Janaka

The Tip of the Plow

In Valmiki the next morning the king sends for Vishvamitra and the two princes and tells the story of the bow himself. “Hear the story of this bow, and why it lies here in my keeping,” Janaka says. Rudra took up this very bow to wreck the sacrifice of Daksha, drew its string as if in sport, and threatened the gods with it; when they had won him over, Shiva gave it to the gods, and the gods placed it as a trust with Devarata, Nimi’s descendant, the king’s own forefather. Then the king’s voice changes, as a man’s voice does when he stops speaking of the gods and starts speaking of his daughter. “Soon after that, as I was plowing the ground set apart for a sacrifice, a girl rose up out of the furrow the plowshare cut.” He found her while he was dressing the field, and so she became known as Sita, and she grew in his care at an astonishing pace. “This girl, born of no mother’s womb, I set apart as one whose bride-price is valor, to be given to the suitor who could win her by his strength.” Kings of many lands came asking, and the bow of Shiva was set before them. “Lift it they could not.” “They could not even stir it enough to judge its weight.” Holding themselves insulted, those kings laid siege to Mithila together. “At the end of a full twelve months of siege, every resource I had was drained, and I was in deep distress.” Then by penance the king won over the hosts of the gods, and the gods gave him an army of horse and elephant, chariot and foot, and the kings fled with their ministers in every direction. And if Rama strings it, he says, he will give his daughter, born of no mother’s womb, to this son of Dasharatha. In the Ayodhya Kanda Sita herself tells Anasuya that birth: the king had no child then, and when he saw her rise out of the furrow with every limb covered in dust he lifted her into his arms himself and said, “This shall be my daughter,” and a voice that was more than human spoke out of the sky that by dharma she was his.

The bow comes in an iron chest mounted on eight wheels, hauled somehow by five thousand unusually tall and well-built men. Rama takes hold of it at the middle, lightly, as if in play, sets the string, draws it, and the bow breaks in two with a sound like a crash of thunder, and the earth shakes as though a mountain had split. Every man there falls to the ground; only Vishvamitra, the king, and the two princes stay on their feet. When the people have taken heart again, the king, every doubt in him now at rest, speaks to the sage with joined palms, and he chooses his words. “I have seen the prowess of Rama, the son of Dasharatha, with my own eyes,” he says. “What he has done is a marvel, past imagining, and I never thought I would see it.” “With Rama, son of the emperor Dasharatha, for her husband, my daughter Sita will bring glory to the family of the Janakas.” His counselors are sent to Ayodhya by chariot that same hour, and after four days on the road Dasharatha arrives in Videha. Janaka asks him to have the wedding performed the next morning, at the close of the sacrifice, and Dasharatha answers that a gift lies in the giver’s hands and that he will do exactly as Janaka says. Before the wedding Vasishtha recites the line of the Ikshvakus, and then Janaka recites his own, from Nimi to his son Mithi, the first to bear the name Janaka, and down through Udavasu and Devarata to his father. “Hrasvaroma had two sons: I am the elder, and the younger is bold Kushadhvaja.” His father set him on the throne, gave Kushadhvaja into his care, and went to the forest; when Sudhanva of Sankashya laid siege to Mithila and demanded both the bow and Sita, Janaka refused, killed him face to face on the field, and set his brother on the throne of Sankashya. Then he gives Sita to Rama and Urmila to Lakshmana, and says it three times, full of the highest joy. “There is no doubt about it.” And Vishvamitra asks for Kushadhvaja’s two daughters for Bharata and Shatrughna.

