Kundadanta: Eight Earths in a Single House

The Visitor in the Study Hall

Rama had listened for days. Now, in Dasharatha’s court, he brought Vasistha a question that was his own. “There is a shadow of a doubt on my mind,” he said. “Clear it as sunlight clears the dark from a doorway, so that whatever is obscure in the world comes into the light. It began a while ago, in the hall where I used to sit with the sages and the learned men, talking over God and the soul.”

One day a stranger walked into that hall, a Brahmin from the land of the Videhas, the country of Mithila, a man who governed himself and whom austerity had made so bright that it was hard to hold your eyes on him. Rama said he looked as people describe the terrible sage Durvasa. He bowed to the elders; the whole assembly returned the greeting and a seat was pushed forward for him. When the stranger had rested, Rama drew him into talk, Vedanta, Sankhya, the Siddhanta schools, and the man met him at every turn. Then Rama asked the plain question. “You look as if the road has been long. Where did you start out from today?”

“It has been long,” the Brahmin said, “and I came for a reason. Hear it. There is a country called Vaideha, as crowded and as prosperous as any on earth, a copy of heaven set down on the ground. I was born there, schooled there, and kept my house there. They named me Kundadanta, because my teeth are white as the buds of the kunda jasmine.”

Study ran its course, and one day the household and all its affairs fell away from him. He gave them up and walked. He went from one hermitage to the next, from shrine to shrine, resting at the feet of the gods and setting out again, until he climbed a sacred mountain and sat down on it in silence, keeping his austerities for a long time.

From there he came to a desert: no grass, no trees, a plain where day and night took turns over open ground as if the sky itself had been laid flat. In the middle of it stood one branching tree with a few thin leaves, and the sun came down through them in a gentle light. Under one of its boughs a man hung by his feet. A knotted cord of munja grass bound his ankles to the branch, his head pointed at the earth, and his body shone in the air like the sun, as though it hung there by its own rays. He looked like a banyan’s aerial root growing down to find the ground. Kundadanta came closer. The man’s palms were pressed together on his chest. He was breathing. His skin answered heat and cold, the breeze, every change in the weather. He was alive, and he was giving nothing away.

Kundadanta did not cut him down, and he did not ask him anything. He stayed. He waited on the hanging man through the glare of the sun and the turning of the seasons, until the man trusted him. Only then did he ask: “Who are you, that you have taken on so painful a discipline? Tell me what you are after, that you spend your life on it like this.” The man answered with a question of his own. “First tell me what you want, devotee. Tell me what anyone wants who gives himself to a thing.” Kundadanta kept pressing, and at last the man spoke.

Hanging Beneath the Branch

“I was born in Mathura,” he said. “I grew from a child to a young man in my father’s house and learned the languages and the arts. Then I learned something else: that a prince is the vessel every pleasure is poured into, and that youth is the one season in which a man can drink it. From that day I began to think of myself as the possessor of the seven continents of this earth, and to expect everything I want in this life to be given me for the asking. That is why I came here. That is what this hanging is for.”

“So go home, my disinterested friend, you who offered yourself to me without being asked. Go back to your own country and your own house, and leave me here with my resolve until the thing I came for is done.” Kundadanta told Rama what he had answered, and said the wise would be glad to hear it. “Let me stay here in your service, under this holy tree, until you are given the boon you are suffering for.”

The devotee did not argue. He closed his eyes and went back to being a block of stone, still as a corpse, nothing moving in his outer limbs. Kundadanta sat down in front of him and became a block of wood. Heat and cold, wind and rain: the two of them took all of it without flinching, for a full six months at that spot.

Then one day something blazed down out of the orb of the sun and stood in front of the hanging man. The devotee, bound as he was, worshiped him in his mind; Kundadanta threw himself flat on the ground. The being spoke in a voice sweet as ambrosia. “Brahmin, you have hung long enough from this bough. Stop your austerities and take the boon you want. It is yours. You will reign over the seven oceans and the seven continents of this earth as you have wished, and you will reign in this present body, for seven thousand years.”

That was all. The second sun turned and sank into the ocean he had risen from. Kundadanta went to the man under the branch. “All my life I have heard that the gods are kind to those who beg of them,” he said. “Today I saw it. You have what you came for. Give up the hanging now and take up the life that goes with it.” The man agreed. Kundadanta climbed the tree and untied his feet, like a keeper slipping an elephant’s fetters off its post.

