The Horse-Sacrifice, the Anugita, the Reviving of Parikshit, and the Mongoose

The water had been poured for Bhishma. Old Dhritarashtra had made the offering to the dead grandsire at the Ganga, and Yudhishthira came up the bank behind him with his eyes full and his wits scattered, keeping the blind king in front of him as a nephew should. He did not reach the top. His legs went, and the victor of Kurukshetra dropped at the river’s edge like an elephant with a hunter’s arrow in it. Krishna looked at Bhima, and Bhima bent and caught his brother as he sank. “This must not be,” Krishna said, and said no more. The Pandavas saw the son of Dharma lying on the ground, spent and without heart, drawing one long breath after another, and grief took them too, and they sat down in a ring around him. It was Dhritarashtra who spoke, a father who had lost every son he had, and who saw by wisdom what his eyes had never shown him. “Rise. There is work waiting for you. You won this Earth the way a Kshatriya is permitted to win her; now enjoy her, with your brothers and your friends beside you. I can find no reason for you to grieve. Gandhari and I are the ones who should mourn, we who have lost a hundred sons the way a man loses the riches he found in a dream. Vidura wished us well, and his words were heavy with meaning, and I would not hear them, and now I repent of it. He saw far, and he told me: ‘Your line will be wiped out through Duryodhana’s offenses. If you want it to live, do as I say. Cast off this prince of the wicked mind, and never let Karna or Shakuni come near him. Put a stop to their gambling, quietly, and anoint Yudhishthira, who is master of his senses and will rule the Earth by the law. Or if you will not have Kunti’s son, then perform a sacrifice and take the kingdom into your own hands, look on every creature with an even eye, and let your kinsmen live on what you give them.’ That was Vidura’s counsel, and fool that I was, I went with Duryodhana. I shut my ears to that gentle voice, and this is what it has bought me: I am sunk in an ocean of sorrow. Look at your old father and your old mother, and at what our days have become. For your own grief I can see no occasion at all.”

Krishna and Vyasa console him, and Yudhishthira begs to go to the forest

The blind king’s words quieted him a little, and Krishna spoke into the quiet. “A man who mourns his dead forefathers past all measure only makes them suffer. Put the grief down and do what gladdens them. Hold sacrifices, many of them, and send the priests home with the gifts the rite demands. Give the gods their soma and the fathers the food and water that are theirs. Feed your guests, and give the destitute as much as they ask for. It does not suit a mind like yours to sit here in this state. What a man needs to know, you know; what a man has to do, you have done. You heard the whole duty of a Kshatriya from Bhishma, the son of the river Bhagirathi, and from Krishna Dvaipayana, and Narada, and Vidura. The road of the dull is no road for you. Walk where your fathers walked and carry the weight they carried. A Kshatriya goes to heaven on his own good name, and of the brave men who were killed in this war, none will ever be turned out of it. So let the sorrow go. What happened was appointed to happen, and you will never see the men who died in this war again.”

Govinda fell silent, and Yudhishthira answered him. “I know very well how fond of me you are. I have had your love and your friendship always. So grant me one thing more, you who carry the mace and the discus. Give me leave, and give it gladly, to go and live as an ascetic in the forest, for there is nothing I want so much. I have killed my grandfather. I have killed Karna, a man above other men, who never once ran from a field. There is no peace for me anywhere after that. Arrange it, Krishna, so that I am rid of this monstrous sin and my mind is made clean.”

He was still speaking when Vyasa broke in, the sage who knew the whole law of how a life should be lived, and there was reproach folded inside the comfort he offered. “My child, your mind has not settled, and so a childish feeling has fogged it again. How many times are we to throw our words to the wind? You know the duty of Kshatriyas, who live by war. A king who has done what was his to do has no business letting sorrow swamp him. You sat and listened faithfully to the whole teaching of release, and time after time I cleared away the doubts your own wanting raised. And you have paid so little heed to what I laid open that it has plainly gone out of your wayward head altogether. Let it not be so. Ignorance of that kind is unworthy of you. You know every form of expiation there is. You have been told what makes a king good and what a gift is worth. You know the whole moral law and all the sacred learning. Why then are you drowning in grief like a man who knows nothing?”

Vyasa did not wait for an answer. “Your understanding, Yudhishthira, still falls short, I think. No one does anything by his own power. It is God who sets a man to his acts, the good ones and the bad, so where is there room for remorse? You hold that what you did was impious. Then hear how sin is taken off a man. Those who have sinned can always free themselves by three things: austerity, sacrifice and giving. The gods perform sacrifices to gather merit, and so do the Asuras, which tells you how much the rite matters. It was by sacrifice that the gods grew to their astonishing strength, and it was after they had held their rites that they beat the Danavas. So make ready for the Rajasuya and the horse sacrifice, and for the Sarvamedha and the Naramedha as well. Rama the son of Dasharatha held the horse sacrifice. So did your own ancestor Bharata, the son of Dushyanta and Shakuntala, a king whose strength the whole Earth acknowledged. Do as they did: hold the Ashvamedha by the rule, with the full gifts that close it.”

Yudhishthira did not dispute the remedy. What he laid before the sage was the cost of it. “The horse sacrifice purifies kings; I do not doubt that. Still, there is something on my mind that you ought to hear. I have brought about this enormous slaughter of my own kin, and I cannot now give gifts on even a small scale, because I have nothing to give. Nor can I go begging wealth from these young sons of kings, who stand before me in a pitiable state with their wounds still raw. I laid the Earth waste myself. How am I, in my grief, to turn around and levy dues on her for a sacrifice? It was through Duryodhana’s fault that the kings of the Earth were destroyed and that we have come away with disgrace for our harvest. He wasted the Earth for the sake of wealth, and for all that, the treasury of Dhritarashtra’s son stands empty. And in this rite the fee owed to the priests is the Earth herself; that is the rule as it is first laid down. The learned know that a lesser gift may be put in its place, and they know that substitution for what it is, a reversal of the rule. I have no wish to offer a substitute. You must advise me in this, revered one.”

Krishna Dvaipayana, whom the world calls Vyasa, thought about that for a while. “This empty treasury will be full,” he said. “There is gold lying in the Himalaya, on the mountain Himavat. The Brahmins left it behind at the sacrifice of King Marutta, who gave them more than they could carry away.” Yudhishthira looked up. “How did so much gold come to be heaped at one sacrifice? And when did this Marutta reign?” “He came of the house of Karandhama,” Vyasa said, “and he was a king of great power and immense wealth. If you want to know when he ruled, listen.” “I do want to hear it,” Yudhishthira said. “Tell me the history of that royal sage.”

A key to reading this (the idea): In the Ashvamedha a horse is turned loose, by scriptural rule, to wander the Earth at its will, with a warrior following to protect it, and the rite closes with gifts on a royal scale; later in this book the horse will be loosed and Arjuna will ride behind it. Yudhishthira’s objection is a moral one. The fee of this sacrifice is the Earth herself, and he cannot bear to raise the wealth for it from the land he has just laid waste, or from young princes whose wounds have not closed. Vyasa answers the practical half of the difficulty: the wealth lies in the Himalaya already, old gold that Brahmins left where a sacrifice once ended, and no one living has to be taxed for it.

The tale of King Marutta, and the gold of the Himalayas

Vyasa began at the head of the line. In the Krita age Manu held the scepter and ruled the Earth. His son was Prasandhi, Prasandhi’s son was Kshupa, and Kshupa’s son was King Ikshvaku. Ikshvaku had a hundred sons, every one of them a man of deep piety, and he made kings of them all. The eldest was Vimsha, who became the pattern of what an archer should be, and Vimsha’s son was Vivimsha, a prince of good fortune. Vivimsha had fifteen sons. All fifteen were strong bowmen, respectful to Brahmins, truthful, gentle, fair of speech, and the eldest of them, Khaninetra, bullied the other fourteen. He conquered the whole kingdom and cleared it of every trouble, and then he could not keep it, because the people took no pleasure in him. They pulled him off the throne, gave the kingship to his son Suvarcha, and were glad in their hearts when it was done. Suvarcha had watched his father’s reverses and seen him driven out, and he learned from it. He bent himself to the good of his people. He honored the Brahmins, spoke the truth, kept himself pure, and held his senses and his thoughts on a short rein, and the people loved that steady, high-minded king. A king who is always doing good spends, though, and in time his treasure and his horses and chariots ran thin. When the treasury was bare, the vassal kings swarmed in on him from every border. He had no money, no mounts, no vehicles, and enemies on all sides, and he and his retainers and the people of his capital went through a hard season together. Yet however low his power sank, they could not kill him, because that power stood on righteousness. And when he and his citizens had come to the very end of misery, he put his hand to his mouth and blew on it, and out of that breath an army appeared. With it he beat every king along his borders. From that day he was famous as Karandhama, the king who blew upon his hand. Karandhama’s heir was born as the Treta age opened, a prince with a grace about him that matched Indra’s, whom the immortals themselves could not have beaten. Every king of that time came under his hand, and by his wealth and his prowess together he was their emperor. His name was Avikshit. He was Indra’s match in courage, a lover of sacrifice and of virtue, the master of his senses; he had the sun’s fire and the Earth’s patience, the intelligence of Brihaspati and the stillness of Himavat. He won his subjects by what he did and thought and said, by his restraint and his forbearance. He performed horse sacrifices by the hundred, and the learned Angiras himself stood as his priest. Avikshit’s son went past even this father in every good quality. That son was Marutta, a king over kings, righteous and renowned, with the strength of ten thousand elephants in his body, so like Vishnu that he seemed the god’s second self. When Marutta resolved to hold a sacrifice he went to Mount Meru, on the northern side of Himavat, and there had shining golden vessels forged by the thousand. Goldsmiths turned out basins and pots and pans and seats beyond counting, the sacrificial ground was laid out close by, and on a great hill of gold, with other princes around him, he performed his rites.

Yudhishthira stopped the sage there. “How did that king come to be so powerful? How did he get so much gold? Where is all his wealth now, and how are we to lay hands on it?” So Vyasa went back and told it from the root. Karandhama had been a king without equal among men in might and daring and character, as strong as Indra of the hundred sacrifices, upright and firm in his vows. Chariots and fighting men, a host of followers, and beds of great price and beauty had come to him through meditation, out of the breath of his mouth, and by his inborn goodness he had brought every prince under him. Angiras had served him as family priest. He lived as long as he wished and then went up to heaven in the body. Avikshit after him, a conqueror as righteous as Yayati, brought the whole Earth under his rule and was his father’s equal in merit and in might. Then came Marutta, full of fire, a second Indra. The Earth in her robe of oceans felt herself drawn to him. Marutta made a habit of defying the king of the gods, and Indra defied Marutta in return, and since Marutta was pure and wanting in nothing, Indra, for all his striving, could not get the better of him. Unable to master him, Indra mounted his horse, gathered the gods, and sent for Brihaspati. “Brihaspati, if you want to please me, you will perform no priestly office for Marutta, whether the rite is for the gods or for the ancestors. I have won the lordship of the three worlds. Marutta is lord of the Earth and nothing more. You have served as priest to the deathless king of the gods; how could you, without a qualm, serve Marutta, who will die? Good fortune to you. Take my side or take his; or, better, leave Marutta and come over to me gladly.” Brihaspati thought it over for a moment and gave the king of the immortals what he wanted to hear. “You are the lord of creatures. The worlds rest on you. You destroyed Namuchi and Vishvarupa and Vala. The prosperity of the gods is your doing alone, and you hold up earth and heaven together. Having been your priest, how could I serve a mortal prince? Hear me. The god of fire may stop giving heat, the Earth may change her nature, the sun may stop giving light, and I will still keep to the truth I have just spoken.” Indra’s envy eased as he listened. He praised his priest and went home to his own palace. Word of that compact reached Marutta when he was already making ready for a great sacrifice. The grandson of Karandhama, a king who spoke well, went to Brihaspati with the plan formed in his mind. “Worshipful ascetic, the sacrifice you once proposed to me I now mean to perform, following your own instructions. I want you to officiate. The materials are gathered. You are the priest of our family; take them, and perform the rite yourself.” “I have no wish to perform your sacrifice,” Brihaspati said. “The lord of the gods has appointed me his priest, and I have given him my promise.” Marutta pressed him. “You are our priest by inheritance. I hold you in high regard for it, and it gives me a claim on your help. It is only right that you should officiate for me.” “Having served the immortals, Marutta, how can I serve mortal men? Go or stay as you like; I tell you I have stopped acting as priest for anyone except the gods. I cannot do it for you now. Appoint whomever you please.”

Marutta turned for home hot with shame, his mind weighed down, and on the road he met Narada. He stood before the divine seer with his palms joined, and Narada looked at his face. “You do not seem easy in your mind, royal sage. Is all well with you? Where have you been, and what has troubled you? If you are free to tell me, tell me, and I will do everything I can to quiet it.” Marutta told him of the rebuff. “I went looking for a priest for my sacrifice. I went to Brihaspati, the son of Angiras, the priest of the immortals, and he would not have me. After that I have no wish to go on living. By casting me off he has left me stained with sin.” Narada’s answer put the life back into Avikshit’s son. “Angiras has another son, a righteous one. His name is Samvarta, and he wanders over every quarter of the Earth naked, a wonder to all who see him. Go to him. If Brihaspati will not officiate for you, the powerful Samvarta will, once he is pleased with you.” “Your words are new life to me,” Marutta said. “Tell me, though, where I can find him, and how I should stay near him, and what I must do so that he does not cast me off too, for if he refuses me I do not want to live.” “He longs for a sight of Maheshvara,” Narada said, “and so he roams the city of Varanasi as he pleases, in the dress of a madman. Go to the gate of that city and lay a dead body somewhere near it. The man who turns away at the sight of the corpse is Samvarta. Follow him wherever he chooses to go, and when you have him in some lonely place, join your hands and ask for his protection. If he asks who told you about him, say that Narada did. And if he wants to know where I am to be found, tell him without flinching that I have entered the fire.” Marutta agreed, paid the seer his due worship, took his leave, and went to Varanasi. He remembered what he had been told and laid a corpse at the city gate, and as it happened that Brahmin came in through the gate at the same hour, saw the body, and wheeled away. The king went after him with joined hands, wanting to be taught. When they reached a lonely place Samvarta turned and covered him with mud and ashes and phlegm and spittle. Fouled and tormented, the king kept following with his palms pressed together, trying to soften him, until at last Samvarta, worn out, came to the cool shade of a sacred fig tree with many branches, gave up walking, and sat down to rest. Then he questioned the man who had dogged him. “How did you come to know me? Who sent you? Tell me the truth if you want any good from me. Speak truly and you will have everything you desire. Lie, and your head will split in a hundred pieces.” “Narada told me, as he wandered on his way, that you are the son of our family priest,” Marutta said, “and the news turned my heart toward you with delight.” “That is the truth. He knows me for a performer of sacrifices. Where is Narada now?” “That prince of celestial seers told me about you, commended me to your care, and entered the fire.” Samvarta was pleased with the answer, and remarked that he could do as much himself.

