Before you read
Inside that stillness Lavana crosses a desert, starves, marries a Chandala girl for half a meal, raises her children, grows old, loses everything to famine, and lights his own funeral fire. When he returns, Vasistha has to tell Rama why a king suffered sixty years in a couple of hours, who was really suffering, and what it meant when Lavana rode south the next day and found the village waiting for him.
The Gaze That Stilled a Court
Rama sat in his father’s court with the look of a young man who had stopped wanting anything, and the sage who had been asked to cure him did it with stories. “Listen, Rama,” Vasistha said. “I have a pretty one for you. It shows the world as an enchanted city, stretched out by the magic of the magician we call Mind.” The courtiers of Dasharatha settled; they had learned by now that the sage’s stories went somewhere.
North of the mountains lies a large and populous country called Northern Pandava, Vasistha began, named for the wanderings of Pandu and his sons during their exile. Its forests are deep. Hermits live in their fastness, and the Vidyadhara girls have hung swings of creeper from the branches for their own amusement. Lotus pollen blows off the lakes in drifts as red as hills. There are tawny rocks on one side and fields brown with ripe corn on the other, doves in the groves, storks crying in the forest, and girls singing in the cornfields. Siddhas sing hymns outside their mountain caves and Kinnaras and Gandharvas hold concerts under the plantain trees. The lord of this country was Lavana, of the solar line, a descendant of Harishchandra, and as glorious on earth as the sun, the father of that line. Lavana’s sword had finished his enemies, who shook as if with fever when they heard his name. His people spoke that name as they spoke the name of Hari, and the Apsaras sang his praises from the peaks of the Himalaya. He gave without stinginess, and he kept himself free of guile and of pride, holding to his own generosity the way Brahma holds his string of rudraksha beads.
He took his seat on the throne among his courtiers as the sun takes its seat in the sky for the eight watches of the day, and once he was seated, as glad as the moon in the firmament, his chieftains and his legions came before him with their salutes and the presenting of arms. Then the singing girls in attendance began, and the music of their lutes carried through the hall. Handsome maids waved the white chowries over his person. His ministers and counselors, men his court compared to Brihaspati and Shukra, the preceptors of the gods and of the demons, took their seats beside him and turned to the public business pending before them, while the officers who had come in from the provinces delivered their reports. On one side the pandits read the holy legends aloud from their books. On the other the panegyrists chanted the king’s praises.
Into this ordered court came a magician in fantastic dress, loud and boastful before the court, like a thundercloud threatening to drown the earth. He bowed low to the ruler of the earth, bending his capped head and neck the way a fruit tree bends at the foot of a mountain, and he approached the king the way a monkey approaches a tall shady tree loaded with fruit. Then, in a voice as sweet as a bee humming at a lotus, he said, “My lord, you who sit on this earthly throne as the moon sits enthroned in the sky, be pleased to watch one wonderful feat of my art. It is called the trick of Kharohkika.” He began to twirl his magic staff, a rod set with peacock feathers, and it threw off a bright circle of rays as it spun, and the king watched it the way Indra watches his own rainbow sparkling far off in the sky. While the feathers were still turning, a chieftain from Sindh, the king’s master of horse, entered the court like a cloud crossing a starry sky. Behind him came a horse, swift and beautiful, following him as Uchchaihshravas, the horse churned out of the milky ocean, follows Indra through the heavens. The chieftain led it before the throne. “This horse, my lord, is a match for Uchchaihshravas himself,” he said. “He flies with the swiftness of thought. He is the best of his kind, the wind made into a body. My master sends him to you as a present, because the best of things belongs with the best of men.”
When the chieftain had finished, the magician spoke again, in a voice as soft as a swallow’s after thunder has died away. “Ride this horse, my lord,” he said. “Wander the earth on him at your pleasure, in full splendor, as the sun shines by circling the heavens.” The king looked at the horse, and in a voice like a peacock answering a cloud he ordered it brought up to him.
The horse stood before him like a figure in a painting. Lavana looked at it with fixed eyes. He did not blink. He looked for so long that he seemed to have become a painting himself. Then he got up from the throne, mounted the horse, and sat on its back with his eyelids closed, the way the sage Agastya once stood stunned at the sight of the sea and its rocks. He stayed like that for a couple of hours, two muhurtas by the court’s reckoning, as if drowned in meditation, as still as a saint lost in some inward enjoyment. No one could rouse him. He was spellbound, overpowered by some force of his own, absorbed in thoughts that belonged to him alone.
The chowries stopped waving over him, and the girls who held them stood as still as moonlight. The courtiers stopped moving when they saw his stillness, like lotus filaments stuck fast in mud. The noise of the people in the courtyard died, as thunder stops at the end of the rains. The ministers sank into their own thoughts and doubts about the state of their king, anxious as the gods watching Vishnu fight the demons with his club, and the common people were frightened. Their prince sat with his eyes shut like two lotuses closed and robbed of their beauty, and nobody knew what had happened to him.
After those two hours the king came back to himself, like a lotus recovering its beauty when the mists of the rainy season lift. His body shook on the horse’s back, ornaments and all, as a mountain shakes its peaks and woods in an earthquake. The seat shook under him. He began to slide from the horse, and his attendants caught him and held him up on their arms, the way the foothills hold up Meru. They bore him, still deranged, as the still sea bears the moon’s reflection when a wave breaks it. He asked them softly what place this was, and whose court. “Where am I?” he said. “And where am I going?” The courtiers asked him, as gently as they could, what was the matter. “My lord, we were badly frightened to see you like that,” they said. “The stoutest heart breaks under an accident that comes from no known cause. What were the pleasant things that bewitched your mind? You know that what looks pleasant now turns bitter in the end. How could an understanding like yours, settled by the doctrines of the wise, fall into the fascinations of fools? Trivial, tawdry things catch common minds. They are worth nothing to a mind as high as yours. The mind that has not practiced reasoning is swept away by whatever time and place bring it, but a noble mind is not subject to incantations and spells. The high mind is Meru. The wind does not shake it.” Consoled like this by the men who loved him, the king’s face took back its color, as the full moon gathers its brightness in the bright half of the month, and his eyes opened fully, like blossoms after frost. But what shone in his face was astonishment mixed with fear, like the moon pale in the sky after an eclipse, because he remembered the magician’s charm. He found the man with his eyes and smiled at him the way the serpent Takshaka smiles at the weasel, his enemy. “You trickster,” he said. “What was that snare you caught me in? How did you disturb a soul as calm as mine with one wily trick, like a gale throwing the sea into confusion? How wonderful the power of spells is, that comes from the Lord, and that has just overpowered the strongest sense of my mind. What are these bodies of ours, that are subject to death and disease? What are these minds of ours, so open to error, that lead us from one danger to the next? A mind living in a body may hold the highest knowledge, and still the minds of the wisest men are liable to error and illusion.”
