Tripura Rahasya: Hemachuda and Hemalekha

The Company That Opens a Question

Parashurama had followed Dattatreya this far: a man who never looks at his own life keeps walking toward ruin, and inquiry is the one road out. One thing would not settle. If inquiry is the remedy, why does it wake in one person and sleep in another? Was it a natural endowment, the way courage belongs to a hero? Then everyone should have it. Why had it not come to him until now, when others who suffered far more had never found it at all? He asked his teacher what the immediate cause was.

Dattatreya gave him the root in a single word: company. Keeping company with the wise is what wears misery away; nothing great was ever won without it, and a man gathers the fruit of whoever he keeps near. “Your meeting with Samvarta carried you here, to the threshold of release,” he said, and he offered a history to prove the rule, one in which a meeting in a forest traveled into a marriage, from the marriage into a royal house, and from the house into every street of a city.

Muktachuda ruled Dasharna. His two sons, Hemachuda and Manichuda, were handsome, well-mannered, and schooled in everything a prince must know. One season they led a hunting party of soldiers and attendants deep into a forest on the Sahya Mountains, country that tigers and lions had made their own. The princes carried their own bows, and the hunt went well: deer, lions, boars, bison, and wolves fell to their arrows across the slopes.

Then the wind turned. A tornado came through the trees hurling sand and pebbles, and dust climbed until the sky was gone and noon went dark as night. Rocks, trees, men, hills, valleys: nothing could be told from anything else. The retinue broke and ran, stung by the flying grit; some crawled under ledges, some into caves, some pressed themselves against tree trunks. The two princes stayed on their horses and galloped out of the worst of it, and somewhere in that darkness their paths parted.

Hemachuda rode until the storm thinned and found himself at a hermitage set inside a well-kept garden of plantain, date, and other fruit trees. A young woman stood among them, golden-skinned, so bright she seemed to burn like a steady flame. The prince forgot the storm. He asked who she was and whose, why she lived unafraid in so wild and lonely a forest, and whether she was alone.

She welcomed him before she answered him. A guest is a sacred charge for the pious, she said; he had plainly been caught by the tornado. He should tie his horse to the date palm, sit, and rest. Fruit and juice came, and when he had revived she spoke. The hermitage belonged to Vyaghrapada, the devotee of Shiva whose tapas had carried him past every world. She was his foster daughter, and her name was Hemalekha.

Her birth had been an accident that nearly did not happen. Her mother, a Vidyadhari named Vidyaprabha, came down one day to bathe in the river Vena. Sushena, king of Vanga, arrived at the same bank, saw her in the water, and wanted her; she wanted him in return. He went home and left her pregnant. Afraid of slander, she tried to end the pregnancy, and the child came out of her womb alive anyway. Vyaghrapada, walking to the river for his evening ablutions, found the infant on the bank, and his love for every living thing made him lift her up and raise her with a mother’s tenderness.

“Whoever shelters a child as dharma asks is that child’s father,” she said. “By that measure I am his daughter, and I am devoted to him.” His greatness kept her safe anywhere on earth; no god or asura could enter this hermitage with an evil purpose without walking into his own ruin. That was her story. She asked the prince to wait a little. Her foster father would soon return, and if Hemachuda saluted him and listened humbly, his wish would be granted and he could leave in the morning.

Hemachuda had stopped hearing the words some time before. He was in love, he sat silent for fear of giving offense, and the silence hurt him. Hemalekha read his face. “Be steady,” she said. “My father is coming now. Tell him all of it.” As she spoke, Vyaghrapada came up the path with a basket of flowers gathered in the forest for his worship. The prince rose, prostrated himself, gave his name, and sat where the sage directed. Vyaghrapada saw the state the young man was in, took in the whole matter by his inner sight, weighed what would serve best, and gave Hemalekha to him as his wife.

Hemachuda rode home with more than he had hunted for. Muktachuda was delighted, ordered festivities across the kingdom, and had the marriage performed with full ceremony. The couple’s first months passed in the palace, in forest retreats, in pleasure resorts by the water. The prince was besotted. And the longer he watched his wife, the more plainly he saw that she did not burn as he burned. She was affectionate, she was present, and pleasure never once seemed to take hold of her.

It wore at him until he asked her, in private, what every lover dreads to ask. Why was she never as attentive to him as he was to her? In the middle of their greatest delights she looked indifferent; when he spoke, she did not seem to hear; when he held her a long time she seemed unaware of him, and then she would ask, “When did you come?” “How am I to take pleasure in a woman who stays as still as a painted figure?” he said. “Nothing can please me that leaves you cold. I keep looking up at you the way the night lily looks up at the moon.” She was dearer to him than his life. He begged her to speak and relieve his mind.

Hemalekha heard the question for what it was: a door. She handed him no verdict. She asked him, in turn, to help her with a question of her own, about the happiness he was so sure he understood.

The Examination of Happiness

Still in his arms, she smiled and told him that she did love him. What kept her from his pleasures was a search for the one joy in life that would never turn stale, and she had not found it yet; being a woman, she said, she could not settle the question alone, so would he tell her what that joy was? Hemachuda laughed out loud. “Women really are foolish,” he said. Even birds, beasts, and crawling insects knew good from bad, or how would they chase the one and flee the other? Whatever pleases is good, whatever does not is bad, and what was there in that to brood over?

