Before you read
One midnight he leaves Chudala and the kingdom of Malava with only a sword, walks twelve days and nights, and builds a leaf hut at the foot of Mandara. Eighteen years pass, and more, until his hair turns gray. Then his wife comes through the sky in the shape of a Brahmin boy and asks him the one question his austerities have never answered.
The Knowledge He Could Not Yet Receive
Chudala had found, inside the palace, the thing her husband was still looking for. Years of practice had given her the yoga that moves through air and over water, that passes through grass and wood and stone, through fire and empty space, as a thread passes through the eye of a needle. She could skim the peaks of mountains and look into the quarters of the sky. She could talk with any creature, the beast on the ground, the snake under it, the wild Pishacha tribes of the forest, the gods. And she kept all of it to herself. She went on living beside King Shikhidhvaja as she always had, the queen of Malava, his wife, the mistress of his house.
She tried, many times, to give him what she had found. He listened as a husband listens to a young wife he loves: with pleasure, with affection, and without the smallest suspicion that she might know something he did not. To him she was accomplished in the arts of a palace and a bedroom, and spiritual knowledge belonged to sages. He had never learned how far she had gone in it, and she stopped showing him, the way a Brahmin stops speaking of his secret rites to a man with no ear for them.
Rama broke in here. “If a woman of such complete wisdom could not teach her own husband, with all her effort, how is anyone ever taught?” Vasistha answered that two things have to meet: a teacher who gives the precept, and a pupil whose own intelligence is awake to receive it. No sermon and no rite can reach the Self on its own. The spirit alone knows the spirit, as only a snake can follow the track of another snake.
“Then tell me this,” Rama said. “If nothing is learned without a teacher, how do a teacher’s words lead to that knowledge at all?” Vasistha answered with a story. There was once an old Kirata who lived with his family at the edge of the Vindhya forests, rich in grain and gold and as miserly as he was rich. One day, walking through his own woods, he let a single cowrie slip from his purse. It fell into a tangle of grass and was gone. For three days he beat the bushes for it and turned over every fallen leaf, and the whole time his mind ran the sums: this one shell, traded, would have become four, and four would have become eight, then a hundred, then a thousand. He had lost a fortune. At the end of the third day, in the same forest, he came upon a jewel as brilliant as the full moon, worth a thousand of what he had lost, and went home to a house that would never know poverty again.
“The student is like that,” Vasistha said. He comes to his teacher for ordinary learning, a trifle beside his eternal concern, and while he is searching for it the real treasure comes to him. The teacher’s words cannot hold the Self, which no sense perceives and no mouth can express. But without the teacher no one goes looking at all, and the man who never searches for his cowrie never stumbles on the gem. So it is wise, he told Rama, to work without clinging to the result, because what comes of our effort is so often other than what we set out for.
Shikhidhvaja, meanwhile, lived in the dark. He groped through the world without the sight of his own Self, the way a childless man passes his days with no glimpse of hope in this life or the next. His heart burned with anxieties that nothing cooled, and his great fortune fed the fire. He found what relief there was in lonely places, in mountain caves and beside falling water, wandering at large like a deer that has fled the hunter’s arrows. “Rama,” Vasistha said, “he was as distracted as you were when you came to me.”
He went through his daily rituals only when his servants begged him to, and then with the coldness of a recluse. He gave up the pleasures of his rank. He gave up, for the most part, his food.
Then he began to give things away. Lands, gold and cattle went to the gods, to Brahmins, to his own relatives. He took up the austerities of the rites, the chandrayana among them, and other disciplines as severe. He went on pilgrimage, far and near, through wilderness and desert and settled country.
Nowhere did he find the peace he was looking for. He was like a miner digging barren soil for a mineral that was never in it. The anxiety hunted him by day and by night, and he withered under it as under the heat of the sun, searching for a cure to worldly care and finding none.
Absorbed in his thoughts, he no longer reached for the poisoned pleasures of his realm, and in the meekness that had come over him he no longer even looked at the great estate spread out before him.
