Vasishtha

Two Sages at the Palace Gate

In sargas 20 to 21 Vishvamitra walks into the court and asks for Rama, a boy not yet sixteen, to guard his sacrifice against the rakshasas. Dasharatha refuses, in words that stumble over his love for the child, and the sage’s anger rises until every world feels it. Vasishtha sees the alarm spreading and turns to the king. “You were born in the house of Ikshvaku. You are dharma itself, walking about in a body. You are steadfast, your vows are excellent, and a man like that does not abandon dharma, and the dharma here is fidelity to your word.” “So send Rama with him.” Then he tells the king exactly who is standing in his hall. “He could punish the rakshasas himself. He has come to you and asked for Rama for one reason only, the good of your son.” Vasishtha’s words did what fear and love could not. The king’s face cleared, and before the sage had finished speaking he sent for Rama, and for Lakshmana with him. Every turn in the story of Rama opens from this one piece of advice.

At Mithila, in sargas 51 to 65, Janaka‘s priest Shatananda tells Rama the long story in which these two sages stand face to face. King Vishvamitra comes with his whole army to Vasishtha’s hermitage, and the sage feasts every soldier with him from Shabala, his cow of plenty. When the king has eaten he asks for the cow. The answer needs no thought. “I will not part with Shabala for a thousand million cows, let alone a hundred thousand, and not for heaps of silver either.” The king has her dragged away by force, and Shabala throws off hundreds of men with one shake and runs back to the sage’s feet: “Have you forsaken me, son of Brahma, that the king’s servants take me away from your very presence?” He answers her the way a man answers a sister in distress, and then gives the order: “Then make a force that will destroy the enemy’s army.” One bellow, and warriors pour out of her, and Vishvamitra’s army is gone within the hour. The king wins the whole science of arms from Shiva and comes back to burn the hermitage, and Vasishtha comes out to meet every weapon of the gods with a stick of wood. “Wait.” He holds the brahma-danda steady. “Here I stand, you disgrace to the Kshatriyas.” Every astra is swallowed by the staff, and when the brahmastra itself goes in, flames burst from every pore of the sage’s body. Only the prayer of the assembled seers brings him back to his natural calm.

The defeated king resolves on a penance that will make him a Brahmin in this very life, and thousands of years later, in sarga 65, when the gods at last call Vishvamitra a brahmarshi, he has one demand left. Let Vasishtha, the mind-born son of Brahma, call him a Brahmin. It had to be Vasishtha; no other voice would settle it. Won over by the gods, Vasishtha comes, makes friends with Vishvamitra, and says, “So be it.” In that same Mithila, in sargas 70 to 73, the two sit side by side. Vasishtha recites the line of Ikshvaku from Brahma down to the king sitting before him and asks for Janaka’s two daughters for Rama and Lakshmana; Vishvamitra proposes Kushadhvaja’s daughters for the younger brothers, with Vasishtha’s assent. Vasishtha builds the altar in the center of the pavilion, feeds the fire, and at his direction the four princes take the hands of the four princesses in their own.

The Requisites at the Door

In sargas 3 to 5 of the Ayodhya Kanda the king resolves to make Rama prince regent, and Vasishtha dictates the requisites item by item: gold and jewels, a white umbrella, a hundred gold pitchers, a tiger skin whole to the claws. That evening the king sends him to Rama’s house to lead the prince and Sita through the night’s fast, and Vasishtha gladdens his pupil with the news: “Your father is well pleased with you, Rama, and so tomorrow you will receive the kingdom. Keep the fast today, then, with Sita.” At dawn, in sarga 14, he stands at the door of the inner apartments with his pupils and every requisite of the ceremony and sends in his message by Sumantra: “Tell the king at once that I am here. Here are the gold pitchers of Ganga water and the water of the seas.” Inside, everything has changed in a single night. The two boons of Kaikeyi have already sent Rama to the forest.

Sarga 37 is the one place in the poem where this quiet priest loses his temper. Kaikeyi has brought bark garments for Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita, and Sita has barely taken hers when Vasishtha, with tears in his eyes, stops her and turns on the queen. If Sita goes to the forest, the city will go, and Kosala with it. His voice hardens. “And then you may rule alone, you vile woman bent on the people’s harm, over a desolate earth emptied of human beings, with nothing left on it except its trees.” Then the ruling. “So take the bark off your daughter-in-law, queen, and give her fine jewels. The bark was never meant for her.” Kaikeyi asked for one exile, “the exile of Rama alone. So let Sita, who deserves to be adorned every day of her life, live in the forest with Rama richly adorned.”

