Bhasa and Vilasa: Friendship, Inquiry, and Liberation

Atri’s Hermitage on Mount Sahya

“As long as a man has not come to see his own soul, Rama, by breaking his mind down of his own accord,” Vasistha said, “he does not get free of the two words that rule him, I and mine. And as long as those two rule him there is no end to his misery in this world, any more than a painted sun ever sets. His adversity spreads as wide as the ocean. His misfortunes follow one another like the waves of the sea, and the whole world looks to him as gloomy as a sky packed with the black clouds of the rains. So let me tell you an old story. It is a conversation between two friends, Bhasa and Vilasa, and it took place in a region of the Sahya mountain.”

Sahya is a mountain mightier than the three worlds together. Its height overtops the sky, its spread outdoes the ground, and its foot goes down into the regions under the earth. It is full of flowers of every kind and cut by waterfalls past counting, and its precious stones are watched over by the Guhyas of the hills. It is called Sahya, the bearable, because it stands in the temperate zone, and all the same the heat on its summit is as unbearable as any mountain’s in the tropics. Its girdle of sunstones seems set with pearls when the slanting sunbeams strike it, and its base is paved with gold, so that it looks like the golden island itself. Here a hill is nothing but flowers, and there another is nothing but ore; on one side lie lakes thick with flowering water plants, and on the other side the gemstones lie about on the ground.

Here the cascades hurl themselves down, gurgling in white froth, and there the old bamboos play through their hollow pipes when the wind goes into them. On one side the winds howl in the caves, and on another the bees are humming on the clustered flowers. The Apsaras sing in chorus on the mountaintops and the wild beasts growl in the forests; birds chatter in the groves, the clouds roar on the peaks, and the birds of the air cry out as they wheel across the sky. Vidyadharas rest in the grottos, black bees hum over the lotus beds, the borderlands ring with the choruses of the Kirata hill people, and the woods are loud with the songs of birds. It is the dwelling place of all three worlds at once: the seats of the gods on its top, the homes of men at its foot, and the holes of snakes beneath its bottom. Siddhas live in its caverns, and precious metals lie hidden in its heart; snakes make their homes in its sandalwood groves, and lions haunt its peaks. Wreaths of flowers hang high over its head like a crown, its body is smeared with the dust and pollen of flowers, a flower-scented wind fans it, and fallen blossoms lie everywhere. It is daubed with the gray dust of its ores and stands on a footstool of precious stones, and the women of heaven come down to its bowers to gather mandara flowers. Its peaks wear a blue mantle of cloud with gems hidden under it, and they look like beautiful women lit by the gold of the sun, rising to meet their lovers, the gods, in heaven.

On the northern edge of that mountain there is a tableland, overhung by trees so loaded with fruit that the branches bend, and holding a lake as clear as a gem, fed by cataracts falling from high up. The ground is strewn with the small flowers the swaying mango branches drop, and its borders are set with blossoming kolkara and punnaga, shining like blue lotuses around a lake. Bowers of creepers shut the sun out; the ground sparkles with gems like the floor of heaven; the jambu fruits drip their juice as cool as moonbeams, and all of it together is as lovely as a sky full of moonlight. It is as delightful as the heaven of Brahma, as delightful as the celestial seat of Shiva. And there the sage Atri kept his hermitage, a place where the Siddhas who came to it laid down their austerities.

In that hermitage lived two hermits, each as wise and as learned as Brihaspati and Shukra, the teachers of the gods and of the demons. The two of them were of one flesh and one soul, and in time two boys were born to them, like two lotus buds growing in the same bed, their bodies as pure as the clear lake they sprang from. The boys were named Bhasa and Vilasa.

One Mind in Two Lives

They grew up like two orchids on the branching arms of their parents. They had one soul and one mind between two bodies, joined to each other the way two loving brothers are joined, or two intimate friends. They stayed in each other the way the oil stays in the sesame seed, the way the fragrance stays in the flower.

Their fathers, already fond, grew more attached to each other in heart and mind through the care and affection they poured jointly into their sons, until they too seemed like one person living in two bodies. And the two graceful boys went on delighting in each other in that one hermitage, moving about it the way two bees move over the same bed of lotuses in the same lake.

Boyhood passed, and they came into their youth, and in a short time they shone out together like the two lights of the sky, the sun and the moon, rising at the same hour.