He bathed. He made offerings with clean hands for the remission of whatever wrongs he carried, and then he broke his long fast with fruit from the very tree he had hung on. Fruit came off that tree in plenty now, more than two men could eat, and they both knew whose merit had put it there. They ate, they rested, and they stayed three days.

Then they set out together for Mathura, a city people compare to the mansions of the sun and moon and to Indra’s Amaravati. They came first to the farming hamlet of Raudha and halted in a mango wood on the rock above it, then turned toward the town of Salisa and spent two days there in good spirits. After that the road was theirs: the lightness that comes with strange places, afternoons under forest arbors, cold brooks, fallen blossoms heaped along riverbanks, the noise of waves and bees and birds, deer in the thick shade, dew hanging on the grass blades like pearls. They crossed hills and gorges, caves and marshes, dry country and towns, river after river. At night they lay in groves of plantain on beds of plantain leaves, worn out from walking through snow and dew.

The Surviving Kadamba

On the third day they came into a jungle of enormous trees, so empty of people that the sky and the woods seemed to have divided the world between them. Here the devotee stepped off the right road into another forest, and said something Kundadanta would later call useless, since it kept them both from getting home. “Let us go to Gauri’s sanctuary. It is near here. Sages come to it from every quarter, and it is where my seven brothers went to win what they wanted. We are eight brothers in all, and every one of us set his heart on something large; we all agreed to earn it by hard austerity. I was there with them for six months before I came to the tree, and I can see it now as I saw it then: the ground under flowering trees, young deer asleep in the shade, birds on the boughs listening to the sages recite the shastras beneath them. Let us go to that house of sages. It is like Brahma’s own seat with Brahmins all around it. It will clean us of what we carry.”

They went. There was nothing there. Not a tree, not a plant, not a shrub or a creeper; no man, no sage, no boy, no child; no altar and no priest. A desert without edges, a plain of burning heat, as if a sheet of blank sky had fallen onto the ground. “What has happened here?” they said to each other, and wandered a long time, until they saw an arbor far off, thick and dark and cool as a raincloud, and under it an old hermit sitting in meditation.

They sat down on the grass in front of him and waited. They waited a long time. Nothing in him moved. At last Kundadanta’s patience went, and he shouted: “Sage! Stop the endless musing of your mind!” The cry woke the old man as thunder wakes a sleeping lion; he came up straight, yawning, stretching his limbs, and stared at them. “Who are you two, sitting in this desert? Where has Gauri’s sanctuary gone? Who brought me here? What does this change mean, and what time is it now?”

“You are the one who knows that,” Kundadanta said. “We do not. How is it that a sage and a seer does not know his own story?” The hermit shut his eyes again, and this time he went looking. He saw everything that had happened to himself and everything that had happened to the two men in front of him. After a moment he came back. “Then hear a marvel,” he said, “and use your good sense to know it for what it is, a delusion.”

“This young kadamba you see standing in the desert, the one that shelters me and is flowering out of kindness to me: for a reason of her own, the chaste goddess Gauri lived on it for ten full years in her form as the goddess of speech, and took every season’s weather sitting on its branch. From her a great grove spread out over this ground, a whole forest that took her name and wore the flowers of every season at once.” He described it as a man describes the house he grew up in. Gods and men sang here with the birds. Clouds of blossom hung bright as a thousand moons, lotus pollen rode the wind, mandara perfume lay over everything, black bees sang in the flower tops with their mates, and the flower beds spread out like moonlight for the siddha girls to swing on. Brooks were loud with cranes and herons; peacocks walked the lawns. Gandharvas, yakshas, siddhas and the hosts of heaven bowed to this tree until their crowns rubbed the branch her feet had touched, the feet of Sarasvati, who is Gauri. The dust of kadamba flowers lay yellow over all the ground, and a cool breeze moved through the secret bowers even at noon.