Hemalekha bowed to the verdict. Women were indeed foolish, so he, the true discerner, must teach her. Then she asked her first question. He had said pleasure and pain follow from what pleases and what does not; yet the same object pleases at one moment and pains at the next, so where was the finality in that? Fire warms in winter and torments in summer, and its effect changes with place, with how large it burns, and with the constitution of the person near it. Wealth, sons, a wife, a kingdom, all behaved the same way. Look at his own father, ringed by wife, children, and treasure and worried every day of his life, every resource aimed at happiness. What had become of his enjoyments?

No one, she went on, ever seemed to own enough for happiness, so could a man be happy on limited means? “What is streaked with misery is not happiness.” Misery came in two kinds, the outer, which belonged to the body, and the inner, which belonged to the mind and sprang from desire; the inner was the worse. Desire is the seed, misery is the tree, and that tree has never once failed to bear; Indra and the gods, fed on nectar in their heavens, were still its slaves. The lull after one desire is met, before the next arrives, was no happiness, because the seeds of pain were still in the ground; even insects enjoyed that much. If one wish granted among many counted as happiness, who in the world would be unhappy? A man scalded from head to foot could call himself happy for the ointment.

She brought it to the body. A man embraced by his beloved is happy; the same embrace in other circumstances makes him wretched. Or would he say it is beauty that sweetens a man’s enjoyment? “Beauty lives in the mind,” she said. Lovers in dreams feel the same pleasure with no one there at all. She had a story to show him what she meant.

There was once a prince, fairer than Kamadeva himself, married to a woman as lovely as he was and devoted to her entirely. She lost her heart to one of the palace servants, and the servant was clever. Each evening he kept the prince’s cup full past the point of sense, and when the prince staggered to bed a practiced courtesan was sent in to lie beside him while the princess and the servant had the night to themselves. The prince, drunk, embraced the hired woman and thought himself the luckiest man alive, married to an angel who adored him.

It went on a long time. Then one evening, pressed by other work, the servant left the liquor on the table and went off, and the prince drank less than usual. He went to bed eager and took the woman in the dark without looking at her. Only afterward did he see that this was not his wife. “Where is she?” he asked, and the woman shook and said nothing. Suspicion flared into rage. He seized her by the hair and drew his sword. “Tell me the truth or you will not live out the minute.” Terrified, she told him everything and led him to the meeting place, and there he found his wife, her lovely body wrapped in a loving embrace around a servant whom anyone else would have called ugly.

The prince stood stunned. When he could think again, the thinking turned on himself. Shame on a man so given to drink; shame on fools infatuated with women, whose faith passes faster than a streak of autumn cloud. He had loved her more than his life, and all that time she had played the loving wife for him the way a prostitute plays it for a lecher, while he believed her as close to him as his own shadow. And what had she found in that ugly man that she preferred to him? He left the company of men in disgust and went to live in a forest.

“So you see how beauty is a thought,” Hemalekha said. The pleasure he took in her looks was matched, and often exceeded, by what others took in their own beloveds, plain or fair. The lovely woman a man thinks he sees is a picture his own mind drew beforehand; redrawn and redrawn, the picture grows so clear that it stands there solid as a thing, and constant association turns it into a pull the mind cannot refuse. A composed mind stays quiet before the loveliest face, and so do children and self-controlled yogis. If beauty sat in the object itself, a child would notice it the way a child notices sugar. Across countries and ages people’s shapes, ears, teeth, hair, and skin differ in every way, and every one of them takes exactly the pleasure Hemachuda took.

Now consider the body itself, she said: a sack of fat and meat with blood sloshing inside, skin stretched over a cage of bone, bile and phlegm in its hollows, a pot that holds urine and dung, started from semen and egg and pushed out of a womb. Men who find delight in such a thing, what sets them apart from the worms that breed in rot? “Is this body not dear to you?” she asked, indicating her own. Go through it part by part; think what the food on the table really is, and everyone knows how it leaves the body in the end. “So tell me, in such a world, what is agreeable and what is not.”

Hemachuda listened and found that earthly pleasure had gone sour in his mouth. He turned the discourse over for days, and he went back to his wife again and again with questions until the final truth stood clear. Here Dattatreya told Parashurama the end before the middle. The prince would come to know the pure consciousness that is his own Self as Tripura herself and be freed while still alive. Under his guidance his brother Manichuda was freed, and so was their father Muktachuda; the queen was freed by her daughter-in-law; ministers, chieftains, and citizens came to wisdom, until no one born in that city stayed ignorant. Its name was Visala, and even the caged parrots there told passersby to meditate on the Self, consciousness bare of objects. Vamadeva and other holy sages heard the birds, marveled, and gave it the name City of Wisdom. “Through Hemalekha a whole people gained jnana,” Dattatreya said. Parashurama pressed him: how exactly had she guided Hemachuda further?

