Before you read
When Bhrigu wakes after a thousand years and finds a skeleton, the lord of death himself must lead the father to the son who is still alive under another name.
The World That Opened Behind Closed Eyes
The question came from Rama, in Dasharatha’s court, where the prince had sat for days listening to Vasistha and had still not been cured of the despair that had emptied him of all appetite for a kingdom. The sage had just finished saying that the mind is the seed from which the whole tree of action grows; nip the seed and there is no tree and no fruit. Heal the mind, he said, and every trouble a person can meet in the world is healed with it. The visible worlds sit inside the mind the way fragrance sits in a cluster of flowers and oil sits in a grain of sesame, the way heat lives in fire and cold in snow; destroy the world and the mind survives it, destroy the mind and the world is gone. Rama wanted to see this with his own eyes. “Tell me, sir, you who know what has been and what is to come, how the form of the world comes to exist so vividly in the mind. Give me an illustration, so that I can see how this world appears as a visible object to the mind within.” Vasistha reminded him of the bodiless son of Indu, whose thought had hardened into a whole creation, and of King Lavana, who under a sorcerer’s spell had lived an entire life as an outcaste in a single evening; the world, he said, sits as firmly in the minds of men as it sat in theirs. Then he named a third case, the son of Bhrigu, who had believed himself the master of every pleasure the world holds, because bliss has far more to do with the mind than with what a man possesses. Rama caught at the name. “How is it, sir, that the son of Bhrigu came to enjoy the pleasures of the earth, when what he had been longing for was the fruit of heaven?” “Attend, then,” Vasistha said, “to the history of Bhrigu and Kala, and you will learn how he came to possess them.”
There is a table-land high on Mount Mandara, the mountain the gods once used as a churning rod when they churned the ocean, where rows of tamala trees stand with arbors of flowers beneath them. In the old days the sage Bhrigu carried out his hard devotion there, and it was to that same place that his son Shukra came to perform a devotion of his own. He came as a young man already formed, high-minded and brave, as handsome as the moon and radiant as if he carried the sun’s beams in his body, and he took his seat in his father’s happy grove with the same purpose that had brought his father to it. Bhrigu by then had gone where sound and season could not reach him. He sat with the stillness of a figure cut from the rock, and he would sit so for a thousand years.
For a long time Shukra sat under the overhang of a rock near his father. Then he moved himself down to the flower beds and the fair plains below, and the devotion loosened. He roved freely through the bowers of Mandara in the sports of youth, and the people of the mountain, the wise and the simple alike, came to revere him. He was living two lives at once, hanging between them the way Trishanku hangs between earth and sky, the king who was pushed back from heaven and left suspended in the middle of the air: on some days Shukra played about like a boy, and on others he sat in fixed meditation exactly as his father sat.
He had no anxiety in his solitude. He was as much at ease as a king whose enemies have all been subdued, and that ease lasted until the day he happened to look up and see an apsara crossing the sky on a journey of her own. He watched her the way Hari watches Lakshmi skim across the water. She was wreathed in mandara flowers, her hair blew loose in the playful wind, her ornaments jingled as she moved and the fragrance of her person reached the breezes of the mountain; her form was as supple as a creeping vine and her eyes rolled as if she were a little drunk. The moonlight of her body seemed to shed its dew over the whole landscape, and it bewitched the hard heart of the young devotee as he stood and looked at her.
She looked back. Bright as the full moon and trembling like a wave of the sea, she saw his face and lost her heart to him in the same instant that he lost his. Shukra felt the impulse the god of love had raised in him and checked it; he was his father’s son and he knew what the impulse was. Then the checking failed. He lost every power he had over himself and was absorbed in the thought of the beloved object, and the apsara passed on across the sky and was gone.
From that moment he thought of the nymph with his eyelids closed and gave himself up to the reverie of an imaginary kingdom. He thought that she was passing through the air toward the paradise of Indra, the thousand-eyed king of the gods, and he thought that he followed her closely, all the way to the happy region where the celestials live. Nothing on Mandara moved. The body sat where it had sat, near the rock, near the father, and the whole journey took place behind its closed eyes.
He thought he saw the gods before him, mandara blossoms braided into chaplets on their heads and garlands hanging on their persons, their bodies bright as liquid gold. He seemed to see the heavenly women, some with eyes like blue lotuses that fed the eyes of whoever looked at them, others with the eyes of antelopes, sporting with sweet smiles all about the garden of paradise. He saw the Maruts, the gods of the winds, carrying the fragrance of the flowers and breathing it on one another, present everywhere at once like Vishvarupa, the god who wears the whole universe as his form. He heard the hum of bees made giddy by the perfumed ichor that ran from the temples of Indra’s elephant, and under the hum he heard the heavenly choir. Swans and storks gabbled on lakes where the lotuses were gold. Along the holy stream of the Mandakini, the Ganga of heaven, the gods rested in arbors: Yama and Indra, the sun and the moon, fire and the winds, and the regents of the quarters, whose shining bodies dimmed the light of a living flame.
