King Bharata had given away a kingdom and walked out of it, and he had settled in Shalagrama kshetra, where his mind rested day and night on Bhagavan Vasudeva and on nothing else. He lived there a long time. Of the virtues a man can hold he reached the summit of every one, ahimsa first of all, and then the restraint of his own mind, and one garland of words moved on his lips without a pause: “Lord of yajna, Achyuta, Govinda, Madhava, Ananta, Keshava, Krishna, Vishnu, Hrishikesha, Vasudeva, I bow to you.” Even in his dreams no other sentence came out of him, and no meaning other than that one entered him. Attachment had gone out of him, he was yoked in yoga and lived as an ascetic lives, and for the Lord’s worship he gathered samidh for the fire, flowers, and blades of kusha grass; past that gathering he did no work at all.
Here the great sage Maitreya stopped Parashara with a question. You have told me all I asked, he said: the earth and its oceans and rivers, the stations of the planets, how the three worlds rest on Bhagavan Vishnu, and why the knowledge of paramartha stands above every other knowledge. And you named King Bharata once and went past him. It is said that this king, yoked in yoga to his last day, lived in Shalagrama kshetra with his mind fixed on Vasudeva. Then why did the power of that holy place and his meditation on Hari fail to set him free, so that he had to be born again as a Brahmin? And what did that great soul do once he was one? Parashara answered him, and the answer begins with one small event on a river bank.
One day the king went down to the great river to bathe. He bathed and did the rites that follow a bath, and just then a doe came out of the forest to the water, thirsty, and so close to giving birth that she had come down to open water alone. She had all but finished drinking when a lion’s roar rose somewhere near, deep enough to terrify every creature within its reach. The doe threw herself from the river straight up the bank in one blind leap, and the leap was so high that it tore the unborn fawn out of her and dropped it into the current. The small body turned over and over in the waves, and King Bharata reached in and caught it. Behind him the doe was already going down; the miscarriage and the violence of the leap had finished her, and she fell backward where she stood and died. The ascetic Bharata looked at her lying dead, gathered up her fawn, and carried it home to his ashrama.
Day after day the king fed the fawn and reared it, and it grew on that care. It grazed near the ashrama, sometimes wandered far into the forest and came running back because a lion had frightened it, and some mornings it went out at dawn to the farthest edge of the woods and was home by evening, folded down in the courtyard of Bharata’s leaf hut. Near or far, the deer had the king’s mind now, and the mind went to no other object. The man who had left a kingdom and a son and all his kin behind him had found one creature to love without measure. When it was late coming home he would talk to himself. Ah, has some wolf eaten the child today? Has it fallen into a lion’s claws? Why is it so long? Look how the whole earth is marked with the prints of those hooves. It was born for my delight, so where has it gone today? Will it come back safe out of the forest and rub my arm with the tips of its horns and make me glad again? “Look,” he would say to the empty clearing, “these kusha and kasha grasses with their tips bitten off by its new teeth stand there like brahmacharis who have given up their topknots and are chanting the Sama.” So the muni Bharata fretted over a late child, and when it came up beside him his face blossomed with love.
In that attachment his samadhi came apart. The king who had put away kingdom, pleasures, wealth and kin had a mind that could hold still for years; now it grew restless when the deer was restless and went far when the deer went far. So when his time came, King Bharata gave up his life with the fawn standing over him, watching him with wet eyes the way a son watches a dying father, and the king, out of love, saw only the deer, and in that absorption thought of nothing else. A lifetime of japa, and the last thought was a deer. The feeling that held him at that moment made his next body. He was born a deer in the dense forest of Jambumarga, on Kalanjara mountain, and a deer of a kind those woods had never held, one who remembered exactly who he had been. The memory turned him from the world the moment he had it. He left his mother where she stood, walked back alone to Shalagrama kshetra, and there, keeping his deer’s body alive on dry grass and fallen leaves, set himself to wearing out the karma that had earned him hooves.
Jada Bharata
He left that body too, and this time was born a Brahmin, in the pure household of a yogi whose conduct was without a flaw, and the memory of his births came with him into this one as well. Every branch of knowledge was his, he knew the marrow of every shastra, and he saw his own self standing beyond prakriti altogether; seeing it there, he saw it everywhere, so gods and men and animals were never other than himself. Then his sacred thread was tied, and he did nothing a Brahmin’s son is meant to do. His guru taught, and he would not recite the Veda after him. He gave no heed to any rite. He opened no other shastra. Press him with questions and back came a few crude village words with nothing in them, the way a dullard answers. His body stayed dirty, his clothes stayed soiled, his teeth went unbrushed, and the townspeople insulted him every day of his life. All of it was his own discipline. He carried a true saying of Hiranyagarbha and never set it down: “For the wealth of yoga the greatest harm is honor; the yogi whom others insult soon gains siddhi.” So a yogi, without stepping off the good path, should live so that people scorn him and keep away from his company. Remembering that, this great-minded man showed the world a dullard and a madman on purpose. Whatever food came to him he ate, boiled barley, grain, greens, a wild fruit, a handful of broken rice, and however little it was he took it for enough and passed his days.
