The World Within the Rock

“It is right that you should greet me like that,” she said, “because I come to you with a grieving heart, and I am going to lay my whole case before you and ask your advice.” Then she began, and she began very far out.

“In one corner of the great vault of emptiness,” she said, “sits this house of a world that you call yours. It has three rooms, the earth, the heavens, and the regions underneath, and the architect who built it, Brahma, set a lady named Fancy in charge of the whole establishment. Here is the dark floor of the earth, the storehouse of the world, dotted with islands and ringed by seas. It stretches away on every side, with islands in the middle of its oceans and mines of gold beneath its skin, ten thousand yojanas from end to end. It shines of itself and is as fair as the sky, it gives us everything we want, and the glitter of its gems rivals the stars. It is the pleasure ground of the gods, of the siddhas who have perfected themselves, and of the apsaras who dance for them, and it is full of every object of desire.”

“At its two ends stand the two polar mountains, the Lokaloka ranges, which get their name because one face of them is lit forever by the sun and the other lies forever in night, like the two belts at the two extremities of the earth. One side is dark as the minds of the ignorant and the other shines like the souls of the wise. One side holds the cities of the gods and the other the cities of the demons; one side lifts its summits toward the city of Brahma in the highest heaven and the other bends down toward the underworld. There are vultures over craters and flower gardens where the women of heaven sit singing; a pit with the Kumbhanda demons in it, and the Nandana garden with its hermitages; eternal clouds roaring like elephants on one slope and rain falling softly on another; deserts where the wind howls and lotus lakes where cranes walk the rim; demons dancing at night and men going about their trades under the sun. The peaks of that mountain are as tall as whole hills elsewhere, and the clouds of the end of time sit on them always, flashing like gems. Forests grow on its white stones and lions and monkeys live in them.” She paused, because she had reached the place that mattered. “On the north of that mountain there is a peak, and on the east side of the peak there is a grotto. That cavern, inside its hard and stony heart, is where I live.”

“There I am confined,” she said, “in that stony prison, and I think I have passed a whole series of yugas in it, past any reckoning. And I am not alone. My husband is shut in the same cave with me, and we are kept there like bees closed inside a lotus when the flower folds at nightfall. We have stayed in that stone dungeon for a very long span of very many years, and it is our own fault that we are not free of it even now; we go on there as prisoners, as we always have. Nor is it only the two of us. Our whole family, our friends and all our dependents, are held in the same stronghold with no end in sight. My husband is a Brahmin twice born, an ancient person, and he has been in that dungeon for age after age without once leaving his single seat. He has kept the vows of a student since he was a boy; he hears the Vedas and recites them and never swerves from his observances. But I am not like him. I am doomed to constant distress, because I cannot pass a single moment without his company.”

“Hear how I became his wife, and how a real affection grew between us. When that husband of mine was still a boy, living in his own house and having picked up a little learning, he thought to himself, ‘I am a srotriya, a Brahmin of the Veda. Is it possible for me to have a partner suited to me?’ And with that he produced me out of himself, in this body you are looking at, the way the bright moon lets the moonlight out of its own body. So I was born from his mind, and I stayed with him as the consort of his mind, and in time I grew the way blossoms come on in spring, as lovely as a mandara tree in flower. My body was bright as the face of the sky and my features glittered like stars; my face was the full moon and every heart turned toward it. My breasts swelled like flower buds, my arms and the palms of my hands were tender creepers with red leaflets. I was made for the play of love, quick with jokes and glances and smiles, fond of singing and music, never tired of being merry. I took whatever came, good fortune or bad, as equally friendly to me; neither tempted by the one nor frightened by the other. And I do not keep house for my Brahmin lord alone. Because I am a being of the mind, I have access everywhere, near and far, and I keep the houses of everyone who lives in the three worlds. I am his lawful wife, fit to bear and raise his children and to carry the burden of this triple house. I am a grown young woman now, with my breasts full, and as giddy with my youth as a cluster of flowers tossing in the wind. And my husband, who has always been slow to act and quick to study, is busy with his austerities, and because he expects liberation he has put off his marriage to me to this very day.”

“But I am far into my youth and I want what the young want, and I have given him my mind, and I burn for him like a lotus in a furnace. I cool myself all day with the breeze off the brooks and the lotus lakes and I still burn in every part of my body, like the embers burning down to ash in the sacrificial pit. I see the garden floor smiling with flowers shaken down from the shade trees and I burn like the ground under the sand of an unshaded desert. The gurgling of water, the breeze off a lake full of lilies, the calling of cranes and waterbirds, all of it is harsh to me. They dress me in garlands and swing me in a cradle of flowers and I think I am lying on thorns. They make my bed of lotus petals and plantain leaves and the leaves dry under the heat of my body and crumble to powder under my weight. Whatever is fair or lovely or sweet, I see it and fill with sorrow and my eyes brim over.

“The tears steam out of me from the heat inside and run down my lids like dew off a lotus leaf. When I swing with my playmates on the hanging boughs of the plantain trees in our pleasure gardens, I think of the grief burning in my heart and break down, covering my face with my hands so no one sees. I look at our bowers of cool plantain leaves, snow strewn all around them, and I run from them as if they were thorn bushes. I watch the crane on the lake fondling the lotus with its stalk of an arm and I despise my own bloom. I weep at anything handsome, I keep quiet at anything plain, I take pleasure in what is ugly, and I am happiest when I feel nothing at all. I have looked at the spring flowers and the hoarfrost of winter and thought them the ashes of lovesick women, burned in the fire of love and scattered on every side by the wind. I have made myself beds of blue lotus leaves and covered myself with chaplets of white flowers and watched them go pale and dry from touching me. So pity me. My young days have all gone for nothing.”

