The Sage in the Sky-Hut

A Stranger in the Hut

Vasistha had just seen the whole of creation lying inside the soul of Brahma, and had lost himself in the seeing. When his mind turned away from everything that could be looked at and settled on the One alone, he found himself, with no sense of having traveled, back in his cell in the air, the hut he kept for himself in the empty sky, with nothing under it and nothing around it. He looked for his own body, the one he had left seated there when he set out on his long journey through the worlds, and could not find it. He could not even tell where he himself was sitting. And in the place where his body should have been, a man he had never seen sat facing him.

The stranger was a siddha, one of the perfected ones who travel the air by their own power, and he was lost in meditation on the supreme spirit. He shone the way the sun shines, and his body gave off light like a flame that has no smoke. He sat in padmasana, each foot drawn up on the opposite thigh, and nothing about him moved. Ash was rubbed over his body. His head rested upright on his shoulders, his face was at ease, and both palms lay open below his navel, turned up, and so bright that the lotus of his heart seemed to have opened in their light, the way the lotuses in a lake open when the sun reaches them.

His eyelids were shut. Behind them the eyes had gone slack, as if whatever they looked at had dissolved into a single whiteness, and they drooped like the petals of a lotus folding at the end of the day. His mind was as still in every one of its chambers as the rim of the horizon is still, and his soul lay as quiet as the sky after a storm has passed through it.

Vasistha could not see his own person. He could see this one perfectly. He turned the sight over in his mind with the sharp attention his years of discernment had given him. So there was a great and perfected siddha here, in this lonely corner of the firmament, sunk in meditation as deeply as Vasistha himself used to sit at ease in this very spot.

The rest he could work out. The man had wanted deep meditation, and he had wanted it badly enough to search the sky for a place where nothing would reach him. He had found this retired cell, judged it the most favorable place he had seen, and come in of his own accord. He had found a body sitting in it, and he had taken the body for a corpse, a shell its owner had finished with. His attention, deep as it was, had not shown him that the owner meant to return to it. So he had thrown out what he took to be a dead man, and made himself at home.

Vasistha looked at the loss of his body and thought of going home, to his own abode far up among the stars. He set out, and as he set out he let go of his fondness for the lone cell, which another man now held. The cell had never stood on anything except that fondness. Once it was withdrawn the place wore away, as all things wear away in time, and where the cell had been there was nothing, an empty hollow in the sky. The siddha who had taken Vasistha’s seat lost his seat with it. He dropped, still folded in meditation, the way a city seen in a dream goes out the moment the dreamer stops wanting it.

The Fall to the Golden Land

He fell as rain falls out of a cloud. He went the way a scrap of cloud goes when the wind takes it off across the empty air, the way the disc of the moon crosses the sky, and the way a god falls back to earth when the merit that bought him his heaven is spent. He fell headlong like a tree torn out by the roots. Vasistha, watching, thought how this is what happens when we count on our dwelling standing and our life going on: both end in a single moment, as they had just ended for the man dropping below him.

What he felt for the falling man was a plain, kind concern. On the flight of his own mind he came down out of the heights in his spiritual form, following, toward the place where the siddha would land. The wind had the siddha now. It carried him on its currents, spinning him as a whirlwind spins a leaf, out beyond the limits of the seven continents and the seven oceans that ring them, to the country at the far edge of the world called the land of gold, the Kanaka land, where the gods take their pleasure.

He came down in padmasana, exactly as he had been sitting in the cell. The lower half of him met the ground, and his head and chest stayed upright, held up from inside by the two breaths he had drawn in, prana rising and apana sinking, the way the rope keeps a pitcher from going down into the well. He had fallen from that height and been carried that distance and he had not come out of his samadhi. He landed like a stone, and as lightly as a bale of cotton, and knew nothing.

Vasistha was now seriously worried for him, and anxious to get him awake. From his place in the sky he roared like a thundercloud and let down a flood of rain over the seated figure. He flung hail at him. He flashed around him as lightning. It worked the way the first monsoon clouds work on a peacock: the body flushed, the eyes came open the way a bud opens into a full flower, and the drizzle brought his spirit back the way driving rain makes the lotuses of a lake bloom.

Vasistha saw him awake and seated before him, and looked at him with goodwill, and asked after his spiritual welfare in the courteous way one asks a stranger. “Tell me, great sage, who you are,” he said, “and where your home is, and what I can do for you. And tell me how you came to be so unaware of your own state that you could fall this far and never notice.”

