, and merit laid over merit grows; and righteousness, an attribute of the mind, is the root of a person and the lasting happiness of the world to come.

Adhyatma: Creation, the Senses, Buddhi, and the Atman

Yudhishthira asked what the thing called Adhyatma is, which is laid down for every person, and of what nature it is. From what was this universe of moving and unmoving things created, and when the universal destruction comes, to whom does it go? Bhishma said that the Adhyatma Yudhishthira was asking about is a subject of great pleasure and great felicity, and that the great teachers had already shown the truths about the creation and the destruction of the universe. A man who knows those truths finds great satisfaction and felicity even in this world; the knowledge bears great fruit and does good to every creature. Earth, air, space, water, and light as the fifth are counted the great creatures, and they are both the origin and the destruction of everything that was made. They return, again and again, to the one they came from, separating themselves from every creature they had entered, like the waves of the ocean sinking back into the thing they seemed to rise out of. As a tortoise stretches out its limbs and draws them in again, so the supreme Soul creates everything and withdraws it all into himself again. The Creator puts the five elements into every created thing in different proportions, and the living creature, in its ignorance, does not see it.

Bhishma then drew a fine map of the senses. Sound, the organ of hearing, and every opening in the body, these three, spring from space as their parent. Touch, action, and the skin are the three attributes of wind. Form, the eye, and digestion are the three of fire. Taste, every liquid secretion, and the tongue are the three of water. Scent, the nose, and the body are the three of earth. The great elements are five; the mind is the sixth, and the senses and the mind together are the sources of everything a living creature perceives; the seventh is the understanding, the buddhi; and the eighth is the Soul. The senses are for perceiving. The mind, unable to settle what they bring in, produces uncertainty. The understanding reduces every perception to certainty. And the Soul exists as a witness, acting on nothing. Everything above the two feet, everything behind, everything above, is seen by the Soul; it pervades the whole being with no space left unfilled. Every man should know the senses, the mind, and the understanding thoroughly, because the three states called darkness, passion, and goodness exist in dependence on those three, and a man who grasps by his intelligence how creatures come into the world and leave it comes gradually to a steady tranquility. The three qualities lead the understanding toward attachments, and in that respect the understanding is one with the senses and the mind, and one with the objects it comprehends; when the understanding is destroyed, the three qualities can no longer lead anyone to act. This universe of moving and unmoving things consists of that intelligence; everything arises from it and everything sinks back into it. When the intelligence desires something it comes to be called mind. It rests on five foundations, each serving a different purpose, and those are the senses. The intelligence in a living creature busies itself with the three states; sometimes it gets joy, sometimes misery, and sometimes it is free of both. And sometimes, by yoga, the intelligence made of the three states goes beyond the three, the way the ocean, lord of rivers, in a rare hour goes past its own high shores.

Then Bhishma opened the subtle difference between the Soul and the buddhi with comparisons. The three qualities go with every creature, and there are three kinds of intelligence, resting on goodness, on passion, and on darkness. Goodness brings happiness; passion produces sorrow; and when those two combine with darkness the result is neither happiness nor sorrow, only delusion. Every state of happiness in body or mind is owed to goodness. A state of sorrow that comes disagreeably is owed to nothing except passion, and a man should never think of it with fear. A state allied with delusion and error, in which a man does not know what to do, which cannot be found out or understood, belongs to darkness. Mark the distinction between the two subtle things, intelligence and Soul: one of them, the intelligence, puts forth the qualities, and the other, the Soul, does nothing of the kind. A gnat and a fig are seen united, and united they are still two things, each distinct from the other; intelligence and Soul, distinguished by their natures, are always seen together in the same way. A fish and the water live in union and each is different from the other, and so it is with the intelligence and the Soul. The qualities do not know the Soul, and the Soul knows all of them; it is the spectator of the qualities and regards them all as proceeding from itself. Acting through the senses, the mind, and the understanding as the seventh, all of which are inert and have no self-awareness, the Soul discovers the objects it lives among, the way a covered lamp shows everything around it by throwing its rays through a gap in the cover. The understanding creates all the qualities, and the Soul only watches. Neither of them depends on any other refuge. The understanding creates the mind, and never the qualities. And when the Soul, by means of the mind, sufficiently restrains the rays that stream out of the senses, then it becomes visible to the understanding, like a lamp burning inside the vessel that covers it.

Bhishma counted out the marks of the three qualities again, so that a man could read himself. Gladness, satisfaction, delight, happiness, and tranquility of heart are the properties of goodness, and a man sometimes gets a measure of them. Discontent, heartburning, grief, greed, and vindictiveness are the signs of passion, and they show up with or without any adequate cause. Disgrace, delusion, error, sleep, and stupefaction, which overtake a man through great ill luck, are the properties of darkness. The man whose mind is far-reaching and can extend in every direction, who mistrusts the winning of the things he wants, and who is well restrained, is happy here and hereafter. The man who renounces ordinary acts, practices tapas, gives himself to the study of the Soul and takes delight in it, and looks on himself as the Soul of every creature, reaches a high end. As a water-bird moves over the water and never gets wet, the man of wisdom moves among the creatures of the world. That is how a man should act in the world with the help of his intelligence, without grief and without joy, with an equal eye for everyone, and empty of malice and envy. Living that way, he creates the qualities the way a spider creates its threads, and the qualities should be looked on as exactly that, the spider’s threads. Some say that in such men the qualities are never lost, and they rely on the revealed scriptures, which contain no declaration to the contrary; others say the qualities are all lost, and they rely on the Smritis. A man should reflect on both opinions and judge for himself which is right, and get past that hard and knotty question, which is capable of troubling the understanding with doubt; once the doubt is removed, he has no more sorrow of any kind to indulge in. Even men with filthy hearts can succeed through knowledge, like people plunging into a full stream and coming out clean.

Bhishma gave a beautiful image. A man who has to cross a wide river takes no happiness in merely seeing the far bank; if the sight of the shore could carry him across, he might be happy at the sight. The man who knows the Truth is in a different position: the bare knowledge of the Truth brings him happiness, and as soon as that knowledge begins to bear fruit, he can be counted as already standing on the other shore. Those who know the Soul in that way, freed of every worldly object and single, are said to reach high and excellent knowledge, and a man who knows the origin and the end of all creatures, which is exactly this, and reflects on it, gradually comes to infinite happiness. The man who has understood that the three aims of life are liable to destruction, and having reflected on that throws them off, comes by yoga to see the Truth and win perfect felicity. The Soul cannot be seen until the senses, which run after every object and are hard to control, have all been properly restrained; the man who knows this is truly wise, and what other mark of a wise man is there? What frightens the ignorant can never frighten the man of knowledge. There is no higher end for anyone than release, though the sages say that differences in the degree of it can be seen according to how good qualities are present in excess or in want. A man who acts without expecting fruit destroys by those acts the sinful acts of his former life, and for the man of wisdom neither the washed-off acts of that former life nor the acts of this one, done without expectation, produce any disagreeable consequence. Look closely at the vicious in this world, who grieve without end when their possessions are lost, and look at those with judgment, who never grieve when the same things happen to them. Those who know both roads, the gradual release and the immediate one, deserve to be called truly wise.

A key to reading this (the elements of adhyatma): Adhyatma is the science of the Self, the knowledge of the Soul seated within the body, the senses, the mind, and the buddhi. The order of the eight principles is worth holding on to: the five great elements (earth, water, fire, air, space), then manas, the mind, which raises the doubt, buddhi, the understanding, which settles it, and the Soul, the witness that does nothing. The gnat on its fig and the fish in its water are Bhishma’s pictures of two things that live together and stay two; the covered lamp is his picture of how the Soul sees through the senses; and the spider and the water-bird are his pictures of a man who lives among the qualities without being caught in them.

The gist: The five great elements are the source of creation and of dissolution; the mind, the buddhi, and the Soul are the levels of doubt, certainty, and witnessing. The Soul knows the qualities and the qualities do not know it; the sage moves through the world unwetted like a water-bird and spins the qualities like a spider’s threads; and the knowledge of Truth is itself the crossing to the far bank.

The Rungs of Meditation-Yoga

Bhishma said he would now speak of the four kinds of yoga meditation. The great rishis who gain knowledge of them reach lasting perfection here, in this very life. Satisfied with knowledge, their hearts set on release, knowing yoga, they act so that their meditation goes on properly, and freed from the faults of the world they never come back to be born. Released from that liability, they live in their original state, the state of the Soul. Free from the pull of the pairs of opposites, heat and cold, joy and sorrow, resting always in their own state, released from attachments, accepting nothing from anyone, they live in places where there are no wives and children, no one to quarrel with, nothing to disturb a complete tranquility of heart.

Bhishma described what such a man looks like in that place. He holds his speech in. He sits the way a block of wood sits, and he presses every sense down until the mind, with nothing left to divide it, joins itself through meditation to the supreme Self. The ear is still there and sound no longer reaches through it; the skin no longer reports touch, the eye no longer takes in form, the tongue no longer knows taste, the nose no longer knows smell. Sunk in yoga he lets everything go. His mind has great force in it, and no part of that force wants anything that stirs the five senses. So the wise man draws the five senses into the mind, and then he takes the mind, unsteady and carrying the senses with it, and settles it in the buddhi, the faculty that judges. It takes patience, because the mind wanders as a matter of habit, and the aim is that the five gates of the body should hold steady while the things beyond them go on shifting. In the open space of the heart he fixes the mind on the path of meditation, resting it on nothing, neither the body nor any other support. Bhishma said he had named this path first because the yogi’s first task is to crush the senses and the mind and turn them onto it.

Bhishma knew what the mind does when it is held like that, and he gave Yudhishthira two pictures of it. The mind is the sixth thing, after the five senses, and once it is restrained it looks for a way out; it flashes the way lightning flashes when it plays among the clouds, quick and without a reason. And it rolls. A drop of water on a lotus leaf never settles; it runs to whichever edge tilts lowest, and the mind newly set on the path of meditation runs the same way. It holds for a while. Then it slips into the path of the wind and becomes as flighty as the wind itself. The man who understands yoga takes none of this as defeat. He does not count the labor lost, he puts away idleness and ill will, and he sets the mind back on meditation. Keeping the vow of silence while he does it, he finds that discernment, knowledge, and the power to keep clear of wrong begin to come to him on their own. The flightiness of his own mind will annoy him, and he fixes it anyway. Despair, Bhishma said, is the one thing a yogi never allows himself; he keeps looking for his own good.

He gave one more picture, a homely one. Take a heap of dust, or of ashes, or of dried cow dung, and pour water over it. It looks wet and it is dry underneath; sprinkle it once and the water runs off the crust, and only when it is drenched again and again does it soak through. The senses are like that heap. The yogi controls them slowly, drawing them back from their objects a little at a time, and the man who works this way is the one who ends with them in hand. Directing mind and senses onto the path of meditation by his own effort, he brings them under full control by steady yoga, and the happiness he then feels has no equal: nothing that exertion can win and nothing that destiny can hand out comes near it. Joined to that happiness he keeps on finding pleasure in the act of meditation itself, and by this road the yogis reach nirvana, the most blessed of states.

A key to reading this (the yoga concept): Meditation, as Bhishma uses the word in this passage, is a sequence: the senses are drawn back from the things they feed on, the mind is gathered onto one point, and at the end even that point is let go and the mind dissolves into what it was fixed on. He names this path first because it is the first labor, the crushing of the senses and the mind. Nirvana at the close of the passage is the state that follows: the stilling of every affliction and a happiness that neither effort nor fate can supply, which he calls the most blessed of all.

The gist: The yogi in solitude holds his speech, sits like wood, and presses the senses down until the mind rests on the supreme Self. The mind fights back, flashing like lightning among clouds and rolling like a drop on a lotus leaf, and the cure is patience without despair: like a heap of ash that soaks through only under repeated sprinkling, the senses come under control by being drawn back again and again. The one who wins that control tastes a happiness beyond effort and destiny, and by that road reaches the most blessed nirvana.

The Path of Those Who Murmur the Mantra: Sankhya and Yoga

Yudhishthira had been listening for a long while by then, and he began by counting what he had already been given. His grandfather had set out the four stages of life and the duties of each, the whole dharma of kings, histories of many kinds, and discourse after discourse on right conduct. One doubt still stood. There were men who sat and silently repeated the sacred mantras; what fruit had been set down for such men, and to what region did they go when they died? What were the rules laid down for that silent recitation? And when the word murmurer was spoken, what exactly should he understand by it: was such a man to be counted as following the ordinances of Sankhya, or of yoga, or of action, or of the mental sacrifice? What was the path of the murmurers called? He asked because he believed his grandfather knew everything, and he wanted all of it.

Bhishma answered that there was an old history on exactly this point, of Yama, of Time, and of a certain Brahmin, and he would come to it; first the ground had to be laid. The sages who know the means of release have spoken of two methods, Sankhya and yoga. In the first of these, which also goes by the name Vedanta, renunciation is taught in the matter of silent recitation, and the Vedic declarations it rests on preach abstention from rites, breathe tranquility, and concern themselves with Brahman. The two paths, he said, are each in one sense bound up with silent recitation and in another sense free of it, and he would explain how. What both of them require, exactly as recitation itself requires, is the subduing of the senses and the fixing of the mind once it has been drawn back from outer things; and along with that, truth, the keeping of the sacred fire, living in solitude, meditation, austerity, self-restraint, forgiveness, kindness toward others, spare eating, withdrawal from worldly attachments, an unwillingness to talk much, and tranquility. All of these together make up the sacrifice that is performed in acts, the one that ripens into heaven and happiness in the life to come.

