The Yamagita

Maitreya’s Question

Maitreya said to Parashara, “Everything I asked, you have described to me as it is. Now there is one thing more I wish to hear. The seven dvipas that ring the earth, the seven patalas beneath them, the seven lokas stacked above, every place within this brahmanda, all of it is filled with beings, gross and subtle, subtler and subtlest, gross and grosser still. There is no place anywhere, even an eighth part of a finger’s breadth, where beings bound by the bonds of karma do not live. And when their span of life runs out, every one of them comes under the control of Yamaraja, and by his order suffers torments of many kinds, naraka among them; and when the fruit of sin is eaten through, they wander on through the wombs of the devas and the other orders of beings, and begin again. This is the view of every shastra, and no shastra says otherwise. So tell me the karma by which a man, having done it, does not come under Yamaraja’s power at all. That is all I wish to hear from you.”

Parashara said, “This very question the great-souled Nakula once put to the grandsire Bhishma. Hear what Bhishma said in reply.” In former times, Bhishma told Nakula, a Brahmin friend from the Kalinga country came to him and said that a jatismara muni, a man who remembered his past births, had answered his questions and told him that all these things would come to pass in such and such a way. Then they came to pass. Whatever that wise man had said would happen, in whatever way he had said it, happened exactly so, and Bhishma asked the Brahmin further questions, and nothing the Brahmin told him in answer ever turned out otherwise. Faith grew in him. So one day he put to that Kalinga Brahmin the very thing Nakula was now asking him, and the Brahmin, calling the muni’s words back to mind, said that the jatismara had told him of a dialogue hidden deeper than any other, a conversation between Yama and his messengers. So the secret had passed from the muni to the Brahmin, from the Brahmin to Bhishma, and was passing now from Bhishma to Nakula, and from Parashara to Maitreya. “Child,” Bhishma said, “that is what I now tell you.”

Yamaraja’s Secret Command

Yamaraja, before whom every life comes at its end to have its account read out, saw his own servant standing near him with the noose in his hand, the noose that goes out to the dying and brings them in, and what he had to say he said low, into the man’s ear. “Those who have taken refuge in Bhagavan Madhusudana, leave them alone. I am lord of every man except the Vaishnavas. The Vidhata whom the devas worship appointed me, under the name Yama, to weigh the merit and the sin of the worlds, every deed of every being laid on my scale, and I hold that office under my guru, Shri Hari. I am not independent. Bhagavan Vishnu is able to control me too.

“Gold is one, and has no division in it, and still it appears in many forms through the differences of kataka and mukuta and karnika, the bracelet, the crown, the ear-ornament; melt the bracelet and it comes back as a crown, and the gold has changed nothing, only the name has. In the same way the one Hari is named through the many imaginings of deva and man and animal and the rest. And when the wind falls still, the atoms of earth that were flying in it, and looked for a while like a thing of their own, come down and join the earth and are one with it; in the same way all of these, deva and man and animal and the rest, produced by the agitation of the gunas, are absorbed at their end into that eternal Paramatma. The man who, with his understanding set on that highest truth, worships the lotus feet of Bhagavan, the feet the best of the devas worship, is free of every bond of sin, like a fire blazing up with offerings of ghee, with nothing left in it that can smoke. Leave that man from afar, and go.”

The Yamaduta heard his master out, the noose still in his hand. The order was clear and the face was not; he would have to know such a man when he stood over him, and nothing in the order told him how. “What is the devotee of Bhagavan Hari, the vidhata of all, like? Tell me.”

Who Is a Devotee

Yamaraja gave him the marks one by one, as a man describes a face to someone who must pick it out of a crowd. “The man who does not swerve from the dharma of his own varna, who holds one and the same feeling toward his well-wisher and his opponent, who takes no one’s property and does violence to no living being, that man of utterly pure mind, with raga and the rest gone out of him, know him for a devotee of Bhagavan Vishnu. The man whose spotless mind the dirt of Kali, the sin that lies on this whole age and settles on everything in it, has not soiled, and who has settled Shri Janardana in his heart, know him for a very great devotee of Bhagavan. And the best of men who sees another’s gold lying in a lonely place, with no eye on it and no one who would ever know, and by his own understanding counts it as straw, and who meditates on Bhagavan without a break, with a feeling that goes to no one else, know him for Vishnu’s devotee.