On the day of the Uttara Phalguni star Sita is brought in, decked with every kind of jewel, and seated before the sacred fire facing Rama, and the king speaks. “This is Sita, my daughter, who will be your partner in every sacred duty of your life,” he says. “She is truly blessed; she will be devoted to you alone, and she will follow you always, the way a shadow follows.” He pours into Rama’s hand the water he holds in his own, blessed by the chanting of the sacred texts, the sign of a father’s will to give, and the kettledrums of the gods sound in the sky, and a shower of flowers comes down. Years later, in the Yuddha Kanda, Sita stands before the fire in Lanka and reminds Rama of that water passing from palm to palm. “My name Janaki, or Vaidehi, came to me from Janaka, but I was born from the body of the earth,” she says; in her girlhood, at their wedding, her hand was placed in his, and he has set no store by that taking. In the Uttara Kanda, some days after the coronation, Rama folds his hands before his father-in-law as a son does and asks him to accept the presents gathered for him and go home to his own city. “The sight of you and the way you govern have made me glad.” Everything that was gathered there for his sake, Janaka says, he gives to his daughter, the queen Sita, and with a delighted heart he sets out for Mithila, and in Valmiki he leaves the story there. In that same kanda Rama tells Lakshmana how the line began: when King Nimi lay bodiless, videha, the sages set the two fire-sticks on his body and churned, pouring mantras and oblations into the work, and from the churning a son came forth, a great ascetic. “Because he was born of Videha, the bodiless king, they called him Vaideha; because he was born of the churning, Mithi; and because he came to birth in so wondrous a way, Janaka.” Tulsidas tells the court of the bow his own way. In the Bala Kanda of the Ramcharitmanas the king watches king after king fail at the bow and cries out that he knows the earth to be empty of heroes, and Lakshmana’s brows go crooked at the words; and in the Ayodhya Kanda of that poem Janaka travels to Chitrakuta and sees his daughter in the dress of an ascetic and tells her she has made both her houses pure. Valmiki has no scene at Chitrakuta; that journey belongs to Tulsidas.

A Thousand Cows

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad shows another Janaka, Janaka Vaideha, emperor of Videha, whose court is the one place in that world where a man who has thought something through can get a hearing and be paid for it. In chapter 3 a thousand cows stand roped in his yard with ten measures of gold tied to each pair of horns, and Yajnavalkya tells his pupil to drive them home before the debating has even begun. In chapter 4 the emperor is the questioner himself. He has listened to many teachers in his life and kept one sentence from each of them, and now he lays those sentences before Yajnavalkya the way a man opens his treasury and turns every coin out onto the table: speech is brahman, breath is brahman, the heart is brahman. Each time the teacher grants that the saying came down a true line, and then asks whether the man who said it also told the king what the thing rests on and where it stands, and each time the king admits that he did not, and the answer is left standing on one leg. “I give you a thousand cows along with a bull elephant,” Janaka says, six times, as each answer is finished, and six times Yajnavalkya returns the same sentence, that his father held that one should take nothing without first giving the whole teaching. Then the teacher puts the question that shakes all the royal splendor loose: you are honored, you are wealthy, you have studied the Vedas; when you are released from here, where will you go? “Revered sir, I do not know where I shall go.” That admission is the largest asset the man owns, and on it the teacher takes him to the self of which only this much can be said, he is not this, and he is not this either, the self that is not grasped because there is nothing of him to take hold of. Then comes the declaration that returns through the whole chapter. “Janaka, you have reached fearlessness.” The king hands the word back at once. “May fearlessness come to you as well, Yajnavalkya, since it is you who tell us where fearlessness lives.” “These Videhas are yours, and I am yours along with them.”

At their next meeting Yajnavalkya comes to him of his own accord, and, pleased with a conversation about the fire offering, grants the king a boon; Janaka asks for kamaprashna, leave to ask whatever he pleases whenever he pleases. His first question is small, and it becomes the spine of the whole chapter: what is the light of this person, by what light does a man sit and go out and do his work and come back? The sun, the teacher answers. And when the sun has set? Then the moon. And when the moon has set too? Then fire. And when the fire has gone quiet? Then speech; let the dark be thick enough that a man cannot make out his own hand, and let someone call out from somewhere in it, and he walks toward that voice. Janaka pulls the last curtain aside. “The sun has set, the moon has set, the fire has died, speech has fallen silent, what is the light of this person then?” The self becomes his light, the teacher answers; by the light of the self he sits, he goes out, he does his work, he comes back. The four outer lights were borrowed, and they went out one after another, and what remained was his own. At the end of the chapter the teacher tells him that this is the world of brahman and that he has been brought to it, and Janaka answers by handing over the Videhas and himself along with them, as a servant.