Then he turned to the other course, the one made of abstention, and to the way a murmurer under the vow of brahmacharya brings his acts to a stop. Such a man conducts himself in every particular as Bhishma had already laid down, and, taking the path of abstention, he sets out to extinguish his dependence on the outer world and on the inner one alike. He sits on kusha grass with kusha in his hand, his crown of hair bound up with kusha, kusha spread around him, kusha for his robe. He bows to all the concerns of the earth, takes his leave of them, and does not think of them again. Gaining evenness by the mind’s own help, he fixes the mind on the mind. Reciting the Gayatri, that composition of the highest benefit, he meditates with his buddhi on Brahman alone, and afterward he lets go even of that and is absorbed in concentrated contemplation; because he leans on the strength of the Gayatri he recites, that absorption comes of itself. Austerity purifies his soul and brings self-restraint and the end of aversion and desire. Free of attachment and delusion, above the pairs of opposites, he never grieves and is never drawn toward the objects of the world. He does not think of himself as the doer, or as the one who enjoys or suffers what his acts bring. He never sets his mind on anything out of selfishness. He earns nothing, and he insults no one, and he does not stop working: the work he does is meditation, which he holds to without wavering, and by meditation he brings on concentrated contemplation and then slowly leaves meditation itself behind. In that state he enjoys the happiness that belongs to the abandonment of all things. Having mastered the principle of desire through and through, he casts off his life breaths and enters the body of Brahman; or, if he does not want that, he goes at once upward into the region of Brahman and is never born again. Become tranquility itself, delivered from every calamity, he attains by his own intelligence the Self that is pure, immortal, and without stain.

Yudhishthira asked whether that very high end was the only one the murmurers came to, or whether there was another. Bhishma told him to listen closely, because the answer was hard: he would describe the ends the silent reciters reach and the kinds of hell they sink into. The murmurer who does not conduct himself at the outset by the method laid down, and cannot complete the discipline he has begun, goes to hell. The one who goes on without faith, who is not content with his work and takes no pleasure in it, goes to hell without any doubt. Those who follow the ritual with pride in their hearts all go to hell. The one who insults and disregards others goes to hell. The one who takes to recitation in a stupor of delusion and from desire for fruit gets everything his heart was set on; the one whose heart is set on the attributes that go by the name of divinity incurs hell and is never freed from it; the one who recites in the grip of attachments, to wealth, to wives, gets exactly the objects he was attached to. The reciter of wicked understanding and uncleansed soul who sets to work with an unstable mind comes to an unstable end, or to hell. The one without wisdom, the fool, grows stupefied, and in that delusion goes to a hell where he sits with his regrets. And even a man of firm heart, resolved to complete the discipline, who fails to complete it because he tore himself free of attachments by a violent effort without any real conviction that they were harmful, goes to hell as well.

Yudhishthira pressed on the point that troubled him. When a murmurer reaches the essence of that which rests in its own nature, uncreated and unborn, the Supreme, past description and past thought, which dwells in the syllable Om that is the substance of both recitation and meditation, when he has, in other words, come to the state of Brahman, why must he ever again take birth in a body? Bhishma’s answer was short. In the absence of true knowledge and wisdom, he said, reciters reach hells of many descriptions. The discipline the reciters follow is certainly a very high one; what he had just described were its faults.

So Yudhishthira asked what sort of hell it was that a murmurer obtained; he was curious, and he wanted it described. Bhishma reminded him first that he was born of a portion of the god of righteousness and kept dharma by his very nature, and that what followed rested on dharma as its base. Then he named the places. The regions owned by the great gods, of every aspect and color and description, each yielding its own fruit, all of them excellent; the chariots there that move at the will of their riders; the beautiful mansions; the pleasure gardens set with golden lotuses; the regions that belong to the four guardians of the quarters, to Shukra, to Brihaspati, to the Maruts, the Vishvedevas, the Sadhyas, the Ashvins, the Rudras, the Adityas, the Vasus, and to the other dwellers in heaven: all of these, measured against the region of the supreme Self, are called hells. That last region has no fear in it, because nothing there can change for the worse. It is uncreated, resting in its own nature. It holds no pain of the kind that ignorance and delusion bring, no element that pleases and none that displeases. It lies beyond the three qualities of sattva, rajas, and tamas; beyond the eight components, which are the five elements, the senses, the mind, and the buddhi; beyond the three distinctions of knower, known, and act of knowing; beyond the four attributes of seeing, hearing, thinking, and knowing; beyond the fourfold causes of knowledge; without joy or delight, without sorrow or disease. Time, in its shapes of past, present, and future, rises there for use, and Time is no ruler there: that supreme region rules Time and rules heaven. The reciter who becomes one with his own Self by drawing everything into it goes there, and after that he never feels sorrow again. That region is called the Supreme, Bhishma said, and the others he had first spoken of are hell; he had not even listed every region that goes by that name, because set against the foremost region, every other one is hell.

A key to reading this (Sankhya and Yoga): Sankhya is the path of knowledge, which Bhishma here also calls Vedanta and ties to withdrawal, the turning away from rites and action. Yoga is the path of practice and discipline. Japa is the silent, repeated recitation of a mantra, and the mantra of this whole passage is the Gayatri. The hardest thing in the passage is its scale: Bhishma calls even the regions of Shukra, Brihaspati, the Rudras, and the Adityas hells, because next to the supreme region, which rules Time itself, every heaven is still a place inside Time and subject to change.

The gist: Two roads lead to release, Sankhya, which is knowledge and withdrawal, and yoga, which is practice, and silent recitation belongs to both. The murmurer of the Gayatri who holds himself neither doer nor enjoyer dissolves into Brahman or rises to Brahman’s world and is never born again. The murmurer without faith, or with pride in his heart, or with his mind on a reward, goes to hell, or gets the very thing he craved and nothing more. And against the supreme region, which rules Time and heaven together, even the worlds of the gods count as hell.

The Tale of Ikshvaku and the Murmuring Brahmin

Yudhishthira wanted the dispute itself, the one his grandfather had mentioned between Time, Death, Yama, Ikshvaku, and a Brahmin, told from beginning to end. Bhishma began. There was once a Brahmin of great fame and pious conduct, a murmurer, a man of great wisdom who knew the six limbs of the Vedas and had won, by austerity, an inner sight into them; he was of the line of Kushika, and his father was Pippalada. He lived at the foot of Himavat, the great mountain of the north, given wholly to the Vedas, and there he silently recited the Gayatri and practiced hard austerities for the sake of reaching Brahman. A thousand years passed over his head in vows and fasts. Then the goddess of that composition, Savitri herself, showed herself to him and said, “I am pleased with you.” The Brahmin went on reciting. He stayed silent and did not say one word to her. The goddess felt compassion for him at that, and she was more pleased still, and she, who is the mother of the Vedas, praised the recitation he was engaged in.

When his recitation for the day was finished the Brahmin rose, bent his head, and laid himself down at the goddess’s feet. “By good fortune you are pleased with me and have shown yourself,” he said. “If you are truly pleased, the boon I ask is this: let my heart take pleasure in the act of recitation.” Savitri asked him what he wished; she would accomplish whatever he named, and everything would be as he wanted. The Brahmin, who understood his duties, answered that he wanted his wish to keep reciting to grow with every moment, and that the absorption of his mind in samadhi should become more complete. “Let it be as you wish,” the goddess said, sweetly, and because she wanted to do him good she spoke to him once more before she went. He would not have to go to hell, she told him, meaning the place where even great Brahmins go. He would go to the region of Brahman, which is uncreated and free of every fault. She was leaving, and what he had asked would come to pass; he should go on reciting with his soul restrained and his attention whole. And then she told him what else would come. The god Dharma would come to him in person. Time, Death, and Yama would also approach him. And there, in that place, a dispute would arise between them and him on a question of dharma.

With that the goddess went back to her own abode, and the Brahmin went back to his recitation. He kept at it for a thousand celestial years, holding his anger in, always in command of himself, firm in truth, free of malice. When the observance was complete, Dharma, pleased with him, showed his person to him. “Look at me, I am Dharma,” he said. “I have come here to see you. You have won the reward of the recitation you have been engaged in, and I will tell you what that reward is. You have won every region of happiness that belongs to gods or to men. You will rise above all the abodes of the gods. Cast off your life breaths now and go to whatever regions you please. By giving up your body you will win many regions of happiness.”

The Brahmin’s answer was the turn the goddess had foreseen. “What business have I with the regions of happiness you speak of?” he said. “Go where you please, Dharma. I will not cast off this body, which is subject to so much happiness and so much misery.” Dharma told him the body should certainly be cast off; let him ascend to heaven, or say what else would please him. The Brahmin said he had no wish to live in heaven itself without this body of his; Dharma should leave him. Dharma tried again: let him cast the body off without setting his heart on it, and be happy, and go to regions free of the quality of rajas, where he would never feel misery. And again the Brahmin refused. He took great pleasure in recitation, he said; what need had he of the eternal regions Dharma spoke of? He did not want heaven even with this body of his. So Dharma stopped persuading and pointed. “If you will not cast off your body,” he said, “then look: there is Time, and there is Death, and there is Yama, and all of them are coming toward you.”

They came as Dharma said they would: Yama, the son of Vivasvat the sun, and Time, and Death, the three who take every creature off the earth, and each of them spoke to the Brahmin in turn. Yama said that he was Yama, and that a high reward awaited the Brahmin for his well-performed austerities and the pious conduct he had kept. Time said the Brahmin had won a high reward, one that matched the course of recitation he had finished, and the time had come for him to ascend to heaven: “I am Time, and I have come to you.” Death spoke last. “You who know dharma, know me for Death herself, in my own form. I have come to you in person, urged by Time, to carry you away.”

The Brahmin welcomed them all with wonderful calm. “Welcome to the son of Surya, to Time of the high soul, to Death, and to Dharma,” he said. “What shall I do for you?” He gave them water for their feet and the arghya, the guest offering of the house, and, well pleased, asked again what he could accomplish for them by his own power. And at that exact moment a king arrived. Ikshvaku, who had set out on a journey to holy waters and shrines, came to the spot where those deities were assembled. The royal sage bowed his head and honored every one of them, and then, as the best of kings would, asked after their welfare. The Brahmin gave him a seat, water for his feet, the arghya, and the customary courtesies. “You are welcome, great king,” he said. “Tell me all your wishes. Say what I am to accomplish for you by putting forth my power.”

The king took the offer the way a king takes it. “I am a king,” he said, “and you are a Brahmin who keeps the six duties of your order. That much is well known: I will give you some wealth. Tell me how much I should give.” The Brahmin declined. There are two kinds of Brahmins, he said, and dharma itself is of two kinds, engagement in work and abstention from work; he had abstained from accepting gifts, and the king should give his presents to Brahmins who kept the duty of work and acceptance, because he himself would take nothing. Then he turned the question around. “And I ask you: what is for your good? What shall I give you? Tell me, and I will accomplish it with the help of my austerities.”

“I am a kshatriya,” the king said. “I do not know how to say the word give. The only thing men of my order know how to say, when we ask for anything, is: give us battle.” The Brahmin answered that the king was content with the duties of his order, and he was content with the duties of his; there was little difference between them, then, and the king could do as he pleased. And the king, who had been listening carefully, caught hold of the Brahmin’s own words. “You said it first,” he said. “You said, I will give you according to my might. So I ask you, Brahmin. Give me the fruit of the recitation you have performed.”

“You were boasting that your speech asks only for battle,” the Brahmin said. “Why then do you not ask me for battle?” The king had the answer ready. It has been said that Brahmins are armed with the thunderbolt of speech and kshatriyas with the might of their arms; that, he said, was why a war of words had broken out between the two of them. The Brahmin accepted the terms. That was his resolution too, today; what should he give the king according to his might? He had wealth of his own kind, and the king should not delay in naming it. And the king named it a second time. If the Brahmin truly wanted to give him something, let him give the fruit he had earned by reciting for a thousand years.

“Then take it,” the Brahmin said. “Take the highest fruit of the recitations I have gone through. Take half of it, without any scruple. Or, if you wish, take the whole of it, and have no scruple about that either.” It was at this point that the king stepped back. Blessings on the Brahmin, he said; he had no need of the fruit he had asked for, and he was about to leave. He asked only one thing before he went: what were those fruits, exactly? And the Brahmin told him the truth. He had no knowledge of what fruit he had won. He had never recited for any specific end, so how could he know what the recitation had earned? Whatever it was, he had given it to the king, and Dharma, Time, Yama, and Death, standing right there, were the witnesses of the gift.

Now neither of them could move. “What will an unknown fruit do for me?” the king said. “If you cannot tell me what the fruits of your recitation are, let them stay yours. I do not want them.” The Brahmin refused to hear another word of it. He had given the fruit; let the king’s words and his own both stay true. He had never cherished any particular wish in his recitation, so of course he could not say what it had produced; the king had said give, and he had said I give, and he would not make those words false. Keep the truth, he told the king. Be calm. If the king made him break his word, the sin of the falsehood would fall on the king, and a king ought not to utter what is untrue; and he himself dared not falsify what he had said. The king had come here and asked for the fruit of the recitation, and if he was firm in truth he would take what had been given. Then the Brahmin began to speak of truth itself, and did not stop for a long while. The man given to falsehood, he said, has neither this world nor the next. He cannot rescue his dead ancestors; how will he do good for the children not yet born? Sacrifices and gifts, fasts and religious observances, none of them rescue a person from evil, in this world or the next, as truth does. Every austerity the king had undergone and every one he would undergo for hundreds and thousands of years to come had no power greater than the power of truth.

