Gadhi’s Chandala Dream: Two Muhurtas and Many Years

The Boon at the Lotus Pond

Rama had asked how a delusion could run so deep that it felt like the world. Vasistha answered him in Dasharatha’s hall with a rule first and a story second. Only the governing of the restless mind, he said, can destroy the delusion that keeps a person circling through birth after birth; there is no other means. Then he told Rama to listen closely, because the story he was about to tell showed how intricate that delusion could become.

There is a large district called Kosala, full of forests and fruit trees and rich in minerals. A Brahmin named Gadhi lived there, learned in the Vedas and so steady in conduct that people treated him as virtue with a face. From his youth his mind had been calm. Worldly business neither drew nor disturbed him, and his heart was as clear as the sky over the groves. One day, with some fixed purpose he told no one, he left his friends and walked into the forest to practice austerity.

He found a lake there, crowded with open lotuses, the moon above it and the stars scattered around her, all of them pouring light on the water like rain. He walked into the lake and stood in it up to his neck. His body stayed under; his head floated on the surface like one more lotus. He had one intention, to see Vishnu before him, and he held it. Eight full months passed that way. The flowers around him opened and closed with the sun. His face shriveled and went pale, like the lotuses of his own lake when the sun fails to reach them.

When the austerity had worn him down to very little, his god came. Hari appeared over him the way a dark cloud of the rains appears over earth cracked by the hot season. “Get up out of the water, Gadhi,” the Lord said, “and take the blessing you wanted from me. The tree of your vow has its fruit on it now.”

Gadhi bowed to him. “I bow to you, Vishnu, my lord. The three worlds rest in you, and all the starry worlds rise like lotuses in the lake of your heart, where you settle on them like the black bee.” Then he asked for what he had stood eight months to ask. “I want to see the spiritual delusion you have ordained to blindfold this world. I want to see what people call Vishnu Maya.”

“You will see it,” the god said, “and afterward, by the strength of this devotion of yours, you will be rid of it.” He vanished as a castle in the clouds vanishes. Gadhi rose out of the water like the moon rising from the milky ocean, cool and wet and bright. The sight of the lord of the world had opened his heart the way moonlight opens the night lotuses.

He stayed on in that forest for some days, carrying the joy of that sight with him through the duties of a Brahmin’s day. Then one morning, bathing in the lake among the open lotuses, he was turning Vishnu’s words over in his mind, the way great sages turn over a Vedic text, and in the middle of the water he began the aghamarshana, the prayer that asks the waters to carry away one’s sins. Halfway through it the mantras left him. The words simply were not there. His mind lost its footing, and he went down into the deep water in confusion.

What he saw next was his own body. It had fallen the way a mountain tree falls into the valley below when a gust takes it; the breath had gone out of it and the limbs lay as still as sugarcane flattened by a storm. The face had faded like a withered leaf. The carcass lay on the ground like a lotus bud snapped from its stalk, the eyeballs dull as morning stars, the earth around it dry and blowing with dust. His friends sat around it weeping, their faces ruined with grief, crying over it like birds on the branches of a tree. His wife sat at his feet, a lotus bent over with water streaming from her eyes as if an embankment had broken. His mother held his chin, where the first whiskers had just come in, in her soft hand, and her wailing hummed over him like a bee. The tears of the friends washed the corpse the way dew washes a tree through its dead leaves. The limbs no longer answered him; they had turned to strangers who refuse a friendship for fear of parting. The lips had drawn back from the teeth, so that the dead mouth seemed to laugh at the vanity of living the way bony old ascetics laugh at the world. The mouth was as silent as a devotee in meditation, the body as motionless as a thing of clay, asleep with no waking in it, and the ears lay lifted as though they were listening to the mourners to measure how much each one had loved him.

Then the relatives raised the full lamentation, beating their breasts, swooning and rising again, their eyes streaming. They lifted the corpse, which was already turning, and carried it with their cries to the burning ground, where it was laid on earth strewn with uncounted bones and skeletons and dried carcasses. Vultures wheeled thick enough to shade the sun; the pyres already burning drove back the dark; jackals showed their open mouths on every side like tongues of living flame; ravens stood in blood and crows dipped their wings in it, and old vultures tangled themselves in strings of torn entrails. His friends set the corpse on the pile and lit it. The moisture of the body went up in fumes, the wood cracked and roared, the smoke curled over the flames, the fire gnawed through the bones and filled the air with its stench, and the whole of him, soft and hard, was swallowed as an elephant swallows reeds. And Gadhi, standing in the lake with his heart full of that grief, went on seeing.

The Life of Katanja

The next thing he saw was a village near Bhuta-mandala, full of people, and himself conceived there in the womb of a Chandala woman. He lay in that womb in great pain, pressed by the coils of her intestines, his new senses forced to live with the stink of her bowels. When the body was ready he was born in due time, black as a cloud of the rainy season and soiled from head to foot.

