Bhagiratha: From Total Renunciation to the Descent of the Ganga

The Question Behind Prosperity

Vasistha had just finished the story of the vetala, the demon who forgot his own hunger over a prince’s answers, and he turned to Rama with the point of it: draw the heart in from everything, do what the day asks without wanting anything of your own, and keep the mind as clean as the open sky. A mind steady and fearless, and quick to act, succeeds in the hardest undertakings. Bhagiratha had such a mind, and with it he brought the Ganga down from heaven. Rama asked to hear how. Vasistha began with the king. Bhagiratha was a man of eminent virtue, the tilaka mark on the brow of the whole earth and its seas. Whoever came to him with a wish received it before he could ask, and the sight of the king’s bright face gladdened a petitioner as the sight of a flawless gem would. He poured his charity on good people for their keep, and at the same time he gathered revenue down to the last straw and valued each straw as a jewel; he earned as he gave. He was bright as a fire without smoke and never weak, even when his duties tired him. He drove poverty out of men’s houses as the rising sun drives night out of them. Among his enemies he blazed like the noon sun and scattered his valor like sparks; among wise men he was gentle and cooled their hearts with his speech, shining among the learned as a moonstone glistens under moonlight.

That was the Bhagiratha whose name the river still carries. He hung the triple cord of the sacrificial thread on the world by stretching the three streams of the Ganga through heaven, earth, and the regions beneath. He refilled the ocean that the sage Agastya had dried up, the way a generous man fills a hungry beggar. He redeemed his ancestors from the underworld where a sage’s anger had left them and led them up the sacred river to Brahma’s heaven, and he did it by wearing down every obstacle in turn, propitiating Brahma, then Shiva, then the sage Jahnu, each of whom held the river back. Before any of that, Vasistha said, there was a young man who could not stand his own days.

He was in the vigor of his youth, and he felt old age coming on him fast, because he could not stop thinking about the miseries of human life. His brooding on the vanity of things produced a cold, philosophical apathy in him, and in the prime of youth it was as strange as a tender sprout shooting up suddenly in a barren desert. In his private hours he turned over the impropriety of the life he was leading and talked to himself about it. “I watch day and night return, one after the other, with no end. I watch the same giving and taking repeated, the same pleasures tasted again, and it has all grown tedious and flat. The only thing worth seeking and doing would be the thing which, once got and once done, leaves nothing further to desire or do in this short life of trouble and care.”

“Is it not shameful for a sensible being to go around the same circuit of business every day? Is it not laughable to be doing and undoing the same thing, day after day, like silly boys?”

Sick of the world like this, and afraid of where his worldly course would end, Bhagiratha went in silence to the solitary cell of his teacher Tritala and spoke. “My lord, I am tired to the bone of my long career in the world. I find it hollow and empty inside, and outside it is a vast wilderness. Tell me how I can get past the miseries of this world, how I can be freed from my fear of death and disease and from the chains of error and passion I am bound in so fast.”

Tritala answered him. “It is done by a continued evenness of disposition, by an unbroken joy in the soul, by knowledge of the one thing that can be known and is true, and by being sufficient to yourself in everything. By these a man is released from misery. His worldly bonds loosen, his doubts scatter, and all his actions turn to his good in both worlds. What I call the knowable is the pure soul whose nature is intelligence. It is present always, in everything, in every place, and it is eternal; it has no rising and no setting. The soul that animates the world is the one supreme soul. There are not two.”

“I know that, great sage,” Bhagiratha said. “I know the pure intelligent soul to be perfectly calm and tranquil, undecaying, without any attribute or quality. I know it is neither the embodied spirit, nor the living creature, nor the principle that dwells in material bodies. What I cannot understand is how I can be that intelligence when I am so full of errors. Or, if I am that very soul, why is it not as plain in me as it is in the pure divine soul itself?”

The admission turned the conversation. Bhagiratha had the doctrine and could recite it. What he wanted to know was why a man who had it could still be so full of errors, and Tritala’s answer began with knowledge and ended with the king’s own kingdom.

Tritala Names the Remaining Enclosure

“It is by knowledge alone,” Tritala said, “that the mind comes to know the truly knowable one within the sphere of its own intellect. Then the living soul finds itself to be the all-pervading spirit and is released from future birth. What widens the soul to its universality is unattachment to earthly relations: wives, children, the whole domestic business left behind, and an even mind in whatever helps or harms you. Union of the soul with the supreme spirit widens it, and continual communion with God, and seclusion from society, and staying in retirement.”

