Tripura Rahasya: Hemachuda and Hemalekha

Tripura Rahasya: Hemachuda and Hemalekha

The Company That Opens a Question

Parashurama had accepted one of Dattatreya's central claims: human beings return to the causes of suffering while their judgment remains clouded. A further difficulty troubled him. Why does serious inquiry arise in one person and remain absent in another? Some endure repeated losses without examining the structure of their lives. Others begin to question after a single encounter. He asked Dattatreya for the immediate cause of that difference.

Dattatreya answered by naming association with the wise. A capable guide gives a question direction, and the quality of one's company helps determine which habits of attention become strong. Parashurama's own contact with the sage Samvarta had prepared him to listen. Dattatreya then offered a history in which one meeting carried its influence from a marriage into a royal family, and from that family into a city.

Muktachuda, king of Dasharna, had two sons, Hemachuda and Manichuda. Both princes were learned, disciplined, and trained for rule. On one occasion they entered the deep forests of the Sahya Mountains with a large hunting party. Armed with bows, the men pursued deer, lions, boars, bison, wolves, and other animals through the mountain country.

A violent wind rose while the hunt was underway. Sand and pebbles struck the riders. Dust covered the sky until daylight resembled night, and familiar distinctions disappeared: trees, rocks, paths, hills, valleys, soldiers. Members of the retinue scattered toward caves, trees, and overhanging stone. The brothers rode away from the worst of the storm and lost sight of each other.

Hemachuda eventually reached a hermitage set within a garden of plantain, date, and other fruit trees. A young woman stood there without visible fear. The prince asked her name, her family, and the reason she lived in so remote a forest.

She answered with hospitality before biography. She asked him to tie his horse to a date palm, sit, and recover from the storm. Fruit and juice were brought to him. Once his exhaustion had eased, she introduced herself as Hemalekha, the foster daughter of the sage Vyaghrapada, a devotee of Shiva whose discipline protected the hermitage.

Her birth had taken place under difficult circumstances. Her mother, the Vidyadhari Vidyutprabha, had come to bathe in the river Vena. Sushena, king of Vanga, arrived there as well. They were attracted to each other, and Vidyutprabha became pregnant. Fearing public disgrace, she tried to end the pregnancy. The child survived the attempt and was born alive. Vyaghrapada found the infant when he went to the river for his evening ablutions. He carried her to the hermitage and raised her with parental care.

Hemalekha described that care as a true form of fatherhood. The person who gives righteous protection, she said, earns the relation through conduct. She asked Hemachuda to wait for Vyaghrapada and place his desire before the sage.

The prince had already become deeply attracted to her. He hesitated to speak openly, worried that a declaration might offend his host. Hemalekha understood his agitation and advised patience. Soon Vyaghrapada returned from the forest carrying a basket of flowers for worship. Hemachuda rose, bowed, and identified himself. The sage perceived the situation, judged the union fitting, and gave Hemalekha to the prince as his life companion.

Hemachuda brought her to his capital. Muktachuda welcomed them and arranged the formal marriage and public celebrations. The couple spent time in the palace, in forest retreats, and along sandy shores. Hemachuda's attachment was intense. Hemalekha shared his life with affection, yet pleasure did not govern her attention. At times he would speak while her awareness seemed settled far within. Even after a long embrace, she could look at him calmly and ask when he had arrived.

His frustration grew. In private he asked why his carefully arranged pleasures left her unmoved. Her interest mattered so much to him that her composure diminished his own enjoyment. He wanted to know where her attention went and why she appeared indifferent to experiences that absorbed him.

Hemalekha heard the question as an opening. She did not begin with a verdict. She invited the prince to examine the happiness he believed he already understood.

The Examination of Happiness

Hemalekha told her husband that she sought a happiness that would remain satisfying and carry no concealed return of distress. She asked him to define such happiness for her. Hemachuda found the inquiry unnecessary. In his view, pleasure was whatever felt agreeable, and pain was whatever felt disagreeable. Animals and insects could approach one and avoid the other. He also spoke with the condescension toward women that belonged to his social formation, assuming that her uncertainty proved an inferior capacity for judgment.

She accepted the role of student long enough to test his definition. The same fire comforts a person in cold weather and oppresses that person in heat. Its effect changes with season, place, intensity, and bodily constitution. Cold can restore one body and harm another. Wealth, children, marriage, kingdom, reputation, and power also shift with circumstance. Muktachuda possessed the resources of a king and still carried daily anxiety about his rule.