He grew through infancy and boyhood in the Chandala’s house, tumbling here and there like a pebble in the current of the Yamuna. He reached his twelfth year, then his sixteenth, and his body filled out like a rain cloud swelling. The name he answered to was Katanja. By then he ran with a pack of hounds from one forest to the next and killed wild deer for a living; it was the only work he knew.

He took a Chandali wife, black as a tamala leaf, with budding breasts and dark palms like new shoots on a tree. Only her two rows of teeth were white; her limbs were as quick and supple as the creepers of the forest. The two of them played along the forest edge like a pair of black bees in the flowering meadows. When they were tired they lay on beds of leaves and creepers spread over the ground, the way the winds spread them along the skirts of the Vindhya hills. They slept in groves and in mountain caves, sat on heaps of leaflets, lived under bowers of climbing plants. They put kankirata flowers in their hair and blossoms of every kind on their necks and chests, hung ketaka flowers from their ears and strung necklaces of mango buds. They rolled on beds of flowers and roamed the foot of the mountain; they knew every arbor worth going to, and both of them could shoot and hunt. They had many children, offshoots of their race in that hill country, as rude and rough as khadira thorns.

Youth went by in family life, and decline came after it, and at last the old age that is as dry of pleasure as desert ground. The two of them went back to their native village in the Bhuta district, built a poor hut of leaves and straw, and lived in it as recluses, giving their last years to devotion. Gadhi, inside the body of that old man, found it worn thin as a dry leaf, like a tamala tree withering in a mountain cave for want of water. His family had grown large around him; he was cramped for means and crabbed in speech, and he was, as far as he knew, the oldest Chandala alive, with nothing to comfort him but the people of his house. Then death took every one of them. It swept the whole family away the way rainwater carries the fallen leaves out of a forest. He wept over them with a torn heart, his eyes as full as a stag’s that has been separated from its herd.

He spent some days in that forest with his grief and then left the land of his birth, the way water birds leave a lake when its water and lotus plants have dried. He wandered through many countries with a sad and sickly heart and found no place to rest in any of them, blown about as a cloud is blown by contrary winds.

One day his wandering brought him into the opulent city of the Kirs. Birds hung in the air over it like balloons. Trees stood on both sides of the road, their leaves and flower clusters waving like enameled cloth set with gems, and the path was strewn ankle deep in flowers. He came out onto the royal road, which looked like the milky path of the sky, and found it packed with soldiers, citizens and more women than he could count. In the midst of them walked the auspicious royal elephant, dressed in jeweled and embroidered trappings, like the golden mountain of the gods out for a walk on the earth. He learned what it was doing. The last king had lately died, and the elephant was ranging about to choose the next one, employed like a jeweler sent to pick the best gem for the throne.

Katanja stood and stared at the animal, which to him was a hill that moved. While he stared, the elephant came to him, lifted him with its trunk, and set him on its head with every sign of respect, carrying him the way Meru carries the sun on its summit. The moment the people saw him sitting there, they sounded their trumpets, and the noise was like the ocean answering the thunder of the clouds at the deluge. The cry went up from the whole crowd, “Victory to the king!”, and filled the air like the single cry of the morning birds over a waking world. The panegyrists took up their praises after it, rolling through the air like waves. The matrons of the city gathered around him to anoint him their king and moved about him like the sea heaving around Mandara after the churning. The great ladies hung him with ornaments of every gem, as the sea lays its colored waves on a shore rock under the rising sun. Young girls poured cooling ointments over him like rain clouds emptying on a mountaintop, and others wound him in wreaths of scented flowers with their soft hands, and others painted him with pastes until he glowed like a mountain striped with its minerals. In gold and gems he drew every heart to him, as Meru draws them when the evening clouds shine on it, and the girls dressed him in tendrils of creeping plants until he looked like the wishing tree wound in its vines. Anointed and adorned, he was attended by the whole royal house and the subjects together, as travelers gather under a flowering tree with shade. Then they all assembled and set him on the throne, the way the gods set Indra on his after he has been carried in on the elephant Airavata.

So a Chandala was made king in the city of the Kirs, and he was as happy at his luck as a raven that finds a fat dead deer in the forest. The Kiri queen rubbed his feet with her lotus hands. His body was dusted with fragrant frankincense until it glowed like an evening sky with crimson clouds in it. He strutted through the Kir city among its women like a lion among lionesses in a flowering wood. His old pains and sorrows left him; he felt cooled, as if he wore a necklace of pearls dropped from the heads of elephants killed by lions, and he took to luxury in such good company the way a sunburned elephant takes to a lake full of water and forage. He reigned for some time in that kingdom that had come to him unearned, extended his power and his orders on every side, governed through his ministers, and was known throughout his dominions by the name of Gavala.

Courtiers surrounded him; ministers attended him; the chiefs paid him homage; the royal umbrella was raised over his head and the chowrie flicked beside him. He saw his orders carried out in every direction and grew into the dignity of it. He liked learning the affairs of the state, and he liked hearing that his subjects were happy and lived without fear inside his borders. The hymns of the panegyrists made him forget himself and everything he had been; the pleasure of it went to his head like drink. He reigned a full eight years over the Kiri kingdom and conducted himself honorably the whole time.

