Dama, Vyala, and Kata: How Habit Creates the Ego

Three Commanders Enter the War

Vasistha had been telling Rama, in Dasharatha’s hall, that the body is a frail flower and its pleasures and pains unreal, and that a man should give up his misjudgments about the reality of himself and of this thing and that, turn his understanding to the Reality beyond them, and go on eating and drinking as before. Now he came to the story that proved it. “Do not let the case of the demons Dama and Vyala, the snare and the snake, apply to you,” he said. “Pull yourself out of this useless grieving over the miseries of the world. Learn fortitude from the story of Bhima and Bhasa.” Rama asked at once: “What is this parable of the snare and the snake, which you say must never apply to me? Tell it in full, so that it takes the sorrow out of my mind and out of all men’s minds. And what is the fortitude of Bhima and Bhasa that you hold up for me to copy, to be rid of every earthly sorrow? Tell me the whole of it. Your words purify, the way the roar of the rain clouds eases the summer heat for the peacocks.” “Listen, then,” Vasistha said, “and I will tell you both, so that you can act on what they teach.” There was once a demon named Shambara, chief of his kind and a sorcerer of great depth, who lived in a cell under the earth filled with enchantments, a treasury of wonders. He built a city in the sky by magic, with gardens and temples of the gods in it, and artificial suns and moons set into its vault. Its stones matched the gems of Sumeru; the women of his inner palace outsang the women of heaven; the arbors of his pleasure garden were shaded by an awning of moonbeams; blue lotuses bloomed in his bedroom, and swans of gemstone cackled about the golden lotuses in his lakes. His garden house had hot and cold baths for the two seasons. His magic elephant drove off Airavata, Indra’s own mount. The treasures of the three worlds were heaped in his inner rooms, a hundred moons lit the night of his underground home, and he sang his war songs before his idol while the whole host of demons honored him as their commander. He kept a great army of Asuras to defeat the gods, and the gods watched him. Whenever the sorcerer slept, or went out of his city, they fell on his legions. It enraged him until he broke trees with his hands; he named generals to protect the army; and the gods found their moments and killed those generals one by one, the way hawks take weak, frightened sparrows out of the air. He appointed others, swift and hoarse as sea waves. The gods destroyed those too, in a short time.

Then the demon chief went after the gods himself, up past their own station above the heavens. They fled their home at the sight of him, the way deer bolt into the thickets at the sight of Shiva’s bull. The gods wept with weakness; the faces of the Apsaras were wet with tears. Shambara found heaven empty, like a world after its ruin. He went through it in his rage, plundered its valuables, burned the cities of the regents of the quarters, and went home. The hatred between the two sides had grown so deep that the gods left their heavenly seats altogether and hid in distant parts of the world. From hiding they persevered, and in the end they defeated and killed every general and every fighter Shambara sent against them. He breathed living fire from his nostrils like a burning mountain. He searched the three worlds, and he found where the gods were hiding, the way a wicked man finds his purpose through sheer effort.

What he did next had never been done. By sorcery he produced three Asuras of enormous strength and terrifying aspect, hideous as death, for the protection of his army. These leaders of his force, born from his spell, flew upward with bodies like the winged mountains of old. He named them for what he wanted of them: Dama, the snare; Vyala, the snake; Kata, the mat; to entrap, to enfold and to wrap up the enemy. They were beings from before the first man, with no shifting desires, and because they had no prior acts behind them, the way human beings do, they moved as freely as spirits, in one even course. They had not been born, as men are, from the seeds of earlier deeds, with solid bodies of flesh; they were artificial forces and airy forms, copies of the images in the demon’s mind.

With that, the chief of the demons dispatched his generals Dama, Vyala and Kata to lead his armies against the gods on earth. The demon army rose out of the foaming sea and the caverns of the underworld in full armor, fiendish weapons at their belts, and burst upward with a hideous noise, huge bodies lifting like mountains in flight. Their monstrous bodies hid the disk of the sun; their stretched arms stripped it of its rays. Under the three they grew, in number and in size. Then the dreadful hosts of heaven came out of the forests and caverns of Meru, the mountain at the center of the world, like the torrents of the great flood.

The two armies fought with such obstinacy that it looked like the ancient war of gods and Titans come untimely to a second end of the world. Heads with shining earrings fell to the ground like the suns and moons of a dead age, shorn of their beams and rolling in the abyss. Heroes hurled whole hills with the roar of lions, and a tornado blew the hills up and down. Broken weapons fell on mountain tops and ground them to grains that fell as hail on the lions resting below. The sparks from the clashing blades flew like the stars scattered on the last day. Vetalas, the corpse-ghouls, tall as palm trees, danced on the heaps of the dead, clapping time with their palms, on a flood of blood that spread over the earth like a sea. Showers of blood pressed down the dust of the field; crowned heads cut from their bodies glittered among the clouds like stars. The demons blazed on every side like burning suns, swinging tall palm trunks to break the peaks off mountains, running with drawn swords so fast that buildings went down in the wind of their passing. The gods drove the weaponless Asuras before them like storm clouds and pounced on them as cats pounce on rats, while the Asuras seized the gods as bears seize men who climb trees to escape them. The two sides dashed together like forest trees in a gale, striking with branching arms and strewing the flowers of each other’s blood.

The sky filled with a confused roar, like the hum of gnats inside a hollow fig. The elephants of the quarters trumpeted back at the thunder of the world-ending cloud. The air thickened with cloud until it could be gripped in a fist. Fire weapons set the mountain forests alight, and the rocks melted into lava with the noise of Meru itself melting its gold. Rocks hurled by the demons flew like birds with thundering wings. The demons spread a night across the sky with the shadow of their arms, and the gods broke it with artificial lightning that blazed like suns. A weapon of sleep was answered by its counter. Some carried the sawing weapon, some the Brahmastra, whose flash swept the dark off the field. The air was full of shells and shot from the fire-arms, and a stone-hurling engine crushed the fire missiles in flight. Heaven’s thunders killed demons by the hundred, and the great art of Shukra, the demons’ preceptor, which gave their kind its deathlessness, brought them back to life. The gods, winning and then fleeing with losses, looked up for good omens and found none; from heaven to earth the world had turned to a single expanse of blood, a forest of red kinsuka flowers in full bloom, with mountains of bodies in it. Corpses hung from the branches of trees like fruit swinging in the wind. Headless trunks with a hundred arms leaped into the air and plucked at the clouds and stars and the chariots of the gods. Fragments of the buildings of the seven heavens fell with the roar of flood clouds. Garuda snatched gigantic demons out of the air as prey. And still the dread of the demons drove the deities, the Siddhas and Sadhyas and the wind gods, the Kinnaras, Gandharvas and Charanas, out of their separate quarters into one huddled side; a tornado tore up the trees of paradise; and in that war the proud demons won the day, and laid waste the cities and villages of the gods with all their hills and forests.