Dattatreya went back to the prince in those first weeks, when the words had done their work and nothing had yet replaced what they destroyed. Pleasure no longer interested him, and he brooded. Habit, though, had not loosened its grip. He could neither enjoy himself nor stop all at once, and he was too proud to confess the weakness to his wife. When habit dragged him back into the old ways he went with reluctance and shame, remembering what she had said; afterward he repented, and fell again. His mind went forward and back like a child’s swing, never at rest. Delicious food, fine clothes, jewels, charming women, caparisoned horses, even his dearest friends, none of it reached him any longer, and he grew pale and melancholy.

Hemalekha, who missed nothing in him, came to his private chamber. Why was he no longer cheerful? She saw no sign of illness in him. Doctors, she said, hold the fear of disease over the pleasures of life, and disease comes when the three humors of the body fall out of balance, as food, clothing, words, sights, seasons, and travel all unsettle them; some disorder lies latent in every body, and remedies exist for it. “So tell me,” she said, “why are you so sad?” The prince told her. What she had said last time had closed off every road to pleasure. “Put a man under sentence of death and set a feast in front of him; he will not taste it. That is how everything is for me now. Habit still drives me to the old pleasures the way a royal command drives a man to a task he hates. Tell me where happiness is.”

Hemalekha heard it and thought: this dispassion is the fruit of my words. Where such signs appear, the seed of the highest good is already in the field; had her carefully weighed words not turned him even slightly, there would have been no hope of freeing him. Dispassion like this arises only in a person with whose steady devotion Tripura, who dwells in the Heart as a person’s own Self, is pleased. Eager now to give him wisdom, she chose a strange way to do it: a family history whose impossibilities were deliberate.

The City of Ten Gates

Hemalekha kept her own wisdom hidden and spoke with care, and what she offered him was, she said, the story of her own past. Long ago her mother had given her a companion, a lady-in-waiting, a good woman at heart. Later that companion fell in with an unsuitable friend called Ignorance, who had a gift for conjuring novelties no one could look away from, and Hemalekha, who loved her companion more than life and could not be parted from her for a second, was drawn in beside her without her mother’s knowledge.

In secret, Ignorance brought her son to the companion: a sodden fool, his eyes red with liquor, whom everyone called the Dullard. The companion took him as her lover and enjoyed him in Hemalekha’s very presence, and still the two women did not part. Out of that union came a boy as dull as his father and as inventive in wickedness as his grandmother, trained by both until nothing could stop him; the roughest country he crossed as if it were a lawn, and they called him Restless. The companion began to drift from Hemalekha, who had no footing of her own and stayed. The Dullard took Hemalekha for a woman of his wife’s kind and tried to force himself on her. He was wrong about her; she was pure by nature and only following her friend for a time. Even so, the whole world whispered that she was in the Dullard’s keeping.

The companion handed Restless to Hemalekha to raise and spent her days with her lover. Under Hemalekha’s care the boy grew up and married a girl called Fickle, who was never still for a moment and changed shape to suit whatever her husband happened to want. Wherever Restless wished to go and whatever he wished to have, Fickle changed herself to match and built him new surroundings, and so she brought him entirely under her hand. He would cover hundreds of miles in the time it takes to blink and be back again, here, there, everywhere, and find no rest in any of it.

She bore him five sons, and these too were put in Hemalekha’s care. Each built a splendid mansion, and they took turns entertaining their father. In the eldest son’s house the fare was sound: music, Vedic chanting, the hum of bees, and then harsher fare, the lion’s roar, thunder, cries from a birthing room. The second son’s house held soft beds and fine cloth, and hard things too, hot and cold. The third was all color and shape, lovely and horrible. The fourth served drinks and things to lick, suck, and chew, sweet, sour, pungent, astringent. The youngest offered flowers, scented grasses, and odors sweet and putrid.

So the father went from mansion to mansion in a continuous round, pleased by some of it and repelled by the rest. The sons were so devoted that in his absence they touched nothing in their own houses. Restless was less scrupulous: he stole from their houses and carried the goods home to share in secret with his dear wife Fickle.

Then a woman called the Glutton fell in love with Restless, and he married her and loved her heart and soul. He carted food to her by the wagonload; it vanished the instant it arrived and she wanted more, and father and five sons laboring together could not fill her. Before long she bore two sons, Firemouth the elder and Disgrace the younger. Whenever Restless sought the Glutton in private, Firemouth’s angry flames scorched him until he fell down senseless; whenever he fondled the younger boy, the whole world despised him and he became as if dead. The companion gave way under grief and public contempt, and Hemalekha collapsed in sympathy with her. Restless, ruled by the Glutton, lost all will of his own.

Doomed, he took himself to a city of ten gates and lived there with the Glutton, his sons, and his mother, hunting pleasure around the clock and getting only misery for his share. Scorched by Firemouth and shamed through Disgrace, he swung back and forth in agitation; he visited his five other sons in their houses and came out bewildered. The Glutton and her two boys were fed by Ignorance and the Dullard, and she got along so well with her co-wife Fickle that the two became intimates. Having made herself agreeable to all of them, she ruled her husband outright.

