The Teaching Concludes: Rama at Rest

Vasistha’s Final Instruction

The long teaching in Dasharatha’s hall was coming to its end. Vasistha had been speaking of the many ways men picture the one God, and he closed that account without choosing among them. “All of these views may be true,” he said, “and all of them apply to the Most High, who is the single object of every one of these theories, since there is nothing that can be positively affirmed or denied of him. Each believer sees the object he longs for made manifest in the open space of his own intellect, and by seeing the whole world inside themselves these men stay undecayed at all times. Everything visible, every law and every prohibition, every desire and design of men, is held inside their knowledge of it. So those who are true to their faiths, firm in keeping their duties and doing their work, are of the nature of the divine soul, because they see all of nature in themselves.”

Then he turned to the prince who had been sitting before him all this while. “I taught you this very doctrine once before, Rama, when you were a pupil under me. You could not take all of it in then, and so you were bound to another birth, to learn it again from me.”

“This world is one long, dark, dreary winter night. Into it the pure light of knowledge comes shining, with the serene and cooling beams of the autumn moon. Now that your own pure intelligence has been enlightened, shake off the dross of dull ignorance and carry on with your duties, as they have come down in a straight line to you and to your royal house.”

“Stay released from your attachment to everything in this passing world. Rely only on the One supreme and universal soul, whose pure nature can be perceived through the whole of nature. Then be as lucid as the clear sky, with peace in your mind and your soul carried beyond itself, and learn to rule your realm with justice and equity.”

He stopped there. The young man who had come into this hall sick of kingship had just been told, as the last word of everything, to go and be a king. For a moment no one in the assembly moved. Then a sound came, and it came from above.

Flowers Over the Assembly

Valmiki, who was telling all of this, described what followed. As the sage finished, the gods sounded their trumpets from heaven, the way clouds thunder in the rainy season, and with the sound came a shower of nectar. The face of the sky went white on every side, as it does under drifting snow in the hoary months of winter, and the ground was covered with drops that fell like flowers. Blossoms from the trees of heaven, shaken loose from their boughs by the wild and restless wind up there, came down in rivalry with the stars scattered over the firmament, laughing at them with shy, blushing smiles. Clouds, trumpet notes, drizzle and falling flowers, all so alike that they could hardly be told apart, settled on the court hall as a soft snowfall settles on the head of the Himalaya, and the assembly sat under it with open mouths and staring eyes.

Then the people seated there, each in his rank, gathered handfuls of the heavenly flowers and poured them over Vasistha, bowing low, and with those offerings they threw off every earthly care and sorrow they had carried in.

King Dasharatha spoke first. “What a wonder it is,” he said, “that we are so lightly released from our cares and sorrows in this wide valley of the world’s miseries; that our souls are relieved of their pangs by your grace, like heavy clouds let go of their weight and floating light at last over the Himalaya. We have reached the goal of our acts and seen the end of the miseries of this life. We have fully known the One who alone is to be known, and we have found our entire rest in that supreme state. We have learned to rest in the final emptiness in our meditation and to be rid of our mistaken thoughts about bodies by holding hard to the abstract. It comes by being rid of the counterfeits and wanderings of our imagination, by escaping the fever for the sights of this dreaming world, by no longer taking shells and cockles for silver, by no longer thinking ourselves dead in our sleep or our dreams. It comes by knowing that the wind is the same as its motion and the water the same as its wetness, and by distrusting this conjuror’s world, this fairyland of our fancy. It must come by giving no credit to the magic scenes of this world, to the castles of fairies in the air, to the clear currents of the mirage, to the groves in the sky and the double moon. It is no earthquake when our tottering feet slip in our drunkenness; we see no ghost in a shadow, as boys do, and no braids of hair hanging down from the clouds. With these examples and the others you gave for our instruction, sir, you have at a stroke wiped out our trust in the visible sights of this world.”

Rama spoke next. “My ignorance is dispelled, and by your good grace I have come to the knowledge of truth. You, the first of sages, have brought me out to the light from a darkness that nothing could get through. I am freed from my doubts and set in the light of the true nature of God, and I will now act as you say, acknowledging the truth that shows through everything. When I remember your words and go over them again, so full of the sweetness of nectar and so full of delight to the taste, I am filled with fresh delight, though their sense had already satisfied and refreshed me. I have nothing to do for myself at present; nothing is left undone and nothing remains to be done. I am as I am and as I have always been, without any craving. What other road to our true happiness can there be than the one you have shown? Without it I find this wide field of the earth full of our woe and misery. I have no foe to vex me and no friend to give me joy; I have no field to work in, no enemy to fear, no good soul to lean on. It is our misunderstanding that makes this world look so troublesome to us, while our good sense makes all of it agreeable. How could we have known any of this without your grace? A boy can never ford a river and cross it without a raft or a bridge.”

