Shukadeva

Born of the Fire Sticks

In the Mahabharata the river Ganga comes to the slope of Meru in her own bodily form and bathes the newborn in her waters; an ascetic’s staff and a dark deerskin drop from the sky for him; the Gandharvas sing, the apsaras dance, the kettledrums of heaven boom, and Mahadeva himself comes with the Goddess and invests the sage’s son with the sacred thread. “The moment Shuka was born the Vedas came to live in him, with all their mysteries and all their summaries, just as they live in his father.” He chooses a teacher anyway, as custom everywhere requires, and the teacher is Brihaspati; he studies all the Vedas, all the histories, and the science of government, pays his teacher’s fee, comes home, and takes the vow of a brahmachari, and even as a child the gods and the rishis respect him for his knowledge and his austerity. His mind is on the dharma of liberation, and he takes no pleasure in the three ways of life that begin with the householder’s. He goes to his father, humble, wanting his own highest good. “You know the dharma of liberation well.” “Teach it to me, so that I may have the highest peace of mind.” At his father’s command he masters every treatise on yoga and the science that Kapila taught.

The Devi Bhagavata tells the same birth in its first book, and after the birth it has another story. “Because Vyasa had seen Ghritachi in the form of a shuki at the churning of the arani, he named the boy Shuka.” When the boy comes home from Brihaspati’s house Vyasa rises quickly, embraces him again and again, smells his head, and before long speaks of a certain muni’s daughter, a beautiful girl: marry, he says, live as a householder, offer to the gods and the ancestors, and free me of my debt. The dispassionate Shukadeva folds his hands. “Father, tell me what happiness in this human world is free of calamity.” “A man bound in a noose of iron or of wood may perhaps get free, and one caught in the bond of son and wife never gets free.” “I am not born of a womb; how then should my mind be on womb-born pleasure?” “Protect me by teaching me tattva-jnana, for I am very afraid of this serpent, samsara.” Vyasa explains that a house is no prison and no cause of bondage, that a man free in mind is free as a householder too, and that the senses are strong; Vishvamitra, who fasted three thousand years, was undone at the sight of Menaka, and his own father Parashara at the sight of a fisherman’s daughter; so be a householder first, and an ascetic in old age. Shukadeva will not have it; the householder’s stage is a net for catching birds and beasts, and a bond for every man. So Vyasa gives him the text he had spread into twelve books, the Devi Bhagavata, and tells him to read it and take it to heart, and Shukadeva reads it in due form and still finds no peace, and goes about looking like a man indifferent to everything, like Narada. The Bhagavatam, in its own first book, tells the same handing-down with a different text: at his hermitage on the bank of the Sarasvati Vyasa composes the Bhagavata, “And then he called his son Shuka to him and had him take the whole of it by heart.”

The Road to Mithila

In the Mahabharata Vyasa sees his son shining with the splendor of the Vedas and says, “Go to Janaka, the ruler of Mithila.” The king of Mithila will tell him everything he needs for his liberation, and his father gives him the rules of the road. “Go by the path ordinary people take.” “Do not use the power of your yoga to travel through the sky.” Go simply, and do not go looking for pleasure; do not seek out friends or wives along the way, since friends and wives are what tie a man to the world. “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.” So Shuka, who could have crossed the whole earth and her seas through the air, walks to Mithila: the regions of Meru and Hari and Himavat, the countries of the Chinas and the Hunas, Aryavarta, and at last the country of the Videhas with its fields of rice and barley, and he passes through all of it without pausing over anything his eyes meet. At the palace the doorkeepers stop him with rough words, and he feels no anger. “He stood where he was and waited, as fresh as if the sun, the long road, hunger and thirst had never touched him.” A minister leads him through the courts into a garden of pools and flowering trees, where fifty courtesans of the highest rank, dressed in red with ornaments of gold, gather around him, bring water for his feet, feed him, and show him the grounds, laughing and singing as they go. “Shuka, born of the fire sticks, master of his senses and of his anger, was neither pleased by any of it nor angered.” He spends the first part of the night in yoga, sleeps through the middle, and gives himself to yoga again with the women still around him.

