The Elephant of Vindhya and the Pit of Ignorance

Kumbha Begins the Parable

Vasistha was still speaking to Rama, and the story he had been telling for some time was that of Shikhidhvaja, a prince of the country of Malava. Shikhidhvaja had been brave and silent, a man of firmness and self-control, and he had a wife, Chudala, who found the Self while he was still arranging his kingdom. When she tried to tell him what she had found, he laughed at her. A girl of her age, he said, should not talk about great things. His dissatisfaction grew until he gave up the world altogether and went away to live as a recluse on the Mandara mountain, where he wore rags, ate what the forest gave, kept the hours of worship, and grew old. Chudala watched him from afar, and nothing in his austerity brought him one step nearer to the peace she had.

She had flown to him once before, on the night he left, and turned back without alighting, because her yoga had shown her what was fated for him. He treated her, always, as his young and silly wife, and nothing she said in her own shape would ever reach him. So she thought over the Agni-soma mantra, changed her form the way water changes into a wave, and came down to earth before his hut in the shape of a Brahmin boy so beautiful that the old king rose to his feet and called him a god who had put on a boy’s body for the visit. The boy said he was Kumbha, son of the sage Narada, born of a pot and given his name by Brahma himself. Shikhidhvaja bowed at his feet. “From today,” he said, “I count you as my teacher and my father and my best friend, and myself as your pupil.”

Kumbha had begun with a story about a rich man who spent years of rites and prayers hunting for the cintamani, the gem that gives its holder whatever he wishes, and who won it at last and saw it lying in front of him and could not believe his eyes. Nobody gets the cintamani in this life, the man reasoned; the shastras say it comes in the next, so whatever glitters here must be something else. While he reasoned, the gem went from him. Later a piece of glass caught the light at his feet and he seized it as the jewel, and on the strength of it gave away everything he owned, decided his own country and his own people were no longer good enough for a man so favored, and carried his glass into an uninhabited forest, where it bought him nothing and every misery found him. Shikhidhvaja listened and did not ask whom the rich man resembled.

Kumbha did not wait for him to ask. “Now listen to another story of mine,” he said. “This one fits your case even more closely, and I tell it to a man who once ruled a country so that he can see what his own understanding has done with itself. There was an elephant in the Vindhya mountains.”

Three Days in Iron Chains

He was the largest of them, the head of a great herd and the one the others followed, and there was a mind in that big raised head worth more than the mountain under his feet; the Vindhya range itself had once bowed its summit at a word from the sage Agastya, and this animal had bowed to nothing. His two tusks were as long as lightning and about as gentle. They could have held a thunderbolt’s edge and bored through a hillside, and there was a fire in them like the fire that burns the world down at the end of an age.

Elephant catchers had laid an iron trap across his path, and one day he walked into it. It closed on him and held him fast, as the spell of a sage holds a mountain, as the chains of Indra once held the demon Bali. An iron goad was worked into his trunk and every movement of the great body drove it deeper, so that the pain never stopped. He lay in the net like the demon Tripura with Shiva’s fire on him. For three days he lay there, and for all three his hunter watched him from a distance, letting the iron do the work.

On the third day the agony forced his mouth open and the scream that came out rolled through the hills like a bank of thunderclouds breaking. Then he set both tusks against the iron and heaved, and the bar that had held him three days snapped in two, the way the gates of heaven once gave under the Titan who stormed them. He was standing. He was loose.

The hunter saw it from where he stood. He saw the fetters go and the fury in the animal and he did what a man of his trade does when the trap fails: he ran to a tall tala palm beside the elephant’s path and climbed it, and when the elephant passed beneath him he jumped, meaning to come down on the broad skull and ride it, the way a driver rules an elephant, by the plain insolence of being on top.

He missed. He went past the head and struck the ground at the elephant’s feet and lay there, face down under the animal he had tormented for three days, like a ripe fruit knocked out of a tree by a hurrying wind.

One step would have finished it. The elephant had the goad still in him and the memory of every hour in the iron, and the man who had put it there was spread out under his foot. What rose in him was pity. The great have that weakness: they feel for another’s misery even in the middle of their own. He stood over the hunter and thought, there is nothing brave in trampling a man who has already fallen. He lifted the foot. He finished breaking the chain that still trailed from him, snapping it into two pieces, and walked away through whatever stood in his road, as flood water goes through a bridge, his strength having broken the net and his decency having spared the man, and went off into the forest the way the sun goes down after it has scattered the evening clouds.

