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King Bharata had given up his entire kingdom and come to settle in the region of Shalagram. There, on the bank of the Gandaki, his mind stayed fixed day and night on Lord Vasudeva alone. In nonviolence and self-restraint he stood above all men of virtue, and one garland of words was forever on his lips: “O Lord of sacrifice, O Achyuta, O Govinda, O Keshava, O Krishna, O Vishnu, O Hrishikesha, O Vasudeva, I bow to you.” Even in his dreams he said nothing else. For the worship of the Lord he gathered only kindling, flowers, and kusha grass; beyond that he had no work at all.
Here a question arises, the very one the great sage Maitreya put to Parashara. Such a man, living in so holy a land, calling on Hari without pause, why was he still not set free? Why did he have to take birth again as a brahmin? The answer lies hidden in one small event.
One day the king went down to the river bank to bathe. His bath done, he had just settled into his japa when a doe came out of the forest to drink. She was pregnant and near her time. The thirsty doe had barely finished drinking when the terrible roar of a lion broke out somewhere close by, and every creature trembled at the sound. In her panic she leaped without warning up onto the high bank, and the shock of that high leap threw her unborn fawn into the river. The little deer went tumbling in the current, and King Bharata lifted it out. On the bank the doe, torn by the miscarriage and the violence of the leap, fell where she stood and died. Seeing her dead, the ascetic Bharata carried the fawn home to his hermitage.
Day by day the king reared the little deer, and it too, nourished on his affection, began to grow. It grazed on the grass around the hermitage, sometimes wandered far into the forest, then came back for fear of the lion; as evening fell it would settle in the courtyard of Bharata’s leaf hut. Slowly the king’s heart bound itself to that deer. The man who had left behind his kingdom, his son, and all his kin now poured his tenderness onto a fawn. When it was late in returning, he would grow anxious and think, “Has some wolf eaten it? Has it fallen into the claws of a lion? Look how lovely the earth is made by the marks of its little hooves. Where has the stay of my life gone today?” And when it came back and scratched his arm with its horns, his face would open in love.
In this attachment his meditation came apart. Chasing the restless deer, the king’s once-steady mind grew restless too; when the deer went far, his mind went far with it. When his last hour came, the deer he had raised gazed at him with wet eyes, like a son, and King Bharata, absorbed in it, gave up his breath; at the moment of death he thought of nothing else. Because of that fixed feeling at the end, he was born a deer in the dense forest of Mount Kalanjara, along the Jambumarga, but a deer of a rare kind, one who kept the memory of his former life. This memory of his past birth turned him away from the world; he left his new mother, came back once more to the region of Shalagram, and, feeding his body on dry grass and leaves, set about living out and clearing the karma that had earned him a deer’s birth.
Jada Bharata
Leaving that body, he took a brahmin birth in the pure family of a yogi rich in right conduct. In this life too the memory of his former birth stayed with him. He knew the inner meaning of all the shastras, saw his own self as beyond nature, and held every living being to be no different from himself. Even after his sacred-thread rite, he would not recite the Veda when his guru taught it, would not set his mind to any task, would not study any shastra. When someone asked him a question, he answered in rough, rustic words, like a dullard. Because of his dirty body, his soiled clothes, and his unbrushed teeth, the townspeople always thought him beneath notice. But this was his own discipline. He knew that for a yogi the greatest loss is honor itself; the one whom others dishonor soon comes to perfection. Remembering this teaching of Hiranyagarbha, he stayed, on purpose, dull and half-mad in the eyes of the world.
After his father was gone, his brothers and kinsmen set him to farm work and gave him rotten, spoiled grain in return. Sturdy as an ox yet dull at labor, he ate whatever came to him. Once the servants of a certain king seized him for a sacrificial victim; by night, dressing him with full ritual, they led him out to offer him before the goddess Kalika. But seeing a supreme master of yoga brought forward this way for slaughter, Mahakali herself appeared; she raised her keen sword and cut the throat of that cruel-handed servant instead, and with her attendants drank his blood. Jada Bharata stayed exactly as he was, at peace.
The Secret of the Palanquin
Around that same time the king of the Sauvira country had set out on a journey carrying one great question. On the bank of the Ikshumati river he meant to ask the sage Kapila where the true good of human beings lies in this world of sorrow. The king rode in a palanquin, and among the laborers pressed into forced service along the way was that same sturdy brahmin, bright as fire hidden in ash. At the servants’ order, Jada Bharata too took up the palanquin and walked. But his nonviolence toward all living things was such that he walked slowly, looking four cubits ahead on the ground; the other bearers went fast, and so the palanquin began to lurch.
The king said in irritation, “You there, bearer! What are you doing? Keep an even pace with the rest.” But seeing the motion still uneven, he said, “Why do you walk with such an unequal step?” The bearers pointed toward Jada Bharata and said, “It is this one among us who walks slowly.” Then the king said, “You have carried my palanquin only a short way; are you tired already? You look strong and well built, so can you not bear even this much effort?”
Jada Bharata answered in a calm voice, “I am not fat, nor have I taken up your palanquin; I am not tired, nor is there any effort for me to bear.” The king said, “You plainly look fat, and this palanquin rests on your shoulder even now; carrying a load does tire the one who has a body.” The brahmin said, “First tell me what it is you plainly see. Look: on the earth are my feet, on my feet my shanks, on my shanks my thighs, on my thighs my belly, on my belly my chest, my arms, and my shoulders, and on my shoulders this palanquin. Where in all of this is the load upon me? In this palanquin rests what is called your body; so to say ‘you are there and I am here’ is itself false. O king, I, you, and every living being are carried by these same five elements, and these elements too are swept along in the current of the gunas, the strands of nature; the gunas are ruled by karma, and karma is born of ignorance. The atman is pure, imperishable, still, without attributes, and beyond nature, woven alike through all beings; it neither grows nor decays. On what ground, then, should I say ‘I am fat’?”
Hearing this, the king climbed down from the palanquin and took hold of his feet. “Ah, best of brahmins! Set this palanquin down and show me your grace. Who are you in this dullard’s guise? Why have you come here? Tell me, I long to hear.”
Now Jada Bharata gave him the essence of the highest truth. The king had asked what the true good of a human being is. Jada Bharata said, “Goods there are by the hundreds and thousands, yet none of them is the highest truth. The man who counts wealth as his good sees that same wealth given away for dharma and also spent on pleasure; how then is it the highest truth? Call a son the good, and he is another’s good, his own father’s, and that father too is someone’s son; in this way the chain of causes would stop nowhere. A kingdom lasts a moment; the rite of yajna is built from perishable materials and is therefore perishable itself; even desireless action is only a means to liberation and not the highest truth in itself. The highest truth is that one atman, all-pervading, the same everywhere, pure, without attributes, free of birth and growth, and imperishable. As one breath through the holes of a flute raises many different notes, so, because of its limiting conditions, one same Supreme Self appears in many forms, as god and man and the rest. This difference reaches only as far as the veil of ignorance; the moment the veil lifts, it is gone.”
This same story comes in the Srimad Bhagavata as well, yet the Vishnu Purana tells it in a manner all its own. The Bharata whose mind, tangled in love for one deer, had missed liberation is the very one who, become Jada Bharata, brought the king of Sauvira to this knowledge of the self: that the carrier and the carried, the high and the low, the king and the bearer, are all the making of ignorance alone.
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)