Lakshmana said, “It is because you have removed the doubts that were born in me and that I inherited through my repeated births, and because of the merit I gathered in those former births, that I have come to know the truth this day by the holy sage’s sermon, and that I feel the radiance of a holy light inside me, shining as brightly as the cooling beams of moonlight. It is strange that men should turn away from this bright and living light, get tangled in a thousand errors, and be burned up in the end like dry wood, through their own foul mistake and their great misfortune.”

Vishvamitra said, “It is by our great merit that we have come today to hear this holy lecture from the sage’s own mouth. It has purged our inner souls at once, as a thousand bathings in the clear stream of the Ganga would.” Rama took it up. “We have seen the highest pitch of prosperity and the best of everything there is to see. We have known the end of all learning and the last extremity of adversity. We have seen many countries and heard many speeches, and never have we heard or seen or known anything better than the discourse on the beauty of the soul that the sage has laid before us today.”

Narada, the sage who travels between the worlds, said, “Our ears are purified today. We have heard what we never heard before, from Brahma, from the gods above or from men below.” Lakshmana spoke again. “Sir, you have entirely dispersed all our darkness, inner and outer, and shown us the transcendent light of the bright sun of the Divine soul.”

Shatrughna said, “I am satisfied and at peace, composed in the supreme soul. I am forever full and perfect in myself, and I sit quite content in my own singleness.” And Dasharatha said once more, “It is by the merit of the deeds we did and gathered in our repeated lives that we have been sanctified this day by your sacred and sanctifying speech.” While the king and his courtiers were still speaking in this way, the sage opened his mouth again, and what he said was full of pure and purifying knowledge.

Ten Thousand Learned Guests

“Dasharatha, moon of Raghu’s race, hear me and do as I tell you. Rise now and honor the assembled Brahmins, who deserve their due honor at the close of a discourse. Rise, and satisfy their wishes with your ample gifts, and by that you will gain the merit that goes with the learning of the Vedas and the doing of your duties as they direct. Even a poor worm like man is bound to honor the Brahmins to the utmost when a sermon on salvation ends. How much more, then, does it fall on a monarch to discharge that duty.”

The king heard the sage’s command and kept a reverent silence. He beckoned to his heralds and sent them out to all ten sides of his dominions to invite, at once, thousands of Brahmins versed in the Vedas to the royal court. He told them to go to Mathura, to Surashtra and to Gauda, and to bring back with due respect every Brahmin born of a Vedic family who lived in those districts and lands.

More than ten thousand Brahmins gathered at the royal palace. The king fed them all alike, and he paid particular regard to the more learned among them. He served them the best kinds of food and rice, honored them with their fees and gave them a great many gifts, and when he had honored them in this way he offered his oblations to the spirits of his ancestors and made his offerings to the household gods.

Next the king served his friends and relations a proper meal, and then, on the same day, he fed his companions and his servants and the citizens of the town. Last of all his attention went to feeding the poor and needy, the lame, the blind and the mad.

When he had done the duties of the festival to the utmost, he commanded a great celebration in his hall, which was decked all over with silk and embroidery, with gold, gems and pearls. The city was adorned and lit until it looked like the ever-bright mountain of Meru, and in every house there was dancing, giddy girls and players whirling as a sign of the general joy. Bells rang and cymbals clashed everywhere; drums and tambourines beat at every door; flutes and wind instruments blew on every side, and lutes and stringed instruments jangled loudly in rivalry with one another. The markets were shut and the traders stopped in their tracks. The air looked like an arbor of plants shaking in the wind, so many were the raised, quivering, waving arms of the dancers in the streets, and it looked like the starry sky with the flash of the strolling players’ teeth as they danced their comic dances and laughed out loud. Here was the heroic dance with the players’ shouts, there the plays set to the soft, sweet strains of the performers, and over there a staggering, strutting dance on one foot and leg that thumped the ground with the other. Here wreaths of flowers were flung, glittering like stars and coming down in showers; there the flowers strewn like raindrops on the ground were trodden underfoot by anyone passing. Here the actresses danced about with their ornaments loose and their gestures of love; there the bards chanted their hymns clearly, the Brahmins recited and the singing women sang. Here the sots and topers drank their fill of wine while the gluttons ate their fill of every kind of food, and the insides of the houses were smeared with wine as the bodies of the princes were smeared with ointments the color of moonlight. The king’s attendants and waiting maids sauntered about in gaudy clothes of many colors and graced the royal festival with their necklaces and the sweet perfumes on their persons, and the sprightly dancing girls, rubbed with a paste of every perfume and hung with glittering ornaments, hurried to the ball in the royal hall.