On one side stood Airavata, Indra’s war elephant, the scratches of demon weapons still on his trunk and his tusks red with the blood of the demon hosts he had broken. Those who had been raised from earth to heaven as stars rode past in aerial vehicles blazing with the sun’s own beams. The gods bathed in showers falling from the peaks of Meru below them, and the waves of the celestial Ganga rolled by with scattered mandara flowers riding on them. The alleys of Indra’s groves were dyed saffron with heaps of mandara pollen, and troops of apsara girls trod the saffron underfoot in their play. Breezes moved among the parijata plants, bright as moonbeams in the sacred bowers, carrying honey from the cups of the kunda and mandara blossoms.
In the pleasure garden the heavenly women were powdered with the frosty pollen of kesara flowers until they looked like creepers in yellow robes. Here the nymphs danced while their lovers sang, and there Narada and Tumburu, the two musicians of the gods, joined their voices to the lute and the lyre. Holy men and the virtuous soared past in their chariots, hung with decorations of every kind. The amorous damsels of the gods clung around Indra as the tender creepers of a garden twine about the trees beside them, and the gulancha trees stood studded with ripening fruit like rows of sapphires and rubies set between rows of ivory teeth.
After all these sights, Shukra thought of making his bow to Indra, who sat on his throne like a second Brahma, creator of the three worlds. Having thought it, he bowed down to Indra in his own mind, with the veneration he would have paid a second Bhrigu, as if the king of heaven were his father in that place. Indra received him with respect, lifted him up by the hand, and seated him at his own side. “I am honored, Shukra, by your visit,” he said, “and this heaven of mine is graced by your presence. Live long, and enjoy the pleasures of this place.” Then he sat back in his seat with a graceful face that shone like the unspotted full moon. Seated beside the lord of gods and men, Shukra was saluted by every god of the assembly, and he went on enjoying every felicity there, received with the affection a father gives a son.
On Mandara, a young man sat with his eyes shut beside a father who had not moved in years. In heaven, the same young man had just been given a seat at Indra’s right hand. Both were true for him, and only one of them was visible from the mountain.
Vishvachi and the Measured Heaven
Among the gods in the celestial city Shukra forgot what he had been, and he forgot it without passing through the pains of death, which is the usual price of forgetting one life for another. He halted a while beside the husband of Shachi, and then he rose from Indra’s side to roam the paradise, charmed by beauty after beauty. He looked with delight at the beauty of his own person, and he longed to see the lovely beings of heaven as a swan is eager for the lotuses of a lake. Then he saw her, in the garden of Indra’s Eden: his beloved, with the eyes of a young fawn and a figure as delicate as the tender shoot of an amra creeper. She saw the son of Bhrigu and lost her hold on herself, and he watched every sign of what she felt pass over her. His whole frame dissolved in affection for her as a moonstone melts under moonbeams, and hers likewise in tenderness for him; her cool beauty soothed him as moonlight soothes the sky, and the sight of him subdued her entirely. Each night they grieved at their separation like a pair of chakravaka geese, the birds that must part at dusk and call to each other across the water till dawn reunites them, and each morning they met with delight. She gave her subdued self up to the god of love, who in return drove his arrows without mercy into her tender heart. She was covered all over with Cupid’s shafts as a lotus is hidden under a swarm of bees; she was as disordered as lotus leaves under a shower of rain; she fluttered at every breath of wind like the filaments of a flower, moved as gracefully as a swan, and looked at him with eyes as blue as the leaflets of a blue lotus. The god of love had thrown her into the disorder a wild elephant leaves in a lotus bed, and her lover saw her in that state, in the flight of his fancy.
At last night came over the landscape of paradise, as if Rudra, the god of destruction, were advancing to bury the world in universal gloom; a darkness as deep as the night at the polar mountains, where the blazing sun hides his face in shame for half the year. The crowds of the place withdrew to their homes in every direction, and the two lovers met in the middle of the grove. The love-struck woman came to him with sidelong glances, as a bird of the air comes down from her evening flight to meet her mate on the ground, as a peahen comes out to meet the rising cloud, and as she came it seemed to her that she saw a whitewashed hall standing there with a couch set in the middle of it. The hall was her own longing given walls. The son of Bhrigu entered it as Vishnu enters the hoary sea with Lakshmi at his side; she held him by the hand with her face turned down. Inside, she pressed against him as a lotus stalk lies along the breast of an elephant, and she began to speak to him sweetly, in words mixed with tender feeling.