Hemalekha distinguished bodily pain from mental disturbance. Bodily conditions have causes and remedies. Desire gives the mind a recurring instability. When one desire is fulfilled, pressure subsides for a short interval. Another demand soon forms. The mind labels the pause happiness while the capacity for renewed distress remains active. Even Indra and the gods, sustained by celestial pleasures and nectar, still labor under desire in the account she gave.

The prince's definition therefore described relief that depended on changing conditions. Hemalekha asked him to consider physical intimacy with the same care. Contact may feel welcome in one circumstance and oppressive in another. Passion is followed by fatigue. Dreams can produce attraction and pleasure without the beloved's physical presence. These facts place part of the experience within memory, expectation, and the image held by the mind.

She illustrated that claim with another prince. He was handsome, devoted to his wife, and certain of her fidelity. The wife had formed a relationship with a palace servant. The servant regularly gave the prince enough liquor to impair his recognition, then sent another woman into the royal bedchamber while he met the princess elsewhere. In his intoxication, the prince embraced the substitute and congratulated himself on his fortunate marriage.

One night the servant's duties kept him from supplying the usual quantity of liquor. The prince entered the bedroom with greater awareness. He still failed at first to recognize the woman beside him. Later he noticed the substitution and demanded an explanation. Fear led her to disclose the arrangement and take him to the meeting place, where he found his wife with the servant.

The discovery drove him into anger and sweeping accusations. Hemalekha did not present those accusations as wisdom. His disgust revealed the limits of his earlier confidence. During the deception, his pleasure had arisen from a mistaken identification. The mental picture carried the force of beauty and intimacy even when the person before him was someone else. Accurate knowledge changed the experience at once.

Hemalekha brought the inquiry back to Hemachuda. The mind repeatedly draws an image of what it finds attractive. Repetition gives that image definition and emotional weight. Attention then stirs the senses toward the imagined source of satisfaction. Customs of beauty vary across countries and periods, while children and disciplined practitioners do not respond to those conventions in the same way. A body is also a changing arrangement of flesh, blood, bone, skin, fluids, food, and waste. Desire selects certain features, excludes the rest, and presents its selection as a self-evident source of joy.

Her purpose was diagnostic. Hatred of the body would merely create another disturbance. She wanted Hemachuda to see the burden he had placed upon conditional experiences. A pleasure could be enjoyed within its limits. It could not carry the demand for permanent satisfaction without producing fear, dependence, and disappointment.

The argument reached him. Familiar entertainments began to lose their authority, and dispassion arose. At this point Dattatreya briefly told Parashurama the eventual result: Hemachuda would realize the Self, guide his father and brother, and help Visala become renowned as the City of Wisdom. Parashurama asked to hear the actual process. Dattatreya returned to the prince at a far less settled stage, when insight had disturbed an old life and habit still possessed considerable force.

Hemachuda could no longer enter pleasure with his former confidence. He also lacked the strength to leave established habits immediately. Fine food, clothes, jewels, companions, decorated horses, and friends had once carried easy appeal. Now he approached them reluctantly and regretted the approach afterward. His mind moved between recognition and compulsion. He grew pale and withdrawn.

Hemalekha noticed the change and visited him in his private chamber. She first asked whether an illness troubled him. When he denied bodily sickness, she asked for the cause of his sadness. Hemachuda admitted that her questions had removed the taste from his old pleasures while his habits continued to command him. He asked her for a happiness that would survive the collapse of those habits.

She recognized dispassion as readiness. The next part of her teaching took the form of a family history whose impossibilities were deliberate.

The City of Ten Gates

Hemalekha began with a pure mother and a daughter who spoke as the narrator of the allegory. The daughter had a companion who was good and clear by nature. That companion formed an attachment to Shunya, the figure of ignorance, whose talent lay in producing fascinating appearances. Through Shunya she became involved with Mudha, delusion. Their child was Asthira, the restless mind.

The daughter remained close to her companion because their bond was intimate. As the companion became absorbed in ignorance, delusion, and the child born from them, the narrator became implicated in the household. Mudha misunderstood her purity and tried to claim her as another object of his world. People who saw the association from outside misjudged her character. Discerning observers could still recognize that her nature had remained clear.

