Manki: From the Desert to Supreme Samadhi

A Traveler in the Heat

Vasistha had spent days teaching Rama dispassion, the thinning of appetite, the laying down of worldly wishes, and now, in Dasharatha’s court, he asked the prince to stand up and walk out of the material world altogether, as a man named Manki had once done. Manki was a Brahmin, praised in his day for his devotion and for the vows he kept without wavering. Vasistha had met him on a road. He told Rama how.

Years before, Vasistha had been coming down from the vault of heaven at the invitation of Aja, Rama’s grandfather, who wanted him at court for some occasion. He walked the earth the rest of the way toward Aja’s kingdom, and the road led him into a desert that had no boundary on any side. The sun stood straight overhead. The sand burned. Dust the color of ash hung over everything and dimmed the light without softening it, and a few hamlets lay scattered across the waste at great distances from one another. To Vasistha the place looked like the immensity of Brahma itself, empty, unbounded, swept by howling winds, blazing with heat and light, its water a seeming in the sand, its untrodden ground resting in a kind of peace. It also looked like avidya, the ignorance that hides the real, with its mirage, its dullness, its emptiness, and the haze that closed in on every side.

Walking through this hollow of sand, Vasistha came upon a wayfarer trudging ahead of him and muttering to himself under the strain of the journey. The man was cursing the sun. “This sun,” he said, “is as hard on me as the company of wicked men. Its beams pour fire on the ground. They are melting the marrow out of my bones the way they dry the leaves and set the forest alight.” He looked across the sand to a hamlet in the distance and made up his mind. “I will go to that village, rest, and get my strength back for the road.” The village was a settlement of Kiratas, a tribe the towns counted as low caste, and he had already turned toward it when a voice behind him spoke.

“Greetings, traveler of the sandy desert,” Vasistha said. “May all go well with you, my fellow on this road. You have a good face, and the look of a man without passions. You have lived a long time in the dwellings of men and never found rest there. What makes you expect to find it now, in this lonely camp of mean people? There is no rest for you in that village. It is full of Pamara ruffians, and thirst is never quenched by salt water; salt water sharpens it. Those huts shelter cowherds who are afraid of the open roads men travel, as a timid deer will not leave its own track. There is no stir of reason in them, no flash of understanding. Base acts do not frighten them and do not repel them; they go on turning like millstones and wheels. Their manhood is the heat of their passions, the show of their cravings and their hatreds, and they love whatever pleases them in the moment, with no memory of yesterday and no care for tomorrow. No rain cloud ever gathers over parched desert ground, and no shadow of cool, clean knowledge has ever fallen across their minds. Better to live in a dark cave like a snake, or lie like a blind worm inside a stone, or limp across this barren waste like a lame stag, than to keep company with these villagers. They are poison stirred into honey, sweet on the tongue for a moment and deadly afterward. They are as rough as the gusts that drive the dust through their broken huts of turf and dry leaves.”

The words fell on the traveler like a shower of ambrosia. He stopped and turned. “Who are you, sir?” he said. “You have the soul of a great man. You seem complete in yourself, full of the divine spirit, and you look at the bustle of the world the way a passerby looks at the commotion of a village beside his road, with no concern in it. Have you drunk the nectar of the gods, that you know what you know? Is the spirit of Viraj in you, the sovereign spirit that fills the whole and stands apart from what it fills, entirely full in its entire emptiness? I see your soul as void and as full as his, as still and as moving as the divine spirit, all that exists and none of it, something and nothing at once. It is quiet and lovely, shining and unseen, inert and full of force, inactive in all its action. You walk the earth and you range above the skies. You have no support and you rest on a sure foundation. You do not stretch yourself over things, and nothing exists without you. Your mind is the moon at the full, without one dark mark on it, cool as moonlight and brimming with the juice of immortality. I see the worlds exist and cease at your will, and your intellect holds the turning world inside it the way the germ of a tree holds the fruit it will bear.”

“Let me tell you who I am. I am a Brahmin of the sage Shandilya’s line. My name is Manki, and I have given myself to visiting the places of pilgrimage. I have made very long journeys and seen holy places in every quarter, and after all that time I have at last turned my steps toward home.”