The siddha looked at him steadily. Then he remembered his visit to the cell, and whose cell it had been, and he answered in a voice as sweet as the cry of the chataka bird when it hears the clouds it has been waiting for. “You will have to wait a little, sir,” he said, “until I can collect myself and recover my former state. Then I will tell you how I came to be here.”

He turned inward and went looking for his past. When he had it, he told it to Vasistha without holding anything back, and he told it as if every part of it had happened that same day. His voice was soft and cooling, like sandal paste on the skin, like moonlight; the words were blameless and well chosen, pleasant to the ear and taking hold of the heart.

The Siddha’s Long Wandering

He bowed to Vasistha first. “I know you now, sir,” he said, “and I greet you with reverence. I must beg your pardon for intruding on you. It is the nature of the good to forgive the faults of others, and I am counting on that.

“Know me as one who lived, in an earlier birth, as a butterfly in the pleasure garden of paradise. For a long time I enjoyed the sweetness there the way a bee takes the honey of the lotuses in a lake. One day I was fluttering over a running stream and found it swollen and loud with waves, and I watched the whirlpools turn in it, and sorrow came into my mind. This, I thought, is what the ocean of the world looks like: trouble everywhere, and I am drowned in grief by the sight of it, and I am no better than the chataka, parched and crying aloud for a mouthful of rain.

“I began to think it through. My real delight, I saw, was in awareness itself; I found no pleasure in the enjoyments of the world, so I would have to rest in my own understanding and live without anxiety in the clear sky of my own spirit. Whatever pleasure there is here comes from the senses meeting their objects, shape, sound, taste, touch and smell, and I found nothing in any of them that lasted long enough to lean on. All of it is either the emptiness of the intellect or the intellect’s own pictures; why should I be fooled by false appearances like a madman? The objects of sense dull us like poison. Every sweet thing is bile in the end, and every pleasure is a kind of pain that happens to feel good. This body falls sick and wears out, and its mind darts about like a shrimp, and death watches it every hour the way the old crane watches the fish skim past. It is a bubble on the ocean of eternity. It is the flame of a lamp, burning bright in front of us and gone in a moment.

“What is a life, more than a stream of water running between its two banks of birth and death? It flows with currents of passing joys and griefs, swells with the waves of what happens to us, and turns with whirlpools of danger and difficulty. It is muddied with the pleasures of youth and goes white with the froth of old age, and now and then it throws up a few bubbles of gladness that burst as soon as they rise. It runs with the torrent of custom, loud with the hoarse noise of opinion, under the thunderclouds of envy and anger. The phrase ‘stream of life’ sounds as pleasant as ‘stream of water’ does, and yet these waters boil with the heat of the three fevers that burn every living thing, and they are full of the whirlpools of illusion and greed that pull us under and up and under again. The world runs as a river runs: it carries off on its back whatever is in front of us, and brings down on its current what we never foresaw. Everything that was present to us is lost and carried away, and it is useless to grieve over it; things we never imagined arrive instead, and which of them can we rely on? Every river on earth loses its water and is filled again from its source. The life that is the water of this body, once gone, is filled from nowhere.

“Fortune turns over people’s destinies without stopping, like a potter’s wheel, and every moment it drags someone new down into the ocean of the world. A thousand thieves and enemies of our estate prowl around to rob us, and it makes no difference whether we sleep or stay awake to guard it. The particles of our life fall away every moment, and the wonder is that nobody notices the days going until there are almost none left. We call today ours, and it is gone as fast as the days before it; nobody knows how much of his life he has lost until he meets his death. We have lived a long time, to eat and drink and move from place to place and roam through foreign lands and forests, and we have felt every kind of good and ill. Tell me what more there is for us to expect. Having known the pain and the pleasure of grief and joy, and the reversals of fortune, I was so impressed with how quickly everything passes that I stopped seeking anything. I had enjoyed every enjoyment and seen it pass, and still I found no satisfaction anywhere, and no distaste either, and no cool loss of appetite.

“I wandered on the tops of high hills. I roamed the airy regions on the summits of Meru, and I traveled to the cities of many a ruler of men, and nowhere did I meet with anything that was any real good to me. I saw the same wooded trees, the same kind of earthen cities, the same sort of bodies made of flesh, all of them frail and passing and full of pain, nothing to love. I saw that no wealth and no friends, no relatives and no enjoyment could keep anyone out of the hands of death. A man passes as fast as rainwater down a mountain gully; death carries him off as quickly as the wind takes a heap of hollow ash. No enjoyment attracted me after that, and prosperity had no charm, when my life was as brief as a woman’s sidelong glance. Where would we look for help, sage, and to whom, when a hundred evils and death itself hang over our heads every day? Our lives are leaves falling from the withered woods of our bodies, and the sap they drew from them dries up at the end.