Asthira grew under the influence of ignorance and delusion. He inherited restlessness and an extraordinary ability to cross distances instantly. He married Chapala, thought and imagination, whose forms changed with his wishes. If he desired a place or object, she could construct a corresponding environment. The speed and flexibility of her inventions gave her great influence over him.

They had five sons. Each built a mansion suited to one class of experience. In the first, the father encountered sound: music, sacred recitation, birds, bees, thunder, roaring animals, quarrels, lamentation, and the noise of upheaval. In the second, he met touch through softness, hardness, heat, cold, fabric, seats, beds, and surfaces. The third presented color and shape across pleasing, threatening, brilliant, dim, proportioned, and distorted forms. The fourth offered things to drink, lick, suck, chew, and taste, including sweet, sour, pungent, and astringent flavors. The fifth provided odors, from delicate flowers and grasses to acrid or decaying matter.

Asthira visited the five mansions in turn. Attraction met some experiences, aversion met others, and neither response gave him rest. The sons waited for their father before engaging their own domains. He also carried impressions away from their houses and shared them privately with Chapala. An experience that had passed from the senses could therefore return through imagination and appear again in dreams.

A second wife entered his life. Her name was Mahashana, insatiable desire. Every provision brought to her vanished at once, and the demand for further provision followed. Asthira and the five sons devoted their energy to feeding her. Her appetite grew through service.

Mahashana bore two sons. The elder, Jvalamukha, represented anger. His heat overwhelmed Asthira whenever desire met obstruction. The younger, Nindyavritta, represented greed and the conduct that brings disgrace. Affection for him exposed Asthira to contempt and made him feel socially dead. Anger burned him from within, greed damaged his standing, and desire sent him continuously among the sensory mansions.

The family moved into a city with ten gates. Shunya and Mudha sustained the household's confusion. Chapala and Mahashana cooperated in directing Asthira. Jvalamukha and Nindyavritta added pain and shame. The clear companion suffered through her attachment to the restless mind, and the narrator reflected the companion's condition. She endured public misjudgment while remaining the indispensable light by which every member of the city functioned.

Another figure guarded the city. Prachara, movement or the vital principle, traveled continually through two upper gates. He held the citizens together as a thread holds the parts of a necklace. When Asthira slept, his wives, sons, and sensory activity also subsided. Prachara continued his work. In that interval the narrator returned to her pure mother and rested in bliss, then reentered the city when the household awakened.

When a city decayed, Prachara gathered the residents and conducted them to another. Asthira therefore occupied many cities, some agreeable and some harsh: forests, deserts, cold regions, dark enclosures, and foul places. Change of residence did not end his misery because desire, anger, greed, and imagination traveled with him.

At last the clear companion sought the narrator's counsel in private. With proper guidance she found a worthy husband, ended the restless mind's tyranny, restrained its offspring, and entered the presence of the pure mother. There she ceased to be tormented by the family she had served and rested in the bliss natural to her.

Hemalekha ended the allegory by telling Hemachuda that his bondage had the same architecture. Acquired patterns could be examined and overcome. The mother could be reached. The prince, however, heard the family history literally and found it absurd.

He pointed to Hemalekha's youth and known parentage. Where was this companion? Where were the husband, wives, sons, cities, and murder she described? He compared her story to a comic impossibility assembled from reflections, mirages, and creatures that had never existed. His newly awakened discrimination had become suspicion, and he wanted facts that could survive examination.

Hemalekha welcomed the demand for examination. She asked him to include observed consequences among his evidence. Her earlier account of pleasure had already changed his relation to enjoyment. A teaching capable of producing accurate recognition deserved patient inquiry. Trust in a competent guide could remain answerable to experience.

Trust, Inquiry, and Tripura

Hemachuda insisted that confidence must be earned. A seeker who follows an incompetent person can be injured as surely as a fish that takes a baited hook. Hemalekha agreed that competence matters. She also showed him a problem hidden in endless demands for proof. Every standard can be challenged by another standard. The evaluator's fitness can then be challenged, followed by the fitness of the next evaluator. Inquiry loses its practical purpose when each answer merely creates a new occasion for refusal.

She used ordinary life to make the point. A child depends upon a caregiver, partners depend upon mutual confidence, an aging parent depends upon grown children, and a farmer tills because actions are expected to have consequences. Even reliance on cause and effect contains a working trust. Human action would stop if no proposition could be provisionally accepted long enough to test it.