A sub-tale: Angiras had two sons, Brihaspati the elder and the ascetic Samvarta, alike in their vows and set against each other the way the Asuras and the gods, all of them offspring of the Prajapati Daksha, were set against each other. Brihaspati would not leave his younger brother in peace. Harried again and again, Samvarta gave up everything he owned and went off to the woods with nothing to cover his body except the open sky. About that time Indra, having beaten and destroyed the Asuras and made himself sovereign of heaven, appointed Brihaspati, the eldest son of Angiras, as his priest. Angiras had been the family priest of Karandhama, and so Marutta, when he wanted a priest, went first to the elder son and found the younger only when the elder had turned him away.

Then Samvarta went back to raving like a lunatic, and abused the king in rough words. “My brain is disordered. I do whatever the whim of the moment tells me. Why are you so set on a priest of this peculiar kind? My brother knows how to officiate. He has gone over to Indra and performs his sacrifices; have yours performed by him. My elder brother took everything from me by force, my household goods, my household gods, the patrons I sacrificed for, and left me this body and nothing else. And since he is owed my full respect, I cannot officiate for you without his leave. Go to Brihaspati first. Get his permission, and then, if you still want a sacrifice, come back to me.” “Hear me, Samvarta,” Marutta said. “I did go to Brihaspati first. He wants Indra’s patronage and would not have me for his sacrificer. He said to me, ‘I have won the priesthood of the immortals and have no wish to act for mortals. Indra has forbidden me to officiate for Marutta, who has become lord of the Earth and is always burning to rival him.’ Your brother had agreed to that; he had said to the slayer of Vala, ‘So be it.’ I went to him gladly, knowing he had secured the protection of the lord of the gods, and he refused to be my priest. I was turned away for no fault of mine, and I have no wish to go to him again. I want to spend everything I own and have this sacrifice performed by you, and by the merit of your office to outdo Indra himself.” Samvarta named his terms. “I can accomplish everything you want, provided you do everything I ask. Know this, though. When Brihaspati and Indra learn that I am performing your sacrifice they will be furious, and they will do all they can to hurt you. So give me a pledge of your steadfastness, to keep me cool and constant. Otherwise, if my anger turns on you, I will burn you and your kin to ashes.” “If I ever forsake you,” Marutta said, “may I never reach the blessed worlds for as long as the mountains stand and the thousand-rayed sun gives heat. If I forsake you, may I never come to true wisdom, and may I stay sunk in the business of this world forever.” “Listen then, son of Avikshit. Your mind is well set on this act, and I have it in me to perform it. Your wealth will be beyond perishing. You will stand over Indra and the gods and the Gandharvas. For myself I want neither riches nor a priest’s fee. I mean to do what will gall my brother and Indra both. I will make you Indra’s equal, and I tell you truly I will do what you desire. On the heights of the Himalaya there is a peak called Munjavan, where the lord of Uma is always at his austerities. Trident in hand, with Uma beside him and wild goblins of many kinds around him, the god lives there as his fancy leads, in the shade of the giant forest trees, in the caves, on the rugged crests of the great mountain. The Rudras and the Sadhyas worship him there, the Vishvedevas and the Vasus, Yama, Varuna, Kubera with all his attendants, spirits and goblins, the two Ashvins, Gandharvas, Apsaras, Yakshas, the celestial sages, the sun gods, the gods of the winds, and evil spirits of every sort; and there he sports with Kubera’s followers, wild and playful creatures, weird and ghostly to look at. The mountain shines by its own light like the morning sun. No creature can make out its shape with eyes of flesh. Neither heat nor cold has any power there; the sun does not shine and the winds do not blow; and no one in that place is troubled by old age or hunger or thirst or death or fear. On every side of that mountain there are mines of gold, bright as the rays of the sun, and Kubera’s attendants stand guard over them with their arms raised, to keep intruders off for their master’s sake. Go there, and appease the god by his names.” And Samvarta recited them, a litany of well over a hundred names: Sharva, Rudra, Shitikantha, Kapardi, Varada, Tryaksha, Shiva, Shankara, Sthanu, Purusha, Bhaskara, Devadeva, Girisha, Pashupati, Bhutapati, Virupaksha, Tryambaka, Pinaki, Mahayogi, Tripuraghna, Trinayana, Ishana, Bhava, Umapati, Vishvarupa, Maheshvara, Ugra, Hara, and so on to Mahadeva and Chaturmukha. “Bow to him there and ask for his protection,” he said. “Make your submission to Mahadeva and you will have that gold. The men who go to him in that way come back with it.”

Marutta did as he was told. The arrangements he then made for his sacrifice were beyond anything human, and craftsmen set to work forging its vessels out of gold. The news traveled. Brihaspati heard that Marutta’s prosperity now eclipsed the gods’, and it grieved him to the heart; and the thought that his rival Samvarta was the one prospering by it made him ill. The glow went out of his skin and his body wasted. When the lord of the gods learned how badly his priest had taken it, he came to him with the immortals around him and asked after him as one asks after the sick. “Do you sleep in peace, Brihaspati? Do your servants suit you? Do you still seek the good of the gods, and do the gods take care of you?” “I sleep in peace in my bed, lord of the gods. My servants are to my liking. I always seek the good of the gods, and they cherish me well.” “Then where does this pain come from, of mind or of body? Why are you pale and so altered? Tell me who has hurt you, Brahmin, and I will kill them all.” “Indra, I have heard that Marutta is going to perform a great sacrifice and give splendid gifts at it, and that Samvarta will be his officiating priest. I want Samvarta kept from officiating there.” “You have everything you could desire. You are the priest of the gods, master of every sacred hymn, and you have gone beyond the reach of death and old age. What can Samvarta do to you now?” “A rival’s prosperity is always painful. That is the very reason you and your gods harry the Asuras, kith and kin, and kill the most prosperous among them. My rival is prospering, and the thought of it has changed my looks. Restrain Samvarta and King Marutta, Indra, by any means you have.” Indra turned to Agni. “Go at my command to King Marutta and offer Brihaspati to him. Tell him that this Brihaspati will officiate at his sacrifice and make him immortal.” “I will go as your messenger,” said Agni, and he went, to make Indra’s word good and to do Brihaspati honor. He went in his own nature, laying waste the forests and the trees along his way, roaring and wheeling like the great wind that blows as it likes at the end of winter. Marutta saw him coming. “Look! The god of fire is here today in his own body. Offer him a seat, sage, and water, and a cow, and water for his feet.” “I accept your water and your seat and the water for my feet,” Agni said. “Know that I come as Indra’s messenger, on his instructions.” “Is the glorious lord of the gods happy, Agni? Is he pleased with us? Are the other gods loyal to him? Tell me how all of this stands.” “Indra is perfectly happy. He is pleased with you and wishes to free you from old age, and all the gods are loyal to him. Hear his message. He has sent me to present Brihaspati to you. Let the priest of the gods perform your sacrifice, king, and make you, a mortal, immortal.” “This Brahmin, Samvarta, will perform my sacrifice,” Marutta said. “And I beg Brihaspati to consider that, having been priest to great Indra, it would not look well for him to serve a mortal now.” Agni raised the offer. “If Brihaspati officiates for you, then by Indra’s blessing you will reach the highest place in heaven; you will win fame and conquer the heavenly world for certain. You will be able to conquer every region where men live, and the regions of heaven, and all the highest worlds that Prajapati made, and the whole kingdom of the gods besides.” It was Samvarta who answered that. “You are never to come here again to present Brihaspati to Marutta. Know this, Agni: if you do, I will lose my temper, and I will burn you with these fierce and evil eyes of mine.” And the god of fire, afraid of being burned, went back to the gods trembling like the leaves of the ashvattha tree.

Indra saw the carrier of oblations come back with Brihaspati still beside him. “Did you go and offer Brihaspati to Marutta as I told you? What did that sacrificing king say to you? Did he accept my message?” “Marutta would not have your message,” Agni said. “When I pressed him he joined his hands in respect to Brihaspati and said, more than once, that Samvarta would be his priest. He said too that he had no desire to win the worlds of men or the worlds of heaven or the highest regions of Prajapati, and that if he had wanted them he would have taken your terms.” “Go back to that king. Give him these words of mine, which he would do well to weigh. If he does not obey them, I will strike him with my thunderbolt.” “Let the king of the Gandharvas carry your message this time. I am afraid to go there myself. Samvarta is practiced in austerities, and he was in a rage, and he told me: ‘I will burn you with my fierce and evil eyes if you come here again on any account to present Brihaspati to King Marutta.’” Indra would not believe it. “It is you who burn everything else. No one exists who can turn you to ashes. The whole world is afraid of your touch. What you are telling me deserves no credit.” Agni answered with a question. “You, Indra, took the dominion of heaven and Earth and the sky between them with the strength of your own arms. How was it, then, that Vritra once wrested the sovereignty of heaven from you?” “I can bring my enemies to their knees. I can grind a mountain down to an atom if I choose. I do not accept soma when an enemy offers it, though, and I do not use my thunderbolt on the weak, and so for a time Vritra seemed to triumph over me. What mortal can live in peace after making a quarrel with me? I drove the Kalakeyas down to the Earth. I cleared the Danavas out of heaven. I put an end to Prahlada’s days there. Is there a man alive who can provoke my enmity and live at ease?” “Then remember Chyavana,” said Agni. “Long ago that sage officiated at the sacrifice of Sharyati, with the twin Ashvins, and took the soma offering into his own hands. You were filled with wrath. You meant to stop Sharyati’s sacrifice, and you struck at Chyavana with your thunderbolt with all your force. And that Brahmin gave way to his own anger, and by the power of his devotions he seized your arm and held it fast, with the thunderbolt still in the fist. In his rage he made an enemy for you as well, an Asura terrible to look at, named Mada, who could take any shape. You shut your eyes at the sight of him. One of his huge jaws rested on the Earth and the other reached to heaven. He had a thousand sharp teeth, each a hundred yojanas long, and four fangs set thick among them that shone like pillars of silver and ran to two hundred yojanas. He came after you grinding those teeth, with a dreadful pike lifted to kill you, and you made a pitiful sight for everyone who stood by. Mastered by fear of that monster, you joined your hands and begged the great sage for protection. The might of Brahmins, Indra, is greater than the might of Kshatriyas. No one is stronger than a Brahmin. I know what that power is, and I do not wish to come up against Samvarta.”

“It is so,” Indra said. “The might of Brahmins is great, and no one is stronger than they are. All the same, the insolent pride of Avikshit’s son is a thing I cannot bear calmly, and I will strike him with my thunderbolt.” He turned to the king of the Gandharvas. “Dhritarashtra, go at my command to King Marutta, where he sits with Samvarta, and tell him this: ‘Accept Brihaspati as your preceptor, prince, or I will strike you with my terrible thunderbolt.’” The Gandharva went to that king’s court and delivered it. “Lord of men, I am Dhritarashtra the Gandharva, and I have come to give you Indra’s message. Hear what the lord of all the worlds, whose deeds are past understanding, says to you, and it is only this: ‘Take Brihaspati as the officiating priest of your sacrifice. If you do not, I will strike you with my terrible thunderbolt.’” “You know, and Indra knows, and the Vishvedevas and the Vasus and the Ashvins all know,” Marutta said, “that in this world there is no escaping what follows from playing a friend false. It is a great sin, as great as the murder of a Brahmin. Let Brihaspati officiate for great Indra, the highest of the gods, the bearer of the thunderbolt. Samvarta will be my priest. Neither Indra’s words nor yours persuade me.” “Then listen to Indra’s war cry, roaring in the heavens,” the Gandharva said. “He will hurl his thunderbolt at you, openly, and soon. Think of your own good. This is the time for it.” Indra’s roar was already in the sky. Marutta heard it and turned to Samvarta, who sat steady in his devotions. “That rain cloud floating up there tells me Indra is near. I seek shelter with you, prince of Brahmins. Take this fear of Indra out of my mind. The bearer of the thunderbolt is coming, and his terrible, unearthly brightness fills the ten directions, and my helpers in this assembly are overcome with fright.” “Your fear of Indra will soon be gone,” Samvarta said. “I will take this dread away with my spells. Be calm. Indra will not overpower you; you have nothing to fear from the god of a hundred sacrifices. I will use my staying charms, and the weapons of all the gods will fail them. Let the lightning flash in every quarter, let the winds enter the clouds and pour the rain down on the forests, let the waters flood the sky: the lightning will do nothing. Let Indra ride among his clouds and send down his rains and throw his thunderbolt wherever he likes to destroy you. The god of fire will protect you in every way, and you will have all you desire.” “The crash of that thunderbolt, and the howling of the wind with it, is terrible in my ears,” Marutta said. “My heart shakes again and again, Brahmin. I have no peace left.” “The fear will leave you presently. I will scatter the thunder with the winds. Put fear out of your mind and choose a boon, whatever your heart wants, and I will accomplish it for you.” “Then I want Indra to come in person to this sacrifice, this moment, and accept the oblation offered to him, and I want all the other gods to come too and take their own shares and drink the soma poured for them.” “My spells have drawn him here already,” Samvarta said. “Look, king. Indra is coming with his horses, and the other gods are hurrying to this sacrifice and worshiping him as they come.”