“I was still sitting on that seat I had imagined for myself in the sky,” Vasistha told Rama, “and she was sitting the same way, on nothing, in the visionary air, and I asked her: tell me how an embodied being like you can live inside a block of stone. How do you move about in a substance with no pores in it, and what put you there in the first place?”

“Do not be surprised at our kind of dwelling,” she said. “It is as habitable to us, and as full of other creatures, as the open and roomy world you live in. Snakes and reptiles live and move in the bowels of the earth; great rocks are rooted in cells underground; water runs inside the body of the ground as freely as wind runs through the open air. The oceans flow full and the fish move slowly under their surface and above it, and countless creatures are being born and dying in them without pause. It is in the hollow of the stone of this world that the waters glide below and the winds fly above; here the gods move and roam through the air, and the earth and the planets turn with their unmoving mountains and everything else that cannot move. Gods, demigods and human beings go round in their own circles inside the womb of this stone, and the rivers have run to the sea in it since the beginning of creation. Since the beginning the sun has thrown his beams down on it like lotuses on a lake, with the dark clouds hovering over them like a swarm of black bees, and the moon has spread her light like sandal paste and wiped the darkness off the face of the night. The wheel of the stars turns in the air at the will of God like a threshing mill on its axle, and that wheel, turning on the pole, grinds everything between its two plates of heaven and earth the way the wheel of fate grinds things to dust.

“Everyone in there is driven to think and act by desire, blown back and forth like leaves, and led by it to birth after birth and death after death. The silent sage sits still in his meditation, like the sky, which holds everything and does not move; but the earth is shaken and worn by the waves, and the fire is put out by its own blaze, and everything else is tossed about like a monkey in the wind of its wants. Every living thing in the earth and water and air, on the hills and in the trees, gods and giants included, is bound to die and be born again, like gnats and worms and flies. Time, the greatest slaughterer of all, kills gods, giants and gandharvas with its many arms of ages and yugas, years, months, days and nights, the way a herdsman slaughters the cattle he raised himself. All of them rise and fall in the ocean of time, leap and dance a little while, and sink into the whirlpool of death, from which no one comes up. Everything living in the fourteen spheres is carried off like dust and ash by the gust of death into the hollow womb of the air, where it vanishes like an empty autumn cloud. High heaven, wearing the stars for a crown and holding the sun and moon in its two hands, stays unmoved through all of it, and the fire under the sea drinks the overflow of the seven oceans the way all-destroying time drinks the creatures of every world.”

“If you doubt any part of what I have told you,” she said, “then come with me and see the place yourself, and you will find there many more wonders than I have described.” “I said, ‘Good,’” Vasistha told Rama, “and we set off together on our journey through the air, the way the scent of flowers goes off with the wind into the empty air where both of them are lost for good. I passed far out through the regions of the sky and met crowds of ethereal beings and saw the celestial houses they live in. I went on past the regions where the gods travel, into the higher spheres of heaven, and came to a blank, bleached sky beyond the height of the polar mountain, above its summit. I went through that pale vault and came out at last on the other side of it, the way the moon comes out from under the white canopy of heaven, and above me I saw the bright belt of the zodiac, holding the seven golden spheres of the seven planets. And as I looked at that belt it seemed to me a crystalline marble, burning with fire. I could not make out any of the worlds it was supposed to enclose.”

“So I asked my lovely companion: where are the created worlds, with their gods and planets and stars and the seven spheres of heaven? Where are the oceans, and the sky with its directions, where are the high heavy masses of cloud, the starry heaven, the rising and setting of the planets? Where are the rows of mountain peaks and the marks of the seas on the earth, where are the rings and clusters of islands, the sunny shores, the dry parched deserts? There is no counting of time here, no record of anything men do, no sign even of a false world, nothing whatever in this endless empty vacuum. No names for the races of beings, gods, demigods, vidyadharas, gandharvas, the kinds of men; no mention of a sage or a prince, of good or evil, of heaven or hell, of day and night and their watches and hours. No reckoning of time at all, no knowing of merit or demerit, no feud between gods and demigods, no love or hate between one man and another.”

“While I was going on like that in my amazement, the excellent lady who was my guide through that maze turned her eyes on me, rolling like two black bees, and said: I do not see anything here in its old state either. But I find everything presented in this crystal stone the way a picture is, the way an image shows in a mirror. I see the shapes of all things in it because of my own preconceived ideas, carved into it forever, and it is the lack of those preconceptions in you that leaves you blind to the same thing. And more than that: it is your constant habit of talking about whether the one entity is one or two, and your forgetting of the pure spiritual and intellectual bodies we have, that keeps you blind to the sight of the reality, while I had only a dim glimpse of it. By long habit of thinking I have learned to look at this world as a plant growing in the air, which is nothing. To me it is a dim reflection of the ideal reality, and never the solid fact it is to you. The world that stood so clear before my sight I now find as faint as its own shadow cast on a pane of glass.”