The Cry of Wonder

In the Ashtavakra Gita Janaka sits in his hall, and before him stands a young sage whose body is bent in eight places. The introduction to that text says itself that the court scene in which the pandits laugh at the crooked boy and he calls them workers in hides, men who keep their gaze on the skin, comes down in popular tradition; the text proper opens on the king’s three questions. Janaka seats Ashtavakra before him and asks, “How is knowledge gained? How is liberation reached? How does dispassion awaken?” In the first chapter Ashtavakra answers across twenty verses that the king is the one seer of everything, free from the start, and that his only bondage was taking the seer for someone else. The second chapter belongs to Janaka, twenty-five verses, eight of which open on one cry, Aho, the sound a man makes when he finds a thing that was in his hand the whole time. A court knows what a king does after a teacher speaks: he praises the teaching, he orders a gift. Janaka does neither. What follows is a confession made in front of everyone who serves him. “Oh, I am stainless, at peace, awareness itself, beyond nature.” “And all this time, delusion alone has made a fool of me.” Then the recognition spreads outward from the body: he alone lights up this body, he says, and the world is lit the same way; as waves and foam and bubbles are nothing apart from water, this world is nothing apart from the self. One verse of teaching, one verse of recognition. And the same text says that even after the Ashtavakra Gita he went on ruling; a wife, children, ministers, war, and the treasury of the realm all stayed on his shoulders, and only his identity stayed unbound from the load. The third chapter of the Gita makes this king its example of a man who had already arrived and kept at his work to the end of his days for one reason, the good of the world.

A Garden in Spring

In the Yoga Vasishtha Vasishtha tells Rama of the Janaka who reigns in Videha, and the story opens in no hall; it opens in a garden. One spring evening the king leaves his attendants behind and climbs alone to a grove on the slope of a hill, where the playful winds carry the scent of the flowers in every direction, and from inside a bower of tamala trees he hears a mingled sound of voices, like the voices of siddhas, the perfected ones who live in the solitudes of the mountains, and he can see no one. We adore that Being, one voice sings, which is neither the subject nor the object, neither the one who sees nor the thing seen; we adore that Being, another takes it up, which is beyond the seer and the seeing and the seen; and one voice has an edge to it, that the fool who has learned the dullness of everything in the world and still binds his mind to it is a donkey, and no man. Then no more sound comes out of the bower, and the king of Videha stands alone in the garden. He goes home without a word, climbs to the highest terrace of his palace, and watching the flocks of birds wheel without order over the roofs he begins to lament the headlong hurry of men. “What sorcerer has bewitched me with his wand so completely that he has made me believe I am not spellbound at all?” “I am tied to the earth without a rope.” “I am soiled here without any dirt on me.” “I have fallen, though I am sitting in this palace.” What use are these possessions and these many relatives to him, he asks, when his soul is sunk in despair like a child afraid of ghosts, and what is his prosperity except a bubble in front of his eyes?

The lament runs on until it reaches the root from which the whole tree has grown, and there his voice changes. “I am awake now, and I am glad to have found out the robber of my soul.” “It is my own mind.” For so long, he says, that mind has been at large like a loose, unstrung pearl; now he will pierce it with the needle of reason and string it on self-control. While Janaka is musing like this the chamberlain comes in and stands before him, the way the dawn stands before the chariot of the sun and waits for it to move. “Sire, your realm is safe under your protecting arms.” Rise, he says, and attend to the daily rites; the women are standing by with jars of water scented with flowers and camphor for the royal bath. The king goes silent, so still that he sits there like a figure in a painting, and the chamberlain, who knows the dispositions of kings, does not say another word. In that silence a decision forms. “I do not wish to have what I have not got, and I do not dare to leave what I have already got.” “I am content with myself.” He comes down from the terrace and takes up the business of the day. From then on he is neither intent on his duties nor forsaking them; he attends, unconcerned, to whatever presents itself. “The venerable Janaka has been liberated in his living state from that time, and he is renowned among mankind since as a veteran of the knowledge of God.” “He goes on reigning over the land of the Videha people from that day, without being subject to a feeling of joy or sorrow for a single moment.” He obtained the obtainable, Vasishtha tells Rama, by his own reasoning and by no other means.