The lord of the gods came, riding in a chariot drawn by the finest of horses, the other gods around him, up to the altar of Avikshit’s son, and drank the soma of that king who had no rival. Marutta and his priest rose to receive him, and with a glad heart the king welcomed him with the highest honors the scriptures lay down. “Welcome, Indra,” Samvarta said. “Your presence has made this sacrifice great, slayer of Vala and Vritra. Drink again of this soma, which I pressed today.” “Look on me with kindness, Indra; I bow to you,” Marutta said. “Your coming has perfected my sacrifice and blessed my life. This excellent Brahmin, Brihaspati’s younger brother, is the one performing my rites.” “I know your priest,” Indra said, “this ascetic of great fire, the younger brother of Brihaspati. I came at his invitation. I am well pleased with you, king, and my resentment against you is gone.” “If you are pleased with us,” Samvarta said, “then direct this sacrifice yourself, and yourself assign the gods their portions, so that the whole world knows it was done by you.” So Indra himself gave the gods their orders: to raise the hall of assembly, and a thousand fine rooms, well furnished, as grand as a painting; to finish quickly a staircase, massive and lasting, for the Gandharvas and Apsaras to climb; and to fit out the part of the ground kept for the Apsaras’ dancing until it matched his own palace in heaven. The dwellers in heaven did it all at speed. Then Indra, honored and content, spoke to the king. “By joining you at this sacrifice, prince, your ancestors who went before you and all the gods have been satisfied, and they have accepted what you offered. Now let the Brahmins offer on the altar a red bull, which belongs to the god of fire, and a consecrated blue bull with a dappled hide, which belongs to the Vishvedevas.” The ceremony grew in splendor after that. The gods themselves gathered the food for it, and Indra, lord of horses, whom the Brahmins worshiped, served as an assistant at the rite. Samvarta mounted the altar, blazing like a second fire, called aloud and graciously on the gods, and poured the clarified butter into the flames with the sacred hymns. The slayer of Vala drank the soma first, and then the assembled gods drank; and happy and well pleased, with the king’s leave, they went home. Marutta, his heart light, set heaps of gold in place after place and gave vast wealth to the Brahmins, and he shone like Kubera, the god of riches. He filled his treasury with wealth of every kind, and then, with his preceptor’s leave, he went back to his kingdom and ruled the whole realm to the edge of the sea. Vyasa brought the tale home to the man in front of him. “Such was the virtue of the king at whose sacrifice that vast quantity of gold was gathered. And that gold, prince, you must now collect; and worshiping the gods with the proper rites, you must hold this sacrifice.” Yudhishthira was glad to hear it. He wanted to perform his sacrifice with those riches, and he took counsel with his ministers again and again. Krishna could see that the son of Pritha was still sick at heart, a king bereft of his kinsmen, dimmed like the sun in eclipse or a fire under its own smoke, and when Vyasa had finished he spoke to comfort him. “Every crookedness of the heart leads to destruction, and every straightness leads to Brahman. If that is the whole aim of wisdom, what can a distracted mind do to the man who knows it? Your karma is not yet worked out, and your enemies are not yet conquered, for you do not know the enemies still lurking in your own flesh. I will tell you, as I heard it, how Indra fought Vritra. Long ago Vritra swallowed up the earth, the seat of all smell, and foul smells rose on every side, and Indra in his rage threw his thunderbolt at him. Wounded deep, Vritra went into the waters, and their liquid nature left them. Struck again, he went into light, and its color and form were lost; struck again, into the wind, and touch was lost; struck again, he overwhelmed the ether, and sound was destroyed. Struck there too, he entered Indra’s own body and took its powers, and a great delusion came over the god. We have heard that Vasishtha comforted him, and that Indra killed Vritra inside his own body with a thunderbolt no eye could see. Indra told this mystery to the great sages, and they told it to me.”

He went on. “Sickness is of two kinds, of the body and of the mind. Each is born of the action of the other, and neither arises alone. In the body the cold, the warm and the windy humors keep health when they are evenly balanced, the warm checked by the cold and the cold by the warm. In the soul there are Sattva, Rajas and Tamas, and their balance is the health of the mind; where one outweighs the others a remedy is prescribed. Happiness is overcome by sorrow, and sorrow by pleasure. Some men in grief want to call back old happiness, and some in happiness call back old grief. You want to recall neither. What is it you do want to remember, apart from this delusion of sorrow? Or perhaps it is your own nature that has mastered you. You do not choose to bring back the sight of Draupadi standing in the assembly hall in a single cloth, in her season, before all the Pandavas. Nor should you brood on leaving the city, on the exile in antelope skins and the wandering in the great forest; nor on what Jatasura did to you, the fight with Chitrasena and the trouble from the Saindhavas; nor on Kichaka kicking Draupadi in the time you lived concealed; nor on the fighting between you and Drona and Bhishma. The hour has come for the battle each man must fight alone, with his own mind. By meditation and by the merit of your own acts you must get across to the far side of that dark and baffling thing. This war needs no arrows, no friends and no attendants. It has come to you now, and if you lose it your state will be wretched indeed. Know this and act on it and you will win; and knowing it, and the destiny of all creatures, follow the conduct of your fathers and govern your kingdom. Release does not come from giving up outward things like a kingdom. It comes from giving up what panders to the flesh. As for the virtue and the happiness of the man who has renounced outward things while the passions of the body still fill him, let our enemies have them. There is a word of two syllables, mrityu, which is death, and a word of three, shashvata, which is the eternal Brahman. The feeling that says ‘this is mine’ is death, and the absence of that feeling is the eternal. Both sit unseen in the soul of every creature and make war on each other. If it is true that no creature is ever destroyed, then a man does not make himself guilty of a creature’s death by piercing its body. What is the world to a man who has won the sovereignty of the whole Earth, with all that moves and stands still on it, and holds no attachment to it? And the recluse in the forest who lives on wild roots and still craves the good things of the world carries death in his mouth. Watch your enemies, the outer ones and the inner ones. The man who can see the eternal reality passes beyond the great fear. People do not approve of those who are sunk in worldly desire; yet there is no act without a desire at its root, and every desire is a limb of the mind. Knowing this, the wise subdue their desires. The yogi knows from the practice of many former births that yoga is the perfect way. He remembers that what the soul desires does not make for virtue, and that the curbing of desire is the root of all true virtue, and so he takes up neither giving nor Vedic learning, neither austerity nor the rites that aim at prosperity, neither ceremony nor sacrifice nor religious rule nor meditation, with any gain in view. The sages who know the old lore recite verses on this, called the Kamagita. Hear them. Desire speaks: ‘No creature can destroy me without the right means. If a man knows my strength and tries to destroy me with muttered prayers, I delude him into taking me for the very self within him. If he tries with sacrifices and many gifts, I appear in his mind as the most virtuous of moving creatures. If he tries by mastering the Vedas and their branches, I appear to him as the soul of virtue among unmoving things. If a man whose strength is truth tries to overcome me by patience, I appear to him as his own mind and he does not perceive me. If the man of austerities tries to destroy me by austerity, I take the shape of austerity in his mind and he cannot know me. And when the man of learning sets out to destroy me for the sake of his release, I frolic and laugh in his face. I am the everlasting one, without an equal, whom no creature can kill.’ So turn your desire toward virtue, and by that means reach what is good for you. Make ready the horse sacrifice with its gifts, and other great sacrifices with theirs. Do not let grief master you again at the sight of your friends lying dead on the field; you cannot see them alive again. Perform your sacrifices, win fame in this world, and reach the perfect way after it.”

The gist: After the war Yudhishthira is sunk in grief and self-reproach and asks leave to go to the forest. Dhritarashtra, Krishna and Vyasa turn him back toward his duty and counsel the horse sacrifice, and when he answers that he has nothing to give and will not levy dues on a ruined Earth, Vyasa tells him of King Marutta: of Brihaspati, who refused to be Marutta’s priest in order to please Indra, of the naked wanderer Samvarta, who took the office, and of the gold of that sacrifice, more than the Brahmins could carry away, still lying in the Himalaya. Krishna adds a harder comfort. The war outside is over, and the one that remains is fought alone, against the mind, where the feeling that says ‘this is mine’ is death.

The man who forgot what he was told on the field: Arjuna’s confession, Krishna’s refusal, and the Brahmin who came down from heaven

With words like these the sages comforted the king who had lost his friends. Krishna himself urged him, and Vyasa, Devasthana, Narada, Bhima, Nakula, Draupadi, Sahadeva and quick-witted Arjuna, with other great men and Brahmins learned in the scriptures, and the sorrow for his dead kin lifted from him. He performed the rites for his departed friends, honored the Brahmins and the gods, and took the Earth with her girdle of oceans under his rule. With his kingdom regained and his mind at rest, he spoke to Vyasa and Narada and the other sages. “The words of such great and ancient seers have comforted me, and I have no cause left for the least grief. I have come into great wealth too, with which I may worship the gods, and with your help I will now perform the sacrifice. We have heard that the Himalayan country is full of wonders. So arrange it, grandsire, that under your protection we reach those mountains safely; the performance of my sacrifice is wholly in your hands. The divine sage Narada and Devasthana have also spoken fine and kindly words for our good. No unlucky man, in a time of great trouble, finds preceptors and friends like these, whom all good men approve.” The sages told the king and Krishna and Arjuna to go to the Himalaya, and vanished where they stood, before the whole assembly, and the son of Dharma sat on there for a while. The Pandavas then gave themselves to the funeral ceremonies for Bhishma, and the days of it seemed long to them. They performed the last rites for Bhishma and Karna and the other leading Kauravas and gave large gifts to the Brahmins; and Yudhishthira performed the rites for the slain once more together with Dhritarashtra, gave away immense wealth, and with the old king walking before him entered the city of Hastinapura, where he comforted his uncle and governed the Earth with his brothers. Janamejaya asked what Krishna and Arjuna did once the Pandavas had won back their kingdom and brought it to peace, and Vaishampayana told him. The two were as pleased as Indra and his consort in heaven. They traveled for pleasure through woodland country and over the tablelands of the mountains, to sacred bathing places and lakes and rivers, like the two Ashvins in Indra’s garden Nandana, and in the beautiful assembly hall at Indraprastha they passed the time in high spirits, going over the stirring moments of the war and the sufferings of their earlier years, and reciting the lineages of seers and gods. Krishna comforted the son of Pritha there for the death of his sons and of thousands of his kin, and Arjuna rested for a while like a man with a great weight lifted off him. Then Krishna told him what was on his own mind. The king, the son of Dharma, had conquered the whole Earth by the strength of Arjuna’s arms, and of Bhima’s and the twins’, he said; it was by righteousness that Yudhishthira had his kingdom back without a thorn left in it, and by righteousness that Duryodhana lay dead with his greedy, foul-spoken brothers. “Wherever you are, and Pritha, and the king, and Bhima and the two sons of Madri, there my heart is drawn,” Krishna said. “Still, a long time has slipped away in these halls, lovely as heaven, without my seeing my father Vasudeva, or Baladeva, or the other chiefs of the Vrishnis, and now I want to go to Dwarka. When the king was struck down by grief, Bhishma and I told him many histories fitted to the hour, and he heeded us, though he is our sovereign and knows all there is to know. My body and all the wealth in my house are at his disposal, and I would do nothing to displease him even if death came for me. So come with me to him today and tell him that I mean to leave. Duryodhana is dead with his armies, the Earth with her seas and mountains and forests has passed under the rule of Dharma’s son, and nothing keeps me here any longer except my affection for you.” Arjuna honored him as he deserved, and in sorrow said only, “So be it.” Janamejaya asked next what the two of them said to each other when, with their enemies dead, they had gone back into the assembly rooms. Arjuna, his kingdom recovered, spent his days in Krishna’s company and did nothing else, Vaishampayana said, his heart full, in that palace of heavenly beauty. One day the two of them wandered idly into a part of it that looked like a piece of heaven itself, and their kinsmen and attendants gathered around them. Arjuna looked over that delightful hall and turned to his companion. “Krishna, son of Devaki, when the battle was upon us I came to know your greatness, and your form as lord of the universe. What you told me then, out of affection, I have lost. All of it has gone from me, because my mind is fickle. Again and again I have wanted to hear those truths, and you will be leaving for Dwarka soon.”

Krishna embraced him, and then he answered, and the answer was a rebuke. “I made you listen to truths that are kept as mysteries. I gave you truths that are eternal. I set out the law in its true form, and all the everlasting worlds. It displeases me greatly to learn that out of folly you did not take in what I gave you. The memory of all I said that day will not come back to me now. You have no faith, son of Pandu, and your understanding is not good. I cannot repeat the whole of it in detail. That teaching was more than enough for the knowing of Brahman, and I cannot deliver it a second time, for when I spoke of the supreme Brahman I had gathered myself in yoga. I will tell you an old history on the same subject. Listen to all of it, you who keep your duty so carefully, so that with an understanding shaped to my teaching you may still reach the highest end. Once a Brahmin came to us from heaven, from the world of the Grandsire, a visitor whose power nothing could withstand. We honored him as he should be honored, and we questioned him in the manner heaven prescribes. Hear what he answered, son of Pritha, and let no doubt of any kind hold you back.”

The Brahmin from heaven began by naming what he had been asked for. “What you want from me, Krishna, belongs to the law of release. You ask for it out of pity for every living creature, with nothing in it that you need for yourself, and it is the kind of knowledge that destroys delusion wherever it touches. I will tell it to you properly. Give me your whole attention.” There was a Brahmin called Kashyapa, he said, rich in austerities, as well versed in duty as anyone alive, who went to another Brahmin, a man who had gone to the bottom of every mystery of the sacred law. That man had mastered everything the scriptures say about how beings depart and how they come back, and he had the other kind of knowledge too, the direct kind that yoga gives. He was at home in the truth of every subject in the world. He had worked out what pleasure is and what pain is. He knew birth and death, and could tell merit from demerit. When he looked at embodied creatures, high ones and low ones, he could see the ends their actions were carrying them toward. He lived like a man already released. His austerities had come to fruit, his mind was entirely still, and his senses obeyed him completely. He seemed to give off the light of Brahman. He could go anywhere he wished simply by wishing it, and he knew the art of vanishing out of everyone’s sight. He wandered in the company of Siddhas nobody else could see, and of celestial musicians, and would sit down with them somewhere far from the noise of people and talk. Nothing held him. He was as unattached as wind.