“I had spent my life in empty wishes and expectations and gained nothing from them of any real worth. My delusion left me at last, and I saw it was useless to go on carrying the burden of this body; better to place no reliance on it than to demean myself by depending on it. All prosperity is adversity, because it passes and because it deceives, and the wise count it so. Men are moved along by the commands of the shastras and by their prohibitions, and tossed up and down between them like things floating on rising and falling water. The poisoned air of worldliness spoils the sweet scent of reason in a man’s mind, the way a canker inside a bud eats the flower to come. Men hurry across the earth in their bodies as fast as rivers hurry to the sea, all of them chasing what their senses want. Our desires fly to their objects like arrows from a bow, and like arrows they never come back to the string, like the friends who leave us when things go wrong. Our friends are enemies, winds that blow us away with their breath; our relations are our fetters; our riches are the causes of our poverty. Our pleasures are our pains, and this whole life is a prelude to its own extinction. Time passes over a man, showing him his sights of joy and misery, and the poor creature lives only long enough to see his friends die and to curse how long he has lasted. To enjoy pleasure is to play with the fangs of a snake; they kill you the moment you touch them, and when you look for them they are gone. Life is spent on the hardships of acquiring perishable trifles, with no attempt at the perfect state that is had without pain or toil. Men bound to their desire for enjoyment are shamed every moment by the contempt of the rich, like wild elephants in iron fetters.

“I take no delight in riches, which only the vulgar worship: fought over, earned with labor, kept with worry, and as unsteady as wind. Fortune favors a man a while and turns to misfortune in an instant, as fickle as the flash of lightning. Riches are like flatterers, all smiles while they stay and all mockery when they go. Health, wealth and youth pass like the shadows of autumn clouds. Tell me who, even among the great, has stayed the same to the end of his journey; men’s lives are dewdrops trembling on the tips of leaves. Our bodies decay, our hair goes gray, our teeth drop out, and everything in the world wears down except our desires, which know no decrease. The animal pleasures die off like wild beasts in the forest of the body, and the poison plant of desire that grows in that forest keeps growing. Boyhood passes as fast as infancy did, and youth as fast as boyhood. Life melts away like water out of cupped palms, and the body goes like a hurricane, gone before we have finished looking at it. I have found unpleasantness in what I took for pleasant, unsteadiness in what I believed steady, and unreality in what I took for real, and so I came to distrust the world and to be sick of it. The ease and rest that come to the soul when the mind has cooled toward everything are never had in any enjoyment the upper or the lower worlds can offer. Even now the pleasant objects of sense try to coax me into their trap, the way fruit and flower tempt the foolish bee to fall on them. But after all this long time I am free of selfish egoism, and my mind has grown indifferent to rewards to come and to the happiness of heaven.

“I have long found my rest in the solitary bliss of emptiness. Like you, I came this way and met with this cell in the ether. I learned afterwards that it belonged to you, but I never imagined you would come back to it. I saw a lifeless body inside it, and I took it for the frame of a siddha, a holy man who had quit his mortal coil and gone out into nirvana. That, sir, is my story as it happened. I am sitting here before you; do with me as you like. A siddha may be as perfect as lotus-born Brahma himself, and still, until he sees everything in his mind and weighs it well in clear judgment, he is blind to past, present and future for all his clairvoyance.”

Responsibility and Forgiveness

They were sitting on a plain of enormous extent, far past the edge of the earth and its waters, and the ground shone like the golden dome of heaven. Vasistha spoke to him as one friend speaks to another. “What you said is true,” he said. “It is the want of attention that keeps us from seeing the present, the past and the future whole. The fault is yours and mine together, and it belongs to every mind that was ever born.

“I say that knowing exactly how fallible we all are. If it were otherwise, sir, you would never have had to fall from your seat in the air. And you must pardon me in turn. I am just as fallible as you.”

He gave no judgment and asked for none. “Get up from here,” he said. “Let us go back to the airy abode of the Siddhas, where we were sitting before. A man’s own seat suits him better than any other, and perfecting himself is the best of all the perfections.” The two of them stood, and rose, and went up as high as the stars, climbing the same path through the sky like two stones flung into the air.