“Gauri, Hara’s wife, stayed here all that time for a cause her own mind knew. Then she changed her name and her form to Kadamba-Sarasvati and went to sway like a kadamba flower on the crown of her husband’s head. Ten years she lived on this tree of her own will, and of her own will she left, to take her place at Shiva’s left side. Her touch was ambrosia, and so the tree does not age. It never fades, it never withers; it stays as fresh as a child in its mother’s lap. Once she had gone, the great garden sank into a common thicket, and the only people who came were woodcutters earning their living from it. As for me, know me for the king of the Malwa country. I gave up my kingdom and took refuge in this hermitage of holy men. They honored me when I came; I sat down under the kadamba, and I have been in meditation here ever since.”

Then he looked at the young man from Mathura. “And some time ago, sir, you came here too, with seven brothers, and the eight of you took up your austerities and were respected by everyone in this asylum. In time one of them left for the Sri mountain. The second went off to worship Kartikeya in another place. The third went to Benares and the fourth to the Himalayas, and the remaining four stayed here and worked at their penances. Every one of them wanted the same thing, to be sovereign of all seven continents of the earth, and every one of them got it, by the grace of the god he worshiped, who was pleased with his devotee and granted the prayer. Each asked his god: make us brothers lords of the seven continents, and let all our subjects be truthful and sincere and faithful to the work of their orders. The gods consented and vanished into the open sky. Only I have stayed, as motionless as a stone under this kadamba, which is sacred to the goddess of speech, while the seasons and the years rolled over my head and I watched the woodcutters cut this forest down around me. They spared the tree, which they revere as the goddess’s house, and they spared me, whom they believe to be past waking. Now rise, both of you, and go to your homes. You will find eight brothers there in the circle of their family and friends, like the eight high-minded Vasus sitting in Brahma’s heaven.” The devotee sat very still. The old man had been telling him the story of his own family.

The Wives’ Request and Durvasa’s Curse

Kundadanta broke in. “I have a great doubt about this wonderful account of yours, and I want you to explain it. We know the earth is made of seven continents, no more. How can eight brothers be lord of all of them at one and the same time?” The hermit was not troubled. “There is nothing inconsistent in what I have told you. Many things look impossible until they are explained. These eight brothers, when their austerities are over, will all become lords of the seven continents of the earth, each in his own domestic circle. All eight will stay in their own houses on the surface of the earth, and there they will become lords of the sevenfold earth, in the way you are about to hear.”

“Each of the eight had a wife at home, a woman of unblemished character and person, and the eight of them together shone like the eight planets of heaven. When the brothers left to carry their long devotions abroad, their wives, who loved them, were inconsolable. For a faithful wife, separation is past bearing. In their grief they turned to austerity in memory of their absent husbands, and each of them carried through a hundred chandrayana vows, the fast that waxes and wanes with the moon, for the satisfaction of the goddess Parvati.”

“The goddess came to them unseen. She spoke to each woman separately, in her own inner apartment, after that day’s worship was done. ‘Child, you have been fading under your austerities like a tender shoot under a scorching sun. Take now the boon your heart wants, for yourself and for your husband.’ When the lady Chirantika heard that voice out of heaven, she poured handfuls of flowers toward it. She was a quiet woman, close-tongued, and she answered slowly, flushed with joy, a peahen calling to a rising cloud. ‘Goddess, as you bear eternal love to Shiva, the god of gods, so I love my husband. Make him immortal.’”

“‘Understand, good lady,’ the goddess said, ‘that immortality cannot be had. The decree of destiny has been fixed since the world was made, and no devotion, no austerity, no charity can buy a life. Ask for something else.’ Chirantika did not take long. ‘If immortality is impossible, then ordain this much: that when he is dead, his soul does not leave the confines of this house of his. When my husband’s body falls dead in this house, grant me that his departed soul never goes from this place.’ ‘So be it, daughter,’ the goddess said. ‘Your husband will go to the other world, and you will remain his beloved wife even after his death.’ Then Gauri was silent in the middle of the air, as clouds go quiet after they have promised good to the world.”

“After she had gone, the husbands came home from every direction, one by one, each with his boon won. Wives met husbands, brothers met brothers, friends and kinsmen crowded in. Now hear a strange thing that happened to them in the same season, and that stood in the way of everything they had earned. While the brothers were away at their devotions, their parents had gone out to look for them, with the eight wives, wandering from one hermitage of the saints to the next with heavy hearts, giving no thought to their own comfort, bent on reaching the village of Kalapa, which lay on their way.”

