Before you read
Then he opens it, and what pours out is everything a mind has ever seen.
The Fruit Vasistha Described
Vasistha had carried the hall a long way by then, through the mind and the senses and the one Brahma who is the soul of all and has no particular form. He looked at Rama and his tone changed, the way a man’s does when he has kept the best thing back. “Listen now, Rama,” he said, “to a pleasant story that has never been told before. I will keep it short. It is for your instruction, and it will give you something to wonder at.”
“There is a bilva,” he said, “a bel fruit, big and beautiful, as large across as many myriads of miles.” Everyone in that hall knew the bel, the hard round wood apple whose leaves go to Shiva and whose pulp is scooped out with a spoon in the hot months. Vasistha was asking them to picture one the width of the sky. “It is so solid that it will not ripen and will not rot in as many ages as it has miles.”
“Its flavor lasts the way honey lasts, or the ambrosia the gods drink. It is old, and it still grows every day like the crescent of the new moon, and its leaves come out fresh and beautiful. It stands in the middle of the universe the way the great Meru stands in the middle of the earth. It is as firm and as fixed as the mountain Mandara, and the winds that blow at the end of a world do not move it. Its root is the foundation the world rests on, and it stretches out in every direction farther than can be measured.”
“Inside this fruit are millions of worlds. They are its seeds. Set against the bulk of the fruit, they are as small as the particles of dust at the foot of a mountain.” He let that stand a moment. Everything Rama had wept over, every kingdom and every death, was one grain in that dust.
“The fruit is never found green or unripe. No one has ever seen it fall overripe to the ground. It is ripe of itself, always, and no age and no accident has ever rotted it or dried it or spoiled it.”
“Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra are not as old as this tree. They do not know where it came from or what root it grows from, and they do not know its extent or its dimensions.” Rama had prayed to all three since he was a child. Vasistha did not soften it.
“No one knows its germ or its sprout. No one has seen its buds or its flowers. There is no stem, no trunk, no bough and no branch of the tree that bears this fruit. It is a solid mass of great bulk, and nobody has ever watched it grow, or change, or fall.”
“It is the best of fruits and the largest, and since there is no core in it and no stone, it is always sound, always unspoiled. It is as dense as the inside of a rock, and it gives off bliss the way the disk of the moon gives off its cooling light, drizzling it down. It is all flavor, and it distills drafts of ambrosia into the conscious souls of men.” Rama had been taught about fruit as a boy, as every boy is: it sets, it swells, it ripens, it drops, it rots. One by one those had been taken away, and what was left had no tree, no seed, no beginning and no end, and was sweeter than anything he had ever eaten.
Sweetness Beyond the Six Tastes
“And it is full,” Vasistha went on, “of every delicacy there is, everything that gives pleasure to the six organs of sense, the eye, the ear, the skin, the tongue, the nose and the mind. Of the six savors a cook knows, there is not one missing from it.”
“It is the source of delight in every being. The moon’s cooling beams come from its brightness. It is the solid rock that all safety rests on, a stupendous body of felicity, and it holds the pith and the marrow that support every living soul. For souls are fruits too, Rama. Each one is shaped by what the person did before, and every one of them is fed by this.”
“So that transcendent pith, the wonder of souls, is held in the infinite spirit of God, and it is deposited and kept in this auspicious fruit, the sriphala, the fruit of fortune, the bel. All of that wondrous power sits in one small bel fruit, which stands for the human soul and for the divine one, and it never loses its thinness or its thickness or its freshness.”
“Now watch what a thought does. The thought ‘I am this’ clothes an unreality in a gross form, the way the thought of a devil gives a phantom that was never there a foul face. It is absurd to attribute differences to nothings, and the mind does it anyway, by itself, and then believes the creatures it has made are real.”
“The divine ego holds in itself the essential parts of all things, set in their proper order, the way the emptiness of the sky is filled with minute atoms, out of which the three worlds burst with all their variety. So the flesh of the bel holds the seeds of the trees to come, and every part of them.”
“In this way the power of consciousness grew into its proper form. And the essence of the soul kept its former state the whole while, and spent nothing. It unfolds without end and is never used up.” Rama was being handed a fruit, and told at the same time that nothing had left the hand that gave it.
Time, Direction, and Worlds
“The power of consciousness, stretched out like this from its own center, sees the fabric of the world and all its bustle inside its own tranquil self. It looks at the great emptiness on every side. It counts the parts of time as they pass. It conceives a destiny that directs all things, and from watching things operate it comes to know what action is.”