Then the aged parents left their worn-out bodies behind and went to heaven, like a pair of birds leaving a broken nest.

The death of their fathers left the young men as dejected as a drooping lotus in a channel that has run dry, and the vigor went out of their bodies and left them listless. They performed the funeral rites, and they stayed a long time in mourning, under the kind of sad blow that falls in every life and that even the good and the great cannot turn aside.

When the obsequies were done, grief and sorrow overpowered them so completely that they went on wailing over the memory of their parents with pitiful cries and tears. Then they sat silent and inactive, like pictures in a painting, their faces dark with melancholy and their hearts heavy with sobs and sighs.

Separation and the Passing Years

The two sorrowing hermits took up rigorous austerities, and kept them up until their bodies were as emaciated as two withered trees in the forest.

They passed their time in the lonely forest with a cool indifference in their minds, and they were as helpless as two stray stags that have been separated from each other and wander far from their home and from everything they owned.

Days and nights went by in this way, and months, and years, until both of them were worn out by age, like two withered trees in a valley where nobody comes to notice them.

They had not reached true knowledge, and without it their austerities did nothing except shatter their frames and drain their strength.

And then at last, after all those years, they happened to meet. And they fell into conversation.

Questions at the Reunion

Vilasa spoke first. “Bhasa,” he said. “You are the best fruit the tree of my life ever bore. You have your seat in the innermost room of my heart, and you are an ocean of nectar to me. I welcome you, my best friend in this world.

“Tell me, my good friend, how and where you passed so long a time after we were separated, and whether your austerities have succeeded and been rewarded with their fruit. Tell me whether your mind is free of its anxieties, and whether you are in possession of yourself. Say, have you won the reward of your learning? And after all of it, have you got your peace and quiet?”

Vilasa’s mind was still troubled by the vexations of this world when he asked that. Bhasa, by now, had come to a complete knowledge. He answered him with the respect a friend owes his dearest friend.

“Good friend,” Bhasa said, “it is a fortunate and happy chance that has brought us together here today. But how can we expect to have our peace and our rest, so long as we have to go on living in this world of strife, this valley of misery?

“How can I be at rest while the turbulent passions are still unsubdued in my breast? How can I be at rest until I know the one thing that is worth knowing, and until I have got across this sea of the world? How can either of us be quiet while desires and hopes and fears go on infesting our minds, and until we have dug them out, like the thorns and brambles of a thicket, with the spade of our reason?

“Until we gain true knowledge and our minds become even, until we know things fully and as they are, there can be no rest in us.

“And without the knowledge of the soul, without the true knowledge that is the greatest of all remedies for the diseases of the mind, there is no escaping the pestilence of this world.”

The Body-Tree and the Restless Mind

“The poisonous plant of worldliness sprouts in our childhood,” Bhasa went on. “It puts out its leaves in our youth and flowers in our old age, and it never bears its fruit before we die. The body decays like a withered tree, and our relatives flutter about it like bees; old age overtakes it with its blossoms of gray hair, and the fruit it bears is death. We have to reap the bitter fruits of the deeds we did in bygone times, laid up in store and ripening each in its season, and so the years glide over us, one upon another, in the same monotonous round of business, in the same sad tenor of mind.

“This tall body of ours, standing up on the ground like a thief, has all its inner cells and caves packed with the thorns of our cravings. It is the den where the serpent brood of our actions lives, spitting the poison of woe that follows us from one body into the next. Look how our days and nights roll around in a circuit of misery and misfortune that men mistake for passing joy and good luck. Look how our lives are spent in useless pursuit of the objects of our idle wishes, how we throw our time away on trifles that do us no good at all. The furious elephant of the ungoverned mind breaks the fetters of good sense, falls in with the wild elephants of desire, and ranges where it likes without rest or sleep. The tongue sits bawling like a vulture in the hollow of this tree of the body, and feeds itself on the gems of thought hidden inside.