“Look at me, my moon-faced love. I see the curve of your brow bent like a bow for my destruction, and from it the god of love is shooting his arrows to finish off this lovesick girl. Protect me from him. I am helpless, and I have come under your protection from his rage. You know, my good friend, that it is the duty of good people to relieve the wretched of their distress, and that those who cannot look on the wretched with a compassionate eye are counted the basest of men. Love is never spoken of with contempt by those who understand it, because the true love of faithful lovers endures to the very end without any fear of parting.
“Know this, my dear: the delightful draught of love outdoes the dewy nectar the moon distills, and the sovereignty of the three worlds is never so pleasing to the soul as the love of the beloved. I take the same bliss from the touch of your feet that mutual lovers take from their first attachment to each other. I live on the nectar of your touch as the kumuda lily blooms by night on the ambrosial beams of the moon. As the fluttering chakora bird is delighted when it drinks the moonlight, so is this suppliant at your feet blessed by the touch of your leaf-soft palm. Embrace me now, against your breast, which is filled with ambrosial bliss.” With that she fell upon his chest, her body soft as a flower and her eyes turning like a leaf in a gentle breeze, and the two of them sank into their trance of love in that happy grove, as a pair of playful bees creeps into the cup of a lotus under the fair filaments of the flower while a light wind shakes it.
So the son of Bhrigu believed himself to be in the enjoyment of the pleasures of heaven, in his ideal reveries. He thought he had the company of his beloved, decked in mandara garlands and flushed with ambrosial drink, like the full moon beside the evening star. He roved around the Manasa lake of heaven, full of golden lotuses and giddy swans and gabbling geese, and walked the bank of the Mandakini in the company of the charanas and kinnaras, the singers of paradise. He drank the sweet juice that beams like moonlight, in the company of the gods, and rested in bowers formed by the swaying branches of parijata plants. He swung in cradles hung from the shady creepers of an arbor, screened from the spring sunbeams, with his favorite Vidyadhari women beside him. He trod the parterres of Nandana, Indra’s garden, under feet as careless as the feet of Shiva’s followers, as careless as the churning mountain when the ocean was churned; the golden shrubs and tangled bushes on the river beach were trampled under his heated elephants the way elephants trample the lotus lakes of Meru. With his sweetheart he spent moonlit nights in the forest groves of Kailasa, listening to the songs of the heavenly choristers. On the table-lands of Gandhamadana he decorated his beloved with lotus garlands from her head to her feet. He went with her to the polar mountain, that wonder of the world, dark on one side and lit on the other, and there they sported together with their tender smiles and fond caresses.
And heaven, for him, had a calendar. He thought that he lived for a full sixty years in a celestial dwelling beside the marshes of Mandara, passing his days in the company of the fawns of the place. He believed that he spent half a yuga with his helpmate on the shore of the milky ocean, among the sea people and the islanders of that ocean. He next thought he lived in a garden in the city of the Gandharvas, and that he lived there for a period beyond measure, like Time itself, which brings forth an infinity of worlds. Then he was translated once more to the seat of Indra, where he believed he dwelt with his mistress through many cycles of the fourfold ages, Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali, one after another, in a happiness that seemed to have no clock in it at all.
It had one. It was at the end of the merit of their acts that the two of them were doomed to return to earth, stripped of their heavenly beauty and the fine features of their persons, because every stay in heaven is paid for out of a store of merit and no store is infinite. Deprived of his heavenly seat and his vehicle, bereft of his godlike form, Shukra was overcome by a grief as deep as a hero’s who falls on the field of battle. His sorrow at the fall from heaven to earth seemed to break his frame into a hundred fragments, as a waterfall strikes stony ground and breaks into a hundred rills. The two of them, their bodies wasted and their minds full of sorrow, wandered about in the air like birds without a nest.
Afterward their disembodied minds entered the network of lunar beams, and in the form of melted frost or of rain they came down and grew the vegetables of the earth. Some of those vegetables were cooked and eaten by a Brahmin in the land of Dasharna, where ten streams meet. The substance of Shukra passed into the Brahmin’s seed, and his wife conceived him, and he was born as their son.
The boy was raised among munis and trained in rigorous austerity, and he lived in the forests of Meru for a whole manvantara, an age of Manu, observing his holy rites. There he fathered a male child of human shape on a doe, for his mistress had been born a deer in her next life, and the man who had stood through the dissolution of a heaven was undone by an infant. He grew so fond of the boy that his sacred duties went neglected. He prayed constantly for the long life, the wealth and the learning of his darling, the three blessings of a householder’s life, and in praying for them he abandoned the constancy of his faith and his reliance on Providence. His thoughts had fallen from heaven to the earthly advancement of his son, and that fall shortened his life and made him an easy prey to death, as easy as the air a serpent breathes in for want of other food.