“Courtiers, listen,” he said, “to the wonderful tale of what I passed through under this sorcery, from the moment I first laid eyes on this magician. I have seen so many scenes go past me in one single moment under this wizard, as many as Brahma showed of old when he broke the magic of Indra.” And smiling, as if he could not quite believe it himself, the king began to tell his court the strange wonders he had seen in his trance. He started with a region full of rivers and lakes, cities and mountains, and the ocean girding the earth with its boundary hills. It was, he said, this very land.
One Night Beyond the Throne
“This land of mine,” the king said, “with its forests and its streams, the younger twin sister of the earth, this paradise of Indra where I am the king and where I am sitting at this moment in my own hall among my courtiers and all of you: this is where it began. That sorcerer appeared here from some distant country like a demon coming up out of the underworld. He turned his wand, and it threw off its light the way a storm tears Indra’s rainbow into pieces in the air. I was looking hard at the whirling wand and at the horse standing in front of me, and then, dizzy in my mind, I mounted the horse. I was sitting on a horse that did not move, and I seemed to be riding a fleet steed, as fast as the Pushkara and Avartaka clouds when they race over the tops of the rocks. I went off at full speed on a chase, out across an ownerless desert that howled like the surges of the sea. Then the horse and I were carried through the air as if the wind had us, and I was dashed onward the way common people are, carried off by the current of their own insatiable desires.”
“My horse tired, and so did I, and we moved slowly, and I came at last to the edge of that desert. It was as empty as a pauper’s mind. It was the wilderness of the world burned down, and not a bird crossed it. A waste of sand like frost, without a tree or a drop of water. It seemed as wide as a second sky, or an eighth ocean with its whole bed dried up, as broad as a wise man’s mind and as furious as a fool’s rage. There was no trace of a human foot on it, no track, no grass, not a herb. My mind lost itself in that boundless desert like a woman fallen into trouble with no friend and no food. The sky itself seemed washed by water, and the water was the mirage on the sand. I crossed it panting, in great pain and sorrow, like a wise man crossing this world, which is all hollow and empty within, and the sun was setting before I was through.”
“On the far side of the desert, as the sun went down behind the western mountain with his tired horses, I met a thick forest. Birds were singing in the jamb and kadamba trees there, the only friends a weary traveler meets on a weary and lonely road. Patches of tall grass nodded their heads, like greedy men nodding at some little windfall. After the pain of the desert that shade gave me a little joy, the way a lingering illness looks desirable next to the pains of death. I got in under the shade of a jambira tree, as pleased as the sage Markandeya when he climbed onto the mountaintop at the great deluge, and I took shelter under the creepers hanging down from its branches, a scorched hilltop finding a moment’s shadow under a dark cloud. I was hanging on to the pendant roots with my hand when the horse slid out from under me, as a man’s sins slide out from under him when he puts his trust in the Ganga. Worn out by a whole day’s travel across that waste, I took refuge under the tree, the way a traveler rests at sunset under a kalpa tree that grants every wish.”
“The business of the world stopped as the sun went to rest in the western hills. Night covered everything, and the whole forest beneath it gave itself up to its nightly rest and silence. I lay down in the grassy hollow of a branch of that tree and put my head on a bed of moss, like a bird in its nest. I lay there as senseless as a man bitten by a snake, as a corpse that has lost its memory, as helpless as a slave who has been sold or as a man fallen into a blind pit. I passed that one night as a long kalpa in my senselessness, and I thought I was being buffeted by the waves, like the seer Markandeya at the deluge. Dangers and troubles came at me all night as they come in a dream. I never thought of bathing or eating or of worshiping my Maker. I shook like a branch of the tree I was lying in. That one night of trouble was as long as it was tedious. My face went dark the way the face of the night had, and my waking eyes watched for the day as blue lotuses watch for the moon. At the end of the night, when the demon noise of the wild beasts had died down in the forest, a shivering fit took me and my teeth clattered with the cold. Then I saw the east go red, flushed as if with drink, as if it were laughing at the sight of me drowning in my troubles, and the sun came up on his elephant Airavata, as full of glee as an ignorant man in his folly, or a poor man who has found a treasure.”
“I got up off my mossy bed and shook out my bedding, the way Shiva tosses his elephant hide about in his giddy evening dance, and I began to wander through that wide forest, the way Rudra roves the wide world after his demons have laid it waste at the end of a kalpa. There was no animal of any kind in that desolate place, as there is no good breeding to be found in the illiterate. I saw only the birds, perching and chattering through the woods without a pause. It was midday, the sun had run his eighth hour, and the plants had dried off the dew of their morning bath, when I saw a girl on the path carrying some food and a goblet of water, the way Hari carried the poisoned drink to the demons in his disguise as Madhavi. She was dark, and dressed in black, and she looked at me sideways as I came toward her, the bright moon advancing on the black night. I asked her for some of her food, in my great distress. I told her that a person is made richer by relieving the needy. ‘Good maid,’ I said, ‘hunger is eating out my bowels. I would take any food at all. The female serpent devours her own brood when her hunger is bad enough.’ I begged, and she gave me nothing. She stayed as unbending as Lakshmi, who declines to favor the wretched however they implore her. So I followed her. I followed her a long time, from one wood to the next, clinging to her like her own shadow moving behind her in the afternoon.”