“As they passed a settlement of munis they came upon a man on the road, short, pale, with stiff gray hair standing up on his head and his body smeared with ash. The parents took him for an ordinary old traveler. They forgot to pay him the honor that was owed, and the dust their feet kicked up blew over his sacred person without anyone caring. The old man turned on the father in a fury. ‘You great fool, on pilgrimage with your wife and your daughters-in-law, do you not know me? I am the sage Durvasa, and you have slighted me. For this negligence, the boons your sons and your daughters-in-law earned so dearly will come to nothing. They will be fulfilled with their contrary effect.’ The parents and the wives were already bending to bow to him when the ancient sage vanished into the air. They went home dismayed and disheartened, with nothing to show for the road but their faces.”

“So you see,” the hermit said, “that one inconsistency, eight brothers each reigning over seven continents at once, was never the only one. Many other odds were waiting on them, as they wait on every human wish, coming thick one after another like the sores that grow on a goiter. The vacant mind builds castles in the air, and as many strange things happen in those wishes as portents and comets and meteors appear in the empty sky.” Kundadanta was quiet for a moment, and then the puzzle came out of him whole. “There are only seven continents. How could each of eight brothers be sole lord of the earth at one and the same time? And how could a man who could not leave his house conquer seven continents abroad, or govern them sitting at home? And they had the boon on one hand and the curse on the other, two opposites, like the cool shade of a tree and the heat of the sun. How can opposite qualities live in the same place at the same time? It is as impossible as the container and the thing contained becoming one thing.”

When Boon and Curse Went to Brahma

“Listen,” the hermit said, “and you will see how their contrary fates fall out in sequence. You two will reach home eight days from here, and you will live happily with your people for a while. These eight brothers, back among their families, will die in the course of time, and their friends will burn their bodies. Then their conscious souls will hang in the air, each by itself, for a little while, torpid, as a man is in the insensibility of sleep. Through that interval their deeds will appear in the empty space of their minds, to render them their due, and the blessing of the gods and the curse of the sage will wait on them there as well, each in a shape of its own. The deeds will wear the faces of the people they were done to. The blessings will come as fair bodies bright as the moon, four-armed, a lotus bud in one hand and a club in another and weapons in the rest. The curse will come in the shape of Shiva, three-eyed, a lance in one hand and a mace in the other, a dark and terrible body with a surly, frowning face.”

“The blessings will speak first, and they will boast. ‘Away, accursed curse! This is our hour to work, as every season has its own hour to act.’ The curse will answer in kind. ‘Get away from here, you blessed blessings, and keep out of my time. I take effect the way a season does, and no one alive can turn me from my course.’ The blessings will say: ‘You are the creature of a human sage. We are messengers of the god of day. The first-born god of light takes precedence over a human being, who is the last thing God made; so the precedence here is ours.’ At that the sage’s curse will swell with rage. ‘I am a god’s creation as much as you are. We are born of Rudra and his consort, the Fury, and Rudra is the greatest of gods; the sage was born carrying a portion of Rudra’s power.’ And it will lift its head as high as a mountain’s summit.”

“The blessing will look at that high head and smile with contempt, and then it will choose its words. ‘Leave off your wickedness, miscreant, and think about how this ends. Think about what has to happen when our quarrel is over. We will have to take the case to the father of the gods for his decision; is it not better to do now what must finally be done anyway?’ The curse will consider. ‘Agreed. Even a fool cannot refuse a reasonable proposal.’ So the two of them will go together to Brahma’s abode, since the wise always go to the great-minded gods to settle their doubts. They will bow and lay the whole affair before him, both sides of it, and Brahma will say: ‘Hear me, masters of blessing and curse. Let whichever of you has intrinsic merit and essence have the precedence.’ On that word they will enter each other’s hearts, each to sound the other’s understanding and find out what he is made of. They will search each other’s essence to the bottom, come out, and plead before the god in turn. The curse will speak first. ‘I am overcome, Brahma. My adversary has beaten me, because I have no inner merit of my own, and I have found my enemy’s blessings as sound and solid as hard stone and the thunderbolt itself. But we are both of us only intellectual beings, the curse and the blessing alike; neither of us has a material body to boast of.’”