Those worldly thoughts had vitiated his understanding, and so he was born next as the son of the king of the Madras and succeeded his father on the throne. He reigned a long time over the Madras, rooting out every enemy he had, until old age overtook him as frost stunts a lotus. The king of the Madras was released from his royal person by a desire for the ascetic’s life, and that desire made him, in his next birth, the son of an anchorite, so that he might carry out the austerities he had wished for. He withdrew to the bank of the meandering Ganga and gave himself there to devotion, free of every worldly anxiety and care. In this way the son of Bhrigu, having passed through form after form in his successive births as the desires of his heart directed, came to rest at last like a fixed arbor on the bank of a running stream.
While Shukra was indulging these reveries, a long series of years slid over him in the presence of his father, and he never felt them pass. At last his body, rooted there like a tree, withered with age under the pitiless sun and the winds and the rain, and it fell to the ground as a tree falls when it is torn from its roots. In all those births his mind had thirsted after fresh pleasures the way a stag hunts fresh grass from forest to forest; he had gone through birth after birth and death after death in search of enjoyment, whirled about as if in a turning mill, until he found his rest on the cool beach of a rivulet.
And now the disembodied spirit of Shukra paused to reflect on all its wanderings, through every real and imagined form, and it remembered its first body on the mountain of Mandara, and how the sun’s heat and its own austerities had reduced that body to a skeleton of bones and skin. It remembered how the wind instrument of its lungs had breathed out the music of its freedom from the pain of action to which other men are bound. Seeing how deeply the mind had been plunged in the pit of worldly cares, the body seemed to laugh at it, showing the white teeth of its mouth in derision. The cavity of the mouth, the sockets of the eyes, the nostrils and the ear holes in the open face all announced the hollowness of human and heavenly bodies alike: they look solid from outside and they are empty within. The body shed the tears of its eyes in sorrow for its past pains and austerities, as the sky rains after excessive heat to cool the earth; it was refreshed by the breeze and the moonbeams as woodlands are renewed by cooling showers. It remembered being washed on the banks of mountain rills by waterfalls from above, and being coated by flying dust and the dirt of sin. It stood as naked as a withered tree, rustling in the breeze, and yet it withstood the keen blasts of winter like unshaken devotion in person.
The faded face, the withered lungs and arteries, the skinny belly: these were the features of the goddess of famine, who cries aloud in the forest in the howling of the wild beasts. Yet the holy person of the hermit went unharmed by envious animals. It was free of passion and feeling, and it was fervent in devotion, and for those two reasons no rapacious beast or bird devoured it. So the body of Bhrigu’s son lay weakened by its abstinence and self-denial, prostrate on its bed of stones, while his mind was employed in holy devotion on a riverbank it had reached by way of a heaven, a doe, a throne and a hermitage. There were now two accounts of one name. One was bone and skin drying on Mandara. The other had crossed heaven, moonlight, grain, kinship, kingship and renunciation, and was sitting very still beside running water.
Bhrigu Faces Embodied Time
After the lapse of a thousand years the great Bhrigu rose out of his holy trance, his mind disengaging itself from its meditation on God the way a man comes back from a swoon. He did not find his son bowing his head before him, the son who had been a general of virtues, who had been every merit in a single shape. He found only the body, lying in front of him as a skeleton, as if wretchedness and poverty had taken that form in order to be seen.
The skin had been dried by the sun. The nostrils snored in the wind like a hooting bird, and the entrails of the belly sounded like dry leather pipes croaking with frogs. The sockets of the eyes were full of newborn worms. The ribs had become the bars of a cage, with a thin skin over them like a spider’s web. The dry white skeleton looked like desire itself, which bends a man to the earth to undergo every accident of life, favorable and unfavorable, in turn. The crown of the head had gone as white and smooth as the linga of Shiva anointed with camphor at the ceremony in honor of the moon. The withered head stood up on the bony neck like a soul propped on a body, to lead it or be led. The nose had shriveled to a dry stalk for want of flesh, and the nose bone stood like a post dividing the two halves of the face. The face, held erect between the protruding shoulders, looked forward into the womb of the empty sky, where the breath of life had fled. The two legs, the thighs, the knees and the two arms seemed to have doubled in length for their long journey through the ether, and lay slack with the fatigue of it; and the belly, lean as a lath, showed by its shriveled skin the empty inside of the ignorant, who are puffed up with pride outside and hollow within.
Bhrigu looked at the withered skeleton of his son lying there like a worn-out tethering post, reflected on it, and rose from his seat. He began to doubt, at the sight of the dead body, whether it could be the lifeless carcass of his son or someone else’s. Then he decided that it was no one else’s. He became bitterly angry with the god of death, who had taken the boy before his time, and he prepared to pronounce his curse on the god of fate for snatching his son away so prematurely. A sage’s curse is the stored force of his austerity released in a word, and Bhrigu had a thousand years of it to spend.
