Punya and Pavana: From Grief to Self-Knowledge

The Hermitage Beside the Celestial Ganga

Vasistha had been telling Rama that the line between friend and enemy is drawn by small minds. A noble mind, he said, keeps no such register; there is nobody in the world to whom you are not related in some way, and nobody who is a unit by himself. Rama had listened to this as a prince listens to a maxim, politely, from a distance. So the sage reached for a story. "Hear an old and holy tale that comes to my mind on this subject," he said. "Two brothers, sons of a sage, on the banks of the Ganga, the river that runs three roads: through heaven, across the earth, and down into the world below."

In the continent of Jambudvipa there is a mountainous country thick with groves and forests, and above the rest of it rises Mahendra. Its peaks touch the sky. Kalpa trees grow on it, the trees of the gods that give whatever is asked of them, and their shade falls on the hermits who settle beneath them and on the kinnaras, the singers of heaven, who rest there on their way through. The sages of that mountain chant the hymns of the Samaveda as they pass from its caverns and peaks up toward the region of Indra, and the rock gives the chant back.

Clouds hang on its thousand peaks and drizzle without pause, washing the plants and flowers on the slopes until the gray fleece of them looks like hair let down from heaven to earth. From the dark hollows of those clouds comes thunder, and from the hollows of the mountain comes an answer: the roar of the sarabhas, the eight-legged beasts of the high rocks. Its cascades fall from precipice to precipice into the caverns with a noise that shames the surf of the sea.

On a tableland near the craggy summit, the sacred stream of the heavenly Ganga itself flows across the rock, and the hermits bathe in it and drink from it. On its bank stands a mountain of gems that sparkles like bright gold, dressed in flowering trees. There, among a grove of fruit trees, lived a sage named Dirghatapas, devotion itself in a body, a man of enlightened understanding and a noble mind, hardened by long austerity. He lived on the riverbank with his wife and the two sons born to them.

The boys were as beautiful as the full moon, and they were named Punya and Pavana, the meritorious and the holy. In intelligence they were like the sons of Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods, the two who are called the Kachas. In time they came to the age of discretion, and the elder, Punya, was the better of the two in every merit. Pavana, the younger, was half awake, like a lotus half open at the first light of day. What he lacked in understanding kept him short of the knowledge of truth, and his faith lived in uncertainty.

Then the time that destroys everything brought the sage to the end of a full century of years. His tall body and his long life had been worn down by age and infirmity. Decrepit now, his vitality thinned, he said goodbye to every desire he had in this world, a world so frail and so full of a hundred fearful accidents: the pains that wait on birth, old age and death, the fear of what comes after. The old devotee went into a grotto of the mountain and quit his mortal frame there, the way a bird leaves an old nest for good, the way a water carrier sets down the pole from his shoulders. His spirit went out of the body like the fragrance out of a flower, into that open space which is always tranquil, free of attributes and thought, pure intellect.

His wife found the body lying lifeless on the ground. She fell on it and lay there without moving, like a lotus cut from its stalk. She had practiced yoga for many years according to her husband’s instruction, and her own body had not decayed. She left it as a bee leaves an unfaded flower for the empty air, and her soul followed her husband’s, unseen by anyone, the way the light of the stars disappears into the sky at dawn.

Two bodies lay in the hermitage where, a little while before, two parents had lived. The elder son, Punya, went to work on their funeral services and was busy with them from that hour. The younger, Pavana, was swallowed by grief at their loss.

His mind went under. He did not have his brother’s firmness, and he wandered out into the woods and stayed there, wailing in his mourning, while the fires of the rites burned behind him and his brother did everything that two dead parents require of a son.

Whose Loss Are You Mourning?

When the ceremonies were complete, Punya went into the woods to look for his brother. He found him where the grief had left him, his face wet, his eyes swollen with it. Punya looked at him for a moment before he spoke, and what he saw was a boy who had already begun to lose his sight to tears.

"Why is your soul under this cloud, my boy? Why are you pouring tears from those lotus eyes like the rain pours, as if you meant to cry yourself blind?"

Pavana had no answer that needed words. The two bodies that had been his mother and his father had gone into the rites, and his brother had done the rites. Punya did not wait for an answer. He had come to say something, and he began at the end, with where the parents were.

"Understand this, my clever boy. Your father and your mother have both gone to the final blissful state in the Supreme Spirit, the state people call salvation, liberation. That is the last resort of every living being. It is the blessed state of every soul that has mastered itself. Why mourn for two people who have returned to their own proper nature and are reunited with it? You are indulging a false grief that will bear no fruit. You are mourning what should never be mourned at all."