A Kingdom Without a King

Dasharatha dies of grief, and in sarga 66 it is on Vasishtha’s command that the king’s body is laid in a trough of oil, because no king can be cremated without a son. The next morning the sages ask him to consecrate some prince of the line, since a state without a king is turning into a wilderness, and Vasishtha names Bharata and sends five messengers riding to Kekaya. Bharata comes home and learns in one sitting that his father is dead and his brothers exiled, and it is Vasishtha, the best of speakers, who comes to the grief-scorched prince with the greatest gentleness: “Enough grief, and may all be well with you. The funeral of the king is overdue.” In sarga 82 he enters the court, reads the minds of the ministers and the people, and speaks softly: “My child, King Dasharatha has gone to heaven practicing virtue to the last, and he has left you the sovereignty of this prosperous earth, full of gold and grain.” Bharata refuses the kingdom in front of his teacher and calls for his chariot.

At Chitrakuta, in sarga 104, Vasishtha comes last, walking behind the widows of Dasharatha, thirsty like them for the sight of Rama, and Rama goes to his teacher and takes hold of his feet. Bharata pleads and Rama refuses. In sarga 110 Vasishtha traces the line of the Ikshvakus generation by generation, and the law that has held in that line from the beginning: the eldest is consecrated. In sarga 111 he says something more. “Three people are always to be honored by a man from the day he is born, Kakutstha: his teacher, his father, and his mother. The father begets a man and the mother brings him into the world; the teacher gives him wisdom, and that is why he is called guru, the weighty one, weightier even than they.” And “if you grant the prayer of Bharata, who is begging you, Raghava, you will not be overstepping any bound at all.” Rama answers that his father’s word will be kept to the letter. On the way home Bharadvaja asks Bharata how it went, and Bharata tells him what the teacher did when the pupil refused. “Then give these gold-worked sandals to Bharata, and give them gladly. Living in Ayodhya in the form of these sandals, provide for the people and keep them safe, wise prince.” Rama stood on the sandals facing east and handed them to his brother.

A Coronation, and a Birth from a Pitcher

Fourteen years later, in sarga 128 of the Yuddha Kanda, Rama presses with love the feet of Vasishtha and takes a seat beside him, and the priest, aged and still vigorous, seats Rama and Sita on the jeweled seat, consecrates Rama with clear and fragrant water, as the Vasus once consecrated Indra, and sets the crown on his head with his own hands. The coronation that stopped at the door fourteen years earlier is finished by the same man.

In sargas 55 to 57 of the Uttara Kanda, Rama tells Lakshmana how their family priest came to be born. Nimi, twelfth son of Ikshvaku, planning a session of sacrifice to run for years, chose Vasishtha first of all the brahmarshis to be his priest. “Indra has already chosen me for his own sacrifice,” Vasishtha told him. “So wait a while, until Indra’s sacrifice is done.” Nimi did not wait; Gautama took the office, and when Vasishtha came back and found the interval filled, he sat for an hour wishing to see the king, who lay sunk in sleep that day with no one to wake him. The curse came out of that hour. “Since you slighted me and chose another as your officiating priest, your body will be left without consciousness.” Nimi woke and in a blind rage sent the same curse back, and in the same instant both became bodiless. Vasishtha, now a drift of air, went to his father. “Nimi’s curse has taken my body from me and turned me into wind. Be gracious to me. Let me have a body again.” Brahma answered at once: “Enter the seed that Mitra and Varuna have let fall, you whose renown is great. There too you will be born without a womb, and in time you will come back into my keeping, born again as my son.” The seed of the two gods went into a pitcher the gods had made, and from that pitcher came Agastya first and then Vasishtha, who had scarcely been born when Ikshvaku chose him as priest for the good of his line. Nimi’s consciousness went to live in the eyelids of every creature.

In sargas 106 to 110 Time comes to the palace gate, and a promise given on Durvasa’s condition forces Rama to forsake Lakshmana. The ministers and teachers sit silent. Then Vasishtha speaks. “Rama, this hour of your parting, and your separation from Lakshmana, I saw long ago in a vision that made my hair stand on end. Forsake him; Time is too strong. Do not make your vow empty.” Bharata refuses the kingdom; the people lie prostrate in the dust; and Vasishtha says, “Child Rama, see the people lying prostrate on the ground; act only after you have learned their wish, and do nothing they would hate.” At his word Rama raises them up and asks what they want, and they answer that wherever he goes, they will follow. When the night is gone, Vasishtha performs the whole rite of the great departure exactly as the scriptures lay down, and the sages walk behind Rama to the open gate of heaven. The poem never tells Vasishtha’s own end. In his last scene he is doing what he was doing in the first, completing a rite with nothing left out.