“Then the blessing will speak. ‘The blessing that the god in the sun gave to the Brahmins who asked him for it is standing here before you; it is in my charge, and I am to deliver it to them. Everyone’s body is the growth of his own intelligence, and that is the body that enjoys or suffers a curse or a blessing, exactly as far as he knows it, in his eating and drinking, in his feeling, wherever he goes and whenever. A blessing received from its giver grows strong in the receiver’s mind with time, and working from inside him, it overcomes the force of a curse in the end. A gift from another is nothing until the one who receives it roots it in himself and tends it. By the steady culture of conscious goodness, by the constant habit of thinking of what one deserves, these things perfect themselves in a man and turn him into their own shape. The pure, contrite conscience completes itself in time; the impure conscience of the evil-minded never finds rest. Now, it was the thought of the blessing that had taken possession of these Brahmins’ minds, and the curse came after. The earlier has priority over the later, even by a single minute, as the first-born takes the estate, and there is no rule and no force of pride that can counter that law. Where both sides are equal, both act on the same thing together, and curse and blessing mix like milk with water and produce a doubled, divided effect in a man’s mind, as a dreamer of a fairy city thinks himself one of its citizens without losing the idea of who he is. Forgive me, Brahma, for repeating to you the truths I learned from you, and let me go back to my work.’”

“The curse will hear this and be ashamed in itself, and it will flee the god’s presence as ghosts and goblins flee the air when darkness breaks up in the sky. And then another blessing will come forward into the place the curse left, the one the goddess Gauri gave to the brothers’ wives, which binds the brothers’ departed spirits to the confines of their house. It will stand before Brahma in the curse’s stead, a substitute pleading for the man who sent him, and it will have a question of its own.”

Eight Seven-Island Realms

“‘I do not know,’ Gauri’s boon will say, ‘how human souls are to range over the seven continents of the earth once they are parted from their dead bodies. Explain it to me. I am the goddess’s blessing that promised these women their husbands’ dominion over the seven continents inside their own house, their conquest of the whole earth within its walls. Tell me how I am to hold their spirits within the narrow limits of their own homes and at the same time give each of them the sevenfold earth, as the god of day’s blessing has destined for them.’”

“Brahma will answer them both. ‘Hear me, you blessing that confers the realms of the seven continents on each of them, and you boon that keeps their departed spirits inside these mansions: both of you will succeed in what you were sent to do. Go from here fully assured. The freed ghosts of these brothers will never quit their present abodes after death; they will stay there forever, in the belief that they are lords of the seven regions of this earth. Their souls will keep a proper distance from one another after their frail bodies are gone, and each will hold himself lord of the earth while he lives in the empty air of his own house.’”

“The boon will still not see it. ‘How can there be eight earths of seven continents each, when the surface of the earth is one flat level everywhere? Tell us where those divisions lie, and in what part of their small house. It is as impossible for a house to hold this wide earth as it is for the little cell of a lotus bud to hide an elephant inside it.’ And Brahma will say: ‘It is as evident to you as it is to us that the universe is made of infinite emptiness only. There is nothing impossible in its being contained in the hollow of a human heart, as it is contained in the tiny particle of the empty mind, which holds all things as it holds its dreams. If the minute grain of their minds can hold the shapes of their houses and their families, why should it be impossible for it to press the greater and lesser circles of this earth into the same ample space? After a man dies, the world shows itself in exactly the form it has in the atom of his mind, a mass of emptiness in the figure of the visible, material world. In that invisible particle the world is seen in its abstract, within the precincts of each man’s body and house, and the earth appears drawn there as on a map, with all seven continents and everything in them. Whatever is manifest in the mind is a conception of the mind, born there, and there is no outside, material world at all. The vacant mind shows these vagaries of the world to its own sight, as the empty firmament shows the weather.’”

“The blessing will learn this abstract truth from the mouth of Brahma, who had himself conferred the boon on the Brahmin brothers, and it will give up its error about a material world. It will bow to the bounteous god and leave his presence at speed, and it will enter the parlor of the eight brother kings in its eightfold spiritual personality, the ashta siddhi. There it will find the brothers each in his own residence, each sitting as lord of the earth with its seven continents, all of them busy with their sacrifices and the enjoyment of their blessings, like the eight lordly Manus for the whole of a day of Brahma. They will be friendly to one another, though none of them knows the others’ provinces; each will be absorbed in his own concern with the world, and none will clash with another’s authority over it.”

