Parashara had brought the world up out of its first cause and carried it through its kings and sages and ages, and now Maitreya wanted to know how it ends. Earlier, in the first amsha, when he was telling Maitreya how Brahma brought the worlds out of himself, Parashara had counted four dissolutions, and the fourth was the nitya pralaya, the quiet daily dying in which every creature born this morning is already walking toward its end. Here he set that one aside, because it never stops, and named the three that arrive as events. “The dissolution of all beings is of three kinds,” he said. “The naimittika, the prakrita and the atyantika. The one Brahma brings at the close of a kalpa is naimittika. The one men call moksha is atyantika. And the one that comes at the end of two parardhas is prakrita.” Maitreya caught at the unfamiliar number. “Tell me what a parardha is, this count you double to find the measure of the prakrita pralaya.” “Count from one by tens,” Parashara said, “one, ten, a hundred, a thousand, each place ten times the place before it. The eighteenth place you reach is the parardha. Twice that is the span of the prakrita pralaya, and when it has run, this whole manifest world has gone back into its cause, the avyakta, the unmanifest.”
“A human nimesha is one matra, the time it takes to speak a single short syllable. Fifteen nimeshas make a kashtha, thirty kashthas a kala, and fifteen kalas a nadika, and a nadika is a thing you can hold in your hands. Take a copper vessel that holds twelve and a half palas of water, the vessel Magadha calls a jalaprastha, and pierce it with a gold needle weighing four mashas and four fingers long. Set it floating. The time it takes to fill through that one hole and go under is a nadika. Two nadikas make a muhurta, thirty muhurtas a day and a night, thirty of those a month, and twelve months a year. That single human year is one day and one night to the gods. Three hundred and sixty of them make a year of the gods, and twelve thousand years of the gods make a chaturyuga, the four yugas run once through. A thousand chaturyugas make one day of Brahma. That day is a kalpa; fourteen Manus rise and rule and pass away inside it, and when it closes, Brahma’s naimittika pralaya comes.”
The occasional dissolution
“Hear the shape of that naimittika pralaya first, because its form is terrible, and the prakrita after it. When a thousand chaturyugas have run and the earth is nearly spent, a drought settles on it and does not lift for a hundred years. The creatures of little strength go first; the drought takes every one of them. Then the imperishable Bhagavan Vishnu puts on the form of Rudra and sets about gathering every creature back into himself. He enters the seven rays of the sun, and from there he drinks: the water in living bodies and the water in the ground, the seas, the rivers, the streams that come down the mountains, the springs, and the water standing in each of the patalas below, until the whole land is dry to its last drop. Swollen with all they have drunk, the seven rays become seven suns, and they blaze above, below and on every side and burn the three worlds down to Patala. Mountains, rivers and seas are left without a trace of sap, and when the trees and the waters of all three worlds have burned, the earth lies bare and hard like the shell on a tortoise’s back.”
“Then Shri Hari, ready to end everything, comes out of the mouth of Shesha as Kalagni-Rudra, the fire of time, and begins burning from below. The patalas go first. The fire climbs to the earth and takes its whole surface, then Bhuvarloka and Svarloka, and its mass of flame wheels round and round there until the three worlds, every moving and unmoving thing in them destroyed, glow like a cauldron left on the coals. Manu and the other office-holders who live in Bhuvarloka and Svarloka are scorched by the flames and go up to Maharloka to wait for the next world. Kalagni finds them even there, and they climb once more, to Janaloka, and there they shelter. When the whole world has burned, Janardana, still in Rudra form, breathes out of his mouth, and from that breath come the Samvartaka clouds, huge as herds of elephants, roaring, lit through with lightning, rising into the sky in every color there is. Some are dark as the blue lotus, some white as the kumuda, some the gray of smoke and some yellow; some the color of a donkey’s hide, some of lac, some of vaidurya, some of the indranila sapphire; some white as a conch or a kunda flower, some pale as jasmine, some black as collyrium, some red as the indragopa insect, some shot with every color like a peacock; some the red of manahshila, some the gold of orpiment, some the blue of a jay’s wing. Some are the size of a city, some the size of a mountain, some the size of a house, and some spread as wide as the surface of the earth. Those great loud clouds cover the sky and pour, and under their torrents the fire goes out. The fire is gone and still they rain, day and night without a pause; they sink Bhurloka under thick sheets of water and flood Bhuvarloka and the worlds above it, and with the world in darkness and every creature destroyed they go on raining for more than a hundred years. All this upheaval at the kalpa’s end happens by the greatness of the eternal Paramatma, Vasudeva.”