Truth, the Brahmin said, is the one Brahman that never decays. Truth is the one austerity that never decays, the one sacrifice that never decays, the one Veda that never decays. Truth is awake inside the Vedas, and the fruits that hang on truth are said to be the highest. From truth come dharma and self-restraint. Everything rests on truth. Truth is the Vedas and their branches; truth is knowledge; truth is the ordinance; truth is the keeping of vows and fasts; truth is the first word, Om; truth is the origin of creatures and truth is their offspring. It is by truth that the wind moves, by truth that the sun gives heat, by truth that fire burns, and on truth that heaven rests. Truth is sacrifice, austerity, the Vedas, the chanting of the Samans, the mantras, and Sarasvati herself. It had been heard, he said, that once truth and all religious observances were set on a pair of scales and weighed against each other, and the pan that held truth sank lower. Where dharma is, truth is, and everything grows through truth. “Why do you want to do a thing stained with falsehood?” he asked the king. “Be firm in truth. You said give. Why would you make that word false? If you refuse the fruit of my recitation that I have given you, you will wander the world fallen away from dharma. The one who promises and does not give, and the one who asks and does not accept, are both stained with falsehood. Do not falsify your own words.”

The king held to his order. To fight and to protect his subjects are a kshatriya’s duties, he said, and kshatriyas are known as givers of gifts; how could he take anything from a Brahmin? The Brahmin pointed out that he had never pressed the king to accept anything, and had never gone to his house; the king had come here on his own and asked, so why did he not take? It was at this point that Dharma spoke, to both of them. Let them both know that he was Dharma himself; let there be no dispute between them; let the Brahmin have the reward that belongs to giving and let the king obtain the merit of truth. Then Heaven came, in an embodied form, in person, and said the same: let the dispute end, for the two of them were equal in the merit they had earned. The king would have none of it. He had no use for Heaven; Heaven could go back to the place it had come from, and if this learned Brahmin wished to go there, let him take the rewards the king had won by his own life. The Brahmin answered that in his younger days, through ignorance, he had held out his hand for gifts; now he recited the Gayatri under the vow of abstention, and had done so for a long time, so why was the king tempting him? He would do his own duty. He wanted no share of anything the king had won; he was given to austerity and the study of the Vedas, and he had renounced acceptance. So the king proposed a division. If the Brahmin was really giving him the excellent reward of his recitation, let half of it be the king’s, and let the Brahmin take at the same time half the reward the king had won by his acts. Brahmins are engaged in the duty of acceptance and men of the royal order in the duty of giving; if the Brahmin knew the duties of both orders, let their fruits be made equal. Or, if he did not wish to be the king’s equal, let him take the whole of what the king had won; let him take it, if he wished to show the king any grace.

A sub-tale: While the two of them stood locked like this, two men of very ugly aspect came along, ill dressed, each with an arm over the other’s shoulder, and they were quarreling. “You owe me nothing. I owe you.” “You speak falsely. I do owe you a debt.” They said the king who rules over men was right there, and they brought their heat to him, each asking that neither of them be left stained with sin. One was named Virupa, the other Vikrita. Virupa said he owed his companion the merit of the gift of a cow and wished to pay the debt, and Vikrita refused to take the repayment; Vikrita said Virupa owed him nothing and was speaking a falsehood dressed as truth. So the king asked Virupa to lay out the debt, and he did. Vikrita, in days gone by, had given an auspicious cow to a Brahmin devoted to austerity and Vedic study, for the sake of merit. Virupa had gone to him and begged the reward of that act, and Vikrita, with a pure heart, had given him the reward. Virupa had then done good acts for his own purification: he had bought two brown cows with their calves, both heavy milkers, and given them with proper rites and proper devotion to a poor Brahmin who lived by gleaning fallen grain. Having once accepted the gift from his companion, he now wished to give back twice the reward, right here; which of them, then, was innocent and which guilty? The king told Vikrita to accept what he knew was his due and not delay. Vikrita said that what he had given he had given away; Virupa owed him nothing and could go wherever he liked. The king said that a man ready to give and a man unwilling to take did not seem proper to him, and that Vikrita deserved punishment for it. Vikrita answered that he had made a gift; how could he take it back? If that was guilt, let the king pronounce the punishment. Virupa warned his friend that the king, an upholder of justice, would surely punish him. Vikrita said only that he had given what was his own when he was asked, that he would not take it back, and that Virupa had his leave to go. And when everything else had been settled between the king and the Brahmin, Virupa revealed what the two of them were: they were Desire and Anger, and it was they who had moved the king to act as he had; Time, Dharma, Death, and the two of them had examined everything about the king by producing this friction between him and the Brahmin.

The Brahmin turned back to the king. “You have heard the words of these two,” he said. “Take without scruple what I have pledged to give you.” The king stood for a moment on the edge of it. This matter, he said, was as deep as a pit with no bottom; how would the obstinacy of this reciter end? And if he did not accept what the Brahmin had given, how would he avoid being stained with a great sin? He sent the two disputants on their way, telling them to go, each having won his object, and he said aloud that he had to see that the duties of a king, vested in him, did not come to nothing; it was settled that kings keep the duties laid down for kings, and by his misfortune the duties set for Brahmins had taken hold of his wretched self. The Brahmin pressed him: accept; I owe you; you asked, and I am pledged; and if you refuse, I will curse you. “A curse on kingly duties,” the king said, “if this is where their settled conclusion leads. I will take what you give, and for one reason only, to make the two courses of duty exactly equal.” He held out his hand, the hand that had never before been stretched out to accept a gift, and it was stretched out now for accepting and for giving both. “Give me what you owe me.” The Brahmin said that if he had won any fruit at all by reciting the Gayatri, the king should accept all of it. And the king let drops of water fall on his own palm, the water that seals a gift, and said that he too desired to give, that the Brahmin should accept his gift, and that there should be equality between them. It was then that Virupa told him who the two ugly men had been, and that the king had made his gift in return; let there be equality between him and the Brahmin in the regions of happiness to come, and let him go now, as he chose, to the regions his deeds had won.

That, Bhishma said, was how reciters obtain the fruit of their recitation, and what their end is, and where, and which regions a reciter can win. A reciter of the Gayatri goes to the supreme god Brahman, or he goes to Agni, or he enters the region of Surya. If he sports there in his new and energetic form, then attachment stupefies him and he takes on the attributes of that particular region; the same happens if he goes to Soma, or to Vayu, or to Earth, or to Space, for he dwells in all of these with attachment and shows the attributes that belong to each. If, however, he goes to those regions having freed himself of attachment, and looks with mistrust on the happiness he enjoys there, and wants only That which is supreme and unchanging, then he enters That itself. He reaches the ambrosia of ambrosia, a state free of desire and free of separate consciousness. He becomes Brahman’s own self, out of reach of the pairs of opposites, happy, tranquil, without pain; he reaches that condition, called Brahman, from which there is no return, the One and Immutable. The four means of apprehension fall from him, and the six conditions, and the sixteen attributes; passing beyond even Brahma the Creator, he is absorbed into the One supreme Self. Or, if attachment still moves him and he does not want absorption, if he wants a separate existence that depends on that supreme cause of everything, then every wish he cherishes is fulfilled. Or, if he looks with aversion on all those regions of happiness that were called hells, then, driving off desire and free of everything, he enjoys supreme happiness in those very regions. Bhishma had told the whole of it, he said; what else did Yudhishthira wish to hear?

Yudhishthira wanted the rest: what reply the Brahmin and the king gave Virupa when he had finished, which of the ends just described they reached, what they said to each other, and what they did there. Bhishma went on. The Brahmin said, “Let it be as you have said,” and he honored Dharma and Yama and Time and Death and Heaven, every one of whom deserved it, and bent his head to all the foremost Brahmins who had gathered there. Then he spoke to the king. “Endowed with the reward of my recitation, royal sage, rise to a position of eminence. With your leave I will set myself to my recitations again. The goddess Savitri gave me a boon: let your devotion to recitation be unbroken.” The king answered that if the Brahmin’s success had been made fruitless by his giving its fruit away, and if his heart was set on beginning again, then let the Brahmin go half and half with him, and let the reward of the recitations be his own again. The Brahmin said the king had made strenuous efforts before all these witnesses to make him a sharer in what the king’s own acts had earned; let them then become equal in their rewards, and go to receive the end that was theirs.

They had resolved on it, and the resolve was known. The chief of the gods came to that spot with the deities and the guardians of the quarters. The Sadhyas came, and the Vishvas, and the mantras in their own persons, and music of many kinds, loud and sweet; the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the sacred waters; the austerities and the ordinances of yoga; the Vedas and the sounds that go with the singing of the Samans; Sarasvati, Narada, Parvata, Vishvavasu, the Hahas and the Huhus, the gandharva Chitrasena with every member of his family, the Nagas, the Sadhyas, the munis, the god of gods Prajapati, and Vishnu himself, thousand-headed and past conceiving. Drums and trumpets were beaten and blown in the sky. Celestial flowers rained on the two of them. Bands of apsaras danced all around. And Heaven came, in an embodied form, and said to the Brahmin, “You have attained success. You are highly blessed.” Then to the king: “You also have attained success.”

Then the two of them, who had done each other good, withdrew their senses from the objects of the world. They fixed the five breaths, prana, apana, samana, udana, and vyana, in the heart, and concentrated the mind on prana and apana joined together. They set the two joined breaths in the abdomen, turned their gaze to the tip of the nose, and then to the place just below the brows, and by the mind’s help they held the two breaths in the spot between the brows, bringing them there very slowly. Their bodies were perfectly still; they were absorbed, their gaze fixed. Masters of their souls, they set the soul within the brain. And then a flame of great splendor broke through the crown of the Brahmin’s head and went up toward heaven. Cries of grief rose from every creature on every side. And that splendor, its praises sung by all who were there, entered into Brahma.

The great grandfather came forward to meet it. The splendor had taken a form about a span tall, the width of a spread hand, and Brahma said to it, “Welcome.” Then he said something for everyone assembled to hear. Reciters, he said, come to the same end as yogis. The end a yogi reaches is a thing all of these gods can see directly with their own eyes; for reciters there is this one distinction, that the honor is ordained for them of Brahma himself advancing to receive them when they leave the earth. “Dwell in me,” he said, and he breathed consciousness back into that splendor, and the Brahmin, freed of every anxiety, entered the mouth of the Creator. King Ikshvaku, in the same way, entered the divine grandfather after the chief of the Brahmins.

The assembled deities saluted the Self-born. A very high end, they said, is ordained for reciters; this exertion Brahma had shown was for the reciters’ sake, and they themselves had come only to watch it. He had made these two equal, given them equal honor, and given them an equal end. The high end reserved for yogis and for reciters alike they had seen with their own eyes that day, and those two could now cross beyond every region and go wherever they wished. Brahma answered them. Whoever reads the great Smriti, which is the Veda, and whoever reads the other auspicious Smritis that follow it, Manu’s and the rest, would reach the same region as he had; and whoever gave himself to yoga would, without any doubt, win his regions after death in the same way. He was going; let them all go to their places and their ends. With that the first of the gods vanished where he stood. The deities, who had taken his leave, went back to their several abodes, and all those great beings honored Dharma and walked behind him, glad at heart. That, Bhishma said, is the reward of reciters and their end, as he himself had heard it; what else did Yudhishthira wish to know?

A key to reading this (lineage and characters): Ikshvaku is named in this telling as the son of Surya, the sun, and called a royal sage, a king whose austerity is counted with a sage’s. Savitri is the goddess of the Gayatri mantra itself; Bhishma calls her the mother of the Vedas, and it is her boon, that the Brahmin’s love of recitation should never break, that makes him refuse heaven when Dharma offers it. Virupa and Vikrita, the two ugly disputants, are Desire and Anger, sent with Time, Dharma, and Death to test the king by friction. The five breaths, prana, apana, samana, udana, and vyana, are the five divisions of the body’s life force; drawing them in turn to the heart, the tip of the nose, and the point between the brows is the yogi’s way of leaving the body, and both men leave it that way, together.

The gist: A Brahmin of Kushika’s line recites the Gayatri for a thousand years, wins Savitri’s boon, and then refuses to die even when Dharma, Yama, Time, and Death stand in front of him, because recitation is all the joy he wants. King Ikshvaku arrives, asks for the fruit of the recitation as a way of not asking for a gift, and is caught when the Brahmin gives it and cannot say what it is; each man’s dharma forbids what the other’s requires. Desire and Anger, in disguise, bring the same knot of giving and refusing before the king as a case to judge. He takes, he gives back with water on his palm, and the two men, made equal, leave their bodies by yoga and are received by Brahma himself, who declares that the reciter’s end and the yogi’s end are one.

