Shambara’s City of Maya: The Making of Dama, Vyala, and Kata

Rama Asks About Three Names

In Dasharatha’s hall, Vasistha had been speaking of the mind: how the senses nest in the body like birds and drop on their prey like vultures, and how a man who can catch those birds in the snare of his own reason is never caught himself in the trap of sin. Rama listened without moving. The sage leaned toward him. “Know your body for a frail flower,” he said, “and know its pleasure and its pain to be unreal. Never take them for real things. That was the mistake of the snare, the snake and the mat. Stay above grieving for anything, as Bhima and Bhasa did. Give up your misjudgments about what is real in yourself and in this thing and that thing, and turn your understanding to the Reality beyond all of them. Stop leaning on the mind. Then go on eating and drinking as before.” He said it a second time, more plainly, so that it could not slip past. “Rama, you who are the delight of this world and work so hard at your own highest good: do not let the case of the demons Dama and Vyala, the snare and the snake, become your case. Pull yourself out of this useless sorrowing over the miseries of the world. Take your steadiness from the story of Bhima and Bhasa.”

Rama had heard three names drop in passing, and a mind in grief catches at anything that has a story behind it. “What is this parable of the snare and the snake that you say must never apply to me?” he asked. “Tell it in full. Let it take the sorrow out of my mind, and out of every man’s. And the steadiness you point me to, from Bhima and Bhasa, that is supposed to put a man beyond every earthly grief: what is it? Tell me the whole of it. Your words wash a man clean, the way the roar of the rain clouds eases the summer heat for the peacocks.” “Listen, then,” Vasistha said. “I will tell you both, so that you can act on what they show you.”

There was once a demon named Shambara, chief of his kind, and a sorcerer whose art went deeper than that of any other. He lived in a cell beneath the earth, far below the ground men walk on, and he had filled it with enchantments the way the sea is filled with gems, until nothing down there was only what it seemed and all of it shone.

A City Fashioned in the Sky

A cell was not enough for him. He built a city in the sky by magic, with gardens in it and temples of the gods, and he set artificial suns and moons into its vault so that its days and nights owed nothing to the real ones. Its walls were studded with stones like the gems of Sumeru, the golden mountain at the center of the world, and his palace in that city was packed with opulence and with treasure of every kind that has a name.

The women of his inner palace sang, and their singing was set against the singing of the women of heaven and did not lose. In his pleasure garden the arbors stood shaded under an awning of moonbeams. Blue lotuses bloomed in his bedroom and put the blue-eyed girls of his court to shame; swans made of gemstone cackled about the beds of golden lotuses in his lakes; the high branches of golden plants carried artificial lotuses for blossoms; and the rows of Karanga arbors let fall showers of mandara flowers, the flowers that grow in paradise, onto the ground below.

His garden house held cold baths and hot ones, cooling rooms and fireplaces, so that no season was ever something he had to endure. The weapons of his demons had already baffled the arms of Indra himself, the king of the gods. His flower gardens outdid the mandara groves of paradise on every side, and his magic had planted rows of sandal trees with snakes coiled about their trunks, as sandal trees stand in the forests where no one planted them. The inner compound was strewn with gold dust, and in the courtyard of the palace the flowers lay heaped to the knee.

An image of Shiva made of earth stood on display and outshone the image of Hari with his discus and his mace. Gems glittered in the inner rooms like fireflies, like the stars that wink in the arena of the sky, and the dark night of that dwelling under the earth was lit by a hundred moons at once. In front of his idol, in that light, Shambara sang his war songs.

His magic elephant drove off Airavata, Indra’s own elephant. His inner apartments were stacked with the treasures of the three worlds. Wealth, prosperity, grandeur and rank came and paid him homage, and the whole host of demons honored him as their commander; the shade of his arm was the shelter the entire body of demons lived under, and he was the storehouse of all their cunning and all their treasure.

The Repeated Attacks

This destroyer of the gods was gigantic and terrible to look at, and he kept a vast army of Asuras for one purpose: to defeat the Suras, the gods who hold heaven. The gods could not meet him in the open. So they watched his city, and whenever the sorcerer slept, or went somewhere outside it, they fell on his army.