Up there they took leave of each other with the greetings due between sages. Then each went his own way, to the place he had chosen.

“So you have the whole of it, Rama,” Vasistha said in Dasharatha’s court. “I have told it so you may know the strange things that happen to us in this ever-changing world.” Rama had listened to all of it with one question held behind his teeth, and now he let it out.

Rama Asks About the Subtle Body

“Tell me, sir,” Rama said, “how you went roaming through the regions of the Siddhas, and in what kind of body, when your mortal frame had already turned to dust.” Vasistha smiled at the memory. “Ah. I remember it well, and I will tell you,” he said. “I wandered through the dwellings of this world until I reached the city of the Lokapalas, the regents who keep the quarters of the sky, and fell in with the companies of Siddhas who travel the middle air. I crossed the regions of Indra, the open firmament, and nobody there saw me, because I was moving in my spiritual body, and had been ever since I lost the one made of matter. I had become a thing of air, Rama, with nothing in it to hold and nothing to be held, only the empty, knowing soul. To people like you, who live among the objects of the senses, I was neither seer nor seen; and I kept no count of the distance I covered or the time it took.

“The soul, when it is like that, is occupied with the thinking principle of the mind alone, apart from everything made of earth and the other elements. It is like the mind in meditation, which handles no material thing. Nothing material presses on it or confines it; it is always at its own cognitions, and it deals with other beings the way a sleeper deals with the people in his dream. Hold on to that comparison with dreaming, Rama. Some schools dispute it, and they are wrong. A sleeping man thinks he is walking and acting in his dream, and no one in the room with him sees any of it. In the same way I walked among those beings of the air and watched them, and they never saw me. I saw every body on earth laid out plain before me, and no one could see the one who was hidden from them in his spiritual form.”

“But sir,” Rama said, “if your bodiless, empty form made you invisible to the gods, how could the Siddha in the Kanaka land see you? And how did you see anyone, with no eyes of your own?” “We who are spirit see everything by our inner knowledge of it,” Vasistha said, “just as other people see the things they want to see and never the things they have no wish for. Every man has a pure soul, and every man forgets it, because he is sunk so deep in his worldly business. I had wished that this particular Siddha should have sight of me, and so, by my wish, he saw me, because a man gets what he earnestly wants. Men who are slack in their purposes fail in their desires. This man was staunch in his and never swerved from it, and he got what he was after. And when two people are set on the same thing, or one is set against the other, the one who tries harder is the one who is crowned with success, and the weaker one fails.

“Then I traveled on through the airy regions of the Lokapalas, and I passed the celestial city of the Siddhas in my spiritual body and watched a people whose ways were nothing like the habits I had known. I studied their strange manners in that space of ether. No one there could see me, and I could see all of them distinctly, their way of living, their dealings with one another, and I watched in amazement. I called out to them aloud. They neither heard nor heeded my voice, and they seemed to me as empty as the phantoms in our dreams. I tried to take hold of some of them, and none of them could be grasped; they slipped through my hands like figures the mind has made up. And so, Rama, there I stayed in the abode of the holy gods, a pishacha, a ghost among them, and thought of myself as a creature turned into a pishacha in the open air.”

Rama leaned forward. “Then tell me, sir, what sort of beings pishachas are in this world. What are their natures, and their forms? What is their condition, and what do they do?”

The Worlds of Pishachas

“I will tell you, Rama, what sort of beings the pishachas are,” Vasistha said, “because it is bad manners in a teacher to leave a hearer’s question unanswered, even when it takes him off his road. The pishachas are beings of the air. Their bodies are subtle, like the empty shapes of people we see in dreams, and they have hands and feet and the other limbs just as you do, and they see everything as you see it. Sometimes one of them takes the form of a shadow to frighten people. At other times they slip into a person’s mind in their airy form and lead him toward error and wicked ends. They kill. They eat the marrow of their victims and suck the blood out of the weak-bodied; they lay siege to the mind and destroy the vitals, the organs, the strength and the life of a man. Some have bodies of air and some are made of frost, and some look like the men we see in dreams, with airy forms. Some are shaped like clouds and some have the nature of wind, and some carry bodies that are pure illusion, and every one of them has a mind and an understanding of its own.