Manu and Brihaspati: The Debate of Knowledge and Action

Yudhishthira’s next question had three parts. What are the fruits of the yoga that consists of knowledge, of all the Vedas, and of the various observances and vows? And how is the soul of a living creature to be known? Bhishma answered with the old account of a conversation between Manu, the lord of creatures, and the great rishi Brihaspati. Long ago Brihaspati, greatest of the celestial rishis and Manu’s own disciple, bowed to his teacher, the first of all creatures, and laid his questions before him. What is the cause of the universe? From where did the ordinances of sacrifice and the other pious observances flow? What are the fruits the learned say belong to knowledge? What is it that even the Vedas have not been able to reveal? What are those fruits that eminent men versed in the science of wealth, in the Vedas, and in the mantras adore through sacrifices and abundant gifts of cows; where do they come from, and where are they to be found? And the old history: from what did the earth and all earthly things, the wind, the sky, the creatures of the water, water itself, heaven and the dwellers in heaven, all spring? A man’s inclinations bend toward whatever he seeks to know, Brihaspati said, and he had no knowledge of that ancient and supreme One; how was he to rescue himself from a false show of inclination toward Him? He had studied the Riks, all the Samans and Yajuses, meter, astronomy, etymology, grammar, the rules of the rite, and phonetics, and he still had no knowledge of the nature of the great elements that enter into the making of everything. He asked Manu to answer with simple assertions and plain distinctions: what the fruits of knowledge are, what fruits belong to sacrifice and the other rites, and how an embodied being leaves one body and comes to another.

Manu began where every religious act begins. What is agreeable to a person is called his happiness, he said, and what is disagreeable is called his misery. “By this I will gain happiness and keep off misery”: from a sentiment of that shape flow all religious acts. The effort toward knowledge rises from a different sentiment, the wish to be free of both happiness and misery at once. The ordinances about sacrifices and the rest of the observances found in the Vedas are all tied to desire; the one who frees himself of desire is the one who reaches Brahman. And the man who, out of a desire to win happiness, walks the many paths of action goes to hell.

Brihaspati made the case for action. A man’s aspirations, he said, concern the gaining of the agreeable, which ends in happiness, and the avoiding of the disagreeable, which brings misery; and both the gaining and the avoiding are accomplished by acts. Manu accepted the description and turned it. It is by freeing oneself from acts that one enters Brahman, he said, and the ordinances about acts have flowed for that very end. Those ordinances tempt only the man whose heart is not yet free of desire. By freeing himself from acts a man reaches the highest state; the one who wants happiness and takes up religious rites is purified by acts whose object is the purification of the soul, and wins great splendor at the last; and by freeing himself from acts he reaches the highest end of all, Brahman, which stands far above anything acts can give. Creatures have all been created by mind and by act, and those two are the two best paths, adored by everyone. Outward acts produce fruits, some transitory and some lasting, and for the lasting ones there is no other means than the mind’s abandonment of fruit.

Then Manu showed what knowledge is worth, with the plainest of comparisons. When the night passes and the veil of darkness is lifted from it, the eye leads its owner by its own power; and the buddhi, once it has knowledge in it, sees every evil that ought to be avoided in the same way. Snakes, the sharp blades of kusha grass, pits: men avoid these when they see them lying in the road. Those who tread on them or fall in do so through ignorance. That, he said, is the superiority of the fruits of knowledge over the fruits of ignorance. He counted the acts that bear fruit, and there were five: mantras rightly applied, sacrifices, the presents called dakshina, the gift of food, and concentration of the mind for divine contemplation; there are no others. Acts have the three qualities for their soul; the Vedas say so, and since the Vedas consist of mantras and acts are done with mantras, the mantras and the ritual carry the same three qualities. The fruit of an act depends on the mind, and it is the embodied creature who enjoys it. Every excellent kind of sound, form, taste, touch, and scent is the fruit of acts, to be had in the region of acts, which is heaven; the fruits of knowledge a man gains here, before death. What is done with the body is enjoyed in a bodily state; what is done with words, in a state where words can be spoken; what is done with the mind, in a state not yet free of the mind. Whatever kind of act a man greedy for fruit performs, the fruit he gets takes its character from the act, and the acts of a past life come to their doer the way fish come up against a current, so that the embodied creature feels happiness for its good acts and misery for its evil ones.

And then Manu turned to the One he had been asked about, the One from whom this universe sprang, whom persons of cleansed soul know and by knowing pass beyond this world, whom no Vedic mantra and no word has expressed. He would indicate it, he said; let Brihaspati listen to the highest of the high. It is free of every kind of taste and scent, of sound and touch and form. The senses cannot grasp it. It is unmanifest, without color, the One, and it has created the five kinds of objects for its creatures. It is neither female nor male nor of the third sex. It is neither existent nor non-existent nor existent-and-non-existent. Only those who know Brahman see it, and it knows no direction.

A key to reading this (shreya and preya): The argument between teacher and disciple turns on two things a person can want: the pleasant, which Manu defines as whatever is agreeable and which every religious act pursues, and the beneficial, which is the freedom from both happiness and misery that knowledge alone pursues. Brihaspati speaks for action, because gaining and avoiding are done by acts; Manu grants him that and answers that the ordinances of action exist so that a man may outgrow them, purifying himself by rites whose object is the soul until he can let the fruit go and enter Brahman, which lies above anything an act can earn.

The Nature of the Atman: The Parable of the Moon and Rahu

Manu set out the order of creation. From that eternal One that never decays came space first; from space came wind; from wind came light; from light came water; from water sprang the universe, and from the universe everything that occurs within it. At their dissolution the bodies of all earthly things go back the same way, first into water, then into light, then into wind, then into space, and those who seek release do not have to come back from space at all: they reach Brahman. And Brahman, the refuge of the released, is neither hot nor cold, neither mild nor fierce, neither sour nor astringent, neither sweet nor bitter. It has no sound, no scent, no form. It passes beyond all of these and beyond everything, and it has no dimensions.

The skin perceives touch, Manu went on, the tongue taste, the nose scent, the ear sound, the eye form, and men who know nothing of adhyatma, the science of the self within, never see past these. Only by withdrawing the tongue from tastes, the nose from scents, the ear from sounds, and the eye from forms does a person come to see his own self, standing apart from the senses and the mind and the qualities. That which is the cause of the doer, of the act, of the material the act is done with, of the place and the time, and of the leanings toward happiness and misery, is called the Self. That which pervades everything and does everything in the shapes of living creatures, which exists in the universe as the mantras declare, which is the cause of all, highest of the high, one without a second, is the Cause, and all else is effect. Then he explained why the Self is not seen. Good and evil results born of a man’s own acts live together in his body, apparently at odds and in fact in harmony, and knowledge dwells in the body the same way. As a lighted lamp reveals the objects in front of it, the five senses, like lamps set high in trees, find their objects when knowledge lights them; as a king’s ministers meet and counsel him, the five senses of the body all serve knowledge, which stands above them. Bodies come and go the way flames and winds and sunbeams and river water come and go, over and over. A man who takes an axe and splits a piece of wood finds no smoke and no fire inside it, and a man who cuts open another man’s arms and feet and stomach finds no principle of knowledge there, since it has nothing in common with arms and feet and stomach. Yet rub one piece of wood against another and both smoke and fire appear; and a person of well-directed wisdom, joining the senses and the soul by means of yoga, sees the supreme Self, which exists in its own nature. And as in a dream a man sees his own body lying on the ground, a thing distinct from himself, so a person furnished with the five senses, the mind, and the buddhi looks, after death, at his own body and passes from it into another form.

The Self, Manu said, is not subject to birth or growth, to decay or destruction. Because the acts of a life carry their effects with them, the soul that is clothed in a body passes from that body, when it loses its animation, into another, and no one sees it go. No eye sees the soul’s form; no hand touches it; with the senses it does no act, and the senses never approach it, and yet it apprehends them all. He gave an image for the confusion. Set a thing before a blazing fire and it takes on a color from the light and heat working on it, though nothing else about it changes; the soul’s form, in the same way, seems to take its color from the body. So a man casts off one body and enters another with no one to see. He gives the body back to the five great elements and takes a form made of those same five elements, and as he leaves, every part of his body goes to the element of its own nature, into space, wind, fire, water, and earth. The senses, which had drawn their powers from the five elements, go back into them too: hearing into space, scent into earth, form, which is the eye’s property, into light, taste into water, and touch into wind. The five attributes, sound and the rest, live in the five elements; the five objects of sense live in the five senses; all of them follow the lead of the mind; the mind follows the buddhi; and the buddhi follows That which exists in its own true and undefiled nature. The doer receives, in his new body, all the good and bad acts done in the old one and in the lives before it, and all of them follow the mind the way water creatures ride a favorable current. A thing that moves quickly and restlessly is still seen; a mirror shows a person the face he could never otherwise see. In the same way the soul, subtle and invisible, becomes an object the buddhi can apprehend.

The mind, joined to the senses, recalls after a long time the impressions of things it took in long ago; and when the senses are all suspended, the Supreme, in the form of the buddhi, exists in its own true nature, holding all those objects before it at once, gathered from every side without regard to their order in time, so that it wanders among things that do not belong together. It is the witness, and the soul encased in the body is therefore something with an existence of its own. There is rajas, there is tamas, and there is sattva, the third; there are three states of the buddhi, waking, dreaming, and sound sleep; and the soul knows the contradictory pleasures and pains of all three. It enters the senses the way wind enters the fire in a piece of wood. No eye sees its form, no touch takes hold of it, no ear catches it; it may be seen with the help of the Vedas and the instructions of the wise, and whichever sense apprehends it stops, in that apprehension, being a sense at all. Then Manu gave his reasons why an unseen thing is not therefore an absent thing. No one has seen the far side of the Himavat mountains or the back of the moon’s disc, and no one says they do not exist; so no one can say the soul, subtle, dwelling in every creature, made of knowledge, does not exist because the senses never catch it. People see the world reflected on the moon’s disc as spots and do not know that it is the world they are seeing, and that is how knowledge of the soul stands: it must come of itself, since the soul depends only on the soul. The sun’s motion cannot be seen, and still men watch it rise and set and conclude that it moves; so the wise see the soul by the lamp of the buddhi, though it is far off, and work to merge the five elements, which are near, into Brahman. Nothing is done without means: fishermen take fish with nets, animals are caught by animals, birds by birds, elephants by elephants, and the soul is caught by the principle of knowledge. Only a snake sees a snake’s legs, and only through knowledge does a person see the soul in its subtle form inside the gross body; the senses cannot know the senses, and bare intelligence, however high, cannot see the supreme soul. Then came the moon. On the fifteenth night of the dark fortnight the moon cannot be seen, because its form is hidden, and no one says the moon has been destroyed; the soul in the body is like that. The moon’s gross body becomes invisible that night, and the soul released from the body likewise cannot be apprehended; and as the moon, gaining another point in the sky, begins to shine again, the soul, obtaining a new body, shows itself again. The moon’s birth, growth, and disappearance are all plain to the eye, and they belong to its gross form, which the soul does not share. The moon that reappears is taken to be the same moon that vanished, and a person, through birth and growth and age, is taken to be the same person without any doubt. No one clearly sees how Rahu comes to the moon and leaves it, and no one sees how the soul leaves one body and enters another. Rahu is visible only while he is with the sun or the moon, and the soul is apprehended only while it is with a body; freed of them, neither can be seen. And even on the night of its disappearance the moon is not deserted by the constellations and the stars; the soul, parted from the body, is not deserted by the fruits of the acts it did in that body.

A key to reading this (the concept): Manu is answering one question in three ways: how can something that no sense has ever caught be real? Fire lies unseen in wood until two pieces are rubbed; the moon on the dark night is hidden and not destroyed; Rahu, who comes to the moon and leaves it, is seen only while he is with the sun or the moon. Being unseen and being absent are two different things, and the soul is the standing case of it. The dispersal of the senses back into the five elements at death makes the other half of the point: the body is a meeting of elements that will part again, and what watches the parting is made of none of them.

The gist: Creation descends from the imperishable One through space, wind, light, and water to the world, and at dissolution climbs back the same stair; those who seek release do not return from space. The soul cannot be grasped by any sense, and it is real all the same: hidden in the body as fire hides in wood, invisible as the moon on the dark night, unseen in its passage as Rahu is unseen in his. At death each element and each sense goes back to its own kind, the soul takes a new form, and the fruit of its acts goes with it as the stars stay with the vanished moon.

Mind, Buddhi, and the Cure for Grief

Manu went on to the sleeping and the waking. As in a dream this manifest body lies inactive while the enlivening spirit, in its subtle form, detaches itself and walks abroad, so in the state called deep slumber the subtle form with all the senses lies inactive while the buddhi, detached from it, remains awake; and existence and non-existence stand in the same relation. When a body of water is clear, the eye sees the images reflected in it, and when the senses are unperturbed the buddhi can see the soul; stir the water and the images are gone, and perturb the senses and the soul is gone from the buddhi’s sight. Ignorance breeds delusion; delusion works on the mind; when the mind is spoiled, the five senses that depend on it are spoiled too, and a man full of ignorance and sunk in the mire of objects tastes neither contentment nor tranquility. His soul, still bound to its good and evil acts, keeps returning to the objects of the world, and his thirst is never slaked while his sin lasts, since attachment feeds on itself and makes him want the wrong things. When all sinful deeds are destroyed, knowledge arises, and with it a man sees his soul in his buddhi as he sees his own face in a polished mirror. Unrestrained senses bring misery and restrained ones bring happiness, so a man should hold his mind back, by his own effort, from the objects the senses reach for. Then Manu set the ladder in order. Above the senses is the mind; above the mind, the buddhi; above the buddhi, the soul; above the soul, the Supreme, which is also called the Great. From the unmanifest came the soul, from the soul the buddhi, from the buddhi the mind, and when the mind takes up with the senses it apprehends sound and the other objects. Whoever casts off those objects, and everything manifest with them, and frees himself of all that arises from primordial matter, enjoys immortality.