When the elephant was gone the hunter got up off the ground and looked himself over and found himself as sound as he had been before he jumped. A fall from the crown of a tala palm, and not one part of him was hurt. Kumbha paused on that. “I have come to think,” he said, “that the bodies of scoundrels are armored against injury, and that the wicked only grow stronger by the repeated practice of their crimes, as rain clouds grow fatter the more often they rain.”

The Hunter Digs Another Trap

The hunter did not thank anyone for his life. He stood by the broken trap and felt what a man feels who has had a treasure in his hands and watched it walk off into the trees. The pity that had spared him he entered in his accounts as a loss, and he set out after what he had lost.

He beat the forest for the elephant for a long time, pushing through thicket after thicket, the way Rahu climbs the sky to lay hold of a moon that has gone behind cloud. And at last he came in sight of him, standing at rest under a tree with his flanks going in and out, like a soldier home from the field breathing in the shade of an arbor.

He kept out of sight. He went away and came back with tools, every tool he had that could take an elephant at his resting place, and he went to work with them. He dug. What he dug was a circular ditch, all the way around the ground where the elephant liked to stand, as the maker of the world once ran the ocean in a ring around the earth.

Then he roofed the pit with green branches and soft leaves until it looked exactly like the forest floor, the way the autumn sky covers its emptiness with thin bright clouds that look like weather and hold no rain. After that there was nothing to do except let the elephant be an elephant.

One day the elephant, roaming at large and thinking of nothing, put his weight on the green roof and went through it. He fell the way a shelf of rock on the coast breaks off and crashes onto the dry bed of the sea. The circular pit took him, as deep as the sea is deep, and held him, and he lay in the bottom of it like a treasure shut up in the hollow of a chest.

He is there still, at the bottom of that pit, passing his days in trouble and dread, like the demon Bali in his dark cave under the ground. Kumbha gave the verdict without softening it. “That is what the elephant bought with his mercy. The hunter lay at his feet and he let him live, and if he had finished him then and there, no pit would ever have been dug. The silliness of a moment put him where he is.”

“People who cannot see a danger coming and will not take the trouble to prevent it are called gaja murkha, fools of the elephant kind, after him,” Kumbha said. “He was so pleased to be out of the hunter’s chains that he never gave another thought to what might come next, and that one failure to think brought the second disaster down on him from a long way off. Understand this, Shikhidhvaja: there is no bondage for a human being except his own ignorance. A king’s jail holds its prisoners loosely compared with the grip a free man’s own errors and prejudices have on him. To know the soul, and to know this whole universe as one soul, is the only freedom there is. Ignorance of that is the root of every slavery in the world.”

“You Are the Elephant”

Kumbha said, “Now let me tell you what the story of the Vindhya elephant means. You will find it as useful as it is strange.”

“That elephant of the Vindhya range is you, here in this forest.”

“His two strong tusks are the two powers you lean your whole weight on: viveka, the discrimination that told you a throne could never give you what you were looking for, and vairagya, the dispassion that let you walk away from it. Those are the strongest weapons a human being has. The elephant’s tusks were real, and so are yours.”

“The hunter who was his enemy, who waited for him along his free range, is the great ignorance that has taken hold of you, and taken hold for no purpose except your misery. The strong are brought down by the weak. A weak man led that elephant from one danger into the next, from grief to grief, and a feeble ignorance has led a prince into this forest. The iron chain he lay in is the snare of your own desire, the wanting of a reward still to come, and that wanting is what brought all of this down on you. Expectation is a harder chain than iron and lasts longer. Iron rusts; a few seasons of rain and it crumbles away. A hope grows thicker every year and holds you faster. And as the hunter marked his elephant from a hiding place where the elephant could not see him, your ignorance follows you at a distance and marks you for its own from somewhere you have never looked.”

“When the elephant broke the iron, that was you breaking the ties of a peaceful reign, your royalty and everything it let you enjoy,” Kumbha went on. “A man can sometimes break iron. What no one has ever managed is to stop a desire from growing once it has started. And when the hunter who had trapped him fell out of the sky onto the ground, that was your ignorance thrown down flat, because it saw you stripped of the kingdom and every dignity you had. A man’s pride and a man’s ignorance fall with his fortunes.”

