The Wish-Fulfilling Gem and the Piece of Glass

Why Kumbha Tells the Story

Vasistha was telling Rama about a marriage. Shikhidhvaja, ruler of Malava, had a wife, Chudala, who woke to the Self while he was still a king in the full enjoyment of his kingdom. He noticed the new radiance in her and asked where it came from. “I have let go of everything untrue and unreal,” she told him, “and taken hold of what is true and real.” He laughed. It was unbecoming, he said, for a girl of her age, still enjoying every royal pleasure, to talk of great things; how could anyone be graceful on a diet of unreal nothing? She tried again and again to pass on what she knew, and he could take none of it, because to him she was his young princess and the mistress of his house, skilled in coquetry and housekeeping and in nothing else. In the end his own despair did what she could not. One midnight, while she slept, he left the palace, walked twelve days and nights to the foot of the Mandara mountain, and built himself a cell. Chudala, waking to an empty bed, took the kingdom in hand and ruled it for him. Eighteen full years went by, and more.

When at last she flew to Mandara and found him, he was lean and dark with austerity, and she saw at once that if she came to him as herself he would hear nothing; he had always treated her as his young and silly wife. So she reflected on the Agni-soma mantra and took the shape of a Brahmin boy. The old king rose for the radiant stranger and called him the offspring of a god. The boy said he was Kumbha, son of the sage Narada, born of a pot in a cave of Meru and named by Brahma. He asked the hermit who he was. “I am Shikhidhvaja, the ruler of a country,” the king said, “which I gave up long ago for a seat in the forest. Fear of the world’s trapdoors drove me here, fear of being born into it again. I keep every rite without fail, I give myself no rest, and I fall from one sorrow into an ocean of them.” The boy looked around the cell. “Then what are these pots and staffs, these wooden stools and these seats of kusha grass? You know that knowledge is the highest good; why do you delight in the toys of fools? Why not ask what you are, and how this world came to be, and when it ends?” The king wept until his face was wet. “From today you are my teacher and my father and my best friend,” he said, “and I am your pupil. Tell me which knowledge saves.”

“Take my words as a boy takes his father’s,” Kumbha said, “knowing they are spoken for his good. Hear them the way you hear music, without asking for its reason or its rhyme. I am going to tell you a story about a certain man whose conduct and character were in every way like yours, and who was brought back to his senses after a long wandering. It is a tale that clears away the cares and fears of intelligent people.” Shikhidhvaja settled himself on his kusha seat to listen.

A Seeker Ready for the Gem

There was once a rich man, Kumbha said, in whom two opposite natures lived side by side, the way the sea holds the water and the fire that burns beneath it: he was open-handed and he was miserly, and he was both at once.

He was skilled in the arts and practiced in arms, trained in every kind of dealing and expert in business. The one thing all that ambition kept him from was knowledge of the most high. His pursuits filled his life to the brim and left no room for it.

Then a great desire took hold of him: he would have the cintamani, the gem that gives its owner whatever he wishes for. He went after it with pujas and prayers and every sacred rite that was said to bring it, and he went after it the way the fire under the sea goes after the water, as if he would drink the whole ocean dry.

It took a long time. His greed for it never slackened and his patience never broke, and in the end he had it, because there is nothing the ardent zeal of a man cannot bring about. Unwearied labor, a firm resolve, a well-laid plan: these had raised the meanest men to fortune before, and they raised him. He saw the stone lying in front of him, close enough to pick up, the way a hermit sitting on a mountain peak sees the rising moon and thinks he could reach out and take it in his hand.

He saw the brilliant gem lying there, and he did not trust his eyes. He did not trust that the thing in front of them was real. He was like a poor man who is told that he has suddenly been made a king and cannot believe the message was meant for him. He stood and looked at it, and the looking turned into thinking, and the thinking went on for a very long time.

