Dasura and the Kadamba Tree: The City of Imagination

A Mountain in Magadha

Rama asked Vasistha to tell the account of Dasura, a story used to explain a world formed through mental construction. Vasistha began in Magadha, a prosperous country of cultivated fields, riverbanks, villages, gardens, and a mountain country rich with flowering trees. Groves of oleander, plantain, and Kadamba covered its slopes.

The ascetic Sharaloma lived there with his only son, Dasura. His spiritual stature invited comparison with a second Brahma. Dasura’s mother was no longer present. When Sharaloma completed the natural span of his life in the forest, he relinquished his body and ascended to heaven. Dasura now stood alone in the place that had held his family.

Dasura’s knowledge did not protect him from the first force of bereavement. He sat alone in the forest, his eyes red and his face drained by grief. An invisible forest deity addressed him.

"Son of a sage, every embodied formation arises, remains for a time, and passes away. This order reaches from Brahma to the smallest creature. You know the law of change. Remember it now as you mourn your father."

The unseen counsel steadied him. Dasura performed the rites due after his father’s death and turned toward disciplined austerity. Yet his understanding of ritual purity had become severe. Every part of the earth seemed exposed to contact, creatures, or actions that might render it unsuitable. He could settle nowhere. At last he decided that a treetop, raised above ordinary traffic like a bird’s dwelling, would provide the purity he sought.

Fire and the Highest Leaf

Dasura lit a fire and began an offering fierce enough to endanger his life. He pulled flesh from both shoulders and placed it in the flames. Agni, the deity of fire, appeared before the ascetic and asked him to name the wish already held in his heart.

Dasura honored him with water and flowers. "The earth is filled with living beings, and I can find no region that appears entirely pure to me. Grant me the power to live above the trees."

Agni granted the request and disappeared.

In the forest Dasura found an immense Kadamba. Its branches spread between earth and sky like an encompassing canopy. Birds occupied its hollows. Bees moved among flower clusters, and yellow and red blossoms shone through the leaves. Dasura climbed until the directions opened beneath him. He established his seat upon the tree’s highest leaf and became known as Kadamba-Dasura.

His place had changed, while desire for the results of ritual still remained. He therefore built entire sacrifices within the mind. For ten years he performed the great rites called gomedha, naramedha, and ashvamedha, along with other elaborate sacrifices and abundant gifts. Every altar, recitation, action, offering, and recipient took form through sustained imagination.

The prolonged discipline purified his inner faculty. Impressions formed through scriptural hearing in a previous life awakened. Knowledge arose, ignorance weakened, and desire lost its authority. Dasura had searched the surface of the earth for purity. Clarity now revealed its decisive ground within the mind that judged every place.

The Forest Goddess and Her Son

One day a radiant woman clothed in flowers appeared on a nearby branch. Dasura asked who she was and what had brought her so high into the Kadamba.

"I am the goddess of this forest," she replied, "and I live among its creepers. On the thirteenth day of the bright half of Chaitra, the forest goddesses of the three worlds gathered in Indra’s Nandanavana. There was music, song, dancing, and a feast. Every companion came with a child. I alone had none. I have approached you because a sincere request placed before a great ascetic may bear fruit. Give me a son. If my prayer fails, I will enter the fire."

Dasura placed a flower in her hand. "Within one month you will bear a beautiful son worthy of honor. Since you came resolved to surrender your life, he will become a knower of reality and will remain free of the pleasure-seeking that occupies the others."

The goddess offered to serve him. Dasura declined further service and sent her home with kindness.

Much later, the goddess returned with a boy who was twelve years old. She bowed to Dasura and seated the child before him.

"This is our son, because you granted the life that came through me. I have trained him in every art. He still lacks the knowledge of Brahman that releases a person from bondage. Please teach him. What father would willingly leave his child in painful ignorance?"

Dasura accepted the boy as student and son. The child served his father-teacher with discipline. Dasura prepared his understanding through hundreds of narratives and examples, the Mahabharata and other histories, the Veda, and Vedanta. Story became a field for examining experience. Reasoned explanation gave precision to what the stories opened.

During this long instruction, Vasistha traveled through the sky toward the Mandakini associated with Kailasa. Night reached him near the Kadamba tree. From among its leaves and hollows he heard Dasura’s voice beginning another account.

King Khottha’s Impossible City

"Listen," Dasura told the boy, "to the history of King Khottha, whose city reveals the structure of this world."

Khottha was powerful enough to attack the three worlds, and even the gods obeyed his command. Weapons, fire, and force could not restrain him. He possessed three bodies: upper, middle, and lower, aligned with sattvic clarity, rajasic activity, and tamasic obscurity.