“They are nothing you can lay hands on, and they can lay hands on nothing; they are empty airy bodies, and yet they know that they exist. They feel the pain and the pleasure of heat and cold, and with their spirit bodies they cannot eat or drink or hold or carry anything at all. They have desire and envy, fear, anger and greed. They can be deluded and they can be fooled. They can be brought under by the power of a mantra, by the virtue of drugs, by rites and practices; and now and then a man has been able to see one and bind it, with incantations, with exorcisms, with amulets and chanted invocations. They are the children of the fallen gods, and so some of them wear the forms of gods, while others look like men and others like serpents and snakes. Some look like dogs and jackals. Some live in villages and in the woods, and many make their homes in rivers, in mud and mire, and in the pits of hell. That is what they look like, where they live, and what they do. Now hear how they came to be.

“There exists forever a power that is almighty by its own nature, the Intelligence that no intelligence can grasp, and we call it Brahman, the great. When that living spirit thickens it becomes the sense of I, and when the sense of I thickens it becomes mind. This divine Mind is Brahma, the creator, the hollow form of the divine will, the unsubstantial source of this unreal world, and as formless as the hollow mind itself. It is like a person you see in a dream: there, and with no body to be there with. It has no earthly or elemental material in it; how could a bare act of will have a material body, standing in empty air? Rama, exactly as you see the city your imagination builds inside your own mind, the mind of Brahma imagines itself as Virinchi, the maker of worlds. Whatever a man sees in his imagination he holds to be true for as long as he sees it, and he takes everyone else to be made as he is. So the long meditation of Brahma, in his spiritual form as the creative power, set before him notion after notion of multitudes of worlds and varieties of creatures, and he became their creator. The idea, perfected, grew compact and took a tangible shape, and that shape we afterwards called the world, with all its varieties. This creating Brahma is the same as Brahman, the supreme soul: the two are one as the sky and its emptiness are one, as the wind and its motion are one. And when Brahma showed himself as Virat, in a material body built of the five elements, earth and water and the rest, that too was a turn of his will, and happened in thought and nowhere else. The world rises and falls the way figures rise and fall in a dreaming mind. Tell me, Rama, whether you find any gross substance growing in the empty space of your own mind, or mine, or anyone’s. If you find none there, how can you suppose it exists in the emptiness of the Divine Intellect, in the hollow of the universe? Even anger and affection, hate and fear, which do nobody any good: these are no created things either. They seem to rise and fall of themselves, like our wrong notions of the world being made and unmade, and they are eternal ideas, as old as the eternal mind. The whole vast void is filled with the clear water of the Divine Intellect, and our imagined conceits muddy it, and the mud is what we call reality. The empty spirit of God is the primal seed of everything, and from it these multitudes of worlds have come, scattered and tumbling through the air like stones. And in truth there is no field and no seed and nothing was ever sown or grown; whatever is, is forever the same, and the rest is fiction.

“Now among those scattered seeds of souls, some grew ripe and came out as gods, and the bright ones among them became the intelligences and the saints. The half-ripe became human beings and the races of the Nagas, and some put themselves out as insects, worms and plants. And the seeds that were bloated and choked and came to nothing in the end, those produced the wicked pishachas, bodies without bodies, empty forms of air. Do not think Virinchi made them so of his own accord. They became so by the desire they fed in themselves in their earlier existence. Every being that exists is as empty as the Intellect in which it exists, and each has a spiritual body quite apart from the material shape you see it in. It is long habit that has taught you to know them as material, the way it is habit that makes us think we are awake inside a dream. All living bodies are used to thinking of themselves as flesh, and live content in their frail, low, earthy shapes, the way the pishachas pass their time gladly in their ugly ones. Some men know others the way villagers know their fellow villagers and deal with them as with themselves, and they are like people living together in a dream. Others meet crowds of men, as in a city built in a dream, and never come to know one another, because they live far apart and belong to different peoples. That is how we stand toward the race of pishachas in this crowded city of the world: there are many races of beings we know nothing about, and the pishachas, the Kumbhandas, the Pretas and the Yakshas are among them.

“As the waters of the earth gather in the low places, the pishachas and the goblins live only where it is dark. Let a dark pishacha settle at bright noon on a sunny shore or in an open field, and it darkens that spot with the gloom of its own presence. Even the sun cannot clear that darkness away, and no one can find out where the dark demon has made its home, because it is made of delusion and slips from human sight. The sun and the moon and the furnace of a burning fire stand bright before our eyes; the dwelling of the pishachas is the opposite, hidden in a darkness no light can pierce. They are strange by nature, Rama. They go out like sparks in daylight and kindle again in the dark. That is the origin and the nature of the pishacha race, and that is what I had become, in the regions of the regents of the gods.”