The Gem He Could Not Accept

He sank into himself and argued. Is this a gem at all? If it is, is it the cintamani or some other stone? Should I touch it? If I touch it, it may fly from my hand, or my hand may soil it.

No one has ever obtained the cintamani, he told himself. Men have hunted it for as long as there have been men, and if anyone ever did get it, the shastra says, it was in his next life. It must be my own miserliness that makes me see this brilliant thing in front of me askew, the way a half-blind man sees a flashing firebrand or a moon sunk deep in the sky. How could the tide of my fortune run so high all at once? How could I get, so soon and so easily, the stone that is the summit of perfection and the source of every treasure? Very few men, very few indeed, can expect good fortune to come courting them for a little trouble in a short time. I am a poor, honest man of small qualification and no account among mankind, and it is impossible that so miserable a wretch should be blessed with this masterpiece of the world.

So he hung for a long time between certainty and uncertainty, and his mental blindness so infatuated him that he never once stretched out his hand toward the jewel lying open in front of him. Kumbha stopped. “Whatever is there to be had,” he said, “at any time, by anyone, is missed and lost sight of in exactly this way, through ignorance or through neglect, with the thing itself lying in full view.” And while the undecided man hung in the balance of his suspicion, the precious gem flew away and vanished from his sight, the way a man of merit leaves the house of someone who has slighted him, the way an arrow leaves the string and a stone leaves the sling. When prosperity comes to a man she brings him wisdom and prudence with her. When she leaves a fool she takes his discretion away with her as well.

He did not give up. He began again to invoke the gem, to call it back into his presence, because a persevering spirit is never tired of trying again for what it expects. And in time he saw before him a brittle piece of glass, shining with a false glare that matched the gem’s. An invisible siddha, one of the accomplished ones who move unseen among men, had set it down in front of him, to tempt him and to laugh at his folly.

The fool took the brittle thing for the real gem, the way a drunk takes sparkling sand for the dust of pure gold. That is how a deluded mind works, Kumbha said: it counts eight and gets six, takes an enemy for a friend, sees a snake in a rope and a lake in the desert, drinks poison for nectar, and finds a second moon in the sky in the reflection of the real one.

He picked up his piece of trash and held it as the cintamani, the stone that would give him whatever he desired, and on the strength of that belief he gave away everything he owned in charity, because none of it was of any use to a man with the gem in his hand. His country, he decided, had nothing delightful left in it, and its people were beneath his company. The house he had given up was no loss. His relatives and friends stood in the way of his happiness.

Thinking like this, he resolved to move to some distant country and enjoy his rest there, and he took his false gem and went out and walked into an uninhabited forest. There the glass did nothing for him, and every calamity a man can imagine came down on him, like the gloomy shadow of a black mountain, like the horrible gloom of deep ignorance itself.

“The afflictions a man’s own ignorance brings on him,” Kumbha said, “are far greater than anything old age does to him or the torments of death. The calamity of ignorance overtops every other grief on earth, the way the black hair rises above everything else on the body and covers the crown of the head.” He did not wait for the king to speak. He went straight on into another story.

The Elephant Between Story and Meaning

It was the story of the great elephant of the Vindhya mountains, who snapped an iron trap with his tusks, spared the hunter who fell at his feet, and one day went down into the hidden pit that same hunter had dug around him.

Shikhidhvaja had listened to the two stories through to the end, and the quiet in the cell was very deep when he spoke. “Explain to me, please, what they mean,” he said. “The true gem and the false one, and the elephant that broke loose and was penned up again. You told them to me for a reason.” Kumbha nodded. “Then hear the meaning of my stories, the sense behind the words. I have been storing them in your heart and mind, and now I will unlock them, so that your understanding has light to see by.”

Shikhidhvaja as the Seeker

“The man who searched for the cintamani knew the sciences. What he lacked was knowledge of the truth, tattvajnana. He hunted for the gem and never knew what it was. And that man is you. You are as learned as he was; you shine above other men as the sun shines on the mountain tops. And you have none of the rest and quiet that come from knowing the truth. You are sunk in your errors like a block of stone dropped into water.”