“But my mind is so sick of the world, so set against it, that I cannot make myself go home. I have watched the lives of men pass out of this world like flashes of lightning. Give me a true account of yourself, sir. The minds of holy men are deep and clear as still lakes. When a great man shows kindness to someone as small as I am at first sight, that man’s heart opens toward him like a lotus bud at the first early gleam of the sun, and he lets himself hope. So I hope you will take from me the error that my ignorance has bred, here in the middle of this tempting world. I believe you can.”

“Know me, then,” Vasistha said. “I am Vasistha, the sage. I live in the ethereal region, and I am on this road on an errand for the royal sage Aja. And listen, wise man: do not be disheartened by your ignorance. You have already come onto the path of wisdom. You have very nearly crossed the ocean of the world and you stand at the coast of transcendent knowledge. I see you have in your possession the treasure beyond price, indifference to the things of the world. Speech like yours, feeling like yours, the steadiness you have shown, none of this comes from a worldling. It speaks of a high mind.”

“A precious stone is polished by gentle rubbing that wears the grit off it, and a mind comes to its reasoning the same way, by rubbing off the dross of its prejudice. So tell me what you want to know, and how you want to leave the world behind. In my view there are two ways it is done: by practicing what a teacher has taught you, or by asking about what you do not know or understand. They say that whoever means to cross the doom of future births should carry good, pure desires in his mind and an understanding inclined to reason, under the direction of a spiritual guide. Such a man is entitled to the state that has no sorrow and no misery ahead of it.”

What Manki Could Not Escape

Manki fell at Vasistha’s feet in the sand. Tears of joy ran from both his eyes. The two of them walked on together, and Manki spoke as they went, with the respect due to the sage’s rank. “Venerable sir,” he said, “I have traveled in all ten directions of the earth for a long time, and I have never met a holy man like you, one who could remove the doubts that rise in my mind.”

“Today I have gained the knowledge that is the chief good of a Brahmin’s body, that body which is held more venerable, higher in birth and dignity, than the bodies of all other beings in heaven and on earth. And still my heart is sore at the evils of this lower world. Birth after birth, death after death, the turning wheel of pleasure and pain: all of it has to be counted as pain, because all of it ends in pain. Pleasure leads to a greater pain when it is gone, so it is better, sage, to stay in one’s pain, which long habit turns into a kind of pleasure. What follows a fleeting pleasure is a lasting pain, and I count the pleasure as pain even while it lasts.”

“Friend, every pleasure has become painful to me, as my pains have become pleasant, at this late age, with my teeth going and the hair falling off my body and my insides worn and failing. My mind keeps reaching for higher stations in life and will not hold to its holy course, and the seed of my salvation is choked by the thorns and thistles of my worldly wants. My mind sits among its passions inside the shelter of this body like a banyan tree standing among its own fallen leaves in the middle of a rustic village, and my desires fly about it like hungry vultures hunting for their foul food.”

“My crooked thoughts are brambles, creeping and thorny. My life is a weary maze, a dark and dismal night in which I am blindfolded and cannot find the way. The whole world and everyone in it is parched and withered like plants without water, because it lacks the moisture of true knowledge, and it decays day by day under its endless cares, moving toward its dissolution without being destroyed all at once. Our present acts drown in the acts of our past lives and bear no flower or fruit here, like withered trees, and acts done out of desire end with the passing things they gain. Our lives are wasted on family and dependents and never spent on carrying the soul across the ocean of the world. The appetite for earthly pleasure decays day by day, and a dreadful eternity waits ahead.”

“Our wealth and possessions, great or small, are as noxious to the soul as the thorny, poisonous plants that grow in the hollow caves of the earth, and they come with thoughts and cares that bring a fever into the soul and waste the body. Fortune sometimes throws the brave and the fortunate into the hands of their enemies, the way a man hot with the wish for gems reaches into a dark cave for the jeweled serpents lying there and loses his life for the treasure. I have given myself entirely to the objects of sense, and so the wise avoid me as they avoid touching anything vile. My mind is fouled with worldly wants and hollow inside, and they shun it as men shun a dead sea with its troubled, muddy water.”