A Body Made Visible by Resolve

“So there I was, in my empty intellectual body, which had none of the five elements in its making, roving the air like a pishacha ghost, seeing everything and seen by no one. The sun did not perceive me, nor the moon. Neither Hari nor Hara saw me, nor Indra, nor any of the gods, and I was invisible to the siddhas, the gandharvas who make heaven’s music, the kinnaras and the apsaras.

“It astonished me, the way it would astonish any honest man who finds himself a stranger in another man’s house, that the people of the place did not perceive me even when I walked straight up to them and called them to me.

“Then I thought to myself: these beings of the ether are seekers of truth, as we are, and it is right that they should see me here among them, in their own ethereal home. And they began to look at me, standing there before them, and they were astonished at an appearance they had never thought of, the way a crowd is startled by a juggler’s trick or a magic show. I conducted myself as a guest should in the house of the gods. I sat down quietly in their presence and spoke to them, and greeted them, without fear.

“Those who first saw me standing in their courtyard knew nothing about me and took me for an ordinary earthly being who went by the name of Vasistha. Those of the celestials who saw me in the sunlight of heaven took me for the enlightened Vasistha who is well known in the world. The siddhas of the air saw me afloat in the air and called me the aerial Vasistha. And the holy sages, who saw me rise out of the waters of the deep, called me the watery Vasistha, from my birth in the water. From then on I was known by all these different names among these different kinds of beings, the earthly Vasistha to some, to others the luminous, the aerial, and so on, each after its own kind.

“Then, in the course of time, my spiritual body took on a material form, and that form sprang from inside me and from my own will. That spiritual body and this material form of mine were both of them air, both of them invisible, because it was in my intellect alone that I perceived the one and the other. So my soul is pure intellect, Rama, appearing sometimes as emptiness and sometimes as the shining of the clear sky. It is spirit beyond everything, and it has no form, and it has taken this one so as to teach you. The living soul that is liberated is as free as the empty spirit of Brahman even while it deals with others in a body, and the liberated soul without a body stays as free as the great Brahman himself.

“As for me, I did not attain Brahmahood, the rank of Brahma and his office as creator of the worlds, though I practiced the rules for winning my liberation. Since I could reach no better state, I have become the sage Vasistha whom you see before you. And still I look on this world as a thing without substance, the way a sage looks at the figure of a person in his dream: it seems to him to have a material body, and it is a formless nothing. In that light the self-born Brahma and all the rest, and the whole of creation, pass before my eyes as visions, with no reality in them. Here I am, the same empty Vasistha of the air, appearing to you as a shape in a vision, and I am in the habit of believing myself full grown, exactly as you are in the habit of believing the world is solid. All these are the empty essences of the self-born Brahma, and since that deity is the Divine Mind and nothing else, this world is nothing more than that Mind’s production. The appearance of me, of you, of everyone, and of the whole world comes out of our ignorance, like the empty ghosts that appear to frightened boys and look to them as solid as anything.

“Once you know this, you can grow wise in time, and then this delusion of yours is certain to disappear, as our bonds to the world are cut when we let go of our desires and attachments. Our knowledge of the thickness and hardness of the world is scattered by true wisdom, as our longing for a jewel we dreamed of is scattered when we wake. The visible world goes out of sight all at once when we come to know what lies under it, as the wish to draw water from a river in a mirage dies when we see what the river is. Whoever reads this great account of Rama is sure to come to the knowledge that liberates, and to come to it in this life. The man whose mind is given to worldly desire and who takes its vanities for his real good lives in misery only, like the insects and the worms, and for all his knowledge of the world and all his piety he is unfit to have been born a man. The liberated man, while he lives, counts the enjoyments of his life as no enjoyment at all; the ignorant man prizes his passing pleasures and lets his everlasting happiness go. Reading this Maharamayana, a coolness settles in the mind, like frost falling on the ground of spiritual knowledge. Liberation is that cool indifference of the mind, and bondage is the heat of our passions; and still the human race turns away from the one and works hard, in its foolishness, only for the other, for its temporal comfort, while the wise look on and marvel. Here every man is the servant of his senses and bent on adding to his wealth and his family at the cost of his neighbor; and yet he could be happy and wise, if he would only think hard about what the spiritual shastras really mean.”

Valmiki said: when the sage had said these words the sun was going down, and the assembly in Dasharatha’s court broke up with salutations all round to perform the evening devotions. They made their ablutions as the sun sank into the deep, and when the night had ended and the sun was up they came back to the court.