“Then let me tell you what the cintamani is. It is the giving up of error. Those who have set themselves beyond the reach of error are the only ones who hold it; get it into your own possession, Shikhidhvaja, and you have set yourself beyond the reach of misery. Letting go of gross objects is what brings the pure joy of holiness. Giving up the world is what gives a man sovereignty over his own soul, and that sovereignty is the true wish-granting gem. The abandonment of everything is the highest perfection there is, and you should practice it while there is time, because to hold the grandeur of the world in contempt is the greatest magnanimity a soul can show.”

“You have done a great deal of it. You gave up your princedom, and your princess with it, and your riches and your relatives and your friends, and you rested in your resignation as Brahma, the lord of creatures, rests on the night when his creating is done. You came a long way from your country to this far hermitage, the way the great bird Garuda, carrying off his prey, the tortoise, came to rest on the farthest mountain of the earth. With your goods you let go of your egotism, and you scoured your nature clean of its stains, as the autumn winds clear the clouds out of the sky.”

“Understand, though, what perfection actually takes. It comes only when the egoism of the mind and every desire of the heart have both been driven out; then a man has the fullness of the world, which is perfect bliss, inside himself. And you have been laboring all this while under an ignorance of what is to be given up and what is to be kept, as the sky labors under its clouds. Your abandonment of the world cannot give you the highest happiness you came here for. There is something else, and you have still to go looking for it.”

“When the mind is flooded with its thoughts and the heart is eaten through by the canker of desire, resignation leaves it, as the stillness of a forest leaves before a storm. What use is giving up the world to a man whose mind is infested with troublesome thoughts? A tree that stands in the path of the tempest cannot be at rest. Thoughts are what the mind is made of, and mind is only another name for will, for desire; and as long as those are raging in a man it is useless to talk about his having subdued his mind. A mind busy with its thoughts has the three worlds standing in front of it in an instant. What good is it to such a man to have abandoned this one world, when the infinite worlds of the universe are present to his mind all the time?”

“Resignation has swift wings. The moment it sees a desire being entertained, it is gone, as a bird takes to the air at the first noise below it. The whole point of abandoning the world is to be done with care. Let one care rankle in your breast and you have said goodbye to your resignation, bowing it out the door as a man bows out an honored guest whom he himself invited.”

Kumbha’s Verdict on the Glass

“You let the precious gem of resignation slip out of your hand. And then you picked up the false, glossy trinket of austerity, for the sake of some fond wish you keep in view. I can see your mind fixed on the willful pains of your penances, as a deluded man’s eyes stay fixed on the moon’s reflection in water because he takes it for the moon. You forsook the indifference of your mind and followed the itch of your heart, and what you chose was an anchorite’s mortification, which is pain from its first day to its last.”

“A man who forsakes the easy task of devotion to God, which carries infinite bliss inside it, and takes up the hard duties of painful austerity, is said to be killing his own soul. You took the vow of self-resignation when you gave up every earthly possession. What you practice here, in this dreary wilderness, is a bound and painful asceticism, and the forbearance of true resignation is nowhere in it. You broke the bonds of your princedom and fled past the borders of your realm because they had become too painful to bear. Tell me, then: are you not held here in faster and far more irksome toils, in the unbearable chains of a rigid confinement? I think you have far more to worry about now, defending yourself from heat and cold in a defenseless forest, and that you have found yourself more tightly bound to your rigors than you ever had any idea of before.”

“You thought you had the cintamani in your hand. You must have found out by now that what you gained is not worth a grain of glass. So there is the full interpretation of the man and his greed to pocket a priceless gem. You have understood its meaning; store it in the casket of your breast.” Shikhidhvaja said nothing. He had heard the verdict on all his years in the forest delivered by a boy, and there was nothing in it he could answer. Kumbha let the silence hold, and then turned to the elephant.