Hemalekha stayed in that city for love of her friend. Without her none of them could have lived there; she was their protectress, even while she lay half dead through her friend’s half-death. Ignorance smothered her, the Dullard made a fool of her, she grew fitful with Restless, unsteady with Fickle, hot with Firemouth, contemptible with Disgrace; she mirrored every mood of her friend. The crowd, judging by her company, called her a whore. Anyone with eyes could see she had never been touched.

For her mother, Hemalekha said, the Supreme Good, is forever pure and clear, wider than space and finer than the finest thing; she does all the work and never lifts a hand; everything leans on her and she leans on nothing; she wears every shape and owns none; she is the light by which all things are seen and is herself seen by no one; she is Bliss, and has neither father nor mother; and her daughters, like Hemalekha, are as numberless as waves on the sea. Yet Hemalekha held a spell of the highest potency, and by it she was in her nature exactly her mother.

When Restless went to his rest he slept soundly in his mother’s lap, and when he slept everyone else slept too; no one could stay awake. At such times the city was guarded by the Mover, the closest friend Restless had, who went endlessly in and out by two upper gateways. In that interval Hemalekha would go to her mother and lie blissful in her embrace, and she had to come back to the city the moment the sleepers woke.

This Mover, she said, is the strongest of them all; he keeps them alive. Though he is one he multiplies himself, appears as the city and its citizens, and holds them together; without him they would scatter like pearls when the string of the necklace breaks. When a city decays he gathers the inmates and leads them to another. So Restless has always ruled over cities and has never known anything other than misery: Fickle tempts him and he grieves, the Glutton sends him running for food, Firemouth burns away his wits, Disgrace leaves him reviled and as if dead. With this tribe he has lived in forests of thorn and wild beasts, burning deserts, icy wastes, putrid ditches, dark holes. Again and again his mother nearly died of grief for him, and Hemalekha grew sad with them. Who expects even a crumb of happiness in bad company? One might as well go to a mirage for a drink.

At last, drowned in sorrow, the companion came to Hemalekha in private. “On my advice,” Hemalekha said, “she found herself a good husband, put her own son to death, and locked his sons away.” Then, with Hemalekha beside her, she quickly reached the mother’s presence, and being pure she embraced the mother again and again, went down into Bliss like a swimmer into the sea, and came up as Bliss itself. “You can shake off your own bad habits the same way,” Hemalekha told the prince. “They are a crust on you, nothing more. Reach the mother, and the happiness you find there does not end. I have told you my own experience of the seat of Bliss.”

Hemachuda was astonished at the tale, and being ignorant he smiled at it with open scorn. Pure invention, he said; her words had no connection to any fact. She was the daughter of an Apsara, raised in the forest by the rishi Vyaghrapada, young and not even fully grown, and here she was talking as if she were generations old, like a girl possessed. Where was this companion, and who was the son she killed? Where were the cities? He knew of no lady-in-waiting in his father’s palace. Her tale was a myth, like the barren woman’s son, of whom a clown once told how he drove a chariot that existed only in a mirror, armed himself with horns taken from men’s heads, won a war in the sky, and made love to dream-women on the shore of a mirage. “I take your words to mean about as much,” he said. “They can never be true.”

The wise girl answered him. Words from lips like hers were never nonsense; a lie destroys the fruit of tapas, and whoever fed an earnest seeker hollow words would prosper in neither world. “Reading the prescription aloud to a man with failing eyes does nothing for his sight,” she said. Did he think his own wife would fob him off with a fable when he was so much in earnest? An intelligent man judges a large matter by testing a few of its details, and she now presented her credentials. “There were pleasures you once enjoyed. Since the last time you heard me, they have lost their taste. Why? My words brought dispassion, and they are bound to bring more of it. Judge your own statements by that.”

Trust, Inquiry, and Tripura

She asked him to hear her with an open mind, because nothing ruins a man faster than doubting the one who wishes him well. Trust, she said, is a mother; the child who leans on her is never left to the danger. Confidence holds the world up and feeds it: how does an infant thrive without confidence in its mother, a lover find pleasure without trusting the beloved, an old parent find peace without trusting his sons? Would the farmer plow? Even cause and effect is a thing believed, and without that belief a man would not dare to draw breath. “So believe first, and then aspire. If you hesitate to rely on someone you think incompetent, as you may think me, that is because you believe some end has to be reached. How else is it to be approached?”

Hemachuda had an answer. If trust must be placed, place it where it is deserved. A man intent on the highest good should never rely on an incompetent guide; he would end the way a fish ends on the hook it mistook for food. “I can believe you only after I have fully established your worth. So why ask me whether the end can be approached?”

Hemalekha took up the point. How is anyone to be judged good or bad? By accepted standards? Then what authority stands behind the standards, and who judges the judge? There would be no end to it. “The whole of life runs on trust,” she said. No one gains anything, in this life or after it, by endless discussion or by blind acceptance; yet of the two, there is hope for the one who accepts blindly, and none at all for the one who only argues.

