Mayamoha and King Shatadhanu

Who Is the Naked One

Parashara had just finished the conduct of the householder, the whole of it, as the great Aurva once laid it out for Sagara when that king asked him, and he had closed on a hard line: no man who steps over good conduct comes to a good end. Maitreya had followed every word, and one word in it he could not place. “I know well enough who the eunuch is, and the outcast, and the woman in her season, and the rest. I do not know who is called nagna, the naked one. Who is the naked one, and by what conduct does a man earn that name? Tell me the nature of the nagna as you know it; nothing is unknown to you.”

Parashara answered. “The Rik, the Sama, and the Yajus, this threefold Veda is the covering of the varnas, the garment that clothes every one of them. The sinner who in his delusion casts that garment away is called nagna. There is no other covering for the varnas, and so the man who abandons the Vedatrayi is naked, without any doubt.” Then he opened the matter wider, with a story that had come down to him through his own house. His grandfather Vasishtha, who knew dharma to its root, had told it to the great-souled Bhishma when Bhishma put this very question, and Parashara had heard it as it was told. Long ago, at some time in the past, a war ran for a hundred divine years between the gods and the asuras, and at the end of it the gods were beaten by the daityas under Hrada. Driven from the field, they went to the northern shore of the Kshirasagara, the Ocean of Milk, gave themselves to tapas, and sang this hymn to worship Bhagavan Vishnu.

The Plea of the Gods

The gods sang, “May the primal Person, Shri Vishnu, be pleased with the words we speak to worship the lord of the worlds. Who can praise the Supreme Self, from whom every being arises and into whom every being dissolves at the end? Your true nature is no object for speech; still, crushed by our enemies and robbed of our valor, we praise you so that fear may leave us. Earth, water, fire, wind, sky, the inner instrument, root-nature, and the Purusha beyond nature: all of them are you. From Brahma down to a post in the ground, divided by place and by time, this whole world, formed and formless, is your body.” Then they bowed to him form after form. To the Brahma-form that first rose from his navel-lotus for the good of the world. To the deva-form that is Indra, Surya, Rudra, the Vasus, the Ashvini twins, the Maruts, Soma, and the rest. To the daitya-form, full of hypocrisy and ignorance, without forbearance or self-command; to the yaksha-form, greedy for the objects of sense and carrying little knowledge in its heart; to the rakshasa-form, terrible, tamasic, thick with cruelty and maya. To the form called dharma, which gives the righteous in heaven the fruit of their sacrifices; to the siddha-form, which passes through water and fire untouched and rejoicing; to the naga-form, cruel, two-tongued, skilled in sensual pleasure and knowing no forbearance; to the muni-form, full of knowledge, peaceful, faultless, and free of sin. To the Kala-form that at the end of a kalpa devours every being without fail; to the Rudra-form that at the pralaya swallows gods and creatures alike and dances; to the human form, driven by rajas, that is the cause of all action; to the beast-form, tamasic, beset by its twenty-eight afflictions and wandering the wrong road; to the plant-form, tree, creeper, shrub, herb, grass, and mountain, which sustains the world and is a limb of sacrifice. “Animals, men, and gods, the five elements beginning with sky and their qualities beginning with sound: all are you. Beyond pradhana and mahat, the first cause of all and without equal, you are the cause of causes. Free of white and every other color, of length and every measure, of density and every quality, past all attributes, most pure, seen by the great rishis: to that form we bow. What is in our bodies and in the bodies of every other being and in all things, unborn and imperishable, beside which nothing else exists, that Brahma-form we bow to. Vasudeva, whose form is this whole universe, eternal, unborn, the seed of all, imperishable and stainless: to you we bow.”

