Before you read
A wall of fire, a hundred hands that close on nothing, a search across every country on earth for a single deed to hold against him, and then Yama’s answer: the power Death carries was never his own. It works through what a man has done and what he believes himself to be, and this man has done nothing and believes nothing of the kind.
A Life Beyond Death’s Reach
Vasistha turned to Rama. The prince had sat through days of teaching in his father Dasharatha’s court, and the sage was about to begin the hardest part of it, the account of how a world comes to be at all. “Hear this first, Rama,” he said. “It is the story of a Brahmin called Akashaja, the one born of space, and I give it to you as a jewel for your ears. Once you have heard it, everything I say afterward about creation will be easier to hold.”
Akashaja lived the way Brahmins are supposed to live and seldom do. He sat most of his hours in meditation, and whatever hours remained he gave to the good of every creature that came near him. The years went on, and then the ages, and he did not die. Death noticed. Death is a servant in Yama’s house, the one sent out to collect what the judge of the dead is owed, and he had never found a debt he could not call in. “I am the one thing that does not perish,” he said to himself. “I eat everything, one by one, each in its turn. Why can I not fill my mouth with this sky-born man? My teeth go blunt on him, the way a sword’s edge is blunted when it comes down on solid rock.”
Having said it, he set out for the Brahmin’s house, intent on finishing the matter; no one who is any good at his work is slow to practice it. At the threshold a flame rose up against him, a blaze like the fire that burns at the end of a world, on the last day, when everything made is unmade. Death did not stop. He drove through the standing fire and came out inside the house.
Akashaja sat before him, plainly visible, a man at his meditation. Death reached for him with the eagerness of long hunger. His hand closed on nothing. He reached again with all the strength he had, a hundred hands at once, and still there was nothing to hold. He might as well have tried to stop a man of settled resolve from walking his chosen road; the strongest arm in the world cannot do it.
There was only one place to take a doubt like this. Death went to Yama, his lord, the one who weighs what the dead have done, and laid the question before him. “I cannot devour the sky-born one,” he said. “Tell me why.”
The Condition Death Requires
Yama answered him. “Death, do not trust your own might so far. It is strong enough to destroy the living, and that has made you think the strength belongs to you. It does not. The chief cause of a man’s death is the man’s own deeds, and nothing else.”
“So go and look. Find out what this man has done, every act of the person you intend to kill. Only with those acts to help you can you seize your prey.”
Death went gladly. He had a method now, and he set to it. He wandered every country under the horizon, the settled lands first, then the lake country and the river country. He went through forests and jungles, over marsh and over rock, along the sea coasts, then across the water to foreign lands and islands, and searched their wildernesses, their cities and their towns. He went through kingdoms and provinces, villages and deserts, until he had surveyed the whole earth, looking in every part of it for one act of the Brahmin’s that he could hold against him.
He found none. After all that searching and effort, the deeds of the sky-born Brahmin turned out to be as real as the children of a woman who has never borne a child. And the Brahmin’s mind, wherever Death looked at it, stood as fixed in meditation as if it were a rock.
So he went back from his reconnaissance to the one master who knows everything, the way a servant does when a task is beyond him and the orders need explaining. “Tell me,” he said, “where are the deeds of the sky-born Brahmin to be found?” Yama did not answer at once. He turned the question over for a long time.
“Death, this sky-born seer has no deeds at all,” he said at last. “He is born of empty space, and so everything he does is null and void. Whoever is born of space is as pure as space. He has none of that joining of cause and act which every embodied being has.”
“He has no connection with the deeds of an earlier life. He is as empty of them as the child of a barren woman; he is unborn, uncreated, unbegotten. The want of causes has left him a being of pure emptiness, and the want of earlier deeds has made him as nothing, a tree planted in the sky.”
“His mind is not ruffled the way other minds are, because there are no former deeds to ruffle it. And there is no deed in his present state either, by which he could become a morsel for you. This is the soul seated in the sheath of emptiness. It stays forever as the simple form of its own causality, steered by no cause outside itself. It has done nothing before. It is doing nothing now. It simply continues, something in the shape of an intelligence made of air.”
The Body Others Thought They Saw
Death had seen the man breathe. He had seen him move. Yama spoke to that before Death could raise it. “When you infer that the soul breathes and moves, that it is the agent behind those actions, you are only supposing. The soul has no thought of action and no leaning toward it.”
“It sits meditating on itself as inseparable from the Supreme Intelligence, the way the figures in a painting or a carving are inseparable from the mind of the painter and the carver. The self-born Brahmin is as closely joined to the objects of his thought as wetness is joined to water and openness to the sky. His soul lives in the Supreme the way motion lives in the wind. It has no store of deeds from past lives and none from this one.”
“He was produced without the cooperation of any accompanying cause, and because he is free of earlier motives he is not subject to the rising and falling that go with a human life. He turns out to be nothing other than his own cause. Having no cause for himself beyond himself, he is called self-produced.”
“Now tell me how you mean to lay hold of a being who has done nothing before and is doing nothing now. He falls under your power on one condition only: when he thinks himself mortal. The one who knows his own soul does not die can never be yours.”