She told him about Kausika, a saint who lived on the Sahya hill near the Godavari with his disciples. Once, while the master was away, the disciples fell to debating philosophy, and a Brahmin named Soonga appeared among them, a man of great learning and no faith, and demolished every argument by his skill in logic. When they said truth must be settled by some standard, he answered with an unending chain of standards: a standard cannot test anything until it is itself shown correct, that takes another standard, and another, so no test is possible, and nothing is true. “And this very claim cannot be true, nor can the man who makes it. Where does that leave us? With nothing: the void. And since not even that rests on any reliable ground, the void swallows the statement that all is void.”

Some of the hearers were swept away by the force of the logic and became scholars of the void, and lost themselves in the maze of it. The discerning ones carried Soonga’s arguments to their master, were enlightened by him, and found peace and happiness. “So keep clear of barren argument that wears the dress of logic,” Hemalekha said. “Reason the way the scriptures reason, and that road ends in release.”

Hemachuda was astonished; he had not seen her depth before, and blessed was he for having fallen into her company. She said faith conferred the highest good. How, and where was it appropriate? The scriptures disagreed, the teachers disagreed, the commentaries disagreed, and a man’s own reasoning was no guide; every school put its own seal on its own view and damned the rest as poison. The school of the void she had just condemned had its adherents and its system; why should it not be respected?

Hemalekha answered with even greater kindness. The mind, she said, is a restless monkey, and that is why ordinary people are never free of trouble; he should hold his mind steady while he listened, because listening with a scattered mind is as good as not listening, like gazing at a fruit tree painted on a wall. A man profits when he turns from dry, ruinous logic to purposeful discussion, and right discussion must be followed by the effort it points to, the zeal that sets the farmer plowing in season and lets the assayer judge gold and gems. No one should hold back from effort of his own, as Soonga’s followers did. “Will sustained effort ever fail of its purpose?”

Many roads were spoken of; he should choose the surest and begin at once. The best road is the one that does not yoke you to suffering again. Nothing stamped with misery can be the good, and wealth, children, wife, kingdom, army, fame, learning, body, and beauty are all passing, all already between the teeth of time; the craving for them is born of delusion. Mahesvara, she said, is the supreme conjurer, and since he made the universe, the universe is under his spell. A street magician fools his audience, and a few in the crowd who know how the trick is done are not fooled; in the same way a man can learn to see through the universal Maya if the Lord is gracious to him, and never otherwise. So begin by worshiping the first cause of everything. That the universe has an origin is plain, and tracing cause from effect one arrives at a Creator unlike any known agent, since dead matter cannot be its own maker. His power is as immeasurable as the creation is vast, and such a one can protect and raise his own creatures. “Surrender to him without reserve.”

If a pleased chief secures the future of a man devoted to him, she said, what could the Lord of the world withhold? Chiefs are many and often cruel and fickle; his mercy is endless, or people would not have worshiped him through untold ages. There are three ways of approaching him: worship to get out of trouble, worship to gain wealth and the like, and the loving dedication of oneself, which is the best and surest. Ambitious service bears limited fruit; selfless service is rewarded soon by God, who dwells in the heart and knows everything. For other devotees he waits on the course of destiny, which is his own ordinance; for the selfless devotee he sets destiny aside, as everyone knew he had done for his famous devotee Markandeya, the boy born to die at sixteen whom devotion kept at sixteen forever.

The saying that no one escapes his fate, she went on, applies only to the weak-minded and the idle. Yogis who master the breath conquer fate. Destiny follows nature, nature is the device by which God’s will is carried out, and devotion to him blunts its edge. “So drop your vanity and shelter in him; he will carry you to the highest state of his own accord. That is the first step of the stair that climbs to Bliss, and no other step is worth taking before it.”

Hemachuda was delighted and had another question. Who was this God, the Creator and Ordainer of the universe, to whom he should consecrate himself? Some said Vishnu; others Shiva, Ganesha, the Sun, Narasimha, and the other avatars; others the Buddha or the Arhat; others still Vasudeva, or the breath of life itself, or the Moon, or Fire, or Karma, or Nature and primal matter. Each sect gave the universe a different origin. Which of them was true? He asked her, on whom Vyaghrapada’s grace rested, to speak the words of eternal life.

God, she said, is the all-seeing one who brings forth the universe, pervades it, sustains it, and dissolves it. Shiva is he, and Vishnu, and Brahma, the Sun, the Moon; each sect claims him for its own, and no sect holds him alone. Suppose the primal being were Shiva with five faces and three eyes. Then the Creator would be a kind of potter, needing a body and a brain to make his pots. Yet in dreams the mind works apart from the gross body and builds whole environments to fit its latent desires, so the body is only a tool and the agent is intelligence. Human agents need tools because their powers are limited; the Creator of the universe is complete in himself and makes the whole of it without outside help, which means he has no body. And yet when devotees worship him in a body, according to their inclination, he shows them grace and takes that body on. The conclusion stands: he is pure intelligence, consciousness absolute and transcendent. That consciousness in its purity is the one sovereign, Parameshvari, who presides over waking, dream, and deep sleep and takes from those three states her name, Tripura. She is an undivided whole, and the whole various universe shows in her the way a reflection shows in a self-luminous mirror, one with the mirror and nothing apart from it. So there is no question of rank, of Shiva above Vishnu or Vishnu above Shiva. “Be wise; give your worship to the one Transcendence, pure and without blemish. If you cannot grasp that pure state, worship God in a concrete form, the one that suits you; that way too reaches the goal, by degrees. There are two ways, and a seeker could labor through millions of births and find no third.”