In the same text Vishvamitra tells Dasharatha’s court another story, and in it Vyasa’s son Shuka is standing at this king’s gate. The doorkeeper carries the news in, and Janaka understands at once that Shuka has come to learn from him; he pays the messenger no attention. “He said nothing, and he kept on saying nothing for seven days.” “Shuka stood there seven days.” Then seven days more in the outer compound, and seven in the inner apartments, among food and perfumes and young women whose business was to be wanted, and in all that week he does not once see the king. When twenty-one days have gone by Janaka has him brought in, looks at the serenity in the young man’s soul, rises from his seat, and bows down to him. “You have carried out every duty you had in this world,” Janaka says, and asks what he wants now. Shuka asks whether the world is real or unreal, and Janaka, who was Vyasa‘s pupil, gives him the same teaching he received from that father, and Shuka recognizes every turn of it. “There is nothing more certain than what you have known by yourself and heard from your father.” “What more do you want to hear?” “I am a pupil of Vyasa, and you are his son; but you are greater than both of us, because you have abandoned the taste for the enjoyments of life.” Shuka says nothing more, and goes out of Videha to a summit of Mount Meru.

What Is Never Unknown

In the Jnana Khanda of the Tripura Rahasya Dattatreya tells Parashurama of the Janaka of Videha who worshiped, with the full rites of sacrifice, the Goddess who dwells in every being as its own Self. Varuna’s son comes to that court disguised as a Brahmin, a formidable debater; the terms are set that whoever loses the debate goes into the sea, and the pandits go down by the hundreds before his fallacious logic, and Varuna’s followers wait below the water and carry them off to their master’s sacrifice. One of the men who go under is Kahola, and his son Ashtavakra hurries to Janaka’s court, defeats the stranger, and has every sunken man restored. But the son of Kahola swells with pride at it, and in that moment a woman ascetic appears in the assembly, silences the young man in debate, and tells him that he has not understood her because this is the first time he has heard the truth, and that this king, the wisest of men, can make him understand. Then she dissolves into the air. In this text the teacher is Janaka and the listener is Ashtavakra. “King of Videha, I have not clearly understood the ascetic’s teaching, because of its brevity.” “How am I to know the unknowable?” Janaka answers as if the question surprised him. “It is neither unknowable, nor does it remain unknown at any moment.” “Tell me how even the ablest of masters could guide anyone to something that always remains unknown.” “This transcendental state is quite easy, or very nearly impossible, according to whether the mind is turned inward in peace or runs outward in restlessness.” Whatever you see, the king tells him, is known by that one abstract intelligence; watch it carefully after everything else has been set aside. “Just as a mirror takes on the hues of its images, abstract intelligence assumes the different shapes of objects, because it holds them within itself.”

Mithila Burns

The Mahabharata has several kings named Janaka, and in the Shanti Parva Bhishma sets them before Yudhishthira one after another. Panchashikha, the pupil of Kapila, gives King Janadeva of Mithila one more thing to hold, and it comes out of the king’s own family: their ancestor Janaka once stood watching his city burn in a great fire and declared, “In this fire nothing of mine is burning.” To Mandavya, who came to him with questions, the ruler of the Videhas said, “I have nothing in this world,” “and I live in great happiness.” “If the whole of Mithila, which people call my kingdom, were to go up in one blaze, nothing of mine would burn.” In the Anugita of the Ashvamedhika Parva a Janaka orders a Brahmin who has given offense out of his kingdom, and the Brahmin asks him how far the land under his rule extends, and the king, searching, finds no ground he can call his own. “Every condition here, in every affair, I have understood to be terminable,” Janaka says, “and so I could not find anything that deserved to be called mine.” The Brahmin smiles. “Know that I am Dharma, and that I came here today to examine you.” In the Vana Parva Ashtavakra defeats Vandin at the sacrifice of King Janaka, and the king says, “Listening to your words, I take them to be excellent and superhuman, and your form too stands revealed as superhuman,” and places Vandin at his disposal.