When the hymn was done, the gods saw the Supreme Lord Shri Hari before them, conch, chakra, and mace in his hands, mounted on Garuda. They bowed and spoke. “Be gracious to us. We have come to you for refuge; protect us from the daityas. Hrada and the daityas with him have gone past even Brahma’s command and seized our shares of the sacrifices, and the shares of all three worlds besides. We and they alike are portions of you, who are every being; still, through ignorance, we see the world as a place of separate parts, ours and theirs. Our enemies keep the dharma of their own varna, they hold to the path of the Vedas, and they are devoted to tapas, and for that reason we cannot kill them. Tell us some means by which we may become able to kill those asuras.” The whole of their trouble sat in that one admission: their enemies were untouchable because they were doing everything right.

Mayamoha Takes Form

When they had said this, Bhagavan Vishnu brought forth from his own body a being named Mayamoha, delusion given a shape, and handed him over to the gods. “This Mayamoha will delude all the daityas. Once they have stepped off the Vedic path they will be yours to kill. Any god or any daitya who obstructs the work of Brahma is mine to slay, for I am engaged in the protection of creation. Go now, and have no fear. Mayamoha will go ahead of you and do your work.” At that command the gods bowed to him and went back the way they had come, and Mayamoha went with them, to the place where the asuras sat at their tapas.

The Preacher on the Narmada

Mayamoha came with the gods to the bank of the Narmada and found the asuras there, deep in tapas. He went to them bearing a peacock feather, sky-clad, with his head shaven, and his voice when he spoke was very sweet. “Tell me, to what end are you doing this tapas? Is it a fruit of this world you want, or of the other?” The asuras answered, “We began this tapas for the fruit of the other world. What have you to tell us about that?” “If it is mukti you want,” Mayamoha said, “do as I say. Honor this dharma; it is the open door to mukti. For mukti there is nothing more useful than this, and no dharma stands higher. Practice it and you will have svarga or mukti, whichever of the two you desire. You are mighty men, all of you. Honor this dharma.”

Then came the arguments, in every form and without end. “This is dharma and this is against dharma. This is sat and this is asat. This gives mukti and by this there is no mukti. This is the highest good and this is no good at all. This is to be done and this is never to be done. This is so and this is otherwise. This is the dharma of the sky-clad, and this the dharma of the clothed.” Doctrine upon doctrine he set before them, countless and contradicting, the anekanta-vada, and with it Mayamoha made the daityas fall from their own dharma. “Honor this great dharma,” he had told them, arhata, and so those who took it up came to be called Arhatas. Turned from the dharma of the three Vedas and deluded, they went out and led other daityas into the same dharma, and those led a third set, and the third a fourth, and the fourth still others, until in a few days the daityas had all but given up the Vedatrayi. Then Mayamoha, master of his senses, put on red cloth and went to other asuras, and his words to them were soft and sparing and sweet. “If you desire svarga or moksha, give up wicked deeds such as the killing of animals, and come to understanding. Know this whole world to be made of consciousness, vijnanamaya; attend to what I say. The wise hold that this world has no support, that it stands only on the appearance of things born of mistaken knowledge, and that it is stained by faults such as attachment; and in this ocean of samsara the jiva wanders in great distress.” Budhyata, he said, know; budhyadhvam, understand; budhyata; and with those words he pried them loose from their own dharma. They said the same words to other daityas, and those to others, and so they abandoned the supreme dharma that shruti and smriti had laid down for them. With heresy after heresy of many kinds Mayamoha, the great deluder, worked on the daityas who remained, and in a short while the asuras had given up even speaking of the Vedic dharma.