At that, Yama, the regent of death, the devourer of living beings, whom the sages also call Kala, Time itself, took on a visible material body and appeared in an instant before the enraged father. He came in armor, with six arms and six faces, accompanied by the army of his followers, holding the noose and the sword and his other weapons in his hands; the learned say his twelve arms are the twelve months and his six faces are the six seasons of the year. The rays of light that radiated from his body made him look like a hill heaped with the crimson kinshuka flowers that grow in mountain forests. The living fire that flashed from his trident hung golden earrings on every quarter of the sky. The breath of his host dislodged ridges from the mountains and left them swinging like cradles over the earth. His sable sword, flashing with a somber light, darkened the disk of the sun as the smoke of the final conflagration will darken it one day. He stood before the great sage, who was raging like the sea, and then, as a storm is calmed, he soothed him with the gentle breath of his speech.
“The sages,” he said, “know the laws of nature, and they see the past and the future as if they were present before them. They are never moved to anything without a motive, and they are far from being moved without a cause. You sages observe the manifold rules of religious austerity; we observe the endless and immutable laws of destiny; and so we honor you, for your holiness, and for no other reason, with no wish to be blessed by you and no fear of being cursed. Do not belie your righteousness with your rage, and do not imagine you can do us any harm. The flames of the final dissolution leave us untouched; your curses cannot burn us. We have destroyed the spheres of the universe, we have devoured legions of Rudras, millions of Brahmas and myriads of Vishnus in the turning of creation after creation. What is there, then, that we cannot do?
“We are appointed as the devourers of all beings, and you are destined to be devoured by us. Destiny herself ordained it, and no act of our own will. It is the nature of flame to go upward and of water to flow down; food is destined to be eaten by its eaters, and creation is destined to come under destruction by us. Know this form of mine to be the form of the Supreme Being, whose universal spirit acts in various shapes all over the universe. To the unstained sight there is no agent here and no object, except the Supreme; it is stained sight that sees many agents and many objects beside the one in all. Agency and objectivity are terms coined by the short-sighted, and they disappear before the enlarged view of the wise. As flowers grow on trees, so animals are born on the earth; their growth and birth, their fall and death, happen of their own spontaneity, and people miscall it causation. No cause pushes the moon along its course, though men attribute one; and death moves through the world in the same way, of its own nature. The mind is falsely called the agent of everything it enjoys in life, though it is no agent at all; that belief is like the serpent seen in a rope where there is no serpent.
“Therefore, sage, do not let your sorrow make you angry. Consider in its true light the course of events that fall on humankind. We were not driven by any desire for fame, nor by pride or passion, to anything we did; we ourselves are subject to the destiny that rules over all our actions. Knowing that the course of our conduct is set by the destiny the Divine will has appointed, the wise never let themselves fall under the darkness of pride or passion at anything we do. That every being should do its appointed duty at all times is the rule the wise creator laid down, and you cannot overturn it by giving yourself up to ignorance and idleness. Where is your enlightened sight, where is your gravity and your patience, that you grovel in the dark like the blind and slide off the broad and beaten road that lies open to everyone? Why do you not consider your case as the consequence of your own acts? Why do you, a wise man, falsely accuse me as the ignorant do?
“You know that all living beings have two bodies here. One is known as the intellectual body, the spiritual body, the mind. The other is the inert corporeal frame, which is fragile and perishable. The minute thing called the mind lasts until its liberation, and it is the mind that leads every creature to its good or evil desires. As a skilled charioteer drives his chariot with care, so the intelligent mind conducts this body, with attention and with fondness. But the ignorant mind, which is prone to evil, destroys the goodly body, as little children break their clay dolls at play. For this reason the mind is called the purusha, the regent of the body, and the working of the mind is taken for the act of the man; it is bound to the earth by its desires, and freed by its freedom from earthly attractions and expectations. That which thinks within itself, ‘this is my body, placed here, and these are its limbs, and this is my head,’ is called the mind. It is called life, for the living principle in it; it is one and the same with the understanding; it becomes the ego by its self-consciousness; and so the one mind passes under many names according to its functions. From the affections of the body it takes the name of the heart, and it takes many other names at will. The earthly bodies all perish. But when the mind receives the light of truth, it is called the enlightened intellect, and, freed from every thought that relates to the body, it comes into its supreme happiness.
