Before you read
Through two ages of their parents’ austerity, a whole kalpa of their own unbroken meditation, and the flood that ends the world, one conviction held. The eldest of the ten, who is the sun, tells Brahma what that conviction did.
Brahma Finds Ten Creations
“You asked me, Rama, how these hosts of created things came to be,” Vasistha said. “I asked the same question once, long ago, of the lotus-born Brahma himself, the mind of God in a person, the father of every creature, and he granted it. He told me the story of the Aindavas, the sons of Indu, in that voice of his that rolls like thunder. He began with a single claim: that this whole visible world is the divine mind showing itself, the way whirlpools and curling ripples show themselves on the surface of the sea. Listen to how he told it.”
Brahma had been alone. At the end of the previous kalpa, the long day of creation that is one day of his life, he had drawn the whole of creation into the focus of his mind, hidden it under the darkness of the first night, and sat quietly intent on the One. When that night of chaos ended he woke as if from a deep sleep, and performed his morning rites, as every living thing does by law when it wakes. Then he opened his eyes to create, and looked into the emptiness around him. As far as he could see there was empty space under darkness, with no light of heaven anywhere in it, no limit and no edge.
He was resolved to bring forth the creation, so he began to make out the world in its simple form inside himself, with the sharpness of his understanding, the way a builder sees the house before the first stone is laid. And there in his mind he saw the great cosmos of creation, set out unobstructed and apart from him in the wide field of the void. The rays of his own reflection reached out across it from the lotus cell where he sat, and settled, and sat in the form of ten lotus-born Brahmas over ten orbs of the world, like ten swans brooding on their eggs. The orbs brought forth multitudes of beings inside their clear watery atmospheres. From them came the great rivers and the roaring seas, and the burning lights and blowing winds of the firmament. Gods began to play in the air of heaven, men moved about on the earth, and demons and serpents were shut into their dwellings underground. The wheel of time turned through the seasons and dressed the earth in their produce. Laws were fixed for everything on every side; human actions were sorted as right and wrong, with heaven as the fruit of the one and the torments of hell as the fruit of the other; and every being set off in pursuit of what it wanted, thriving the harder it strove. So the sevenfold worlds and continents, the seven oceans and the seven boundary mountains came to exist, and so they would continue until their dissolution at the end of a kalpa.
The first darkness fled before the light from the faces of the open lands and hid in mountain caverns and hollow caves, lingering in a few places alongside the light, in the shade and sun of forest and lawn. The blue sky lay like a lake of blue lotuses, with scraps of dark cloud on it like swarms of black bees, and the stars trembling in it like yellow filaments shaken by a wind. Heaps of snow in the high valleys stood like tall semul trees loaded with their pods of cotton. The earth wore the polar mountains as her girdle and the polar seas as her ringing anklets, the polar dark as her blue garment, and gems grew and glowed in the deep bosom of her mines and seas; she sat wrapped in her green like a lady in her robes, with the paddy harvest for her food and the busy hum of the world for her music. The sky was a bride veiled in the black mantle of night with chains of glittering stars for her jewels, and the fruits and flowers of the seasons hung about her like wreaths of lotus. The orbs of the worlds were ripe pomegranates, and the peoples in them were the shining seeds packed in their cells. The moonlight ran above and below and around the three sides like a white sacred thread girding the world, or like the Ganga running in her three streams through the upper, middle and nether worlds, and the clouds scattering with their lightning were the leaves and flowers of forests in the air, blown every way by the breeze. And all of it, lands and seas and skies and everything in them, was as unreal as a dream and as deceiving as an enchanted city in a fairy tale. The gods and demons, men and serpents, crowding every world, were swarms of gnats buzzing around a fig tree. And through it all time moved on with his train of moments and minutes, his ages and yugas and kalpas, toward the destruction of everything, which none of them foresaw.
