Narada

A Serving Woman’s Son

To answer Vyasa, Narada opens his own story. “I was not always Narada.” In the kalpa before this one he was a small boy in a village, “I was the son of a serving woman.” His mother was a maid in the house of some Brahmins learned in the Vedas, and “Of my father I knew nothing, not so much as a name.” One monsoon a company of wandering sadhus stayed four months under that roof, and the five-year-old spent the whole season in front of them; with their leave he ate, once each day, the little that was left clinging to their vessels, and that daily handful of leavings, he says, washed every old stain out of him. When his mother died of a snakebite in the dark, going out to milk the cow, he turned his face north and walked alone into a forest without a far side; he sat down under a peepal tree, closed his eyes, and the Lord appeared slowly on the screen of his heart, and then, without warning, was gone. Out of that empty forest came a voice, deep and grave and sweet at once. “Sinless child, I showed you this one glimpse of my form for a single reason: to wake in your heart the burning desire to reach me.” “When you lay down this coarse and perishable body, you will come to me and stand among my own attendants.” In time the body of five elements dropped away, he was carried into the sleeping Narayana on Brahma’s indrawn breath, and when Brahma woke after a thousand cycles of the four ages and Marichi and the other rishis came forth from his senses, he came forth with them. “That was my next birth. The birth of Narada.” “I came back with one work to do: to carry the story of Narayana to every ear in every world.” Then he turns the story on the man who asked for it. “Now sit. For the freeing of every bound creature, go down into samadhi, and this time remember, one by one, the lilas of the Lord whose power thought cannot circle.” The vina’s note thins into distance, and in that silence the Bhagavatam is conceived.

The First Spark

After that the Bhagavatam makes him the first spark of story after story, and every time he is found at a door where someone has just been turned away. In the fourth skandha a five-year-old named Dhruva, cut by a stepmother’s sentence, has walked out of his father’s capital alone, and on the road Narada passes a hand over the boy’s head and tries to turn him around. “Son, you are a child still. This is the age for games. What can honor and insult weigh at five?” “Go home.” The child answers, “The fire in me is lit today. Tomorrow it may have gone cold. I have to go today.” Narada stops arguing and gives him the whole of it, the twelve-syllable mantra and the place: “The path your mother showed you is the path of your highest good.” “Go to Madhuvana, on the sacred bank of the Yamuna near Mathura.” In the seventh skandha the door is a woman’s wrist. Indra is dragging the pregnant queen Kayadhu down a road toward Amaravati, meaning to kill Hiranyakashipu’s child the moment it is born, and over her weeping comes a thread of music. “Devaraj, stop. This lady is innocent. She is a chaste and virtuous woman, and she is another man’s wedded wife. Let her go.” And then, “Death will not come to that child from your hands. There is no power in you for it. All you would carry home from this road is the sin.” Indra lets go, walks once around the mother in worship, and leaves, and Narada turns to the queen. “Daughter, come with me. Stay in my hermitage until your husband returns from his austerities. You will be safe there, and so will the one you are carrying.” In the hermitage he teaches her the way of the Lord and the deathless Self, and the text says that one more listener lies curled in the dark, taking in every sentence; the mother forgets, the one within does not, and he is born Prahlada, murmuring Narayana though no one taught him. And to King Prachinabarhi he tells the riddle of a king who made his home in a city with nine gates, hands over the key, Puranjana is you, and gives the way off the wheel: “Live in the city. Rule it well, keep its gates, repair its walls.” Only never take yourself for the city.

See the End of the Earth

The Vishnu Purana gives him one short scene in Daksha’s house. Eager to multiply the people, the Prajapati begets five thousand sons by Asikni, the Haryashvas, and the sweet-speaking sage comes to them. “Haryashvas, it seems you will create people; hear what I say. You are quite ignorant, I am sorry to say, for you do not know even the middle, the upper, and the lower parts of this earth. How will you create people? Your movement is unobstructed in this brahmanda, up, down, and to every side; so why do you not all go together and see the end of this earth?” They go off in every direction, and like rivers running into the ocean they have not returned to this day. Daksha begets a thousand more, the Shabalashvas, and Narada tells them the same thing; they follow their brothers’ path, and Daksha’s anger falls on Narada, and he curses him. The chapter never gives the words of the curse, only the fact of it, and inside that one sentence the whole figure is visible: a question he asks sends six thousand sons past the horizon.