Then his father died, and his brothers and kinsmen set the strong simpleton of the house to the field work and fed him on what had already gone bad, keeping the good food for themselves. He had a body like an ox and worked like a thing without a mind, and so the whole family fed him and worked him like a draught ox. King Prishata’s servants found him in that state, a man with no samskara on him and nothing of a Brahmin in his dress, and judged him fit for the goddess. By night they bathed him and dressed him and marked him by the full rule of the offering and led him to Kali’s altar. Then the goddess looked at what had been set in front of her. Mahakali saw a supreme lord of yoga brought to her for slaughter, and she took up a keen sword and cut the throat of the cruel royal servant who had brought him, through to the root, and she and her attendants drank his hot blood.
The Secret of the Palanquin
Around that time the great-souled king of the Sauvira country was on the road, carried in a palanquin, with one question riding along with him. On the bank of the Ikshumati, in the ashrama of the maharshi Kapila, who knew the dharma of moksha, he meant to ask: in this world made of sorrow, where does the good of a man lie? A palanquin needs shoulders, and the king’s bearers pressed men into service as they went; they looked at the sturdy Brahmin and saw one more pair of shoulders, and never saw that they had seized a fire lying quiet under ash. At the servant’s word Bharata put his shoulder under the pole and walked among the other bearers. He carried the king in order to burn off a prarabdha that still had sin left in it. He was the one vessel of all knowledge, he remembered every birth he had passed through, and he walked slowly, with his eyes on the four hands’ length of ground in front of his feet, while the men beside him walked fast. Between them the palanquin began to lurch.
The king called down to his bearers. “What are you doing? Walk evenly.” The lurching went on exactly as before. “What is this? Why do you walk out of step?” The bearers tipped their heads toward the Brahmin. “One among us walks slowly.” So the king leaned out at him. “You have carried my palanquin a little way and you are tired already? Look at you, as stout as any man I have seen. Can you not bear even this much toil?”
The Brahmin answered in a level voice. “I am not stout, and I have not carried your palanquin. I am not tired, and there is no toil here for me to bear.” The king said, “You plainly look stout. The palanquin is on your shoulder at this moment. And carrying a load is toil for anyone who has a body.” The Brahmin said, “First tell me what it is you plainly see. Words like strong and weak can wait their turn. You say I have carried your palanquin and that it rests on my shoulder now; hear why that is wholly false. My two feet stand on the earth. On the feet stand the shanks, on the shanks the thighs, on the thighs the belly, on the belly the chest and the arms and the shoulders, and on the shoulders this palanquin. Show me the place in that stack where the load comes down on me. And this palanquin carries the body you call yours, so when you say you are up there and I am down here, that is a sentence with nothing under it. I, you, and every being that lives are carried by the five elements, and the elements themselves are swept along in the current of the gunas; the gunas, sattva and the rest, are under karma, and karma in every creature is born of avidya. The atman is pure, imperishable, calm, without a single guna, beyond prakriti, and woven through all beings as one; it does not grow and it does not shrink. When it neither swells nor dwindles, by what reasoning did you say to me, you are stout? If this palanquin, resting on earth, feet, shanks, hips, thighs, belly and shoulders in turn, could be a load to me, then it is just as much a load to you, and by the same reasoning every being alive is bearing the mountains, the trees, the houses and the whole earth, and the palanquin besides. When the purusha is wholly apart from everything born of prakriti, how could any toil be borne by me? And the stuff this palanquin was made from is the stuff your body was made from, and mine, and everyone’s; a man looks at one piece of it and says mine, and that saying is the whole of the difference between us.”