“Then she turned around to me and said, ‘Know who I am. I am a Chandala girl, and my name is Harakeyuri. We are as cruel as Rakshasas. We eat human flesh the way we eat the flesh of horses and elephants. You cannot get your food from me by craving it, King. It is hard to have the favor of men without first meeting their desires.’ Having said that she went on, tripping along at every step, and then stepped into an arbor by the wayside and spoke to me merrily. ‘Well. I will give you some of this food, if you will consent to be my husband. It is not the business of base and common people to do good to others before they have secured their own good. My Chandala father is here, plowing in the field with his sturdy yoke of bulls. He has the figure of a demon. He stands in the burning ground, haggard and hungry and dark. This food is for him, and it can be given to you, if you agree to marry me. A husband deserves to be served, even at the peril of one’s life.’ I said to her, ‘I agree to take you as my wife. What fool keeps to the usages of his family when his life is in danger?’ Then she gave me half of the food she had with her, the way Madhavi once gave half her ambrosia to a hungry Indra. I ate the Chandala’s food, and I drank the drink of jambu fruit that she gave me, and then I rested in that place, and fell into the sleep of a man who has walked too far.”
“She came to me then like a black cloud moving across the sun. She held me in her arms and led me on with her hand, as fondly as if I were her second self. She took me to her father, a fat, ugly fellow of repulsive appearance, the way the agony of death leads a person to the hideous cell of the devil. My companion whispered our news into his ear, as the black bee hums her tale softly to an elephant. ‘This man is to be my husband, father,’ she said, ‘if you will give your consent.’ He gave it. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Let it be so, by the end of this day.’ That is the hour of godhuli, the dusty dusk when the herds come home from pasture and marriages are made. He unyoked his bulls, the way the regent of death releases his hounds, and in the dusk, with the sky dim with evening mist and the dust of the returning cattle, we were dismissed from the demon’s presence to go our own way. We crossed the great jungle quickly and came to the Chandala’s home in the evening, the way demons cross a burning ground at night to rest in their charnel vaults.”
“On one side of that dwelling lay slaughtered monkeys, cocks and crows, with swarms of flies over them sucking the blood that was sprinkled on the ground. The wet entrails and arteries of butchered beasts hung up to dry in the sun, and ravenous birds hovered over them, and more birds fluttered over the jambira trees, picking at the fruit. Heaps of fat were laid out to dry in the portico, with birds flying over them, and the skins of the slain animals lay in bloody piles in front of us. Little children held bits of flesh in their hands, beset by buzzing flies, and old Chandalas sat by and scolded the boys. We went into the house. Entrails and intestines lay scattered everywhere, and I thought of myself as the ghost of a dead man standing at the side of Yama. They gave me a seat of a big plantain leaf, with due respect, so that I might sit as a welcome guest in the abominable home of the father-in-law I had just earned. My squint-eyed mother-in-law looked me over with her blood-red eyeballs and muttered, with gladness in her face, ‘Is this our would-be son-in-law?’ Afterward we sat on seats of skin, and I ate the meal that was set before me as the reward of my sins. I heard a great many endearing words there, which were the seeds of endless misery, and a great many other speeches that did me no good. Then one day, when the sky was cloudless and the stars were out, they set a dowry of cloths and other articles before me, and with those they made that frightful girl over to me, and we were joined together, black and white, sin and its torment. The flesh-eating Chandalas celebrated the wedding with a profusion of wine and loud shouts of joy, and beat their tomtoms in their merriment, the way the wicked delight in the carrying on of their vileness.”
A Life That Acquired Sixty Years
“What more can I tell you about that festivity? It subdued my soul completely. From then on my new fellows called me Pushta-Pukkusha, the cherished Chandala, the son-in-law fed in his wife’s house. The celebration lasted a week. I had been in that place a full eight months when my wife came into her womanhood, and after that she conceived.”
“She gave birth to a daughter, and a daughter is the beginning of woe the way a danger is the spring of calamities. The girl grew as fast as the cares and sorrows of the ignorant grow. In the course of three years my wife brought forth a black boy, the way folly brings forth a false hope. Then she bore another daughter, and then another boy, and so I became an old Chandala with a large family in that forest. Many years passed with those shoots of my woe around me, the years a man who has killed a Brahmin passes in hellfire. I went through every pain of heat and cold, of chill wind and frost, with no help to be had in that dreary forest, like an old tortoise condemned to crawl about in the mud of its pool forever.”
“Burdened with the cares of my family and troubled in my mind, I watched my afflictions rise around me like a fire in dry grass. Dressed in bark and wrapped in old rags, with a covering of grass over me and a straw hat on my head, I carried loads of logs out of the woods the way we carry our sins on our backs and heads. I passed many a long year under the dhavali trees with nothing on me but an old kaupina, a tattered strip of dirty, stinking cloth that was alive with fleas and leeches. I was out in the chill winds in all my labors to support my family, and in the keen blasts of winter I lay like a frog in some cave in the woods.”
“The quarrels and bickering, the sorrows and wailing that I met with at home and outside it made my blood come out of my eyes as tears. We spent our nights on marshy ground in the jungle, and when the clouds poured on us we took shelter in the caverns of the mountains with nothing to eat but roasted bear meat. When the sowing rains were over and the dark drizzling clouds had scattered, I was driven out of my home by the unkindness of my relations and my endless quarrels with everyone else. Afraid of every neighbor I had, I moved to another man’s house, and I lived there with my wife and my prattling children for some years.”
“The scolding of that termagant wife of mine, and the threats of the villainous Chandalas around me, turned my face as pale as the moon going dark under Rahu. My wife bit me and scratched me with her teeth and her nails until my flesh felt torn and gnawed under the grinders of a tigress, and I felt like a man caught and sold to a fiend from hell, and I thought that I had turned into some infernal creature myself. I suffered under the snow that the caves of the Himalaya threw down and under the frost that fell without a break in the dewy season. The rain came down on my naked body like iron darts loosed from the bow of death, and in a sick, decrepit old age I had to live on the roots of withered plants. I dug them in quantity out of the woodland ground and ate them with as much relish as a lucky man eats his well-cooked meat.”