The Face of a Monkey

The Srishti khanda of the Rudra Samhita of the Shiva Purana shows the same sage in his pride. In a cave of the Malaya mountain he sinks into samadhi; Indra shakes, sends Kamadeva with the spring beside him, and the god of desire goes home beaten, because on that same soil Shankara had once burned him to ash and no arrow of his can land within sight of it. Narada never grasps this. He rises certain that he has conquered desire by his own strength, tells Rudra on Kailasa, tells his father in Brahmaloka, “Father, by the power of my austerity I have defeated Kamadeva,” and, forbidden by both to repeat it, hurries to Vaikuntha to repeat it before Vishnu. The moment he leaves, by Shiva’s will, Hari brings forth his maya: a city a hundred yojanas wide across the sage’s road, a king named Shilanidhi, and a swayamvara for his daughter Shrimati. The sage looks at the girl and loses his place in the conversation, and desire takes him so completely that he runs back to Vaikuntha with folded hands. “Lord, I am your servant. Grant me your form, so that Princess Shrimati is certain to choose me.” Vishnu laughs and gives him exactly what he asked for, every limb in the likeness of his own and on it the face of a monkey. In the hall the princess reaches him, sees a monkey’s face on a body like Vishnu’s, turns away in anger, and lays her garland on a king no one else can see, who is Vishnu himself. Two of Shiva’s ganas, seated there as Brahmins, finish it for him: “Take a mirror and see for yourself that hateful monkey face of yours.” He looks, and fury goes up in him like a struck light. He curses the two ganas to be born rakshasas from a Brahmin’s seed, and then, with his wisdom gone out of him, reaches Vaikuntha and curses the Lord. “Vishnu, you have driven me to torment over a woman. So take birth in that same human form you wore while you worked your trick on me, and bear the grief of it there as a man. The monkeys whose likeness you set upon my face, let them be the ones who come to your help in that hour.” Vishnu takes the curse in silence, Shambhu draws his maya back, and it goes out of the sage the way a fever goes; he throws himself at Hari’s feet, “Lord, unmake that curse,” and hears the answer, “Dear one, do not grieve, for you are among the finest of my devotees, and hell is not where you are going. This curse will come to pass only by the will of Lord Shiva.” In the Parvati khanda of the same Purana he comes without any pride at all, reads the line on a girl’s palm in Himavan’s house and foretells the yogi who has neither mother nor father, and at the wedding it is Narada who strikes his vina and answers that Shiva has no lineage, no family, and no name.

Saubhagyasundari

The Devi Bhagavata takes hold of the same pride from the other end, and lets Narada tell it himself. He comes to Shvetadvipa playing his great vina, and Lakshmi, seeing him, withdraws from Vishnu’s side into the inner rooms. “Why did Mother Lakshmi leave your side the moment she saw me? I am no rake and no rogue. I am an ascetic who has conquered the senses, and anger, and maya.” Vishnu smiles. “What you said just now, that you have conquered maya, you must never say. Neither I nor Shiva nor Brahma can conquer that unborn one, nor can Sanaka and the other munis.” Narada insists on seeing her, and the two of them come down on Garuda beside a lake near Kanyakubja, where Vishnu laughs and tells him to bathe first. He lays down his vina and his deerskin and steps into the water, and as he bathes, while Hari watches, he leaves his male form and becomes a woman beyond compare; Vishnu picks up the vina and the deerskin, mounts Garuda, and is gone, and the forgetting of his former body rises in his mind. King Taladhvaja comes by with his chariots and asks who she is. “King, I do not know for certain whose daughter I am, where my parents are, or who set me down beside this lake.” He carries her to his palace, marries her with the fire as witness, and names her Saubhagyasundari; twelve years pass like a moment, twelve sons are born and then eight more, and the one thought that never once comes is, “I am Narada, and the Lord has deceived me with his maya.” Then a distant king lays siege to Kanyakubja, every son and grandson falls in the battle, and on that field, wailing among the dead, she is found by an old Brahmin who tells her that the bath for dead kin is done at a tirtha, never at home. At the lake called Puntirtha she goes down into the water and comes up a man, and Hari stands on the bank in his own form with the vina in his hand. I am Narada, he thinks; I came here with Hari; deluded by maya I became a woman. The king weeps for a wife who has vanished into a lake, is argued by the Brahmin into renunciation, and goes to the forest, and the sage, laughing, tells Hari that now he knows the power of maya.