Then Manu came to sorrow, and what he said might have been addressed to the man listening at Bhishma’s side. When sorrow of body or of mind appears, he said, a person cannot practice yoga; so he should not brood on it. The remedy for sorrow is to stop dwelling on it, because sorrow that is brooded over comes on aggressively and grows in violence. Mental sorrow is to be relieved by wisdom and bodily sorrow cured by medicines; that is what wisdom teaches, and a man under sorrow should not behave like a child. The man of wisdom never cherishes a desire for youth, for beauty, for length of life, for stored wealth, for health, or for the company of those he loves, because all of these are passing. To a man content with the objects of the senses, death, which he does not want, comes in the middle of his stupefaction.

For a sorrow that falls on a whole community, Manu said, no one should grieve alone; without grieving, if an opening appears, one should try a remedy. He was plain about the proportions: in this life the measure of sorrow is far greater than the measure of happiness. The man who steers clear of both sorrow and happiness comes to Brahman, and such men, being wise, never have to grieve. Worldly possessions bring sorrow. Guarding them gives no happiness, and they are earned with misery, so their loss is nothing to grieve over.

Manu set out the way to Brahman through the buddhi. Pure knowledge, which is Brahman, is taken by ignorance to exist in the many forms that are its objects; the mind is only an attribute of knowledge, and when the mind unites with the faculties of knowing, the buddhi, which gives things their shapes, sets to work. When that buddhi, freed of the attributes of action and drawn back from outward objects, turns toward the mind, then, in the absorption that ends in samadhi, it comes to know Brahman. Left to ignorance, full of senses and attributes, it runs toward outer objects the way a river pours off a mountain summit toward other lands; withdrawn into the mind and absorbed in contemplation of what has no attributes, it reaches the knowledge of Brahman the way a touchstone reveals gold. The mind, which grasps the objects of the senses, must first be extinguished, since a mind fed on the attributes in front of it can never show what has no attributes. Shut all the doors that the senses are, withdraw the buddhi into the mind, and absorbed there it reaches the knowledge of Brahman. As the five great elements, when the attributes by which they are known are destroyed, withdraw into their subtle form, so the buddhi may dwell in the mind alone with every sense drawn off its object; and as long as it dwells there, busy with the inner, it is still only mind. When that consciousness, refined by contemplation, learns to tell the attributes from what seems to own them, it can drop every attribute and reach Brahman, which has none. No sign is fit to yield knowledge of the unmanifest, and what cannot be put into language cannot be acquired by anyone; with a cleansed soul one approaches the supreme Brahman through austerity, inference, self-restraint, the observances of one’s own order, and the Vedas, and those of clear sight, having found it within, seek it in outer forms too by freeing themselves of attributes. Argument never catches what is called the Knowable. A buddhi free of attributes reaches Brahman; one still bound to them falls back, because it is the buddhi’s nature to rush at attributes and move among them like fire among fuel. As in sushupti, deep and dreamless sleep, the five senses exist freed of their functions, so the supreme Brahman exists high above prakriti, freed of all its attributes. Embodied creatures act because of the attributes, and when they cease to act they win release; some, by action, go to heaven. The living creature, primordial nature, the buddhi, the objects, the senses, consciousness, and the conviction of a personal self are all called creatures, since all of them are subject to destruction; their first creation flowed from the Supreme, and every creation after that comes from the union of pairs, bound by the law that each species produces its own. From dharma creatures win a high end and from sin a low one; the one not yet free of attachment meets rebirth, and the one who is free of it reaches knowledge.

A key to reading this (the cure for grief): Bhishma is relaying Manu’s rule to a listener who needs it: Yudhishthira came to the bed of arrows sick with grief for the war he had won. Sorrow, Manu says, grows by being turned over; the mind’s sorrow is answered with wisdom and the body’s with medicine, and a man in grief should not act like a child, nor pine for youth, beauty, wealth, health, or the company of the people he loves, since none of it stays. A grief shared by a whole people is to be met with a remedy, if one appears, and never with private mourning. Sushupti, at the close, is deep dreamless sleep, in which the senses lie idle; Manu uses it as the nearest picture of Brahman resting above prakriti with none of its attributes at work.

The gist: The ladder runs from the senses to the mind, from the mind to the buddhi, from the buddhi to the soul, and from the soul to the Supreme. Sorrow swells when it is brooded over; wisdom answers the mind’s sorrow, medicine the body’s, and the man who has stepped past both happiness and sorrow reaches Brahman. The buddhi, drawn back from objects and gathered into the mind, knows Brahman as a touchstone knows gold.

From Action to Knowledge, and Vishnu Beyond Time

Manu explained why one man’s knowledge and another’s are so unlike, with a thread. When the five attributes are joined with the five senses and the mind, Brahman is seen by the embodied soul as a thread is seen running through a gem; and as a thread may lie inside gold or pearl or coral or a bead of clay, so a soul, because of its own acts, may live inside a cow, a horse, a man, an elephant, a worm, or an insect. The good a person does in one body yields rewards enjoyed in that body. A soil drenched with a single kind of water feeds each herb that grows in it the juice that herb needs; so the buddhi, whose course the soul witnesses, has to follow the path the acts of former lives have marked. Then he gave the chain. From knowledge springs desire; from desire, resolution; from resolution, action; from action, fruit. Fruit therefore rests on action as its cause, action rests on the buddhi, the buddhi rests on knowledge, and knowledge rests on the soul. The excellent result that comes when knowledge, fruit, buddhi, and act are all destroyed is called the knowledge of Brahman. Great and high is that self-existent essence which the yogis see; the unwise, whose minds are given to possessions, never see what lies in the soul itself. And he set out the gradation of things. Water is greater than earth in extent; light greater than water; wind greater than light; space greater than wind; mind greater than space; buddhi greater than mind; Time greater than buddhi. And greater than Time is the divine Vishnu, whose this whole universe is. That god has no beginning, no middle, and no end, and because of that he is unchangeable, and he passes beyond all sorrow, for sorrow has limits.

That Vishnu, Manu said, has been called the supreme Brahman; he is the refuge of what is called the Highest. Those who know him, wise and freed from everything that owns the power of Time, reach what is called release. Everything we perceive is displayed in attributes, and Brahman, having none, is above all of it. Abstention from acts is the highest religion, and that religion leads surely to deathlessness. The Riks, the Yajuses, and the Samans have the body for their refuge; they flow from the tip of the tongue; they cannot be won without effort, and they are subject to destruction. Brahman is not won that way, because it depends on nothing bodily, only on the knower whose refuge the body is; without beginning, middle, or end, it cannot be earned by exertion the way the Vedas are earned. The Riks, the Samans, and the Yajuses each have a beginning, and what has a beginning has an end; Brahman is said to have no beginning, and having neither beginning nor end it is called infinite and unchangeable, and by its unchangeableness it stands past all sorrow and past every pair of opposites. Mortals fail to see the road to it through unfavorable destiny, through failing to find the means, and through the obstructions their own acts raise; through attachment to possessions, through a glimpse of the joys of the highest heaven, through wanting anything other than Brahman, men do not reach the Supreme. Some see worldly objects and want them, and wanting them they have no longing for Brahman, which is above all attributes; and how should a man attached to inferior attributes arrive at knowledge of what carries the superior ones? By inference one reaches knowledge of Him who passes beyond all of this in attribute and in form; by subtle intelligence alone can he be known; words cannot describe him. Mind is seized by mind, eye by eye. Knowledge purifies the buddhi of its dross, the buddhi is used to purify the mind, the mind controls the senses, and with all of that done a person may reach the Unchangeable. The one whom contemplation has freed from attachments, and whom a discerning mind has enriched, reaches Brahman, which is without desire and above every attribute.

Manu closed with a set of images. As the wind keeps away from the fire that lies buried in a piece of wood, so people agitated by desire for possessions keep away from the Supreme. When every earthly object has been destroyed the mind reaches what is higher than the buddhi; when they are merely set aside, it gets what is lower. The person who works in the manner described at destroying earthly objects is absorbed into the body of Brahman. The soul is unmanifest, and when it is clothed in qualities its acts turn unmanifest too, and when the body dissolves it becomes manifest once more. The soul in truth does nothing; it exists joined to the senses that produce happiness or sorrow, and joined to all of them and furnished with a body, it takes refuge in the five elements, and when the Supreme and Unchangeable withdraws its force from it, it has no power to act at all. No man sees the end of the earth, and every man knows the earth’s end will come. A man tossed by attachments is still carried at last to his final refuge, as the wind carries a vessel tossed on the sea into a safe harbor in the end. The sun, spreading its rays, becomes the possessor of an attribute, the lighter of the world; withdrawing them at the hour of setting, it becomes a thing without attributes again. In the same way a person who abandons every distinction and takes up austerity enters at last the indestructible Brahman that has no attributes. And by discerning Him who has no birth, who is the highest refuge of all righteous persons, self-born, from whom everything springs and to whom everything returns, unchangeable, without beginning, middle, or end, certainty itself and supreme, a person reaches immortality.

A key to reading this (beyond time): Manu’s gradation puts Time (kala) above even the buddhi, and then names Vishnu as greater than Time, because Vishnu has no beginning, middle, or end and Time measures only things that do. In the same breath he calls that Vishnu the supreme Brahman, the one refuge of the Highest. The sun that is a bearer of attributes while its rays are out and free of them when it draws them in is Manu’s picture of the person, who sheds attachment the way the sun sheds light at evening and enters the Brahman that has no attributes at all.

The gist: Knowledge, desire, resolve, action, and fruit make one chain, and the knowledge of Brahman is what remains when the chain is broken. In the ascent of things, water, light, wind, space, mind, buddhi, and Time each outrank the last, and Vishnu, without beginning or end, outranks Time; he is the supreme Brahman. The Vedas have a beginning and therefore an end; Brahman has neither. Abstention from acts is the highest religion, and it leads to deathlessness.

Krishna-Narayana: the source of creation and the boar avatar

Yudhishthira wanted to hear in full of the lotus-eyed and indestructible one, the maker of everything who was made by no one, who is called Vishnu because he pervades all things, from whom all creatures come and to whom they go back, who bears the names Narayana, Hrishikesha, Govinda, and Keshava, and whom no one has ever defeated. Bhishma said he had heard this matter discoursed on by Rama the son of Jamadagni, by the celestial rishi Narada, and by Krishna-Dvaipayana Vyasa; and Asita-Devala, Valmiki of the hard austerities, and Markandeya all spoke of Govinda as the most wonderful and the supreme. Keshava is the divine and mighty lord of all, he said. He is called Purusha, and he pervades everything, having made himself many. Yudhishthira should listen now to the attributes the great Brahmins say are found in the wielder of the bow Sharnga, and to the acts that people versed in the old histories ascribe to Govinda.

He is said to be the soul of every creature, the great-souled one, the first of beings. He created by his will the five elements, wind, light, water, space, and earth, and having made the earth, that lord of all things laid himself down on the surface of the waters. Floating there, that refuge of every kind of energy and splendor created Consciousness, the firstborn of the universe, the ground on which every created thing rests, and, as Bhishma had heard it, the mind along with it; that Consciousness holds up all creatures and the past and the future both. After Consciousness had sprung, a lotus of surpassing beauty, bright as the sun, grew out of the navel of the Supreme Being as he lay on the water, and from that lotus the illustrious and divine Brahma, grandfather of all creatures, sprang into existence, lighting every point of the horizon with his radiance.

Brahma had scarcely risen from the primeval lotus when a great asura named Madhu, having no beginning, started into birth out of the quality of darkness, tamas, and set himself at once to a fierce deed, the killing of the grandfather. For Brahma’s sake the supreme divinity killed that fierce asura of fierce deeds while he was still at it, and from that killing the gods, the Danavas, and men all came to call the best of righteous beings Madhusudana, the slayer of Madhu.

After this Brahma created seven sons by an act of his will, with Daksha completing the count: Marichi, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu, and Daksha. The eldest, Marichi, begot by his will a son named Kashyapa, full of energy and first among those who know Brahman. Daksha himself Brahma had created from his toe, even before Marichi was born, to be the progenitor of creatures. To Daksha were born first thirteen daughters, the eldest of whom was Diti, and Marichi’s son Kashyapa, who knew every duty and its distinctions, a man of righteous deeds and great fame, became the husband of all thirteen. Daksha then begot ten more daughters and bestowed them on Dharma, and Dharma became the father of the Vasus, of the Rudras of immeasurable energy, of the Vishvedevas, the Sadhyas, and the Maruts. Daksha begot twenty-seven daughters more, younger still, and the highly blessed Soma married them all. Kashyapa’s other wives gave birth to the gandharvas, to horses, birds, and cattle, to the kimpurushas, to fishes, and to the trees and plants. Aditi bore the Adityas, chief among the gods and of great strength, and among them Vishnu took birth in the form of a dwarf; called Govinda, he became the foremost of them all, and by his prowess the prosperity of the gods increased and the Danavas were defeated. Diti’s offspring were the Asuras, all of great strength, and Danu gave birth to the Danavas, with Viprachitti at their head.