Kashyapa heard a true account of this man and wanted to see him, and being intelligent, he found him. Kashyapa had austerities of his own behind him, and he still fell at the sage’s feet with his whole heart in the gesture, because he had seen those extraordinary powers and because he wanted merit. Then he stayed. Filled with wonder, he attended on the sage the way a student attends on a teacher, and he kept at it, and in time he pleased him. The sage was learned in the scriptures and excellent in his conduct as well as accomplished in every other way, and it was Kashyapa’s devotion and obedience that won him over. One day the sage spoke to him cheerfully, with the student’s highest success in view. “Listen to his words, Krishna, as I repeat them,” the Brahmin from heaven said.

“By many kinds of action, my son, and with the help of merit, mortal creatures reach many different ends here and earn their stay in heaven,” the perfected sage told Kashyapa. “Nowhere is there the highest happiness. Nowhere is a residence permanent. Those high regions are bought with enormous suffering, and creatures fall out of them over and over. I know, because I indulged in sin and had to reach one miserable destination after another, full of lust and anger and stupid with greed. I have died and been born again more times than I can set out. I have eaten every kind of food. I have sucked at many breasts. I have had many mothers, and many fathers who resembled each other in nothing. Many happinesses have been mine, and many miseries. Again and again I was cut off from what I loved and tied to what I could not stand. I earned wealth with hard labor and then had to watch it go. Kings insulted me and so did my own relatives, and the misery of that was excessive. I have known severe pain in the mind and severe pain in the body. I have been humiliated. I have died in bad circumstances and been shut up in worse ones. I have fallen into hell and been tortured at length in the country of Yama. Old age came for me repeatedly and so did disease, and calamities arrived in quantity. Every affliction that comes from perceiving the world in pairs of opposites, I have had, and had again.”

The Brahmin gave the rest of it as the sage had spoken it. “Then one day the sorrow finished its work and a blank despair came down on me, and I took refuge in the Formless. I was in enough distress to give the world up entirely, with all its joys and all its griefs together. I understood this path, and then I practiced it, here, in the same world where I had suffered. Afterward, through stillness of mind, I arrived at the success you are looking at. I do not have to come back. Until I am absorbed into eternal Brahman, until the universe itself dissolves, I will go on watching the happy ends that are coming to me and watching the beings who make up this universe. When I leave here I will go to what is above this world, and from there to what is above that, and I will reach the condition that is the unmanifest aspect of Brahman. Do not doubt any of it. I will not return to this place where creatures die. I am pleased with you, wise as you are. Tell me what I can do for you. The hour has come for the very thing you came here to get, and I know what that is, because I know why you sought me out. I am leaving this world soon, which is why I am giving you this hint now. Your conduct has pleased me greatly. Ask. I will speak about whatever benefits you, in whatever direction you want it. I think your intelligence is considerable. In fact I admire it, since it was your intelligence that let you recognize me at all. You are certainly a very intelligent man, Kashyapa.”

A key to reading this (who is speaking): Four voices are stacked here. Vaishampayana is telling King Janamejaya; inside that, Krishna is telling Arjuna; inside that, a Brahmin who came from the world of the Grandsire is telling Krishna; and inside that, a perfected sage is speaking to Kashyapa. The law of release is the teaching about how a creature gets free of the round of birth and death, and a Siddha is one whose austerities have reached their success, so that he can go where he wishes and pass out of sight. What Krishna taught on the field as the battle approached he declines to say a second time: he spoke it gathered in yoga, he says, and what he gives Arjuna now is an old history on the same subject.

The gist: The kingdom is recovered, and in the assembly hall at Indraprastha Krishna tells Arjuna that he means to go home to Dwarka. Arjuna then admits that everything he was told when the battle was upon them has gone from his fickle mind. Krishna embraces him, tells him he lacks faith and understanding, and says he cannot give that teaching again. He gives an older story in its place: a Brahmin who came down from the world of the Grandsire, that Brahmin’s account of a seeker named Kashyapa, and the released sage at whose feet Kashyapa fell, who tells over his own births and deaths and his falls into hell, and then says, question me.

Kashyapa’s six questions: how a body comes apart, how the Jiva gets out, and how it settles into a womb again

Kashyapa touched the sage’s feet and then asked him things that are very hard to answer, Krishna told Arjuna, and the sage, as righteous a man as there was, answered them. “How does a body dissolve,” Kashyapa asked, “and how is another one acquired? A creature goes around and around through painful births; how does anyone get out? The Jiva enjoys Prakriti for a while, so how does it throw off the particular body that Prakriti handed it? Once it is free of the body, how does it reach the thing that is other than the body? How does a human being collect the fruit of the good and the bad he has done? And when a man has no body left, where are his actions kept?” The released sage took the questions one at a time, the Brahmin from heaven said, and he asked Krishna, a son of the Vrishni line, to listen while he recited the answers.

The sage started with the body. “Every body a Jiva takes has a stock of actions in it that lengthen life and bring reputation. When that stock is used up, when the span has shortened, the Jiva living in that body starts doing things that work against his own life and health. As destruction comes near, his judgment turns off the proper road. His soul has not been cleansed, and he may know his own constitution perfectly well, and his strength, and what season of the year it is and what season of his life, and he still begins eating at irregular hours and eating what does not suit him. He does actively harmful things. He overeats, then he stops eating altogether. He takes spoiled food or spoiled meat or bad drink, or dishes whose ingredients quarrel with each other. He eats heavy food past the helpful amount, or eats again before the last meal has gone down. He exercises past the right measure and takes his pleasures past it too, or else, greedy for work, holds back the body’s urgings when they are already insistent. He eats things too rich. He sleeps in the daytime. Undigested food, when its hour comes, stirs up the faults by itself, and out of that disturbance in the body he gets the illness that ends in his death. Sometimes a man goes further and does something perverse and unnatural, hanging himself, for instance. Through these causes a living body comes apart. Understand exactly how it happens, as I tell it to you.”

He went on to the dying itself. “The wind grows violent, and driven by it the heat in the body rises and travels through one part after another until it shuts down every movement of the vital breaths. Excited through the whole body, that heat becomes very strong and pierces each vital spot where life can be said to live. The Jiva feels enormous pain and leaves its house of clay quickly. Know this, Kashyapa: when the vital spots are wounded in that way, the Jiva slips out of the body in great distress. Every living creature goes through birth and death repeatedly, and the pain of putting a body down is the same pain as first entering a womb, or coming out of one. The joints nearly come apart, and the waters of the womb cause real suffering. Then a second violent wind drives the wind that is inside the body, which is excited by cold, and it undoes the assembly of matter that people call a body and returns it to its five elements. Inside this compound of the five great elements, the wind that lives in the breaths called Prana and Apana rushes upward out of a position of distress, and leaves the embodied creature. That is how the wind departs. Breathlessness is what an onlooker sees. The man loses his heat, his breath, his beauty and his consciousness, and since the Jiva is Brahman, a person whom Brahman has deserted is pronounced dead.”

The sage followed what leaves. “The ducts through which he used to take in everything he saw and heard no longer bring him anything. It is the eternal Jiva that produces, in those very ducts, the life breaths that food generates. The gathered elements knit themselves tightly together in certain places, and the scriptures call those places the vital spots. When they are pierced, the Jiva rises and goes into the creature’s heart and arrests the principle of animation without any delay at all. The creature still has consciousness in it and can no longer know anything with it. The vital spots are overwhelmed and the creature’s knowledge goes under into darkness. The Jiva, now with nothing left to stand on, is shaken by the wind, draws one long painful breath, goes out fast, and the body it leaves shudders. Outside the body, the Jiva is surrounded by what it did. It is fitted out on every side with its auspicious acts of merit and with its sins, and Brahmins who have knowledge and hold firm conclusions from the scriptures can read from the signs whether a departing Jiva carries merit or the reverse. Men with working eyes watch a firefly blink on and off in the dark. In the same way men with the eye of knowledge, whose austerities have succeeded, watch the Jiva leave a body, take birth, enter a womb.”

Then he told Kashyapa where a Jiva can go. “Three regions are assigned to the Jiva, and they have always been three. This world, where creatures live, is the field of action, and by doing good and bad in it every embodied creature earns what it gets, so that right here, on account of their own acts, creatures come into higher enjoyments or lower ones. Those who do evil here reach hell on account of it, and hell is that condition of sinking head downward in which creatures are cooked. It is a great misery and getting out of it is extremely hard, and a man should work hard at saving himself from it. Now I will tell you truly where creatures live when they go up from this world; listen with care, because hearing it will steady your understanding and make the working of acts clear to you. The regions above are the star worlds that shine in the sky, the disc of the moon, and the disc of the sun that shines in the universe by its own light, and these are the destinations of creatures whose deeds were righteous. When the merit runs out they fall from those regions, repeatedly. Even in heaven there are grades of happiness, low and middling and high. Even in heaven a resident looks at prosperity more blazing than his own and is discontented. Those are the destinations, set out in full. Now I will tell you how the Jiva comes to reside in a womb. Listen with your attention gathered.”

He kept his word about the womb. “Whatever a Jiva does, good or bad, is not subject to destruction. Body after body, those acts go on producing fruit that matches them. A fruit tree in its season yields a heavy crop, and merit earned with a pure heart yields a heavy crop of happiness the same way, and sin done with a sinful heart raises a heavy crop of misery. The soul puts the mind in front of itself and goes to work. Here is how the Jiva, loaded with its acts and overpowered by lust and anger, gets into a womb. The vital seed, mixed with blood, enters the womb of a woman and becomes the field of that Jiva, good ground or bad according to what the Jiva has done. Because it is subtle and because it is unmanifest, the Jiva takes a body and still attaches itself to nothing, which is why it is called eternal Brahman. It is the seed of all creatures, and creatures live at all on account of it. That Jiva enters every limb of the fetus piece by piece, takes on the attribute of mind, occupies all the regions that belong to Prana, and holds life up. That is why a fetus that has acquired mind starts moving its limbs. Molten iron poured into a mold takes the shape of the mold, and the Jiva enters the fetus in just that way. Fire that gets into a lump of iron heats the whole lump, and the Jiva shows itself in the fetus in just that way. A lamp burning in a room reveals everything in the room, and the mind reveals the separate limbs of the body in just that way.”

He named the acts that carry a Jiva well. “Whatever a Jiva did in an earlier body it has to enjoy or endure now, and by that enjoying and enduring the old acts are used up while new ones pile on, and this continues until the Jiva acquires knowledge of the duties contained in the contemplation that leads to release. So I will name for you the acts that make a Jiva happy while it is still going around the circle: gifts, the keeping of austerities, brahmacharya, bearing Brahman in the manner the ordinances lay down, self-restraint, tranquility, compassion for every creature, control of the passions, refusal of cruelty, refusal to take what belongs to another, refusing even mentally to do anything false or injurious to any living creature on earth, reverent service to mother and father, honor paid to deities and to guests, worship of preceptors, pity, purity, unbroken restraint of all the organs, and the doing of every good act. That list is what is meant by the conduct of the good. Righteousness comes out of such conduct, and it is righteousness that protects all creatures forever. A man will find that conduct among good people, where it lives permanently. The course of practice that people with quiet souls hold to is the indicator of righteousness, and eternal righteousness has been placed among them. Anyone who takes up that righteousness will never come to a miserable end, and when the world slips off the roads of righteousness it is the conduct of the good that pulls it back. The yogi stands above even these people, because he is released. For a man who acts rightly and well on every occasion, deliverance comes after a long time. A creature always meets the acts it did in an earlier life, and those acts are the reason it arrives in this world wearing a condition that is not its own true form.”

Last he came to a doubt the world still holds. “People ask who decided, the first time, that a Jiva should accept a body at all. The Grandsire of all the worlds, Brahma, first made a body for himself, and then created the three worlds entire, with everything in them that moves and everything that does not. Having taken a body first, he then created Pradhana. Pradhana is the material cause of every embodied creature, the thing that covers all this and that everyone came to recognize as the highest. What is seen is called destructible; the other is immortal and indestructible. What is seen is Kshara; what is other is the immortal, the Akshara. Take each Purusha separately and the whole is duality among these three. Prajapati, who was seen first in an embodied form, then created all the primal elements and all the immobile creatures, and this is the ancient hearing. For that acceptance of a body the Grandsire fixed a limit in time, and fixed the migrations through various creatures, and the returning and being born again. All of this that I am telling you is proper and correct, the way a man of intelligence who has seen his own soul would tell it. A man who treats pleasure and pain as inconstant, which is the correct view of them, who regards the body as an unholy assemblage and destruction as something already built into action, and who keeps in mind that the small amount of pleasure there is amounts in the end to pain, will get across this terrible ocean of worldly migration, which is otherwise so hard to cross. Assailed by old age and death and disease, the man who understands Pradhana looks with a level eye at the consciousness living inside every conscious being, and with the supreme seat in view he becomes completely indifferent to everything else. Now, learned Brahmin, understand the excellent knowledge of that indestructible seat, as I set it out for you.”

A key to reading this (the words): The Jiva is what wears a body and outlasts it, and this teaching identifies it plainly with Brahman, which is why the dead are said to be deserted by Brahman. The faults are the three humors of the body, wind, bile and phlegm; in balance they are health, and undigested food rouses them into disease. Prana and Apana are two of the life breaths. The vital spots are the places where the elements of the body are knit tightly together, and where a wound reaches life. Pradhana is the material cause of every embodied creature; Kshara is the destructible that is seen, and Akshara the indestructible. Kashyapa’s questions as he speaks them come to six, and the old commentator counts seven.

The gist: Kashyapa asks his questions, and the answer begins like a physician’s account and ends at the making of the worlds. When the acts that lengthen life are spent, a man begins to eat and live against himself; undigested food rouses the faults; heat driven by wind pierces the vital spots; a second wind returns the body to its five elements; and the Jiva goes out on one long painful breath, surrounded by every merit and every sin it earned. From this field of action the doers of evil go to hell and the righteous to the worlds of the stars, the moon and the sun, and from those too creatures fall when their merit is spent. The same Jiva enters a womb as molten iron enters a mold. One road is named for the long journey, the conduct of the good, and the yogi stands above even that.