The longest of those stories is the one in which Vyasa sends his son Shuka to Mithila, with a warning. “The ruler of Mithila is a king at whose sacrifices we officiate.” “Even so, you must not let yourself feel superior while you live with him.” Shuka walks the whole way and spends a night in the palace garden among fifty courtesans dressed in red, neither pleased by any of it nor angered. The next morning King Janaka comes to him with his priest walking ahead and his whole household behind, bearing the materials of the arghya on his own head as he approaches the son of his revered teacher; he presents him with a seat set with gems, and then, this high-born king, sits down on the bare ground with his palms joined and asks why his guest has come. Shuka asks what the duties of a Brahmin are, “And how is liberation won, by knowledge or by austerity?” Janaka lays out the four ways of life in their order, and Shuka asks whether a man whose understanding is already clean must still pass through the three earlier ones. “The teacher is the helmsman, and knowledge is the boat.” A man who has gained that boat succeeds, the king says, and once he has crossed the ocean he may leave both behind; a man cleansed by the austerities of many births can reach liberation in the very first way of life, and such a man lives as the animals of the water live in water, never soaked by it. And then the king looks at the young man in front of him. “I see that all the knowledge I am giving you is in you already.” “Your knowledge is much greater than you think.” Perhaps it is his youth, Janaka says, or doubts he has not cleared away, or the fear that comes of not having reached liberation yet; whatever the cause, he is not aware of the knowledge that has already arisen in his mind. “I see that a lump of gold and a clod of earth are the same in your eyes.” “What else do you have to ask me?” Shuka asks nothing more, and sets off north toward Himavat, moving like the wind.

The Devi Bhagavata tells the same meeting a third way. There Vyasa says to his brooding son, “If my teaching gives you no peace, go to Mithila, which King Janaka rules.” “That Videha king is jivanmukta and an ocean of truth; he will destroy your delusion.” Shukadeva finds the idea impossible; a king liberated while living, ruling with joy, “That is as impossible as a barren woman having a son.” He crosses Mount Meru in about two years and the Himalaya in one, the gatekeeper stops him at the city gate, and he stands there like a post and laughs. The king comes to him with his priest before him and his ministers behind, and Shukadeva asks which of tapas, tirtha, vows, yajna, study, and knowledge is the direct means of liberation. Janaka lays out the stages in their order, and when Shukadeva asks why a man in whom dispassion has already arisen should not go straight to the forest, the king gives him the ant and the bird: an ant climbs from the root onto a branch and from there, slowly, resting as it goes, reaches the fruit, while a bird flying very fast in the sky grows tired. “See me: I do the king’s work, and I am jivanmukta.” “I do all my work as I wish, and I feel no grief and no joy.” “The cause of bondage and of liberation is neither this body, nor the jivatma, nor these senses; the mind alone binds and frees men.” Bathe at every tirtha again and again, he says, and if the mind has not become pure all of it is wasted. The Vishnu Purana begins this line in its fourth book with the same Nimi, from the churning of whose body the first Janaka was born, and sets Siradhvaja in it, the king who was plowing the yajna ground, wishing for a son, when a daughter was born from the tip of his plow.

His Path

The Line of Nimi · The curse exchanged between Vasishtha and Nimi, the churning of a body, and the first Janaka born of it, in whose line Siradhvaja drove his plow.

Ashtavakra and Vandin · The gate of Janaka’s sacrifice, a counting match from one to thirteen, and Kahoda coming back out of the sea.

Shukadeva at the Gate of Mithila · A gatekeeper’s questions, a young sage laughing like a post outside the city, and a king who says, see me, I do the king’s work.

The Man Who Kept Asking

Janaka is a name that several texts give to a king of their own, and no text makes a single man of them. Valmiki’s Janaka is a father, whose whole story lies between the line a plow cut and a bow, and who goes quietly home to Mithila after Rama‘s coronation with his gifts given to his daughter. The Janaka of the Brihadaranyaka is an emperor whose largest asset is one admission, that he does not know where he will go. The Janaka of the Ashtavakra Gita finds himself in one verse and goes on ruling; the Janaka of the Yoga Vasishtha hears the siddhas sing in a garden, recognizes his own mind as the thief, and, liberated while living, comes down from his terrace to the business of the day; the Janaka of the Tripura Rahasya teaches the same Ashtavakra who teaches him in the other text; and the Janaka of the Mahabharata and the Devi Bhagavata gives Vyasa‘s son a jeweled seat, sits on the bare ground before him, and ends by telling him that all the knowledge he is giving is in him already. One thing is the same in all these kings. Whatever they have, a kingdom, a court, a thousand cows, a daughter, they are ready to give, and whatever they lack, they feel no shame in asking for. Mithila burns and nothing of theirs burns, because they had already searched out what was their own. The man who rises from his sacrificial ground to ask who these two boys are is the same man found seated at the end of every text, and people come to him to ask.