“I ate my food apart, where no one could touch it, out of fear of being polluted by the touch of that vile and base-born family, and because my unsavory diet twisted my mouth at every bite. While I was starving like that I watched the others eat venison and mutton that they had bought from other places, and pamper their bodies with flesh they cut out of living animals and devoured raw with great zest. They bought animal flesh sold in iron pots and stuck on spits. And in the cool of the evening I would go out to the garden grounds of the Chandalas with my spade and my basket, to gather up the raw flesh that had been thrown out there in the dirt, and make my food of it.”
“It seemed a mercy, when I was on the point of being thrown into hell, that I was led to take refuge in the mountain caverns and live on the roots and plants that grew there. There I had the good luck to meet some Chandalas who came in person, driving the village dogs ahead of them with their clubs, and they gave my wife and children some bad rice of the kind the villagers ate. We passed that night under the shade of a palm tree whose withered leaves rattled with the rain that came down in showers on them. We passed it in the company of the forest apes, our teeth clattering with cold and every hair on our bodies standing on end like a thousand thorns. The raindrops hung on our bodies like beads of bright pearl, and our bellies were as lean and empty as a cloud that holds no rain. And in that direful forest a quarrel broke out between my wife and me, and we answered each other back and forth with our teeth chattering and our eyes red from the cold.”
“Foul and filthy, I looked like a black demon. We roamed the banks of rivers and streams, and I fished them with a rod and hook in my hand. I wandered with a trap in my hand like Yama with his noose at the desolation of the earth, and I caught the deer and killed them and drank the blood of their hearts in my hunger and my thirst. I sucked the warm heart’s blood as I had sucked my mother’s milk, when I was starving, and smeared in blood I stood like a blood-drinking demon in a burning ground. The Vetalas of the woods, the ghouls who haunt such places, fled from me as they flee from the furies of the forest. I set my snares and nets in the woods for the deer and for the birds of the air. People spread the nets of wives and children only to get themselves entangled in them, in the false hope of happiness; I spread my net of thread to lure the birds to their destruction. Worried and worn out in the nets of worldly cares, surrounded on every side by the miseries of our vicious lives, our minds still take their delight in cruel and foul acts. We had cast kindness out of our hearts the way a snake casts its slough, and we took pleasure in letting fly the hissing arrows of our malice.”
“The difficulties multiplied on me as thickly as the weeds in a valley, and I moved through every corner of that hellish place for the time that was allotted to me. I sowed the seeds of sin under the rainwater of my ignorance, and they grew up fast as thorns on my way. I laid hidden snares for the unwary and the innocent to keep myself safe in the mountain caves. I caught and killed the innocent deer in my trap to eat their flesh. I killed the chowri cattle, the yak, to lay my head on the hair that hangs down from their necks. I slept, unconscious of myself in my ignorance, as Vishnu lies on his great serpent, stretched out with my legs and limbs flung wide in a brown cell that rang with the howling of the wild beasts outside. I lay my body on the frost of a cave in the marshy ground of the Vindhya, and wrapped my dark form in a tattered quilt that hung down my neck and was full of fleas, and I bore it on my back as a bear bears its long bristles even in the hot season. I suffered the heat of the wildfires that burned up whole herds of wild animals at once, as in the last burning of the world. My wife bore her young, for our pleasure and for our pain, the way a glutton’s food is both his satisfaction and his sickness. And so I, the only son of a king, had to pass sixty painful years of my life, each one as long as a kalpa. I raved at times in my rage and wept at other times in my bitter grief. I ate coarse meals and lived in the hovels of the lowest Chandalas, and I passed all those years of misery in that place like a man fastened to the fetters of his insatiable desires, who is doomed to toil and sweat for nothing until he dies.”
“Time went on, and old age overtook me, and turned my beard into blades of grass covered with hoarfrost. My days slid by in alternate joy and grief, brought on by my fate and my own acts, the way a river flows on with the green leaves and the dry ones that the wind scatters on it. Quarrels and brawls, misfortunes and mischances fell on me at every moment, as thick and fast as the arrows of woe in a battle. My foolish mind fluttered like a bird in the maze of its wishes and fancies, and my heart was churned by passions as the sea is churned by its waves. My soul rode the vehicle of my wandering thoughts and was carried off on them like a floating straw into the whirlpool of time. I crept about those Vindhya woodlands like a worm for my simple keep, and as the years went by I felt my frame weakening and pulled down like a two-legged beast of burden. I forgot my royalty like a dead man, in that wretched state. I was confirmed in my belief that I was a Chandala, and I was bound to that hilly place like a bird without wings.”
“Then the world turned as desolate as it will be at its final dissolution: a forest eaten by fire, a shore lashed by huge surges, a withered tree struck by lightning. The marshy ground at the foot of the Vindhya dried up. It gave no corn and no vegetable and no water to eat or drink, and the whole tribe of Chandalas was about to die of the dryness and the dearth. The clouds stopped raining and vanished from the sky, and the winds blew with sparks of fire in them. The forest trees stood bare, their withered leaves strewn on the ground, and wildfire raged here and there, until the woodlands were as desolate as the deserts where the harshest ascetics live. A terrible famine set in, and a furious blaze of wildfire spread all around and burned down the whole forest and turned grass and gravel alike to ash. The people went about daubed with ash, famished for want of food and drink, because the land had turned to a dreary desert with nothing on it, not grass, not water. The mirage shone like water and fooled the dry buffaloes into rolling in it, and no breeze moved to cool the air. The cry for water went up and reached only the ears of men who were parching themselves under the burning sun. Hungry mobs rushed to browse on branches and herbs and died in the act, while others sharpened their teeth on one another, tearing and devouring. Some ran to bite the gum of the catechu tree, taking it for a bit of flesh. Others swallowed stones as if they were cakes lying on the ground. The ground was sprinkled with the blood of men biting and tearing each other, as much blood as a lion spills when it kills a big starving elephant. Everyone was a lion then, trying to devour the next man as his prey, and men fought one another like wrestlers in a contest. Hot winds blew like firebrands on every side, and wild cats licked the human blood off the rocks. The flame of the wildfire climbed into the air, and clouds of smoke whirled on the howling forest wind, and it growled in every quarter and filled the land with heaps of brown cinders and burning brands. Huge serpents burned in their holes, and the fumes of their burning bodies raised poisonous plants where they died, and the flames stretching up on the wind gave the sky the glory of a sunset. Heaps of ash lifted like dust on the high wind and stood in the open sky like domes with no pillars under them, and the little children stood crying in fear of them beside their weeping parents. Some men tore at a dead body with their teeth and, in their haste to get at the flesh, bit their own hands and fingers, and were smeared in their own blood. Vultures in the air dove at the smoke, taking it for the crown of a tree, and pounced on firebrands, taking them for bits of raw flesh. Men flew in all directions, biting and tearing at one another, and the splitting of the burning wood hit them in the breast and the belly and left them gushing blood. The winds howled in the hollow caves, the flames flashed with fury, the snakes hissed in terror of both, and the burnt woods came down with a hideous noise.”