“So it was with the mind of your son. While you sat absorbed in meditation it wandered out of your presence, to regions far and wide, along the ways of its various desires. His body was before you; his mind had been led far off by what it wanted. Leaving this body of his behind in the cave of Mandara, he fled to the celestial region as a bird flies from its nest into the open air. His mind got into the city of the gods, and it remained in a part of the Nandana garden, in the happy groves of Mandara, under a bower of parijata flowers. There he thought he passed a revolution of eight cycles of the four yugas in the company of Vishvachi, an apsara of great beauty, clinging to her as the six-footed bee clings to the open lotus. But as his strong desire had led him up to those happy regions of his imagining, so he fell from them when his merit was spent, as the night dew falls from the sky. He faded in his body and all his limbs, like a flower worn on the ear or in the hair, and he fell down together with his beloved, as the ripe fruits of a tree fall. Stripped of his aerial, celestial body, he passed through the atmosphere and was born again on earth in a human figure.
“He became a Brahmin in the land of Dasharna, and then a king of the city of Kosala. He became a hunter in a great forest, and then a swan on the bank of the Ganga. He became a king of the solar race, and then a raja of the Pundras, and after that a missionary among the Sauras and the Salvas. Next he became a Vidyadhara, and at last the son of a sage. He was a ruler in the Madras, and then the son of a devotee, bearing the name of Vasudeva and living on the bank of the Samanga. Your son has passed through many other births, too, which his desire led him into, and he has had to undergo some low births, among the lower animals.
“He was again and again a Kirata, a hunter of the hills, in the Vindhyas and at Kaikata. He was a chieftain in Sauvira, and he became an ass at Trigarta. He grew as a bamboo in the land of the Keralas, and as a deer on the borders of China. He became a serpent on a palm tree, and a cock on a tamala tree. This son of yours had been skilled in mantras, and he propagated them in the land of the Vidyadharas, who take their name from their skill in enchantment. Then he became a Vidyadhara magician himself, and plied his conjuring by charming the ornaments off the persons of women. He was as handsome as Kama in his person, and he became a favorite of the Vidyadhara girls in the land of the Gandharvas, as dear to them as the sun is to the lotus. At the end of the kalpa, when the universe was destroyed, he saw the twelve suns of the zodiac shining all at once in front of him, and their heat reduced him to ashes as a grasshopper is burned when it falls into fire. Finding no world and no body anywhere he could enter, his spirit roved about the empty air as a bird soars high without a nest. After a long time Brahma woke from his long night of rest and began his creation of the world anew in all its forms, and the roving spirit of your son was driven by its desire, as if a gust of wind had caught it, to become a Brahmin again and be reborn as one on this earth. He was born as a Brahmin’s boy under the name of Vasudeva, and he was taught all the Shrutis among the intelligent and learned men of the place. It is in this kalpa that he has become a Vidyadhara again and taken himself to devotion on the bank of the Samanga, where he is sitting still now in his yoga. So his appetite for the varieties of worldly appearance has led him through birth after birth, among the woods and forests of this earth, through its jungles of thorny khadira and karanja and every bramble.
“Your son is still engaged in his rigorous austerities on the bank of the river, where the loud waves roll onto the beach and the winds howl in from every side. He has been sitting there in firm devotion, with matted braids of hair on his head and a string of rudraksha beads in his hand, holding every limb of his body back from straying. If you wish, Bhrigu, to know the reveries that have passed in his mind, you must open your intellectual eye, which can look into the thoughts of others.” Having said this, Yama, lord of the world, who sees everything at one view, made the muni dive into his son’s thoughts with that inner eye. The sage saw at once, by his own perception, every thought his son’s mind had thought, as if they were reflected in the mirror of his own mind. Having seen his son’s mind inside his own, the muni returned from the bank of the Samanga to his own body on Mount Mandara, which had been left sitting there in Yama’s presence while the mind was away.
Surprised at what he had seen, the sage looked at Yama with a smile; dispassionate as he was, he spoke to the god in soft and dispassionate words. “God, lord of the past and the future, we are ignorant striplings before you, whose brilliant insight sees all three times at once. Knowledge of the existence of the world, whether it is a real thing or not, is the source of all the errors of the wisest of men, through its shifting forms and fluctuations. It is you, potent god, who know what is inside this world; to us it shows only its outward figure, a magic scene. I knew very well that my son is not subject to death, and that is why I was struck with wonder to see him lying there as a dead body. Thinking the imperishable soul of my son had been snatched by death, I was led into the vile desire of cursing you for his untimely end. For though we know the course of things in the world, we are subject to the impulses of joy and grief whenever prosperity or adversity strikes; and to be angry with wrongdoers and pleased with those who act rightly has become the general rule in the course of the world. As long as we labor under the sense of what is our duty and what we must refrain from, we are subject to the error that the world is real; deliverance from that error removes all such responsibilities from us. When we fret at death without understanding its intention, which is only our good, we are of course to blame. Now you have acquainted me with the thoughts of my son, and by your favor I have seen the whole scene on the bank of the Samanga. Of the two bodies of men, the mind alone goes everywhere, and it is the leader of the outer body of every living being. The mind, therefore, is the true body. It reflects, and it makes us conscious of our own existence and of the world outside.”
