Shambara’s City of Maya: The Making of Dama, Vyala, and Kata

Rama Asks About Three Names

Vasistha advised Rama to avoid the condition represented by Dama, Vyala, and Kata and to seek the stable state associated with Bhima, Bhasa, and Dridha. Rama asked him to explain both expressions through their histories.

“I shall begin with Dama, Vyala, and Kata,” Vasistha said.

The account opened in Patala, the subterranean realm of the demons. There lived Shambara, a demon king whose mastery of maya allowed a formative thought to assume visible shape. His powers extended across buildings, gardens, living forms, celestial imitations, and armies.

A City Fashioned in the Sky

Shambara fashioned a city in the sky. Demon temples rose within it, and artificial sun and moon gave it light. Its houses shone with gems, its inhabitants possessed extraordinary wealth, and women bright as jewels sang with a skill that rivalled the celestial apsaras.

The gardens joined marvels that ordinary seasons keep apart. Moon-like fruits hung among flowers of every time of year. Blue lotuses floated beside golden lotuses and cranes. Gemlike swans stood in the water, while lotus buds appeared upon golden branches. Mandara blossoms descended through the air.

Shambara placed ice-cold fire among these creations. Sandalwood trees brought from Mount Malaya arrived with serpents still coiled around them. Flowers covered the courtyards to the knees, and moving jewel-light passed across the inner apartments like stars.

At night the sky of Patala appeared to hold one hundred moons. Fashioned singers praised the works of their maker. Maya-created elephants carried such splendour that they challenged the pride of the gods’ elephants, including Indra’s Airavata.

Inside and outside, the city gathered the rarest wealth of the three worlds. Demon chiefs bowed to Shambara’s authority. His armies rested under the protection of a king who seemed able to replace any loss with another act of creation.

The Repeated Attacks

The gods observed a practical limit in this abundance. Whenever Shambara slept or travelled elsewhere, they attacked his army.

After one destruction, Shambara appointed three commanders named Mundi, Krodha, and Druma. Their charge was to keep the host secure during his absence. The gods waited until another opportunity came and killed all three.

Shambara created or appointed further fierce commanders. Each seemed capable of holding the army. Each was studied by the gods and struck down when the demon king was away.

The losses enraged Shambara. He left Patala and advanced upon heaven to destroy his elusive enemies. The gods feared the reach of his maya and withdrew before he arrived. They concealed themselves in the thickets of Mount Sumeru.

Shambara searched for them and entered Amaravati, Indra’s celestial capital. He found the city nearly empty. Lesser gods lamented, and apsaras wept. He carried away its valuable objects, burned the cities of the guardians of the directions, and returned to his own realm.

The raid had displayed his power, yet it had not solved the military problem. The gods remained hidden. When Shambara appointed another commander and turned his attention elsewhere, they emerged, destroyed the new guardian, and disappeared again.

Shambara searched through the three worlds and could not find them. Strength, wealth, and spectacle had given him no dependable protector for the hours when his own will was absent.

Shambara Changes His Method

The earlier commanders had entered battle with prior impressions. They knew injury and survival, advantage and loss. Such histories could produce courage, though they also supplied the material for hesitation, fear, and self-protective calculation.

Shambara decided to begin before personal history had formed. Through maya he created three immense and terrifying demons. They appeared like moving mountains, bearing great trees and weapons, and like embodied forms of the three divisions of time.

He named them Dama, Vyala, and Kata. The names carried the functions he intended for them. Dama would subdue enemies. Vyala would wind around them like a serpent. Kata would interpose himself and shield the army from enemy weapons.

The three had no former lives. No earlier karma had given them a biography, and no accumulated vasana, or conditioning, had fixed a pattern of desire and avoidance within them.

Fear had no remembered injury from which to rise. Suspicion, flight, attachment to life, and anxiety about death had not occurred to them. They held no concept of war as a path to honour, no image of defeat as personal ruin, and no stored preference for one outcome over another.

Action Before Personal Identity

Vasistha described the three as a small creation-thought within Shambara’s maya. The presence of consciousness made their movements appear alive, much as figures fashioned by an illusionist seem to act before an audience.

Their limbs moved like those of a half-asleep child. The child does not first compose a theory of movement and then raise an arm. In the same way, Dama, Vyala, and Kata did not pause to conceptualize advance or retreat.

When an enemy stood before them, they struck. Shambara’s vasana supplied the operative impulse. No private claim arose between the command and the action.

Their absence of fear did not amount to self-knowledge. They had never examined identity or understood the conscious ground of experience. The personal centre that would appropriate action had simply not accumulated.

This condition gave them formidable initial strength. A warrior concerned with life can imagine losing it. A warrior attached to victory can anticipate defeat. The newly created commanders possessed neither chain of thought.

The Demon King’s Confidence

Shambara inspected the three protectors and was delighted. He believed he had finally removed the weakness the gods had exploited. These commanders could remain at their posts without memories of former reversals and without a private future they wished to preserve.

He imagined his army under their guard as firm as Meru’s golden rock, unmoved even when struck by the tusks of the elephants that guarded the directions.

Vasistha brought this part of the history to a close at the moment of Shambara’s confidence. Dama, Vyala, and Kata had been made, named, and placed over the army. They stood ready in Patala, immense weapons in hand, responding to the demon king’s will without fear, ambition, or doubt.

The battle lay ahead. Vasistha had first shown Rama the exact condition in which the three entered it: action was present, consciousness was present, and a personal history had not yet gathered around either one.