“True knowledge is the continued knowledge of the spirit and insight into the unity and identity of God; everything else is ignorance and false knowledge. The only remedy for the sickness of worldliness is the abatement of love and hatred, and it is the extinction of egoism that leads to the knowledge of truth.” Bhagiratha caught at the word. “Tell me, reverend sir, how anyone can be rid of his egoism. It is rooted deep in our constitution. It has grown up with our bodies, as big as the tall trees on the mountain tops.” “All egoistic feeling subsides of itself,” Tritala said, “when worldly desires are abandoned. That takes very great efforts of fortitude, the practice of self-denial and self-command, and the widening of the soul into benevolence toward everyone.”

Then he said exactly where the root was. “We stay under the reign of our egoism for as long as we lack the courage to break down the painful prison house of shame at our own poverty and of fear at being exposed to the contempt of others. Poverty is a shame to worldly people and an ornament to holy men.”

“If you can renounce all your worldly possessions and stay unmoved in your mind, you can be rid of your egoism and reach the state of supreme bliss.”

“Stripped of every title and honor. Freed from the fear of falling into poverty and the indignity that comes with it. Without one effort to rise again. Poor and powerless among enemies who hate you, and living in contemptible beggary among them, with no pride of mind and no vanity of body. If you can stay like that, destitute of everything, you are greater than the greatest.”

Bhagiratha heard these admonitions from his teacher’s mouth and made up his mind what he was going to do, and he set about doing it. He spent a few days devising his project, and then he began the Agnishtoma, the great sacrifice to the sacred fire, and he consecrated everything he owned to it, for the sake of the one object he wanted.

Three Days to Give Everything

He gave away his cows and his lands, his horses and his jewels, and money past counting, to the twice-born and to his relatives, without asking who deserved it and who did not. For three days he gave, lavishly, everything he had, until at the end there was nothing left to him except his life and his flesh and his bones.

When his inexhaustible treasuries were exhausted, he gave up his great realm itself like a straw to the enemy kings on his borders, to the horror of his subjects and the people of his city.

The enemy overran his territories and his kingdom and seized the royal palace and everything in it. Bhagiratha tied on the cloth he wore under his robes and walked out past the limits of what had been his kingdom.

He wandered far, through distant villages and desert country, until at last he settled where no one knew him at all, where nobody knew his face or his name or what he had been.

He stayed there in retirement for some time, and he became entirely composed, blunt to every feeling that came from inside him or from outside, and he found his rest in the serene quiet of his soul.

Then he set out again and roamed through different countries and crossed to distant islands, to see the ways of men, until, without meaning to, he turned back toward the land of his birth and the city where he had reigned, which was in his enemies’ hands.

He went from door to door there, as the current of time carried him, and the citizens and the ministers saw him begging for alms. Every one of them recognized their former king. They paid him the homage due to him and grieved to see him in such a state. The enemy who reigned there now came out himself to meet him and begged him to take back the estate he had neglected and the kingdom he had abandoned of his own will. Bhagiratha brushed all their offers aside like so many straws. He accepted the plain meal they gave him, and nothing else.

He stayed a few days and then turned onto another road, and the people cried out behind him, “What has become of our unfortunate Bhagiratha!”

Wandering with the Teacher

The prince walked on with a calm soul, a contented mind, and a quiet face, amusing himself with his wandering habits and his wandering thoughts, until on the road he met his teacher Tritala. They greeted each other gladly and joined company, and the two of them began to wander together through the places where men live and over hills and deserts.

Once, as the dispassionate pupil and his teacher sat together in the cool calm of their natures, the talk turned to human life. What good is there in carrying this frail body, they asked, and what do we lose when we lose it? Neither having it nor losing it brings any real gain or loss, so bear it as it is, in the discharge of the duties that have come down to us by the custom of the country.

They rested in that conclusion and passed their time going from one forest to another, feeling no joy beyond their inward bliss and knowing no sorrow, nor the mixed state between joy and grief that is the general lot of humanity, nor the turning wheel of pleasure and pain.

They spurned riches and property, the possession of horses and cattle, and even the eight siddhis, the supernatural powers yogis labor for, as so much rotten straw beside the contentment of their minds. This body, which is the result of past acts, has to be borne with fortitude as long as it lasts, whether we wish it or not. Like silent sages they welcomed whatever good or evil, whatever desirable or undesirable thing fell to their lot, as the unavoidable result of their earlier deeds, and they rested in the heavenly felicity to which they had made themselves alike.