A Conversation in the Palace
It happened one day as he sat with the queen reclining in his lap. He spoke to her softly. “I have tasted the pleasures of this kingdom for a long time, the sweet and the bitter of all this land and property, and I am tired of them. They have gone stale. The silent sage is free of pleasure and pain. No prosperity and no adversity can touch a hermit alone in the forest. He never fears losing his men in battle or his territory in defeat. His helpless state seems to me far happier than the dignity of a king.”
“The woodland groves please me as you do,” he went on. “Their spring blossoms, their red leaves like your rosy palms, their twisted filaments like the curls of your hair. The thin white clouds above them are their clean garments, the flowers their ornaments, the pollen the scented powder on their skin. The streams that run among them are the strings of pearls at their throats. The young creepers are their playful daughters and the frisking fawns their darlings. They offer fruit to every passerby. The water of the cascades is sweet to taste and cools the body as your company gratifies my senses. I love those woods as I love you. And the calm that those solitudes give the soul is worth more to me than cool moonlight, than Indra’s paradise, than the heaven of Brahma himself.”
“So you must put no obstacle in my way. No faithful wife stands between her husband and his wish.”
Chudala answered him. “A thing done in its season is praiseworthy. Out of season it is not. Blossoms are a delight in spring, and ripe fruit and grain are a delight in autumn. The woods are for the old, for people whose bodies have been broken by age. It does not suit a young man like you to run from the world, and I do not approve of your choice.”
“Stay at home while our youth lasts, as flowers stay on the tree until the flowering is over. Let us grow gray together, like creepers going hoary, and then leave together, the way a pair of herons rise from a dried lake and never come back.”
“And remember the sin that waits for a king who abandons the welfare of his people in the time of his rule. Remember too that your subjects have the right to check an unseasonable act of yours, exactly as you have the right to check theirs.”
Shikhidhvaja heard her out. “Your pleading is wasted on me. Know that I am already gone from you and from this kingdom, into the far woods. You are young and beautiful, and you must not come with me into forests that are dreadful to men and that men can hardly cross. A woman, however hardy, cannot bear the hardship of forest life; a tender shoot cannot stand against the woodcutter’s axe. Stay here and rule the realm while I am away. Carry the burden of everyone who depends on you. That is the highest duty of a woman.”
With that he rose from his seat and went to his bath and the hundred duties of a king’s day, and he did them all.
That day he took leave of his subjects. They begged him to stay, and he went from them anyway, like the sun going down shorn of its glory, and vanished from everyone’s sight as the sun does. Chudala watched him pass out of her chamber, and a veil of melancholy settled over her face, as the face of the earth darkens when daylight drops below the horizon.
The night came on and covered the world in ash-colored dusk, as when Hara leaves the fair Ganga and takes the dark Yamuna into his arms. The evening clouds showed their teeth along the edges of the sky, moonlight glittered on the shoots of the tamala trees, and the stars came out in handfuls, like the fried rice a celestial girl scatters at a wedding. The night grew into her full beauty, lotus buds for breasts, a moon for a face, and smiled in the opening of the night flowers. Shikhidhvaja finished his evening rites, came back to his wife, and sank into sleep as Mount Mainaka sank into the sea.
The Departure After Midnight
At midnight everything was still. The people of the city slept as if sealed inside stone. The king woke and found Chudala fast asleep in the soft bed beside him, lolling in the lap of ease like a bee asleep in the cup of a lotus. He drew himself out of her embrace slowly, the way the node of Rahu slowly lets the eclipsed moon slip from its mouth, and rose from his half of the bedclothes while she lay on the other, as Hari rises from his bed on the milk ocean and leaves Lakshmi rolling in the waves behind him. He walked out of the palace. At the gates he told the guards to stay at their posts. He was going beyond the edge of the city, he said, to arrest a band of robbers, and he needed no one.
“Farewell, my royalty,” he said, and passed out of his own princedom, through farmland and then forest, as a river runs toward the sea.
He went through the black of the night with a sword in his hand, through thickets of thorn, through country full of dangerous beasts and crawling things, and kept his nerve.
In the morning he came out onto open ground, clear of woods and jungle, and walked on foot from sunrise to sunset. At dusk he took shelter under the bower of a grove.
When the sun was gone he bathed and did the evening rite, ate whatever root or fruit he could find, and slept on the bare ground.