“One of them, handsome in the bloom of his youth, will hold a happy reign over the great city of Ujjain, which lies inside the precincts of his own house, or say inside the environs of his own mind. Another will have his domain over the Shaka country, where he will settle in for his conquest of the Nagas, and from there he will cruise the wide outlandish seas like a corsair, winning on every side.”

“Another will reign secure in his capital in Kushadvipa, where he will make his subjects safe from every alarm, and then, like a hero who has quelled his enemies, he will rest in peace on the bosom of his beloved when all his conquests are done. One will spend his days with the celestial nymphs of the Vidyadharas, swimming the lakes on mountaintops, where the waterfalls come gushing down the sides.”

“Another of the eight will be conducting a horse sacrifice in his royal house in Krauncha-dvipa, which he has made great with the gold he has gathered from the other continents. Another will be waging a battle in the Shalmali continent, where his war elephants have mustered and are uprooting the boundary mountain from its base with their tusks.”

“The monarch of the Gomedha continent, who was the eighth and last of the Brahmin brothers, will be struck with love for the princess of Pushkara-dvipa, and he will muster a great army to carry her off by force of arms. And the monarch of the Pushkara continent, who is also master of the mountain regions of Lokaloka, will set out with his deputy to inspect the land of the gold mines.”

“So every one of these brothers will think himself lord of his own province, as his imagination paints it for him in the country of his mind. Then the blessings will lay down their several forms and persons and become one with the Brahmins’ consciousness, and they will feel and see whatever passes in the brothers as if it were passing in themselves. In that way the brothers will become, and find in themselves, what they had been longing for so long, their several lordships over the seven regions of the earth, and they will go on enjoying it ever after to their hearts’ content. That is how these men of large understanding will get what they sought in their minds, by hard devotion and firm fixing on their purpose. So it is with the learned: whatever they are intent on, they find beside them, by acting on the same principle and using the means that lead to that end.”

Kundadanta asked the question anyone would ask. “How are the seven great continents of the globe to be held within the narrow limits of each brother’s house? It is next to impossible.” The hermit under the kadamba answered: “The essence of the intellect is empty in itself, and all the same it is the most capacious and the most pervasive thing in existence; wherever anything is known to exist, the intellect is already there, present in its own nature. The soul sees itself in the shape of the three worlds, and in the shape of everything else besides, each with its own nature and figure, and does not change into any one of them.”

A Past That Appears With the Dream

“But how,” Kundadanta said, “can you attribute variety, multiplicity, to the purely simple and immutable nature of the Supreme soul, as if it belonged to its character the way it belongs to everything else in nature?”

“The sphere of the intellectual void is wholly quiet and serene,” the hermit said. “There is no variety in it, no multiplicity. The changes that show on its face are no more than the waves and eddies whirling on the surface of the changeless sea. It is in that immensity that infinite creations seem to be forever rising and purling, as waves whirl up in the ocean, and it is into its fathomless depth that they seem to sink, as the waters settle back into the deep.”

“The solid forms of things that rise in the unsubstantial essence of the intellect are like the forms of things seen in dreaming, all of which are forgotten in sound sleep. A hill seen in a dream is no hill at all, and the things that move in a dream are found afterward to have been perfectly still; so all things in nature are unrealities, though they seem real because the soul they rest on is real. The intellect is immaterial. It neither makes nor perceives anything material; it conceives everything as its idea was first shown to it. Just as it sees a great variety of objects in a dream and takes them for real while the dream lasts, so its belief in the reality of its ideas makes it take them for real things. It glitters in its own transparency, and it finds the world shining in that same light inside itself. We feel the heat of a fire even when we see the fire in a dream; so we are conscious of the presence of anything in our minds even when the thing itself is absent, and this is how those brothers were conscious of their lordship without ever having the realms. We know a pillar is solid from dreaming of one; so we have the idea of the great variety of things, though there is no diversity at all in the one unvaried unity that pervades the whole.”