The discipline she proposed joined trust with scrutiny. Listen to a competent person. Compare the teaching with experience and established guidance. Choose after careful consideration. Then make a sustained effort. Endless argument leaves every possibility untouched and every habit intact. Unexamined acceptance creates a different form of vulnerability. Hemalekha wanted reasoning that could guide practice and practice that could clarify reasoning.

Her example concerned the sage Kausika, who lived near the Godavari on the Sahya Hill. While Kausika was away, his disciples discussed philosophy. A learned Brahmin named Soonga entered and defeated their arguments through a relentless demand for validating standards. Any test, he argued, required another test to establish its validity. The second required a third. He carried the regress until claims of truth, the speaker, and even the claim of universal emptiness dissolved into the same refusal.

Some listeners admired his skill and became lost in the maze he had constructed. Others presented the argument to Kausika. Their teacher helped them recognize the difference between verbal victory and an understanding that produces clarity and peace. Hemalekha used the episode to warn against arid polemics that borrow the prestige of logic while avoiding every responsible conclusion.

Hemachuda now understood that his wife possessed a depth he had failed to recognize. Yet the plurality of doctrines still troubled him. Scriptures, teachers, commentaries, and schools disagreed. Each group gave authority to its own system and criticized the rest. He asked where trust should be placed among competing claims.

Hemalekha began with the condition of the listener. A restless mind can hear precise instruction without receiving it. Attention must become steady enough for a teaching to enter memory and judgment. Purposeful discussion should be followed by effort, just as a farmer acts in season and an assayer tests metals, gems, and herbs through trained procedures. Results depend upon the quality and persistence of that effort.

The safest aim, she said, is freedom from renewed subjection to suffering. Wealth, status, family, learning, physical beauty, military strength, and political command all change under time. Devotion to the primal cause of the universe gives inquiry an orientation beyond those changing supports. She described divine grace as the condition through which the universal appearance can be understood, much as the craft of a magician becomes intelligible through knowledge of its source.

She distinguished three motives for worship. A distressed person seeks relief. An ambitious person seeks desired goods. A third gives devoted service without a private bargain. Hemalekha valued this selfless dedication because it turns the whole person toward the source being sought. She cited Markandeya, whose devotion to Shiva overcame the death appointed for his sixteenth year and left him perpetually sixteen in the traditional account.

Hemachuda then asked which deity should receive his devotion. Traditions named Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, Ganesha, the Sun, the Moon, Narasimha, Vasudeva, fire, karma, nature, and other principles. If the universe had one source, how should a seeker understand such different names and forms?

Hemalekha answered that the all-seeing consciousness which originates, permeates, sustains, and withdraws the universe is addressed through many names. A chosen form can answer the disposition of a devotee and become a genuine avenue of practice. The ultimate source has no need of a physical instrument or external material. Bodies serve limited agents. The creative intelligence she described is self-sufficient.

She called that pure consciousness Tripura, the one sovereign reality associated with the three states of waking, dream, and deep sleep while exceeding their limits. The variety of the universe appears within this undivided intelligence as images appear in a luminous mirror. Hemalekha advised those who found this subtle contemplation difficult to worship a concrete divine form with sincerity. Both approaches could serve as graded means under the same encompassing principle.

Following her counsel, Hemachuda learned an appropriate mode of worship from qualified teachers. He practiced with concentrated devotion for a few months. His dispassion became steadier, and his attention moved from debate toward direct investigation.

When he returned to Hemalekha, she received him with ceremony and affection. She washed his feet, bowed according to his royal standing, embraced him, and spoke as though his long absence had wounded her. The prince remained composed. He understood that her inner happiness did not depend upon his response, and he recognized the affectionate display as a gentle test of his readiness. He bowed to her knowledge and asked for the key to the allegory.

The Key to Hemalekha's Allegory

Hemalekha explained the figures in the order of their appearance. The pure mother was transcendent consciousness. The narrator was its illuminating presence within experience. Her naturally clear companion was the discriminating intellect. Shunya was ignorance, and Mudha was delusion. Their descendant Asthira was the restless mind, while Chapala was thought, conception, and imagination.

The five sons were hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell. Their five mansions were the corresponding sense faculties. Objects carried from the mansions were sensory impressions retained by the mind. Their private reappearance with Chapala described dream, memory, and the later activity of latent tendencies.