As the battle raged on, bodies pierced on both sides, blood poured from the wounds like waterfalls into the basin of the Ganga, and the gods caught in the demons’ snares groaned and roared like lions. Vyala, with his long arms, crushed the bodies of gods. Kata harried them in a fight they could not match. The Daityas fought with the fury of the midday sun and put Airavata, the elephant of the leader of the gods, to flight. The gods dropped with their bodies gored and spouting, and their armies broke on every side like a river in flood breaking its bank. Dama, Vyala and Kata went after the fleeing gods the way a fire runs after the wood that feeds it. They searched a long time and found no one; the gods had vanished like deer and lions into the thickets after slipping their snares. Unable to find them, the three generals went home with cheerful hearts to their chief in the underworld.

The beaten gods halted, caught their breath, and went to Brahma, the maker, to ask him how they might win. He appeared to them, blood-smeared as they were, with his face flushed purple, the way the cool moon rises in the evening over a sea still tinged crimson by the sunset. They bowed and complained of the danger Shambara had brought on them through his generals Dama, Vyala and Kata, and told him everything the three had done. Brahma heard it all, weighed it, and gave them his answer.

Brahma Tells the Gods to Feed Their Pride

“You will have to wait another hundred thousand years,” Brahma said, “for Shambara’s destruction at the hands of Hari in open battle. Today you were put to flight by Dama, Vyala and Kata, who fight with magic and deceitful weapons. They are swollen with pride in their skill at war, and that pride will vanish soon, like the shadow of a man in a mirror. These demons whom ambition leads to harass you will be brought under your power like birds caught in a snare.

“You gods have no ambition, and so you are free of the swings of pain and pleasure; you have become unconquerable by wearing the enemy down with patience. Whoever is caught and bound in the net of his ambition and led by the thread of his expectation is defeated in his aims, caught like a bird on a string. The learned who have no desire, whose minds are attached to nothing, are truly great and cannot be conquered, because nothing can lift them up or cast them down. A man may be great and experienced and still be overcome by a boy, once his greed has sent him chasing after everything.

“The knowledge that says ‘this is I, and these things are mine, apart from all others’ is the bane of life. Whoever holds that knowledge of himself becomes a vessel of evils, like the sea of brine. A man who shuts his mind within narrow limits, for want of any larger view, is a coward and a small man whatever his learning. Whoever puts a boundary on his soul, which has no boundary, reduces his own greatness to a speck by his own hand. If there were anything in the world beside yourself that could be yours and worth your wanting, you might long for it; all things, though, are parts of the one universe, and there is nothing in particular for anyone to own or to seek. Reliance on earthly things is the source of unhappiness; indifference to all of them is the spring of lasting joy.

“As long as the Asuras stand independent of worldly things, they must remain invincible. The moment they depend on them, they will perish like a swarm of gnats in a wildfire. It is the desire inside a man that makes him miserable in himself and makes him the subject of others; without it, even a worm of a man is as firm as a rock. And wherever a desire exists in the heart, it thickens and hardens with time, because everything that exists grows in bulk with time. What does not exist cannot grow. The absence of desire has nothing in it to increase.

“So this is what you must do, Indra. Foster both the egoism of Dama and the others and their ambition for universal dominion, if you want to cause their destruction. Know that greed is the cause of poverty and of every danger to living beings, the way the karanja tree is the source of its bitter and poisonous fruit. Everyone who roams the world under the bondage of greed has said goodbye to happiness and signed himself over to misery. A man may be learned, well informed in everything, noble and great, and still be tied down by his greed, as a lion is held by its chain. Greed is the snare of the mind; it sits like a bird in its nest in the heart, inside the hollow of the tree of the body. The greedy wretch falls easily into the clutches of death, as a bird caught on a boy’s birdlime lies panting on the ground for the sake of a crumb.

“You gods need not carry the burden of your weapons any more, nor toil and sweat in the field of war any longer. Put your whole effort into inflaming the ruinous greed of your enemies to its utmost. Know that no arm, no weapon, no statecraft and no policy can defeat this enemy until they defeat themselves, when excess of greed has eaten their patience. Dama, Vyala and Kata, swollen with their success in war, must now be made to cherish their ambition and feed their greed, to their ruin. The moment these ignorant creatures of Shambara have gained their high desires, you will foil them in their vain attempts. The great height has its fall. So go, and provoke your enemies to war by this policy: create in them an ambition and an intense desire for conquest, and by that you will gain your object. Once they are subject to their desire they will be easy to subdue, because no one who is led blindfold by his desires in this world is ever master of himself. The road through this world is smooth or rugged according to the desires of the heart. The heart is like the sea after a storm, its waves as still as desires that have subsided; or it is the stormy sea itself, with our greed rising.”

With that, Brahma vanished from the sight of the gods, the way a wave that has dashed and broken against the shore draws back and mixes with the sea. The gods, having heard him, returned to their own homes, the way a breeze that has taken up the scent of the lotus carries it off into the forests on every side. For some days they rested in their pleasant houses, as bees rest in the cells of flowers after their wandering. Then, refreshed and strong again, they gave the signal of their rising with the beating of their drums, a sound like the thunderclap of the last day.

