When the Brahmin under the palanquin had finished speaking, the king of Sauvira sat silent above him, turning over what he had heard. Parashara told Maitreya that the Brahmin saw that silence and the thinking behind it, and chose to fill it with a story about advaita, the oneness that leaves no room for a second. “Hear what the maharshi Ribhu once said while he was teaching the great-souled Nidagha.” Brahma, the Parameshthi who sits above the created worlds, had a son named Ribhu, who knew the paramartha-tattva, the truth of what finally is, by his very nature; no one ever had to hand it to him. Pulastya’s son Nidagha became his disciple, and Ribhu, well pleased with him, gave him the whole of tattva-knowledge and held nothing back. Then Ribhu looked at what his teaching had made. Nidagha knew every shastra there was, and still his footing in advaita was missing; the oneness lived in his memory and he had not yet learned to stand on it. On the bank of the river Devika stood a lovely and prosperous city called Viranagara, which Pulastya himself had settled, and in that city, among its fine groves, Nidagha the knower of yoga made his home and kept his fires. A thousand divine years went by. Then the maharshi Ribhu went to Viranagara to see his disciple.
He came at the hour when Nidagha had just finished the balivaishvadeva, the offerings a householder makes to all beings before he himself sits down to eat, and was standing at his door, where a householder stands at that hour, waiting for a guest to feed. A Brahmin came into his sight. Nidagha did not recognize his teacher in him; he saw a guest, and a guest was what the hour asked for. He went to the door, gave him arghya, the water of welcome poured over the hands, brought him into the house, had his hands and feet washed, seated him, and said respectfully, “Please eat.” Ribhu said, “Tell me first what food there is to eat in your house. I have no taste for poor fare.” Nidagha said, “There is sattu in the house, and barley gruel, roots and fruit, and sweet fried pua. Eat whichever of these pleases you.” Ribhu said, “Those are all poor foods. Feed me something delicious: halva, kheer, whey, food made with fine khand sugar.” A guest’s word is a command in such a house, and Nidagha went in to his wife and asked her to make the tastiest food she could from the best things the house held. She honored her husband’s word and took great care over it, and when the dishes came Ribhu ate as he wished, to his full content.
When he had eaten, Nidagha asked him with great humility, “Tell me, has the meal given you ease? Are you fully satisfied and content? Is your mind at rest? And tell me this as well: where do you live, where are you preparing to go, and where have you come from?” Four courtesies, the questions any host asks a traveler, and Ribhu took them apart one by one. “The one who has hunger is the one who gets satisfaction. I never had hunger. Why then do you ask me about satisfaction? When the fire in the belly, the jatharagni, wastes the solid elements of a man, he feels hunger; when it wastes the water in him, he feels thirst. Hunger and thirst are dharmas of the body. They are not mine. So I am never hungry, and never being hungry, I am always satisfied. Ease and contentment live in the mind alone; the purusha has no connection with them. Ask about them where they belong. As for your three questions, where I live, where I am going, where I have come from, hear my view. The atman is all-pervading, like akasha itself, the space that holds everything and is held by nothing. Where have you come from, where do you live, where will you go: to that, what meaning can the words have? I go nowhere, I come from nowhere, and I live in no one place. Bodies make you and me and the others look like three separate things; in truth you are not you, another is not another, and I am not I. And in truth sweet is not sweet either. Look, I asked you for sweet food only to see what you would say. What is tasty or tasteless to the one who eats? A tasty thing, when its time has passed, turns tasteless, and then it disgusts. Sometimes the unpleasant becomes pleasant, and pleasant things disgust men. Name me a food that is pleasant at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. A clay house is made firm by plastering it with clay; this earthly body is strengthened the same way, by the particles of earth in its food. Barley, wheat, mung, ghee, oil, milk, curd, jaggery, fruit, all of them are particles of earth and nothing more. Of those, which shall be called tasty and which tasteless? Know this, and make the mind that keeps judging tasty from tasteless see everything equally. Samata is the one means to moksha.”
Those words were full of paramartha, and Nidagha, fortunate in hearing them, bowed to the man who had spoken them. “Be pleased with me. Tell me, who are you, who have come here wishing my good? Hearing your words, all my delusion is destroyed.” Ribhu said, “I am Ribhu, your guru. I came here to give you a mind that tells the real from the unreal. Now I go. What paramartha is, I have told you. Hold to that paramartha-tattva, and know this whole world as the one form of Vasudeva, the Paramatma. There is no difference in it anywhere.” Nidagha said, “Very well,” and bowed, and worshiped him with the highest devotion, and Ribhu went where he willed.
Who Is Above, Who Is Below
Another thousand years passed. Whether the teaching had taken root could be seen only by coming back, and the maharshi Ribhu came to that city a second time to give Nidagha knowledge. He arrived on a day when the king of the place was entering his city with a great army and a great deal of pomp, and the whole of Viranagara had gone out onto the road to watch it pass. Far back from the crowd, where the noise thinned out, stood Nidagha, with the kusha grass and the samidh he had brought in from the forest for his fire, hungry and thirsty, waiting for the road to clear. Ribhu went up to him, greeted him, and asked, “Why do you stand here in this lonely place?” Nidagha said, “The king is entering this lovely city today, so the road is very crowded. That is why I stand here.” Ribhu said, “It seems you know everything here. Tell me, then, which of them is the king, and who are the others?” Nidagha said, “The one riding that maddened royal elephant, the one as high as a mountain, is the king. The others are his attendants.”
Ribhu said, “You have shown me the king and the elephant together, and you have given me nothing that marks one from the other. Tell me what distinguishes them. I wish to know which is the king and which the elephant.” Nidagha said, “The one below is the elephant and the one above it is the king. Who does not know the relation of the carried to the carrier?” Ribhu said, “Then explain it to me so that I will know it. What is meant by the word below, and what is called above?” Nidagha answered with his body. In one movement he climbed onto Ribhu’s back and sat there, a householder astride a stranger on the public road. “Listen, I am telling you what you asked. Now I am above, like the king, and you are below, like the elephant. I showed you this example so that you would understand.” From beneath him Ribhu said, “If you are like the king and I am like the elephant, then tell me this: who are you, and who am I?”
Nidagha was off his back in an instant and had seized both his feet. “You are my acharya, the maharshi Ribhu. No one else has a mind refined by the samskara of advaita the way my acharya’s is. Our guru himself has come.” Ribhu said, “Nidagha, you honored me greatly with your service before, and out of affection for you I, Ribhu, your guru, have come to teach you again. To hold the awareness of the undivided self in all things: that is the essence of paramartha, and I have taught it to you in brief.” Having said this to Nidagha, the learned Bhagavan Ribhu went away, and this time the teaching held: by it Nidagha turned wholly to the contemplation of advaita.
He came to see every being as no different from himself. Here the Brahmin turned the story on the king who rode above him. “As that Brahman-devoted Brahmin attained supreme moksha, so you too will gain mukti, holding yourself, your enemy and your friend to be alike and knowing yourself to be all-pervading. One akasha appears with distinctions in it, white here and blue there; so to those whose sight is deluded the one atman appears divided. Whatever is in this world is all one atman, and it is imperishable, and besides it there is nothing else. I, you and all of these are of the form of the atman. So give up the delusion that sees difference.” When the Brahmin had said this, Parashara told Maitreya, the king of Sauvira took the paramartha view and gave up the sense of difference; and that best of Brahmins, who remembered his births and had woken through that remembering, was freed in that very birth. Whoever tells this essential story of King Bharata with devotion, or hears it, has his mind made pure; he never forgets the self, and in birth after birth he gains fitness for mukti.
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)