What a free man looks like, the pith drawn out of a blade of grass, and the disciple who asked what becomes of food

The sage gave that knowledge as the portrait of a man who is released. “A man becomes absorbed in the one receptacle of all things, and lets go even of the thought that he is one with all things, and at last lets go of the thought that he exists at all, casting off one bond after another until he has crossed them. Such a man is the friend of everything alive. He endures whatever comes. His mind rests in quiet, his senses are conquered, fear and anger have gone out of him, and he holds himself in. He treats every creature exactly as he treats himself. He is restrained, he is clean, he carries no vanity, and the sense of I has left him. Life and death look the same to him, and so do pleasure and pain, gain and loss, the welcome thing and the unwelcome thing. He does not want what belongs to anyone else. He looks down on nobody. He has walked past the pairs of opposites and his mind holds on to nothing. He has no enemy, no kinsman, no child. He has set down duty, wealth and pleasure, the three things men arrange their lives around, and desire has no hold on him. He gathers neither merit nor demerit, and he throws off the merit and demerit he brought with him out of earlier births, wearing down the elements of his own body to win a settled mind. Every one of these is a man set free.”

The portrait went on. “Such a man keeps clear of action altogether. He sees the universe as a thing that will not last, like the ashvattha tree with birth and death and old age always hanging on it. His understanding has settled on renunciation and his eyes are turned permanently toward his own faults, and he is soon out of the bonds that held him. He sees his soul as empty of smell, of taste, of touch, of sound, of possessions, of anything the eye can reach, and finally as unknowable. He sees it without the properties of the five elements, without shape, without cause, tasting the qualities and yet owning none of them. Then, using the understanding to set down every purpose that belongs to body or mind, he arrives by degrees at the end of separate existence, the way a fire goes quiet when nobody feeds it. Free of every impression, past the pairs of opposites, holding nothing, running his senses under the discipline of austerity, he reaches Brahman, which is eternal and supreme and tranquil and steady and lasting and beyond destruction. And now hear the science of yoga, which has nothing above it, and how men of yoga come to see the perfect soul by concentration. I will give you the instructions in their order. Learn from me the doors through which a man turns the soul inward in the body and sees what has neither beginning nor end.”

Then he gave the method. “Draw the senses back from the things they feed on and fix the mind on the soul. Do the severest austerities first, and only then practice the concentration that leads to release. A learned Brahmin with intelligence in him should keep to austerity, keep to concentration, follow the precepts of the science, and look for the soul inside the body. A good man who manages to hold his mind on the soul, and who has made exclusive meditation a habit, sees the Supreme Soul inside his own. Restrained, gathered, with the senses thoroughly beaten, his mind washed clean, he comes by that gathering to see the soul with the soul. A man sees a stranger in a dream, and later, awake, meets him and knows him at once, and says, ‘This is the one.’ The man who has seen the Supreme Soul deep in samadhi knows it again the same way when he comes up out of samadhi. And a man draws the soft pith out of a blade of munja grass and holds it up separate from the blade. That is how the yogi draws the soul out of the body and looks at it. The body is the munja, and the pith is the soul. It is the fine illustration that men who understand yoga have always given.”

He told Kashyapa what such seeing gives. “The man who has truly seen the soul in yoga has no master over him any more, because he has become lord of the three worlds. He takes whatever bodies he wants. He turns old age and death aside and neither grieves nor rejoices. Restrained and gathered, he can make for himself the godhood of the gods themselves, and when he drops this passing body he reaches the Brahman that does not change. Watching every creature alive go down to destruction in front of him raises no fear in him. When all creatures are in agony, nothing can put him in agony. Empty of wanting, quiet in mind, he is never shaken by the terrible things that grow out of attachment and affection, which are pain and grief and fear. Weapons do not go into him. Death does not exist where he is. Nobody anywhere in the world is happier. He stands on himself and stays there. He turns aside old age and pain and pleasure and sleeps comfortably. He drops the human body and takes other shapes as he likes. While a man is enjoying the sovereignty yoga hands him, he must never slip out of his devotion to yoga, and once he has seen the Soul inside himself he stops having any particular regard even for Indra, the god of a hundred sacrifices. Hear now how a man trains himself to exclusive meditation and arrives at yoga. Think of the quarter of the sky that has the sun behind it, and fix the mind inside the house you happen to live in, never outside it; staying in that house, let the mind with all its outward and inward workings look into the particular room you are sitting in. At the moment when deep meditation shows you the All, there is nothing left outside Brahman for the mind to go and live in. Hold the senses still in a forest that is empty of people and empty of noise, put the mind there, and meditate on the All outside the body and inside it. Meditate on the teeth, on the palate, on the tongue, on the throat, and on the neck as well. Meditate on the heart, and on the ligatures of the heart.”

The Brahmin from heaven spoke of that pupil now as his own. “When I had told him this, Krishna, my intelligent disciple asked me once more about this law of release, which is so hard to explain. ‘How does food eaten at intervals get digested in the stomach? How does it turn into juice, and after that into blood? How does it feed the flesh, the marrow, the sinews and the bones? How do the limbs of an embodied creature grow at all? Where does the strength of a growing man come from? How do the parts that carry no nourishment, and the impurities, find their separate ways out? How does this creature draw breath in and let it out again? Sitting on what part of the body does the Soul live there? How does Jiva keep the body up by its own effort? And when it leaves one body and settles into another, what color is that body, and of what kind? Tell me all of it exactly, holy one.’ That was what the learned Brahmin asked me, and I answered him the way I had heard it myself. ‘A man puts something precious away in his storeroom and keeps his mind on it; put the mind inside your own body like that, hold the senses in, and hunt for the Soul without letting your attention wander. Keep at it, be satisfied with your own self, and in very little time you reach the Brahman by seeing which a man comes to know Pradhana. The eye cannot take hold of it, and neither can all the senses together. The lamp of the mind is the one light by which that great Soul is seen. It has hands and feet on every side and ears on every side, and it lives spread through everything in the world. Jiva sees the Soul drawn out of the body. Then, holding the mind inside the body, he lets go of Brahman as something that has form and sees Brahman with every attribute gone. He sees the Soul with his mind, and at that moment he seems to smile. Resting on that Brahman he reaches release in me. All this mystery has now been declared. I ask your leave, for I am going from this place; go yourself wherever you please.’ And that disciple of mine, Krishna, a Brahmin of hard penances who kept his vows, went where he liked.”

“That Brahmin, son of Pritha, having said those words to me about the law of release, vanished on the spot,” Krishna said. “Did you hear this discourse with your mind held to it and nothing else? This is what you heard that day, when you were standing on your chariot. It seems to me that a man whose understanding is muddled, or who has gathered no wisdom from study, or who eats food that does not agree with his body, or whose inner self has not been cleaned, will find it hard to take in. Among the gods themselves this is a great secret, and it has now been told. Nowhere in this world, at no time and in no place, has any man heard it. Nobody except you deserves to hear it. A man whose inner self is in confusion cannot easily understand it even now. The world of the gods is full of those who follow the religion of acts, and the ending of the mortal form, which the religion of inaction brings, is not to the liking of the gods. The highest goal is the one made of eternal Brahman, where a man drops the body, reaches deathlessness, and stays happy. By holding to this teaching even those said to be of sinful birth, which is to say women and Vaishyas and Shudras, reach that highest goal, and there is no need to speak of Brahmins and Kshatriyas, learned men who keep to the duties of their orders and have the world of Brahman in view. The reasons for it have been laid down, and the means of getting it, and the full attainment and the fruit, which is release and a settled certainty about the nature of pain. Nothing carries greater happiness than this. A mortal with intelligence and faith and courage in him, who gives up as worthless what the world holds to be solid, gets the Supreme in a short time by these means. That is everything there is to say, and there is nothing higher. Yoga comes to the man who keeps at its practice steadily for six months.”

A key to reading this (who is speaking): Three voices are stacked here. Krishna is speaking to Arjuna; inside that, the Brahmin from heaven is speaking to Krishna; and inside that, the perfected sage is teaching Kashyapa. Partway through, the visitor begins to say ‘by me’ and ‘that disciple of mine’, telling the sage’s teaching as his own. When the visitor has vanished, Krishna returns to his own voice and tells Arjuna that this is what he heard on the chariot. Pradhana is that from which the whole universe was made. Munja is a grass whose blade gives up a fibrous pith when it is drawn, the image the teachers of yoga use for the soul drawn out of the body. The words ‘release in me’ stand in the visitor’s speech, and in them Krishna, reciting another’s words, speaks as the supreme Brahman in whom the released are merged. The Brahmin of the next scene, who answers his wife, is a different man.

The gist: The sage finishes his likeness of the released man, hands over the method of yoga, and gives the image the teachers of yoga use, the pith drawn out of a blade of munja grass. He lists what the yogi gains, lordship over the three worlds and freedom from fear, and tells where the mind is to be fixed. The disciple asks a run of blunt questions about digestion, blood, bone and breath, and is answered with a storeroom, a lamp and a Soul with hands and ears on every side. Then the teacher takes his leave, the visitor from heaven vanishes, and Krishna tells Arjuna that this is the teaching he heard on his chariot, which a man may make his own by six months of steady practice.

A wife asks what her husband’s renunciation leaves her, the fire with seven tongues burning inside the body, ten priests, and the argument in which Mind was judged above Speech

“There is an old story told about this, son of Pritha,” Krishna said, “a conversation between a husband and a wife.” A certain Brahmin had mastered every branch of knowledge and every kind of wisdom, and his wife found him sitting alone. “What region am I going to reach, with you for a husband?” she asked him. “You sit there having thrown away every religious act. You are hard with me, and you do not see how things stand with me. We have always been told that a wife arrives at whatever regions her husband earns. So what is the goal waiting for me, having got you?” The Brahmin, whose mind was entirely quiet, smiled at her. “Your words have given me no offense at all, blessed lady. The acts that men devoted to action perform are the ones that need other people’s help, the ones gross enough to be visible, the ones that can be called real. Men with no knowledge in them pile up nothing by such acts except delusion. And freedom from action is not available in this world for even a moment: from birth until a creature takes some other form, action good or bad, done by mind or speech or body, goes on inside every living thing. The paths that are recognized by visible objects, the ones marked out by soma juice and by the ghee poured into fire, were being ruined by Rakshasas. I turned my face away from those, and, with no help from the soul, I found the seat of the soul, which is inside the body.”

He told her what lives in that seat. “Brahman is there, who stands past every pair of opposites. Soma is there with Agni. The wind that urges the understanding moves there continually, holding up every creature alive. That is the seat for whose sake the Grandsire Brahma and others sit in yoga and worship the Indestructible, and for whose sake learned men of excellent vows, quiet in themselves and with their senses thoroughly put down, keep striving. No nose smells it. No tongue tastes it. No organ of touch reaches it. The mind is what arrives at it. The eye cannot conquer it and it lies past hearing, and scent and taste and touch and form are none of them among its attributes. The well-ordered universe comes out of it and stands on it. The life breaths called Prana and Apana and Samana and Vyana and Udana flow out of it and go back into it again. Prana and Apana travel between Samana and Vyana. When the soul goes to sleep, Samana and Vyana are swallowed up. Udana lives between Apana and Prana and is spread through everything, which is why Prana and Apana never desert a sleeping man. Because it holds all the life winds under control, Udana is called the controlling breath. That is the reason men who utter Brahman undertake austerities with me for their goal.”

Then he showed her the fire. “In the middle of those life breaths, which swallow one another and go round inside the body, burns the fire called Vaishvanara, and it is made of seven flames. The nose, the tongue, the eye, the skin, the ear which is the fifth of them, the mind and the understanding are the seven tongues of that flame. What is smelled, what is seen, what is drunk, what is touched, what is heard, what is thought about and what is understood are the seven kinds of fuel I burn. What smells, what eats, what sees, what touches, what hears as the fifth, what thinks and what understands are the seven great officiating priests. Look, blessed one, at learned sacrificers casting seven libations in seven ways into the seven fires, the smelled and the drunk and the seen and the touched and the heard and the thought and the understood, and creating those things again inside their own wombs. Earth, wind, ether, water and light as the fifth, and mind and understanding, are the seven wombs. Every attribute that goes in as an offering enters the attribute born of the fire, lives inside that dwelling, and is born again into its own womb, and in the thing that generates all beings they all lie absorbed for as long as the dissolution lasts. Out of that comes smell, and out of that taste, and out of that color, and out of that touch, and out of that sound; out of that rises doubt, and out of that comes resolution. This is what is called the sevenfold creation, and the ancients understood the whole of it in exactly this way. By the three full and final libations, the full become full of light.”

“There is an old story about this too,” the Brahmin said, “and you should understand how the institution of the ten Hotris works. The ear, the skin, the two eyes, the tongue, the nose, the two feet, the two hands, the generative organ, the lower duct and speech are the ten sacrificing priests, beautiful one. Sound and touch, color and taste, scent, speech, action, motion, and the discharge of seed and of urine and excreta are the ten libations. The quarters, which are the points of the compass, and wind, sun, moon, earth, fire, Vishnu, Indra, Prajapati and Mitra are the ten fires. The ten organs of knowledge and action are the priests, the libations are ten, and the objects of the senses are the fuel thrown into those ten fires, with the mind for a ladle and the sacrificer’s good and bad acts for his wealth. What is left over when all that has burned is pure and highest knowledge. We have heard that this entire universe was separated out of knowledge. Everything that knowledge takes as its object is mind, and knowledge only looks, without fastening on to what it looks at. The knower, which is Jiva, wrapped in a subtle form, lives inside the gross body that the seed produced. The bearer of the body is the Garhapatya fire, and from that another fire is produced. Mind is the Ahavaniya fire, and the oblation goes into it. Out of that came the Word, and Mind after it, and Mind, wanting to create, settles itself upon the Word. Then a form arises that no particular color marks off, and it runs toward the Mind.”