The slayer of Madhu also made the day and the night, the seasons in their order, and the morning and the evening. After reflection he made the clouds and everything that moves or stays still, the Vishvas and the earth with all that is on her. Then Krishna, highly blessed and mighty, created a hundred foremost Brahmins from his mouth, a hundred kshatriyas from his two arms, a hundred vaishyas from his thighs, and from his two feet a hundred shudras. Having made the four orders of men, that master of austerity made Dhatri, who is Brahma, lord and ruler of all created beings, and Brahma of immeasurable radiance became the expounder of the knowledge of the Vedas. Keshava made Virupaksha ruler of the spirits and ghosts and of the female beings called the Mothers. He made Yama ruler of the ancestors and of all sinful men. The supreme soul of all creatures made Kubera lord of every treasure, made Varuna lord of the waters and governor of everything that lives in them, and set Vasava, who is Indra, over the gods as their chief. In those days men lived as long as they chose and had no fear of Yama. No union of the sexes was needed to continue the race; children were begotten by an act of will alone. In the age that followed, the Treta, children were begotten by touch alone, and the people of that age were still above the need of union. It was in the next age, the Dvapara, that the practice of union arose and spread among men, and in the Kali age men have come to marry and live in pairs.

So this universe was set going by the great-souled Krishna, Bhishma said, and the celestial rishi Narada, who watches every world, has said that Krishna is the supreme God; even Narada admits his supremacy and his eternity. Such is Keshava, whose prowess no one has overcome. The lotus-eyed one is more than a man. He is beyond conceiving.

A sub-tale: Yudhishthira wanted to know why that mighty one had ever taken the form of an animal, and for what deed. Bhishma answered with something he had heard himself. Once, out hunting, he had come to the hermitage of Markandeya, where ascetics of many kinds sat by the thousands; the rishis honored him with honey and curds, he saluted them in return, and there the great rishi Kashyapa told this account. In former days the principal Danavas, full of anger and greed, mighty Asuras by the hundreds, drunk with their own strength, and countless other Danavas whom no one could defeat in battle grew bitterly jealous of the gods’ unrivaled prosperity, and the gods and the celestial rishis, oppressed by them and unable to find peace, fled in every direction. From heaven the earth could be seen in sore distress: covered with huge Danavas of terrible aspect, she seemed crushed under a weight, downcast and grief-stricken, as if she were going down into the depths beneath her. The Adityas, frightened, went to Brahma and asked how they were to go on bearing the Danavas’ oppression, and the Self-born told them that he had already ordained what was to be done. Those senseless wretches, swollen with boons and might and pride, did not know that Vishnu of the invisible form, whom the gods all acting together could never defeat, had taken the form of a boar; he would rush to the place where the Danavas dwelt by the thousands beneath the earth and kill them all. The gods rejoiced. Some time later Vishnu of mighty energy, in the body of a boar, went down into the nether regions and charged the sons of Diti. The Daityas, stupefied by Time, saw that strange creature, gathered together, surrounded it, seized it all at once, and in their rage tried to drag it from every side; and those huge-bodied Danavas, with all their energy and swelling strength, could not do anything to that boar. They wondered at it, and then fear took them, and in their thousands they understood that their last hour had come. Then that supreme god of all the gods, whose soul is yoga and whose companion is yoga, became rapt in yoga and began to roar. The roars shook the Daityas and Danavas; every world and all ten directions rang with them, every creature was frightened, the gods with Indra at their head were terror-struck, and the whole universe went still in that dreadful time, every moving and unmoving thing stunned by the sound. The Danavas, paralyzed by Vishnu’s energy, fell down lifeless, and the boar pierced those enemies of the gods with its hooves and tore their flesh, fat, and bone. Because of those roars Vishnu came to be called Sanatana, the eternal; he is also called Padmanabha, the lotus-naveled; he is the foremost of yogis, the teacher of all creatures and their supreme lord. Every tribe of the gods went to the grandfather and asked what noise that was, whose sound had stupefied the universe and stripped gods and Danavas alike of their senses, while Vishnu in his boar’s form stood in sight of them all with the great rishis singing his praises. Brahma told them: that was the supreme God, the creator and soul of all beings, the first of yogis, huge of body and great of strength, come back from killing the greatest of the Danavas, the master of yoga and the great ascetic. “Be still, all of you,” he said. “He is Krishna, the destroyer of every obstacle.” Having done a feat no one else could do, that god of immeasurable splendor had returned to his own unmixed nature; from his navel the primeval lotus had sprung; there was no need for sorrow or fear or grief. He is the Ordainer, the creating principle, all-destroying Time, the upholder of the world; the roars that had alarmed them were his; that lotus-eyed one, who never decays, is the origin of all beings and their lord.

A key to reading this (lineage and number): Bhishma counts Brahma’s seven sons twice in these sections and closes the list two ways: here, with Marichi, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu, and Daksha, whom Brahma made from his toe before Marichi was born; in the next section, with Vasishtha in Daksha’s place, as the Puranas name them. The four ages descend in the manner of begetting: by will alone in the first age, by touch in the Treta, by union in the Dvapara, and by marriage in the Kali, each a step further from the first men who lived as long as they chose. The boar in Kashyapa’s account does its work underneath the earth, killing the Danavas who had settled there by the thousands and whose weight was pressing her down; its roar, which stills the whole universe, is the reason Vishnu carries the name Sanatana.

The gist: Krishna-Narayana is the root of everything: he makes the elements, lies down on the waters, brings forth Consciousness and the mind, and from his navel rises the lotus that bears Brahma. He kills the asura Madhu as it attacks the grandfather. Brahma’s seven sons, Daksha’s daughters, Kashyapa’s wives, and Dharma’s and Soma’s brides fill the worlds with gods, Asuras, Danavas, and every kind of creature; the four orders of men come from Krishna’s own body, and the first age gives way to the Treta, the Dvapara, and the Kali. As a boar he goes beneath the earth and roars the Danavas dead. Narada himself says that Krishna is the supreme God, past all conceiving.

The Prajapatis, the seven seers, and a guru and disciple on liberation

Yudhishthira wanted the beginning of things laid out plainly: who were the first Prajapatis, the lords of creatures, and which of the great rishis lived on which point of the compass? Bhishma took him back to the start. At first there was one Eternal, Divine, Self-born Brahma, who begot seven illustrious sons, Marichi, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu, and the highly blessed Vasishtha, the equal of the Self-born himself; the Puranas speak of these seven as seven Brahmins. Then the Prajapatis who came after them. In Atri’s line was born the eternal and divine Barhi the ancient, who had penance for his origin; from him sprang the ten Prachetasas, and the ten had one son between them, the Prajapati Daksha, who goes by two names, Daksha and Kashyapa. Marichi’s son Kashyapa likewise has two names, for some call him Arishtanemi. Atri had another son born of his loins, the handsome and princely Soma, who performed penance for a thousand celestial yugas. The divine Aryaman and his sons are described as setters of commands and creators of creatures. Shashabindu had ten thousand wives and a thousand sons by each, ten hundred thousand in all, who refused to call anyone Prajapati except themselves; the ancient Brahmins gave the creatures of the world a name derived from him, and his vast race became in time the progenitor of the Vrishnis. Then the gods who are lords of the three worlds. Bhaga, Ansha, Aryaman, Mitra, Varuna, Savitri, Dhatri, Vivasvat of great might, Tvashtri, Pushan, Indra, and Vishnu the twelfth are the twelve Adityas, all sprung from Kashyapa. Nasatya and Dasra are the two Ashvins, sons of the illustrious Martanda, the eighth in that count; these were first called the gods and the two classes of Pitris. Tvashtri’s many sons include the handsome and famous Vishvarupa, Ajaikapat, Ahi, Bradhna, Virupaksha, and Raivata, and Hara, Bahurupa, Tryambaka the chief of the deities, Savitrya, Jayanta, and the invincible Pinaki. The eight blessed Vasus Bhishma had counted before; they were reckoned as gods in the time of the Prajapati Manu. Among the Siddhas and the Sadhyas there were two classes, by conduct and by youth, and the deities were once held to be of two classes, the Ribhus and the Maruts. Even the gods fall into the four orders: the Adityas are kshatriyas, the Maruts vaishyas, the two Ashvins, given to severe penance, shudras, and the deities of the line of Angiras Brahmins. Whoever rises from his bed in the morning and recites these names is cleansed of every sin, whether he committed it knowingly or unknowingly or took it on from his dealings with others. Then the quarters. Yavakrita, Raibhya, Arvavasu, Paravasu, Aushija, Kashivat, and Vala, the sons of Angiras, with Kanva the son of the rishi Medhatithi, Barhishada, and the well-known seven rishis who are the progenitors of the three worlds, all live in the east. Unmucha, Vimucha, Svastyatreya of great energy, Pramucha, Idhmavaha, the divine Dridhavrata, and Agastya the son of Mitra and Varuna live in the south. Upangu, Karusha, Dhaumya, Parivyadha of great energy, the great rishis Ekata, Dvita, and Trita, and Atri’s illustrious son Sarasvata live in the west. Atreya, Vasishtha, the great rishi Kashyapa, Gautama, Bharadvaja, Vishvamitra the son of Kushika, and Jamadagni the son of Richika, these seven live in the north. These rishis of fiery energy are the witnesses of the universe and the creators of all the worlds, each in his own quarter; reciting their names cleanses a person of all his sins, and one who travels toward those quarters is cleansed of his sins and comes home in safety.

Then Yudhishthira asked for the thing he wanted most. Tell me of that high yoga, he said, by which I may obtain release; I want to know everything about it, and truly. Bhishma answered with an old account of a discourse between a preceptor and his disciple on the subject of release. The preceptor was a twice-born man, the best of rishis, and to look at he was like a mass of splendor; noble of soul, firm in truth, a complete master of his senses. One day a disciple of great intelligence and close attention, wanting what was for his own highest good, touched the preceptor’s feet, stood before him with joined hands, and said that if his teacher had been pleased by the service he had offered, he should resolve a great doubt. Where do I come from, and where do you come from? Tell me this fully. Tell me also what the final cause is. And why, when the material cause in all beings is the same, do their origin and their destruction happen in such dissimilar ways? He asked him to explain, too, the purpose of the Vedic declarations that lay down different rites for different classes of men, the meaning of the injunctions of the Smritis, and the meaning of those injunctions that apply to every man alike.

The preceptor told him first what kind of question he had asked. This, he said, is undisclosed in the very Vedas; it is the highest subject there is for thought, and it is called Adhyatma, the science of the self within, the most valuable of all branches of learning and of all sacred institutes. Vasudeva is the supreme cause of the universe. He is the origin of the Vedas, the syllable Om; he is Truth, Knowledge, Sacrifice, Renunciation, Self-restraint, and Righteousness, and those who know the Vedas know him as all-pervading, eternal, omnipresent, the Creator and the Destroyer, the Unmanifest, Brahman, the Immutable. A Brahmin should hear the greatness of that god of gods, Vishnu of immeasurable energy, from Brahmins, a man of the royal order from men of his order, a vaishya from vaishyas, and a noble shudra from shudras; the disciple deserved to hear it, and the teacher gave him the account of him who was born in the race of the Vrishnis, the greatest of all accounts. Vasudeva is the wheel of Time, without beginning and without end; existence and non-existence are the attributes by which his real nature is known, and the universe revolves like a wheel that depends on him. Keshava is the indestructible, the unmanifest, the immortal, Brahman, the immutable. Highest of the high and himself without change, he created the Pitris, the gods, the rishis, the yakshas, the rakshasas, the nagas, the asuras, and human beings, and the Vedas and the eternal duties and customs of men. Having reduced everything to non-existence, he creates Prakriti, primordial matter, once more at the beginning of a new yuga, and creatures start into existence then as the seasons come round, each in its turn, and with them the knowledge of the rules and duties that keep the world on its course. At the end of every celestial yuga the Vedas and all the other scriptures disappear with the rest, and by the grace of the Self-born the great rishis win them back through penance: Brahma himself first recovered the Vedas, Brihaspati their limbs, the Angas, Bhrigu’s son Shukra the science of morality that does the universe so much good, Narada music, Bharadvaja arms, Gargya the history of the celestial rishis, the dark-complexioned son of Atri medicine, and other rishis Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Sankhya, Patanjala, and the rest. Neither the gods nor the rishis could at first apprehend Brahman, which is without beginning and the highest of the high; only the mighty Narayana, the divine creator of all things, had that knowledge, and from Narayana the rishis, the chief of the gods and the asuras, and the royal sages of old derived their knowledge of the highest remedy for sorrow. When primordial matter, moved by the primal energy, brings existences forth, the universe with all its potencies flows from it; as thousands of lamps are lit from one lighted lamp, primordial matter produces thousands of existent things, and being infinite it is never used up. From the Unmanifest flows the Understanding, shaped by acts; the Understanding produces Consciousness; from Consciousness comes Space, from Space Wind, from Wind Heat, from Heat Water, and from Water the Earth. These eight are primordial Prakriti, and the universe rests on them. From the eight have come the five organs of knowledge, the ear, the skin, the two eyes, the tongue, and the nose; the five organs of action, the two feet, the lower duct, the organ of generation, the two arms, and speech; their five objects, sound, touch, form, taste, and smell, which between them cover everything; and the Mind, the sixteenth, born of their modification. The Mind dwells on all the senses and their objects: in tasting it becomes the tongue, in speech it becomes the words, and furnished with the senses it becomes every object it apprehends. These sixteen, each in its own form, are to be known as deities, and they worship him who creates all knowledge and dwells within the body. Taste is the attribute of water, scent of earth, hearing of space, vision of fire, and touch of wind, in every creature and at every time; the Mind is the attribute of existence, and existence springs from the Unmanifest, which rests in That which is the Soul of all beings, and these existences, resting on the supreme Divinity who stands above Prakriti and has no inclination toward action, hold up the whole universe of things that move and things that stay still.