The demons rose from the underworld at once, met the gods in the middle air, and began a dreadful assault. Armor clashed; swords and arrows clattered; lances and spears flashed; mallets, battle axes, discuses and thunderbolts cracked together, and rocks and whole trees were flung. Magical engines ran on every side like rivers in spate, and hills and mountains were hurled from both sides until the earth was full of a confused rumbling. A magic flood from the demons, like the stream of the Ganga, surrounded the camp of the gods, while showers of fire-arms and missiles of every sort fell on their heads from above. The huge bodies of gods and demons rose and fought and fell by turns, the way the elements rise into view and vanish by the act of maya. Great bombs broke the heads off mountains. The earth became a wide sheet of blood, and the heaps of the dead on both sides rose like forests toward heaven.

Living lions with bodies of iron, teeth like rows of saws and claws as white as kasha flowers, were let loose by magic to roam the field in the air, devouring the stones flung by both sides and bursting out in shells and shot and weapons of every kind. Serpent weapons with mountainous bodies flew through the ocean of the sky, eyes flashing with venomous heat, burning with the fire of the twelve suns of the last day. A water engine sent floods of weapons spinning like whirlpools, loud as thunder, sweeping hills and rocks along in its current. Stone missiles flung by the Garuda engine into the aerial field gave off water and fire by turns, now shone like the sun and now went wholly dark. The Garuda weapons flew roaring across the sky, the fire-arms spread a battle of burning hills above, and the burning towers of the gods fell to the earth, until the world was as unbearable as it will be in its final conflagration. The demons leaped up from the earth into the sky as birds fly up from mountain tops; the gods fell violently to the ground as a fragment of rock drops from a cliff.

Long weapons stuck in the bodies of gods and demons like bushes, burning where they stood, so that their great statures looked like rocks with arbors growing on them. Streaming with blood as they roved, the mountainous fighters looked like the evening clouds of heaven pouring down the purple floods of the celestial Ganga. Weapons fell like waterfalls, like rain, and thunders flowed as fast as meteors in a wild confusion. Those skilled in the arts of war sprayed floods of purple fluid, mixed with the red clay of the mountains, from the trunks of elephants, the way holiday crowds squirt red-powdered water from syringes at the spring festival. Worn down as they were by one another, neither the gods nor the Asuras gave up hope of victory. They hurled weapons from their hands for mutual harm and rode the broad backs of great elephants through the air, spreading their brightness around them, and then wandered the sky like flights of ill-omened locusts, pierced through head and hand and arm and breast, filling the vault of the world like flying clouds that hid the sun and the quarters of heaven and the surface of the earth. The earth was battered to pieces by broken weapons dropping from the belts of the combatants. The sky echoed to the thunderclaps of stroke on stroke, the clatter of stones and trees, and the blows of the warriors on one another, as if it were the uproar of universal destruction.

The disordered world seemed to be nearing an untimely end, with furious winds mixed with fire and water, and the many suns of gods and demons shining above and below. All the quarters of heaven seemed to cry aloud with the sound of weapons rolling like mountain peaks and roaring like lions, carried on the wind in every direction. The sky became an ocean of illusion, burning with the bodies of warriors like flaming trees, rolling in surges of the dead, gods and demons floating on it like mountains, while the skirts of the earth became a forest of clubs and lances and spears falling without pause. The horizon was ringed by a dense, impassable line of demon bodies, like the chain of Sumeru girdling the earth, and the earth itself was an ocean filled with the mountainous bodies of the fallen and the towers of celestial cities blown down by the wind. Torrents of blood washed the earth and its mountains; blood-drinking goblins danced on every side. The war of gods and Titans, Vasistha said, was like the tumults that rage through the endless spaces of the world, rising and falling with the turns of pleasure and pain to which it is forever subject. And while it raged, year on year, the thing Brahma had planted was taking root in the three who had never known a yesterday.

When Action Acquired an Owner

In this manner the fierce and murderous Asuras repeated their attacks and fought war after war with the gods. They carried on sometimes by fraud and often by open aggression; they came back to the field after a truce as readily as after open war; sometimes they took to flight, recruited their strength, and met the gods again in the open field; at other times they lay in ambush, hidden in their caves under the earth. So they fought for thirty-five years, flying off and withdrawing from the field and reappearing on it in arms. Then they fought for five years, eight months and ten days more, hurling fire-arms, trees, stones and thunders at the gods.

Used to war for so long, they grew proud of their superior strength and their repeated successes, and the desire for a final victory came into them. Constant practice in arms made them sure of success, the way an object brought near a mirror throws its reflection into the glass; and as a distant object casts no reflection, no desire for anything succeeds without the intense application that had brought this one so close. This was the mechanism Brahma had counted on. Nothing had been done to them from outside. They had simply fought long enough to expect, and the expectation was theirs.

When the desires of Dama and the others became identified with their selves, their souls fell from their greatness and were confined within the belief in the objects desired. Every worldly desire leads to a mistaken expectation, and whoever is caught in the snares of his expectations is reduced to a meanness of spirit by them. Falling into the errors of egotism and selfishness, they went on to the blunder of mamata, of thinking “these things are mine,” the way a man takes a rope for a snake. Reduced to that depravity, they began to think that their personalities consisted in their bodies, and to consider how those bodies could be kept safe and secure from harm, from the head to the foot.

They lost their patience by thinking continually about the stability of their bodies, their property and the pleasures of life. The wish to enjoy drained their strength and their valor, and their former feats of gallantry became a dead letter to them. They thought only of how to become lords of the earth, and the thought made them lazy and limp, like lotus flowers out of water. Their pride and egoism turned their inclination toward good eating and drinking and toward the possession of every worldly good.

They began to hesitate before joining the battle, as timid as deer facing furious elephants in a ravaged forest. They moved slowly, in despair of victory and in fear of losing their lives in the encounter. Wanting to keep their bodies out of the hands of death, these cowards grew so powerless that they were content to have the feet of their enemies set on their heads; they fell at the feet of the gods to spare their lives. Enervated, they were as unable to kill the enemy standing in front of them as an unlit fire is unable to consume the offering of ghee poured on it. Before the aggressive gods they became as gnats, and they stood with their bruised bodies like beaten soldiers.