“In the beginning all substances were as pure and simple as the essence of their maker, by whom and after whom they were made, and they still stand in that ideal purity in which they came out of that airy entity and unity. As a tree is diversified into roots and fruits and leaves and flowers and trunk, so the Supreme unity is varied in all things and everywhere, in its own self-same, undivided essence. The immensity of creation subsists in the fathomless ocean of that essence as the waters subsist in the deep, and in the boundless space of that transcendent void the infinity of worlds has been rolling on in its original empty and apparently visible forms. The immaterial soul and the material world are commutual terms, like the tree and the arbor it makes; the difference lies in the intelligibility of the one and the unintelligibility of the other. True intelligence leads us to the inconceivable One, while ignorance of it deludes us into the knowledge of many and ends in distress. The mundane and the supermundane are surely one and the same thing, and knowing this truth takes a man to his final liberation. The world is the product of God’s will, and the will is a power that belongs to the person of the Deity; the will having become the world, the world is the formal part of the Supreme soul.”

“He whom no words can define, who nonetheless defines the sense of words; who is subject to no law or prohibition, to no state or condition of being, and appoints them all for every kind of being: he alone is the Lord of all. He is ever silent and speaks through all; inactive as a rock, he acts in all; always existent, he appears inexistent, and he is the Supreme Lord of all. That subtle essence which makes the solidity of every gross body and stays undecayed in every frail one is pure Brahman himself. He has no wish to create and no wish to destroy, and he neither has nor lacks the property of anything. It is the one invariable soul, resting always in its own rest and sleep, that perceives the succession of the world’s creation and destruction in its alternating states of dream and dreamless sleep, which stand before its sight as two pictures. In the substratum of the intellect, unnumbered worlds seem to rise and set, one after another, passing before the mind like pictures, without being rooted or painted in it. As the mixing of one thing with another gives the mixture a different taste, so the union of the mind with the organs of sense prints a variety of impressions on the intellect. All things exist in the essence of the intellect only; without it nothing is knowable to anyone, and so there is nothing new in nature, only representations of the original idea in the mind. Our consciousness of the identity of things with the essence of our intellect proves them as immaterial and immovable as their fixed ideas in the mind. So this world, so visible and perceptible to us, is a mere nullity, and whatever appears to exist in it, the great gods and the angels included, is no more than the false visions of our dreams and fancies. The fluctuations we see rising in the waters of the ocean of the intellect take the forms of our joy and our grief, of moving bodies and bodies still. That the course of the world should so darken the bright mirror of the intellect, hiding it under the dirt of our passions and the clouds and snows of our ignorance! Specters and dissolving views appear in the air to the dim-sighted; so this shadow of a world appears as substance to the unspiritual eye. Whatever we imagine, that we find, and seem to enjoy for the time; as we delight in the sight of an imaginary city, so we indulge ourselves in the sight of this air-drawn world, and as we enjoy our ecstasy in the fairyland of our fancy, so we are taken in by the delusion of this unreal world and believe it real.”

“And there is one eternal destiny, running always in its accustomed course, which destines all beings to go on in their allotted careers as they always have. It is destiny that brings moving bodies out of living beings and still ones out of the unmoving; it is that predestination which fixed the downward course of water and the upward motion of flame. It is that blind impulse that drives the limbs of the body to their several actions and makes the luminous bodies give light; it makes the winds wind on their endless course and makes the mountains stand unmoved in their places. It makes the lights of heaven roll in their regular revolutions and the rains and dews of the sky pour down in their appointed seasons, and it is this eternal destiny that directs the course of years and ages and cycles, the whole wheel of time, in its accustomed round. It is the divine ordinance that set the limits of the earth and the distant oceans and fixed the hills and rocks in them; it has allotted the natures and powers of all things and prescribed the laws, the rights and the duties of each and every one.”

Kundadanta had one more question, and it was the one that had been forming the whole time. “The memory of past lives comes up in this life as imagination and as desire for the same things, and those inward thoughts become the marrow out of which our lives are built. Tell me, sir, how could the first created beings, at the beginning of creation, have had any memory at all, out of which their lives and natures were molded?” The hermit answered: “All these things that offer themselves to our sight are quite unprecedented. They have no original patterns in the mind. They are like the sight of our own death, which we happen to see in a dream. It was Brahma’s omniscience that made the first creation, and never his memory of a past, as it is with us and the other created beings.”