“When those calamities had gone on raging, by the displeasure of destiny, and the disasters of the last dissolution had come early to the forest and the mountain people, some of the men went out of that place with their wives and children to look for new homes in foreign lands, the way clouds scatter and disappear from the sky when the rains are over. Their wives and children and close relations went with them, clinging to them like the limbs of their own bodies, and the lean and the infirm were left behind like branches cut off a tree. Some of those who set out were eaten by tigers as they came out of their houses, as unfledged birds are taken by falcons when they come out of the nest. Some walked into the fire like moths, to end their miserable lives. Others fell into pits, like fragments of rock falling off a hill. I separated myself from my father-in-law’s people and all the rest of them and, relying on myself alone, I escaped narrowly out of that stricken country with my wife and my children around me. We passed the pitfalls and the storms, the wild beasts and the snakes, without harm, and came out of the forest safe from every deadly peril of the road. At the border of the forest we found the shade of some palm trees, and there I set my children down off my shoulders, where I had carried them like the burdens of my sins and sorrows. I halted there after that long and weary journey, a man fled from the borders of hell, and rested like a wilting lotus out of the scorching sun. My Chandala wife slept under the same tree, and my two boys lay fast asleep in each other’s arms in the cool of the shade.”
“Then my younger son, Prachchhaka, who was as dear to us as he was slow, got up and came and stood in front of me. He said, with his spirit sunk and the tears pouring out of his eyes, ‘Papa, give me some meat soon, and something to drink, or I will die.’ The little boy asked for the same thing over and over, weeping, saying that he was dying of hunger. I told him that I had no meat, and the more I said it the more he repeated that foolish craving of his, which could neither be satisfied nor silenced. Then my father’s heart and the affliction in it moved me to say to him, ‘Child, cut off a slice of my flesh, and roast it, and eat it.’ He agreed. ‘Give it, then,’ he said, because his hunger pressed him so hard and his strength was so far gone that he could not refuse my flesh for his food. At that I was overpowered by love and by pity, and I thought of ending all my grief together with my life, which had become unbearable to me in the face of his distress. I could not endure the pain of my own affection any longer. I despaired of my life, and I resolved on death as the only friend left to me in that last extremity. I gathered some wood and heaped it into a funeral pyre and set fire to it, and I watched it blaze up as I wished. And as I was hurrying to throw myself onto the pile, I was roused all at once out of that trance by the sound of music coming from this palace, hailing me as king and shouting jaya, victory.”
Fire, Trumpets, and an Unfinished Question
“I understood then that this conjurer had worked his enchantment on me,” Lavana said, “and put me through every trouble a man can imagine for so long a stretch of time. Like the ignorant, I was subject to a hundred changes of fortune, the kind that never come near the wise.” The court listened to the great king go back over the turns of that fortune, the desert, the girl, the sixty years, the boy, the fire, and the music that had pulled him off the pyre and back onto a horse that had never moved.
While he was still speaking, the sorcerer vanished. One moment he stood in the hall; the next he was gone, and the courtiers looked around them with staring eyes and then turned to the king. “That man was no sorcerer, my lord,” they said, “and he had no mercenary aim of his own in this. It was divine magic, shown to our lord to represent the lot of humanity and the state of the world. This world is plainly a creation of the mind, and an imagined world is only a display of the infinite power of the Almighty. These hundreds of world-systems show the manifold powers of Omnipotence, and they delude even the wisest into believing unrealities real, as if by a spell. If the delusion is that strong on the wise, it is no wonder our king was overpowered by it, when every common mind labors under the same error. No trick of a conjurer spread this over your mind. A conjurer aims at nothing beyond his own gain, and people who love money never walk away of their own accord without getting something. So we doubt that he was a sorcerer at all.”
Vasistha looked at Rama. “I am sitting here at this moment in front of you and the rest of this assembly,” he said, “and I know that this story is true. It is no fiction like the tale about the boy that I told you before, and it is no invention of mine, and no hearsay. This is how the mind grows, by the inventions of its own imagination, the way a tree grows by throwing out boughs and branches. The extended mind encompasses everything, as an outstretched arbor covers the ground, and it is the mind’s grasp of everything, its familiarity with the natures of all things, that leads it on toward its perfection.”
Rama had questions, and he asked them the way a young man asks who has not yet decided whether he believes what he has been told. “What became of Lavana afterward?” he said. “Who, exactly, suffered those sixty years, the king sitting on the horse or someone else? And who was that sorcerer, and where did he flee to when he vanished?”
“The living soul is the subject of its own good and bad acts,” Vasistha said, “but through its irrationality it is confined in its body and stays pent up there like a silkworm in its cocoon. The mind, bound fast to its ignorance, exerts its faculties in every direction and turns like a wheel in its pursuits and employments. It is the mind dwelling in the body that makes the body rise and sit, eat and drink, walk and go, hurt and kill. Those are acts of the mind. The body does none of them on its own. The master of a house does the many things that get done in it; the house does nothing. In the same way the mind acts its several parts in the body, and the body does nothing by itself. The mind is the active and the passive agent of all the actions and passions, of all the pains and pleasures of the body. It is the mind only that makes the man.”