What more is there to say? Overpowered by the gods, the demons fled the field of battle for fear of their lives. And when Dama, Vyala, Kata and the rest, who had once been a byword for prowess before the gods, ran like cowards in every direction, the whole force of the Daityas fell before the deities and dropped out of the air on all sides, like the stars falling from heaven at the end of a kalpa.

They fell on the summits of mountains and in the groves of the Sumeru range; some were wrapped in the folds of the clouds above, others fell on the shores of distant seas below. Many fell into the whirlpools of the seas and the abyss of the ocean and into running streams; some fell in far forests, some into burning woods. Some, pierced by the arrows of the gods, fell in distant countries, villages and cities on earth; others were flung into thick jungles of wild beasts, into sandy deserts, into wildfires. Many fell in the polar regions, some on mountain tops, some sinking into the lakes below; several were tossed over the countries of Andhra, Dravida, Kashmir and Persia. Some sank in the billowing seas and in the watery maze of the Ganga; others fell on distant islands in different parts of Jambudvipa, and into the nets of fishermen.

So the enemies of the gods lay everywhere with their mountainous bodies scarred from head to foot and their hands and arms maimed. Some hung on the branches of trees by their own spilled entrails; others, with crowns and heads cropped off, lay on the ground with open, fiery eyes. Many lay with their armor and weapons broken, slashed by the superior power of the adversary, their robes torn and dismantled by the fall. Their helmets, once terrible in their blaze, hung down their necks; the braids of their hair, woven with stones, hung loose about their bodies; their hard brazen coronets were broken by the slabs of stone the gods had pelted on them. In this manner the demons were destroyed on every side, together with all their weapons, at the end of the battle; it devoured them as sea water dissolves dust.

The gods were beside themselves with joy. Dama and the other leaders of the Daityas sank into sorrow and grief. Shambara’s wrath kindled against his generals like the fire that ends the world; he called them by name, aloud: “Dama. Vyala. Kata. Where are they?” They had already fled their homes in fear of his anger, and they hid themselves in the seventh sphere of the underworld. There lived the horrid myrmidons of death, as formidable as their lord Yama himself, glad of their charge of guarding the abyss of hell. The dauntless warders of the hell gate took the three into their favor, gave them shelter in the hell pit, and gave them their three unmarried daughters in marriage.

In that company they passed ten thousand years, and gave free rein to their evil desires to the end of their lives there. Their time went by in thoughts like these: “This is my wife, and this is my daughter, and I am their lord.” They were bound together in ties of mutual affection as strong as the chain of death.

It happened on one occasion that Yama, the god of retributive justice, paid a visit to that place, to survey the state of affairs in the doleful pits of hell. He came without his ensigns and without attendants. The three Asuras, knowing nothing of his rank, took him at their peril for one of his own servants and failed to bow to the lord of hell. A nod of his eyebrows assigned them a place in the burning furnace, and the stern porters of the hell gate threw them in at once. There they lay burning with their wives and children, until they were consumed to death like a hut of straw and a stand of withered trees.

The Long Descent into Small Lives

The evil desires and wicked habits they had picked up in the company of hell’s household carried them, in their next birth, into the forms of Kiratas, hunters of the hills, to go on with their slaughters and atrocities like the myrmidons of Yama. Freed from that birth they were next born as ravens, and then as the vultures and falcons of the mountain caves that prey on the harmless birds below. Then they were hogs in the land of Trigarta, then mountain rams in Magadha, then loathsome reptiles in caves and holes.

After passing in turn through a variety of other forms, they are now lying as fishes in the woodland lakes of Kashmir. Burned first in hell fire, they have their respite now in the watery lake, and they drink its filthy water, by which they neither die nor live to their hearts’ content. Having passed over and over into various births, transformed again and again to be reborn on earth, they are rolling like the waves of the sea to all eternity. Like their endless desires, they have been rolling forever like weeds on the ocean of the earth, and there will be no end of their pains until their desires end.

Vasistha turned to the prince. “It was for your enlightenment, Rama, that I told you the case of Dama and Vyala, so that you would take instruction from it and not let it go for nothing as an idle story. Running after untruth while slighting the truth carries the danger of endless miseries, and the careless pursuer has no idea of them. Consider how great the leadership of Shambara’s army was, once held by Dama and his colleagues, by which they defeated the hosts of the immortals; and reflect on the change in their state, to contemptible fishes in a dry and dirty bog. Consider their former fortitude, which put the legions of the immortals to flight, and then their base servility as hunters under a chief of the Kiratas. See their unselfishness of mind and their great patience at the start, and then their empty desires and their assumption of the vanity of egotism at the last.

“Selfish egotism is the root of the wide-spreading branches of misery in the forest of the world; it bears the poisonous blossoms of desire. So be diligent, Rama, to wipe the sense of your egoism from your heart, and try to be happy by always thinking of the nothingness of yourself. The error of egoism hides the bright disk of the moon of truth under its gloom, like a dark cloud, and takes its cooling beams out of sight. The three Daityas Dama, Vyala and Kata, under the demoniac influence of egoism, believed their nonexistence to be a positive existence through the excess of their illusion. They are living now as fishes in the muddy pool of a lake in the forest lands of Kashmir, content for the present to feed with relish on the moss and weeds that grow in it.”

Rama stopped him there. “Tell me, sir, how they came to exist when they did not exist before. Nothing can become something, and no existing thing can become nothing, at any time.” “So it is, Rama,” Vasistha said. “Nothing can ever be something, and something can never become nothing. It is possible, though, for a small thing to become great, and for a great one to be reduced to minuteness. Say what nonexistent thing has ever come into being, or what existing thing has lasted forever. I will explain all of this to you with the best proofs and examples.” Rama answered: “Sir, everything that exists is present in front of us all the time, as our own bodies and all the things beside ourselves. And you speak of Dama and the demons as pure nullities, and yet as having been in existence.”