“It is because of our old prejudice in favor of the false doctrine that the body is the person,” she went on, “that we have lost our footing in the spiritual body and fallen into the deep dark of delusion. Whatever we are used to thinking in our inner minds grows and takes deep root in the heart, watered by the intellectual soul, and the mind takes on that nature, the way early habit shapes a youth. Nothing is ever accomplished by the precepts of the best shastras or the dictates of right reason unless they are made effective by constant application and practice. Your mistaken speech about the nothingness of the world in this empty space came only from your constant habit of thinking the false world real, and it was about to mislead me too. Be wise now that you have overcome your old prejudice and seen the present truth. Know that it is your habitual thinking of a thing as such and such that makes it appear so to you, just as a craftsman’s skill comes from constant practice under his master. The wrong notions of this thing and that, of a material world, of the reality of one’s own ego and person, are all cleared away by the cultivation of spiritual knowledge and by the constant habit of seeing everything in its spiritual light. I am a weak and young disciple next to you, and yet I see the stony world perfectly well, which you with all your knowledge cannot see, and that is because of my habit of thinking about it differently from the way you are practiced to think.

“Look at what practice does. It makes a scholar of a dunce, it grinds a stone to dust, it drives a dead arrow to a distant mark. In the same way the dark of our ignorance and the sickness of false knowledge are both dispelled by right reasoning and deep thinking, and both of those are the fruit of habit. Habit makes the taste for a food; some relish the sour and the sharp and others the sweet. A stranger becomes a friend by staying in your company and a friend becomes a stranger by living in a distant land. Our spiritual body, which is perfectly pure and airy and full of intelligence, is turned into the gross material body and mistaken for it by our constant thinking of ourselves as flesh. The impression that you are a material body will fly off like a bird the moment you come to know yourself as a spiritual and intellectual soul; it is the habit of thinking yourself such that makes you really so. All our merit is wrecked by one small act of demerit and our prosperity flies at the first touch of adversity, but nothing can take our habit from us. Everything hard is made easy by practice, enemies are turned into friends, poison is made as pleasant as honey. The person who will not practice what is good and proper for him is counted mean and vile; he never gets what he wants and is as useless to his family as a barren woman. Whatever is desirable and good must be worked for all your life, the way life itself, your greatest good, must be guarded until death comes.

“Whoever neglects to practice an act or an art that would do him good is headed for his ruin. Those who incline toward meditation on the spiritual soul cross the rough stream of this world easily, however attached they may be to it in their outward and bodily doings. Practice is the lamp that shows the way to the thing you want, the way a lamp shows where the lost pot or cloth is lying in the room. The tree of habit bears in its season like the kalpa tree that gives every fruit you wish for, like hoarded capital that pays interest. Habitual inquiry into spiritual truth is the sunlight that shows the soul its own nature; otherwise it lies hidden in our very body, like any part of it in a sunless night. Every animal needs provisions to live and gets them by continual searching, never without it; the force of habit is at work everywhere like the sunshine. All fourteen kinds of living beings live by the habit of their own activity, and none of them gets what it wants without honest effort. The repetition of the same act is what we call habit, and what we call personal effort, and nobody can do anything without effort. Constant habit of action, joined to the energy of body and mind, is the only means of accomplishing anything whatever. There is nothing the power of habit cannot do; it is as strong as the sunbeams that make everything on earth grow, and it is habitual energy alone that gives the brave their success and their fearlessness, on land and water and mountains, in forests and deserts.”

“Now,” she said, “since it is long practice, joined with understanding and reflection on a subject, that makes a person proficient in it, apply the same to the meditation of the pure spiritual soul, and the material world will vanish into the stone.” That was the whole of her instruction, and Vasistha took it. “After the celestial woman had spoken like that,” he told Rama, “I withdrew into the cavern of a rock, sat in padmasana with my legs folded, and went into samadhi. I gave up every thought of material bodies and kept my mind on the intellectual soul alone, exactly as she had told me. Then I had the sight of an intellectual void inside me, a clear fair prospect like the vault of heaven in autumn. By intense application to the meditation of the true One, my mistaken view of appearances went down inside me entirely. The sphere of my intellect was filled with a transcendent light that knew no rising or setting; it shone evenly, always.”

“And as I looked into that light and through it, I could find neither the sky nor that great stone I had come to find. The clear thick blaze of my spiritual light carried off my outward sight the way it had already carried off my inward vision. The way a man dreams a huge stone standing in his house, I saw the whole vast vacuum as a crystalline globe, set in the clear atmosphere of the intellect. A dreamer may take himself for another person; when he wakes he knows himself. The man who is drowned in ignorance comes to his right understanding in time and knows at the end that there is no real entity except the essence of God. When I saw that solid transparent light, which looked like a crystal stone lying in the emptiness of Brahma, I could find nothing material in it, no earth, no water, nothing attached to it at all. The pure spiritual form in which all things were first presented at creation is the form they still have in our ideas of them. All these bodies of created beings are the bodies of Brahma, considered in their first spiritual nature, and it is the mind that gives them the imaginary shapes of matter inside its fabricated kingdom of the visible world.

“The yogi, like every knowing mind, sees all things in the abstract and in a general view; the ignorant, who cannot abstract or generalize, fall into the error of concrete particulars and the lie of the senses. All sensation is a passing perception that leaves a wrong impression; know every perception of the senses to be false and deluding, and the concepts in the yogi’s mind to be the true realities. The subtle form of a thing comes first before the mind and is afterward paraded before us in various false shapes, and that is true of every material thing in the world. What was not there before has never been there since; as all the variety of gold jewelry is nothing but gold, so the first subtle ideas can have no gross material form. The error of materiality in the spiritual body, which is ruled by chit, is like the mirage of a vast sea on the shining sand of a desert, like taking the shells on the beach for silver, or the sunshine on sand for water, or a second moon in the mist.