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, presents him with a seat set with gems, and then sits down on the bare ground with his palms joined and asks why he 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 when Shuka asks whether a man whose understanding is already clean must still pass through the three earlier ones, the king tells him, “The teacher is the helmsman, and knowledge is the boat.” Once a man has crossed the ocean, he says, he may leave both behind. 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, he says; perhaps it is your youth, or the doubts you have not cleared away, or the fear of not having reached liberation yet. “What else do you have to ask me?” Shuka asks nothing more. “He rested in the Self by the Self, having seen the Self by the Self.” He sets off north toward Himavat as fast as the wind, touches his father’s feet in the hermitage at the foot of the mountains, and tells him cheerfully everything that passed between him and the king.

The Yoga Vasishtha tells this journey in the court of Dasharatha. Rama has just finished saying before his father’s full assembly that nothing in the world is worth wanting, and the sage Vishvamitra, seated in front of him, speaks first, and gently. “You have the mind of Shuka, the son of the great Vyasa.” “He knew the knowable by his own intuition, and he still needed someone’s word to confirm what he knew.” He raises his hand toward the man on the golden seat at the king’s side, dark as a hill of black coal and blazing like the midday sun: there sits the great Vyasa himself. In that text his son, a boy with a face like the moon and a bearing as settled as a sacrificial altar, is led by his own understanding into a long inquiry after what is true. “He asked no one.” “He searched on his own account, and on his own account he found it.” And having got hold of the highest truth, he is still unsettled; he cannot bring himself to believe that what he knows is certain. One day he finds his father sitting quietly by himself and asks, “Tell me, father.” “Where did this whole commotion of the world have its rise, and how is it to subside?” Vyasa explains everything there is to say, from the first thing to the last, and the words his father uses are the words the son arrived at alone, and because they are already his he does not think much of the instruction. Vyasa understands what his son is thinking, and answers the thought. “I know the true nature of these things no better than this,” he says. “But there is a prince in this land named Janaka who truly possesses the knowledge of the knowable.” “Go to him.”

In the city of Videha the doorkeeper carries the news in, and Janaka understands at once why Shuka has come. “He said nothing, and he kept on saying nothing for seven days.” “Shuka stood there seven days.” Then seven days in the outer compound, in everything that vexes a man’s spirit, and seven in the inner apartments, among food and perfumes and young women whose business is to be wanted, and in all that week he does not once see the king. “It stayed as firm as a rock under the blasts of the wind.” He remains there like the full moon, which neither wanes nor grows, his desires quiet, his tongue still, his mind content. When twenty-one days have gone by the king has him brought in. “He looked at the serenity in the young man’s soul, and the king rose from his seat and bowed down to him.” Shuka asks him to say truly whether this world is real or unreal, so that his mind may be set at rest and stop wandering the world over in search of the truth. “There is nothing more certain than what you have known by yourself and heard from your father.” “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. “His mind settled on the purely supreme object and stayed there.” Sorrow leaves him, and fear, and every doubt, and he goes out of Videha to a peaceful summit of Mount Meru, and there he passes ten thousand rainy seasons in a meditation that does not alter, until at last “he was extinguished in the supreme soul, as a lamp goes out when its oil is gone.” Vishvamitra turns back to the prince in front of him. “Rama, it is now your turn to have your mind properly cleansed of its doubts, as it was done for the son of Vyasa.”