Mahashana was desire. Her two sons were anger and greed, represented by Jvalamukha and Nindyavritta. The city with ten gates was the body, understood through its openings and functions. Prachara was the vital principle expressed through moving breath. His work kept embodied life coordinated, continued during sleep, and carried the conditioned household from one body to another when a former city could no longer sustain it.

The clear companion's worthy husband represented proper guidance and mature discrimination. Ending Asthira's domination meant quieting the mind's compulsive rule. Restraining his children meant restoring order among thought, senses, desire, anger, and greed. The consummation of discrimination was samadhi, contemplative absorption. Entrance into the mother's chamber represented emancipation in pure consciousness.

The parable now gave Hemachuda a working map. It also raised the decisive question. If the mother was beginningless consciousness, how could he know her? A thing known by the mind stands before a knower as an object. Pure consciousness, according to Hemalekha, was the condition by which knower, knowing, and object appeared. It could not be placed before him in the same manner as a visible form.

A teacher could direct attention, just as one person may remind another to notice what has been overlooked. The inquiry itself belonged to Hemachuda. Hemalekha asked him to examine each item called "mine" and see whether possession made it identical with the possessor. Home, wealth, position, relationship, body, breath, mind, and intellect could all be observed or claimed. He was to release each identification and attend to what remained outside acquisition and surrender.

The instruction sent him out of the room immediately. He mounted his horse, rode beyond the capital, and entered a royal pleasure garden. There stood an imposing crystal palace. He dismissed his attendants and ordered the keepers to admit no one without permission. Ministers, elders, and even King Muktachuda would have to wait.

Hemachuda climbed to a chamber on the ninth floor. Its outlook opened in every direction. He sat on a cushion, gathered his attention, and began the examination alone.

The Chamber on the Ninth Floor

The prince first considered the activity of people throughout the kingdom. Some recited scripture, some studied commentaries, some accumulated wealth, some administered land, some fought enemies, and some pursued refined pleasures. All acted for something they called themselves, though few had examined what that self was. Hemachuda resolved to carry the question through without relying on inherited labels.

His house, treasury, kingdom, women, cattle, and possessions were his. Ownership marked a relation and did not establish identity. The body seemed closer. He had long treated his physical form, royal birth, limbs, complexion, and abilities as himself. Yet the body could also be observed. It was composed of blood, bone, and changing material. It altered from moment to moment and served as an instrument.

The vital force that sustained the body was also known through its operations. The senses supplied information. The mind coordinated images and impulses. The intellect distinguished, compared, and reasoned. Each could be called "mine" and used as a faculty. Hemachuda concluded that the aware subject could not be reduced to any member of this changing collection.

He saw that awareness was continuous through the inquiry, yet he did not know how to isolate it. Objects were disclosed through the senses. Vitality appeared through living function. Mental activity became evident to the intellect. What made the intellect evident? He suspected that mental appearances obscured the very awareness through which they were known.

He tried to remove the obstruction by force. When he arrested thought, blank darkness appeared. He took the blankness for the Self, became excited, and repeated the effort. A boundless light then appeared. Since the two experiences differed, he questioned both. A third attempt ended in sleep and elaborate dreams. He recognized that darkness and light could also be mental appearances. He suppressed thought again and entered an exceptional bliss. The state soon ended when mental activity resumed.

The bliss exceeded any pleasure he knew. It resembled sleep in the absence of ordinary external awareness, though it carried a quality of clarity and happiness that sleep had not revealed to him. He wondered whether darkness, light, dream, and bliss were successive forms of the Self. Their variation left him uncertain. He summoned Hemalekha.

Within one muhurta, a traditional division of the day, Hemalekha climbed to the ninth-floor chamber and found her husband calm, collected, and visibly relieved.

He described the sequence with care: forced restraint, darkness, light, sleep, dream, and bliss. He asked which, if any, disclosed the Self. Hemalekha praised inward attention as a serious beginning. She also corrected his expectation that a technique could manufacture the reality being sought. Awareness had been present before, during, and after every state. A newly produced experience would begin and end, while the Self in her teaching was the constant condition of experience.

She offered several analogies. A lamp reveals objects that darkness had concealed; it does not create them. A person who becomes calm may remember where a misplaced purse lies; calmness allows recognition and does not produce the purse. Someone unfamiliar with a royal hall may stare at its dazzling objects and fail to understand the chamber that contains them. Attention can be captured by contents and overlook their support.