“Yes, Rama. It was in exactly that way that the nonexistent and unreal Dama and the others seemed to exist, by pure illusion, as a mirage seems to us to be full of water through a trick of the eye. In the same way we ourselves, these gods and demigods, and everything else besides are unrealities in fact, and yet we seem to turn about and speak and act as real persons. My existence is as unreal as yours, and yet it appears as real as our own death does when we dream it in sleep. The sight of a dead friend in a dream is no reality; in the same way the notion of the reality of the world stops at the conviction of its unreality, as the death of the person seen in the dream stops when one wakes.

“Such assertions of our nothingness, though, are unacceptable to people deluded by the belief in the reality of the things they sense. It is the habit of thinking it real that refuses to hear its own contradiction. This mistaken impression of the reality of the world can never be erased without the knowledge of its unreality, drawn from the shastras, and the practice of thinking it so. The man who preaches the unreality of the world and the reality of Brahman is laughed at by the ignorant as a madman. The learned and the ignorant cannot agree on this, any more than the drunk and the sober can meet; only the one who knows light from darkness can tell shade from sunlight. It is as impossible to turn the ignorant to the truth, away from their faith in the reality of unrealities, as to make a dead body stand on its legs. It is useless to preach ‘Brahman is all’ to the vulgar, who are given over to the notions of their senses for want of any abstract meditation. Instruction is for those who can take it; the learned who already know themselves to be Brahman need no lecture, and the rest cannot be persuaded.

“The intelligent man who believes that the supremely quiet spirit of Brahman pervades the whole universe cannot be led away from his conviction by anyone. Nothing can shake the faith of a man who knows himself to be no other than the Supreme Being, who is all in all, and who understands himself to depend on the substance of God the way the shape of a ring depends on its gold. The ignorant have no notion of spirit apart from matter, which they take to be the cause and the effect of its own production; the learned man sees the one substantive spirit in every form of creation, as he sees the gold in every ornament made of it. The ignorant man is composed of his egoism and nothing else; the sage is made of his spirituality alone; and neither is ever shaken from his own belief. A habit of thinking can hardly be altered at any time; it would be foolish for a man who has always thought of himself as a man to take himself for a pot. And so, although we ourselves and others, and Dama and the demons, are nothing in reality, who can believe that we are anything other than what we take ourselves to be?

“There is only one Being that really exists, who is truth and consciousness itself, of the nature of the void and of pure understanding: immaculate, all-pervading, quiet, with no rising and no setting. Being perfect stillness and emptiness, he seems like nothing that exists, and all these creations subsist in that emptiness as particles of its own splendor. As the stars shine out in the darkness of night, and worms and waves show on the surface of water, so all these phenomena appear to occur in his reality. Whatever that Being purposes himself to be, he conceives himself to be immediately. It is that empty Intellect alone that is the true reality, and all other things are real as they are viewed in it, rising and setting in it at its own bidding. So there is nothing real or unreal in the three worlds; everything has the form in which the Intellect views it, rising before it of its own accord.

“We too have sprung from that divine Will, exactly as Dama and the others did, and so there is neither reality nor unreality in any of us except at the time we exist or cease to. That infinite and formless void of the Intellect is everywhere, and in whatever form it shows itself in any place, there it appears in just that figure and manner. When the divine consciousness expanded itself with the images of Dama and the others, it took those shapes at once by its notions of them; here it was the consciousness of Shambara that showed itself in those forms. So it is with every one of us: all things are produced to our view according to the notions that present themselves to our consciousness. What we call the world is the representation of things to us as in a dream, a hollow body like a bubble rising in the empty ocean of the Intellect, like the water in a mirage. The waking state of that empty Intellect is called the phenomenal world; its state of sleep and rest is what we call liberation, release from pain. And the Intellect that never sleeps and never needs waking is the vacuity of the divine Mind, in which the world is always present in its visible form. There creation is joined to the rest of nirvana, and the cessation of creation to unbroken quiet; there is no alternation of work and rest in God at any time. The divine Intellect sees its own form in the world and the world in itself, as a blinded eye sees the light inside its own orbit; it sees nothing from outside, because there is no visible world beside what lies within the empty sphere of the Intellect. All these things are everywhere as we have ideas of them in our minds, and nothing is anywhere of which we have no prior idea in the mind. The one quiet spirit of God lies extended in all these forms that come to our knowledge. So know him as all in all, give up all your fears and sorrows and your sense of duality, and rest in peace in his unity. The great Intellect of God is as solid and clear as a block of crystal, dense and transparent at once: it looks hollow inside, and it is full of the images of all things.”

Rama had been listening with the fishes still in his mind. “Tell me, sir, how Dama, Vyala and Kata obtained their liberation at last, like all other virtuous souls, and were released from the torments of hell, the way children get free of their fear of Yakshas and Pishachas.” “Hear, then, Rama, what Yama said about Dama, Vyala and their companions when they begged him for their liberation through his attendants in hell,” Vasistha said. “He said that Dama and the others would obtain their liberation on their release from their demon bodies by death, and on hearing the account of their lives and actions.” Rama said: “Tell me, sir, how, when and from what source Dama and the others came to learn the accounts of their lives, and in what manner they were released from hell.”

“These demons, in the form of fishes in a pool by the bank of the great lotus lake in Kashmir, went through many miserable births in their finny shapes in that same bog. Then they were crushed to death in that marshy ground under the feet of buffaloes, and after that they were transformed into cranes that frequented the lake of lotuses. There they fed on moss and mushrooms and the tender petals of lotuses, and lived on the leaves of the water plants and creepers that floated on the waves. They swung in cradles of flowers and rested on beds of blue lotuses; they dived into the eddies of the water, and flew under the cooling showers of the rain clouds. These lovely cranes and herons were cleansed at last of their brutish foulness by their vegetable food of sweet fruits and flowers and their pure drink from the crystal lake, the food of holy saints. By these means they came to a clear understanding, and were made ready for release from the brute state, the way men who can distinguish the qualities of sattva and rajas, goodness and energy, from tamas, the dark and wrong, are entitled to their liberation.