In the Devi Bhagavata Vyasa sees his son brooding like a poor man in debt and says, “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 doubts it: a man liberated while living, without a body, and ruling with joy, “That is as impossible as a barren woman having a son.” How does that king rule without punishment, and are the good man and the thief equal in his kingdom? Still he has never seen such a king, and he longs to see this one, who lives in the world like a lotus leaf in water. Vyasa holds his desireless son hard. “I live happily only seeing your lotus face, and without you I am sad.” “Son, you are my very breath.” Give me your word that you will come back to this hermitage, he says, and Shukadeva bows, circles him, and sets off like an arrow loosed from a bow. He crosses Mount Meru in about two years and the Himalaya in one, and at the gate of Mithila the gatekeeper stops him and asks who he is and what his business is. Shukadeva says nothing. He goes back out of the gate, stands there like a post, and after a while stands there laughing. “The purpose I came for is fulfilled by your words alone.” “I came to see the city of Videha, and here even entry is hard.” “I have been cheated by my own father.” Where is Mount Sumeru, he asks, and where is this Mithila; he came on foot, and what fruit has he got for the labor? “Prarabdha has cheated me.” The gatekeeper, feeling that this is some wise and excellent Brahmin, begs his forgiveness, and Shukadeva answers, “There is no fault of yours in this; a servant must obey his master’s order.” Nor is it the king’s fault, since the wise should know their thieves and their enemies; the fault is wholly his own, for coming uninvited to another’s house. Then the gatekeeper asks him what happiness is, and what sorrow, and who is an enemy and who a friend, and he answers first like a scholar, in divisions, and when the gatekeeper says he has not understood, he tells it plainly: the attached man’s happiness comes by getting wealth and sons and honor, and whoever obstructs it he counts an enemy; the dispassionate man’s happiness comes only from solitude and contemplation of the self. “The learned man seeking his welfare has many enemies, kama, krodha, pramada and the rest; and a man’s true friend is contentment alone.” “There is no other in the three worlds.” The gatekeeper lets him in.

In the palace garden the women of the inner apartments, skilled in dance and song, are all enchanted by the young and radiant muni, and pure-souled Shukadeva, son of the arani, “regarded them as his mother, neither glad nor sorry.” Janaka comes 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. The king lays out the stages in their order, gives him the ant that reaches the fruit by resting as it climbs and the bird that flies fast and tires, and says, “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.” Bondage and liberation lie in the mind alone, he says, and bathing at every tirtha is wasted if the mind has not become pure. Shukadeva’s doubt remains even then, since the Vedic rites abound in violence, and Janaka answers him: “Violence done by the attached is violence; for the unattached it is not called violence.” There the Devi Bhagavata’s chapter ends.

Seven Days

In the Bhagavatam Shukadeva is awake from birth itself, and he comes to a man who has seven days left. Cursed by a Brahmin’s son to die of the serpent Takshaka’s bite, Parikshit has walked out of his kingdom and sat down on the bank of the Ganga to fast, to listen, and to die. “There Shukadeva arrived, and for seven days the river of the Bhagavata flowed.” The king asks one question. “A man with seven days left, what should he listen to, what should he do?” And in answer the whole scripture comes down onto that bank, from the making of the worlds to the birth of Krishna and the end of the Yadava line, told to a listener who sits facing his own death, which is why there is a hurry in every line of it and no idle wandering anywhere. The seventh evening comes. The whole Bhagavata has descended from the mouth of that muni who feels the moving and unmoving world as his own atman, and he turns at the last to the one thing the king most needs to carry across the threshold that is now only hours away. The body is born and perishes, he tells him. “You are not that.” “When a clay pot breaks, the space that was held inside it does not break with the clay; it is the same open sky it always was.” Takshaka’s fangs have no power to burn the one who knows this. “What more would you have me say?” “When he had spoken, the gathering went quiet along the whole bank, and in it there was only the sound of the water.” Parikshit slides a little forward on his seat to come nearer the muni’s feet, joins his palms, and says that by this grace all that he was ever born to do stands done. “Shukadeva looked at him and said nothing.” The king goes on: he has been brought face to face with the fearless ground, the oneness of Brahman and the atman, and he has no fear left of Takshaka or of deaths arriving in rank upon rank. “I have become free of fear itself.” Now give me your leave, he says; let me close my speech, let me fall silent, let me release my life-breath into that Paramatman. “Shukadeva stayed silent a while, and the river filled the silence.” Then he gives the king the leave for which he has joined his palms. “Vyasa‘s son Shukadeva rose.” The renunciants seated all around and the king bow to him, “And just as he had come, without any show, without a farewell, he rose with those mendicants and walked away.” The king watches him go, and then his eyes turn back inward. The Bhagavatam takes its leave of Shukadeva on that bank, and of the road he took from there it says nothing.