“My mind turns around its empty vanities the way rheumatic pains move around the body. I have died beyond counting, and I am still hunting after the void I desire, with sorrow for company. And this though reading the shastras and keeping the company of good men has scoured the dross of ignorance from my mind, as the moon and stars stand clean in the empty sky with their power to drive off darkness. There is no end to the dark night of my ignorance while the gloomy specter of my egoism plays its part in it. I lack the knowledge that would destroy the furious elephant of my ignorance like a lion and burn down the straws of my actions like a fire. The dark night of my desire has not passed, and the sun of my disgust with the world has not yet risen. I still take the unreal for the real, and my mind wanders about like an elephant.”

“My senses have never stopped tempting me, and I do not know where these temptations end. They keep even the wise from observing the precepts of the shastras. And this blindness to the shastras, this neglect of them, leads to a deeper blindness, because it kindles our desires and darkens our understanding.”

“So tell me, sir, what I am to do in this difficulty. What is it that leads to my chief good? That is what I am asking you to tell me. They say the mist of our ignorance flies off like clouds at the sight of wise men and at the purifying of our desires. Prove the saying of the wise true, here, by enlightening my understanding and giving my mind peace.”

Four Seeds of Samsara

Vasistha answered him as they went on, with the sand burning under both their feet and the whole empty country shimmering around them. He began with the roots.

“Consciousness of the objects we perceive, the reflection of those objects in the mind, the desire to have them, and the imagining of them: these four are the roots of evil in this world,” Vasistha said. “The words themselves mean nothing, yet a great deal of sense has been attached to them, as if they were four sources of knowledge. Understand that knowledge of outward things is their reflection too, and that this reflection is the seat of all evil. Every calamity we suffer springs from it, as thickly as vegetation springs from the sap of spring.”

“Men dressed in the robes of their desires walk the dreary roads of this world performing act after act, ritual and worldly, circles drawn inside circles, one round of duty enclosing many others. For the wise these wanderings over the earth end when their desires end, as the moisture in the ground dries up and dwindles at the close of spring.”

“Our many desires are what grow the thorny plants and brambles of the world, as the moisture of spring grows the thick clumps of plantain trees. To a mind clogged with the juice of its own appetites, the world looks like a dark maze, the way the ground lies in shadow under bushy trees fed by the sap of spring.”

“Nothing exists except the clear, empty intellect, as nothing exists in the boundless sky except the hollow of the air. There is no intelligent soul besides this one, and everything else is the everlasting reflection of this one alone. That reflection is what we call ignorance, and error, and the world.”

“It is seen without being seen, and it is lost the moment it is seen. Look for it and some unreal thing, some evil spirit, appears to the sight in place of the true and holy one, the way ghosts and goblins appear to children. It is by rejecting every visible sight that the understanding comes to view the one essence of all, and then all things dwindle into it, as every river on earth runs down and falls into one ocean.”

“An earthen pot cannot exist without its earth, and intelligent beings are never without their intelligence, the intellect. Whatever the understanding knows, we call our knowledge. The understanding has no knowledge of the unknowable, and the want of understanding can know nothing at all, because the two are opposite in nature.”

Manki kept pace beside him and said nothing. The man who had been cursing the sun a little while before was listening now with everything in him, and Vasistha went on to the one who sees, the seeing, and the seen.

The Seer, Seeing, and the Seen

“There is one relation of knowledge running through the looker, his seeing, and the thing he sees,” Vasistha said, “and in the same way it is the omniscience of Brahma that is the only essence. Everything else is as null as a flower growing in the sky, which never exists. Things of the same kind have an affinity for one another and run together into one, as water does with water. The world is alike to our notion of it, and all our notions are alike to the eternal ideas in the mind of God, so the world and the divine mind are one and the same thing and nothing else.”

“If we had no knowledge or notion of wood and stone, they would be the same to us as the things that do not exist and of which we have no notion, the horns of a hare, a flower in the air. The outward and visible features of things match the notions we hold of them in our minds so exactly that they turn out to be nothing other than our notions of them. Every visible appearance in the universe is the outstretched reflection of our inner ideas. They flutter as the winds flutter, and they move as the waters of the ocean move.”

“All things are mingled with the omnipresent spirit. To the unthinking it looks like a log of wood coated with lac dye, two things stuck together; the thinking part of mankind takes the two for one and the same. The idea of reciprocity is unity, and the knowledge of mutuality is union, as water and milk interchange, as vision and the visible answer each other. It is nothing like the union of wood and dye, where one merely sticks to the other.”