Then the preceptor came to the body his disciple was sitting in. This sacred edifice of nine doors, he said, is furnished with all of those existences, and that which is high above them, the Soul, dwells within it and pervades it all over; for this reason it is called Purusha, the one who lives in the city. The Soul is without decay and not subject to death. It knows what is manifest and what is unmanifest; it is all-pervading, possessed of attributes, subtle, and the refuge of every existence and every attribute. As a lamp reveals all objects, great or small, whatever its own size, so the Soul dwells in every creature as the principle of knowledge, whatever that creature’s attributes or accidents. Urging the ear to hear what it hears, it is the Soul that hears; employing the eye, it is the Soul that sees. The body furnishes the means by which the Soul gains knowledge, and the Soul is the doer of every act; the organs of the body carry out what it moves them to do. There is fire in wood, and no one has ever seen it by cutting a piece of wood open; the Soul dwells in the body in the same way and cannot be seen by dissecting the body. The fire in the wood can be brought out by the proper means, which is rubbing the wood against another piece, and the Soul within the body can be seen by the proper means, which is yoga. Water must exist in rivers; rays of light are always attached to the sun; and in the same way the Soul has a body, and this connection does not end with the constant succession of bodies the Soul has to enter. In a dream the Soul, furnished with the five senses, leaves the body and roves over wide country, and when death comes it passes out of one body, the senses with it in their subtle forms, to enter another. It is bound by its own former acts. Bound by the acts it did in one state of existence, it comes to another, led from body to body by acts that are very powerful in their consequences. And how the owner of a human body leaves it and enters another, and then another, and how the whole range of beings is the result of their own acts in past and present lives, the preceptor said he would now tell him.

Bhishma went on with the teacher’s answer. All beings that move and all that stay still, distributed into four classes, are said to have an unmanifest birth and an unmanifest death; and the Mind, which exists only in the unmanifest Soul, is said to carry the attributes of the unmanifest. A vast tree lies folded inside a small unopened flower of the ashvattha and can be observed only when it comes out, and birth takes place from the unmanifest in the same way. A piece of iron, which has no life in it, runs toward a piece of lodestone; and inclinations and propensities that come of natural instinct, and everything else of that kind, run toward the Soul in a new life in the same way. Those propensities and possessions that are born of ignorance and delusion, and that have no life of their own, unite with the Soul when it is reborn; and those other propensities and aspirations of the Soul that have their gaze turned toward Brahman unite with it as well, coming to it directly from Brahman itself. Neither earth nor sky nor heaven, neither things nor the vital breaths, neither virtue nor vice nor anything else existed before, except the Chit-Soul, the self that is awareness; and none of them has any necessary connection even with the Chit-Soul that ignorance has defiled. The Soul is eternal. It is indestructible. It occurs in every creature. It is the cause of the Mind, and it is without attributes. This universe that we perceive is declared to be the work of ignorance, and the Soul’s apprehensions of form and the rest are due to past desires; when the Soul is furnished with those causes it is led into acts, and because acts breed new desires that end in new acts, this vast wheel of existence revolves without beginning and without end.

The teacher described the wheel itself. The Unmanifest, which is the Understanding together with its desires, is the nave of that wheel. The Manifest, the body with its senses, is its assemblage of spokes; perceptions and acts form its circumference. The Soul, propelled by rajas, the quality of passion, presides over it, a witness to its revolutions. Like oilmen pressing oilseeds in their machine, the consequences born of ignorance assail the universe of creatures, which is moistened with rajas, and press and grind it in that wheel. In that succession of existences the living creature, seized through desire by the idea of self, engages in acts, and in the union of cause and effect those acts become causes in their turn. Effects do not enter into causes, and causes do not enter into effects; in the production of effects, Time is the cause. The eight primordial essences and their sixteen modifications, laden with causes, exist in a state of union because the Soul always presides over them. Like dust following the wind that moves it, the creature-soul, stripped of its body but still carrying the inclinations born of passion and darkness and the causes set up by the acts of the life that is over, moves on in the direction the Supreme Soul gives it. And the Soul is never touched by those inclinations and propensities, nor are they touched by the Soul that is above them. The wind, which is pure by nature, is never stained by the dust it carries away, and the man of wisdom should know that the connection between what is called existence, or life, and the Soul is exactly as separate as that. No one should take the Soul’s apparent union with the body, the senses, the propensities, the beliefs and the unbeliefs to mean that these are its necessary and absolute qualities. The Soul should be taken as existing in its own nature.

That was how the divine rishi resolved the doubt that had taken hold of his disciple’s mind. And yet, Bhishma said, people go on depending on acts and scriptural rites to cast off misery and win happiness. Seeds scorched by fire put out no sprouts. If everything that contributes to misery is consumed in the same way by the fire of true knowledge, the Soul escapes the obligation of being born into the world again.

A key to reading this (the nine gates and the wheel of existence): The body is the city of nine doors, the two eyes, the two ears, the two nostrils, the mouth, and the two lower openings that pass waste and water, and the Soul is called Purusha because it lives inside that city and fills it. The wheel of existence has the Understanding with its desires for a nave, the body with its senses for spokes, and perceptions and acts for a rim; passion drives it round, ignorance grinds creatures in it as oilmen grind seed, and the Soul presides over the whole turning as its witness, no more stained by it than the wind is stained by the dust it carries.

The gist: Brahma’s seven sons head the Prajapatis, the twelve Adityas and the rest of the gods descend from Kashyapa and his brothers, and the great rishis hold the four quarters as witnesses of the universe. A disciple asks his teacher where the two of them come from and why beings so alike in their material rise and perish so differently, and the teacher answers with Adhyatma: Vasudeva is the wheel of Time, the eight primordial natures and their sixteen modifications spring from him, and the Soul lives in the city of nine doors as its unseen doer. Birth comes out of the unmanifest as a tree comes out of a bud; the wheel of existence turns on desire; and once the seeds of misery are scorched in the fire of knowledge, they sprout no more.

The three gunas, man and woman, and the path of brahmacharya

Bhishma set the two roads side by side. Those engaged in the practice of acts think highly of acts, and those devoted to Knowledge regard Knowledge alone. Persons fully conversant with the Vedas, who rest on what the Vedas say, are rare, and the more intelligent among men want the path of abstention from acts as the better of the two ends, heaven and release. Abstention is observed by those who possess great wisdom, and that conduct is therefore worthy of praise; the intelligence that urges a man to abstain from acts is the intelligence by which he reaches release. A person with a body, through folly, and carrying wrath and greed and all the propensities born of passion and darkness, becomes attached to every earthly object. So one who wants to end his connection with the body should never indulge in an impure act; and he should make a path to release by the acts he does, wishing for no blessed world in the next life. As gold, when it is mixed with iron, loses its purity and fails to shine, so Knowledge, when it lives alongside attachment to earthly objects and faults of that kind, fails to put out its splendor. He who, driven by greed and following the dictates of desire and wrath, practices unrighteousness and steps off the path of righteousness, meets with complete destruction. One who wants his own good should never pursue, with an excess of attachment, the earthly possessions the objects of the senses represent; if he does, wrath and joy and sorrow rise out of one another and make him miserable.

Bhishma asked the plainest question the subject allows. When everyone’s body is made of the five original elements and of the three qualities of goodness, passion, and darkness, whom is a man to adore, whom is he to blame, and with what words? Only fools become attached to the objects of the senses, and through their folly they do not know that their bodies are only modifications. A house made of earth is plastered over with earth; this body, made of earth, is kept from falling apart by food, which is only a modification of earth. Honey and oil and milk and butter and meat and salt and molasses and grain of every kind and fruit and roots are all modifications of earth and water. Recluses living in the wilderness give up every longing for rich and savory food and take simple fare, and unsavory fare at that, only to keep the body going; a person who lives in the wilderness of the world should be ready for labor in the same way and take his food to get through life, the way a patient takes his medicine. A person of noble soul, examining every earthly thing that comes upon him by the light of truth, purity, candor, a spirit of renunciation, enlightenment, courage, forgiveness, fortitude, intelligence, reflection, and austerity, and wanting tranquility, should restrain his senses. All creatures, stupefied through ignorance by the qualities of goodness, passion, and darkness, keep revolving like a wheel; so every fault born of ignorance should be closely examined, and the idea of self, which has its origin in ignorance and produces misery, should be avoided. The five elements, the senses, the three qualities, the three worlds with the Supreme Being himself, and acts: all of these rest on self-consciousness. As Time, under its own laws, always brings out the seasons one after another, so one should know that consciousness in every creature is what induces acts. And tamas, from which consciousness proceeds, should be known as the producer of delusions; it is like darkness, and it is born of ignorance.

Bhishma counted out what each quality yields, because all the joys and sorrows of creatures are attached to the three of them. Contentment, the satisfaction that rises from joy, certainty, intelligence, and memory are the consequences born of goodness. Desire, wrath, error, greed, stupefaction, fear, and fatigue belong to passion. Dejection, grief, discontent, vanity, pride, and wickedness all belong to darkness. A man should weigh the gravity or lightness of these and the other faults that live in the soul, and reflect on each of them one after another, to learn which of them exist in him, which have grown strong and which weak, which have been driven off, and which remain.

Yudhishthira had doubts on exactly that point, and he laid them out. Which faults do people who want release abandon altogether? Which do they only weaken? Which faults come back again and again and therefore cannot be got rid of? Which are held to be weak through stupefaction, and so permissible? And which are the faults whose strength and weakness a wise man should reflect on with the aid of his intelligence and of reasons? Bhishma answered that a person of pure soul reaches release by pulling out all his faults by the roots, and he gave him a picture of what that costs. An axe made of steel cuts a steel chain and, in accomplishing the act, is broken itself; in the same way a person of cleansed soul, destroying all the faults that spring from darkness and that are born with the soul when it is reborn, dissolves his connection with the body and is released. The qualities that have their origin in passion, those that spring from darkness, and the stainless ones characterized by purity, which belong to goodness, are together the seed from which every embodied creature has grown. Among these, goodness alone is the cause through which persons of cleansed soul reach release, so a person of cleansed soul should abandon all the qualities born of passion and darkness; and when goodness is freed from those two, it grows more resplendent still. Some say that sacrifices and the other acts performed with the aid of mantras, which certainly contribute to the purification of the soul, are evil or cruel acts. Bhishma held the opposite: those acts are the chief means of separating the soul from all worldly attachments and of keeping the religion of tranquility. Through the qualities born of passion all unrighteous acts are done, all acts with earthly purposes, and all acts that spring from desire; through the qualities born of darkness a man does everything that greed and wrath prompt, and under that same quality he takes to sleep and procrastination and grows addicted to every act of cruelty and carnal pleasure. The person who has faith and scriptural knowledge and keeps to the quality of goodness attends only to good things, and he comes to have a moral beauty and a soul free of every taint.

Bhishma traced the chain from its first link. From the quality of passion arises delusion, the loss of judgment; from darkness arise wrath and greed and fear and pride. When all of these are destroyed a man becomes pure, and by purity he arrives at knowledge of the Supreme Soul, which is resplendent with radiance, incapable of decay, without change, pervading all things, having the unmanifest for its refuge, and the first of all the deities. Wrapped in that being’s maya, men fall away from knowledge and lose their senses, and with their knowledge darkened they yield to wrath. From wrath they become subject to desire; from desire spring greed and delusion and vanity and pride and selfishness; from selfishness proceed acts of many kinds; from acts spring the various bonds of affection; from those bonds spring sorrow and misery; and from acts laden with joy and sorrow comes the liability to birth and death. With the obligation of birth comes the obligation of a residence within the womb, brought about by the union of vital seed and blood, a residence defiled with excreta and urine and phlegm and always fouled with the blood generated there. Overwhelmed by thirst, the Chit-Soul, the self that is awareness, is bound there by wrath and the rest of the faults Bhishma had counted, and even so it keeps seeking to escape them.