“You have said rightly, Brahmin,” Yama replied, “that the mind is the true body of a man. It is the mind that molds the body according to its will, as a potter makes a pot as he pleases. It frames a form and gives a person features he did not have before, and it destroys an existing form in a moment. It is imagination that gives a shape to airy nothing, as children see ghosts before them in the dark. Its power to create apparent realities out of absolute unreality is known to everyone from dreams and delirium, from misconceptions and fallacies and every kind of error, from the sight of magic cities and talismans. It is from reliance on the eyes that men take the visible frame for the principal body and the mind for a secondary part. It was the Divine mind that formed the world out of its thought, and so the phenomenal is neither a substance in itself, since it subsists in the mind, nor nothing at all, since it exists in us. The mind spreads itself out in thoughts and desires into many forms, as the branch of a tree puts out its blossoms and leaves, and as we see two moons by a trick of the eye, so one mind appears as many in many individuals. From the variety of its desires it perceives and produces a variety of things, pots and pictures and the rest. The same mind thinks itself many through the diversity of its thoughts: ‘I am weak, I am poor, I am ignorant,’ and the like, and it comes to resemble whatever it constantly thinks of. The thought ‘I am none of the forms I imagine for myself; I am of that form from which I come’ makes the mind one with the everlasting Brahman, by stripping it of the thought of everything else. All things spring from Brahman and sink in him at last, as the huge waves of the billowy ocean rise only to subside in its calm water below. One who thinks himself a little ripple shrinks his soul to littleness; one who believes himself a great wave enlarges his spirit to greatness. He who thinks himself a small being, fallen from above to suffer in the world below, is born on earth in the very form he took for his pattern; and he who thinks himself born to greatness, and rises early by his energy, grows as big as a hill and shines with the gems that grow on it. The waves do not abide in the sea, and yet they are not without the sea, nor the sea without them; they are of the nature of desires in the soul, rising and setting of their own accord. As water is everywhere the same and transparent in its nature, so the all-pervading spirit of God is pure and holy in every place; that one self-same spirit is the body of God, which is called the transparent Brahman, and it constitutes the whole world that seems distinct from it. There is one eternal law presiding over all things, and that one law branches into many and brings forth a hundred kinds of effect. Both the inert and the active proceed from the same source, and the mind proceeds from the intellect of God; it is Brahman that manifests itself in the visible world, full of various forms as the sea is full of its billows, and as the same seed develops into branches and buds, twigs and leaves, fruits and flowers, so the one almighty seed evolves itself into all the varieties of creation. From the active agent proceeds inert matter, as the living spider produces its passive thread and the living man brings on himself his torpor in sleep. And the Lord makes the mind produce matter for its own bondage only, as he makes the silkworm weave its sheath for nothing except its own confinement. The mind forgets its spiritual nature of its own will and builds itself a strong prison out of its earthly possessions, as the silkworm spins its coat. But when the mind inclines, of its own free will, to think of its spiritual nature, it gets its release from the prison of the body and from bondage in the world, as a bird is let out of its cage and a great elephant is loosed from its fetters and its tethering post. The mind gradually molds itself into the form it constantly thinks on, and from within itself it draws the power to become what it wishes to be; the power, once gained, becomes as familiar to the soul as rain clouds are to the sky in the rainy season. There is no bondage and no liberation of the soul, which is the same as the Divine; we cannot account for the use of those words among men. It is this delusive world that shows the immortal soul under the veil of mortality, and it is the unsteady mind that has wrapped the steady soul in the sheath of error, as the silkworm’s cocoon covers the dormant worm. Every other bond that ties the embodied soul to the earth is the work of the mind, the root of all worldly ties and affections.