“The knowledge of one’s own egoism is his bondage, and the knowledge of his unegoism is his release from it. Both his imprisonment in the body and the world and his freedom from them lie under his own control. So why is he slow to set himself free from his endless slavery? We see two moons in the sky when our sight is doubled, and we believe in water in the mirage; in the same way we believe in the reality of our egoism, which is entirely unreal. We think it present when it is absent. Disbelief in the self, in egoism, removes selfishness as well, the sense of mine. It is in everyone’s power to be rid of them both. How is it that a man can stay ignorant of this?”

“Why do you keep your egoism shut up in the cell of your body, like a plum drowned in a cup of water, like air trapped in a pot? Your relation to God is to be no other than he is, to be one with him, and to be one with him is to know yourself in the likeness of God. They say that the loss of reciprocal knowledge is what unites two things into one, the thorough mixing of two into one. That is wrong both ways. No dull material thing and no spiritual substance ever loses its own form, however mixed with the other. Force is never turned into inertness; the spirit never becomes matter, since neither can be destroyed. And whenever the spiritual is seen as the material, you have a duality, and there is no unity in that view of the two.”

“So men under the sway of their desires, beset by vanities of every kind, keep going downward, like a stone torn from the head of a cliff that falls from ledge to ledge headlong to the ground. Men are straws carried here and there on the current of their desire and whirled about in its eddy. They are overtaken and overwhelmed by a series of troubles without end, more than I could ever count.”

“A man is a ball flung from the palm of fate. His burning desires hurry him on until he is hurled headlong into the depths of hell, and there, worn out and wasted by its torments, after long ages he takes on other forms and other shapes, and comes back to fresh toil on the earth.”

Action Without an Owner

“So the living soul, let fall into the mazy paths of this world, is beset by calamities and accidents as countless as the tiny creatures bred in the rains. They have no connection with one another, yet they follow so fast and so closely on each other, like the loose stones that lie scattered yet close together across a rocky desert, that the mind links them into one lengthening chain of thought. A mind blinded of its reason becomes a wilderness overgrown with the thickets of its own calamities, and still it smiles before men like a grove in spring, with its feigned merriment and good humor. How pitiable they all are, the beings bound in subjection to hope, who pass through state after state of pain and pleasure, born again and again in form after form on this earth. And how strange, how unnatural, the desires that subject men’s minds to the triple error: taking what does not exist, the seer, the seeing, and the seen, for something actually present before them.”

“Those who have known the truth are delighted in themselves. They are immortal in their mortal lives, and they spread a pure light all around them. What difference is there between the sage who is cool in every respect and the cool moon that enlivens the world with its nectar beams? And what difference between a whimsical boy and a covetous fool who grasps at whatever lies to hand, with no thought of the past or the future that attends it? What difference between the greedy fool and the hungry fish that swallows the baited hook of pleasure and will not let go of the line until it gives up its life for it? Everything we possess on earth, our bodies and our lives, our wives, our friends, our property, is as frail as a plate made of sand, which cracks and flies to pieces as soon as it is dry and tried. Soul of mine, you could wander forever through hundreds of bodies in shape after shape, birth after birth; you could pass from the heaven of Brahma to the highest empyrean, and you would never find your peace until you came to the even indifference of your own mind.”

“The ties and bonds of the world come apart under mature introspection into the nature of things, as the roughness of the road does nothing to slow a wayfarer who walks with his eyes open. The careless soul becomes prey to lust and unruly passion, as a heedless traveler is caught in the clutches of demons; the well guarded spirit has nothing to fear from them. As the opening of the eyes presents the visible to sight, so waking consciousness brings the ego and the world of appearances into the mind. And as the shutting of the eyelids shuts the visible out, so the closing of consciousness puts out every sight and every thought from your eyes and your mind. The sense that an outer world exists, and the sense that one’s own self exists, is all unreal and empty. It is consciousness alone that shows everything in itself, by the fluctuation of its own error, as the motion of the wind spreads the painted clouds across empty air. The divine consciousness alone makes the unreal appearances look real within itself, without creating anything apart from its own essence, as earth or metal produces a pot or a jar out of itself, and the pot is in no way separate from its substance.”