“Whoever believes his soul is made of this earth, whoever thinks of himself as an earthly creature, him you overtake easily. Your reach runs over mortals born of earth. That is the whole of it.”
“This Brahmin is formless, because he has disowned the material body. So to bind him is as hard for you as to tie up the air with a rope.” Death heard him out. He had one more question, and it went to the root.
How the Unborn Appears
“Then tell me this,” Death said. “How is the unborn, the Aja, the Svayambhu who exists of himself, produced out of emptiness at all? And how can a body of earth and the other elements be there and not be there at the same time?”
“This Brahmin is never born and is never nothing,” Yama said. “He stays forever the same, as the light of intelligence, and that light has no decay. Think of the great Doomsday, when everything is dissolved. Nothing remains then except the tranquil, imperishable, infinite Brahman in his spiritual form. That is what the everlasting emptiness is, too subtle in its essence to carry any attribute at all. And yet at the beginning of the next creation it sees the whole stupendous cosmos standing before its mind like one huge mountain.”
“Because its nature is intelligence, it cannot perish. Those who see the spirit in the form of some body or other perish along with that body, like every embodied being. So this Brahmin stayed in the womb of emptiness at the beginning, in his state of unchanging, open intelligence. He is purely of the nature of that formless understanding, a vast expanse of knowing, with no body and no organs, no acts and no agency, and no desire of any kind in himself.”
“What is simply of the form of emptiness and pure light is never caught in the snare of old desires the way a creature of flesh is caught. It has nothing to know and nothing to see outside itself. The only idea we can form of it is something like an intelligence spread everywhere. Under those conditions, how could it take on an earthly form, or any outward form? So give it up, Death. Stop trying to lay hold of it.”
Death turned it over. There was no body anywhere that could lay hold of empty space, and that was exactly what he had been sent to do. He went home sorrowful, with nothing in his hands.
The Creator Revealed
Rama had listened with the attention of a man who has found the shape under the cloth. “You told me, sir, that Brahma is your father,” he said. “I think it is Brahma you mean by this unborn, self-born one, the universal soul and intelligence.” “It is Brahma, Rama,” Vasistha said, “just as I have told it. The argument between Death and Yama was held long ago about him and about no one else.”
It happened like this. A manvantara had closed, one of those ages that run under a single Manu and end with the sweeping away of everything that lived in it. Death had made an end of all living beings, and the long success made him feel strong enough to bear down on Brahma, the lotus-born, as well. Yama checked him. “It is your habit that drives you,” he said. “You go on along your usual track of killing. The form of Brahma is finer than the ether, and it lies beyond your reach. It is simply of the nature of mind, connected to its own thoughts and to nothing else, with no business in the actual forms of things. It is the wonderfully empty intellect with the faculty of knowing in it, and an intellect that is emptiness has no cause behind it and produces no effect.”
Vasistha went on in his own voice. The faculty of will in a person shows itself without taking on any material shape, and the self-born shows himself to everyone in the same way, in his own immaterial nature. Strings of pearls seem to hang in the clear sky; cities stand complete in a dream. The self-born appears like that, out of himself, owing nothing to outer objects. The solitary Supreme Spirit, which is the intellect itself, has no one to see it and nothing to see; so the mind too is manifest of itself, looked at by no one. It is the willing mind that is called Brahma, and will is a faculty of spirit, with no tie to any material substance. A painter’s mind is crowded with the images of things, and Brahma’s mind is crowded in the same way with the figures of every created being. He is manifest in his own mind as Brahman is manifest in the empty sphere of its intellect, without beginning, middle or end, and he seems to have the figure of a male. In reality he has no body at all, like the child of a barren woman.
Rama accepted it, and pressed on the one place where it seemed to leak. “It is as you say,” he said. “The mind is a pure essence with no tie to earth or any other material thing, and that mind is Brahma itself. Then tell me this. Why is the memory of his former states, in the kalpas that went before, not the cause of his birth? It is the cause of mine, and of yours, and of every other being’s.” “Whoever had a former body,” Vasistha said, “carrying the deeds of an earlier life, keeps the memory of it, and that memory is what causes him to be born again. Brahma is known to have no earlier deeds. Of what, then, could he hold a memory? He exists without any cause except the causation of his own mind. By his own causality the Divine Spirit is self-born and is his own spirit. He is everlasting; his body is born of itself out of the self-existent Brahman. This unborn Brahma has no material body of any kind. He has only the subtle one, the ativahika, the linga deha that carries a being across from one state to the next.”
“Then the everlasting body is one thing,” Rama said, “and the mortal body is another. Tell me, sir, do all created beings have a subtle body, as Brahma does?” “Every created being that is produced from a cause has two bodies, the subtle and the gross,” Vasistha said. “The unborn being that has no cause has one body only. The uncreated Brahma is the cause of every created being, and because the uncreated spirit has no cause of its own, it has the one body. The first lord of creatures has no material body. He shows himself in the empty form of his spiritual body alone.” Rama held the two bodies in his mind, his own and the one that would outlast it, and the sage went on toward the question waiting under all of it: how a mind with no body comes to be bound inside one.