“The slack limbs of the old and withered body drop like the dry leaves of a tree, and there is nothing to prop up the drooping spirit as it declines and decays from one day to the next. The brightness goes out of the body in old age, and the mind, dejected because nobody regards it any more, turns as pale and shriveled as a lotus under frost. The channel of the body dries up, the water of youth is drained out of it, and the swan of life flies far from it with nothing to slow its flight. The old, time-worn tree of the body is beaten down by the blasts of time, which strip off its leaves and flowers, our hopes, and bury them all under the ground. The serpent of desire, which cannot catch its prey any more, lies in the heart like a croaking frog with its complaints held in its mouth, and the mind hides itself like a monster in the pool of dark despondency. Our desires, with all their various wishes, are the many-colored flags of temples, fluttering every way until the hurricane of old age tears them down. The world is a long chain lying in the depth of eternity, and the rat of death is always at work in it, gnawing through the knot of life at the root.

“The stream of life runs muddy, with the foam and froth of cares on it, with whirlpools of birth after birth and waves of youthful folly as dangerous as they are loud. The stream of our actions on earth flows on without end, with the billows of our worldly duties and all the arts of living on it, and all of it runs toward the pit of perdition. The current of our friends and relatives and all the crowds of people glides on without pause to the deep and boundless ocean of eternity, and from that shore nobody comes back to life. This body is a valuable instrument for carrying out our duties in the world, and it is soon lost in the mud of this world-ocean, and nobody knows where it lies buried through all its repeated births. The mind is bound to the wheel of its anxieties and racked for its misdeeds; it goes round and round like a straw in the eddy of the ocean of the world. It dances and bobs on the waves of life’s endless duties, with no moment’s respite from its thoughts, swinging with every movement of the body and rising and falling with the course of events.

“The mind is a bewildered bird fluttering between its thoughts of what it has done, what it is doing, and what it is about to do, and so it is caught forever in the trap of its own fancies. The thoughts that this one is my friend and that one is my enemy are our greatest enemies in this world; they tear at my heartstrings the way a rough wind tears the tender leaves and fibers of a lotus. The mind is sunk in the whirlpool of its cares; sometimes it is hurled to the bottom, and sometimes it floats and is loosened from the depths like a living fish caught on an angler’s hook. The belief that this outer body is the inner self is the cause of every woe we have here, and taking other people for our own is just as much a cause of our misery. And all mankind, set between their weal and their woe, are swept away to age and to death, as the leaves of the trees that grow on the high hills are scattered by the high winds of heaven.”

Conversation Followed by Practice

Having greeted and welcomed each other in this way, the two brothers gave themselves to acquiring divine knowledge, and by it they gained their liberation while they were still alive. “And now I will tell you, strong-armed Rama,” Vasistha said, “that there is no salvation for the enslaved mind without true knowledge of the Divine. Know this, Rama of the polished understanding: the intelligent cross this world of endless woes as easily as the great eagle crosses the wide ocean, though no other bird alive can do it.

“The great soul is outside the body and beyond it. It is seated in its own intellect, and it looks on the body from a distance, as a spectator looks on at a crowd of people. When the body is pulled down by decay and disease, it affects us no more than a broken coach injures the rider. When the mind is depressed and dejected, it affects the understanding no more than the waves that ruffle the surface of the sea disturb the waters of the deep. What relation do swans have to the water of the lake they float on? What relation have the pebbles and stones of the sea to its waters, or the blocks of wood that ride the current to the stream that carries them? None, and in the same way no object of sense has any relation to the supreme soul. Tell me, Rama, what connection there is between a rock and the sea. The rock puts no stop to the inner current of the sea, and in the same way none of these worlds can stop the course of the Divine Mind. The lotuses in a stream are related to the water only as things it holds, and so all solid bodies are related to the all-containing Divine soul only as its contents.

“When a log strikes a body of water, the water is thrown up in drops all around; so the contact of the body and the soul throws up the various affections of the mind. When a tree grows at the border of a pool, it casts its shadow in the water below; so the nearness of objects to the soul casts their images in the mind. The reflections of things in a mirror, or in a glass of water, or in the swelling waves of the sea, are neither real nor unreal, and the reflections in the soul are the same, neither substance nor nothing, only something laid on from outside. The wind that breaks a tree or a rock is unaffected by the breaking; so the joining or the parting of the elements and the parts that make up a body alters nothing in the soul. A tree falling into water sets up a shuddering sound in it; so the contact of body and soul sets up a vibration in the organs of the intellect, which take in every impression. And those impressions belong to neither party, neither to the pure and simple soul nor to the gross body; they are the delusions of our mistaken knowledge, and when that is gone, the transparent intellect alone is left. Nobody understands how the wood is connected with the water that feeds it, and nobody knows how the body is united with the soul. The world looks real to the unintelligent, and it looks like a substantial thing to those who do not know the truth. Those who have no inner perception of the moisture in wood and in stone are like the worldly-minded materialist, who knows outer objects and nothing else; and those who have no intuition see no difference between the wood and the water, and so believe the body and the soul to be one thing, and never learn how unrelated and unconnected the two of them are. The soul is purely conscious of itself everywhere, with no objective knowledge of anything at all, and it is not even liable to the error of seeing two.