“The sky is only emptiness, the wind is only a stirring of the air, and the waves are nothing except water; in the same way the world is nothing other than a phenomenon of consciousness, since we know nothing of it apart from our consciousness of it. The world subsists undivided, a figure raised on the surface of consciousness, with no existence of its own apart from the conscious soul that is its substance, a soul as calm and clear as empty air. The world is the shadow of a mountain lying in the breast of a lake. It is a wave rising on the face of the sea. A calm coolness rises in the souls of wise men who cannot be stirred, when the shining worlds fall like cooling moonbeams on the inner mirror of their minds. And how, by what means, in what manner, is this invisible supreme light produced in the calm, quiet, all pervading soul, in the empty expanse of the universe? The essence we call Brahma forms the essential nature of everything besides, and it permeates all of nature except where some obstruction stands in its way. And whatever stands in its way, whatever hinders the pervasion of the divine essence, is a nullity in nature, a sky flower, nothing at all.”

“The wise man sits as quiet as a stone, with even his inner, mental faculties at rest, because the Lord is without reflection or sensation of anything, without birth and without decay at any time. The man who stays insensible and unconscious of everything, like the empty state of the open sky, arrives by constant practice at a sleep without dreams. How do we know the world is nothing except the thought, the will, of the divine mind? Because Brahma, the creative power, thought of forming this wondrous world in his mind, pictured it in himself, without a tool, without an instrument, without a means, without ground to build on. So the world is purely ideal and in no way real, and there is no cause and no maker of it anywhere. As the Lord stretches the world out in his thought, he becomes it that instant; and as the Lord has no visible form, this seeming world has no visible, material form either, nor is there any framer of what is simply an idea. So all men are happy or unhappy as they think themselves to be the one or the other in their minds. They all abide in the one universal soul common to all, and each believes himself a kind of his own. It is as vain, then, to look on anything, on any intelligent being, as earthly substance, as it is false to take the hills of a dream for real rock standing on the earth. Assign egoism to yourself and you become subject to error and change. Be without egoism and the soul settles into its unchanging identity and its calm. The meaning of the word bracelet is nothing different from the gold it is made of, and your false egoism is nothing other than the tranquil soul.”

“The sage who has gone cold and sober, silent as a muni, is no willing actor of any act, though his body is busy in its active duties. The quiet saint carries an empty, careless mind, though it is full of learning and wisdom. The wise man handles himself like a mechanical figure, a puppet, which never moves of its own motion and moves only as it is moved; with no impulse of desire inside him, he sits as still as a doll that cannot move. The man who knows the soul is as quiet as a baby asleep in a swinging cradle, rocked without rocking itself, or he moves the limbs of his body as a baby does, for no cause of his own. The soul intent on the thought of the One alone, as calm and quiet as the infinite spirit of God, loses consciousness of itself and of everything else, together with all its objects of desire and all its hopes of good and bliss. He who is no viewer himself, with no view before him, free of the threefold condition of subject, object, and act, can have nothing in his view; it is fixed on the vision of the invisible one. Our regard for the world is our strict bondage, and our disregard of it is our perfect freedom. He who rests in disregard of everything that words can express has nothing left to look after and nothing to desire. Tell me, what is there that is ever worth looking after, worth our regard, when these material bodies of ours are as fleeting as our dreams and our very self-existence is a delusion? So the wise man rests in his knowledge of the true one alone. He has subdued his efforts and his desires and quelled all his curiosity, and he is empty of all knowledge except the knowledge of the one thing worth knowing.”

A Hundred Years in Supreme Samadhi

When Manki had heard all of this, he was released from his great error, the way a snake slips free of the old skin that had held it fast.

Vasistha still had Aja’s errand before him. Manki left the road where it was, with the hamlet and the heat, and retired to a mountain.

On that mountain he stayed in deep meditation for a hundred years. Whatever duties arose for him of their own accord, he performed, and he kept no desire for any of them and no expectation of their fruit.

He lives there still, Vasistha told Rama, unmoved and insensible as a stone, every sense and every feeling gone cold, and inwardly awake by the light of his yoga.

“Now, Rama, enjoy your own peace of mind. Rely on the habit of reasoning and discrimination you have built. Do not let your understanding be spoiled by fits of passion, and do not let your mind turn light and drift like a stray cloud in the rainless autumn sky.”