At one time, as Bhagiratha was passing through a large city, he saw its ruler, who had no child, snatched away by the hand of death as a shark seizes a fish. The people were afraid of anarchy and lawlessness with no one to rule them, and they went looking for a fit person, one with noble endowments and the marks of a king, to be made their ruler.

They came upon the silent, patient prince in the act of begging alms and knew him for King Bhagiratha himself. They took him with them, escorted by their own regiments, to set him on the throne as their king. Bhagiratha mounted an elephant at once and was led along by a great body of troops who gathered around him as thickly as raindrops falling into a lake and filling it. The people shouted, “Here is Bhagiratha, our lord! May he be victorious forever!” and the noise of it reached the farthest mountains and filled their hollow caves.

He had thrown away one kingdom with his own hands. This one came to him in the street, unasked, while he was holding out a begging bowl, and he took it the way he had taken his meal in his old capital, as a thing that had arrived.

Two Kingdoms Return

While Bhagiratha reigned over that realm, the subjects of his own former kingdom came to him with reverence and petitioned their king. “Great King, the man you set over us has lately been devoured by death, as a little fish is swallowed by a large one. So rule your own realm again. Do not refuse an offer that comes to you unasked.”

The king, so entreated, accepted their prayer, and he became the sole master of the earth bounded by the seven seas on every side.

He went on discharging the duties of royalty without the least dismay or disquiet, and all the while he was calm and serene in his mind, quiet in his speech, and empty of passion, envy, and selfishness.

Then he thought of his ancestors. They had dug out the coast of the sea, the princes of Sagara’s line, and they had been burned alive beneath the ground by the curse of the sage Kapila, and they lay there still. He had heard that the waves of the Ganga had the merit of purity and the power to save every soul and body they touched, and he thought of washing his ancestors’ bones and dead bodies in them. The heavenly Ganga did not then flow over the land at all. Bhagiratha resolved to bring her down from heaven to this lower world.

The pious prince handed his kingdom into the charge of his ministers and went to the solitary forest, resolved on austere devotion for the success of his undertaking.

Many Years for the Ganga

He stayed there many years, through many rains, and he worshiped Brahma, and Shiva, and the sage Jahnu, by turns, until he succeeded in bringing the holy stream down to the earth. Each of them held her. She was pent up first in Brahma’s water pot, then caught in Shiva’s crest, and then shut under Jahnu’s seat, and from that last confinement she carries the name Jahnavi.

Then the crystal wave of the Ganga gushed out of the basin of Brahma, the lord of the world, and rushed into the moon-crowned crest of Hara, who is Shiva, and from there she fell to the earth below and took a triple course, like the meritorious acts of great men, which are praised in all three worlds.

She ran through heaven, over the earth, and into the regions beneath, and the three streams lay across the world like the triple cord of the sacrificial thread across a Brahmin’s chest. She poured into the ocean that Agastya had dried up and filled it again, as a generous man fills a hungry beggar with gifts without end.

Bhagiratha was the first to wash his ancestral remains in her holy water, and the stream has been known ever since by his name, Bhagirathi. His kinsmen, cursed and burned in the underworld, rose up the sacred river to the heaven of Brahma. So the river of three roads came to flow over this earth, a channel carrying Bhagiratha’s glory to distant lands. She runs fast, heaving her waves, smiling the whole way with her foam, sprinkling purity with the spray of her breakers and scattering plenty across the land as the reward of the best deserts of men.

“A mind steady and fearless, and quick to act, succeeds in the hardest undertakings,” Vasistha said to Rama, “as Bhagiratha did, with a perseverance that never wavered. It was by his perfectly peaceful and contented mind, by the lasting happiness of a soul in equilibrium, that this prince brought the heavenly Ganga down to earth, and the princes of Sagara’s line were given their release. Keep your view fixed on one object, Rama, as it was fixed in Bhagiratha’s mind, and pursue your calling with a calm and quiet understanding, as that steady-minded prince did in accomplishing his purpose.”

“Give up your thoughts of this and that. Shut the flying bird of your mind inside your breast and stay in full possession of yourself, after the example of the resolute prince Shikhidhvaja of old.”

“Who was this Shikhidhvaja, sir,” Rama asked, “and how did he keep his purpose so firm? Tell me the whole of it.”