Dasharatha’s Seven Days

King Dasharatha kept his entertainment going for a whole week. Seven full nights passed in festive mirth and rejoicing, and the hall that had held the long argument about the soul now held music and dancing feet.

And for as many days he went on distributing his gifts and his food, which redounded, Valmiki says, to an inexhaustible prosperity on earth.

That is where the account of the court ends. Valmiki had been telling the whole of it to Bharadvaja, the chief of his pupils, and now he turned from the kings and sages of Ayodhya to the young man in front of him.

“Bharadvaja, most intelligent of my pupils,” he said, “you have now heard how the great Rama and the others came to the knowledge of the One who alone is to be known, and crossed this valley of misery and sorrow by their attention to these lectures.”

Valmiki Entrusts the Teaching

“So fix your sight on the light of Brahma, and carry yourself gladly. Give up your affections and the cares of this world, and stay fearless in your liberation while you live and in the tranquility of your mind. Know that the learned and the meek, who keep clear of the society of worldly men and stay as steady as Rama and the others in their right principles, are never deluded, though temptations beset them on every side.”

“So these men of great nature, King Dasharatha and the prince Rama and his brothers, with their companions, have reached the state of those liberated while still alive. And you, my son Bharadvaja, who are of a liberal mind by nature, have become more liberated now, by hearing these sermons on the salvation of our souls.”

“It is possible even for boys to win their liberation by attending to these holy lectures, which are the plainest and surest means to salvation, and that alone should convince you of their truth. As the high-minded, sinless and sorrowless sons of Raghu’s race reached their holy state of perfection and freed themselves, so you too may reach that best and highest state by attending to the lectures of the divine sage Vasistha.”

“It is by the advice of the good and by service under the great, and by humble questions put to the learned and the explanations they give, that weak men of good understanding come to know the knowable, as the Raghavas and the others did under Vasistha. The ties of greed and affection that bind the hearts of the ignorant to this world keep them, like boys at their games, from inquiring into the means of their liberation, until they are too old for their knowledge to do them any good. Only those who can discern the minds of high-minded men come to the knowledge of truth, and such men alone have no more returning to this world of woe. That is the substance of everything I can tell you.”

“Having first received your instruction from the teacher, you must weigh its meaning well and digest it in yourself, and then pass its sense on to the most sensible and intelligent student you can find. The sages and saints call this the threefold way of knowledge. Know this, and you will need nothing more to become wise once your boyhood is over.”

“Whoever reads this book with an understanding of its sense, whoever copies it out by hand without expecting a fee for it, and whoever recites it or has it recited to others, with or without any wish for reward, shall have his ample recompense in the land of the Aryas, in this life and in the lives to come. Such men receive the reward that waits on the Rajasuya, the great sacrifice by which a king is consecrated over other kings, and they are entitled to their seats in heaven in their pure essence, as often as they rise to it after their death on earth, until their final liberation comes to them as prosperity comes to the deserving.”

“It was the god Brahma, whose form cannot be known, who first composed this work in his excellent diction, and then, judging it the one means to the liberation of mankind, revealed it to the assembly of saints. Let no one take the truth of that saying for an untruth.”

“At the close of a recital of these lectures on the means of human salvation, every man of good sense should honor the Brahmins diligently, serve them with the gifts of food and drink they desire, and furnish them with good houses for their lodging. They should also be rewarded with their fees and supplied with money to their heart’s desire and to the utmost of the giver’s capacity. Then the giver, the master of the ceremony, may rest assured that he has done his duty and reaped its merit as the shastras intend.”

“I have now recited to you the great shastra, an elucidation of divine knowledge and its pure truth, with a great many tales and stories added as examples and illustrations of its hard doctrines, so that you would understand them clearly. May your hearing of these lead you to an utter indifference to this world and to the desire for liberation in it while you are still alive here. And may it bring you continued prosperity too, so that you can give your attention to perfecting your knowledge and your devotion, and to discharging the duties of your station without fail.”