His wife caught the order of that and stopped him. “Why did Word come first and Mind afterward, when Word only comes into existence after Mind has thought it? On what authority can anyone say that Prana takes shelter in Mind? And why, in dreamless sleep, when it has been cut off from Mind, does Prana fail to apprehend anything at all? What is holding it back at that hour?” “The Apana breath becomes the master,” he answered, “bringing Prana under itself and making Prana identical with itself, and that restrained motion of Prana is what has been called the motion of the mind. So the mind depends on Prana, and Prana does not depend on the mind, and that is why in dreamless sleep the mind disappears and Prana stays. Since you have asked about Word and Mind, I will tell you a conversation the two of them once had. Word and Mind went together to the Soul of matter and said, ‘Tell us which of us is the superior. Clear our doubt, mighty one.’ The holy one answered, ‘The Mind, undoubtedly.’ Then Word said to him, ‘I yield to you the fruition of all your desires.’ And this was the reply: ‘Know that I have two minds, one immovable and one movable. The immovable one is with me. The movable one is in your dominion, and the mind that is called movable is the one that comes as mantra, as letter, as voice, which is why you are the superior there. Since you came of your own accord, beautiful one, and bound yourself in that promise, I fill myself with breath and utter you.’ The goddess Word used to live between Prana and Apana. Sinking down into Apana, though she was urged upward, and cut off from Prana, she ran to Prajapati and said, ‘Be gracious to me, holy one.’ And Prana appeared again and nourished her. That is why Word says nothing at all when it meets a deep outbreath. Word flows out either carrying utterance or carrying none, and of those two the Word without utterance stands higher; like a cow with good milk in her she yields meaning of many kinds, and this is the one that gives the Eternal, speaking of Brahman. Word is a cow, you of the lovely smile, because her power is divine and is also other than divine. Look at the difference between those two subtle forms of her as they flow.” “And what did the goddess of Word say in the old days,” his wife asked, “when the wish to speak drove her and speech could not get out?” “The Word that Prana generates in the body goes from Prana to Apana, then turns into Udana, leaves the body, wraps all the quarters of the sky along with Vyana, and after that settles in Samana. That is how Word spoke in the old days. So Mind is marked off by being immovable, and the goddess Word is marked off by being movable.”

A key to reading this (the household fire, and two counts that ask for care): This Brahmin is a different man from the visitor of the scene before; Krishna takes up a separate old story here. Its teaching rests on one image: the body is the ground of the sacrifice, the senses are the priests, what the senses take in is poured into the fire, and what is left when the offering has burned is knowledge. Garhapatya and Ahavaniya are two of the fires a sacrificer keeps, the first of them the fire of the household. Prana, Apana, Samana, Vyana and Udana are the five life breaths. The Soul of matter is the judge before whom Word and Mind bring their question. Two of the counts ask for care. The ten priests are counted by organ, so that the two eyes, the two feet and the two hands each count once. The ten libations come out when the discharge of seed is one and the discharge of urine and excreta another, and the ten fires when the quarters, which the list names twice over, as the points of the compass and as the quarters, are taken once.

The gist: A wife puts to her husband the question of her own fate: he has given up every religious act, so what world is left for her, who has been told that a wife attains whatever worlds her husband earns? His answer takes the sacrifice indoors. In the body, amid the life breaths, burns the fire Vaishvanara with seven tongues; the senses, the mind and the understanding are its priests, and all that is smelled or heard or understood is its fuel. He counts out ten priests, ten libations and ten fires, with the mind for a ladle. Then, because she asks why Word should come before Mind, he tells of the day the two went before a judge: Mind was named the superior, and Word was shown that her silent form stands above her spoken one.

Seven priests who cannot see one another, the mind’s claim to come first, and five breaths that each went out to prove it

“There is an old account, blessed one,” the Brahmin said to his wife, “of what the institution is of the seven sacrificing priests. The nose, the eye, the tongue, the skin, the ear counted as the fifth, and after them the mind and the understanding: these are the seven, and they stand apart from one another. They live in a subtle space, and living there, not one of them perceives another. Know them, beautiful one, by what each one is.”

“How can that be?” his wife asked. “If they live in a subtle space, how is it that none of them perceives the rest? And what is the nature of each, my lord?” “Not knowing the qualities of a thing is ignorance of that thing,” the Brahmin answered, “and knowing its qualities is knowledge of it. These seven never once lay hold of one another’s qualities. The tongue, the eye, the ear, the skin, the mind and the understanding cannot catch a smell; the nose alone catches it. The nose, the tongue, the ear, the skin, the mind and the understanding cannot take in color; the eye alone takes it in. The nose, the tongue, the eye, the ear, the understanding and the mind cannot feel touch; the skin alone feels it. The nose, the tongue, the eye, the skin, the mind and the understanding cannot hear a sound; the ear alone hears it. The nose, the tongue, the eye, the skin, the ear and the understanding cannot entertain a doubt; the mind does that. And the nose, the tongue, the eye, the skin, the ear and the mind cannot reach certainty; the understanding alone reaches it. On this subject, beautiful lady, there is an old account of a quarrel that once broke out between the senses and the mind.”

The mind spoke first. “The nose does not smell without me. The tongue does not lay hold of taste. The eye does not seize color, the skin does not feel what it touches, the ear does not catch a sound, when I am taken away from them. Among all the elements I am the eternal one and the first. It happens always that when I am gone the senses do not shine, the way a house does not shine when nobody lives in it, the way a fire does not shine when its flames have been put out. Without me, with every sense straining at its work, creatures lay hold of neither qualities nor objects, as wet wood and dry wood together still fail to catch.”

The senses heard that and answered it point by point. “What you think would be true if you could enjoy your pleasures without us and without our objects. It would be true if, once we had gone out, there were still satisfaction, still a life held up, still your enjoyments running on. It would be true if, once we were absorbed and the objects of sense were standing there untouched, you could have your enjoyments by wishing for them, exactly as fully as you have them through us. And if you hold that your power over our objects is complete, then take color with the nose and taste with the eye. Take a smell with the ear and touch with the tongue. Hear sounds with the skin, and feel what you touch with the understanding. Those who are strong are not under the dominion of any rule; rules exist for the weak. Go and enjoy the enjoyments that nobody has enjoyed before you, since what others have already tasted is beneath you. A pupil goes to a teacher to receive the sacred texts, and having received them he lives afterward inside their meaning; in the same way you call your own the objects we show you, whether they are past or still coming, whether they belong to sleep or to waking. In creatures of small intelligence, when the mind has gone wandering and grown joyless, life is still seen to be held up by our objects going on doing their work. It is seen too that a creature who has formed uncountable purposes and dreamed his fill, the moment the wish to enjoy begins to gnaw at him, runs straight at the objects of sense. A man who enters enjoyments that rest on the purposes of the mind alone, with no actual object of sense behind them, comes to his death when the breaths run out, the way a kindled fire goes out when the fuel runs out. It is true that each of us is tied to its own attribute, and true that none of us has knowledge of another’s. Yet without us nothing whatever is present to you. Without us no happiness reaches you at all.”

“There is another old account, blessed lady,” the Brahmin went on, “of what the institution is of the five sacrificing priests. The learned hold it for a great principle that Prana, Apana, Udana, Samana and Vyana are the five.” His wife stopped him there. “My conviction until now has been that the sacrificing priests are seven by nature. State the great principle: how does the number come out five?” “The wind nourished by Prana is born afterward in Apana. Nourished in Apana it becomes Vyana. Nourished by Vyana it develops into Udana. Nourished in Udana it is generated again as Samana. And long ago those good beings went to the first-born Grandsire and said, ‘Tell us which of us is the first. Whichever one you name will be our chief.’”

Brahma gave them a test in place of a name. “He upon whose going out all the breaths in the bodies of living creatures go out, and upon whose moving they move again, that one is the first among you. Go now where you please.” So Prana claimed it. “When I go out, every breath in the body of every living creature goes out, and when I move they move again; therefore I am the first. Watch, I am going out!” Prana went out and came back and began to move, and Samana and Udana said to him, “You do not dwell here pervading all of this as we do. You are not the first among us, Prana, and only Apana is under your dominion.” Then Apana made the same claim in the same words and went out and came back, and Vyana and Udana told him, “You are not the first, Apana. Only Prana is under your dominion.” Then Vyana spoke. “I am the first of all of you. Listen to the reason: when I go out every breath goes out, and when I move they move again. Watch, I am going out!”

Vyana went out and came back, and Prana and Apana and Udana and Samana told him, “You are not the first among us, Vyana. Only Samana is under your dominion.” Samana made the claim next, and went out, and came back, and Udana made it after him in the same words and went out and came back, and Prana and Apana and Samana and Vyana told Udana, “You are not the first among us. Only Vyana is under your dominion.” Then Brahma, the lord of creatures, spoke to all of them where they were gathered. “Not one of you is above the others. Every one of you is endowed with particular attributes. All of you are first in your own spheres, and all of you have your own special attributes. There is one that does not move and one that moves. It is on account of special attributes that the breaths are five. My own self is one, and that one gathers itself into many forms. Be friends with one another and satisfy one another, and go in peace. Blessings on you: hold one another up!”

A key to reading this (the priests, and who is speaking): The sacrifice described here burns inside the body, which is why the senses and the breaths are called its priests. The seven are the five senses together with the mind and the understanding, and the Brahmin says of them that they dwell in a subtle space and that none perceives another. The five are the breaths: Prana, Apana, Udana, Samana and Vyana. Three frames are stacked here. Krishna is telling Arjuna an old story; inside it a Brahmin is instructing his wife; and inside his instruction the mind, the senses and the breaths argue with one another in their own voices. In the list of what each of the seven alone can apprehend, smell, color, touch, sound, doubt and determination are named, and taste is passed over.

The gist: The Brahmin tells his wife that seven priests serve the sacrifice inside the body, and that none of them can do another’s work: smell belongs to the nose, color to the eye, doubt to the mind, certainty to the understanding. Then comes the quarrel. The mind claims that without it no sense shines at all, and the senses answer with a challenge: seize color by the nose, then, and taste by the eye. The same contest runs among the five breaths, each going out to prove that all the rest depend on it, each coming back to be told by the others that it is not the first. Brahma refuses to rank them. His own self is one, he says, and gathers into many forms, and he sends them away with an order to uphold one another.

Which breath arrives first: Narada and Devamata, the four-priest sacrifice burning inside the body, and the one in the heart who is ruler, teacher and enemy at once

“On this subject,” the Brahmin said, “there is the old account of what passed between Narada and the Rishi Devamata.” Devamata asked, “Which comes into existence first in a creature that is taking birth: Prana, or Apana, or Samana, or Vyana, or Udana?” “By whatever a creature is created,” Narada answered, “the thing that comes to him first is the thing that is other than himself. And the breaths are to be known as existing in pairs, some of them moving crosswise, some upward, some down.”

Devamata pressed him. “By which of them is a creature produced? Which of them comes first? And what exactly are these pairs that move crosswise and upward and downward?” Narada answered with the whole sequence. “Pleasure arises from the wish. It arises from sound as well, and from taste, and from color. Out of the seed joined with blood, Prana flows first. When the seed has been altered by Prana, Apana flows. Pleasure arises from the seed too, and from taste, and this is the form of Udana. Pleasure is produced from union. The seed is generated by desire, and from desire comes the monthly flow. Into that union of seed and blood, which Samana and Vyana have generated, the pair made of Prana and Apana enters, moving crosswise and upward; and Vyana and Samana together make the pair that moves crosswise.”

Then he turned to the fire. “Agni is all the deities, and this is the teaching of the Veda; the knowledge of Agni rises in a Brahmin who has intelligence. The smoke of that fire has the form of Darkness. The quality called Passion is in its ashes. Goodness rises from that part of the fire into which the offering is poured. Those who know sacrifices know that Samana and Vyana come from Goodness, and that Prana and Apana are portions of the offering of clarified butter. Between those two stands the Fire, and the Brahmins know that this is the excellent seat of Udana. Now hear what stands apart from the pairs. Day and Night make a pair, and between them stands the Fire, and that is the excellent seat of Udana. The existent and the non-existent make a pair, and between them stands the Fire, and that is the excellent seat of Udana. First there is Samana, then Vyana, whose work is managed by way of Samana; then Samana comes into operation a second time. Vyana alone exists for tranquility, and tranquility is the eternal Brahman, and there, as the Brahmins know, Udana has its excellent seat.”

“There is an old account also,” the Brahmin said to his wife, “of what the institution is of the Chaturhotra, the sacrifice of four priests. Its ordinances are about to be set out whole. Listen, gentle lady, for I am going to tell you a wonderful secret. The agent, the instrument, the action, and release: these four, beautiful lady, are the sacrificing priests by whom the universe is wrapped around. Hear how their causes are assigned, seven at a time. The nose, the tongue, the eye, the skin, the ear counted fifth, the mind and the understanding are caused by the knowledge of qualities. Smell, taste, color, sound, touch counted fifth, the objects of the mind and the objects of the understanding are caused by action. He who smells, he who eats, he who sees, he who speaks, he who hears counted fifth, he who thinks and he who understands are caused by the agent. These have qualities, and they enjoy their own qualities, whether the qualities please them or not. The Soul stands outside all quality. These seven are the causes of release. In men who are learned and whose understanding suffices, the qualities occupy the position of deities and eat the offerings, each in its proper place and according to what has been ordained.”

He set the unlearned man beside the learned one. “The man without learning eats many kinds of food and is seized by the sense of mineness. Digesting food for himself alone, he is ruined by that sense. Eating what should not be eaten and drinking wine finish the ruin. He destroys his food, and having destroyed it he is himself destroyed. The learned man, who has power in him, destroys his food in order to reproduce it, and the smallest transgression does not arise in him from what he eats. Whatever is thought by the mind, whatever is uttered in speech, whatever the ear hears, whatever the eye sees, whatever the touch feels, whatever the nose smells: all of it is an offering of clarified butter, and after the senses have been restrained with the mind counted as the sixth, all of it is to be poured into the fire of high merit that burns inside the body, which is the Soul. The sacrifice made of yoga is the one going on in me. The spring from which that sacrifice proceeds is the one that yields the fire of knowledge. The upward breath Prana is the Stotra of that sacrifice. The downward breath Apana is its Shastra. The renunciation of everything is its excellent fee. Consciousness, Mind and Understanding, becoming Brahman, are its Hotri, its Adhvaryu and its Udgatri. The Shastra of the Prashastri is truth. The ending of separate existence is the fee. On this, those who know Narayana recite certain verses of the Rik: animals were offered to the divine Narayana long ago. Then certain Samans are sung, and there is authority for it. Know, timid one, that the divine Narayana is the soul of all.”