“When someone sickened of the world decides to give up his pleasures, his ignorance trembles inside him, the way a demon living in a tree shakes when the axe goes into the trunk. When he has given them up and stays without them, the ignorance leaves him as the demon leaves the fallen tree. A man who has finished with his animal gratifications has pulled down the house his ignorance lived in, as a woodcutter, felling a tree, brings every bird’s nest in it down to the ground with him.”

“You did that. You put your ignorance down when you gave up the kingdom and came here. It fell, and your mind fell with it. What it did not do is die. Your resignation was a sword, and the sword knocked it flat and never went through it, and a thing knocked flat gets up. It has gotten up, Shikhidhvaja, with new strength and a long memory of its defeat, and in the end it has beaten you by shutting you inside this wilderness, in the painful dungeon of a false asceticism. If you can kill it now, while it still lies where it fell, it will not be able to finish you here among your rigors, even though it has already brought you to this by way of your abdication.”

The Leaves Over the Pit

Kumbha turned to the pit. “The ditch the hunter dug to get around his elephant is this pit of austerity you are lying in, with all its pain. Your ignorance scooped it out for you, to hold you.”

“And the fodder the hunter heaped in the hollow to draw the elephant on, the tender shoots and soft leaves, those are the many rewards your ignorance keeps setting in front of you as the payment for your penance: everything that is going to come to you for all this, if you only hold out a little longer. ”

“You are not the witless elephant, Shikhidhvaja. I grant you that. You are also not so very different from him, because an ignorance you have never once corrected has thrown you into this forest the way the pit took him.”

“And his pit at least was lined with tender plants and leaves he could eat. Yours is full of austerities, rigors no human body should be asked to bear, and the one asking is the thing in you that wants you kept here. You are caged in the prison of a hermit’s cell, condemned to every torment your own imagination can devise under the names of penance and martyrdom. You are Bali in his cell under the ground.”

“So, yes. You are the empty-headed elephant, bound fast in a chain of false rigors and shut up in the cave of your own ignorance. That is the whole meaning of the elephant of the Vindhya mountains, and I have held nothing of it back. Take from it the lesson that is yours.”

The Renunciation Still Required

There was a question the boy had been saving, and he asked it with a perfectly straight face. “Tell me something. What made you refuse the advice of the princess Chudala? She is as skilled in right conduct as she is in the knowledge of God. She is an adept among those who know the truth, and she practices every word of what she teaches; what she says comes from the truth and deserves to be heard with respect. If you turned her down out of confidence in your own judgment, then explain one more thing to me. Why did she not stop you from giving away everything you had?”

Shikhidhvaja let the question about his wife go by and took hold of the other one. “Let me ask you something first, and I hope you will answer it. How can you say I have not given up everything? I resigned my realm, my house, my country, all of it at once. I left my wife behind. I left every piece of wealth I had.”

“You are telling the truth,” Kumbha said. “You have given up the kingdom and the house, the lands and the relatives, the wife and the wealth. It still does not add up to giving up everything, because not one of those was ever yours. They come to a man on their own and they leave him on their own. The only thing that is yours is your egoism, and that you have not let go of. It is the dearest delight your soul has. Until you are clean of it you will not be clean of your sorrows.”

“Then hear me,” the king said. “If my kingdom and my possessions were never my all, then this forest I came to must be my all now. These rocks and trees and shrubs are what I own. I am willing to give these up too, if that is what giving up everything means.” Vasistha paused here in his telling to Rama. The Brahmin boy’s words had gone deep, he said; the prince, whose blood had long since run cool, sat silent for a while and gave no answer. Then he wiped his attachment to the forest out of his heart and made up his mind to slip away from it, as a stream in the rainy season slides along and carries off the dust and dirt of its own bank.

“I have decided,” he said. “I will leave this forest and say goodbye to its caves and its arbors. Tell me, then. Does this complete it? Is this the giving up of everything?”

Kumbha was not moved. “The foot of this mountain,” he said, “with every woodland on it and every arbor and cavern, is no property of yours. These are the common hills and valleys of everyone who walks them. How can leaving what was never yours count as giving yourself up? The one great boon that did fall to your lot, your egoism, you hold as tightly as you ever did. That is the thing you must be rid of, if you want to be free of the cares and sorrows of this world of woes.”

“If none of these things is mine,” the king said, “then there is my hermit’s cell, and the grove around it. Those I have always called my own. I am willing to resign them too, if that is what makes the giving up complete.”