"And listen. She is not your mother. He is not your father. You are not their only son. In their repeated births they have had offspring beyond counting. You yourself have had thousands of fathers and mothers in the births behind you, as many as there are streams of running water in every forest. You are not their only son, because they had innumerable sons before you; the generations of men have gone by like the currents of a running stream. Our parents had numberless children in their past lives. The branches of human generation are as many as the fruits and flowers on the trees."

This was the knot Punya had come to find, and he had found it in the first minute. His brother’s mind held one woman and said: this one is my mother. It held one man and said: this one is my father. It held the two of them together and said: and I am their son, and this is the whole of it. Once that structure was accepted as complete, the death of two bodies tore away a part of Pavana’s own existence, and he could feel the tear. Punya was going to widen the frame until the structure could no longer hold.

"Count the friends and relatives we have had in our repeated lives in this world. They are as many as the fruits and flowers of one great tree across all the seasons it has ever stood through. If we are to lament the loss of parents and children who are dead and gone, then why do we not lament all the ones we lost and left behind in every one of our past lives?"

He let the question stand. Then he answered it himself. "It is all a delusion, my fortunate boy, everything this illusory world sets in front of us. In truth, my sensible child, we have nobody here whom we can call a real friend, and nobody we can call a positive enemy. Nothing and no one is ever truly lost. Things seem to exist and to pass away the way water seems to lie on the dry desert, and a thirsty man runs toward it."

"Look at the royal dignity you see in the world, the state umbrella over the king’s head, the fans waving on either side of him. It is a dream that lasts a few days. Consider all these things in their true light, and you will find that none of them, and none of us, is going to last forever. So throw out of your mind, for good, this error about the passing world. ‘These are dead and gone.’ ‘These are still here before us.’ Both sentences are errors of our minds, creatures of our false notions and our fond desires, with no reality in them. Our notions and desires paint these changes in front of our eyes the way the sun’s rays paint water on the mirage. Our fancies, working in the field of our ignorance, produce these mistaken conceptions, and the conceptions roll on like the currents of the eventful ocean of the world, with its waves of favorable and unfavorable events breaking over us."

"Who is our father, who is our mother, who are our friends and relatives, except our notion of them as such? And the notion is dust raised by a gust of our airy fancy. The ideas of friend and foe, of our sons and our relations, are the products of our affection and our hatred. They are the effects of ignorance, and when the understanding is enlightened they vanish into nothing, as if they had been made of air. Thinking of a man as a friend makes him a friend. Thinking of him as an enemy makes him an enemy. One thing is honey to us and another is poison because of our opinion of it. There is one soul, and it pervades the whole equally, so there is no ground at all for conceiving of one being as a friend and another as an enemy."

Pavana was listening now. The argument had been a doctrine so far, true and far away, the kind of truth a half-awake mind can agree with and go on weeping. Punya had something else to put in front of him. His discernment was clear and his sight reached all the way back, and he could see the states his brother’s soul had passed through before this one. He was going to name them.

Pavana’s Former Lives

"If you are a subtle body, a linga sharira, and you have gone through many births, then you had many friends and many possessions in the lives before this one. Why do you never think of them? You had friends on the flowery plains where you grazed when you wore the form of a stag. Why do you not think of those deer? They were your dear companions once. Why do you not weep for the swans you lost in that pleasant pool of lotuses where you dived and swam as a gander? Why not for your fellow trees in the woodland where you once stood as a stately tree among them? You had comrades among the lions on the rugged crags of the mountains. Why do you not lament for them? You had mates among the fishes in the clear lakes decked with lotuses. Why do you not grieve your separation from them?"

"You were a monkey in the country of Dasarna, where ten rivers meet, in the gray and green woods there. You were a prince in the land of frost. You were a raven in the woods of Pundra. You were an elephant among the Haihayas and an ass in Trigarta. You became a dog in the country of Salya and a bird in a wood of sal trees. You were a pipal tree on the Vindhya mountains and a wood insect in the trunk of a great banyan. You were a cock on Mount Mandara, and then you were born as a Brahmin in one of its caverns, where the rishis live. You were a Brahmin in Kosala and a partridge in Bengal. You were a horse in the snow country and a beast on Brahma’s sacred ground at Pushkara."

"You were an insect in the trunk of a palm tree and a gnat in a big tree and a crane in the Vindhya woods, you who are now my younger brother. You were an ant for six months, and lived inside the thin bark of a tree in a glen of the Himalayan hills, you who are now my younger brother. You were a millipede in a dunghill in a distant village, and you lived there a year and a half, you who are now my younger brother. You were once the infant of a Pulinda woman, a woman of the hill tribes, and you lived at her breast the way a bee lives on the heart of a lotus. And the same one is now my younger brother."

