The Infinite Bilva: A Figure for Consciousness

The Fruit Vasistha Described

Vasistha said, “Rama, hear a brief and wonderful illustration that leads toward knowledge of reality.”

He asked Rama to imagine a Bilva, the fruit often rendered in English as wood-apple, whose extent could never be measured. Thousands upon thousands of yojanas would not define it. Its reach exceeded even endless crores of that traditional distance.

Countless ages had passed without making it old. It was always ripe, filled with unfailing sap, and sweeter than nectar. Ripeness brought no decline. The fruit never fell, split, dried, or lost its freshness.

Vasistha compared its beauty and cool gentleness to the young moon. Among worlds it stood with the majesty of Meru and the firmness of Mount Mandara. Even the violent wind that rises at cosmic dissolution could not move it.

Beside this Bilva, universes appeared like rows of mustard seeds below a mountain. One whole universe seemed no larger than a mustard seed set before Sumeru. Rama was being asked to consider scale until ordinary measurement could no longer serve.

Brahma, Vishnu, Indra, Rudra, and other long-lived gods had never discovered the fruit’s origin. None could point to its beginning, middle, or end. No one had seen a sprout, tree, flower, trunk, root, or branch from which it grew.

The Bilva had no hollow chamber. It had no ordinary pulp and no stone at its center. No stages of arising, alteration, and result could be found in it. It remained one pure, changeless, self-luminous mass.

Rama listened as each familiar property of fruit was removed. What remained was no object that a traveller might find or carry. Vasistha had announced an illustration, and its strangeness was directing attention away from physical size and toward the reality that permits size to be experienced.

Sweetness Beyond the Six Tastes

Vasistha then spoke of the Bilva’s sap. Every delight known through sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and thought appeared within its sweetness. Even the pleasure attributed to Brahmaloka could not exhaust it.

He led Rama through a hierarchy of happiness, beginning with human enjoyment and rising through the delights of higher beings to Hiranyagarbha, the cosmic intelligence. Each degree of experienced bliss drew its power from the same ground. The Self’s own self-revelation exceeded the entire hierarchy.

Vasistha called that self-revelation the fruit’s marrow or essence. The word “marrow” described the intimate presence of awareness in every experience. It did not identify a substance concealed behind a rind.

This essence remained free from the three limitations imposed by place, time, and object. It could not be confined to here instead of there, to one moment instead of another, or to one thing instead of everything else. The Self itself was the Bilva.

Vasistha described consciousness as subtler than the subtle and greater than the great. He called it ancient because it did not begin with any remembered event. He also called it childlike because age never altered or exhausted it.

Rama heard that consciousness did not abandon its nature when varied forms appeared. The sense “I am this body” introduced an imagined stain and divided experience into self and world. That division depended upon the light that revealed it.

Time, Direction, and Worlds

Vasistha now unfolded what appeared in the Bilva’s radiance. He named individual and collective identity, space and sound, bodies and the relations among them. He moved through measures of time: a moment, a watch, a day, a month, a year, and a kalpa.

He spoke of direction and movement, action and order, attraction and aversion, acceptance and rejection. The distinctions “you,” “I,” and “that” appeared there, along with above and below, before and behind, near and far, present and future.

Vasistha continued until the list held universes and innumerable beings, cosmic lotuses and their forms, Meru, heaven and hell, seasons and lifespans, fire, sun, moon, ageing and death. Knowledge and ignorance, as well as the different standpoints expressed by teachings, arose in the same field.

Rama could follow each item because it was already available to experience. Every distinction appeared in awareness and was known through awareness. Nothing on Vasistha’s list could step outside that knowing light to establish an independent existence.

The power of consciousness, called chitishakti when its active appearance was emphasized, seemed to assume all these arrangements. Vasistha said its own nature remained quiet and free from injury. Movement, pain, and imagination appeared, while the illuminating ground did not become a separate object among them.

He also warned Rama against treating unity as a numerical count. Consciousness was not “one” in the way one fruit might stand beside a second fruit. Numerical one and many already belonged to the distinctions appearing within it. The Bilva indicated the common reality of every form.

Rama Recognizes the Figure

Rama considered the parable and answered, “Master, you have described the solid mass of supreme consciousness in the form of a Bilva fruit. The ego-sense and the whole expansion of worlds share that conscious essence.”

Vasistha accepted his understanding and refined one point. He had called the universes the Bilva’s marrow, yet consciousness possessed no material interior in which physical worlds could be packed.

“Consciousness has no inner wall and no outer wall,” he said. “Its nature does not undergo a material transformation into mountains, bodies, cities, or stars. Those forms appear through its power while it remains indivisible.”

The world’s presence in consciousness was therefore an appearance without a change in the substance of consciousness. The traditional word for such an appearance is vivarta. Vasistha used the fruit’s marrow to bring that relation close to thought, then prevented Rama from turning the figure into an enclosure.

Rama no longer searched for a tree that could bear the Bilva or a knife that could reveal its center. The fruit, the imagined search, the measures of time and space, and the mind considering them had all appeared in awareness. Vasistha ended the illustration by identifying that self-revealing awareness with the changeless power named by the Bilva.