The king arose in space, lived in space, and built a city in space. Its scale was cosmic. The fourteen worlds formed its immense procession of chariots, and fourteen branches of knowledge served as its roads. The three worlds and three Vedas gave it threefold divisions. Mountains such as Meru became grounds of recreation. Seven oceans opened as seven stepwells. Moon and sun burned as two inexhaustible lamps, one cool and one hot.

Within this city Khottha constructed innumerable body-houses. Some occupied upper regions, some the middle, and some the lower. Their lives varied in length. Every house had nine doors, while vital breath moved in and out. The ears, eyes, nostrils, and other organs formed its openings. Five senses shone as five lamps. Two thighs and the spine served as three supports. White bones made the frame, skin covered it like plaster, and the arms extended as broad streets.

Yakshas shaped by ahankara, the ego-making principle, inhabited and guarded these houses. They feared the light of self-discrimination because clear knowledge dissolved their claim of independent ownership. Khottha entered a body with these guards, conducted its affairs, and departed. He built dream cities, left old residences, imagined future ones, and moved toward the very conditions his intention had formed.

At times he lamented his ignorance and suffering. At other times pleasure carried him into exhilaration. He appeared throughout waking and dream. In deep sleep, cosmic dissolution, absorbed contemplation, and liberation, he could no longer be perceived. His motion resembled a wave rising and settling within the same sea.

The boy interrupted. "Father, who can this king be? How can a city arise in space, disappear, and be replaced by another?"

The Ruler Made of Intention

"Khottha is the apparently individual consciousness shaped by sankalpa," Dasura said. "Sankalpa is formative intention, the mental construction through which consciousness presents a subject facing a world of objects. The king seems to arise within infinite consciousness. His world appears with that construction and ceases to appear when it settles."

Dasura then opened the allegory in detail. The city signified the cosmos and each body-house within it. Its fourteen worlds, fourteen branches of learning, seven oceans, mountains, sun, and moon described the ordered universe. Its nine doors, five sensory lamps, three supports, bones, skin, organs, and breath described embodiment. The same formative movement appeared on two scales.

The three bodies expressed three courses of tendency. A sattvic orientation supported clarity and fitness for freedom. A rajasic orientation carried a person through action, family, work, and worldly involvement. A tamasic orientation led toward obscurity and lower conditions. Desire directed the apparently individual consciousness from one house to another.

The ego-shaped guards treated the house as their possession. Self-discrimination exposed that claim as a construction. Dasura gave the boy a sequence of practice: cultivate the qualifications for inquiry, hear the teaching accurately, reflect until its reasoning becomes clear, and sustain contemplation until the mind rests in Brahman.

The boy asked a further question. "How does sankalpa begin? What causes it to grow, and how does it end?"

Dasura answered that its seed appears when consciousness turns toward objects and treats them as separate. The division between knower and known feeds the first shoot. One construction generates another, branches multiply, and sorrow develops with them.

The mind then mistakes sequence for necessary cause. A crow lands on a palm tree at the instant a fruit falls, and the two events become linked in thought. A mirage presents water where none can be found. A disorder of vision presents two moons. Appearance alone cannot establish independent reality.

Recollection gives the construction renewed force. The mind repeatedly revisits earlier pleasure and pain, supplies them with attention, and extends their influence into the present. When these impressions stop receiving rehearsal, sankalpa weakens.

"Even crushing a soft flower requires the fingers to move," Dasura said. "Ceasing to feed sankalpa asks for less. It can lose strength within half a blink. Turn the mind’s own discriminating power upon its movement. Examine the object’s lack of independent permanence. Let memory cease supplying desire with its old material, and rest in the Self."

In this teaching, mind, jiva, citta, and desire-bearing intelligence name aspects of the same constructed movement. They do not introduce separate substances. The Self is complete in its own nature. When sankalpa settles, the structure supporting sorrow settles with it.

One Night in the Kadamba

Vasistha descended from the sky and entered the tree. Dasura welcomed him with a seat, water of honor, fruit, leaves, and flowers. The two sages continued their discussion of Brahman so the boy’s understanding could mature. Dasura already possessed knowledge; the student remained the intended recipient of the final clarification.

Through the night Vasistha also observed the living expanse of the Kadamba, its birds, flowers, bees, and vine-covered spaces. The discussion continued until the boy received the supreme knowledge once again in a decisive form. The long night seemed to pass in a single muhurta.

At dawn the stars faded. Dasura and his son accompanied Vasistha to the tree’s skyward limit. He asked them to return to their dwelling, went on to the celestial Ganga, and rejoined the seven sages. Dasura remained in the Kadamba, established in knowledge and still guiding his son.