One day he was sitting at his ease in the open air without his royal dress, looking up at a sky that was clear of cloud and darkness and had neither sun nor moon nor stars in it. His heart was full with the enjoyment of being king, and he no longer thought much about the trinkets and ornaments that were loaded on him. In that bare state he went out one evening and watched the sun bending down below the horizon off its usual road of glory. Near there he came on a band of Chandalas, big men with black skins, singing like cuckoos announcing the spring, their trembling fingers striking the wires of their lyres the way a swarm of bees sets the leaves shaking. An old man stood among them who was plainly their leader, gray headed and red eyed, like Meru with its snowy top and its caverns full of gems.

The old man looked at the king and knew him, and came up to him with the ease of a long friendship. “Katanja! How did you get here? Has the king of this place taken you up as a companion for your music? Does he like a sweet singer the way people like the kokila, and load him with gifts, cloths for the house and seats? I am as glad to see you here, doing this well, as people are glad to see a mango tree in spring with its fruit and flowers on it. I am as glad as a lotus bud when the sun comes up, as the moon plants at moonrise, as a great man with the best of his gains in his hands. Nothing is a greater joy than the sight of a friend.” While the old man was still talking to him in this way, the king told him how the wheel of time had turned in his favor. His consorts and his servants were standing at a window above. They overheard the whole exchange, and it sank into them that their king was a Chandala by birth. They sickened at it like lotuses under a frost, like a field in a drought; when the news reached the city, the citizens took it as people take the sight of a mountain forest on fire. The king, feeling the thing go wrong, turned on the old man’s words and bared his teeth at him, the way a lion on the ground shows its teeth at a cat sneering from the top of a tree. Then he fled inside, into the inner apartments, his heart pounding like a swan’s that has to land on a lake of withered lotuses in the dry season. His limbs went stiff. His face went pale with fear, and his knees shook with the rage inside him, as a tree’s trunk shakes when fire is burning in its hollow.

Everyone he found inside sat sunk in gloom, eyes down and heads drooping, like plants whose roots the mice have eaten. The ministers, the ladies of the inner rooms, and the people of the city stopped touching him, as they would refuse to touch a dead body lying in the house. The servants ceased to serve him. The women, who had loved him and were grieving for him, could not bear to be near him. They looked at his cheerless dark face, its luster gone, as people look at a cremation ground, something everyone turns away from. They pitied the dark body that was now smoking with his grief, and still no one dared to approach it; it seemed to burn like a volcano inside its own smoke. The courtiers left him with heaving chests, and his orders were obeyed about as much as an order to put out cold ashes with water. People fled from him as from a Rakshasa that brings nothing but harm and danger. So he was shunned by everyone and left alone in the middle of a crowded city, a stranger in a foreign country without money or a trade. He called to people and spoke to them, and no one answered, as no one answers a hollow reed sounding by the roadside.

They were saying to one another that the guilt of their long association with a Chandala could not be wiped out by any penance except one: to burn themselves alive on a funeral pile. Once that was decided, the ministers and citizens together built pyres for themselves out of heaps of dry wood. Lit, the pyres blazed across the ground like stars across the sky, and the city filled with wailing. Wives wept in showers with piteous cries; people groaned in choked voices around the burning furnaces; the cries of the dependents of self-cremating ministers rose like wind whistling through a forest. The bodies of great Brahmins burned on the piles and sent up a greasy smoke that the winds scattered over the land like a mist of ill omen. The stench of human fat and flesh went far into the sky and called in flocks of birds to the feast, until the disk of the sun was hidden under the shadow of their wings. The flames rose to the sky like a conflagration in the air, and the flying sparks were meteors falling on the horizon. Here boys with no guardians cried for the ornaments that robbers had stripped from them; there citizens were threatened with their lives and goods by gangs of dacoits. On one side people mourned the relatives they had lost in the fire, and on the other bands of thieves crept unnoticed around the houses after plunder. The city stood struck dumb in its ruin, as if the last day of the world had come.

Gavala, the Chandala prince, whose mind had been purified and whose manners had been refined in the company of the great men of the palace, watched the catastrophe of the state and mourned over it in his heart. “All of this is because of me,” he said. “Every misfortune that has fallen on this kingdom, and the doomsday that has come early to the realm, the royal family and the officers of the state. What is the use of this miserable life of mine? Death is a blessing to me now, better than living on in this wretched condition. It is better for the mean and the base to die than to live and be reviled.” Resolved, Gavala built a pile for himself and made an offering of his body to the furnace, dropping into it like a moth onto a flame, without a sigh.

As Gavala’s body went into the fire and he writhed, pulling at limbs the flames had singed, the violence of that movement and the pain of it woke the dreaming Gadhi where he stood in the water.

As the sage reached this point, the day went down with the setting sun to its own evening worship. The assembly broke up with mutual salutations for the evening ablutions, and gathered again with the rising sun after the dark of night had scattered.