“The bliss of the soul is turned to misery by its false apprehension of things that are not there, the way a man sees an apparition because his imagination has made a ghost for him. Things with no bearing on each other come to bear on each other through our inner conviction that they do, as we see thieves in our dreams, or a demon’s face in a block of wood. The relation between the wood and the water is unreal from beginning to end, and so is the relation between the soul and the body. Water is untroubled until a tree falls into it, and the soul is undisturbed until it thinks of the body; the soul freed from its connection with the body is free of every malady and misery that flesh is heir to. Mistaking the body for the soul makes the soul subject to all the body’s imperfections and infirmities, the way the clear water of a lake is fouled by the leaves and twigs floating on it. A soul with no inner tie to outer things is set loose from every accident in the course of things, while a soul full of outside associations turns turbid, like water under a steady fall of leaves and rubbish and fruit and flowers. The soul released from its native hold on objects is wholly absolved from misery, and its knowledge of its connection with body, senses and mind is the mainspring of all its woes. That inner connection with outer things is the seed of every evil men suffer in this world, and brings forth all their pain and sorrow and error. The man who is bound inwardly to outward things sinks under the load of his connections into the depths of the earth; the man who stands aloof from his inner relations floats above the surface of this sea and rises into the air like a being of the air. A mind with inner bearings is a tree with a hundred branches; a mind with no inner relations is said to have faded and gone out. The mind unattached to the world is a pure crystal with no tint of color in it, and the mind attached to the world is a prism, throwing every color of the rainbow.

“The unattached, untinted mind is said to be at liberty though it is hard at work in the world, and the mind that clings to the world is said to be bound to it though it sits in austerities. The mind attached to the world is bound; the mind detached from it is free. It is the inner attachment and the inner detachment of the mind that are the causes of its bondage and its liberation. People whose minds are not of the world are not tied to the earth by their worldly actions; such a mind stays clear of all it does, as a floating boat stays above the sweet and salt waters of the lake beneath it. It is the bent of the mind that makes a man the master of an act he never actually did, as the delusion of dreaming makes a sleeper feel the pleasure and pain of his pleasant and unpleasant dreams. The activity of the mind moves the body, as the dreaming mind moves the inert body of the sleeper. The inactivity of the mind stills the body, and if the body should act by its own physical force, a mind that is out of itself is not aware of the act. A man receives the retribution of the acts he did with his mind, and none for those that passed beyond his knowledge. The inert body is never the cause of an action, and the mind is not joined to the living body as the spring is set in a self-moving machine or a clock; the body needs the action of the mind to set its animal force going. A mind that does not attend to an action of the body is never counted as its agent, any more than it is counted the agent of breathing, and no reward of any act accrues to one who was not engaged in doing it. The man who was not intentionally engaged in the sacrifice of a horse or the killing of a Brahmin neither reaps the merit of the one nor incurs the guilt of the other, just as the minds of distracted lovers never notice the results of what they do. One who is free of inner relation to anything is agreeable to everyone by his elevated bearing, and whether he does his part or neglects it he stays indifferent and neutral to both. No agency attaches to the man whose act is involuntary and whose mind is released from any inner attachment.

“It is the unconcerned indifference of the mind that brings it composure, and its careful concern for anything whatever brings it only vexation. So keep your inner concern away from everything you know to be only outwardly related to you, and release yourself from the mortification of loss by releasing all your outer relations. A mind cleared of the foulness of its inner relation with outer things takes on the clarity of a cloudless sky, and once every speck of dirt and dross is cleared from inside it, the mind becomes one with the soul, like a bright gem that shines twice as bright in the light of a star, or like a blue stream that takes the blue of the open sky.”