On this matter Bhishma spoke in the vocabulary of Sankhya, and he did not soften it. Women, he said, must be regarded as the instruments that set the stream of creation going; by their nature women are kshetra, the field, and men are kshetrajna, the knower of the field, when it comes to the attributes, and for this reason persons of wisdom should not pursue women in particular among the objects of the world. Women are like frightful mantra-powers; they stupefy persons without wisdom; they are sunk in the quality of passion, the eternal embodiment of the senses. From the keen desire men have for women, offspring proceed by the action of the vital seed, and as a man casts off from his body the vermin that take birth there without being any part of him, so he should cast off those vermin of his body that are called children, who are regarded as his own and are not his own in reality; from the vital seed, as from sweat and other filth, creatures spring from the body, moved by the acts of previous lives or in the course of nature, and a person of wisdom should feel no regard for them. Then the order of the qualities. Passion rests on darkness, goodness rests on passion, and darkness, which is unmanifest, spreads over Knowledge and gives rise to intelligence and consciousness; knowledge bearing those two attributes is the seed of embodied souls, and the seed of that knowledge is called the jiva, the Chit-Soul. Through acts, and by the virtue of time, the soul goes through birth and repeated rounds of rebirth. As in a dream it sports as if it had a body, a body that is only the mind’s doing, so in the mother’s womb it obtains a body from the attributes and propensities that have past acts for their origin, and whatever senses are awakened in it there, with past acts for the operating cause, are generated in consciousness because the mind coexists with its attachments: from past thoughts of sound the soul receives the ear, from attachment to forms the eye, from longing after scent the nose, from thoughts of touch the skin, and in the same way the five breaths, prana, apana, vyana, udana, and samana, which keep the body going. Encased in a body whose every limb has grown out of past acts, the soul takes birth with sorrow, physical and mental, in the beginning, the middle, and the end. Sorrow springs from the very acceptance of a body in the womb and increases with the idea of self; from the renunciation of the attachments that cause birth it comes to an end, and he who knows sorrow’s end reaches release. The origin and the destruction of the senses both rest in passion; the man of wisdom acts with proper scrutiny, using the eye the scriptures give him, the senses never overwhelm the man who is without thirst, and the embodied soul, by making its senses weak, escapes the obligation of rebirth.

Bhishma said he would now tell him the means of conquering the senses as the eye of the scriptures sees them; a person attains the highest end by such knowledge and by shaping his conduct to it. Among all living creatures man is said to be the foremost. Among men, those who are twice-born have been called the foremost, and among the twice-born, those who are conversant with the Vedas; these last are regarded as the souls of all living creatures, all-seeing and omniscient, persons who have come to know Brahman. As a blind man without a guide meets many difficulties on a road, so a person without knowledge has to meet many obstacles in the world, and for this reason those possessed of knowledge are regarded as superior to the rest. Those who want to acquire virtue practice rites of many kinds as the scriptures direct, and they do not reach release by them; all they gain is a set of good qualities, which Bhishma named: purity of speech, of body, and of mind, forgiveness, truth, steadiness, and intelligence, the qualities righteous persons of both kinds of religion display. What is called brahmacharya, the religion of abstention, which is yoga, is regarded as the means of attaining Brahman, and it is the highest of all religions; by its practice a man obtains the highest end. Brahmacharya has no connection with the five vital breaths, the mind, the understanding, the five senses of perception, or the five senses of action, and on that account it is free from every perception the senses give. It is heard only as a word; its form, without ever being seen, can only be conceived; it is a state of existence that depends on the mind alone, free of all connection with the senses, and that sinless state is to be reached by the understanding alone. He who practices it duly reaches Brahman; he who practices it half and half reaches the condition of the gods; and he who practices it indifferently takes birth among Brahmins and, possessed of learning, rises to eminence.

Brahmacharya, Bhishma said, is exceedingly difficult to practice, and he told Yudhishthira the means. The twice-born person who takes it up should subdue the quality of passion as soon as it begins to show itself, or as soon as it begins to grow powerful. One who has taken that vow should not speak with women. He should never cast his eyes on an undressed woman, for the sight of women, even under indifferent circumstances, fills every weak-minded man with passion. If, while keeping the vow, he feels a desire for a woman rising in his heart, he should observe the vow called Krichchhra as an expiation and pass three days in water as well; and if the desire comes to him in the course of a dream, he should dive into water and mentally repeat, three times over, the three Riks of the Aghamarshana. The wise man who has given himself to this vow should, with an extended and enlightened mind, burn away the sins in his mind, all of which are due to the quality of passion. As the duct that bears away the refuse of the body is very closely connected with the body, so the embodied soul is very closely connected with the body that confines it.

Then Bhishma described the body’s own machinery, because the vow has to be kept inside it. The different kinds of juices, passing through the network of arteries, nourish a man’s wind and bile and phlegm, his blood and skin and flesh, his intestines and bones and marrow, and the whole body. There are ten principal ducts, and these assist the work of the five senses; from those ten branch out thousands of other ducts, minuter in form, and like rivers filling the ocean in the proper season, all of these ducts with their juices nourish the body. Leading to the heart there is a duct called the manovaha, and it draws from every part of the human body the vital seed that is born of desire; many other ducts branch out from that principal one into every part of the body, and bearing the element of heat, they cause the sense of vision and the rest. As the butter that lies within milk is churned up by churning rods, so the desires generated in the mind by the sight or the thought of women draw together the vital seed that lies within the body. Even in the middle of a dream, passion born of imagination assails the mind, and the manovaha then throws out the vital seed born of desire. The great and divine rishi Atri, Bhishma said, understands the generation of the vital seed thoroughly. The juices that food yields, the duct called manovaha, and the desire that is born of imagination: these three are the causes that originate the vital seed, which has Indra for its presiding deity, and the passion that aids in the emission of that fluid is therefore called indriya. Those who know that the course of the vital seed is the cause of that sinful state of things called the intermixture of castes are men of restrained passions; their sins are held to have been burnt off, and they are never subjected to rebirth.

Bhishma brought the teaching to its close. He who takes to action simply to sustain his body, who reduces the three qualities of goodness, passion, and darkness to a state of uniformity with the aid of the mind, and who at his last moments brings the vital breaths to the duct called manovaha, escapes the obligation of rebirth. The mind is sure to gain Knowledge, for it is the mind that takes the form of all things, and the minds of all noble persons, attaining success through meditation, become freed from desire, eternal, and luminous. Therefore, to destroy the mind as mind, one should do only sinless deeds; freed from the qualities of passion and darkness, a man is sure to reach a very desirable end. Knowledge acquired in younger days grows weak with decrepitude, and a person of ripe understanding, through the auspicious effects of past lives, succeeds in destroying his desires. Such a person passes beyond the bonds of the body and the senses the way a traveler crosses a path full of obstacles, stepping past every fault he sees, and tastes the nectar of release.

A key to reading this (the field and the knower of the field): In the vocabulary of Sankhya the kshetra is the field in which creation grows and the kshetrajna is the one who knows it; Bhishma applies the pair to woman and man as the instruments that set the stream of creation going, and the counsel that follows, on women, on children, and on the vermin of the body, is addressed to the man who has resolved to end his connection with the body and wants nothing of the world to hold him. The manovaha is the duct that leads to the heart and gathers the vital seed that desire and imagination stir, the way churning rods gather the butter in milk; a man who brings his breaths to it at the last escapes rebirth. The Krichchhra is the penitential vow that expiates a desire felt while brahmacharya is being kept, and the three Riks of the Aghamarshana are the verses repeated under water after a desire that came in a dream.

The gist: Those who act prize acts and those who know prize knowledge, and the wisest choose abstention from acts as the better road to both heaven and release. Every body is a modification of earth kept going by food that is a modification of earth, and every joy and sorrow belongs to one of the three qualities; goodness alone carries a cleansed soul to release, so passion and darkness are to be cut away like a chain by an axe that breaks in the cutting. From passion comes delusion, from darkness wrath and greed and fear and pride, and from wrath the whole chain runs down through desire and acts and bonds of affection to sorrow, birth, and the womb. Brahmacharya, heard only as a word and grasped by the understanding alone, is the highest of religions; it is kept by subduing passion the moment it stirs, by expiation when it stirs anyway, and by the mind’s mastery of the body’s own ducts and seed.

The conquest of the senses and the last stair of moksha

At the end Bhishma gave Yudhishthira the conduct itself. Living creatures that stay attached to the objects of the senses, which are always laden with evil, become helpless; the noble ones who are not attached to them reach the highest end. The man of intelligence, seeing the world overwhelmed by the evils of birth, death, decrepitude, sorrow, disease, and anxiety, should exert himself to reach release. He should be pure in speech, in thought, and in body. He should be free from pride. Of tranquil soul and possessed of knowledge, he should lead a life of mendicancy and pursue happiness without attaching himself to any worldly object.

Then came a warning that only a teacher who had watched his listener for a long time would think to give. If attachment is seen taking hold of the mind out of compassion for creatures, the man should look at the universe as the result of acts and show indifference toward compassion itself. Whatever good acts are done, and whatever sin is committed, the doer tastes the consequences; so in speech, in thought, and in deed he should do only acts that are good. He finds happiness who practices abstention from injuring others, truthfulness of speech, honesty toward all creatures, and forgiveness, and who is never heedless; and so a man should use his intelligence to train his mind and set it on peace toward all creatures. Whoever regards the practice of those virtues as the highest duty, as conducive to the happiness of all creatures, and as destructive of every kind of sorrow, has the highest knowledge and wins happiness. He should never think of doing evil to others. He should not covet what lies far above his power to reach, and he should not turn his thoughts toward objects that do not exist; he should direct his mind toward Knowledge by the kind of persistent effort that is sure to succeed, and with the help of the declarations of the Srutis and that effort, Knowledge is sure to flow to him.

Bhishma turned to speech. One who wants to say good words, or to keep a religion refined of all dross, should utter only truth that carries no malice and no censure. One who has a sound heart should utter words that are free of dishonesty, and never harsh, never cruel, never evil, and never full of idle talk. The universe, he said, is bound in speech. And if a man is disposed to renounce every worldly object, he should proclaim his own evil acts, with a mind full of humility and a cleansed understanding. He who takes to action driven by propensities laden with the quality of passion obtains much misery in this world and at last sinks into hell; so one should practice self-restraint in body, in speech, and in mind.

He gave Yudhishthira an image from the roads. Ignorant persons bearing the burdens of the world are like robbers laden with their booty of straggling sheep, culled from herds taken out to pasture; such men are always watching for roads that are unfavorable to them, where the king’s watch is posted. And as robbers have to throw away their spoil if they want to be safe, so a person must cast off every act dictated by passion and darkness if he is to reach felicity. Without doubt, Bhishma said, the person who is without desire, free from the bonds of the world, content to live in solitude, sparing in his diet, devoted to penances, with his senses under control, who has burnt all his sorrows by the acquisition of knowledge, who takes pleasure in practicing every particular of the discipline of yoga, and whose soul is cleansed, reaches Brahman, because his mind has been withdrawn into itself.

Then he set out the last stairs in their order. A man of patience and cleansed soul should, without any doubt, control his understanding. With the understanding so disciplined he should next control his mind, and then with the mind he should overpower the objects of the senses. Once the mind is brought under control and all the senses are subdued, the senses grow luminous and gladly enter into Brahman. When the senses are withdrawn into the mind, what happens is that Brahman becomes manifest in it; and when the senses are destroyed and the soul returns to the attribute of pure existence, it comes to be regarded as transformed into Brahman.

Bhishma marked the bounds of the practice. A man should never make a display of his yoga power; he should always exert himself to restrain his senses by the rules of yoga, and one engaged in those rules should do all the acts by which his conduct and disposition become pure. He should not make his yoga powers the means of his subsistence; he should live on broken grains of corn, ripe beans, the dry cakes of seeds from which the oil has been pressed out, pot-herbs, half-ripe barley, the flour of fried pulses, fruits, and roots, all of it obtained in alms. Reflecting on the character of the time and the place, he should observe vows and rules about fasts according to his inclination and after proper examination, and he should never suspend an observance he has begun. Like a man slowly building up a fire, he should gradually extend an act that knowledge has prompted, and by doing so Brahman gradually shines in him like the sun.

The last thing Bhishma said on it was about the three states a person lives in. Ignorance, which has Knowledge for its resting ground, extends its influence over all three of them, waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep; and the Knowledge that follows the understanding is assailed by ignorance. The evil-hearted person fails to obtain knowledge of the Soul because he takes it to be united with those three states, though in reality it stands beyond them all. When, however, he grasps the limits within which the two things, union with the three states and separation from them, are manifested, then he is stripped of attachment and reaches release. Once that apprehension is attained, a man passes beyond the effects of age, rises above the consequences of decrepitude and death, and obtains Brahman, which is eternal, deathless, immutable, and never decays.

A key to reading this (the three states): Waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep are the three states over which ignorance spreads its influence, and Bhishma’s final teaching is that the Soul is united with none of them, though a corrupted heart takes it to be. The person who can tell where union with the three states ends and separation from them begins is the one who loses attachment and is released; the practice that gets him there is the ordered conquest he has just been given, the understanding mastering the mind, the mind mastering the senses, and the senses, withdrawn, growing luminous and entering Brahman.

The gist: Attachment to the objects of the senses makes creatures helpless; purity of speech, thought, and body, a mendicant’s life, non-injury, truth, honesty, forgiveness, and unfailing heed are the road out, and even compassion is to be watched when it starts to bind. Speech binds the universe, so a man speaks only truth without malice, and confesses his own evil acts if he means to renounce. He throws off the acts of passion and darkness as a robber throws off stolen sheep to escape the king’s watch, controls the understanding, then the mind, then the senses, and lives on grains and roots got in alms without ever showing his yoga power. Knowing the Soul to be beyond waking, dream, and sleep, he passes beyond age and death into the Brahman that never decays.

Source: the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Shanti Parva, Apaddharma and Mokshadharma sub-parvas, Sections 129 to 353. The Sanskrit e-text, the Gita Press Hindi edition, and Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s complete English translation were used to verify names, sequence, and principal events. Where the recensions differ, this English retelling follows Ganguli, and the Hindi edition follows Gita Press.