“The yogi relies on his inner perception and rejects the perception of his senses, while the common run go giddy drinking the vapor of that mirage. What people call pleasure and pain is a passing feeling of short duration; the unfeigned and lasting peace of mind that neither rises nor falls is what is called true happiness. Reject the sight of this triple world that your perception sets before your imagination, because nothing is more foolish than taking a delusion for the truth. There is but one unchanging entity in all of nature, and its solidity rests on the consolidation of the divine intellect, the way sea salt rests on the hardening of seawater. As a dreamer dreams of a high hill in his house, in a form unknown and unseen to the others sleeping in the same house, so the two of us had thought of that stone we had been talking about, and it is nothing other than the intellect. It is this intellectual soul that shows a great many ideal appearances inside itself, every one of them as unsubstantial as empty air: this is a hill, and this is the sky; this is the world, and these are myself and yourself.”

“Only people of enlightened soul can perceive these appearances of the intellect in themselves,” Vasistha said. “The unenlightened cannot, just as the man who listens to a lecture takes in its meaning and the man who dozes through the reading of a sermon does not. To the unenlightened every one of these false sights of the world looks true, the way the trees and mountains, which never move, seem to dance to a drunk. The yogi sees one irrepressible form of God, Shiva, in every place, standing before him in the form of his own intellect; the ignorant are led by false guides to put their trust in the objects of the senses, frail as those are. The world has no figure and no substance, Rama, though it puts on the look of both; in the light of the pure imperishable essence of God, seen with the keen sight of the highest philosophy, it is that essence which shows the rare spectacle of the cosmos in itself, and the shapes of hills and rivers appear in it like pictures in a panorama, or like specters in empty air.” He had found the stone, and found it to be his own mind. The woman who had brought him there was waiting to go in.

“The creatures of the water were stewed under the warm waters of the seas, and the crying of people inside the cities was hushed by the howling of the flames around them. The elephants of the four quarters of heaven fell and rolled on the burning ground and lifted the hills with their tusks to shelter themselves from the falling fire, while the caverns of the mountains sent out gusts of smoke from the fire underground. Burning hamlets were crushed under falling stones and hills, and the mountain elephants bellowed in their death agonies. Heated by the sun, every living thing rushed to the hot waters of the seas and splashed in them, and the vidyadharas of the mountains fell into the hollow hearts of those mountains as they burst with their volcanic heat. Some, tired of crying, and others who had gone into their yoga, sat quiet where they were, and the serpent races were left to roll on the burning cinders, below the earth and on it. The great beasts of the sea, the sharks and the whales, baked in the drying channels and driven into the whirlpools of the deep, and the poor fish, trying to escape the sharp fire, flew into the air by the thousand. The burning flames rose high into the air as if dressed in crimson, and leaping there as if in a dance, they caught the garments of the Apsaras in heaven. The desolating fire of the kalpa, wreathed in its flashing flames, began to dance about on every side, to the loud bursting of bamboos and cracking of trees as to the beating of drums and timbrels; the sportive fire danced like a playful actor on the ruinous stage of the world.

“It ravaged every land and island and desolated every forest and fort; it filled every cave and cavern and the hollow vault of the sky, until it reached the tops of the ten sides of heaven. It blazed in caverns and over cities and across the dales and the lands; it blazed over hills and mountaintops, over the seats of the siddhas and over the seas and oceans. The flames flashing from the eyes of Shiva and the Rudras boiled the waters of the lakes and rivers and burned the bodies of gods and demons, of men and of the serpent races, and a hoarse whispering rose from everywhere. With columns of flaming fire over their heads, beings began to play at throwing ashes on one another, the way playful demons flirt with dust and water. Flames flashed out of the cells and caves under the earth, and everything that lay among them was reddened by their light. All the sides of heaven lost their blue under the vermilion of the clouds that hung over them, and everything, with the reddened sky, lost its own color and took on the rosy tint of the red land lotus. The world seemed covered with a crimson canopy by the burning flames spread over it, like the evening sky under the parting glories of the setting sun; overspread with the flaming fires, the sky looked like a hanging garden of blooming ashoka flowers, or a bed of red kinshuka blossoms hung up in the air. The earth seemed strewn with red lotuses and the seas sprinkled with red dye; so the fire blazed in many forms, with its tails and crests of smoke. The conflagration raged with a youthful vigor in the forest, where it glared in many colors, as a burning scene is shown in a painting.

“Sunrise and sunset disappeared from the Vindhya mountain under the continual burning of the woods on its summit. The flying fumes looked like the blue Sahya mountain in the south, from the flashes of fire in their midst, like the luster of the gems in that mountain. The blue vault of the sky seemed a blue lake decorated with lotus-like firebrands all over it, and the flames flashed over the tops of the cloud mountains in the air like the brisk dancing of actresses in a play; flames with their smoky tails, like the train of a comet, danced about on the stage of the world like dancing girls with their loosened hair flouncing. The burning fire burst the parched ground and flung its sparkling particles all around, like fried rice flying about a frying pan in many colors. Then the burning rocks and woods showed a golden hue on the breast of the earth, with their bursting and splitting noise, as if the earth were beating her breast at her own impending destruction. All lands were crushed together with the cry of their inhabitants, and all the seas dashed against one another with foaming froth in their mouths; the waves shone in their faces with the reflection of the shining sun, they clashed against each other as if clapping their hands, and they struck the land with such force that they beat and broke the rocks on the shore. The raging sea with its billowy arms grasped the earth and the stones, as foolish men do in their anger, and devoured them in its hollow cell with a gurgling noise, as fools swallow their false hopes with vain bawling.