“When the water has risen past even the station of the Saptarshis, the three worlds are one great ocean. Then a wind rises from the breath of Bhagavan Vishnu, breaks up those clouds, and blows across that water for another hundred years. At the end of it Hari, who is made of all beings, who has no beginning and cannot be thought, the origin of the world, Madhusudana, drinks up the wind as well. Sanaka and the other siddhas who took shelter in Janaloka praise him, the seekers of liberation who have gone up to Brahmaloka hold him in their meditation, and he takes refuge in yoga-nidra, the sleep that is his own divine maya, turns his contemplation on his own nature as Vasudeva, and lies down on the bed of Shesha in the middle of that ocean. That is the whole cause. The only nimitta of this pralaya, its one occasion, is Hari asleep in the form of Brahma, and so it is called the naimittika pralaya. While Vishnu, the Self of all, is awake, the whole world acts; when Achyuta sleeps on his bed of maya, the world dissolves with him. Brahma’s day is a thousand chaturyugas, and his night, while the world lies as one ocean, is as long. When that night ends the unborn Bhagavan Vishnu wakes, takes the form of Brahma, and creates again in the same order as before. This is the pralaya at the close of a kalpa, the naimittika, which also carries the name avantara.”
The elemental dissolution
“Now hear the other, the prakrita. When drought and fire and flood have destroyed every world and every patala, and by Bhagavan’s will the hour of this pralaya has come, everything that evolved out of prakriti, from mahat, the great principle, down to the gross earth, is destroyed in order, each thing taken back by the one it came from. Water takes smell first, the quality that belongs to earth, and with smell gone the earth dissolves; where there was earth there is water, and that water comes up roaring and swelling fast and fills the whole world, now still, now flowing, garlanded with waves. Then fire takes taste, the quality that belongs to water, and without taste the water is destroyed; it becomes fire, and the fire spreads everywhere, the water resting inside it, until the whole world above and below and around is one slow filling of flame. Then wind takes form, the shining quality that belongs to fire; the fire’s light goes into the wind that is the life of all things, the fire has nothing left by which it can be seen, and it goes out, the world is dark, and a fierce wind blows from its own origin, akasha, above, below, across, in all ten directions at once. Then akasha takes touch, the quality that belongs to wind, and the wind falls still and akasha stands uncovered. One vast akasha alone remains, without form, taste, touch, smell or shape, round and hollow, pervading everything, with nothing left of it except its one mark, which is sound, and as sound it covers everything.”
“Then bhutadi, the first of the elements, the ahankara in which tamas rules, takes sound, the quality that belongs to akasha, and the five elements and the senses go down into bhutadi together, all at once. Mahat, the great principle, which has the form of buddhi, takes bhutadi into itself. And as earth and mahat are the first and the last bounds of the world inside the egg of Brahma, and of the world outside it too, so the seven coverings that wrap the outer world dissolve into one another in the same order: water takes the whole sphere of the earth with its seven dvipas, its seven seas, its seven lokas and every range of mountains; fire drinks the covering of water; fire goes into wind, wind into akasha; bhutadi takes akasha, mahat takes bhutadi, and the mula prakriti, the root of everything, takes mahat with all of it inside. This prakriti is the equilibrium of the three gunas, sattva, rajas and tamas, with none of them more and none of them less; it is also called pradhana, and it is the supreme cause of the whole world. It is manifest and unmanifest at once, and so what is manifest merges into what is unmanifest. Distinct from it stands the Purusha, pure, akshara, eternal, pervading everything, and even he is an amsha, a portion, of the Paramatma who is all being. That Self, which is bare existence, the knower and the thing known, the lord of all, in whom no notion of name or of birth can arise: that is the supreme refuge, the Parabrahman, and that is Ishvara. That Vishnu stands as this entire universe, and the yogis who reach him do not return to this world. So prakriti and the Purusha both merge into that Paramatma, the support of all and its one lord, whom the Vedas and the Vedantas describe by the name Vishnu. Men come to him by two kinds of Vedic karma, pravritti and nivritti: on the path of pravritti, the path of Rik, Yajus and Sama, they worship him as the Yajna-purusha, the lord of yajnas; on the path of nivritti the yogis worship that same Vishnu by jnana-yoga, as the self made of knowledge, the giver of mukti. Whatever is called by any sound, short or long or drawn out, and whatever lies beyond speech, is the imperishable Vishnu. The two parardhas I gave you as the measure are one day of that Bhagavan Vishnu, and when the manifest world has gone into prakriti and prakriti into the Purusha, his night is of the same length. In truth that eternal Paramatma has neither day nor night; we say so only by figure. This is the prakrita pralaya. Now hear the atyantika.”