At the Door of Two Epics

The first canto of the Valmiki Ramayana seats him before a question. Is there a man alive in the world at this hour, Valmiki asks, who holds every virtue at once, strong and truthful and master of his anger, and the seer who wanders between the worlds of gods and men listens to the whole list and says, “Listen.” The virtues are rare, and rarer still in one man, “He was born in the line of Ikshvaku, and people know him by the name of Rama.” Then he tells the whole poem in a single telling, and the part of it that has not yet happened. In the Uttara Kanda he meets Ravana among the clouds, the rakshasa in the Pushpaka and the sage riding a cloud, and when the king of Lanka turns south to conquer Yama, Narada asks why he travels by this other road, “This road is very hard going, tamer of enemies, and it leads to the city of Yama,” then sits a while in thought and goes ahead to Yama’s house himself, so as to see the thing before it happens. The Mahabharata brings him again and again to the Pandavas. In the Adi Parva he finishes the story of Sunda and Upasunda, two inseparable brothers who clubbed each other to death over Tilottama, and says, “I tell you this out of affection for you, princes of the Bharata line. If you wish to please me, make some arrangement among yourselves so that you never come to quarrel over Draupadi,” and while he is still present they bind themselves to the rule of twelve years in the forest. In the Sabha Parva he walks into the hall Maya built and puts to Yudhishthira the long examination of a king, and when the king asks whether he has ever seen a finer hall, he answers, “Among human beings, I have never seen or heard of an assembly hall of gems and precious stones equal to yours,” describes the halls of Yama, Varuna, Indra, Kubera and Brahma, and ends, “I have visited these assemblies in the regions of the gods, and your own is unquestionably the finest among human beings.” In the Narayaniya of the Shanti Parva he goes to Shvetadvipa and wins a sight of the Lord that Brahma himself never won, and at Badari, explaining his rites to Nara and Narayana, says that Brahma “in a glad hour brought my father Daksha into being.” In the Ashramavasika Parva it is Narada who brings Yudhishthira the news that Dhritarashtra, Gandhari and Kunti have died in a forest fire, and who draws out the thorn Sanjaya had left: “The king was not burned to death by an unsanctified fire.” And in the Harivamsha he walks into the pavilion on Raivataka where Krishna sits with Rukmini and gives Krishna a single flower of the Parijata; Krishna hands it to Rukmini, she sets it in her hair, and Narada turns to her, “Goddess, the flower is worthy of you. Your touch has finished it. Chaste one, so devoted to your husband, this flower never withers.” The maids of the other wives hear every word, and from that one speech runs the whole story, Satyabhama’s chamber of anger, Krishna’s promise, and the war with Indra, with Narada going up and down between heaven and Dwarka as the messenger of both brothers.

His Path

The Previous Birth of Narada · A serving woman’s son, the leavings of sadhus, and a voice in an empty forest.

Prahlada’s Lessons in the Womb · A wrist in Indra’s grip, a hermitage, and a listener who hears from inside.

The Allegory of Puranjana · A city with nine gates, and the witness who is not the city.

Prachetas and the Origin of Daksha · Five thousand Haryashvas, one question, and a curse whose words the text withholds.

Narada’s Pride · A cave on the Malaya mountain, Shrimati’s swayamvara, and a monkey’s face in a mirror.

The Parijata · One flower, one sulking queen, and a sage carrying messages between heaven and Dwarka.

The One Who Comes Before the Story

In every text Narada arrives before the story does. The Bhagavatam begins with him, because Vyasa‘s empty bowl becomes visible only under his finger; the Ramayana begins with his answer, because Valmiki’s question was put to him. Yet the texts that make him the spark also show him burning. In the Shiva Purana the pride of having conquered desire shows him a monkey’s face in a mirror and turns his own curse into the seed of Vishnu’s birth as a man; in the Devi Bhagavata the claim to have conquered maya costs him his name in a lake and the grief of twelve sons; in the Vishnu Purana one question of his sends six thousand sons past the horizon and brings Daksha’s curse down on him. The two kinds of story hold one figure, and his mark in both is that he never stays: he arrives, says one sentence, and the vina’s note thins into distance. The Bhagavatam puts the reason for that in the serving woman’s son, who was shown a single glimpse in an empty forest and told he would not see it again in that life, and who came back across the dissolution with one task, to carry the story of Narayana to every ear. A man living on one glimpse is the one who comes to wake the hunger for it in others, and that is why, in every text, he arrives at the exact hour when someone’s inside stands emptiest.