“The all-destroying fire, with a hoarse sound, melted down the rivers with their banks, and the regents of the sphere fell before the geysers. The ten sides of the compass were out of order and confused together, and all the mountains were reduced to liquid gold with their woods and abodes and caves and caverns. By degrees the prodigious Meru melted like snow in the heat of the fire, and soon after the great Himalaya melted down like lac in the same fire. Everything grew cold and pinched in itself, as good people are chilled by the awe of the wicked, except the Malaya mountain, which gave out its fragrance even in that state of its tribulation. The noble-minded man never forsakes his nobleness, though he is exposed to troubles, because the great never afflict another, though they are robbed of their own joy and happiness; burn the sandalwood, and it still spreads its fragrance to all living beings, because the intrinsic nature of a thing is never lost or changed into another state. Gold is never consumed nor disfigured, though it is burned in the fire of a conflagration; so there are two things, gold and vacuum, that the all-destroying fire cannot consume. Those bodies are above all praise that do not perish at the perdition of all others: the vacuum is indestructible because it is everywhere, and gold suffers no loss because of its purity. The property of goodness alone is true happiness, and neither passion nor ostentation. Then the fiery clouds moved aloft like a moving forest and poured down showers of vivid flame; mountainous clouds of fire, with flame and fume, poured liquid fire all around and burned away every body already dried by the heat and the want of water.

“The dry leaves of the trees, rising high in the air, were burned away by the flame in place of the rain of heavy clouds. The gorgeous flame passed by the Kailasa mountain without touching it, knowing it to be the seat of the dread god Shiva, the way wise men keep clear of the mud and mire of sin, knowing it is attended with their perdition. Then the god Rudra, growing furious at the final destruction of the world, shot the direful flame of his fiery eyes and burned the sturdy trees and the robust rocks to ashes with stunning cracklings. The hills at the feet of the mountains, crowned with flames, seemed to move forward to fight the fire with their stones and their clubs of clumped trees. The sky became a bed of lotuses in full bloom, and creation became a mere name, like that of Agastya, who departed and disappeared forever from sight. The suffering fool, remembering the end of the kalpa in his mind, took the world to be at an end, as the fire consumes all objects like the unreality of the world. The falling thunderbolts pierced every body, the glittering flames inflamed every tree and plant, and the winds blew with a fiery heat that scorched the bodies even of the gods and singed everything on every side. Here the wildfire raged loose among the trees of the forest, there were clouds of hot ashes flying in the air, and smoky mists threw off red-hot embers and fiery sparks; darknesses rose upward with fagots of fire falling from their midst, and gusts of wind blew with speed and force to befriend the destroying fire.”

“Now the destroying winds blew, shaking the mountains by their force, filling the seas with tremendous waves and rending the skies with cyclonic storms. The bounded seas broke their bounds and ran to the boundless oceans under the push of the wind, as poor people run to the rich under the push of their poverty. The earth, fried by the fire, went under the overflowing waters and joined the infernal regions that lie below the waters of the deep. Heaven disappeared into nothing and the whole creation vanished into the air; the worlds were reduced to vacuum, and the light of the sun dwindled to the light of a star in the starry sphere. Then out of some cavity of the sky there appeared hideous clouds, called Pushkara and Avartaka and other names, in the forms of dreadful demons, roaring with a tremendous noise. The noise was as loud as the bursting of the egg of the world, as the hurling down of a great building, as the dashing of the waves against one another in a furiously raging sea. The loud peal resounded through the air and the water and echoed among the towers of the cities, deafening and stunning to the ear, and the swell of it over the tops of the mountains filled the world with uproar. The sound swelled as if in the conch shell of the egg of the world and came back with a triple clangor from the vaults of heaven and sky and the infernal world. The supports of all the distant sides tottered at their bases, and the waters of all the seas mixed together, as if to quench the thirst of the all-devouring doomsday.

“Doomsday advanced like the god Indra mounted on the back of his elephantine clouds, which roared aloud amid the waters held in the ethereal ocean from the beginning, and it came with a hubbub as loud as the churning of the ocean of old, or as the roar of the revolving world. Hearing that roaring of clouds among the surrounding fires, I was astonished at the stridor and cast my eyes on every side to see the clouds, and I saw no trace of a cloud in any part of the heavens; I only heard their roar and saw the flashes of firebrands flaming in the sky, with showers of thunderbolts falling from above. The flaming fire spread over millions of miles on every side of earth and heaven and burned everything in them to a horrid devastation. After a little while I made out a spot at a great distance in the sky, and felt a cool air blowing on my body from it. Then I saw the clouds of the kalpa appearing and gathering far off in the sky, where no relic of the living fire could be seen, and the airs of the kalpa began to breathe from the watery corner, the western side of the sky; they rose at last into blasts able to blow away the great mountains of Meru, Malaya and Himalaya and to carry them off. Those winds blew the mountainous flames away and put the burning cinders to flight like birds; they bore down the spreading sparks and drove the fire from every side. The clouds of fire went from the air like evening clouds; then clouds of ashes rose to the sky, and the atmosphere was cleared of every particle of fire.