“Now hear the useful moral of the story of Lavana,” he went on, “and how he came to be transformed into a Chandala by a derangement of his mind. The mind has to feel the effects of its actions, whether they are good or evil. So that you understand this well, listen carefully to what I am going to tell you now.”
What he told Rama next was something that Lavana himself had never mentioned to his court that day, because the king had not connected it with the magician at all. It concerned a thing he had done one day, alone, sitting apart from everyone, without lifting a hand.
The Rajasuya Performed in Mind
“Lavana, who was born of the line of Harishchandra, was sitting apart from the rest of his court one day,” Vasistha said, “and he thought to himself: ‘My grandfather was a great king, and he performed the Rajasuya sacrifice in act. I am born of his line. I must perform the same sacrifice in my mind.’ The Rajasuya is the great sacrifice of kings; his grandfather had done it with real priests, real fire and real gifts.”
“Having made up his mind, he got the things ready for the sacrifice and entered the sacrificial hall for his initiation into the rites. He called the sacrificial priests and honored the holy saints. He invited the gods to it and kindled the sacrificial fire. He performed the sacrifice to his heart’s content, and honored the gods and the sages and the Brahmins, and then he went to a forest to live there for a year. He made presents of all his wealth to the Brahmins and to other men. And then he woke from his slumber, in that same forest, by the evening of that same day.”
“So King Lavana attained the merit of the sacrifice, in his own inner satisfaction at having attained its meritoriousness. Learn from this, Rama, that the mind is the recipient of pleasure and of pain, and turn your attention to the purification of your mind. Every man becomes perfect in his mind, in its full time and its proper place; the man who believes he is made of his body only is utterly lost. When the mind is roused to transcendental reason, all its miseries are removed from the rational understanding, just as the beams of the rising sun falling on a lotus bud dispel the darkness shut up inside its folded petals.”
Rama said, “What evidence is there, sir, that Lavana obtained the reward of his mental Rajasuya in being transformed into a Chandala by the magician’s enchantment?” Vasistha said, “I was myself present in King Lavana’s court when the magician appeared there, and I saw everything that happened with my own eyes. After the magician had gone and his work was done, the king respectfully asked me and the other courtiers to explain the cause of the dream and all its circumstances. I pondered it, and when I had clearly seen its cause I expounded the meaning of the magician’s spell to him, the way I am explaining it to you now. I remembered that every performer of the Rajasuya sacrifice is subjected to painful difficulties and dangers, and that they suffer under those for a full twelve years. That was why Indra, the lord of heaven, had compassion on Lavana and sent his heavenly messenger in the form of the magician, to avert that calamity from him. The messenger charged the sacrificer with all those many hardships inside his dream, and then he departed on his aerial road to the home of the gods and the Siddhas.”
“So, Rama, it is quite evident and there is no doubt about it. The mind is the active and the passive agent of every kind of action and of its consequences. Therefore rub the dirt out of your heart and polish the gem of your mind; melt it down like a sliver of ice in the fire of your reason, and attain your chief good at last. Know the mind to be the same thing as ignorance, avidya, which sets these multitudes of beings in front of you and produces endless varieties of things by its magical power. There is no difference in meaning among the words ignorance, mind, understanding and living soul, any more than between the word tree and all its synonyms. Knowing that, keep a steady mind freed of all its desires, and as the clear sun of your intellect rises, the darkness of your wanting and your not wanting flies away from you. Know this too: there is nothing in the world that you cannot see, nothing that cannot be made your own or taken from you. There is nothing that does not die, nothing that is not yours and others’. All things become all, at all times. The multitudes of existing bodies and their known properties meet together in the one substance, the way unbaked clay pots of every kind melt down into the same water.”
Rama said, “You told me, sir, that it is by weakening the desires of the mind that we put an end to our pleasures and pains. But tell me now how it is possible to stop the course of a mind that is fickle by its very nature.” Vasistha answered him at length: how Brahma, who took on himself the shape of the Divine Will, saw before him whatever he wished to produce and brought the world into being, and how every living being comes out of the mold of its own inner wish in the same way, and how a man passes from boyhood to the choices of manhood to the seven grounds of yoga. Then he came back to the king. “Now, Rama, attend to the wonderful power of this avidya, this error,” he said, “in displaying the changing appearances of things, like the changing forms of the ornaments in the one substance of gold.” Because Lavana, the morning after the magician, had not been finished with the Vindhya.
The Road to Pukkasa-Ghosha
“When his dream was over and King Lavana had seen through the falsehood of his vision, he resolved to go and visit that great forest himself the following day. He said to himself, ‘Ah, when shall I see the Vindhya region again? It is inscribed in my mind. I remember undergoing a great many hardships there, in my forester’s life.’”
“So he set out southward with his ministers and attendants, as if he were going to make a conquest of that quarter, and he came to the foot of the mountain in a few days. From there he wandered along the southern and the eastern and the western shores of the sea, as pleased with his curving course as the sun is with his daily journey from east to west.”
“In a certain region he saw a deep and doleful forest stretching wide along his path, like the dark realm of Yama. Roving through it, he saw everything that he had seen before in his dream. He asked about the past of each place, and he was astonished to find how it conformed with what he had seen in his vision. He recognized the Chandala hunters of his dream, and, curious to know the rest, he kept on through the forest. Then he saw a hamlet at the skirt of the wilderness, foggy with smoke, and it was the place where he had borne the name Pushta Pukkasa, the fostered Chandala. He saw the same huts and hovels, the same dwellings and fields and open ground, the same men and women who had lived there before. He saw the same landscape and the same leafless branches, stripped bare by the famine that devoured everything. He saw the same hunters out after their game. He saw the same helpless orphans lying about.”