The man whose servants had once had to beg him to perform his daily rituals now performed them alone, with no one to see, at the end of a day’s walking. Whatever else he had left behind in Malava, he had not left the ordering of sacred time.
Morning after morning brought new cities and districts into view, new hills, new rivers, and he crossed them all. Twelve days and twelve nights he went on like this.
Then he reached the foot of the Mandara mountain. A dense forest covered it that no human foot had penetrated, far beyond the last boundary of human habitation. Inside it he found a place where streams ran with a sound, where trees stood in rows with water channels beneath them, and where the ruins of a tumbled dwelling showed that some holy hermit had lived there once. It was clear of snakes and biting insects. Sacred plants and creepers grew in it, the kind the siddhas use in their rites, and fruit trees enough to feed whoever lived there. A level, clean stretch of ground lay beside a watercourse, green, shaded by heavy-laden trees.
He built himself a bower there of green creepers and leafy branches, and its blossoms shone in it the way the blue sky shines under monsoon lightning. He made a staff of bamboo. He made vessels for food and drink, plates to hold his offerings of fruit and flowers, and a jar for the holy water. He strung seeds together for a rosary.
He gathered the hides of dead animals and a deerskin, for a seat and for cover against the cold, and set them carefully in his cell. He collected everything else a hermit’s rites require and stored it there, as the Lord of creatures stocked the earth with everything living things would need.
When it was done, the king of Malava owned a hut, a staff, a few vessels, a string of seeds and some skins. The court was twelve days behind him. Now he would find out whether peace arrives when the palace is gone.
The Order of the Hermitage
His day took its shape from the sun. In the morning he did his devotions, and through the forenoon he sat turning his beads and murmuring his mantras, the string of seeds he had made himself passing through his fingers one by one.
In the afternoon he bathed and offered flowers in the service of the gods. The plates he had made held the blossoms; the jar held the water; the staff leaned by the door of the bower. Each thing he owned had a single use, and each use had its hour.
In the evening he ate: wild fruit, roots dug from the ground, the soft stalks of lotuses from the water nearby. Nothing was cooked for him and nothing was brought.
At night he sat alone with himself, master of his own mind, and meditated on his Maker until sleep took him on the deerskin.
So the prince of Malava passed his days in the cell he had built at the foot of Mandara, and he passed them, Vasistha said, with perfect cheer in his heart. He gave no more thought to the pleasures of a king. They had been lost completely under the resignation that now held his entire mind and soul.
The days ran into one another. The rains came and went and the leaf roof was mended; the fruit ripened and dropped and was gathered; the beads went around and around. The man who had once pined under his anxiety as under the heat of the sun now believed he had found the shade. He had left the realm, and the burning had stopped, and to him the one thing seemed to have caused the other.
“That was the prince in his forest, Rama, in what he took for perfect felicity,” Vasistha said. “The princess stayed at home. What she did there, you will now hear from me.”
Chudala Follows and Returns
Chudala startled awake that same night, the way a fawn that has wandered into a village starts up at a sound. The bed beside her was empty. It looked to her as dreary as a sky with neither sun nor moon in it.
She got up with her face dark and her heart heavy, her limbs gone slack like the leaves of a plant left unwatered in summer, and the brightness went out of her the way a winter day goes gray under cloud and frost. She sat on the edge of the bed and spoke to herself. “He has gone. He has given up a kingdom for a retreat in the woods. What can I do now, except go to him where he is? By the law of nature and the law of God, a husband is the only refuge a wife has.”
Having said it, she rose to follow him. She went out through the window into the open air, and her yoga carried her. She rode the wind on the force of her own breath, and the siddhas who live in the upper sky, seeing her pass, took her for a second moon.
It was still night. Below her she caught sight of her husband roving through the lonely forest with a sword in his hand, like a vetala, a ghost that wanders the woods at night.
From her seat in the air she looked at him and then, with the yoga that sees forward, she looked at what lay ahead of him. “What is written for anyone, Rama,” Vasistha said, “at whatever time and place and in whatever manner, comes to pass at that very moment and on that very spot, and the holy seers and seeresses who have gained the prophetic power through yoga see it plainly.”