“The air had been blowing with fire and passing everywhere like the fire of an incendiary, and it had melted down the golden citadels on the flying mountain of Meru; the mountains of the earth had been set on fire and their flames had spread about like the rays of the twelve suns; the waters of the oceans had boiled with rage and the trees and leaves of the forest had burned in the blaze. The cities and the celestials sitting on their happy seats in the highest heaven of Brahma fell below with all their inhabitants, women and young and old, burned by the flames, and the fire of the end of the kalpa was mixed with the water in the lake of Brahma. The strong winds uprooted the deep-rooted mountains and rocks and plunged them headlong into the fiery mire of the infernal regions. Then the clouds of the end advanced like a troop of dark camels, moving slowly across the blue sky with a grumbling noise. They appeared from a corner of the sky like a huge mountain flashing with lightnings of gorgeous flame, loaded with the waters of the seven oceans, clouds able to rend the great vault of the world with their uproar and to split every side of heaven, which stands on its solid, snow-white and impregnable walls. Doomsday was like the raging ocean: the planets were the rolling islands in the whirlpools of their orbits, the flitting lightnings were its darting water creatures, and the roaring of the clouds was the howling of its waters. The moon, devoured by Rahu and burned by the fiery comet, rose to heaven again and took on the colder form of a cloud, to pour down more moisture than her nightly beams and dews. Lightning like a golden sphere, in the shape of the cold of the Himalaya, held the stupefied waters, woods and hills.

“After the clouds had split the vault of heaven with their harsh crackling and thunder, they dropped solid snow at first, which melted down into liquid rain. There was a jarring of dissonant sounds that grated on the ear, from the bursting of the woods in the wildfire and the stridor of thunderclaps in the bellowing air, and the cracking and crashing of everything in the shattering world. There was a sharp, shrill noise from the warring winds blowing a hundred ways, and the drift of bleak, cold showers of driving snow covering the face of heaven. The vault of heaven, which stands on the blue, sapphire-like pillars of the sky on every side, shattered the earth and its props, the mountains, with the big, heavy showers of the deluge. The earth burst and split with a sound from the blazing furnaces of fire on every side, and the hearts of all living beings were rent by the loud rattling of thunderbolts from heaven. The rain that reigned long over the realm of the fiery earth was now going upward in the form of smoke, which the burning earth heaved from her bosom as her sighs toward heaven. Now the vault of heaven seemed spread over with a network studded with the red lotuses of the fires flying on high, while the dark showers looked like swarms of black bees and the raindrops like their fluttering wings. Every side of heaven rang with the mingled clatter of hailstones and firebrands falling together from the commingled clouds of dire and dreadful appearance, and the scene all around was as fearful to look on as the mingled warfare of two dreadful armies, with dire arms and commingled bloodshed.”

“Hear now of the chaotic state of the world that was brought on by the conflict of earth, air, water and fire with one another, and how the three worlds went under the great waters of the deluge. The dark clouds flying in the air like pitchy ashes overspread the world like a great ocean with whirlpools of rolling smoke. The dark blaze of the fire glimmered among the combustibles and turned all of them into heaps of ashes, which flew and spread over the whole world. The swelling sound of the hissing showers rose as high as if they were blowing the whistle of their victory. All five kinds of cloud were gathered there, and all of them pouring their waters in profusion on the ground: the ashy clouds, the gray clouds, the clouds of the kalpa, the misty clouds and the showering clouds. The howling breezes tottered the foundations of the world; the high wind rose to heaven and filled all space, and bore the flames to burn down the regencies of the gods on every side. The winds dived into the depths of the water and carried its cold to every side of the air, which numbed the senses and deafened the ears of all. A loud hubbub filled the world, raised by the ceaseless fall of rain in columns from the vault of heaven and by the roaring and growling of the fire of the kalpa. The whole earth was filled with water as one ocean, by waterfalls from the clouds of heaven like the torrents of the Ganga and the currents of every river.

“The canopy of the deluge clouds, pierced by the shining sunbeams above them, looked like the leafy tuft on top of the dark tamala tree, with clusters of lurid flowers peeping through the sable leaves. The all-destroying tornado carried off the broken fragments of trees and rocks and the tops of towers and castles aloft in the air, dashed them against the sky-capped mountains and broke them to pieces. The swift stars and planets, clashing with the rapid comets and meteors, struck sparks of fire and flame by their concussion, which burned about like fiery whirlpools in the air. The raging winds raised the waves of the seas as high as mountains, and these, striking the rocks on the seashore, broke and hurled them down with a tremendous noise. The deep, dusty, showering clouds, joined with the wet clouds of the kalpa, threw the bright light of the sun into shade and darkened the air under their sable shadows. The seas overflowed their beds and banks and bore down the broken fragments of the rocks in their bowels, and grew dreadful and dangerous with the falling and rolling of the stones in their current; the huge surges, carrying fragments of rock in their bosom, were raised aloft by the cloud-rending winds and dashed against the shores and broke them down with a deep and tremendous noise.

“Then the deluge cloud broke the vault of heaven asunder and split the bosom of the sky with its loud rattling, and clapped its oak-like hands together to see the universal ocean it had made. Earth, heaven and the infernal regions were torn to pieces and tossed and loosed in the all-devouring waters, and the whole of nature was reduced to its original vacuity, as if the world were an unpeopled and vast desert. Now the dead and the half-dead, the burned and the half-burned bodies of gods and demigods, of gandharvas and men, saw one another in the general ruin and fled and fell on each other with lifted arms and weapons, with the speed of the winds. The winds of the deluge flew like the ashes of a funeral pile, or as a fit of choler drives a person up and down in the air like a column of ash. The heaps of stones collected in the air fell on the ground with force and broke whatever they struck, as hailstones falling out of season clatter down and shatter everything wherever they fall. The rustling breezes howling in the caverns of the mountains resounded with a rumbling from the fall of the mansions of the regents of every side; the winds growled with harsh sounds like the jarring of demons, and blowing among the woods they seemed to be passing through windows. The cities and towns burned with the demonic fire, the mountains and the abodes of the gods flamed with solar gleams, and their sparks flew in the air like swarms of gnats.