Every one of those lives had been complete from the inside. The stag had known the plain and the herd and nothing past the edge of them. The gander had known the pool and the other swans. The tree had known its seasons and the trees beside it. The lion had known the crag and the hunt. The millipede had known the warmth of the dunghill, and the Pulinda child had known one breast, one face, one voice above him, and had called that the world. Hunger, fear, shelter, kinship, the particular warmth of the particular body nearest: each form had felt all of it as immediate, as total, as Pavana now felt the loss of two parents on a mountain beside the Ganga.

"In this way, my boy, you were born in many other shapes besides these, and you wandered all over Jambudvipa for myriads of years. And now you are my younger brother. I see these past states of yours, which were caused by the desires your soul carried before, and I see them by my own discernment, with a sight that is clear and takes in everything."

Pavana said nothing. The thing Punya had done was put the present loss on a scale where it could be seen. His love for the two who had just died stayed whole; the border his mind had drawn around them gave way, the certainty that relationship began with this one birth and ended with it. Somewhere behind the stag and the gander and the gnat were other mothers, as many as streams in a forest, each of whom he had once wept for or failed to weep for, and not one of whom he could now name.

Punya was not done. A list of another man’s lives can be heard as an accusation. So he turned the same sight on himself.

Punya Remembers His Own Forms

"I also remember the births I had to go through in my own ignorance. I see them clearly now with the sight that enlightenment gave me. I was a parrot in Trigarta, and a frog on the bank of a river. I became a small bird in a forest, and then I was born in these woods. I was a Pulinda huntsman in the Vindhyas, and after that a tree in Bengal, and after that a camel in the Vindhya range, and at last I was born in this forest."

"I was a chataka bird in the Himalayas, the bird that will drink nothing except rain as it falls, and a prince in the province of Paundra, and then a mighty tiger in the forests of the Sahya hills, and now I am your elder brother. I was a vulture for ten years and a shark for five months and a lion for a full century, and now I am your elder brother in this place. I was a chakora bird in the village of Andhara, the bird that lives on moonlight, and a ruler in the snowy regions, and then the proud son of a priest named Shailacharya in a hilly tract."

"I remember the customs and the pursuits of the different peoples of the earth, because I had to observe them and follow them, one after another, in my passages among them. In all those migrations I had many fathers and many mothers, and more brothers and sisters than that, and friends and relatives by the hundreds and the thousands."

"So for whom am I to lament, and whom am I to forget, out of that number? Shall I wail only for the ones I lose in this life? These too will be buried in oblivion like all the rest. That is the course of the world. Numberless fathers have gone by. Unnumbered mothers have passed and died away. Generations of men beyond counting have perished and disappeared, like the fall of withered leaves."

None of this had made Punya cold. He had just done, with care, everything the dead require of the living, and had come out into the woods afterward to find the one mourner he had left. The hundreds of mothers he could remember had not thinned his tenderness for the one who had died a little while before. They had changed what he believed he had lost.

And under his brother’s grief he could see the question that grief had not yet asked. If she was not his mother, if he was not their son, if Pavana had been a gander and a gnat and the infant of a hill woman, then what was Pavana? Punya had been working toward that question since the first words, and now he put it to him directly.

The Awareness Behind the Names

"Think, in your own mind, what you are. What is the thing that makes your identity, when your body is a composition of bones and ribs and flesh and blood, and that body is not you? Seen in its true light, there is no such thing as myself or yourself. It is a fallacy of the understanding that makes me think of myself as Punya and of you as Pavana. Who is your father, and who is your son? Who is your mother, and who is your friend? One Supreme Self pervades the whole of infinity. Whom will you call the self in it, and whom the not-self? What is yours in it, and what is not yours?"

"There are no bounds, my boy, to the pleasures and the pains of this world under the moon. Lay all of them aside and stay unmindful of every kind of existence, past, present and to come. Give up your thoughts about false appearances. Let go of this firm conviction you hold about your own ego. Look toward the one road that has led the learned to their final beatitude. What is all this commotion of people for, except a struggle to rise or to fall, to climb into heaven or drop into hell? Strive for neither. Live without regard for either, the way the indifferent philosophers live."

"Live free of all care about existing and not existing, and then you will be free of your fear of decay and death. Remember your own self, unruffled, alone, and do not be moved from it by the accidents of a life, the way the ignorant are moved. Know that you have no birth and no death. You have no weal and no woe of any kind. You have no father and no mother, no friend and no foe, anywhere. You are only your pure spirit, and nothing in you is of any other nature. The world is a stage, and it presents many acts and many scenes, and the ones who play their parts well on it are the ones whom its passions and its feelings do not carry away."

