The Hundred Rudras: A Hundred Worlds of One Mind

Rama’s Question

Rama asked Vasistha how one dream could give rise to another when each dreamer experienced his own world as complete. If the first mind woke, would the later lives disappear, or could every imagined person continue along a separate course?

Vasistha answered with the history of a contemplative mendicant. The man had cultivated restraint of mind and senses, dispassion, attentive hearing, reflection, and the practice of samadhi. His discipline was genuine, though settled knowledge of the Self had not yet arisen.

After completing his daily observances, the mendicant chose to examine the ordinary movements of a worldly mind. The exercise had not been prescribed by his teacher. Concentration gave unusual force to what might otherwise have passed as idle fancy.

He thought, “I am Jivata.”

The monastery receded from his experience. He found himself moving through a dream-created city as Jivata, accepting the streets, people, and purposes of that life without recalling the mendicant who had imagined him.

A Life Dreams the Next

Jivata drank wine, became intoxicated, and fell asleep. In his dream he was a Brahmin who studied the Vedas and performed the proper daily rites. That identity carried its own habits and obligations. When the Brahmin slept, he dreamed that he was a feudatory ruler commanding soldiers and territory.

The ruler slept and became a universal emperor. The emperor’s sensual disposition then shaped the life of an apsara, a celestial woman surrounded by beauty and pleasure. Her attraction to deer-like eyes drew the next dream toward a doe.

The doe lived within the instincts of its form and dreamed itself a vine. When the vine was cut, an impression associated with a bee determined the next course. Conscious experience opened as a bee moving among flowers.

The bee entered a lotus to drink nectar and remained clinging to it. An elephant crushed the lotus, and the dying bee’s last sight and thought fixed upon the animal. The next body was an elephant.

Elephant catchers trapped and trained it. The animal became beloved by a king and was taken into battle. During a night engagement, swords and long blades struck it down. Its association with bees gathering around elephants’ temples remained active, and another bee life followed.

That bee also entered a lotus. An elephant’s hoof crushed the flower. At the final moment the bee saw a swan nearby, and its attention carried it into a swan’s body.

Vasistha did not present every intervening birth as a numbered catalogue. Many lives unfolded between the explicitly named forms. Each arose from an impression strengthened at the point when the preceding identity released its hold.

Brahma’s Swan

After passing through many births, the being again lived among swans. In their assembly it heard of the exalted swan who served as Brahma’s vehicle. Admiration became a steady wish. At death, that wish matured, and the next experience opened as Brahma’s own vehicle-swan.

Life near Brahma altered the course of the long dream. The swan heard instruction in discernment, dispassion, and knowledge of reality. It understood the distinction between passing identifications and the awareness in which they appeared. In that very life it became a liberated knower.

The swan once accompanied Brahma to Rudrapura. There it saw Bhagavan Rudra. A powerful identification with Rudra’s form arose in the already clarified mind, and the swan assumed a Rudra-like mental body.

This was a form resembling Rudra in knowledge and power. The principal cosmic Rudra, Adi-Rudra, remained distinct. As the derived Rudra awakened, the entire chain became present to memory. He recalled primordial consciousness appearing as mind and individualized life. He remembered the mendicant, Jivata, the Brahmin, the ruler, the emperor, the apsara, the doe, the vine, the bees, the elephant, the swans, and the many lives between them.

The memory carried a further recognition. Those lives had not merely replaced one another like discarded masks. Each projected world had acquired its own causal and experiential continuity.

Returning to the Monastery

The derived Rudra decided to visit every stream of life and awaken each form to the knowledge he now possessed.

He first reached the monastery. The original mendicant lay there motionless, as though dead, still absorbed in the mental course that had begun with the thought of Jivata. Rudra awakened him and joined his understanding to the common knowing mind.

The two then entered Jivata’s continuing world. They found him asleep with a sword in his hand. He woke to the presence of the identity that had imagined him and to the knowledge carried by Rudra.

They proceeded to the Brahmin’s world. The Brahmin was sleeping in his wife’s embrace. They awakened him and continued to the feudatory ruler, the universal emperor, and the other forms. With every awakening, another person recognized the conscious ground shared by the whole sequence.

The tour did not empty the houses, courts, forests, or realms they visited. The remaining force of already-begun action, called prarabdha, sustained each body and its surroundings. Families, duties, and consequences still awaited completion.

Inwardly the awakened forms knew through one pervasive consciousness. Outwardly they occupied many bodies and worlds. Their agreement did not require one body to enter the physical space of another. Awakened knowers could meet because the conscious ground was common to them, just as waves share the nature of water.

Why They Were Called a Hundred

The initial mendicant and the final Rudra-like form enclosed ninety-eight intermediate forms. Together they made one hundred.

Vasistha called all of them Rudras because each had received Rudra-like knowledge and power. In relation to Adi-Rudra, they could also be called ganas, or attendants. The two names described their shared attainment and their relation to the principal Rudra.

Adi-Rudra instructed the awakened forms to return to their own worlds. Knowledge had arisen, though the lives already in motion still had a course to complete. They were to live with their families and experience the remainder of prarabdha without renewing the old error of separate identity.

When those lives ended, they would return to Rudrapura as ganas. Vasistha said they might be perceived as star-like forms in the sky. At the end of two parardhas, when the last trace sustaining those courses was exhausted, they would attain the supreme state with Rudra. A parardha is a traditional cosmic duration, and Vasistha supplied no ordinary calendar conversion for it.

He added that many such Hundreds of Rudras had appeared. The world in which Rama now listened to this teaching was the world of the eleventh Bhramara-Rudra within this mendicant-Rudra’s hundredfold succession.

Rama could therefore no longer picture the chain as a row of private fantasies that vanished behind a waking dreamer. Ignorant beings remained confined to the limits of their own projections and did not perceive one another. Knowledge disclosed the conscious field in which their apparently separate histories arose.

Vasistha Searches Through the Night

Rama then asked whether the mendicant was only a teaching construction or whether such a person existed somewhere.

Vasistha said that the history had been formulated through yogic consideration and that a corresponding life must be possible. He promised to search during the night.

When the assembly met the following day, Vasistha reported what he had found. In a northern region stood a settlement called Vihara. Inside a locked hut there, a yellow-haired monk named Dirghadarsha had remained in samadhi for twenty-one nights.

For the people outside the hut, only those nights had passed. Within Dirghadarsha’s mental experience, thousands of years and a long procession of worlds had unfolded. The difference did not require time to stop. Experienced duration followed the movement and intensity of mind.

Vasistha also saw that the monk’s physical life had ended. Dirghadarsha had instructed his attendants to keep the hut closed for one month. After that interval they would open it, immerse the body, and install a stone likeness in his memory.

The conscious history associated with the monk had reached the state of Brahma’s swan. The silent body in the hut and the immense interior succession belonged to one causal course viewed from different points.

Vasistha brought the inquiry back to Rama. Repeated identification can carry a being from one long dream into another, with every stage felt as a world. Knowledge ends the binding confusion while allowing already-begun experience to finish. The journey that seemed to span a hundred worlds had begun with one disciplined man permitting one unexamined thought to gather the full strength of his attention.