“The sea roared with its whirling rainwater on the surface and boiled with the fire under the sea below, destroying alike the big mountains below and the abodes of the gods above. The conflict of the waters and the rocks demolished the cities of the rulers of the earth on every side and hurled down the abodes of the deities and demons, of the siddhas and gandharvas too. The stones and all solid substances were pounded to powder and the firebrands reduced to ashes, and the flying winds blew them about like dust. The hurling down of the abodes of gods and demons, and the dashing together of their walls, gave out a noise like the crashing of clouds or the jangling of metal on metal. The sky was full of peoples and buildings falling from the seven regions of heaven, and the gods themselves whirled in the air like anything fallen into a whirlpool in the sea. All things, burned or unburned, swam up and down in the ethereal ocean, as the winds toss the dry leaves of trees about in the air, and the air was filled with the jarring and jangling of fallen buildings of every metal and mineral in all the worlds. Then the smoky and ashy clouds flew upward, while the heavy, watery clouds lowered on the earth; the swelling billows rose high on the water, and the hills and every other substance sank below. The whirlpools wheeled against one another with a gurgling noise, and the old ocean rolled on with gigantic mountains floating on it like clumps of leaves and shrubs.

“The good deities wailed aloud, and the weary animals moved on slowly; the comets and other portents flew through the air, and the look of the universe was dreadful to see. The sky was full of dead and half-dead bodies, borne into its bosom by the breezes, and it had a gray, dingy appearance, like the dry, discolored foliage of trees in the fading autumn. The world was full of water falling in profuse showers from the mountain peaks, and hundreds of streams flowed down the sides of the mountains and were borne about by the breeze. The fire now ceased to rage with its hundred flames, and the swelling sea ran over its boundary hills and overflowed its banks. Masses of grass mixed with mud and mire appeared like large islands, and the intellect, in the far distant vacuity, appeared like lightning over a forest. The closing rains put out the fire, but the rising fumes and smoke filled the air and hid the heavens, so that the existence of the former world and the former creation went out of remembrance altogether. Then there rose the loud cry of the extinction of creation, and there remained only the One, who is exempt from creation and destruction. Now the winds abated too, which had been struggling without pause to upset the world and filling the universe with their particles as with an unceasing supply of grain.

“The bodies of the comets, clashing against one another, were reduced to sparks of fire like gold dust, and these, going out at last to ashes, filled the vault of heaven with powdered dust. The orb of the earth, shattered to pieces with all its islands and the rest, rolled in large masses together with the fragments of the infernal worlds; the seven regions of heaven and those of the infernal worlds, mixed in one mass with the shattered mass of the earth and its mountains, filled the universal space with the chaotic waters and the winds of the deluge. Then the universal ocean swelled with the waters of all its tributary seas and rivers, and there was a loud uproar of the rolling waters, like the clamor of an enraged madman. The rain fell at first in the form of fountains and cascades, then in falling columns and waterspouts, then in the figure of a palm tree, and then it poured down in torrents; then it ran like the current of a river, flooding and overflowing on every side, and the raining clouds made the surface of the earth one extended sheet of water. The flame of the fire was seen to subside at last, as some very great danger in human life is averted by keeping to the precautions given in the shastras and the advice of the wise. At last the vast vault of the world was as empty of all its contents and as drowned in water as a goodly bel fruit loses its substance from being tossed about in play from the hands of boys.”

“The rainstorm and the falling hail and snow shattered the surface of the earth into parts and parcels, and the violence of the waters kept growing, like the oppression of kings in the last days of the world. The rain falling on the stream of the heavenly Ganga made it run in a thousand streamlets, flowing in huge torrents higher than the mountains of Meru and Mandara. Here the waves rose to the path of the sun, and there the waters sank down and lay dull in the mountain caves; and then that dull element made itself the universal ocean, as when a fool is made the sovereign lord of the earth. The great mountains were hurled down like straws into the deep, broad whirlpools of the water, and the tops of the huge surges reached to the far distant sphere of the sun. The great mountains Meru and Mandara, Vindhya, Sahya and Kailasa dived and moved in it like fishes and sea monsters; the melted earth settled as its soil, and great snakes floated on it like the stalks of plants, with their hoods for lotuses. The half-burned woods and the floating plants were its moss and bushes, and the wet ashes of the burned world were the dirty mud beneath the waters.

“The twelve suns shone out like so many full lotuses in the great lake of the sky, and the huge, heavy cloud of Pushkara, with its dark showers of rain, seemed the bed of blue lotuses, filled with sable leaves. The raging clouds roared aloud from the sides of the mountains like the foaming waves of the ocean, and the sun and the moon rolled like two pieces of sapphire over the cities and towns, darkened by the clouds. The gods and giants and people at large were blown up and carried into the air, until at last they flew up from their lightness and fell into the disk of the sun. The clouds rained in torrents with a loud clattering, and their currents carried the floating rocks into the distant sea as if they were bubbles of water; and the deluging clouds rolled about the air after pouring their water in floods on the earth, as if in search of other clouds, with their mouths and eyes open to see whether any raining cloud was still left. The rushing tornado filled the air with uproar and with one gust of wind blasted the boundary mountain from its base into the air. The furious winds gathered the waters of the deep to the height of mountains, which ran with a great gurgling noise on every side to drown the earth under them. The world was torn to pieces by the clashing of bodies driven together by the tempestuous winds, which scattered and drove millions of beings pell-mell against one another.