She saw plainly what would befall her husband. She saw that nothing could avert it. And she stopped where she was in the sky and did not go down to him. “Let my visit to him wait,” she decided, “until the time when it is destined for me to be in his company again.”
She turned in the air and went back the way she had come, into her inner apartment, and lay down on her milk-white pillow like the crescent moon lying on the pale forehead of Hara.
In the morning she proclaimed to the people that the prince had gone away on an important errand. She consoled them with the promise of his quick return. Then she took the reins of the government into her own hands.
She ruled as he had ruled, by the established rules of tolerance, with the care and watchfulness of a farmer’s wife guarding the ripening grain. The people were protected.
So they lived apart, the husband and the wife, without seeing each other, one in the royal palace and one in the forest. Days passed and nights, weeks and fortnights, months and seasons, in their regular turns, while he counted his days in the woods and she counted hers in the palace. What is the use of describing all eighteen years of it, Vasistha said, that crept over the separated pair? And more years passed after those, until old age overtook the hermit prince in his cell on the great Mandara mountain.
The Return to Mandarachala
Chudala saw that her husband’s passions were on the wane with his failing years and his gray hair, and that she herself was not yet too old to cross the distance to him. She judged that the proper time had come to prevail on him and bring him back to the palace. She resolved to go to Mandara. One night she left her home and rose on the wings of the air into the upper sky.
As she went she passed Siddha women in the heights, dressed in the thin bark of the kalpa tree and belted with clusters of gems, the inhabitants of the garden of paradise going out to meet their Siddha husbands, sprinkled with perfume, shedding light like dew. She breathed air scented with the flowers of that garden. She moved through moonlight that rolled like the waves of the milk ocean, purer the higher she climbed, and she passed among the clouds the way lightning moves in them.
And the lightning gave her a thought she could not shake. “That lightning sits in the bosom of her cloudy husband and still keeps looking at him, over and over, with the flicker of her eyes. So must I look out for my absent lord as I pass through the middle sky like her. It is true that one’s nature cannot be put down while one is alive. My mind is disturbed, and it will not be quiet without the sight of him, my lion. It runs mad when I say I will see him. It runs mad when I see these creepers wind around their trees and cling, when I see these siddha women flying out to their husbands. When shall I meet the man who lives in my heart, as they meet theirs? This soft breeze, this cool moonlight, these forest plants, all of them should cool me, and all of them set my heart on fire.”
“Why does my heart throb like this, for nothing, in every vein of me? My mind was pure as air; why has it lost its reason and its discretion? It is my faithless mind that drives my heart after its husband. Let it keep its longings to itself and stop tormenting my quiet spirit. And why does a silly woman long for a husband who has grown old and does not need her, who is an ascetic now, weak in the body, emptied of every earthly desire? The taste for a king’s honors and pleasures has been torn out of him by the root. The plant of his fondness for pleasure is as dry as a channel that has poured all its water into the sea. The man who loved me so much that we were one soul has gone as callous to tenderness as a withered tree.”
Then the thought turned. “Or I will use the power of my yoga to waken his mind, and pour the longing and the throbbing of my heart into his. I will gather the ascetic’s thoughts to one point and turn them to the government of his realm, where we can settle for good and be content. There. After so long I have found the way to what I want. I will put my own thoughts into my husband’s mind. When a wedded pair are of one mind, and have the pleasure of being always together, that is the highest happiness human beings can have on earth.”
Turning all this over, she went on through the air, over mountains and over mountains of cloud, past the bounds of lands and visible horizons, until Mandara came in sight and she found the glen and the cavern in it. She entered the grove invisible, as a spirit of the air enters, known only by the trembling of leaves. In a corner of the wood she saw a leafy hut, and by her yoga she knew the man in it for her husband, though he had become someone else.
The body that had once been decked with jewels, that had glittered like Meru with its gold, had grown lean and thin and dark and dry as a withered leaf. He looked as if he had been dipped in a fountain of ink. He sat alone on the bare ground, tall still, every limb and every sense under his command, with ashes rubbed over his body so that he looked like a mountain of ice, and he was stringing flowers into his braided hair. He might have been Shiva himself, with every desire gone.