Brahma saw all this in his clear, enlightened understanding, and it confounded him. Where had it come from? And why could he not see with his eyes what he perceived so plainly as a magic show spread across the sphere of his mind? He looked into it for a long time with steady attention. Then he called to himself the brightest of the suns in those shining spheres. “Come to me, god of gods, luminous sun,” he said. “You are welcome here. Tell me what you are, and how this world with all its bright orbs came into being. If you know anything of it, reveal it to me.” The sun looked at him, and knew him, and made his salutation, and answered in graceful words.
“Lord,” the sun said, “you are the eternal cause of all these false appearances. How can you not know it? Why ask me for the cause? Still, if you, who know everything, take pleasure in hearing me speak, I will tell you how I came to be made, though no one asked for me and no one thought of me, and I beg you to attend to it. Great Spirit, this world is made of reality and unreality both, and seen two ways it tricks the understanding into taking it now for a real thing and now for an unreal one. It is the great mind of the Divine Soul that is busy with these ceaseless, endless creations, for its own diversion.”
A Vow on Kailasa
“It was only the other day, my lord,” the sun went on, “in one of your kalpas that has gone by. At the foot of a mountain beside the tableland of Kailasa, in a corner of the continent of Jambudvipa, there lived a man named Suvarnajata, with all his sons and their children after them, and together they had made that place a beautiful and pleasant habitation.”
Among those people lived a Brahmin named Indu, a descendant of the patriarch Kashyapa. He had a saintly soul, he was virtuous, and he knew the knowledge that concerns the divine. He lived in his house among his relatives and spent his days happily in the company of his wife, who was as dear to his heart as his own second self. And no child was born to this virtuous pair, as no grass grows in barren ground, and the wife went about discontented at the fruitlessness of her flowering. With all the purity and simplicity of their hearts, and all the grace of their persons and their manners, they were as useless to the earth as the fair straight stalk of a paddy plant that carries no ear of grain. So the unhappy couple set out for the mountain, to make their devotions for the blessing of a child.
They climbed Kailasa, where no tree gave shade and no living creature stirred, and there they stood fixed, side by side, like two trees in a barren desert. They kept their austerity on the liquid food that keeps trees alive. One drink of water a day, as much as they could hold in the hollow of their palms, from a cascade nearby, at the close of the day, and nothing else. They stood as unmoving as trees that cannot move, through heat and through cold, like standing timber, for a long time. Two ages of the world passed in this manner before their devotion won the approval of the god who wears the crescent moon on his forehead.
Shiva came toward the parched pair with the cool moonlight on his brow, the way the moon lays her dewy light on dried-out trees and scorched lotuses after a summer day of burning sun. He rode his milk-white bull, with fair Uma held close on his left side and the shining moon on his head, and he came to them as the spring comes to a dry wood, strewing flowers over it. Their eyes and faces brightened at the sight of him as lotuses brighten when the lovely moon appears, and they bowed down to the god of the silver bow and the snow-white face. He rose before them like the full moon standing between heaven and earth, and spoke to them smiling, in a gentle, carrying voice, and the breath of it refreshed them like the breath of spring reviving the faded plants of a forest.
“I am pleased with your devotion, Brahmin,” the god said. “Make your prayer to me, and what you ask for is granted this moment.”
“Lord of gods,” Indu said, “favor me with ten sons, and let them be intelligent. Let them be born of me, and let them take away all my sorrow.”
“So be it,” said the god, and he vanished into the air, and his great body passed along the path of the ether like a surge of the sea, with a roar like thunder. The Brahmin and his wife went home with glad hearts, and they looked, the pair of them, like reflections of Shiva and Uma in their own persons.
Back at home, the Brahmin’s wife grew big with child by the blessing of her god. In her full pregnancy she looked like a thick cloud heavy with rain, and in due time she brought forth a boy as beautiful as the first digit of the new moon. And so, one after another, ten sons were born of her, each as handsome as the tender sprout of a plant. Once they had received the sacred thread and the rites that go with it, they grew in strength and stature, and in a short time they reached boyhood and were fluent in Sanskrit, the language of the gods, the way silent clouds find their voices in the rainy season. In their circle they shone with the light of their persons the way the bright orbs of the sky burn and turn in their spheres.