“It is the nature of our intellect to show the imaginary city of the world in its own emptiness; that city is neither a positive reality nor a negative unreality, now in view and now gone of itself. The clearness of the intellect presents the imaginary world in the manner of a dream, while the pure, empty intellect neither sees the world nor keeps any remembrance of it. The wise, who are free of joy and grief and stay unchanged in good fortune and bad, are men of right integrity and evenness, and they move on as evenly as the wheel of fortune carries them. As the intellect keeps in itself the remembrance of what it saw in a dream, so it carries the false impression of these three worlds to its end. What passes under the name of the world is only the reflection of our consciousness; once you know your consciousness to be mere emptiness, you will wipe out the impression of the world along with it. That which is all and everything, from which all things have issued and in which they exist: know that All as all, filling all space, with all things placed in it. I have now explained to you fully how you may come to know this creation as its creator, the great Brahma himself, and how you may get free of your impression of the phenomenal world. Now rise, Brahmins, and go back to your homes, as the bees go back to their cells and to the cups of the lotuses at dusk. Go and do your evening services. I stay here in my meditation, absorbed in my own ecstasy, forever.” He closed his eyes. He became as motionless as a statue or a painting, no movement of breath, no movement of mind. They pleaded with him fondly, and he said no further word; he had gone past the reach of the outer world.

They left with heavy hearts. After a few days on the road their glad friends received them at home, and there they lived in festivity as long as the seven brothers were alive, telling their adventures over, trading the old accounts of bygone times. Then, in the course of time, the seven brothers vanished one by one, as the seven oceans go into the one ocean of eternity at the end of a world, released like many of Kundadanta’s friends from the cares of this life. After a while the only friend he had, the man from the tree, went down too, like the sun setting into darkness, and Kundadanta was left alone to grieve their loss. In the sorrow of his heart he went back to the devotee under the kadamba tree, for the help of his counsel against his grief. He waited on him there for three months before the old man came out of his meditation, and then, at his humble request, the hermit answered him.

“I cannot pass a moment without my meditation,” he said, “and I must go back to it at once. As for you, you will never get the benefit of my advice, however high it reaches, unless you set yourself to practice what I have taught you, with all diligence. So I tell you: go to the city of Ayodhya, where King Dasharatha reigns with his son Rama and the rest of his house. Go to this Rama, who has been attending the lectures of the sage Vasistha, the preceptor and priest of the royal family, which he delivers before the princes assembled in the imperial court. You will hear there the holy sermon on the means of final emancipation, and by it you will come to your own best bliss, the divine state that I have come to.” With that he sank back into the cool ocean of his meditation. Kundadanta turned his road this way, and arrived at last before Rama and the princely assembly. “And here I am,” he told them. “These are the incidents of my life: all that I have heard, all that I have seen, and all that has happened to me.”

The Question Ends in Ayodhya

Rama let the memory go and came back to the hall in Ayodhya. “The eloquent Kundadanta who made that speech to me,” he said to Vasistha, “has been sitting by my side in this assembly ever since. This very Brahmin, this Kundadanta, has sat here beside me all along and has heard the whole of the sermon you have delivered on the means of liberation. Now ask him, since he is sitting here, whether he has understood what you have taught, and whether his doubts are wholly gone or not.”

Vasistha turned and looked at Kundadanta. “Tell me, Kundadanta, good Brahmin, what you have learned and understood from your long attendance on this discourse, which is meant to bring men to liberation.”

“Sir,” Kundadanta said, “your discourse has wholly removed the doubts of my mind. I find myself now the master of myself, through victory over every selfish passion and through knowledge of the One who is to be known. I have known the immaculate One that is to be known and seen the undecaying One that is worth our seeing. I have obtained all that is worth obtaining, and I have found my rest in the state of transcendent happiness.”

“I have known this fullness to be the condensation of that transcendental essence, and this world to be nothing other than a manifestation of this self-same soul. The universal soul, being the soul of every single being, is the soul inherent in every form of thing; it is the self-existent soul alone that appears in all existences and all places. It is possible for the human mind, which is smaller than the molecule of a mustard seed, to hold the whole world in itself, though before the clear sight of the intelligent it is nothing at all, a mere zero. It is possible also for a little room to hold the seven continents of the earth, as in a map or a picture, though the room itself is no more than empty space. Whatever object we perceive at any time or in any place is only the concrete form of the divine spirit, which stands quite apart from every one of those things.”

Vasistha heard him out. Then he turned from Kundadanta to the whole assembly, the princes, the sages, Rama among them, and began to speak of what such a man would now see: the world like a globe in his hand, glowing with the glory of God.