The sight hurt her. She said to herself, without a sound: “How painful it is to see this. This is the stupidity that comes from not knowing the Self. It has brought my self-deluded prince to this. And yet I must not call him unfortunate while he is my husband, however deep the darkness of his mind has sunk him. I must do everything I can to bring him to the knowledge of truth. It will give him back his joy in this life and his liberation in the next, and it will change this figure of his into another altogether. I must come closer to him than I have ever been, to plant understanding in his mind, or my words will have no effect on him at all. He has always treated me as his young and silly wife.”
“So I will admonish my husband in the figure of a devotee. Delivered that way, it may take hold in him, now that he is gray. Good sense can dawn in an understanding that is clear and has not been twisted from its nature.” With that she fixed her mind for a moment on the Agni-Soma mantra, and her form changed as water changes into a wave, and she came down to earth in the shape of a Brahmin’s boy.
The Visitor at the Leaf Hut
Shikhidhvaja saw a Brahmin boy walking toward him with a smile, as if from some other forest, and the boy looked like devotion itself given a body. His skin was as bright as molten gold. A string of pearls lay on his chest, and the white sacrificial thread crossed it. Two pieces of milk-white cloth wrapped him. He carried the sacred water pot in one hand and a student’s staff in the other. A string of beads was wound around his wrist, and a long double rosary hung from his neck almost to the ground. His hair was long and jet black, like swarms of black bees over white lotuses, and it shed a radiance on the spot where he stood. His face, with its earrings, glowed like the rising sun with rosy rays, and the knot of hair on the top of his head, with a mandara flower fastened in it, looked like a mountain peak with the moon above it.
To the hermit he was the full moon rising over the golden slope of Meru, and he rose to meet him with the reverence the moon’s worshipers pay their luminary. He took the boy for the son of some god. Standing barefoot before him, he said, “I bow to you. You must be the son of a god. Take this seat, and sit.” He pointed with his hand to the bed of leaves spread there, and he poured a handful of flowers into the boy’s hands.
The boy answered him. “I greet you in return. You are a king’s son, and you shine like a dewdrop, like moonlight sparkling on a lotus leaf.” He took the flowers from the hermit’s hand and sat down on the leafy bed.
“Tell me where you come from and where you are going,” Shikhidhvaja said. “You were born in heaven, I think. It is a lucky day for me that has brought you into my sight. Accept this pure water, these fragrant flowers, and this gift of honor; and take this string of flowers that I strung with my own hands. May all be well with you.” So saying, he offered the flowers, the wreathed blossoms, the gift and the other offerings, everything the ceremonial law directs, to the guest who was the lady he had worshiped at his own hearth.
“I have traveled far and wide,” Chudala said, “over many countries on the face of this earth, and I have never met so hearty a welcome or such honors as I have received from you. Your humility, your courtesy, your evenness: they show that the gods favor you, and they promise you long life.”
“Now tell me this. You gave up every earthly desire long ago, and you have spent a long time quieting your soul with great patience. In all of that time, have you ever once applied your mind to your final liberation itself, to the end of all this? Because the road you have chosen to it is a very painful one. You have taken the vow of this forest hardship and thrown away the care of a great dominion. “
The hermit answered him without a flicker of suspicion. “I am not surprised that you know all this. You are a god yourself; you only wear the form of a Brahmin boy, and the beauty of your person tells me you are an all-knowing deity. Your limbs look wet with the nectar of moonlight. How else could the mere sight of you pour such peace into me at the first glance? And there is something more. I see in your face a great likeness to my beloved, who is ruling my kingdom now.”
“Rest your fair, tired body. Wear these garlands of flowers from head to foot, the way a white cloud wraps a mountain from its summit to its base. Your face is as beautiful as the stainless moon, your limbs as delicate as the petals of flowers, and I can see them fading in the glare of the sun. Know that I wreathed these flowers for the service of the gods, and I give them now to you, who are no less a god to me. My life is crowned today with its best luck, serving a guest like you. The wise say that attending on a guest earns more merit than attending on the gods.”
“So tell me, then, with your face like the moon, which god you are, and the child of which deity, that you honor me with this visit. Tell me all of it and take away the doubts that are troubling my breast.”
“Listen, then,” the Brahmin boy said. “I will tell you everything you want to know of me. Who is so rude that he would deceive a man who asks him humbly?”