Bho

In the Mahabharata, after Mithila, Shuka lives with his father and his father’s four disciples at the foot of Himavat. The disciples go down to the earth to divide the Vedas into their branches, and Vyasa stays in the hermitage with only his son for company, silent in a quiet corner, until Narada comes to him. “Why are the sounds of the Vedas silent here?” “Recite the Vedas with your wise son, and with the echo of them drive away the fear of Rakshasas.” So father and son recite in loud, ringing voices, keeping every rule of pronunciation, and the sound seems to fill the three worlds, and one day a great wind breaks in on the recitation, and Shuka asks where the wind comes from, and Vyasa teaches him the seven winds. Then Narada gives him the medicine for grief, the helplessness of the embryo, the certainty of disease and age, the unequal fruits of men’s acts. “Give up both dharma and sin.” “Give up truth and falsehood too, and when you have given them up, give up the thing by which you gave them up.” Shuka thinks over what he has been taught and cannot arrive at certainty. He asks himself what state there is that lasts forever and is free of every misery, and then he resolves. “I want the state from which there is no return.” He will turn to yoga, cast off this body, change himself into wind, and enter the mass of brilliance that is the sun; the moon falls to earth when its merit is used up and climbs back when it has earned enough, “The moon is always seen to wane and to wax once more,” and he does not want an existence with such changes in it; the sun warms all the worlds, “His disc never grows smaller.” He tells Narada what he means to do and goes to his father, and Vyasa hears it and is greatly pleased, and asks him anyway, “stay here today, so that I may look at you a while and satisfy my eyes.” Shuka is unmoved by the request. Free of affection and of every doubt, with his heart set on the journey, he leaves his father and climbs the broad slopes of Kailasa.

On the summit he sits down on a level place, bare of grass and far from the paths of other creatures, facing east with his hands and feet drawn in, soon after sunrise, and fixes his soul in one part of his body after another, from the feet through every limb. “Then he saw his own soul, free of every attachment.” “Looking on that highest of all things, he laughed for joy.” He walks around Narada and tells him. “I have seen the path,” Shuka says. “I have set out on it.” Then he enters yoga once more, passes into the element of space, rises from the slope of Kailasa, and soars into the sky, one with the element of wind, as radiant as Garuda, and every creature raises its eyes to him. On the Malaya mountains Urvashi and Purvachitti see the energy of the great rishi’s son and marvel that a young Brahmin raised on the Vedas should hold such concentration, that he gained it by serving his father dutifully, that his father loves him dearly. “Why has that inattentive father let him go, down a road from which there is no return?” Shuka hears what Urvashi says, looks around on every side at the whole sky and the whole earth with her mountains and rivers, and speaks to the gods of all of them. “If my father follows me and calls after me by name again and again, answer him for me, all of you together.” The points of the compass, the forests, the seas, the rivers, and the mountains answer that it shall be as he says. Then he casts off the four kinds of faults, the eight kinds of tamas, the five kinds of rajas, and at the last sattva too. “He came to rest in the eternal station that has no qualities and no mark of any kind, which is Brahman, blazing like a fire without smoke.” Meteors fall, the horizons seem to be on fire, the earth shakes, the sun loses its light for a moment, and Indra sends down showers of rain that taste and smell sweet. Traveling north, Shuka sees two peaks standing pressed close together, one of Himavat, yellow gold, and one of Meru, white silver, each a hundred yojanas high, and with a fearless heart he drives straight at them. “They could not bear the force and split in two, a wonderful thing to see.” A great shout goes up in heaven, and flowers come down, and far below him the heavenly river Mandakini runs through its flowering groves, with apsaras playing unclothed in its waters. “Shuka had no body now, and his passing did not disturb them.”