It drove Shambara into rages in which he tore up trees with his hands. He appointed generals to protect his legions in the hours he was away.

The gods found their moments and killed those generals one by one, as hawks hanging in the air drop on feeble, frightened sparrows. The king of the demons appointed others over his army, fighters as swift of foot and as hoarse of voice as the waves of the sea.

The gods destroyed those too, and in a short time, and now the leader of the demon host went after his enemies himself, up to their own station above the heavens. The gods ran from their home at the sight of him, like timid deer bolting into the thickets at the sight of the bull that Shiva and Gauri ride. They were weak with weeping; the faces of the Apsaras, the dancers of heaven, were wet with tears. Shambara looked around at a heaven its gods had abandoned, and it looked like the world after its end.

He went through it in his rage. He plundered it and carried off everything of value, he burned the cities of the regents of heaven, the guardian kings who hold the quarters of the sky, and then he went home.

By now the hatred between gods and demons had gone so deep on both sides that the gods quit their heavenly seats altogether and hid themselves in distant parts of the world. From hiding they kept at it. By sheer persistence they defeated and killed every general and every fighter that Shambara set against them, until there was no one left over his army.

The beaten demon let his fury out. He breathed living fire from his nostrils like a burning mountain. And he searched the three worlds, and after a long search he found the hiding place of the gods, as a wicked man gets what he is after by trying harder than anyone else. Finding them was one thing. He still had to hold an army together in the hours when he was not standing over it.

Shambara Changes His Method

Every general he had named had been a fighter like the rest, and every one of them was dead. This time he turned to the art that had built his city.

By sorcery he produced three Asuras, enormously strong and fearful to look at, with faces as hideous as death, for the protection of his army.

These three leaders of his force, born out of his magic and out of nothing else, flew upward with their huge bodies, and watching them climb was like watching the mountains fly, as the mountains did in the old time.

He named them for what he wanted of them, and he said the names aloud. Dama, the snare, to entrap the enemy. Vyala, the snake, to coil around him. Kata, the mat, to wrap him up. A snare, a snake and a mat: nothing in the three names was a sword. He meant the gods to be caught, held and covered, and the names said so.

To the army they must have looked like three more generals, larger than the last. Vasistha wanted Rama to understand what they were made of before the fighting began.

Action Before Personal Identity

They were older than the first men, beings of the kind that existed before mankind had been thought of, and nothing in them shifted. A man wants one thing in the morning and another by evening; desire moves through him like weather. In the three, no desire moved at all.

They had no prior acts behind them. A man comes into his body already in debt: everything he did in earlier lives is a seed, and it sprouts as this life’s luck and this life’s cravings, and he walks under that weight whether or not he knows he is carrying it. The three carried nothing of the kind. With no past to pay for, they moved as freely as spirits move, in one even course, without a swerve in it.

They had not been born at all, in the way men are born, from the seeds of previous deeds and into solid bodies of flesh that can be cut. They were artificial forces. They were forms made of air.

What they were, exactly, was copies: facsimiles of the images in Shambara’s mind. He had pictured a snare, a snake and a mat with the strength of mountains, and the pictures had stood up and flown.

That was the condition in which they went to war. Rama, whose grief was for everything that ages and ends, was being shown three fighters with nothing in them to protect and nothing in them that could be taken away. Whether that made them strong, and for how long, was the question Vasistha left standing as he went on.

The Demon King’s Confidence

Shambara looked at what he had made and gave his orders at once. He dispatched his three generals, Dama, Vyala and Kata, to lead his armies against the gods and destroy them upon the earth, where they had hidden.

There was no trial first, no small skirmish to see how the three fought. He had made them himself, out of his own mind and to his own wish, and there was nothing in them he had not put there.

The armies rose out of Rasatala, the regions under the earth, with the three at their head, and climbed toward the gods. The gods had killed every general who ever came at them by waiting for the sorcerer to look away. Now three were coming who had never been born, and who wanted nothing.

In Dasharatha’s hall Vasistha paused there. Rama had asked for the parable of the snare and the snake, and so far he had only the snare, the snake and the mat, rising out of the earth at the head of an army. What they did when they met the gods, and what the gods found to do against them, came next.