“It is the Supreme spirit that is stretched out as one universal ocean, agitated into myriads of waves and billows. All those who appear as Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra, those who have become gods, those who are called men: all of them are waves of that sea, raised spontaneously by the spirit beneath, and so are Yama and Indra, the sun, fire, Kubera and the other deities, and the Gandharvas, Kinnaras, Vidyadharas and the rest, who rise and fall, or stay a while, like the breakers of the sea. Some last a long time, like the lotus-born Brahma; some are born to die in a moment, like petty gods and men; some are dead almost as soon as they are born, like the ephemerids and certain worms. Worms and insects, gnats and flies, serpents and great snakes rise in the ocean of the Divine Spirit like drops of water scattered by the waves. Men and deer, vultures and jackals are produced on land and mountains, in woods and forests and marshes. Some live long and some live briefly; some live with high aims and others care for nothing except their contemptible bodies; some think themselves stable in this unstable world; some, sunk in penury, do little in their lives except torment themselves with the thought that they are poor and miserable, weak and ignorant. Some are born as trees, some have become gods, some have moving bodies and some are dissolved like water in the sea; some endure through many kalpas, like the land and the sea and the mountains, and some return to the Supreme Spirit by the moonlike purity of their souls. All things have risen from the oceanlike Spirit of Brahman like its moving undulations, and the intellectual consciousness in each of them is what is called its mind. The consciousness of gods, demigods and men as distinct beings is simply wrong, since they are in no way distinct from the infinite ocean of the Divine Spirit, of which they are all undulations. It is from our erroneous conceptions that we make these distinctions between ourselves and the Supreme Soul; the thought that we are separate from the Supreme spirit is the cause of our fall from our pristine holiness. To remain in the depth of the Divine Spirit and yet think ourselves living outside it is what keeps us in darkness on the surface of the earth. Our consciousness of ourselves as Brahman, vitiated by the various thoughts in our minds, becomes the root of our activities, while the pure consciousness ‘I am’ is free of all action and all effort. It is the inward desire of the heart that becomes the seed of earthly action, and it sprouts in thorny plants like the karanja, a handful of which fills the ground with the rankest weeds. From the highest heaven of Brahma down to the lowest deep there is an incessant undulation of the Divine spirit, like the swaying of the wind, and it keeps all beings in their successive wailing and rejoicing, their incessant births and deaths. Some souls are pure and enlightened, like the gods Hari and Hara; some are somewhat darkened, like men and the lesser demigods; some are placed in greater darkness, like the worms and insects, and some in utter darkness, like the trees. Some have come into being with bodies only and no share of understanding, and they do not know that death has been undermining the fabric of their bodies as a mouse burrows through a house. Some have crossed the ocean of Divine knowledge and become divinities in their living bodies. Some beings have gone through many births and have many more to pass through, and have remained benighted all the while, without the light of truth; some are tossed up and down like fruit flung from the hand, and those flying upward go higher still while those going down fall lower and lower. It is forgetfulness of the Supreme felicity that makes a being rove through births of weal and woe, and it is knowledge of the Supreme that ends the roving, as the remembrance of Garuda destroys the power of the deadliest poison.
“Among these various species of living creatures, which are like the waves of the ocean and as numerous as the plants and creepers of spring, there are some, among the Yakshas, Gandharvas and Kinnaras, who have overcome the errors of their minds, who have considered well everything before them and behind them, who have become perfect in their lives and pass through this world as the living liberated. Others, among the moving and the unmoving, are as unconscious of themselves as wood and stone, and many are so worn down by error that they cannot judge for themselves. But those who have awakened to sense have the rich mine of the shastras, framed by the enlightened for the guidance of their souls, and the study of good works destroys the errors of the mind as the sun’s course across the sky destroys the darkness of night. Those who have failed to dispel the errors of their minds have darkened their understanding with a mist of ignorance, like a frosty winter sky, and they see the phantoms of their error dancing like demons before their eyes. All living bodies are subject to pain and pleasure; but it is the mind that constitutes the body, and the flesh feels neither. The body of flesh and bone and the five elements is a creation of the mind’s imagination and has no substance in it. What your son thought of in his mental body, that is what he found, in that same body, and he was accountable to no one for anything that passed in his mind. Whatever a man wills to do in his own mind comes to pass in a short time, and no other agency is required to bring it about; whatever the mind does in a moment, of its own accord and by its own desire, no one in the world has the power to do or undo at any time. The torments of hell and the joys of heaven, the thoughts of birth and death, are all fabrications of the mind, which labors under them. Why should I go on talking like a verbose writer? Let us go together, at once, to the place where your son is. Having tasted the pleasure and pain of all these states in a moment’s thought of his mind, he is now seated as a devotee on the bank of the Samanga, under the spreading beams of the moon.” Saying this, the lord of death smiled to think of the course of nature. He took Bhrigu’s hand in his own, and the two of them departed together like the sun and the moon. “How wonderful is the law of nature,” Bhrigu said slowly to himself, and rose higher and higher, as the sun climbs above the mountain it rises from. With their luminous bodies they arrived over the Samanga and shone there above the tamala trees, rising together in the clear sky like the sun and the full moon rising at once over a cloudy horizon.
As the sage Vasistha was telling these things, the sun went down behind his setting mountain and the day departed to its evening service. The court broke up with mutual salutations, each man to his evening rites, and they gathered again in the assembly at the dawn of the next day, with Bhrigu and the lord of death still hanging in the air above the river, and the son below them not yet woken.
What Bhrigu finds on the bank of the Samanga, and how Shukra returns to his first body, is told in Vasudeva: From the Samanga to Shukra’s Return.