What he said next came five times over in one shape. “There is one Ruler, and there is no second beside him, and he lives in the heart. Of him I will speak now. Driven by him I move where I am directed, the way water moves down a slope. There is one Teacher, and no second beside him, and he lives in the heart; of him I will speak now. Take instruction from that teacher, since those who are always full of animosity are like snakes. There is one Kinsman, and no second beside him, and he lives in the heart; of him I will speak now. Instructed by him kinsmen come to have kinsmen, and the seven Rishis shine in the sky.” Krishna, repeating the words, spoke that line to the son of Pritha, and went on in the Brahmin’s voice. “There is one Dispeller, and no second beside him, and he lives in the heart; of him I will speak now. It was by living with that instructor in the proper manner that Indra came to the sovereignty of all the worlds. There is one Enemy, and no second beside him, and he lives in the heart; of him I will speak now. Instructed by that same teacher, every snake in the world is filled with animosity forever. On this there is the old account of how the lord of creatures instructed the snakes and the deities and the Rishis at once.”

“The deities and the Rishis, the snakes and the Asuras sat down around the lord of creatures and said, ‘Declare what will be of the highest benefit to us,’” the Brahmin said. “To all of them asking the same question he uttered one word only, Om, which is Brahman in a single syllable, and hearing it they scattered in every direction. Among those who ran off in all directions wanting to be taught, the disposition that first arose in the snakes was the disposition to bite. In the Asuras there arose the ostentation that belongs to their nature, and pride. The deities went to giving, and the great Rishis went to self-restraint. One teacher, one word, and the snakes and the deities and the Rishis and the Danavas all went away to dispositions entirely different from one another. It is that one who hears himself while he is speaking and takes in what he says; and when he speaks it is heard from him again. There is no second teacher. Action flows afterward in obedience to his counsel. The instructor, the one who understands, the one who hears, and the enemy are all satisfied within the heart. By acting sinfully in the world it is he who becomes a man of sinful deeds; by acting well it is he who becomes a man of auspicious deeds; it is he who becomes unrestrained by attaching himself to the pleasures of sense at the push of desire, and he who becomes a brahmacharin by giving himself always to the subduing of his senses; and it is he again who throws off vows and actions and takes refuge in Brahman alone. Moving about in the world while holding himself one with Brahman, he becomes a brahmacharin. Brahman is his fuel, Brahman is his fire, Brahman is his origin, Brahman is his water, Brahman is his teacher, and he is rapt in Brahman. So subtle is the thing the wise understand by brahmacharya. Having understood it, taught by the Kshetrajna, they gave themselves to it.”

A key to reading this (the words of the altar, and one address that does not fit): The Chaturhotra is the sacrifice of four priests, and Hotri, Adhvaryu, Udgatri and Prashastri are names of priestly offices; the Udgatri is the chanter of the Vedic hymns. Stotra and Shastra are the praises of a sacrifice, and the fee is the gift that closes it. Every one of these is moved here to something inside the body: the breaths are the praises, renunciation is the fee, and the animals once offered to Narayana are read by the commentator as the senses. One address in the discourse does not fit its speaker. At the line about the seven Rishis the words ‘son of Pritha’ appear, which is a name of Arjuna, although the Brahmin is speaking to his wife; for that moment the voice is Krishna’s own, addressing the man who sits listening to him.

The gist: Narada tells Devamata how the breaths arrive in a creature being conceived, which of them travel in pairs and in what directions, and where the seat of Udana is: the fire that stands between every pair, whether the pair is Prana and Apana, or Day and Night, or the existent and the non-existent. The Brahmin then moves the four-priest sacrifice inside the body. The agent, the instrument, the action and release are its priests; everything thought and spoken and heard and seen and touched and smelled is the butter poured into it; and the fire it burns on is the Soul. He ends with the one who lives in the heart and is at once ruler, preceptor, kinsman, dispeller and enemy, and with the day the lord of creatures answered gods, sages, snakes and Asuras with the single syllable Om, after which each of the four went away to a different nature.

A forest with seven trees in it, and the goat whose family was asked for permission

The Brahmin had been telling his wife about a sacrifice that needs no altar and no fire on the ground. Now he changed the figure on her and spoke of a country he had crossed, the way a traveler describes bad country, by its hazards. “There were gadflies and mosquitoes in it, and those were the purposes a man forms. There was cold and there was heat, and those were his griefs and his joys. There was a darkness that blinded anyone walking through it, and that darkness was heedlessness. There were creeping things that struck, and those were greed and disease. There was one danger standing on the road, and that danger was wealth. There were robbers, and their names were lust and anger. I have crossed that impassable country, and I have come into a wide forest, and the forest is Brahman.”

His wife asked him for a map. “Where is this forest, wise as you are? What are its trees? What rivers run in it? What are its hills and mountains, and how far away does it lie?” “Nothing exists apart from it,” her husband said. “Nothing is more delightful than it. Nothing is unseparated from it, and nothing is more afflicting. Nothing is smaller, nothing is vaster, nothing is finer, and no happiness anywhere resembles it. The twice-born who enter it step over joy and sorrow in the same instant, and afterward they hold no fear of any living thing, and no living thing holds any fear of them. Seven great trees stand in that forest. Seven fruits grow there. Seven guests are fed there. There are seven hermitages, seven concentrations of yoga, and seven initiations. That is the description of the forest.”

He went on through the trees one class at a time. “Some of the trees that fill the forest bear splendid flowers and fruits of five colors. Some bear flowers and fruits of excellent colors that come in two kinds. Some bear flowers and fruits that carry fragrance and come in two colors. Some bear flowers and fruits that carry fragrance and come in a single color. And two trees stand there bearing many flowers and many fruits whose color never becomes manifest at all. One fire burns in that place, a fire possessed of a good mind, and it is joined to the Brahmin. The five senses are the fuel it takes. The seven forms of release that rise from them are the seven initiations. The qualities are the fruit, and the guests eat that fruit, and in various parts of the forest the great Rishis accept the hospitality offered them. When those Rishis have been honored and have passed out of being, a second forest shines up behind the first. In that one the tree is intelligence, the fruit is release, and the shade it throws is tranquility. Knowledge is the house a traveler rests in. Contentment is the water. The sun overhead is the Kshetrajna. Upward, downward, or sideways, no one has found where that forest ends.”

Then he peopled it for her. “Seven women live in it permanently, faces turned downward, full of light, carrying in them the cause by which generations come. They draw every taste out of every creature, the way inconstancy draws the truth out of a man. The seven Rishis who are perfected in austerity dwell in that forest and come forth from it, and Vasishtha stands first among them. Seven things follow this forest as rays follow the sun, and they are glory, splendor, greatness, enlightenment, victory, perfection, and energy. There are hills there and mountains standing together, and rivers and streams whose water was born of Brahman, and in the secluded place appointed for sacrifice those streams run together. From that confluence the ones who are content with their own souls go on to the Grandsire. Those whose wants have shrunk, whose intentions have turned toward the hard vows, whose sins have burned away in austerity, merge into their own souls and arrive at Brahman. The people who know this forest of knowledge praise tranquility above everything, and they keep the forest in view when they take birth so that their courage does not fail them. Such is that sacred forest as Brahmins understand it, and understanding it, they live as the Kshetrajna directs.”

“I smell no scents,” the Brahmin said. “I taste nothing. I see no colors, I touch nothing, I hear none of the sounds that rise around me, and I form no purposes. Nature is what wants the thing it likes. Nature is what hates the thing it dislikes. Wanting and hating come up out of Nature the way the upward and downward breaths come up in a body once a soul has entered it. Separate from all of that lie other things, and the constant dispositions live in those, and a man practiced in yoga can find them, and the soul of every creature, inside his own body. Living there, I take no hold on anything through desire or anger or old age or death. I want no object of desire and hate no evil, and so my nature carries no stain, in the way a drop of water leaves no stain on a lotus leaf. To that constant one, which looks out on many natures, they are possessions that do not last. Actions keep happening, and the mass of enjoyments does not stick to them, in the way the mass of the sun’s rays does not stick to the sky. On this an old story is told, glorious lady, of an argument between an Adhvaryu and a Yati. Listen.”

A goat had been sprinkled with water at a sacrifice and was standing ready. A Yati saw it and spoke in reproach to the Adhvaryu sitting there. “This is the destruction of a life!” “This goat will not be destroyed,” the Adhvaryu said. “If the Vedic declaration on the subject holds, the animal meets with great good. The part of him that is earth goes to earth. The part of him born of water enters water. His eye goes into the sun, his ear into the quarters of the horizon, his breath into the sky. I follow the scriptures, and I take on no fault by assisting here.” “If you see that much good coming to the goat out of being parted from his breath,” the Yati said, “then this sacrifice is for the goat, and what do you need it for? Let his brother give you his approval, and his father, and his mother, and his friend. Take him to them and consult them. This goat is a dependent creature, and you ought to go and find the ones who are able to consent on his behalf. Once you have heard them say it, the matter becomes worth discussing.”

He pressed it further. “The breath of this goat has already been sent back to its sources. What is left standing is an inanimate body; that is how I see it. People who mean to get their happiness out of an inanimate body, a thing no different from firewood, should understand that the firewood of this sacrifice is the animal himself. Abstention from cruelty is the first of all the deities. That is what the elders teach. We hold the proposition that there shall be no slaughter of living creatures. If I said more, it would come out that you are capable of faulty acts of many kinds. Never to be cruel to any creature is what we approve. We prove it from what can be seen directly, and we build on nothing past direct perception.” The Adhvaryu came back at him hard. “You enjoy the property of smell, which belongs to earth. You drink the tastes that belong to water. You see colors that belong to things that give light. You touch what has its origin in wind, and hear what has its origin in space, and think thoughts with the mind. You hold that all these things are alive. Then you are taking life too, and in plain fact you are engaged in slaughter, since nothing moves at all without it. Or what do you say?”

“The indestructible and the destructible are the two ways the soul shows itself,” the Yati said. “Of these the indestructible is what exists. The destructible is called exceedingly non-existent. The breath, the tongue, the mind, the quality of goodness and the quality of passion are all existent things. The Atman stands above these forms, and so it holds no duality and no hope. For the man who is free of those existent things, who has crossed over every pair of opposites, who cherishes no expectation, who is the same toward every creature, who has let go of the idea that anything is his, who has subdued himself and is released from his surroundings, there is no fear left from any direction at all!” The Adhvaryu heard it and gave way. “A man should live among the good. My understanding has light in it after hearing your opinion. I came to you taking you for a god, and I say now that I bear no fault in performing these rites with the mantras.” The Yati said nothing more, the Brahmin told his wife, and the Adhvaryu went on with the great sacrifice with the delusion gone out of him. “That is the shape in which Brahmins understand release, which is a very fine thing,” he said, “and having understood it they live as the Kshetrajna directs, who watches every subject there is.”

A key to reading this (the words and the frame): Kshetrajna is the name these sections keep closing on; in the second forest the Brahmin makes it the sun. An Adhvaryu is one of the priests of a sacrifice, and a Yati is an ascetic; the first argues from scripture and the second from what can be directly perceived. The seven trees of the forest are read by the commentator as the five senses, the mind and the understanding; the fruits as the pleasures and pains that come through them; the guests as the powers of each sense, which receive those pleasures and pains; the hermitages as the trees themselves, under which the guests shelter; the seven concentrations as the stilling of the seven; and the seven initiations as the giving up of their actions one after another. All of it reaches Arjuna at one remove: Krishna is repeating what a Brahmin once said to his wife.

The gist: The Brahmin tells his wife that he has crossed a wilderness whose mosquitoes are purposes, whose darkness is heedlessness and whose robbers are lust and anger, and has entered the forest of Brahman, a place counted in sevens, behind which a second forest shines where intelligence is the tree and the Kshetrajna the sun. He says that wanting and hating belong to Nature and leave no taint on him, as water leaves none on a lotus leaf, and he tells of an argument at a sacrifice. A Yati calls the killing of the goat destruction of life and asks the priest to get the consent of the goat’s brother, father, mother and friend. The priest answers that the Yati too lives by taking life, since nothing moves without it. And when the Yati has spoken of the one for whom no fear exists, the priest owns that his understanding is lit, and finishes his rite freed from delusion.

The king with a thousand arms, the slaughter that ran twenty-one times, and the arrows that came back into Alarka’s own vitals

“The next story, lady, is the old one of what passed between Kartavirya and the Ocean,” the Brahmin said. There was a king called Kartavirya Arjuna who had a thousand arms, and who had taken with his bow the whole Earth as far as the shore. One day, it is told, he was walking along that shore, pleased with the size of his own strength, and he began shooting hundreds of arrows into the water. The Ocean bowed to him with his palms joined. “Stop shooting, hero. Tell me what you want from me and I will do it. The creatures that have taken shelter inside me are being killed by these great arrows of yours. Give them safety, lord.” “If there is any archer alive who is my equal in battle,” Kartavirya said, “any man who would stand against me in the field, give me his name.” “If you have heard of the great Rishi Jamadagni,” the Ocean said, “then his son is the one to receive you as a guest should be received.”