Vasistha took up the story where he had left it. Gadhi was soon relieved of the agitation that the delusion of the world had thrown him into, and settled back into himself like the sea settling after its waves have gone down. Freed from its painful thoughts, his mind found its rest again after the troublesome dream had passed, as Brahma rests when the labor of a creation is over at the end of a kalpa. His senses came back to him slowly, as they come to a man waking from sleep, or to a drunk sobering up. “I am the same Gadhi,” he said to himself, “and I am in the middle of the same rite, standing in the water. All of that, everything I was seeing for so long, is nothing at all, and I see that now as clearly as people see things after the shadow of night has been lifted.” Remembering what he was, he lifted his feet out of the water, the way a lotus bud lifts its head above the surface once the frost of the year is over. “This is the same water, the same sky, the same earth. But what I was just seeing astonishes me. What am I, and what am I seeing now, and what was I, and what have I been doing all this time?” He stood a long time with his brows knitted and his eyes staring. “It was my weakness that showed me this delusion.” Knowing it for certain, he came up out of the water like the sun coming up over the horizon.

On the bank he went on talking to himself. “Where is that mother and that wife of mine, who attended me at the moment of my death? My parents died when I was a boy, before I knew anything, like the parent plant of a young shoot cut down by death’s sword. I am unmarried. I do not know what a wife looks like, and I am as ignorant of married love as a Brahmin is of the taste of forbidden liquor. I am far from my own country here, and I know none of my friends and relatives, so to whom was I going to return, and where was I going to die? Every one of these scenes I have been seeing is a picture of fairyland painted in my own fancy. Whatever it was, all of it is delusion and dream, and we are living dead among our friends; it is all magic and delusion, and nothing in it is true or real. Our minds are wild beasts, running furiously through the forest of error, and that forest shows every living thing an endless run of such scenes.”

The Guest Who Knew the Story

Gadhi spent some days at his own house in the woods turning these delusions over in his mind. Then one evening a Brahmin traveler came to the door looking for a place to rest, and Gadhi took him in as his guest. The man ate fruit and the syrup of flowers until he was as refreshed as a tree that spring has filled with sap and set leafing and fruiting. The two of them performed the evening service, told their beads, and lay down on beds of tender leaves and grass. There they began to talk about the divine matters both of them knew, and the words fell from their lips like the sweetness of spring. In the course of it Gadhi asked his guest why he was so thin and drawn, and why he seemed so very tired.

“Listen,” the guest said, “and I will tell you the cause of both, the leanness and the weariness, and I will tell you the facts as they are. I am no wandering teller of tales. In the forest country of the north lies the great district of the Kirs, famous everywhere for its wealth. I lived in the city there. The people honored me, and the variety of good food I got in that place pleased my body and my mind alike. One day someone told me, as a piece of gossip, that a Chandala had once been king of that country for eight years. I asked the village people whether it was true, and they told me with one voice that a Chandala had really reigned there for a full eight years. In the end he was discovered for what he was, and he burned himself on a pyre, and hundreds of Brahmins burned themselves after him. When I heard that from their own mouths I left the district, meaning to do penance for having lived there, and went on pilgrimage to Prayaga, where the Ganga and the Yamuna meet. I kept the Chandrayana fast there for three days and nights, and I broke it only today. That is why you find me so thin and worn.”

Gadhi put a hundred questions to his guest about the matter, and the man answered every one of them, and every answer confirmed the story.

Gadhi passed the night until sunrise with his heart beating hard. In the morning he bathed and said his prayers, took leave of his guest, and sat down to think with an understanding that no longer knew where it stood. “What I saw in my delusion has been ratified as fact by my Brahmin guest. I cannot tell whether this is magic, or some fascination worked by the conjurer Sambara. What I saw of my death among my relatives was certainly a delusion of my mind. But the later part of the vision, that I became a Chandala, is verified by a Brahmin’s penance for having entered the Chandala’s city. I must find out the whole particulars of this Chandala, and I must go at once to the Bhuta country, and go with an undaunted mind.” So resolved, Gadhi rose to visit that distant district, as the sun rises to visit every side of Sumeru.

He traveled with the speed of a stream in the rains, through many countries he had never heard of, as a cloud crosses distant realms on the back of its airy horse, and at last he came in sight of the country he had seen in his dream. He had set out to test the truth of a delusion, and he found, as travelers do, that what looks unreachable at the start yields to persistence. He arrived among the Bhotas, a people whose customs were nothing like his own, and felt as lost among them as a camel that has wandered into a karanja forest looking for its thistles. Near there he saw a city, the very one he had seen in his delusion, as fine as a dwelling of the Gandharvas. He went on through it, and at the far end he found the Chandala quarter, like the pit of hell set at the edge of the town, and it was exactly as spacious as the place in his vision. In the figures of the Chandalas there he saw his own likeness from the dream, as a man sees the shape of a Gandharva or a ghost in a dream or a delirium. He saw the Chandala houses as he had seen them in his delusion, and looked with grief and a cold mind at the deserted dwellings of the people who had been his. Then he saw his own house. Rainwater had flooded it. Barley sprouts and brambles grew through it. The roof was gone, and the bedstead was barely to be made out. The hut was a picture of poverty and wretchedness, and its yard was ruin and desolation, as if a raiding party had been through. He stood a long time looking at the dry white bones of bulls and cows, buffaloes and horses, strewn over the ground around the hut, and he remembered them as the remains of the beasts he had hunted and slaughtered. He saw the dry hollow skulls lying on the ground that had been his cups and his dishes, still unmoved from where he had left them, filled now with rainwater. He saw strings of dried entrails from his kills lying on the plain like parched plants waiting for rain. Gadhi, who knew himself to be Gadhi the Brahmin, looked long at his former house and its surroundings, which lay there like the dry and broken skeleton of a human body left unburied on the bare ground.