“Where is Bhagavan Vishnu, spotless as a slab cut from the crystal mountain, which takes no stain and shows every stain laid against it, and where are the faults of raga and dvesha and the rest that live in the minds of men? There is no way to join those two. The heat of a fire’s radiance cannot stay in the net of the moon’s rays. The man who is pure of mind, free of matsarya, deeply calm, pure in his conduct, the well-wisher of every being, a speaker of what is dear and what is beneficial, free of abhimana and free of maya: in his heart Bhagavan Vasudeva sits always. And with the eternal Bhagavan seated in his heart a man becomes saumya-murti, gentle in his very form, here in this world, and it shows on him the way a new sal sapling declares by its own beauty the lovely earthly sap that fills it; no one has to cut the tree to know what is inside.

“Those whose heap of sin has been cleared away by yama and niyama, by what they hold back from and what they hold to, whose heart stays fastened to Shri Achyuta without a break, and in whom there is not a trace of garva, abhimana, or matsarya: leave those men from afar. If the imperishable Bhagavan Hari sits in a man’s heart, bearing the khadga, the shankha, and the gada, the sword and the conch and the mace he is known by, then every sin of that man is destroyed by that destroyer of sin. How can darkness stay while the sun is present?”

Those You Must Not Approach

Then he gave him the marks of the other kind. “The man who takes the wealth of others, does violence to living beings, and speaks falsehood and harsh words, that evil-minded man, maddened by his own inauspicious deeds, has a heart Bhagavan Ananta does not abide in. The ill-minded man who cannot bear to see another’s prosperity, who reviles others and harms the sadhus, who neither worships Shri Vishnu nor gives gifts, that lowest of men has a heart Shri Janardana never enters. The evil-minded man who shows greed for wealth toward his own dearest well-wisher, his kin and his relations, his wife, his son, his daughter, his father, and the servants of his own household, who counts what is theirs and wants it for himself, do not count that man of sinful conduct a devotee of Bhagavan. And the ill-minded man who is sunk in evil deeds, who is mad with the conduct and the company of low men, and who binds himself every day with a fresh bond of sinful karma, so that each morning finds him tied tighter than the last, that man is a beast in human form; he cannot be a devotee of Bhagavan Vasudeva.

“Those whose understanding has grown steady, because Bhagavan Ananta stays in their heart in this form, ‘this whole prapancha, and I myself, are the one Paramapurusha, the Parameshvara, Vasudeva’: leave them from afar and go. Those who call out to him by his names, ‘Kamalanayana, Vasudeva, Vishnu, Dharanidhara, Achyuta, Shankhachakrapani, give us refuge,’ leave those sinless men from afar. As far as the sight reaches of that best of men in whose inmost being the imperishable Bhagavan sits, there, by the influence of Bhagavan’s chakra, strength and valor are destroyed, yours and mine alike; neither your going nor mine can be there. That man is fit for other worlds.”

The Secret Concluded

The Kalinga Brahmin said, “So did Dharmaraja, the son of the Sun, speak to his messenger, to instruct him. This account the jatismara muni told me, and I have told the whole of it to you.” Then Bhishma said, “Nakula, in former times that great-souled Brahmin who came from Kalinga was pleased with me, and told me all of this. Child, that whole account I have now told you exactly as it was, and this is what it comes to: in this ocean of samsara there is no protector of the jiva other than the one Bhagavan Vishnu. The man whose heart is given to Bhagavan without a pause, to him Yama can do no harm at all, nor the Yamadutas who go out for him, nor Yama’s noose, nor Yama’s rod, nor any torment that Yama keeps in his house.”

Parashara said, “So, as you asked, I have told you all that Yama said to his messenger, and told it well, from the whisper to the last word. Now what else do you wish to hear?”