Vasistha, telling it to Rama, marked the change in the man. The self-governed prince was waking under the boy’s admonitions. He sat silent for a moment, and a light shone inside him. His pure conscience came back to his mind, and the blaze of right knowledge burned away the dross of his attachment to the hermitage, as a gust of wind drives the dust off the ground.

“Know this, sir,” Shikhidhvaja said. “I have taken my heart away from this hermitage. I have let go of my attachment to all its sacred bowers and arbors. Consider me now a man who has resigned his all, every single thing in the world.”

“How can I consider you fully resigned,” Kumbha said, “when all you have resigned is a few groves and arbors and whatever goes with them? None of it belongs to you. You were never its master, and you cannot be its deserter either; there is one being alone who is master of all of it. You have one thing still to let go of, and it is the greatest and best thing that ever fell to your lot in this world. Only when you let that go will you have set yourself free of everything.” The prince was so taken up with his knowledge of gross and tangible things that he could not come to see what egoism meant.

“If even this is not the all you want me to give up,” Shikhidhvaja said, “then take these earthen pots and basins. Take these hides and skins. Take this cell of mine as well, and know that I forgo every one of them forever and take myself elsewhere.”

With that the dispassionate prince rose from his seat, his mind composed and quiet, the way an autumn cloud lifts off a mountaintop and scatters somewhere else. Kumbha watched his movements from where he sat, and the queen behind the boy’s face smiled in her amazement, as the sun laughs from above at the foolish attempts of men on the earth below. Kumbha looked steadily at the king and sat in silence with a single thought: let him do whatever he likes for his sanctification; let him renounce every temporal article of this world; none of it will serve his spiritual edification at all.

Shikhidhvaja brought every sacred vessel and seat out of his grotto and collected them in one spot, as the great ocean yielded up all her submerged treasures once the flood of dissolution had gone down. He stacked them in a pile, laid dried fuel against them, and set fire to the pile, as a sun-stone kindles whatever will burn by catching the sun’s own fire. Then he left the vessels to the fire and sat down on a seat beside Kumbha, like the sun setting on Mount Meru after burning the world down with the fire of dissolution.

He spoke to his rosary first. “You have been your master’s confidant all the time I turned you on my fingers as my counting beads. I turned you over and over with my sacred mantras in these forests, and you were of no service to me at all. I traveled with you, my reliquary, and saw many holy places in your company, and since you proved of no good to me, I give you now to the flames.” The fire rose in flames and flashes into the sky, and they looked like stars glittering there.

He cast his seat of deerskin onto the fire. “I have carried you about on my back this long, as an ignorant stag carries his hide. It was my ignorance that kept you with me so long. Now you are at liberty to go your own way, and may peace and bliss attend you forever. Ascend with the rising fire to heaven and twinkle there among the stars on high.” So saying, he took the hide garment off his own body with his own hands and committed it to the flames.

The prince’s pyre spread until it was an ocean of fire, driven about like a forest blaze by the winds blowing off the mountains, and he thought of his water pot. “You, sir, who bore the sacred water for every priestly function of mine, my good water pot, it is true that I have no power to render you the proper recompense for your past services. You were the best model of true friendship, good nature, benevolence, and constancy to me, and in your great bounty the best exemplar of goodness and every good quality. You who were the receptacle of all goodness for me, go now your own way, purified in the same sacred fire out of which you first came to me from the potter’s kiln. May all your ways be blissful.” He cast the water pot into the consecrated fire. All good things are given to the good or to the fire; bad things are thrown off like the dust of the earth, the way foolish men fall to the ground by their own secret craft.

“It is well for you, my lowly mattress, to be put to the fire and reduced to worthless ashes.” He took up his wet matted seat and threw it into the flaming fire. The seat of kusha grass on which he had sat for his pure meditation on God followed it at once, since it is better to give up early a thing one must be rid of shortly afterward. Then he lifted the alms bowl. “You held the best food, presented to me by good people. I commit you to this flame with whatever is still in you. Fire burns a thing only once, and the burnt thing never burns again; that is why I shun every implement of my ceremonial rites, to set myself free from the bondage of all actions forever. Do not be sorry that I forsake you this way. Who would carry about with him things unworthy of himself?”

So saying, he threw into the fire all his cooking vessels, the plates and dishes of his kitchen, everything he had ever needed in his hermitage. They went up in one blaze, as the world is burned down by the all-destroying fire of the kalpanta, the end of an age.