Three Hearings in Adhishthana

“Now, there is a city called Adhishthana in the happy valley of Kashmir, hemmed in by mountains and trees on every side and very lovely to see. In the middle of the city stands a hill called Pradyumna Shekhara, which looks like the pistil rising from the pericarp inside a lotus flower. On top of that hill there is a building that towers over every other building, its high turrets piercing the sky like pinnacles above the summit. At the northeast corner of that building, at the top of its towering head, there is a hollow overgrown with moss, which rings continually with the blowing winds. There the demon Vyala built his nest in the form of a sparrow, and chirped his meaningless notes, like a man who repeats the Vedic hymns without knowing what they mean.

“At that time a prince named Yashaskara, the renowned, reigned in that city like Indra over the gods in heaven. The demon Dama became a gnat and lived in the palace, and went on buzzing his low tune in the crevice of one of its lofty columns.

“Then it came to pass that the citizens of Adhishthana laid out a pleasure ground in the city, called Ratnavati-vihara. There the king’s minister, Narasimha, took up his residence. He understood the fates of human beings the way an astronomer knows the stars of heaven on the small celestial globe he holds in his hand. And it happened at that time that the deceitful demon Kata was reborn as a parrot, and became the favorite of the minister, who kept him in a silver cage in his house.

“So the three who had once flown over the gods as winged mountains now lived in a single city: a sparrow in a mossy hollow on the hill, a gnat in the crevice of a palace column, a parrot in a silver cage on the pleasure ground. Each had been a general over the demon host and a lord over a wife and daughter in hell; the sparrow, the gnat and the parrot knew nothing of it.

“Then it turned out that the minister recited this poetical narrative of the war of the Titans to the people of his house. And the parrot Kata, happening to hear it, remembered his past life. By that remembering he was absolved of his sins, and he attained his final liberation.

“Yama’s word, given through his attendants in hell, had two parts, and the first had been met long before, when the furnace consumed the demon bodies. The second was met in a minister’s house, by a bird in a cage who heard his own name spoken as a character in a poem.

“The sparrow on top of the Pradyumna hill also chanced to hear, in that place, the narration of his own life, and obtained his emancipation by it.

“And Dama, who lived as a gnat in the palace, also happened to hear the minister’s recital of his tale, and obtained his peace and release by it.

“In this manner, Rama, the sparrow on the Pradyumna mount, the gnat in the palace and the parrot on the pleasure ground all had their liberation. So I have told you the whole story of the demon Dama and the others, and it will fully convince you of the vanity of the world. It is the ignorant who are tempted into vanity by their error, as they are led into the delusion of water in a mirage; and the great are just as liable as these demons to fall from their high stations through their error.

“Think of one of these three, who brought down the high mountains Meru and Mandara with a nod of his eyebrows, forced to stay as a contemptible gnat in the chink of a pillar in a palace. Look at another, who threatened to destroy the sun and the moon with a slap, living at last as a poor sparrow in a hole on the peak of the Pradyumna hill. Look at the third, who balanced Mount Meru in his hand like a bouquet of flowers, lying imprisoned as a parrot in a cage at the house of Narasimha. When the sphere of the pure Intellect is tinged with the hue of egotism, it is debased into another form without any change in its nature. It is because of a man’s wrong desire that he takes untruth for truth, as a man in the extremity of thirst mistakes a mirage for water, and loses both his way and his life.

What Vasistha Asks Rama to Practice

“Those alone can ford the ocean of the world who, by the natural bent of a good understanding, are inclined to the study of the shastras and look ahead to their liberation, rejecting whatever is vicious and untrue. Those who are prone to false reasoning and heresy, and reject the revealed word, are subject to every kind of change and misery, and fall into the pit like running water, losing the best interests of their lives. Those who walk by the dictates of conscience and follow the path shown by the Veda are saved from destruction and reach their best state. Rama, a man whose mind forever longs to have this thing and that loses the highest gain of his manhood to his greed, and leaves not even ashes behind him. The high-minded man regards the world as a straw and sheds all its concerns as a snake sheds its skin. The repeated wish to enjoy what has already been enjoyed, and to see what has often been seen, is no way out of the world; it is the cause of being born again for the same enjoyments. So renounce all your sorrow and fear, your anxieties, your pride and your haste; conduct yourself by the ordinances of law and the shastras, and make your name immortal. Take care that your soul does not perish as prey in the snare of your sensual appetites, nor like a blind old man falling into the hidden pits of the world. Wake up, and shake off the dullness of your long, deep, deathlike sleep, like the old tortoise torpid in the bog. Rise and take the antidote against old age and death: the knowledge that all wealth and property are for our harm, and all pleasures and enjoyments only sicken and weaken our frames. Know your difficulty to be your prosperity and your disrespect to be your great gain. Act by the shastras and by good usage, and such acts bear the best fruits of immortality.

“Seeing that the complete success of every undertaking depends on your own exertion at all times and in all places, never slacken your energy. See how Nandi satisfied the wishes of all his friends and relations by his own exertion, and conquered death itself by his adoration of Mahadeva beside a lake. See how the Danavas, too, got the better of the gods, who had every perfection, by their greater wealth and prowess, as elephants destroy a lake of lotuses. See how Marutta the king created another world like Brahma’s by means of his sacrifice through the great sage Samvarta. See how Vishvamitra, the war chief, obtained the dignity of a Brahmin by his great energy and continued exertion; he won by austerity what no other could have won. See how the poor, unlucky Upamanyu obtained his nectar-like food of cake and curdled milk from the milky ocean by his worship of Shiva, in the days of old. See how the god Vishnu devoured the demons of the three worlds like a wildfire eating the tender filaments of lotuses, and how the sage Shveta conquered death by his firm faith in Shiva. Remember how the chaste Savitri brought her husband Satyavan back from the realm of death by prevailing on stern Yama with the sweetness of her speech. No great exertion of any kind goes unrewarded in this world; every impossibility becomes possible to the one who pursues it with ardor.