Having learned from his wife the true meaning of Tripura, Hemachuda sought out competent teachers and, prompted by grace, learned from them the technique of her worship. He gave himself to it with intense devotion, and some months passed. The Supreme Mother’s grace came down on him, and pleasure lost its hold altogether, because his whole mind was absorbed in the search for truth. Such a state, Dattatreya told Parashurama, is impossible without grace.

Once more Hemachuda went looking for his wife alone. She saw him coming, went out to meet him, gave him her seat, washed his feet, and bowed to the ground before him as a prince’s rank demanded, and her words melted with love. Why had he neglected her all these days, when before not a day passed without his seeing her? He used to say a moment without her was an eternity he could not bear. She embraced him fondly and seemed distressed. He stood in her arms unmoved. “You cannot fool me any longer,” he said. “I know your strength now, and I know nothing can touch the happiness that is your nature. How could anything affect you like this? I have come for your counsel. That tale you told me once and called your life: explain it to me. Your mother, who is she? And your friend, and the man she married, and the sons, and what have any of them to do with me? I no longer think it was a lie. I bow to you.”

The Key to Hemalekha’s Allegory

Hemalekha heard him out with a smiling face and thought: he is pure in mind now, indifferent to pleasure, and strong; this is grace, and the time is ripe. “God’s grace is on you,” she told him. “Dispassion arises no other way. Now I will solve the riddle of my life.” Her mother was Transcendence, pure Consciousness. Her friend, the lady-in-waiting, was the intellect, the faculty that discerns. The unsuitable friend she had called Ignorance was ignorance itself, the dark one who can make a rope look like a snake. Ignorance’s son, the Dullard, was the mind, the greatest illusion of all; and Fickle, his wife, was thought, conception, imagination.

Fickle’s five sons were hearing, taste, sight, touch, and smell, and their mansions were the five sense organs. The goods the mind stole from those houses was the enjoyment of sense objects, which leaves a print on the mind and grows later into its proclivities; sharing the stolen goods with his wife was the surfacing of those proclivities in dreams, and dream, married to the mind, is Ignorance’s daughter-in-law.

The Glutton was desire, and her sons were anger and greed. Their city of ten gates was the body. The spell of highest potency Hemalekha had claimed for herself was realization of the Self. The mind’s friend who guarded the city was the vital principle, which moves as the life-breath. The many cities the household passed through were the hells the soul walks through on its unending road. The ripening of the discerning faculty was samadhi, and her admission into her mother’s chamber was final release. “That is my life in brief,” she said. “Yours is the same. Think it through and be free.”

When the parable opened for Hemachuda, surprise and pleasure choked his voice. How was he to describe the wisdom folded into the story of her life? He had not known until now how far she had traveled; it was as plain as a gooseberry lying in his open palm. He understood what human life was for. “Tell me more,” he said. “This mother of yours, who is she, and how can she have no beginning? And who are we, and what is our real nature?”

What she had to say now was subtle, she warned him. The Self is no object to be perceived or described, so how was she to tell him of it? He would know the mother only by knowing the Self, and since the Self admits no specification, no teacher can teach it. It pervades everything from the personal God down to the smallest living speck; nothing outside lights it, and it lights everything, everywhere, always. “What you are asking,” she said, “is that I hold your own eyes up for you to look at. The best teacher in the world cannot bring your eyes before your sight, and he is no more use here. He can point you toward it. That is all.”

She would give him the means. As long as he was stained with notions of me and mine, my house, my body, this mind and intellect of mine, the Self would not be found. He should go into solitude, examine everything he knew as "mine," discard it all, and look past it for the real Self. “You know me as your wife,” she said. “You do not take me for yourself; I am related to you, no part of you. Analyze everything this way and set it aside. What is left over, past all conception, past taking and past giving up, that is the Self, and to know it is to be finally free.”

Hemachuda rose from his seat in a hurry, mounted his horse, and galloped out of the city. Beyond the outskirts he entered a royal pleasure garden and went into a well-furnished palace of crystal. He dismissed his attendants and gave the keepers their orders: “No one comes up while I am inside. Not the ministers, not the elders, not my father the king. Whoever comes waits until I send word.”

Then he climbed to a fine chamber on the ninth story, with windows looking out in every direction, and settled onto a soft cushion. He gathered his mind and began.

The Chamber on the Ninth Floor

All these people, he thought, are deluded. None of them has so much as brushed the Self, and every one of them is busy on its behalf. Some recite the scriptures, some pile up wealth, some rule land, some fight, some chase the luxuries of life, and none of them ever asks what the self might be. With the Self unknown, all of it was wasted motion, a dream’s work. He would investigate it now.

House, wealth, kingdom, treasury, women, cattle: he was none of them; they were only his. He had always taken the body for the Self, and the body was simply a tool of his. He was the king’s son, with good limbs and a fair complexion, and these people were caught in the same notion, that their bodies were their egos. He considered the body and could not make it the Self. The body belonged to him; it was not him. It was built of blood and bone and it changed every moment, as separate from him as the waking body is from the body in a dream.