In the course of time the young men lost both their parents. Indu and his wife put off their mortal bodies and went to their last abode, and the ten Brahmin youths, bereft of both of them, left their home in grief and went up to the summit of Kailasa to pass what was left of their lives there in mourning. And there, in time, they began to talk with one another about their own best welfare, and about the right course a man should take to get clear of the troubles and miseries of life.
The Highest Office They Could Conceive
They argued it the way young men argue who have just learned that nothing they love is safe. What is true greatness? What are the best riches, the real affluence, the highest good a human being can have in this dying world? What is the use of great power, of possessions, of being chief among men, of winning a kingdom? What makes the true dignity of a king, or the high majesty of an emperor?
“And what is even the sovereignty of great Indra worth,” one of them said, “when it is lost in a single moment of Brahma’s time? What is the thing that lasts a whole kalpa? That must be the best good, because it lasts the longest.”
The eldest brother cut in. His voice was as grave as the voice of the leader of a herd of deer when the whole herd stops to listen. “Of every kind of wealth and rank there is,” he said, “one thing lasts a whole kalpa and is never destroyed, and that is the state of Brahma. I prize it above everything else.” The good sons of Indu cried out as one, “Well said!” and paid him their respects in gentle words.
“But how, brother,” they asked, “can it be possible for us to reach the state of Brahma, who sits on his seat of lotuses and is adored by the whole world?” The eldest answered his younger brothers. “Do as I tell you, my worthy brothers, and you will succeed in it. Sit in your posture of padmasana, and think of yourselves as the bright Brahma, full of his light, holding the powers of creation and annihilation in yourselves.”
The younger brothers answered him, “So be it,” and sat down to meditate together with him, glad at heart.
One Conviction Without Interruption
They stayed in their meditation like the still figures in a painting, their minds gathered on the Brahma within, whom they adored and thought on, and this is what each of them thought. “Here I sit on the seed-cup of a full-blown lotus, and I find I am Brahma, the great god, the creator and sustainer of the universe. I find in me the whole ritual of the sacrificial rites, the Vedas with their branches and supplements, and the rishis who heard them. I see in me the Sarasvati and the Gayatri mantras of the Veda, and all the gods and all men are seated in me. I see in me the spheres of the regents of the world, and the circles of the Siddhas revolving about me, and the wide heaven spangled with stars. I see this earth of land and water, decked with its oceans and continents, its mountains and islands, hanging like an earring in the system of the worlds. The hollow of the underworld is inside me, with its demons and titans, its serpents and dragons, and the cavity of the sky is inside me, with the dwellings of the immortals and their damsels. There is strong-armed Indra, the scourge of the lords of peoples, the sole lord of the three worlds, who receives the sacrifices of men. I see every side of heaven spread with the bright net of the firmament, and the twelve suns of the twelve months pouring out their beams in it without pause. I see the righteous regents of the sky and the rulers of men protecting their regions and their peoples with the same care cowherds take over their cattle. Every day I see beings of every kind rising and falling, diving and floating, like the waves of the sea that never stop. It is I who create, preserve and destroy the worlds; I rest in myself and pervade all that exists, as the lord of all. I watch within myself the turning of years and ages and all the seasons and times, and I find that time itself is both the maker and the unmaker of things. I see a kalpa passing away in front of me, and the night of Brahma stretched out in my presence, while I live forever in the Supreme soul, as full and as perfect as the Divine Spirit itself.”
So these Brahmins, the sons of Indu, stayed in that meditation in their motionless postures, like fixed rocks, like images cut out of the stone of a hillside. They kept it up for a long age, knowing the nature of Brahma fully and holding the spirit of that god in themselves, seated in padmasana on seats of kusha grass, freed from the snare of the restless, trifling desires of this false and fragile world.
“Great father of creation,” the sun said to Brahma, “that is how these venerable Brahmins stayed at that spot for a long, long time, occupied with all these thoughts of existence, with all the doings of the worlds going on inside their minds.”