“And he saw the old woman, his mother-in-law, wailing over the misfortunes of the other matrons, who were lamenting like her, with their eyes full of tears, the untimely deaths and endless miseries of their people. Those old women, tears pouring down, their bodies and their breasts wasted by their afflictions, were mourning aloud in that dreary district that drought and dearth had struck. ‘Sons and daughters,’ they cried, ‘you who lie dead there with your wasted bodies, three days without food, say where your dear lives have fled, struck by the steel of famine out of the armor of your bodies. We remember your sweet smiles, your coral teeth like red gunja seeds, and your fathers coming down from the tall tala palms with the ripe red fruit held in their teeth. When will we see our boys spring at the wolves crouching among the kadamba and jamb and clove and gunja trees again? Even in the face of Kama, the god of love, we do not see the graces we used to see in the blue-black faces of our children, dark as tamala leaves, when they feasted on their fish and flesh.’”
“The mother-in-law had her own lament. ‘My dark daughter has been snatched away from me with my dear husband,’ she said, ‘the way fierce Yama took the dark Yamuna. They have been carried off from this forest like a tamala branch with all its clustered flowers, by a tremendous gale. My daughter, with your necklace of strung red gunja seeds on your young breast, and your dark skin like an ocean of ink gently shaken by the breeze, where have you fled, in your dress of woven withered leaves, with your teeth as black as ripe jambu fruit? Young prince, you who were as fair as the full moon, who left the fairies of your harem and took such delight in my daughter, where have you fled from us? Ah, my daughter. She too is dead in your absence, and gone from my sight. Cast on the waves of this earthly ocean and joined to a Chandala’s daughter, prince, you were put to mean and vile employments that disgraced your princely character. Ah, that daughter of mine with her trembling eyes like a timid fawn’s, and that husband, as valiant as a royal tiger: you are both gone together, the way the high hopes and great efforts of men go with the loss of their wealth.’”
“‘Now I am without a husband,’ she said, ‘and lately I have lost my daughter too, and I am thrown into a distant barren land, and I have become the most miserable and wretched of beings. Born of a low caste, I am cast out of every prospect in life. I have become a terror to myself and a horror to everyone who sees me. The Lord has made me a widow and exposed me to the insults of the vulgar and the haughtiness of the rich. Flattened by hunger, mourning a husband and a child, I go from door to door without rest, begging alms to keep myself alive. It is better that a person who is unfortunate and friendless, or at the mercy of passion and disease, should die sooner than live on in misery. The dead and the lifeless are far better off than the living wretched. Those who have no friends, and have to toil and sweat in unfriendly places, are the grass of the earth, trampled underfoot and drowned under a flood of calamities.’”
“The king, seeing his aged mother-in-law mourning like this, offered her some consolation through her female companions, and then he asked the old woman to tell him who she was, what she was doing there, who her daughter was, and who her daughter’s husband was. She answered him with tears in her eyes. ‘This village is called Pukkasa-Ghosha. Here I had a Pukkasa for my husband, and he had a daughter as gentle as the moon. She found a husband here as beautiful as the moon, a king who happened to pass this way. By that accident they were matched together, the way a she-ass in the forest happens on a pot of honey lying in her path. She lived long with him in wedded happiness, and bore him sons and daughters, and they grew up in the shelter of this forest the way a gourd vine grows up the tree that supports it. After some time a dearth came on this place from the failure of the rains, and it broke everyone under its pressure. Pressed by extreme scarcity, all our village people scattered far abroad, and they died in the famine and never came back. Since then, lord, we have been exposed to the utmost misery, and we sit here lamenting in our helpless poverty. Look at us, lord, all bathed in tears that fall and fall from eyes that never dry.’”
“The king was lost in wonder at what he heard from the old woman’s mouth. He looked at the face of the faithful minister who had followed him there, and he stood in dumb amazement like a figure in a picture. He went over that strange occurrence again and again in his mind, and its curious concurrence with his adventures in the dream. He put question after question to them about other circumstances, and the more he heard and learned, the more he found that it coincided with what he had seen in his vision. He felt for them in their woes, and he saw them in the very state in which he had seen them before in his dream, and he gave them suitable gifts and presents to relieve their wants. He stayed there a long while, pondering the decrees of destiny, until the wheel of fortune brought him home again, and he rode into his city amid the loud cheers and low bows of the citizens.”
“In the morning the king appeared in his court hall, and sitting there among his courtiers he asked me, ‘How is it, sage, that my dream has been verified in front of my own eyes, item by item, to my great surprise? They answered exactly and to the very point everything I asked of them, and they have swept my doubt of its truth out of my mind, the way the wind sweeps the clouds out of the sky.’”
What the Mind Makes Continuous
“Know this, then, Rama: it is the illusion of avidya that causes a great many errors, by making untruth appear as truth and representing sober reality as unreality.” Rama said, “Tell me, sir, how the dream came to be verified. It is a mysterious account. It cannot find a place in my heart.”
“All of this is possible, Rama, to the illusion of ignorance, which shows you a picture inside a pot, and presents the actual events of life as dreams and dreams as realities. Distance appears near, like a far mountain seen in a mirror, and a long time seems a short interval, like a night of undisturbed sleep. The untrue seems true, as when a man dreams his own death in his sleep, and the impossible seems possible, as when he flies through the air in a dream. The fixed seems unsteady, the way fixed things seem to move to a man riding in a vehicle, and the unmoving seems to move, as it does to a drunk man. The mind that is taken over by one obsession sees spread out in front of it whatever it thinks about within itself. It sees things in the same light in which its fancy painted them, whether they exist or not, whether they are real or unreal. No sooner does the mind contract its ignorance, through its false notions of I and you, than it is subject to endless errors, which have no beginning, middle or end and go on happening without a pause. It is the notion that gives a shape to all things. It makes a kalpa appear as a moment, and it stretches a moment of time into a whole kalpa. A man deprived of understanding believes he has turned into a sheep if he is told so, and a fighting ram thinks himself a lion in his imagined bravery. Ignorance causes the blunder of taking things for what they are not, and the errors of I and you follow, and all the errors in the mind produce errors in action too. It is by mere accident that men come into possession of the things they desire, and it is custom that decides how they deal with one another.”