He stood amazed at it, and then withdrew to the village nearby, as a traveler comes back to the dwellings of the Aryas after a stay among the barbarians. There he began asking people. “Do you remember anything about the former state of that village out there, and the lives of the Chandalas who lived in it? I have heard good people say that a knowing man carries the annals of every place, as he knows every spot on a globe held in his hand. If you remember anything of the good old Chandala who lived retired in that spot, if you remember his adventures the way everyone remembers the accidents of his own life, then please tell me. They say there is great merit in guiding a stranger and in settling the doubts of someone hanging in suspense.” He importuned the villagers one after another in this way, and they were as puzzled by the request as physicians are by a patient with a complaint they have never seen. “It is an undeniable truth, just as you say,” the villagers said. “A Chandala of hideous shape named Katanja lived in that place. He was surrounded by a large family, sons and grandsons, friends and servants, and other relatives and kinsmen besides; his children were as many as the fruits on a mango tree. Cruel fate snatched all of them away in time, the way a fire burns down a mountain forest with its fruit and its flowers in one go. Then he deserted his native land and went over to the city of the Kirs, and he became its king, and he reigned there twice four years. When the citizens afterward learned how low his birth was, they drove him out at last, as one takes a poisonous tree out of a garden. And seeing the people burning themselves on funeral piles, he entered a pyre he had built for himself, and was purified by the sacred fire along with the rest. But tell us, why are you so curious about the Chandala? Was he a friend of yours? Had you some connection with him?”

Gadhi asked them many more things about the Chandala, and spent a whole month in their several houses on his inquiry. He also told the village people everything he knew of the Chandala from his dream, and they listened closely as he told them the whole story from first to last. Informed of every particular, both from what the people had heard and from what he had seen with his own eyes, Gadhi went home. He went equally ashamed and astonished, the disgrace of his past vileness stamped on his mind like the black spot on the moon.

At home he could not rest with what he had heard and seen of the Chandala and his dwelling, and he wanted to know more. So he went back to the place and looked again at the dwellings scattered over the plain, as Brahma looks over the ruins the great deluge leaves at the end of a kalpa. “These bones lying about the ruined huts in this forest look like little imps gathered around the trees of a burial ground. These posts and pegs of elephant tusk, fastened to and on the walls of the ruined houses, look like the crags of Meru drowned under the waters of the deluge. Here the Chandala feasted on monkey flesh dressed with young bamboo shoots, and there he caroused on country liquor with his drunken friends. Here he slept in the embrace of his dark wife on a bed of lion skin, drunk on a better liquor mixed with the musk that runs from an elephant’s temples. There was a pack of hounds tied to the trunk of the withered bharanda tree and fed on the rotten flesh of carcasses. Here I see three earthen pots covered with buffalo hide, like broken pieces of dark cloud, which once held the pearls that fall from the skulls of slain elephants. I see the place I saw in my dream where the Chandala boys played in the dust with as much glee as cuckoos flitting among mango leaves. I see the place I saw in my vision where the boys sang to the tune of their bamboo pipes, drank the milk of bitches, and decorated themselves with flowers from the cremation grounds. Here the families of wedding parties met for their marriage feasts and danced and sang as loudly as the waves of the sea. There I find the bamboo cages still hanging high, set out before to catch the birds of the air, to be killed for their food.” He stayed on the spot a long time, going over everything he remembered from his dream, lost in wonder, his heart pounding, that his dream had disclosed all of this.

Then he left that place and traveled a long time through many countries beyond the borders of Bhuta-mandala. He crossed rivers and rocks, deserts and forests, until he reached the snowy mountain and the settled lands of men beyond it, and came to the city of a great monarch, whose towers rose off the earth like hills. There he stopped after his long journey, as Narada rests in his heavenly dome after the fatigue of traveling through the worlds. He saw in that city every place that answered to the thoughts in his mind, the places he had seen and enjoyed in his dream, and he asked the citizens, respectfully, “Do you remember anything about the Chandala king who reigned here for a while? If you do, please tell it to me in its proper order.” “Yes,” the citizens said. “A Chandala king reigned here for a full eight years, and he was elected to it by the auspicious elephant of the realm. When at last he was discovered to be of so vile a race, he burned himself on a funeral pyre, and it is now a dozen years since that dreadful event.” Gadhi went on questioning every man he met, and was satisfied to hear the same account from every mouth in the city.