"I" could not be the body, then, and the vital force could not be the Self either. Mind and intellect were plainly his tools, so they were not "I." He was something apart from the whole series, from the body at one end to the intellect at the other.

Yet he was always aware. He knew that much, and still that pure awareness escaped his grasp. Objects were known through the senses; life was known by touch; the mind was known by the intellect. By what was the intellect made evident? He did not know. Other things, things not himself, kept pushing in to block the realization. Very well: he would stop imagining them. Nothing could appear unless he pictured it, and nothing that failed to appear could stand between him and the Self.

With that he forced his thoughts to a stop. A blank came down at once. He decided on the spot that this was the Self, was overjoyed, and plunged in again. The mind’s restlessness held down, there flashed before him a blaze of light that had no edge. When ordinary consciousness returned he wondered: there was no constancy in the experience, and the Self could not be more than one. He dived again, and this time fell into a long sleep full of marvelous dreams. Waking, he thought furiously. The darkness and the light must be of the same dreamlike kind, and dreams were mental imagery. He suppressed his thoughts once more. For a time his mind lay placid and he felt himself sunk in bliss, and then the mind began to move and he came back.

What was all this? The experience was a fact, and it outran his imagination. Why was that bliss unlike anything he had ever known, so that the highest of his old pleasures could not match the smallest fraction of it? It had been like sleep, in that he was aware of nothing outside, and there had been a peculiar happiness in it, though nothing was there to give him pleasure. Had he realized the Self, or were darkness, light, dreams, and bliss stages on the road? He would ask his deep-sighted wife.

He told the doorkeeper to send for Hemalekha. Before an hour and a half had passed she was on the stairs of the mansion, rising like the moon up the night sky. She found the prince in perfect peace, calm, collected, his face happy, and sat down at his side. As she nestled against him he opened his eyes and saw her, and at once she embraced him fondly and asked what she could do for him, and why he had called her up to this place.

He told her. As she had advised, he had withdrawn to investigate the Self. Believing that the constant awareness of the Self was dimmed by the interference of mental activity, he had forcibly suppressed his thoughts and stayed calm. Darkness came, then light, then sleep, and finally a unique bliss for a little while. Was this the Self, or something else? Hemalekha spoke gently. Suppressing thought with the mind turned inward was a good beginning, and the worthy praised it as the best of ways; no one had ever succeeded without it. What it could not do was produce the Self, which is realized already and at every moment; gain belongs to what one does not already have, and when was the Self ever absent from itself?

She gave him examples. Things unseen in the dark are found when a lamp removes the darkness, and people say they were recovered, though the lamp made nothing. A flustered man forgets where he put his purse; when he steadies his mind he finds it, though the steadying did not produce it. So controlling his mind was no cause of realizing the Self; the Self was always there, and he did not recognize it because he was not acquainted with it, like a villager who walks into the king’s lamplit hall of audience at night and, knowing nothing of courts, sees none of its grandeur.

“Attend to this,” she said. Blank darkness had appeared after he controlled his thoughts. In the brief interval between the two there is a state in which the effort of control has ended and the darkness has not yet appeared. “Remember that state always. It is perfect, transcendent happiness.” Everyone is deceived at that point, because their minds are used to facing outward; learned and keen as people may be, they search and search and are thwarted.

A theoretical knowledge of sculpture never made anyone a sculptor, and a pandit grounded in the philosophy of the Self cannot realize it that way; realization comes by staying where one is, and by letting thought stop. “Trying to realize it by effort,” she said, “is like chasing the shadow of your own head to tread on it. Every step you take, it moves ahead of you.” An infant grabs at its own reflection because it does not know about the mirror, and ordinary people are taken in by the reflections their minds cast on the pure, luminous mirror that is the Self. People understand space and pay it no attention, being taken up with the objects in it.

Let him consider it well. The world is two things, knowing and what is known. Objects are perceived through the senses; knowledge is self-evident, and without knowledge there is no world. Objects depend on knowledge, and knowledge depends on the knower, who needs no test to know that he exists; the knower, then, is the one reality behind both. Objects and their knowledge are reflections thrown in the eternal, self-lit, supreme Consciousness, and that Consciousness is the knower; time and space are knowable concepts and equally reflections. “So still your mind and know your own true nature, the one pure undivided Consciousness beneath the restless mind. Fixed in that ground, one becomes the doer of all. I will tell you how to rest there. You will be That.”

“Find, with a still mind, what lies between sleep and waking, the instant after one thing is recognized and before the next, the pause that separates two perceptions. That is the real Self. Whoever rests there is deluded no longer; it is because people do not know it that they have inherited sorrow. Now stop your mind from going out. Turn it inward; rein it in a little, no more, and keep watch for the Self, remembering that the one who investigates is himself the Self of the Self. Let go even of the thought ‘I see.’ Sit as still as a blind man, and yet see. What you are lies past both seeing and not seeing. Be quick.” Hemachuda did as she said. He reached the state she had pointed to and stayed in it a long time, peaceful, aware of nothing besides the Self, a state the commentators name nirvikalpa samadhi.