Having said it, the twice-born fell silent and went on holding the palanquin. The king was on the ground before the words had settled, out of his seat and holding the man’s feet. “Put this palanquin down and be gracious to me. Who are you, walking about inside a dullard’s guise? For what purpose have you come here, and what brought you? Tell me all of it; I am eager to hear.” The Brahmin said, “Hear me. I am so-and-so is a thing that cannot be said. As for the cause of my coming here, all coming and going has one purpose, the enjoyment of the fruit of karma. The body and the rest are the means by which pleasure and pain are tasted; the jiva takes a body to taste the pleasure and pain that dharma and adharma have earned it. Dharma and adharma are the cause of every state of every being, so why ask specially about the cause of my coming?” The king said, “Surely dharma and adharma lie behind every act, and a being goes from body to body to taste their fruit. But you said that who you are cannot be told, and that is what I want to hear. Why can you not say, I am that which is? The word aham, this word I, does the atman no harm.” The Brahmin said, “You are right, the word aham brings no fault to the atman. The word itself, though, plants the knowledge of self in what is no self at all; it is rooted in error, and that is the fault. Aham is uttered by tongue, teeth, lips and palate, and none of those causes of its utterance is I. Does the tongue say aham of itself? It does not. And in that case, to say you are stout is no more proper. This body of head and hands and feet is distinct from the atman, so where exactly shall I use the word I? If there were another of my own kind, distinct from me, one could say this is I and that is another; when one atman dwells in every body, who are you and I am he are empty words, all of them. You are the king, this is the palanquin, these are the bearers in front, these are all your subjects: in paramartha none of it is true. From a tree came wood, and from the wood this palanquin; tell me, shall we call it wood, or tree? No one says the maharaja sits on a tree, and no one says he sits on wood; everyone says he sits in a palanquin. A palanquin is a heap of wood in a particular arrangement. If it is anything more than that, separate it from the wood and find it. Take the ribs out of an umbrella one by one and tell me where the umbrella stays. Now apply that reasoning to you and to me. Man, woman, cow, goat, horse, elephant, bird, tree: know these as names for bodies that karma has shaped. The purusha is neither god nor man nor beast nor tree; those are only the differing shapes of bodies born of karma. Wealth, the king, the king’s soldiers and whatever else there is in the world, none of it is true in paramartha; it is imagination, all of it. That alone is real which, in no length of time, comes to bear another name through change and the rest; tell me, king, what thing is that? You are king to your people, son to your father, enemy to your enemy, husband to your wife, father to your son; tell me, what shall I call you? Are you this head, or the neck, or the belly, or the feet and the rest? And what are the head and the rest to the one who is you? You are apart from every one of these limbs. So gather your attention and ask, who am I? That is how the truth of the atman stands: it can be shown only by separating it from everything else. How then shall I name it with the word aham?”
The king heard these words full of paramartha and answered humbly. “Since you spoke, the workings of my mind have come loose. The knowledge you have shown me, unattached, pervading every being, is Brahman beyond prakriti; of that I have no doubt. You said that you do not carry the palanquin, that the palanquin is not on you, that the body carrying it is wholly apart from you, that beings act by the push of the gunas and the gunas by the push of karma, so how are you the doer; and since those words reached my ears my mind has gone restless for paramartha and will not be quiet. I set out to go to the fortunate muni Kapila and ask him where the good of men lies in this world, and on the way I heard you, and now my mind has turned to you. Kapila is an amsha of the all-pervading Bhagavan Vishnu, come down to earth to burn the world’s confusion off; and from the way you speak I am certain that Kapila himself has appeared in your form, wishing me well. So tell me, humbly I ask it, what is our highest shreya. You are the ocean every wave of knowledge rises from.” The Brahmin said, “Do you wish to ask about shreya, or about paramartha? They are two questions, for every shreya stands short of paramartha. A man who worships the gods and wants wealth or prosperity or a son or a kingdom has his highest shreya in exactly that. For a man who wants svarga, the karma of yajna is shreya; the chief shreya lies in wanting no fruit of it at all. So men yoked in yoga should keep their meditation on the atman beyond prakriti, since union with that Paramatma is the real shreya. Shreyas there are by the hundreds and the thousands, and none of them is paramartha. Now hear what paramartha is. If wealth were paramartha, why is wealth given away for dharma, and why is it spent on pleasures? If a son were paramartha, he is the paramartha of another man, his father, and that father, being another’s son, is paramartha to someone else, and so in this whole world of moving and unmoving things a son, the effect of a father, is paramartha to no one, or every effect of every cause would be paramartha. If gaining a kingdom were paramartha, kingdoms come and kingdoms go, so paramartha would come and go with them. If you hold the yajna done by the three Vedas, Rik, Yajus and Saman, to be paramartha, hear my view. Whatever is made from clay is known to be clay; it follows its cause. A rite built out of perishable things, samidh and ghee and kusha, is itself perishable, and the wise call paramartha the imperishable; so karma done with perishing things, and the svarga it earns, perish with them. If desireless karma, done without a fruit in view, is held to be paramartha, it is the means by which mukti is reached, and a means is a step short of the thing itself. If meditation on the atman as a thing apart from the body is called paramartha, that meditation sets one atman apart from another, and in paramartha there is no apartness. And if the union of Paramatma and jivatma is called paramartha, that is wholly false, for one substance can never become one with another.”
“So all of these are shreyas, without any doubt. Now I tell you briefly what paramartha is. The atman is one, all-pervading, the same everywhere, pure, without guna, beyond prakriti, free of birth and of growth, and imperishable. It is supreme knowledge in its own form, and it has never had, and does not have, and will never have, any contact with the unreal, with name and jati and the rest. It is present in your body and in mine and in every other, and it is one: that special knowledge is paramartha, and the man who sees two things does not see it. One undivided air goes down a flute, and the holes turn it into shadja and the other notes, each with a separate name; so the one Paramatma, through the differences of the bodies it wears, appears as god and man and the rest. The many differences in the one-formed atman come from the outer workings of bodies, and when the difference of god and man and the other bodies is taken away, nothing of them remains. Their whole existence is the covering of avidya.” The Bharata whose mind, tangled in love for one small deer, let liberation slip out of his hands was the one who, walking under another man’s palanquin as Jada Bharata, brought the king of Sauvira to this knowledge: that the carrier and the carried, the king in the seat and the bearer under the pole, are the making of avidya alone.
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)