The Vasishtha of the Yoga Vasistha

The Yoga Vasistha, also called the Maharamayana, gives the same priest a second role, in a story that runs on its own track beside Valmiki’s and is kept on its own track here. In its first book, the Vairagya Prakarana, Rama comes home from a pilgrimage and, in his fifteenth year, begins to waste away like a lake in autumn; asked what the matter is, he answers that nothing is the matter. Dasharatha turns to Vasishtha, and the sage says that there is a cause for Rama’s sadness and that the king need not be anxious about it. Into this Vishvamitra arrives, again asking for Rama to guard a sacrifice, and Rama is brought into the hall and delivers the long speech on the vanity of the world that fills most of the first book. When it ends, unseen siddhas rain flowers on the court. Then Vishvamitra turns to Vasishtha. He reminds him of the day on Mount Nishadha when Brahma taught the two of them the knowledge that ended their old enmity, and asks that the same knowledge now be given to Rama. Vasishtha answers that no one, however mighty, refuses the behest of the good and wise, and that he will destroy the darkness in the princes’ minds as a lamp dispels the night.

In the second book, the Mumukshu Prakarana, Vasishtha tells Rama his own birth, and it is a different birth from the pitcher in Valmiki. Brahma, looking at the misery of the people he had made, saw that only knowledge would carry a man across, and sitting on his lotus in meditation he produced Vasishtha out of himself. He laid a cloud of insensibility over his son’s mind for a moment, and when the son, now helpless and grieving, asked how the world came to be so full of misery, taught him the wisdom that restored him, and told him he had been made ignorant on purpose, so that he would ask. Then he sent him down to the land of Bharata, to give those who are sick of the world the knowledge that confers true felicity. Through six books, from dispassion to nirvana, that knowledge is given to Rama by way of stories: sixty years lived by King Lavana in the space of two muhurtas, the ages watched by the crow Bhushunda, Chudala teaching her husband from behind a disguise. One story Vasishtha tells about himself: he found himself back in the hut he kept for himself in the empty sky, unable to find his own body, and in the place where it should have been a stranger sat facing him in meditation so deep that he never noticed the sage was there.

On the last day of the teaching Vasishtha says the one thing that has not been said in all those months. “I taught you this very doctrine once before, Rama, when you were a pupil under me. You could not take all of it in then, and so you were bound to another birth, to learn it again from me.” And his last instruction: “Then be as lucid as the clear sky, with peace in your mind and your soul carried beyond itself, and learn to rule your realm with justice and equity.” The young man who had come into this hall sick of kingship has just been told, as the last word of everything, to go and be a king. Then flowers come down on the hall, and Rama answers, “My ignorance is dispelled, and by your good grace I have come to the knowledge of truth.” The assembly gathers the heavenly flowers by the handful and pours them over Vasishtha.

His Path

The Sacrifice for Sons, and the Birth of Rama · A priest taking the whole weight of a rite, and four names given to four newborn princes.

The Exile of Rama · The requisites of a coronation waiting at the door, and a bark garment taken out of a queen’s hands.

The Departure of Rama to His Own Abode · One sentence spoken when the whole court had fallen silent, and a last rite completed on the road to the Sarayu.

The Man Who Held the Rite

Valmiki’s Vasishtha gets none of the poem’s great scenes. He is found standing just before each of them, or just after: the burden of the sacrifice, the names after the births, the requisites before the coronation, the rite of the great departure at the very end. Twice he steps forward out of that place, and both times for dharma: he tells a king to keep the word he gave, and he takes the bark out of Sita‘s hands. His anger has the same measure: the staff comes up for Shabala, the curse comes down on Nimi, and a single prayer brings him back. At Chitrakuta this same priest sets the teacher above the mother and the father and tells Rama to take the kingdom, and the pupil refuses him; the remedy of the sandals still comes out of his mouth a moment later. The Yoga Vasistha seats this same man in Dasharatha’s hall and hands him the one task Valmiki never gave him, to change the mind of a prince who has obeyed every order he was ever given, and there he has no staff and no requisites, only stories. In both texts his place is the same. Wherever something must be done by the rule, a sacrifice or a teaching, the weight of it rests on him.