The Measure of an Eyelid

Hemalekha saw that her husband had reached the supreme peace and left him undisturbed. He woke after an hour and a half, saw his wife beside him, and shut his eyes again at once, eager to fall back into that state. Hemalekha caught both his hands. What did his closed eyes give him, she asked, and what did his open eyes take away? She loved to hear him; he should tell her.

Pressed for an answer, he looked like a man who had been drinking and spoke slowly, with reluctance. He had found pure, unstained happiness. The business of the world had gone tasteless for him, like an orange already sucked dry. He had been a beggar sitting on buried gold: he had run after sense pleasures with a boundless ocean of bliss inside him, taking passing things for lasting joys. “I beg you with folded hands,” he said. “Let me fall back into the peace of my own blissful Self. And I pity you, that you know this state and do not stay in it, and keep yourself busy to no purpose.”

The wise girl smiled gently at all of it. He did not yet know the highest state, the one untouched by duality. “Between you and that state lies the whole distance from earth to sky.” His small measure of wisdom was as good as none, because it hung on whether his eyes were open or shut. “What is perfect cannot hang on doing or ceasing to do, on effort or the lack of it. How can a state be perfect if an eyelid moving the width of a barley grain can make or unmake it, or if it lives only on the inside? How absurd, to think an inch of eyelid can close off the expanse where millions of worlds spin in a single corner.”

Until certain knots were cut, she went on, bliss would not be found. The knots were millions in number, tied by delusion, which is ignorance of the Self. The chief of them was taking the body for the Self, and out of that came the round of birth and death. The second was setting the world apart from the Self, though consciousness, the Self’s own being, is the mirror in which all appearances are only reflected; the others were of the same family, setting beings apart from one another and from the universal Self. No one was finally free until he had worked himself out of every one of them.

The state he reached by closing his eyes could not be enough, because the Self is pure intelligence and eternal truth, the great mirror in which every appearance within it is reflected. “Show me one thing, if you can, that it does not hold.” Whatever he admitted knowing was in that consciousness; even what he supposed to exist somewhere else, at some other time, was inside it; and a reflection needs its mirror.

So his conviction, "I will lose it when I open my eyes," or "I know it," was itself the knot waiting to be cut; and whatever can be attained cannot be the perfect state in any case. Was there any place the fire at the dissolution of the universe did not reach? In the same way the fire of realization would burn away his whole sense of things to be done. “Be strong. Cut from your heart the deep-set knots, ‘I will see,’ ‘I am other than this,’ ‘This is the non-Self,’ and all the rest. Turn where you like and meet the same Self, one, unbroken, eternal, blissful, and watch the universe come up and sink back in it like an image on water. Look for it inside yourself and outside yourself, and know that the seer within and the Self spread everywhere are not two. Settle into the quiet of what you truly are, where no appearance remains.”

Visala, the City of Wisdom

When she finished, Hemachuda’s confusion was gone, and by degrees he came to rest in the perfect Self, where inside and outside no longer divided. Equable in all things, he lived happily with Hemalekha and his household. He ruled and his kingdom prospered; when enemies came he fought and beat them; he studied scripture and taught it; the treasury filled; and he performed the sacrifices a king owes.

He lived twenty thousand years as a jivanmukta, free while still alive, a figure the translator’s note reads as eighty.

Word reached Muktachuda that his son had become a jivanmukta, and he consulted his other son, Manichuda. The two agreed that Hemachuda was changed. The greatest pleasures no longer touched him and neither did the worst sorrows; he treated friend and enemy alike; he went about his royal duties like an actor playing a part; he looked as if he had been drinking all day, and he did his work well. They asked him in private for the reason, and when they heard him describe his state they wanted the instruction for themselves, and in the end they became jivanmuktas like him.

The ministers reached the same state after instruction from the king, and after them the citizens, the artisans, every class of people in the city, until even small children and the oldest people were no longer moved by passion. Worldly dealings went on, because the people consciously played their parts, like actors in a drama. Mothers sang the highest truth over the cradle; actors played it; singers sang nothing else; the court jesters got their laughs by mocking ignorance; the schools taught knowledge of God and nothing besides.

The whole state was made up of sages and philosophers: men and women, the boys and girls who served, actors and idlers of fashion, craftsmen and laborers, the king’s ministers and the city’s harlots. Each still worked at a trade, in harmony with creation. None of them bothered to rake over the past or speculate about the future to win pleasure or dodge pain; they laughed, wept, shouted, and celebrated like drunk men, and in doing so burned off the last of their old tendencies.

When the rishis Sanaka and others visited, they called it the City of Wisdom. Even the caged parrots and cockatoos there talked wisdom. “Know the Self as pure awareness with no object in it,” one would say; what is known is nothing apart from that awareness, like faces in a mirror; everything else borrows its light, and it alone needs none. A city where the birds talk like this is still called the City of Wisdom, and the name goes back to one woman: Hemalekha, whose counsel made her husband a jivanmukta and drew a whole people after him.

Dattatreya turned back to the man who had asked him why inquiry wakes in one person and sleeps in another. “So you see, Parashurama, the first cause of release is the company of the wise. Follow that counsel before every other.”