The three afflictions and the absolute dissolution
“There are three tapas, three kinds of burning that afflict every creature: the adhyatmika, the adhidaivika and the adhibhautika. The wise man who comes to know these three, and in whom knowledge and vairagya arise out of the knowing, attains the atyantika pralaya. The adhyatmika tapa is of two kinds, of the body and of the mind. Diseases of the head, catarrh, fever, colic, fistula, gulma, piles, swellings, asthma, vomiting, diseases of the eye, dysentery, leprosy and the rest are the sufferings of the body. Desire, anger, fear, hatred, greed, delusion, dejection, grief, envy, the sting of an insult, jealousy, malice and their kin are the sufferings of the mind; all of these together, in their many kinds, are the adhyatmika. The pain men take from deer and birds, from other men, from pishachas, snakes, rakshasas, scorpions and the things that crawl is the adhibhautika. And the pain of cold and heat, of wind and rain, of water and lightning, the best men call adhidaivika.”
“Beyond these three, the sorrows that come out of the womb, out of birth, old age, ignorance, death and hell are of a thousand kinds. In the womb the jiva, its body tender, lies wrapped in the caul in great filth, the bones of its back and neck bent round, in a mire of urine and excrement, and every hot, sour, bitter, pungent, scalding and salty thing its mother eats doubles its pain. It cannot stretch, it cannot curl tighter, it is conscious and cannot draw a breath of its own, and it lies there remembering its hundreds of former births, bound by its karma, in misery. At birth the Prajapatya wind that contracts the womb grinds the joints of its bones, and the strong birth-wind turns its face downward and drives it out of its mother in great pain. The outer air touches it, and the jiva faints, and its awareness goes out of it like a lamp. It falls to the ground like a worm out of a stinking sore, as if thorns were pricking it and saws were cutting it. It has no strength to scratch itself or to turn over; it is bathed and fed at another’s pleasure; it lies on a soiled bed, bitten by flies it cannot drive off. So at birth and through all its childhood the jiva suffers. Then the man grows, with the darkness of ignorance over him, and in his foolishness he does not know: ‘Where have I come from? Who am I? Where will I go? What is my nature? By what bond am I bound, and what caused it? What should I do and leave undone? What is dharma and what is adharma? What is my duty, and what is merit, and what is fault?’ Men given over to sex and the belly, without discrimination, like beasts, suffer the great sorrow that ignorance breeds; ignorance is a state of tamas, the ignorant begin tamasic actions, the rites of the Veda lapse, and the wise have called hell the fruit of lapsed rites. Then age wears the body down. The limbs go slack, the old teeth loosen and fall, wrinkles and veins cover the skin; the eyes can no longer reach a distant thing, the pupils sink into their sockets, the body trembles, the spine bends, the digestive fire grows faint. Walking, rising, sitting and lying down become labors, and saliva runs from his mouth and soils his face. With none of his senses under his command he faces death, and he forgets at once the things he has just lived through. He rises when others lift him and sits when others set him down, and so his servants, his wife and his children come to disregard him; his craving for pleasure and for food grows, those who tend him laugh at him, and he remembers the deeds of his youth as if they had happened in some other birth, and sighs long sighs in his distress.”