He gave his brother two things to look at. "Those who are indifferent in their views keep their quiet through everything that happens in a life. Those who have known the True One stay here only to witness the course of nature. The knowers of God do their acts without thinking of themselves as the actors, the way the lamps of the night witness the objects around them without any consciousness of what they light. The wise witness objects as they are reflected in the mirror of their minds, the way a looking glass or a polished gem receives the image of a thing and holds it and is not changed by it." Pavana could test both against the lives he had just been given: the gander had been reflected and had passed, the millipede had been reflected and had passed, and the surface that received them had received each one whole and had received the next.

"Now, my boy, rub out all your wishes, and rub out the vestiges of your remembrance from your mind, and look at the image of the serene spirit of God in your inmost soul. Learn to live as the great sages live, with the sight of your own spiritual light, and wipe every false impression from your mind."

Punya stopped. The forest around them went on with its noise, the cascades and the drizzle and the far roar from the caverns. What had been, a little while before, a boy crying for a man and a woman had begun, somewhere in the middle of the catalogue of his own births, to be something quieter, and the thing that had risen in him when the names were taken away had no name yet. He stood where he was and did not go back to weeping.

The Brothers’ Remaining Life

Vasistha told Rama what came of it. Pavana, admonished by Punya in this way, became as enlightened in his intellect as a landscape at the dawn of day: the same hills, the same trees, every one of them suddenly visible.

From then on the two of them went on living in that forest, in the perfection of their spiritual knowledge, and they wandered the woods to their hearts’ content. After a long time they both had their extinction, and they rested in the disembodied state of nirvana, the way a lamp with no oil left in it wastes away on its own.

"So that is where the great boast of men ends," Vasistha said, "the boast of having large retinues and numberless friends while they are in their bodies. They carry nothing of it with them to their afterlife, and they leave nothing behind that they can properly call their own. The best way to be released from the many objects of our desire is to suppress the appetite for them, and never to feed it. It is the hankering after an object that makes the appetite grow, the way thinking about a thing makes you think about it more. A fire blazes when you give it fuel and goes out when you stop. So rise now, Rama. Stay up high, as if you rode in your own aerial chariot, loosed from the desires of this world, and look down with pity on the miseries of mortals who crawl below. That is the divine state called the position of Brahma, which looks on everything from above with unconcerned serenity. Whoever gains it, even the ignorant, is freed from misery."

"A man who walks with reason for his companion and his good understanding for his wife does not fall into the trapdoors hidden along the road of a life. A man stripped of every possession and every friend has nothing to lift him out of his adversity except his own patience and his reliance on God. Let men raise their minds with learning and dispassion, with self-respect and with courage, so that they rise over the difficulties of the world. There is no greater good to be had by any other means than by greatness of mind. It gives a security that no wealth and no treasure on earth can give. It is the weak and crazed minds that are flung up and down and swung to and fro on the tempestuous ocean of the world. A mind full of knowledge and full of the light of truth finds that same world filled with ambrosial water and crosses it as easily as a man in dry shoes walks on a floor spread with leather. It is the absence of desire that fills the mind, more than any desire fulfilled. Dry up the channel of desire the way the autumn heat dries a pool. Otherwise it empties the heart and leaves its gaps open to the wind; the hearts of the greedy are as dry as the bed of the sea that Agasti drank. The wide garden of the human heart goes on flowering with humanity and greatness only as long as the restless ape of greed is not loose among its trees. A mind without greed takes in the three worlds in the time it takes to blink, and sees all of space and all of time as a speck beside its own idea of the infinite Brahma. There is a coolness in such a mind that is not in the watery moon, and not in the icy caverns of the Himalayas; the juice of the plantain and the paste of sandalwood are nothing beside the cool head of a man who wants nothing. The mind that desires nothing shines brighter than the disk of the full moon and brighter than the face of Lakshmi. Appetite darkens the mind the way a cloud covers the moon, the way ink wipes out a fair picture. The arbor of desire spreads its branches far and wide on every side and darkens the whole space of the mind with its shadow. Cut that tree down by the root, and the plant of patience that was stunted beneath it shoots up in a hundred branches, and when the unfading arbor of patience has taken the place of the uprooted desires, it bears the tree of paradise, and the fruit of that tree is immortality. Rama, you mean well. If you do not let the sprouts of desire germinate in your breast, then you have nothing in this world to fear. When you have grown sober by moderating the desires of your heart, the plant of liberation will grow in it in full luxuriance. When the rapacious owl of desire nests in your mind, be sure that every evil the bird of ill omen brings to its lodging will come to you. Thinking is the power of the mind, and thoughts settle on the objects of desire; so give up your thoughts and their objects, and be happy in thinking of nothing. Whatever depends on a faculty is lost when that faculty is still. It is by stilling your thinking that you put down your desires, and so give your mind rest and peace. Be free in your mind, Rama. Tear off every tie that binds it to the world and become a great soul by putting down the small desires that belong to the frailty of earth. For who is there who is not set free, once the fetters of desire that bind his mind to this earth are loosened?"