Beyond the Dissolution
They stayed so until the sun and the wind had dried their bodies out, and the bodies dropped, in time, like the withered leaves of trees. The beasts of the forest ate the dead bodies, or the monkeys on the hills tossed them about like ripe fruit.
The ten took no notice. Their thoughts had been drawn off from every outward thing and gathered into Brahmahood, and in their spirits they went on in divine felicity until the close of the kalpa, at the end of the four yugas. And at the end of the kalpa the light of the sun went out under the rains that the heavy Pushkara and Avartaka clouds poured down in the great deluge; the hurricane of desolation blew from every side, and every being was buried under one universal ocean.
“Then it was your dark night, lord,” the sun said, “and the whole of the previous creation slept in your sleeping self, as if in yoga-nidra, the sleep that is not sleep. You went on in your spirit, holding everything in you in its spiritual form. And when you woke today with your desire to create, all of this was set out before your eyes, a copy of all that already lay in your inmost mind. That is how these ten Brahmins came to be ten Brahmas, lord, and became the ten bright orbs that sit in the empty sphere of your mind.
“I am the eldest of the ten. I was consecrated in this temple of the sky, and you yourself, lord of all, appointed me to measure out the portions of time for the beings of the earth. Now you have the full account of the ten orbs of heaven. They are nothing other than the ten persons united in Brahma’s mind, and they now appear to stand apart from him. This beautiful world you see spread out across the skies with all its marvelous structures serves at best as a snare to catch your senses, and to fool your understanding into taking unrealities for realities in your mind.”
Bhanu’s Answer to Brahma
The sun said that much, Brahma told Vasistha, and fell silent. Brahma turned it over in his mind for a while. Then he said, “Sun, sun. Tell me now what I am to create next. Tell me what need there is for me to make any more worlds at all, when these ten orbs have already come into existence.”
The sun thought for a long time about what Brahma wanted from him, and then he answered in words that fit. “What need have you of the act of creating, my lord, when you are free of effort and free of desire? This work of creation is for your pleasure only. Free of wanting, you give rise to worlds the way the sunbeams raise water out of the sea, the way sunshine is always accompanied by its shadow. You are indifferent whether this body of yours is fostered or forsaken, and so you have nothing to desire and nothing to renounce, for pleasure or for pain. You create all of this for your pleasure, lord of creatures, and you draw it all back into yourself, as the sun gives his light and takes it back by turns. You are unattached to the world, and you make your creation out of love, with no effort or striving on your part.
“If you stop stretching the creation out of the Supreme Spirit, what good will your idleness bring you? Do the duty that presents itself to you; do not sit still and do nothing. A dull man is a dirty mirror that gives back no image, and he is of no use at all. The wise have no wish to do anything beyond their reach, and they never leave undone the useful thing that stands in front of them. So do your work as it comes to you, with a cheerful heart and a calm mind and a tranquil soul, as if you were doing it in your sleep, with none of the desires whose fruit you can never reap. You took pleasure in forming the orbs of the sons of Indu, lord of worlds, and the lord of gods will give you your reward for your works of creation.
“The way you see the worlds with the eyes of your mind, lord, no one can see them so clearly with the outward organs of sight; who could say, looking with his eyes, whether they were created or uncreated? The one who has created these worlds from his mind, he alone can see me face to face, and no one else can, with his eyes open.
“Whatever those ten worlds looked like to you when you first saw them, nobody has the power to destroy them now, seated as firmly as they are in the mind. It is easy to break what the hand has made, and easy to shut the objects of sense out of our perception. Who can annul what a mind has settled on?
“Whatever belief is rooted deep in the mind of a living being, no one can remove it except its owner. What a mind has made its habit and its settled faith, no curse can take out of it, though the curse may kill the body. The principle rooted deep in a mind shapes the man after its own stamp, and there is no way to make him otherwise, any more than you can make a rock bear fruit by watering its root like a tree.”