“It finds the world stretching as far as someone’s wish, and the sides of heaven extending as far as men’s desires. It comes to know love and hatred, the things it likes and the things it cannot stand. It understands ‘I’ and ‘you’, the one who sees and the thing seen, and then it looks at itself as a thing seen and forgets that it was the seer. It looks up at the worlds above, and though it is as high as any of them, it finds itself far below. It sees one thing in front of it and another beside it, some things behind, some near and some far off, and then some things become present to it, and others past, and others still to come.” The soul that had seen everything at once now saw a little at a time, from one spot, and called the arrangement a world.
“So the whole world is seen seated inside it like a playhouse, with its imaginary figures brightening like lotuses in a lake. Our consciousness sits at the center of the heart’s lotus, where the seeds are, with the knowledge of our endless desires budding around it, and it watches the countless worlds turn like a rosary of lotus seeds.” The men in the hall who told their beads every dawn could see it: world after world, each one a seed passing under the thumb.
“Its hollow is like the firmament, and it is filled with the great Rudras, who roam the distant paths of the middle sky like comets falling with their tails on fire. The great mountain Meru stands in the middle of it, the way the bright seed cup stands in the middle of the lotus, and the immortals wander over its moonlit summit like bees after the honey the moonbeams distill up there. Here is the tree of the garden of paradise, with its clusters of flowers spreading their fragrance all around; and there is the deadly tree of the old world, scattering its pollen to call us down to death and hell. Here the stars shine like the bright filaments of flowering arbors on the banks of the wide ocean of Brahma, and there lies the pleasant lake of the milky path, in the endless space.”
“Here roll the uncontrolled waves of ceremonial acts, with frightful sharks swimming in them, and there are the dreadful whirlpools of worldly acts that spin mankind through birth after birth forever. Here runs the lake of time in its meandering course, with the broad expanse of heaven for its open blossom, the moments and the ages for its leaves and petals, and the sun, the moon and the stars for its bright pistils and filaments. Here it sees the bodies of living beings, full of health and full of disease, teeming with old age, decay and the torments of death; and there it sees the quarreling expositions of the shastras, some delighting in their knowledge of Vidya, the knowledge of the spirit, and others wandering in the gloom of Avidya, from one error to the next.”
“In this way our inner consciousness sets out the wonders in the pulp of the bel: the unsubstantial substance of our desires and wishes, and the pithless marrow of our false imagining. It sees some who are tranquil, calm, cool and dispassionate, free of restraint and free of desire, who pay no attention to whether they are acting or at rest and do not care whether a work is done or left undone. So this single consciousness shows all her faces. She is neither alone nor many; she is what she is. In reality she has one form, which is peaceful stillness, and she carries the vast capacity to conceive within herself, at her liberty, every form of every thing.”
Rama Recognizes the Figure
Rama had sat still through all of it. Now he spoke. “You know the substance of every truth,” he said. “I understand the parable of the bel fruit you have just told me. It is about the essence of the compact intellect, the one unit that is identical with itself. The whole fullness of existence, with the persons in it, I and you and this and that, is the body of that intellect, and there is not the least difference between them, as if this were one thing and that another.”
Vasistha took the answer and sharpened it. “This mundane egg, this universe, is like a gourd, with the mountains and everything else as the flesh inside it. In the same way the intellect is like the bel fruit, the great substratum, which holds even the universe as the kernel inside it.”
“And yet,” he said, “though the world has no other container than the divine intellect, it is not literally the kernel inside that crust. The world decays. It declines, and in time it dissolves. None of that belongs to the nature of the everlasting mind of God.”
“Think of the hard coat of a peppercorn, with the soft pith held inside it. Or think of a block of stone, with the sculptured figures lying asleep inside it, in peace, before any chisel has touched it.” Everything, he was telling Rama, is already engraved in the divine mind, the way the statue is already in the rock.
Rama had been handed a fruit without a tree and told that his own grief and his father’s court were seeds in it, and then told that they were not quite seeds either, since seeds rot and this does not. He did not go looking for the tree. Vasistha was already drawing breath for the next one. “Listen, Rama,” he said, “and I will tell you another pleasant story, here in this place, and you will find it as charming and as strange as this one.” It was the story of a stone.