Now one of them began to revile the Vedas, another the gods, another the rites of sacrifice, another the Brahmins. “That violence can be dharma is a claim no reasoning will hold. That burning oblations in a fire bears any fruit is a child’s talk. If Indra won his godhood through sacrifice after sacrifice and still has to eat shami wood and the like, then a beast in the field eating leaves is better off than Indra. If an animal slaughtered in a yajna goes to svarga, why does the yajamana not kill his own father? If one man’s eating could satisfy another, why would travelers trouble to carry food on a journey abroad? Let the sons perform the shraddha at home. Understand that all this is the blind faith of the people; ignore it, and for your own good take an interest in what I have said. Authoritative words do not fall out of the sky. We, you, and everyone should accept only words that reason backs.” So with argument on argument Mayamoha unsettled the daityas until none of them kept any taste for the Vedatrayi. When they had taken the contrary path, the gods made their preparations in full and came against them, and battle broke out again between gods and asuras; in it the daityas, who had set themselves against the right path, were slain by the gods. Their own dharma had been their armor, the svadharma-kavacha, and it had protected them in every earlier fight; this time it was destroyed, and they were destroyed with it. From that day, those who walked the path Mayamoha set going were called nagna, because they had thrown off the garment that is the Vedatrayi. Parashara then widened the word. Brahmachari, grihastha, vanaprastha, and sannyasi are the four ashramas, and there is no fifth; the man who gives up the householder’s life and becomes neither vanaprastha nor sannyasi is also nagna. One who is able to perform the enjoined daily rites and leaves them undone falls that very day, and a single day and night undo all his nitya-karma; one who abandons them for a fortnight, except in a time of distress, is cleansed only by a great prayaschitta. If a good man’s eyes fall on someone who has gone a year without his daily rites, he should look at the sun; if he touches him, he bathes in his clothes; for the sinner himself there is no purification at all. There is no greater sinner in the world than the man from whose house the gods, the rishis, the pitris, and the bhutas go away sighing, unworshiped; a year of conversation and greetings and sitting and rising with him makes a man as great a sinner as he is, and whoever eats in his house, takes his seat, or shares his bed soon becomes like him. One who eats without worshiping the gods, the pitris, the bhutas, and his guests eats sin alone, and no good end awaits him. Brahmins and others who leave their own dharma for another’s, or live by low acts, are also called nagna; where the four varnas are badly mixed, the good conduct of the place decays; and those who so much as converse with a man who eats without worshiping rishis, gods, pitris, bhutas, and guests fall into hell. So a wise man always shuns speech and touch with these nagnas, defiled by their abandoning of the Vedatrayi; and if their eyes fall on a shraddha, even one performed with care by men of faith, it satisfies neither the gods nor the pitris.

King Shatadhanu and Shaivya

It is heard, Parashara said, that in former times there was on the earth a famous king named Shatadhanu, and that his wife Shaivya was a woman of the deepest devotion to dharma. She was a pativrata, given wholly to her husband, endowed with truth, purity, and compassion, with every auspicious mark, with humility and good judgment, and the fortune of the house ran through her. With that queen beside him King Shatadhanu worshiped the all-pervading God of gods, Shri Janardana, in the highest samadhi, and every day, absorbed and of one mind, the two of them gave the Lord their devotion through homa, japa, dana, fasting, and puja.

One day, after fasting on the Kartika purnima, husband and wife bathed together in the Bhagirathi, and as they came up out of the water a pashandi stood before them, a heretic who had walked off the Vedic path. He was a Brahmin and a friend of the king’s teacher of archery, and out of regard for that teacher the king treated him as a friend too: a greeting, a few words. His wife paid the man no regard at all. She was fasting, she told herself, and she kept silent and turned her eyes to the sun. Then the two of them went home and performed the whole worship of Bhagavan Vishnu as the rite requires. In the course of time that king, conqueror of his enemies, died, and Queen Shaivya climbed onto the pyre and followed her husband.

One Mistake, Many Births

Because King Shatadhanu had conversed with a pashandi while he was fasting, for that sin he was born as a dog. Shaivya was born the daughter of the king of Kashi, marked with every auspicious sign, endowed with every knowledge, and jatismara: she remembered her former birth. Her father wished to give her to some groom, and she prevented it, and he let the marriage drop. Then by her divine sight she learned that her husband had become a dog, went to the city of Vidisha, and saw him there in that state. The beauty fed her great husband with full respect, and the food she set before him was very fine. He ate the sweet food he had wanted, and then he showed her every kind of fawning that comes naturally to his species. Shame went through the girl at that fawning. She bowed to her beloved, born into that vile womb, and said, “Remember that generosity of yours, by which you have reached the womb of a dog and fawn on me. Do you not remember that you got this vile birth because you conversed with a pashandi after bathing at the tirtha?”