Then he saw the king of that city coming out with his bodyguards and his vehicles, going out of the city, and he recognized the king: it was the god Vishnu, with his attendants, as he had seen him in his devotion. The cloud of dust raised by the feet of the procession shadowed the sky, and Gadhi remembered with grief the same pomp under his own kingship. “Here are the same Kiri girls with their rosy skin like lotus petals, and those others with bodies blazing like liquid gold and eyes trembling like blue lotuses. The chowries waving there flash with the light of moonbeams, like the water of a cascade, like clusters of kasa flowers. The beautiful maidens waving snow white fans in their hands are forest plants with pearly flowers on their branches. The rows of furious elephants standing on both sides of the road are thick lines of wishing trees growing on the ridges of Sumeru. These chieftains like Yama, Kuvera and Varuna are the regents of the quarters of the sky going out with Indra. These long lines of fine buildings, full of every kind of thing and every comfort, are a grove of kalpa trees granting every wish. In this royal city of the Kirs and in the ways of its people I see exactly the same customs and usages as in the kingdom of my past life. Truly this is a vision from my dream appearing as a reality in my waking state, and I cannot understand why this delusive magic show is being spread out in front of me. Yes, I am as fast bound by my ignorance and held captive by my memories as a bird in a net that has lost all power over itself. Shame on my silly mind, so deluded by its desires that it is always mistaking the shadow for the substance, like people living in their castles in the air. This extraordinary magic, I think, is being shown to me by Vishnu, the holder of the discus, of whom I remember asking the favor of showing me maya. I will go into the cavern of a hill and take up austere devotion there, to learn where delusion comes from and what it consists of.”

Having thought this through for a long time, Gadhi went out of the city and came to a cave in a mountain, and rested there after all his travels and all his travail of thought, like a lion worn out from ranging after food. He stayed there a whole year, living on nothing except the water of the waterfall collected in the hollow of his palm, and gave himself to the worship of Vishnu, the holder of the Sharnga bow. Then the lotus eyed god appeared to him in a watery form, as clear and graceful to the eye as a limpid lake in autumn with the blue lotuses open on it. In that form the god came to the hermit’s cell in the mountain and stood over it like a transparent cloud of water resting on the humid air. “Gadhi,” the Lord said, “you have now fully seen the great spell of my maya, and you know the net of delusion that destiny spreads over all the affairs of this world. You understand the nature of the delusion you wanted in your heart to know. What is it that you want to know now, that you do these austerities in this mountain cave?” Gadhi, hearing Hari address him so, honored him with armfuls of flowers strewn at his feet, bowed, and walked around him. Then he spoke, in words as sweet as the notes of the chataka to the opening lotus.

“I have seen the dark delusion you showed me, in her form of gloom. Now I ask you to show her to me in her fair form, as the sun shows itself after the gloom of night. A mind soiled by the dirt of its desires sees any number of errors rising before it, like false phantoms and visions in a dream. But how is it that the same visions go on being seen in the waking state as well? It was for a moment only, standing in the water, that I thought I saw something as false as a dream. How was it then that it became manifest to my outward sense and sight? Why was the delusion of my birth and death as a Chandala, which happened long ago and has lately been verified by so many people, not confined to my memory, like the other idle creations of the brain? Why did it stand solid in front of my open eyes?”

The First Answer and the Second Search

“Gadhi, it is the nature of delirium, as of desire, to show a person many false appearances, and to make him believe that what he never saw before is present to his outward sight, when in reality it is a vision of his mind alone. There is nothing outside anyone: the earth, the sea, the hills and the sky are all contained in the mind, as the fruit, the flowers and the leaves of a tree are born in the seed and grow from its germ. Like fruit and flowers growing out of the seed and its sprout, this earth and everything else are productions of the mind alone and nothing distinct from it. Know it for certain: this earth and all other things are situated in the mind and nowhere outside it, as the fruit and flowers and leaves are all contained inside the seed.

“The sight of things present and the thoughts of the absent past and the unseen future are all acts of the mind, as the making and unmaking of pots are both the potter’s doing. Whatever notions people hold from their youth to their old age are like the phantoms of their dreams, or the delirium of drink or of some disease. The settled desires of the mind present a thousand appearances to its sight, as plants rooted in the earth cover the ground with fruit and flowers of every kind. But pull the plants out by the roots and no trace of fruit or flower or leaf remains on the earth. Drive the desires out of the mind in the same way and nothing is left behind them; and there is no likelihood of any future transmigration once the memory of the past has been wiped entirely from the soul.

“It is no wonder that the shifting stage of the mind showed you the single scene of the Chandala, when it holds in store, and can show you with equal ease, an infinity of appearances at its pleasure. It was the impression in your mind that made you think yourself the Chandala, the way phantoms rise before the mind in a sick man’s delirium. It was the same frenzy that made you see the arrival of your Brahmin guest and feed him and give him a bed, and all your conversation with him was a fantasy of your own mind. Then your thoughts of leaving home, your arrival in the district of the Bhotas, your sight of the Bhotas and their villages and houses, were aberrations of your mind. Next, your sight of the ruins of the former house of Katanja, and the account you got of him from the mouths of the people, were the fumes of your fancy. After that, your visit to the city of the Kirs and the tale the people told you of the Chandala’s reign were the workings of your own mind. Everything you heard and saw was the net of your imagination, and what you believe to be true is as false as a phantom of your brain. The mind, infatuated by its hopes and desires, sees everything before it, however far off it may be, as a man dreams of things standing in front of him that it would take him a whole year to reach.