The king went, and he went angry. He found Rama at his retreat, the son of Jamadagni whom men call Parashurama, and with his kinsmen he did a long list of hostile things there and made a great deal of trouble for him. Then the energy in Rama, which has no measure to it, came up and began burning the king’s troops where they stood. He took his axe and put out his strength all at once and cut down the thousand-armed man the way a tree with many branches is cut down. The kinsmen saw him dead on the ground and came together and took up their darts and rushed at Rama from every side while he sat. He took his bow, got quickly onto his chariot, and punished that army with showers of arrows. Some of the Kshatriyas went into the fastnesses of the mountains with the terror of Jamadagni’s son on them, the way deer go when a lion has been among them. Of those who, in their fear of him, could no longer perform the duties appointed to their order, the children became Vrishalas, because there were no Brahmins to be found for them. That is how the Dravidas and the Abhiras and the Pundras, along with the Shabaras, became Vrishalas, through men who had been given Kshatriya duties by birth and had fallen away from them. After that, the Kshatriyas begotten by Brahmins on Kshatriya women whose heroic sons had been killed were destroyed again by Jamadagni’s son, and again after that. The slaughter ran twenty-one times.

At the end of it a voice came out of heaven with no body attached to it, sweet, and all people heard it. “Rama, Rama, stop! What good do you see, son, in destroying these lesser Kshatriyas over and over?” His own grandsires came to him too, with Richika at their head, and told him the same thing. “Stop now.” Rama could not bring himself to forgive the killing of his father. “It is not for you to forbid me,” he told those Rishis. So the Pitris tried it another way. “It is not right for you, victorious as you are, to kill these lesser Kshatriyas. You are a Brahmin yourself, and it is not proper that you should be killing kings. There is an old story on this. Listen to it, and act on what it says.”

There was a royal sage named Alarka, the Pitris said, whose austerities were as hard as austerities get. He knew every duty, he kept his word, his soul was high, and he was immovable in his vows. He had conquered the whole Earth to the seas with his bow, which is a thing almost no one manages, and having done it he turned his attention to what is subtle. He sat down at the root of a tree, and his thoughts let go of all those enormous accomplishments and went toward the subtle. “My mind has gotten strong,” Alarka said. “A conquest only becomes permanent once a man has conquered his mind. I am surrounded by enemies, and I intend to shoot at other targets now. This mind is unsteady, and because it is unsteady it sets every mortal going after actions, so the mind is where I will put my sharpest arrows.” “These arrows will never go through me, Alarka,” the mind answered. “They will go into your own vitals, and when your vitals are pierced you will die. Go and look for some other arrows to destroy me with.”

He thought about that, and then he tried again, one faculty at a time, and every one of them gave him back the same sentence. “The nose smells a great many perfumes and then wants nothing else,” he said, “so I will send whetted arrows into the nose.” “These arrows will never cross through me, Alarka,” the nose told him. “They will pierce your own vitals, and you will die. Look for other arrows.” “The tongue enjoys savory tastes and then wants nothing else, so I will send whetted shafts at the tongue.” The tongue said the same. “The skin touches every kind of touch and then wants nothing else, so I will tear the skin with arrows fledged with the feathers of the kanka.” The skin said the same. “The ear hears every kind of sound and wants nothing else, so I will shoot at the ear.” The ear said the same. “The eye sees many colors and wants nothing else, so I will destroy the eye with sharp-pointed arrows.” The eye said the same. “The understanding forms one determination after another by reasoning,” Alarka said last of all, “so I will shoot at the understanding.” And the understanding answered exactly as the other six had answered. “These arrows will not cross through me at all. It is your own vitals they will pierce, and with your vitals pierced you will die, so look for other arrows to destroy me with!”

Alarka stayed where he was and put himself through austerities that were hard to perform and severe to hold, and even out of that high power he failed to find a single arrow he could shoot at those seven. So he sat with his mind gathered and thought about it for a long time, and at the end of the thinking the best thing he had found was yoga. He fixed his mind on one object and went completely still. Then, with his energy in him, he entered his own soul by yoga and killed all the senses at once with a single arrow, and by that he reached the highest success there is. Full of wonder, the royal sage sang a verse about it. “What a pity that we spent ourselves on everything outside! What a pity that with a thirst for enjoyment on us we went after the pleasures of sovereignty all that time! I have learned it late. There is no happiness higher than yoga.” “Know this, Rama,” the Pitris said when the story was done. “Stop killing Kshatriyas. Take up the hardest austerities you can hold. That is the road to what is good for you.” And Jamadagni’s son, the Brahmin told his wife, did as his grandsires said. He performed the severest of austerities, and by them that blessed man reached the success that is so difficult to reach.

A key to reading this (two names that trip readers): The Arjuna of this story is Kartavirya Arjuna, the thousand-armed king of the Haihayas, whom the son of Jamadagni killed; he is a different man from the Arjuna who sits listening to Krishna. The Rama here is Jamadagni’s son, the Rama of the battle-axe, called Parashurama, and a different man from Rama the son of Dasharatha; the text calls him simply Rama. Vrishala is the name for those who fell from the Kshatriya order: the fugitives could find no Brahmins to assist at their rites, and their children lost their standing. The lesser Kshatriyas of the heavenly voice are Kshatriyas of a low or inferior kind. The kanka is a bird whose feathers fledge arrows.

The gist: The Brahmin tells two stories, one folded inside the other. A king with a thousand arms shoots arrows into the sea out of pride in his strength; the Ocean names the son of Jamadagni as the one archer fit to receive him; and the meeting ends with the king hewn down like a tree and a slaughter of Kshatriyas that goes on twenty-one times, until a voice out of heaven tells Rama to stop. He will not, because his father’s killing is unforgiven, and so his ancestors tell him of Alarka, the conqueror who meant to shoot his own mind, nose, tongue, skin, ear, eye and understanding and was told by each of the seven that the arrows would pierce his own vitals. Alarka sat still, entered his soul by yoga, killed all the senses with one arrow, and sang that there is no happiness higher than yoga.

Three enemies that are really nine, the one fault Ambarisha could not kill, a king who searched a whole country for his kingdom and never found it, and fire drawn out of two sticks

“There are three enemies in this world,” the Brahmin said to his wife, “and counted by their qualities they are nine. Exultation, satisfaction and joy belong to Goodness. Greed, anger and hatred belong to Passion. Lassitude, procrastination and delusion belong to Darkness. The man of intelligence cuts all of these down under showers of arrows, and then, free of procrastination, tranquil in soul, his senses held under him, he dares to go out and conquer others. On this subject those who have the old cycles by heart repeat certain verses that were sung long ago by King Ambarisha, whose soul had come to rest. Faults of every kind were rising in the world and the righteous were being ground down, and Ambarisha put out his strength and took the sovereignty. He subdued his own faults, he honored the righteous, and great success came to him. Then he sang.”

“‘I have put down a great many faults,’ the king sang. ‘I have killed all my enemies. There remains one, the largest of them, which deserves to be destroyed and which I have left standing. Driven by that one fault a creature never arrives at freedom from desire. Afflicted by desire a man walks into ditches without seeing them. Driven by that fault he does the things that are forbidden him. Cut it off, cut off that greed, with swords ground sharp. Out of greed the desires rise. Out of desire the anxiety flows. The man who gives way to desire acquires a crowd of the qualities that belong to Passion, and once he has those he acquires the qualities that belong to Darkness, and because of those qualities he is born again and again with the bonds of a body tied onto him and is pushed out into action. When his term runs out and the body comes apart and scatters, he meets once more the death that was folded into his birth. Understand this properly, therefore, and put greed down by intelligence, and want sovereignty over your own soul. That is real sovereignty. There is no other sovereignty here. The soul, correctly understood, is the king.’ Those were the verses,” the Brahmin said, “sung on the subject of sovereignty by that celebrated king, who had cut off the one chief fault, which is greed.”

“And on the same subject, lady,” he said, “an old story is told about a Brahmin and King Janaka.” Janaka had a Brahmin before him who had committed some offense, and meaning to punish him the king said, “You shall not live inside my dominions.” The Brahmin asked one question. “Tell me, king, where the borders run of the territory that is subject to you. I wish to go and live in the dominions of some other king, and I wish to obey you as the scriptures say I must.” The king said nothing at all. He drew long hot breaths, one after another, and while he sat there thinking a cloudedness came over his understanding the way the planet Rahu comes over the sun. When the cloud lifted and he was comforted, he spoke. “There is a large settled tract in this kingdom I inherited, and yet I have searched the whole Earth and cannot find my dominion. When I could not find it on the Earth I searched Mithila for it. When I could not find it in Mithila I searched among my own children. When I could not find it even there, that cloudedness came over me, and when the cloud passed my intelligence came back, and I thought that either I have no dominion at all or else everything is my dominion. This body is not mine, or else the whole Earth is mine. And at the same time, Brahmin, I think it is as much mine as it is anyone else’s. So live here as long as you like, and enjoy what you please as long as you please.”

The Brahmin would not let it go at that. “You have a large settled tract in your ancestral kingdom. Depending on what understanding have you got rid of the idea of mineness? Depending on what understanding have you concluded that everything is your dominion? What is the notion by which you have no dominion, or everything is your dominion?” “Every condition here, in every affair, I have understood to be terminable,” Janaka said, “and so I could not find anything that deserved to be called mine. Considering whose a thing might be, I thought of the Vedic text about anybody’s property, and still my understanding could find nothing to call my own. That was how the idea of mineness went. Now hear the other notion. The smells that are in my nose I do not want for myself, and so the earth is conquered by me and subject to me always. The tastes that come in contact with my tongue I do not want for myself, and so water is conquered by me and subject to me. The color and light that belong to my eye I do not want for myself, and so light is subject to me. The sensations of touch in contact with my skin I do not want for myself, and so the wind is subject to me. The sounds in contact with my ear I do not want for myself, and so sounds are subject to me. The mind that is always in my mind I do not want for myself, and so the mind is subject to me. All these acts of mine are for the deities, for the Pitris, for the Bhutas, and for guests.” The Brahmin smiled then and spoke again. “Know that I am Dharma, and that I came here today to examine you. You are the one man fit to set this wheel turning, the wheel whose circumference is Goodness, whose nave is Brahman, whose spokes are the understanding, and which never turns back!”

“I do not move through this world, timid one, in the manner your own understanding finds fault with,” the Brahmin said to his wife. “I am a Brahmin who knows the Vedas. I am released. I am a recluse in the forest. I keep the duties of a householder. I observe vows. What you see of me in good acts and bad acts is something other than what I am. Everything that exists in this universe is pervaded by me, and of every creature in the world, moving or unmoving, know that I am the destroyer, the way fire is the destroyer of every kind of wood. Set sovereignty over the whole Earth on one side, or sovereignty over heaven, and this knowledge on the other: this knowledge is my wealth. For Brahmins there is this one road, and those who understand it go by it into households, or into the forest, or to residence with a preceptor, or among the mendicants. Under many symbols, and no confusion among them, one knowledge is worshiped, and whatever the symbols and the modes of life a man holds to, if his understanding has come to have tranquility for its essence he arrives at that single entity, as many rivers arrive at the ocean. The road is traveled by the understanding; this body cannot travel it. Actions have a beginning and an end, and the body has actions for its bonds. So have no fear about the world to come, blessed lady; with your heart set on the real entity, it is into my soul that you will come.” “A person of small intelligence cannot take this in,” his wife said, “nor can anyone whose soul has not been cleansed, and my own intelligence is small, and narrow, and confused. Tell me the means by which this knowledge is acquired. I want to learn from you the source it flows from.” “Know that intelligence devoted to Brahman is the lower arani,” he said, “and the preceptor is the upper arani, and austerities and knowledge of the scriptures are the rubbing between them, and out of that the fire of knowledge is produced.” “That symbol of Brahman which is called Kshetrajna: where is there any description of it by which it can be seized?” “He is without symbols, and without qualities, and nothing exists that can be called his cause. Still, here are the means by which he is seized or missed. A good means can be found, which is perception by hearing and the rest, the way bees find flowers, and that means is an understanding cleansed by action. Those whose understanding has not been cleansed take that entity, out of their own ignorance, for something invested with the properties of knowledge and the like. In the rules for release, where a knowledge of the soul arises only in the man who sees and hears, it is not laid down that this is to be done and this is not to be done. Comprehend as many parts, unmanifest and manifest, by hundreds and by thousands, as you are able to comprehend here. Comprehend objects of many kinds and many meanings, and every object of direct perception. Then, out of practice, will come that above which nothing exists.” “Then,” Krishna said, “when the Kshetrajna was destroyed, the mind of that Brahmin’s wife became what lies beyond the Kshetrajna, through the knowledge of the Kshetra.” “Where is she now, Krishna, that Brahmin’s wife,” Arjuna asked, “and where is that Brahmin, the two who won such success? Tell me about them.” “Know that my mind is the Brahmin,” Krishna answered him, “and my understanding is the Brahmin’s wife, and that the one who has been spoken of here as Kshetrajna is myself.”

A key to reading this (the words and the images): Goodness, Passion and Darkness are the three qualities, and the count of nine comes from giving three faces to each, so that even exultation, satisfaction and joy stand among the enemies to be cut down; the commentator distinguishes those three as the joy of being sure of what one desires, of gaining it, and of enjoying it. Mineness is the sense that calls a thing one’s own, and Janaka’s answer turns on losing it; the Vedic text he remembers is read as the one that forbids coveting anyone’s property. The arani are two sticks rubbed together to make fire, which is why the lower stick, the upper stick and the rubbing each get a name here. Kshetra and Kshetrajna are a pair, and the wife’s mind passes beyond the Kshetrajna through knowledge of the Kshetra. The Brahmin who came to try Janaka was Dharma himself.

The gist: The Brahmin counts the enemies, three by kind and nine by quality, and recites the verses of King Ambarisha, who had subdued every fault except the greatest, which is greed, and who sang that the only sovereignty is sovereignty in one’s own soul. Then comes Janaka, who orders a Brahmin out of his dominions and is asked where their limits lie. He searches the Earth, Mithila and his own children for a dominion he cannot find, concludes that nothing is his or everything is, and learns that his examiner is Dharma. At the end the wife asks how such knowledge is to be had, hears of the fire rubbed out of two sticks, and passes beyond the Kshetrajna; and Arjuna learns that the Brahmin was Krishna’s mind, the wife his understanding, and the Kshetrajna Krishna himself.

Source: the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Ashvamedhika Parva, Sections 1 to 92; this part draws on Sections 1 to 34. 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.