Reminded by the Kashi princess, he reflected a long while on his former birth, and a detachment that few ever reach came over him. With a mind full of dejection he went out of the city and gave up his life, and he was born in the womb of a jackal. The princess knew by her divine sight that in this second birth he was a jackal, and she went to Mount Kolahala to see him. There too, seeing her husband as a jackal, she said, “Do you remember what I told you of your former life, when you were born a dog, about your conversing with a pashandi?” The truthful Shatadhanu, best of kings, knew the whole truth from her words; he took no more food, and gave up his body in the forest. Then he became a wolf, and the blameless princess went to him in that lonely forest and woke him again. “You are no wolf. You are King Shatadhanu. You were a dog, and then a jackal, and now you have become a wolf.” He left the wolf’s body and was born a vulture, and there too the sinless lady roused him: “Remember your own nature; give up these vulture ways. It is by the fault of conversing with a pashandi that you became a vulture.” In the next birth he was a crow, and she found him by her yogic power. “You, at whose command every vassal lord brought tribute of every kind, are today born a crow, eating what is thrown out as offering.” In the crow’s womb too he gave up his life when she had reminded him, and he was born a peacock. In the peacock state the Kashi princess tended him every moment and gave him food of great beauty, fit for a peacock. At that time King Janaka was performing the great sacrifice called the Ashvamedha, and at the avabhritha, the bath that closes it, she had the peacock bathed. Then she bathed herself too, and reminded the king how he had passed through the wombs of the dog and the jackal and the rest. He remembered the whole chain of his births, gave up that body, and was born as the son of the great-souled Janaka himself.

The Reward of Devotion

Then the beauty urged her father to arrange her marriage, and at her urging the king of Kashi held her svayamvara. Among those who came to it was the son of Janaka, and the princess chose him, that same husband, again. The prince enjoyed many pleasures with the Kashi princess, and after his father Janaka passed to the other world he ruled Videha. He performed many sacrifices, gave many gifts to those who asked, begot many sons, and fought many wars with his enemies, and when he had ruled the earth justly and enjoyed his kingdom, at the end he gave up his dear life in a dharma-yuddha, a righteous war. Then the fair-eyed queen, as before, joyfully followed her husband onto the pyre according to the rule. By this the king, together with that princess, attained imperishable worlds higher even than Indraloka; purified in this way, he gained an undecaying svarga, the rarest married happiness, and the fruit of the merit he had earned before.

“So I have told you,” Parashara said, “the fault of conversing with pashandis, and the greatness of the bath that ends the Ashvamedha.” The rest he gave as rule. Never converse with pashandis and sinners, and never touch them; above all at the time of the nitya and naimittika rites, and for a man consecrated for a yajna, keeping clear of them is the first necessity. Seeing a house where the monthly rites have gone unperformed for a single month, a wise man looks at the sun; what then of those who have wholly abandoned the Vedatrayi, who eat the food of pashandis and set themselves against the Vedic teaching? Even the sight of such sinners calls for cleansing. Conversation with these wicked pashandis, contact with them, sitting and rising with them, is a great sin, and all of it is to be given up. Pashandis, men who do what is forbidden, the bidala-vratis and the baka-bhaktas, the cat-vowed and the heron-devout, the wicked, and the selfish: honor none of them even with a word. Contact with pashandis, wicked men, and sinners is to be shunned from afar, and always. “These, then, are the nagnas,” Parashara said, “whose sight spoils a shraddha and whose conversation destroys a day’s merit.” Those who grow matted hair or shave the head without cause, who eat without feeding the gods and their guests, who have no purity in them, and who are shut out from offering water and pinda to the pitris: by conversing with these, men go to hell.