“There was no guest. There was no city. There were no Bhotas and no Kirs that you saw in reality. All of it was a daydream that you saw with the eye of your mind. The truth is this. At one time, on your way to the country of the Bhotas, you stopped in the cave of this mountain, as a stag rests in a forest after a long wandering. Tired from the travel, you fell into a deep sleep there, and in that reverie you dreamed the Bhota city and the Chandala without seeing anything in reality. It was there, and in the same state of mind, that you saw the city of the Kirs; and it was the delusion of your mind that showed you those things at the time of your devotion in the water. You will see many other things in the same way wherever you go, as a man flying high sees his own vagaries on every side. So rise, and stay unshaken in the discharge of your duties, and do not be misled by the vagaries of your mind. It is the practice of a man’s calling that leads him to success; the fancies of his mind lead nowhere.” With that, Hari, lotus naveled, worshiped by saints and sages everywhere, went back to his abode in the sea, where the gods and the holy sages received him and led him to his residence.

Vishnu gone, Gadhi began to wander the Bhot country again, as a cloud keeps moving about the sky. He went from place to place collecting everything he could learn about himself in the life of the Chandala, and when he had gathered it all he went back to a mountain cave and took up the worship of Vishnu again.

In a short time Hari appeared to him again, since it is his nature to be pleased with even a little devotion when the heart is sincere. He spoke to Gadhi with the courtesy of a rain cloud addressing a peacock, and asked what he wanted this time, that he had come back to his devotions.

“I have wandered the countries of the Bhotas and the Kirs again for these past six months, and I have found no discrepancy anywhere between the accounts they gave of me now and the ones they gave before. You told me that all of this was mere delusion, and the testimony of every person I asked proves it to be a positive fact. I know that the words of the great are meant to dissipate a delusion. Yours have made mine deeper.”

Gadhi and the Historical Katanja

“It often happens,” the Lord said, “that many things occur at one and the same moment, the way a crow lands on a branch just as the fruit drops on its head, with neither one causing the other. That is how the idea of the Chandala grew up at the same time in the minds of all the Bhotas and the Kirs as it did in yours. There are plenty of people who hold the same opinion as everyone around them, however wrong it is. That is why their accounts matched your thoughts, and why they told your story exactly as you were reflecting it to yourself. A reflection of something cannot be otherwise at the same time; it has to appear alike to everyone.

“It is true that a Chandala built a house at the border of that village, the one you saw now fallen into ruins. But it was a mistaken conception of yours to think yourself that very man and to think you had built that very house. The same mistake sometimes lays hold of many minds at once, as a whole crowd is seen to be led astray by one current of opinion running in many directions. In the same way many people see the same dream at the same time, as the giddy heads of drunken men all fall into the same dizziness together and all see the earth and the sky rolling around them. Many boys are seen to join in the same game at once; a whole herd of stags is seen to gather in the same green field. Many men take up the same employment at the same moment to gain the same object, as an army flees together or fights together for its safety or its victory.

“People commonly say that time is the giver and the obstructer of the things people pursue, and of every other event. But time is as quiescent as the supreme spirit. It is people’s desire and people’s exertion that bring about the effects they desire. Time is a formless void, identical with the nature and form of the uncreated Lord himself; it neither gives anything to anyone nor takes anything away at any time. Reckoned the common way, by years and kalpas and yugas, it gets classed among substances, when it is far from being a substance; it is the source of all substances. Men of deluded understanding fall into errors that rise from the same cause as their fallacy, and it was from that false conception that the Bhota and the Kiri people fell into the very same error as you.

“So apply yourself to your duty, and try to know your true self. Get rid of the error of your personality, this notion of being so and so, and move about as freely as I do, by myself.” Saying this, the lord Vishnu disappeared from his sight, and Gadhi stayed on in his cave in great perplexity of mind. He passed some months on the same hill, and then went back to his devotion to Vishnu with redoubled fervor.

He saw his god appear to him again, and he bowed down before him. “I am completely bewildered by the thought of my Chandala-hood and by my reflections on the delusions of this world. Pull me out of my errors, and set me to the one work of adoring the Holy One.”

“This world, Gadhi, is a delusion, like an enchantment of the conjurer Sambara. Everything here is a wondrous production of the imagination, and all of it proceeds from forgetting the self. It was your error that made you see so many things in your sleeping dreams and your waking ones. The Kirs were led to see the same things you saw, and to take those falsities for true, because the same error laid hold of all of you at the same time, as the tricks of a juggler are taken for true by everyone watching. Now listen while I tell you the truth as it was, for your own good. Your error will fade at it like a creeping plant in the chilling month.