“Lavana’s remembrance of his dream of having lived in the Pukkasa’s hamlet was the inner cause that showed him the outer picture of that place as a reality. The human mind is liable to forget many things that were actually done, and it is just as liable to remember as true things that were never done at all and had merely been thought of in the mind. It is like my thinking that I have eaten something while I am actually fasting, or that I have traveled in a distant country in a dream: it appears true to me while I am thinking of it. That is how the king came to find the same conduct in the Chandala habitation at the side of the Vindhya as he had been impressed with in his dream. And again, the false dream that Lavana had dreamt of the Vindhya people took possession of their minds also. The notion of Lavana settled in the minds of the Vindhyans just as the thoughts of those people had risen in the mind of the king. The same sentiments and the same figures of speech occur in different poets of distant ages and distant countries, so there is nothing striking in the same thoughts and ideas rising at the same time in the minds of different men.”
“In common experience we find that our notions and ideas stand for the things themselves. Otherwise nothing is known to exist at all, without our notion or idea of it in the mind. One idea takes in many others under it, as the ideas of the waves and the current are contained under the idea of water, and one thought brings with it the thoughts of its past, present and future states, as the thought of a seed carries the thought of what it was and what it will be, the flowers and the fruit of the tree. Nothing has being or non-being, nothing can be said to exist or not to exist, unless we hold a positive idea of the existent and a negative notion of the nonexistent. All that we see in our error is as nonexistent as oil in sand, and so the bracelet is nothing in reality: it is a shape taken by the substance of gold. A fallacy can have no connection with the reality, as the fallacy of the world has none with the reality of God, or the fallacy of the ring with the gold, or the snake with the rope. The relation of gum resin to the tree is a union of unlike things, and it gives no distinct idea of either of them beyond the idea of the tree that contains the other. Because all things are full of the Spirit, we have distinct ideas of them in our minds, and our minds are spiritual substances too, and no dull material stones that feel nothing. Two unlike things can have no lasting connection; they are never united, and without such a relation no idea of the two can be formed together. Intellect joined to an abstract idea produces a single invisible, inward, uniform thought, and dull matter joined to another dull object forms a denser material thing to look at, but the intellectual and the material can never unite, because their natures are different. Wood and stone combine to build a house. The tongue and taste belong together, because taste and the organ of tasting are both watery substances. Between intellect and matter there is no relation of that kind; the intellect cannot combine with wood and stone to form anything. Spiritually considered, all things are alike, because they are full of the same spirit, and otherwise the error of a distinction between the viewer and the view breeds endless differences, as between wood and stone and everything else. Spirits can assume any form at will, without limit, but it must be a spiritual form and never a material one. Know, you seekers of truth, that all things are identical with the being of God. Renounce your knowledge of nonentities and every kind of error and fallacy, and know the One as All.”
“The Intellect being full with its knowledge, there is nothing wanting to us. It presents us with everything inside its circle, as the imagination, with its wide range, shows us its castles in the air and everything beside them. To Him there is no limit of time or of place; His presence extends over the whole of His creation. It is ignorance that separates the creator from the creation and raises the errors of I and you. Leaving the knowledge of the gold itself, a man contracts the error of taking it for the ornament made of it, and that mistake of the jewel for the gold is the taking of one thing for another, of the product for the producer. The error of the appearance vanishes when the eye that sees it is gone, and the difference of the jewel is lost in the substance of the gold. The knowledge of unity removes the sense of a separate creation, as the knowledge of clay takes away the toy soldiers made of it. The same Brahman causes the error of the reality of the outer worlds, as the sea beneath causes the error of the waves on its surface; the same wood is mistaken for the carved figure, and the common clay is taken for the pot made of it. Between the sight and its object lies the eye of the one who sees, which is beyond the sight of its own viewer, and is neither the view nor the viewer. The mind, traveling from one place to another, leaves the body behind in the meantime, neither moving nor quite unmoved, since only its mental part is in motion.”
“Remain always in that quiet state which is neither waking, dreaming nor sleeping, and which is neither sensibility nor insensibility, a state of everlasting tranquility and rest. Drive out your dullness and stay always in the company of your sound intellect, like a solid rock, and in joy or in grief commit your soul to your Maker. There is nothing that anyone has to lose or to earn in this world, so remain in one even joy and bliss, whether you think yourself blessed or unblessed in life. The soul living in your body neither loves nor hates anything at any time. So rest in quiet, fear nothing for whatever happens to your body, and do not engage your mind in the actions of the body. Stay as free from anxiety about the present as you are unconcerned about the future. Never be driven by the impulses of your mind. Stay steadfast in your trust in the true God. Be unconcerned with everything and remain like a man who is elsewhere. Let your heart stay unmoved by everything, like a block of stone or a toy of wood, and look on your mind as an inanimate thing, by the spiritual light of your soul. There is no water in stone and no fire in water, and in the same way the spiritual man has no mental action, and neither does the Divine spirit. If what is unseen should ever come to do anything, that action is credited to something else, and the something else is the mind; and once the mind is ignored, its actions are ignored with it. The man who does not possess himself, and follows the dictates of his fickle and willful mind, is like a man of the border country who takes up the customs of the outcast Mlechchhas. Once you have disregarded the dictates of your vile mind, you may remain at ease and as fearless as an insensible statue made of clay. The man who understands that there is no such thing as the mind, or that he had one once but it is dead in him today, becomes as immovable as a marble statue with that assurance in himself. Since the mind makes no appearance anywhere, and you have no such thing in you in reality except your soul, say: why do you infer its existence in vain, for your own error and harm? Those who subject themselves in vain to the false apparition of the mind are mostly men of unsound understanding, and they bring down thunderbolts on themselves from the full moon of the pure soul. Remain firm as you are, with your own self, by casting your fancied and fanciful mind far from you, and be freed from the thoughts of the world by being settled in the thought of the Supreme Soul. Those who follow a nullity like the unreal mind are like fools who shoot their arrows at the empty air and are cast into the shade. The man who has purged off his mind is a man of great understanding. He has crossed over the error of the existence of the world and has been purified in his soul. We have considered this for a long time, and we have never found anything like the impure mind in the pure soul.”