The crucial interval came before the darkness. Hemachuda had ceased the effort of control, and the next object had not yet appeared. In that unforced pause, awareness remained without being organized around a particular perception. Habit moved attention outward so quickly that the interval escaped notice.

Hemalekha compared the difficulty to looking at images in a mirror while overlooking the reflecting surface, or attending to objects in space while giving no thought to space itself. Every known object depends upon knowledge of it. Time and place are also known within awareness. The knower's presence does not need a second proof before experience can occur.

She directed him toward the quiet interval between one perception and the next, and toward the transition between sleep and waking. He was to remain alert without forming the thought "I see." The investigator, the act of investigation, and the reality investigated could settle into one undivided field.

Hemachuda followed her instruction. His attention ceased pursuing objects and ceased trying to seize the background as another object. He entered nirvikalpa samadhi, absorption without conceptual division. Hemalekha saw his profound peace and allowed the absorption to continue without interruption.

The Measure of an Eyelid

After one muhurta, Hemachuda returned from the absorption. He opened his eyes, saw Hemalekha beside him, and immediately tried to close them so he could recover the state.

She took both his hands and asked what opening the eyes had removed. Hemachuda answered that he had found an untainted happiness within. The activities of the world now seemed depleted, and he begged to return to the peace he had experienced.

Hemalekha told him that the absorption was valuable and incomplete as a final understanding. A truth controlled by the movement of eyelids only eight barley grains wide would remain conditional. The expanse of consciousness that contains innumerable worlds could not be confined by so small a physical interval.

The first major knot had been identification of the body with the Self. Several subtler knots remained. Hemachuda still divided inner awareness from an outer world, one being from another, and stillness from action. He assumed that pure consciousness could be present in a closed room and absent from royal work. Those divisions would make peace dependent on withdrawal.

Hemalekha returned to the mirror. A reflection has no independent appearance without a reflecting surface. In the same way, anything Hemachuda knew, remembered, anticipated, or imagined appeared within present awareness. A distant country, an earlier event, and a possible future could enter experience only as known content. The entire field of difference depended upon consciousness for its disclosure.

She also asked him to release the subtle claim "I see the Self everywhere." That thought preserved a separate observer who surveyed a field. Stable realization required ease in the natural condition beneath the claim. The world could arise and subside within awareness without forcing Hemachuda to alternate between contemplative seclusion and practical life.

Visala, the City of Wisdom

His understanding became steady gradually. He returned to the palace and lived happily with Hemalekha and his family. He governed Dasharna, met enemies in war when royal responsibility required it, studied scripture, taught others, maintained the treasury, performed royal sacrifices such as the ashvamedha and rajasuya, and increased the kingdom's prosperity. Action no longer displaced the clarity he had discovered in the chamber.

He lived as a jivanmukta, a person liberated while living, for two ayutas of years, traditionally reckoned as twenty thousand years.

Muktachuda and Manichuda observed Hemachuda's change. Great pleasure did not make him careless, and severe sorrow did not break his judgment. He dealt evenly with gain and loss, friend and enemy. Royal duties were performed with the care of an actor who knows the part while remaining free of confusion about his identity. Father and brother questioned him in private, received his instruction, and also became jivanmuktas.

The understanding moved from the royal family to ministers, chiefs, and citizens. Artisans, servants, enslaved people, women, men, children, and elders received the teaching. Occupations and relationships continued. Mothers sang of the Self while rocking infants. Actors staged stories about knowledge. Singers shaped the teaching into songs. Court humor exposed the absurdities of ignorance. Places of instruction discussed consciousness and self-knowledge.

The population remained engaged with immediate responsibilities. People worked, celebrated, grieved, laughed, and made decisions as circumstances required. They understood each role as an appearance within consciousness and allowed its force to subside when the action ended.

Sanaka and other rishis visited Visala. They heard words about consciousness repeated even by parrots and cockatoos in cages. The birds spoke of known things as images dependent upon the self-luminous awareness in which they appeared. The visiting sages called Visala the renowned City of Wisdom.

Dattatreya closed the history by returning to Parashurama's question. Hemalekha's company awakened inquiry in Hemachuda. His tested understanding became instruction for Muktachuda, Manichuda, and the court. Their conduct carried it through the city's daily institutions. Association with the wise had worked through attention, examination, practice, realization, and example.

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