Vyasa learns that his son has set out on his great journey, and, full of love for him, follows along the same road through the air; but Shuka has already passed into the part of the sky that lies above the region of wind and become one with Brahman. In less than a moment the father reaches the spot from which the son set out, sees the mountaintop split in two where he passed through, hears from the rishis what his son has done, and breaks into lamentation, calling his son loudly by name until the three worlds ring with his voice. And Shuka, who has entered the elements and become their soul and is present everywhere, answers his father with a single syllable, Bho, in the form of an echo, and the whole universe takes up the syllable. “From that day to this, when a sound is made in a mountain cave or on a mountainside, the mountain echoes it back, as if it were still answering for Shuka.” Vyasa sits down on the slope of the mountain and thinks of his son with grief, and the apsaras playing on the banks of the Mandakini see him sitting there and are thrown into confusion; some plunge into the stream, some run into the groves, some snatch up their clothes, and none of them had shown the least disturbance when his son went by. The rishi watches them and understands. “His son had been free of every attachment, and he himself was not.” “He was filled with joy and with shame together.” Then Shiva comes to that place carrying his bow Pinaka, with the gods and the Gandharvas around him, and comforts the father who is burning with grief: you asked me for a son with the energy of fire, of water, of wind, and of space, and the son born to you was of that very kind, and he has reached an end that even the gods cannot win. “Why then do you grieve for that son?” As long as the hills last, as long as the ocean lasts, his fame will last undiminished. “And by my grace you will see in this world a shadow in the likeness of your son, moving at your side, that will never leave you for a single moment.” The rishi sees a shadow of his son beside him and comes back from that place full of joy. “The celestial rishi Narada and the great yogi Vyasa told it to me many times, long ago, when the subject came up in conversation,” Bhishma says to Yudhishthira. In the Anushasana Parva there is one more question from this son, asked of his father one morning after the rites, “Which sacrifice seems to you the first of all sacrifices?” and when Vyasa has told him of the world of the givers of cows, Shuka begins from that day to worship cows every day.

His Path

Shukadeva’s Birth and Dispassion · A refusal to marry, a laugh at the gate of Mithila after two mountains crossed on foot, and the gatekeeper’s four questions.

Parikshit and Kali · A king who leaves his kingdom and sits down on the bank of the Ganga, and the muni who arrives there unsent and unasked.

The World of Cows · A son’s question about which sacrifice is first, and a father’s answer after which Shuka worshiped cows every day.

The One Who Already Knew

One thing happens in every story of Shuka: what he goes to learn is already his, and still he has to go. In the Mahabharata the Vedas live in him from the moment of his birth, and he chooses Brihaspati anyway and walks to Mithila, where Janaka tells him that all the knowledge he is giving him is in him already. In the Yoga Vasishtha he has found the highest truth by his own search and heard it again from his father, and he stands three weeks at a king’s gate so that a third man can say it once more. In the Devi Bhagavata he cannot even get through the gate of the city he crossed two mountains to see, and standing outside it he laughs. And in the Bhagavatam, where he is awake from birth, he comes unsent to a dying king and speaks for seven days. Why does a man who knows everything need to hear it from another mouth, and why does the man who can say everything fall silent at the end? The texts give no answer; they show only that knowledge and rest are two different things, and that what a man knows on his own becomes his own only by passing through someone else. That is why the Mahabharata makes his death an answer. A father calls, and the whole world speaks up for the son, and from that day the mountains return every voice, as if they were still answering for a son who once needed an answer himself.