“Then hear what he suffers at death. His throat, his hands and his feet go slack and his body shakes; again and again he faints, again and again a little awareness comes back. Out of attachment he frets over his gold and his grain, his sons, his wife, his servants and his house: ‘What will become of all of these?’ Terrible diseases begin cutting the bonds of his life, piercing the vitals like saws, like the dreadful arrows of Yama. His eyes roll up, his palate and lips go dry, his throat chokes with the humors massed in it and he makes a rattling sound, and in that state, with Yama’s messengers pressing on him, he leaves the body in great pain and takes on a yatana-deha, a body made to suffer the fruit of his karma. After death come the torments of hell. First Yama’s kinkaras bind him with nooses; then the beatings with staves; then the sight of Yama himself and of the dreadful road that leads there; then the hells, terrible with burning sand and engines of fire and weapons. Sawn through, burned in crucibles, hacked with axes, buried in the ground, impaled on stakes, thrown into the mouths of tigers, eaten by vultures, crushed under elephants, cooked in oil, flung from heights: what the dwellers in hell undergo for their sinful karma cannot be counted. Nor is hell the only place of sorrow. In svarga too there is the constant fear of the fall, and never any peace. Then he enters a womb again and is born again, and whoever is born dies for certain, in infancy or youth or middle age or old age. As long as he lives, sorrows wrap him round the way the threads wrap a cotton seed, grown out of the seed itself. Whatever a man holds dear becomes a seed of the tree of sorrow; wife, sons, friends, wealth, house and fields give him far more grief than they ever give him joy. For men whose hearts are scorched by the sun of samsara’s sorrow, where is there any happiness, except in the deep shade of the tree of moksha? So in my view there is one medicine, and only one, for the threefold sorrow that rises from the womb, from birth, from age and the rest: the attaining of Bhagavan, whose first mark is that he gives a bliss nothing surpasses. The wise should strive for that attainment. Karma and jnana are the two causes that bring a man to him.”
Bhagavan and Vasudeva
“Jnana is of two kinds: the knowledge born of the shastra and the knowledge born of viveka, discrimination. What the shastra gives is shabda-brahman, Brahman as sound; what viveka gives is the knowledge of Parabrahman. Ignorance is dense darkness. Against it the knowledge born of the shastra is a lamp, and the knowledge born of viveka is the sun. Manu, recalling the meaning of the Veda, said the same: Brahman is of two kinds, shabda-brahman and para-brahman, and the man who has mastered shabda-brahman goes on from it to the para. The Atharva shruti calls them two vidyas, para and apara; by the para the imperishable Brahman is reached, and the apara is the trayi, the three Vedas of rite and hymn. That which is unmanifest, ageless, beyond thought, unborn, imperishable, without form, without hands or feet, pervading everything, eternal, the origin of beings and itself without a cause, which the wise see with the eye of knowledge: that is the supreme Brahman, that is what the seekers of moksha should meditate on, and that is the very subtle supreme state of Bhagavan Vishnu the Veda speaks of. That form of the Paramatma is what the word ‘Bhagavat’ denotes. Brahman lies beyond the reach of words, and still it is called ‘Bhagavat’ by figure, so that it may be worshiped; the word belongs to the pure Parabrahman, the cause of all causes. In the word itself, bha carries two meanings, the nourisher and the support of all; ga carries three, the one who leads karma to its fruit, the dissolver and the creator. Complete aishvarya, dharma, fame, shri, jnana and vairagya, these six are the ‘bhaga’. And since every being dwells in that Self of all and he dwells in every being, he, the imperishable, is the meaning of the letter va. So this great word ‘Bhagavan’ names Shri Vasudeva alone, the Parabrahman, and no other; it is used of the Paramatma in its first sense and of others only in a secondary one. The one who knows how all beings arise and how they dissolve, their coming and their going, and knows vidya and avidya both, is fit to be called Bhagavan. Jnana, shakti, bala, aishvarya, virya and tejas, free of the gunas and of every klesha that must be cast off, are what the word denotes. And because all beings dwell in that Paramatma and he, the Self of all, dwells in all beings, he is also called Vasudeva.”
“Long ago Khandikya Janaka put this very question to Keshidhvaja, and Keshidhvaja explained to him the true meaning of Bhagavan Ananta’s name ‘Vasudeva’. ‘Because the Lord pervades all beings,’ he said, ‘and all beings dwell in him, and he is the maker and the protector of the world, he is called Vasudeva.’ That Self of all is beyond every covering. He is distinct from the prakriti of all beings, from its evolutes, from the gunas and the faults that follow them, and whatever lies between the earth and the sky, he pervades. He is the form of every auspicious quality. With a fraction of his maya-shakti he pervades all beings, and by his own will he takes a great body to his liking and accomplishes the good of the whole world. He is one single mass of qualities, tejas, bala, aishvarya, great knowledge, virya, shakti; he stands beyond prakriti and all that comes of it, and in him, the lord of the high and the low, there is no trace of any klesha, avidya first of all. He is Ishvara, the whole and the part, manifest and unmanifest; lord of all, witness of all, knower of all; and that omnipotent one is named Parameshvara. The jnana by which that faultless, pure, stainless Paramatma of one single form is seen or known is the para vidya. Whatever runs against it is ajnana.”
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)