“The Chandala Katanja, whom you think to be yourself, was a man who really existed in that place before you. Bereaved of his family there, he went out of that place to wander in foreign parts, and he became king of the Kirs, and afterward he burned himself in the fire. This state of Katanja entered your mind while you stood in the water at your devotion, and the thoughts of the whole career of the Chandala took over your mind entirely. Things once seen or once thought of can hardly escape the memory; and it sometimes happens that the mind comes to see many things in its imagination that it has never seen with its eyes. As a man sees a kingdom in his dream, as the delirium that comes from the vitiated humors of the body shows a sick man what is not there, so the mind sees many daydreams and deliriums in its waking and healthy states as well. The past conduct of Katanja presented itself to your mind as the past and future events of the world stand present before the mental vision of a seer of the three times.

“‘This is I, and these things and those friends are mine’ is the mistake of people who lack knowledge of themselves. That is how you took Katanja to be yourself and his house and his goods and his relatives to be yours. ‘I am all in all’ is the belief of the truly wise, and it keeps them from falling into such mistakes; it holds them back from the wrong notions of individuality and particularity, because they believe in the generality of all persons and all things. That general and universal view of everything preserves people from the mistaken notions of pleasure and pain, and it makes the drowning wretch as buoyant as the floating gourd tied to a sinking net. But you are tangled in the snare of your desires, and you have lost your good sense, and you cannot be at your ease as long as you are suffering under the symptoms of your sickness. It is because your knowledge is imperfect that you cannot ward off the errors of your mind, just as a man cannot keep off the rain unless he does the work of raising a shed over himself. You take every impression your untutored mind gives you, as a small tree is easily reached over by a tall man. The heart is the nave of the wheel of delusion. If you can stop the motion of that central power, there is nothing that can disturb you anymore. Now rise and go to the sacred bower on this mountain, and perform your austerities there for a full ten years with a steady mind, so that you may reach perfect knowledge at the end of that time.”

Ten Years at Rishyamukha

With that the lotus eyed god disappeared from the place, the way a thin cloud or a candle flame or a wave on the Yamuna goes out in a light gust of wind. Gadhi, left alone, gradually gained his dispassion by means of his discrimination, as trees fade for want of moisture at the end of autumn. Freed at last from the vagaries of his mind, he sat and reflected, and blamed himself for having nursed the false thoughts of the Chandala and all the rest.

Then, with his heart melting in pity and sorrow for himself, he went to the Rishyamukha mountain to make his penance, and he sat there like a rain cloud that has stopped on the top of a hill. He let go of all his desires and performed his austere devotion as his duty, and at the end of the tenth year of his penance he attained the knowledge of his self.

Knowing himself as the great souled Brahma knows himself, and rid of his fears and his sorrows in this world of retribution, he wandered about with the joy of a being liberated while still alive, in perfect tranquility of mind, like the serene light of the full moon turning in the sphere of the sky.

“Know, Rama,” Vasistha said, “that this delusion is as vast in its form as it is inexplicable in its nature. It is full of ignorance. It is an illusion of the spirit itself, and the senses played no trick in it. Look on the one hand at the Brahmin’s mistaken dream of a couple of hours, and on the other at his transformation into the state of a Chandala, which lasted many years. See how the Brahmin’s false conception appeared present to the perception of his senses; see how the false thought appeared true to him, and how his true knowledge of himself vanished at last into untruth. That is why I say this illusion is utterly inexplicable in its nature, and why it leads the unguarded mind into so many errors and difficulties, and in the end into danger.” Rama asked him, “How can we stop the wheel of delusion? Its spinning is so fast that it is grinding every part of us all the time.”

“This revolving world is the wheel of delusion, Rama, and the human heart is the nave of that great wheel. Stop the motion of the heart by driving a peg into it, and the wheel stops. The mind is the nave of the wheel of ignorance; bind it fast with the rope of your good sense, and you escape the danger of being dragged around in the whirl of errors. You know the discus. You know a wheel is stopped at its center and nowhere else. There is no other medicine for anyone to cure the disease of worldliness except restraining the mind to its own pivot. Set aside your pilgrimages, your austerities and your charities; keep the mind under control and that is the whole cure. The world is situated in the mind as air is confined in a pot; break the pot and the air mixes with the endless emptiness. You are a gnat in a pot. The way out of the delusions of the mind is to fix your attention on the present moment alone; let the past and the future go, and come to a settled unconcern. The wise come to know the vanity of things by the nature of things themselves, by the Sastras, by the company of holy men and by saintly practice, and by determined exertion they withdraw the mind from its ignorance. Rely on your own consciousness and on nothing else, in waking, in dream, in sleep, in birth and in death, and drop the thought that says this is I and that is another. Curb the mind by degrees, through a dislike of enjoyments and long abstinence from them; the thought that says this is mine is what fattens it. The mind is a long rope binding you to your acts, and only self-knowledge breaks it. Make yourself lighter than a straw, and cross over to beatitude in this very life.”