“So men who have full knowledge of the spirit and exert their utmost devotion are able to root out their destiny of transmigration, with all its pain and pleasure, both of which do equal harm to the soul. To the intelligent, everything visible is full of danger; there is no pleasure to be had from anything without its attendant pain, before it or after. Though the supreme Brahman is hard to know, and supreme happiness easy to reach, Brahman should be sought first, as the giver of all happiness. Forsake your pride; rely on your unalterable peace of mind; weigh well your own worth in your understanding; and keep to your attendance on the wise and good. There is no other way to your salvation in this ocean of the world except attendance on the wise. All your pilgrimages, austerities and learning of the shastras are of no use for your liberation without it. He is called wise whose greed, anger and mistaken notions are on the wane day by day, and who walks the path of right conduct as the shastra teaches it. The company of spiritual guides clears the visible things out of the sight of the devout, as things that do not exist are hidden from sight; and when all other objects are gone, the Supreme Spirit alone remains in view, and the human soul, with nothing else to rest on, rests at last in the Supreme Soul alone.

“The visible things did not exist before, nor are they produced from nothing; they are not in existence though they are seen in front of us, nor will they exist in the future. The Supreme alone exists forever, without change or decay. I have already shown you by many instances the falsehood of visible things; now hear the falsity of existence itself, as the learned know it. Whatever wonders the active intellect displays to the passive soul, that is what is taken for the world. The idea of the sphere of the world comes from the rays of the central intellect stretching to the circumference of the understanding, and since there is no difference between the radiating point and the circle it radiates, know the radiator, the radii and the circumference to be one. The blinks of the intellectual eye, opening and shutting, give the notions of the appearance and disappearance of the world in endless succession. One who does not know the true sense of the Ego is blind in the midst of the luminous sphere of the intellect; one who knows it finds himself within the sphere of spiritual light. He who understands the divine Ego keeps no notion of his own egoism; he mixes with the Supreme Soul as a drop of water is lost in the ocean. In reality there is no I and no you, no visible world and nothing else; all of it blends, under right reasoning, into the one Ego that remains after all other existences. As long as the moonlight of the intellect is darkened by egoism, the lotus lake of the spirit cannot come into bloom. Once the feeling of egoism is wiped from the mind, the sense of self and the selfish passions vanish from the heart on their own, and there is an utter end of the fears of death and hell and of the desires for heaven and liberation alike. The vain assumption of egoism breeds error upon error; it leads to the ambition of winning an infinity of worlds, as it did in the case of these foolish demons. The conceit ‘I am such and such a man’ is an error than which there is no greater, nor will there ever be, for leading us into utter darkness. Whatever joy or grief comes to us at any time in this changing world is the effect of the turning wheels of egoism, going up and down every moment. Egoism is the sprout of the tree of our lives through their endless revolutions in the world, and mamata, the sense that ‘this is mine,’ is what makes it spread into a thousand branches. Swift as birds in flight, our desires and the things we desire vanish from us, and on mature reflection they prove to be bubbles bursting on the passing waves of our lives. It is for want of knowing the one Ego that we think of ourselves as I, you, this one or that one, and by shutting out our view of the one soul we see the ceaseless revolutions of this world and the next. As long as the darkness of egoism reigns over the wilderness of human life, the goblin of selfishness haunts it with its wanton revelry; and the vile man seized by that greedy demon loses every moral precept and every mantra of his religion that might have met his need.”

Rama asked: “Tell me, venerable sir, how we may suppress our egoism and selfishness, so as to escape the dangers and difficulties of our course through the world.” Vasistha replied: “It is by seeking to settle the mind in the resplendent soul, as it shines in the clear mirror of the intellect, that anyone can suppress the consciousness of his self or his personal existence. Look closely into human life and it proves to be a maze of false magic shows. It is unworthy of love or hatred, and it cannot be the ground of our egoism or our pride. He whose soul is free of egoism, who carries no impression of the phenomenal world, whose life runs in one even course, is the man in whom there is no sense of egoism. He who knows his inner self to be beyond the external world, and neither desires nor dislikes anything in it, and keeps his temper serene at all times, is never susceptible to egoism. Whoever takes himself for the inward reality, distinct from the outward show, and keeps the calm equanimity of his mind, is never ruffled by the feeling of his egoism.”

Rama pressed him: “Tell me, sir, what is the form of egoism? Does it consist in the body, or in the mind, or in both? And is it got rid of along with the body?” “There are three sorts of egoism, Rama, in this triple world,” Vasistha said. “Two are of a superior nature, and the third is of a vile kind and is to be abandoned by all. The first is the supreme and undivided Ego diffused throughout the world; it is the Supreme Soul, Paramatma, beside which there is nothing in nature. The feeling of this egoism leads men to liberation, the liberation of the living. The knowledge of the ego as distinct and apart from everything else, and thought of as minute as the hundredth part of a hair, is the second form of self-consciousness, and it also is good; this second form also leads human souls to liberation in the present state of their existence, the state called jivanmukta. The other kind of egoism is composed of the knowledge of the body with all its limbs as parts of the Ego; it is the last and the worst, and it takes the body for the soul. This third kind is the popular belief of mankind, who take their bodies as parts of themselves. It is the basest form of egoism, and it must be forsaken as we shun an inveterate enemy. The man debased by it can never come to his right sense; he is subject to every evil of life under the thrall of that powerful enemy, and troubled without pause by the various desires that expose him to them. By the better egoisms men transform themselves into gods; the common form debases a man to the state of a beast, with all its attendant evils. ‘I am not the body’ is the certainty the great and good arrive at; believing themselves to be of the first two kinds, they stand above the vulgar. Belief in the first two raises men above the common level; belief in the lower kind brings every misery on mankind. It was because of their baser egoism that the demons Dama, Vyala and the others were reduced to the deplorable state their story relates.” Rama asked: “Tell me, sir, the state of the man who, by discarding this third and popular kind of egoism from his mind, attains the well-being of his soul in this world and the next.” “Having cast off that noxious egoism, which everyone must get rid of,” Vasistha said, “a man rests in the Supreme Spirit in the same manner as the believers in the other two sorts. The two former views place the egoist in the all-pervading spirit or in the spirit exclusive of all; and then all these egoisms, which are in reality only different forms of dualism, are lost in the unity, and all consciousness of a distinct personality is absorbed in the supreme oneness. The good understanding should always strive its utmost to be rid of its common and gross egotism, in order to feel in itself the ineffable happiness of that unity. Renunciation of the unholy belief in one’s own personality in the material body is the greatest good a man can attain, the highest state, parama padam. The man who drives the feeling of his egoism from his mind is neither debased nor ruined, whether he is indifferent to worldly affairs or manages them. A man who has got rid of his egoism, by the subsidence of his selfishness within himself, is as indifferent to pain and pleasure as the sated are to sweet and sour. The man who detests the pleasures of life has his full bliss in front of him, as a mind cleared of doubt and darkness has nothing hidden from its sight. It is by investigation into the nature of egoism, and by forsaking this gross selfishness, that a man crosses the ocean of the world of his own accord. The man who has nothing of his own and knows himself to be nothing, and yet has everything and thinks of himself as all in all; who, though he possesses wealth and property, has the greatness of soul to disown them to himself; that man is situated in the Supreme Soul, and finds his rest in the state of supreme bliss.”

“Now hear what Shambara did after the flight of Dama and his train, and how he kept to his rocky stronghold in the underworld. After the complete overthrow of his whole army, after its fall from heaven like countless raindrops from a spreading cloud that then scatters and vanishes in autumn, Shambara stayed motionless for many years in his citadel, at the loss of the forces the gods had defeated, and then he thought within himself about the best means of overcoming the celestials. He said: ‘The demons Dama and the others, whom I produced by my black art, have all been overthrown in battle by their foolishness and the vanity of their pride and egotism. I will now produce other demons by the power of my charm, and endow them with the power of reason and with acquaintance with spiritual science, so that they can know and judge for themselves. Knowing the true nature of things and free of false views, they will be subject to no pride or vanity, and they will be able to defeat the deities in combat.’ Thinking so, the arch-fiend produced a host of good demons by his skill in sorcery, and these creatures of his spell filled the space of the sky as bubbles and foam float on the surface of the sea. They knew everything and understood all that can be known; they were dispassionate and sinless, wholly intent on their allotted duties, with composed minds and good dispositions. They were known by the names of Bhima, Bhasa and Dridha, and by the holiness of their hearts they regarded all earthly things as straws. These spirits burst out of the ether and sprang up to the upper world, spreading across the face of the sky like a flight of locusts, cracking like guns and rolling and roaring like the clouds of the rainy season. They fought with the gods for many cycles of years, and they were never swollen with pride, because reason and judgment guided them. For as long as they had no desire to possess anything and no thought that ‘this is my own,’ they had no sense of their own personal existence, no ‘this is I, and that one is another,’ and so no one could conquer them. They were fearless in fighting the gods, because they knew the gods to be as mortal as themselves, and they knew of no difference between one being and another. They charged with the firm conviction that the insubstantial body is nothing, that the intellect is lodged in the pure soul, and that there is nothing that can be called I or another. Having no sense of themselves and no fears, they had no dread of their own decease, and they did their present duty without thought of past or future. Their minds were attached to nothing. They killed their enemies without thinking themselves killers; they did their duties and thought of themselves as no doers of them; and they were wholly free of desire. They waged the war in the sense of doing their duty to their master, while their own nature stayed free of all passion and affection, of one even tenor at all times. The infernal force under Bhima, Bhasa and Dridha bruised and burned and killed and devoured the celestial phalanx, as men knead and fry and boil rice and then eat it up as their food. Harassed on all sides by Bhima, Bhasa and Dridha, the celestial army fled headlong from the height of heaven, as the Ganga runs down from the Himalayan height.

“The routed legion of the deities went to the god Hari, Vishnu, where he sleeps on the surface of the ocean of milk, as clouds are driven by the wind to the tops of mountains, above the region of storms. The god lying folded in the coils of his serpent, like a man in the arms of his beloved, gave the gods their hope of final success in time to come, and they kept themselves hidden in that ocean until it pleased the lord Hari to come out of it for the destruction of the demons. Then there was a dreadful war between Vishnu and Shambara, which broke the mountains and carried them away as in an untimely flood of the whole earth. The mighty demon was overthrown at last by the might of Narayana, and after his death he was sent to the city of Vishnu and settled there. The demons Bhima, Bhasa and Dridha were also killed in their unequal struggle with Vishnu, and they went out like lamps in the wind. They became extinct like flames of fire, and no one knew where their vital flame had gone; because it is a person’s desire that leads him on to another state, and these, having no wish in them, had no other place to go. Hence the wishless soul is liberated, and the wistful mind is never freed; so use your reason, Rama, to have a mind and a soul without wishes. A full investigation into truth will put down your desires at once, and the extinction of desires will bring your mind to rest like a candle put out. Consummate wisdom is the knowledge that nothing in this world is real, that our knowledge of its reality is wholly false, and that the nothingness of things is the true reality. The whole world is full of the spirit of God, whatever else anyone may think of it at any time; there is no other thought to have of it except that it is nothing, and that is our perfect knowledge of it. The two weighty words, will and mind, are empty fictions, like the head and trunk of the ascending and descending nodes of a planet; rightly understood, they are lost in the Supreme Spirit. The mind in the company of its desires is kept confined in this world; released from them, it is said to have its liberation. The mind has gained its existence in the belief of men from the many ideas of pots and pictures and other things imprinted on it; when those thoughts are suppressed, the mind vanishes of itself, like the phantoms of goblins. The demons Dama, Vyala and Kata were destroyed by reliance on their minds, by thinking their bodies to be their souls; Bhima, Bhasa and Dridha were saved by their belief in the Supreme Soul pervading all things. So, Rama, reject the example of the former and imitate the latter. ‘Be not guided by the example of Dama, Vyala and Kata’ is the lesson that was first delivered to me by Brahma, the lotus-born, my own progenitor. I repeat this lesson to you, Rama, as my intelligent pupil, so that you may never follow the example of the wicked demons Dama and the others, and may imitate the conduct of the good spirits, Bhima and the others, in your own. It is incessant pain and pleasure that forms the fearful feature of this world, and there is no other way of escaping all its pangs and pains except by the detachment that must be your crowning glory in this life.”