“The hills floated on the waves like straws, and dashing against the disk of the sun, they broke it to pieces as if with pelted stones. The great void of the universe spread the great net of the waters, as it were, across its ample space, and caught the great hills in it, like big eels caught in fishing nets. The great animal bodies rising or plunging in the deep, living or dead, traced the eddies made by whirlpools and whales on the surface of the waters, the one sinking downward and the other rising up. Those still alive floated about the tops of the sinking mountains, which looked like the floating froth of the sea, while the gods fluttered like gnats and flies above them. The spacious firmament on high, filled with innumerable raindrops shining like bubbles of water in the air, looked like the thousand eyes of Indra looking down on the rains; Indra, the god of heaven, with his body of the autumn sky and his eyes of the bubbling raindrops, was watching the floating clouds in the midway skies flowing like the currents of rivers on high. The clouds Pushkara and Avartaka, with their world-overflowing floods, met and joined in a mutual embrace, like two winged mountains flying in the air and clashing against one another.

“These clouds, satisfied at last with devouring the world under their all-swallowing waters, were now roaring loudly and flying lightly in the air, as if dancing with their uplifted, hilly arms. The clouds poured their floods of water from above, the mountaintops flamed in the midway sky, and the huge snakes that had supported the earth dove deep into the mud of the infernal regions now that the earth was gone. The incessant showers filled the three regions, like the triple stream of the Ganga running in three directions; they drowned the highest mountains, whose tops floated like froth in the universal ocean. The floating mountains struck the sphere of heaven and broke it into fragments, and the fairies of heaven floated like pretty lotuses on the surface of the waters. The universe was reduced to a universal ocean, roaring with a tremendous noise, and the three worlds, split to pieces, were carried away into the waters of the endless deep. There remained no one to save another, and no one who was not swept away by the flood; for who is there that can save us, when all-devouring time takes us in its clutches? There remained neither sky nor horizon; there was no up and no down in the infinite space; there was no creation and no creature anywhere, and everything lay under one infinite sheet of water.”

“With her horrid, wide-open jaws she seemed to view the spacious vacuum of the air, and with her long legs and outstretched arms she seemed to measure the depth and breadth of open space on every side. Her frame was as faint as if reduced by long fasting, and it stooped lower and lower as if pressed down by hunger, wavering to and fro as a body of sable clouds is driven back and forth by the winds. Her stature was so lean and long that it could not stand by itself; it was held up like a skeleton by the ligaments of the ribs and the ligatures of the arteries that kept it from falling. In a word, her stature was so tall and towering that it took my whole day’s journey through the upper and the lower skies to see the top of her head and the base of her feet. Then I saw her body as a bush of tangled thickets and thistles, from the complicated ligatures of the tendons and arteries that fastened all its members together. She was wrapped in robes of many colors, and her head was decked with the luminaries, like a headdress of lotus flowers; she was beset by the pure light of heaven, and her robe flashed like fire fanned by the breath of the winds. The lobes of her long ears were adorned with rings of snakes and pendants of human skulls, her kneebones stood out like two dried gourd shells, and her two dark dugs hung loose on her breast.

“The braid of hair on top of her head was adorned with the feathers of peacocks, grown and young, and defied the crowned head of the lord of the gods and the circlet of his discus. Her moon-like teeth cast their luster like moonbeams, and it glistened in the dark ocean of chaotic night as moonbeams play on the surface and the rising waves of the dark blue deep. Her long stature rose like a tall tree in the sky, her two kneepans were like two dry gourds growing on it, and they clattered like a tree rustling in the breeze as she turned about in the air. As she danced in the air with her somber arms lifted high, they looked like the rising waves of the dark ocean of eternity. Now she lifted one arm, and then many more, and at last she showed her countless hands, to play her part in the playhouse of the universe; now she showed one face, then another, and then many more without end, to represent her various and infinite parts in the vast theater of the world; now she danced on one foot, and the next instant on both her feet; one moment she stood on a hundred legs and the next on her numberless feet. I understood this person to be the figure of chaos, the one the wise have fixed as the goddess known by the name of Kali, the eternal night; I knew her in that moment as the figure of the dark night, kalaratri, which the wise have determined to be the image of dark eternity and named the goddess Kali.”

“The sockets of her three eyes flashed with a flame like that of a furnace, and her forest was as glaring and flaring as the burning Indranila mountain. Her cheekbones were as frightful as two high hills projecting over her hideous open mouth, which looked like a mountain cavern able to engulf the whole world. Her shoulder blades were as high as two mountain peaks piercing the starry frame, where they were decorated with clusters of stars as with strings of pearls. She danced with her outstretched arms like the waving branches of trees and showed the brightness of her nails on them like blooming blossoms, or like so many full moons shining under the blue sky; as she turned and tossed her sable hands on every side she seemed a dark cloud moving about the sky, and the luster of her nails seemed to shed the splendor of the stars all around. The face of the sky was like a forest floor taken up by the black arbors of her two sable arms, and her outstretched fingers, like the twigs of the trees, were covered with the blossoms of their pearly nails, which waved like flowers in the blue sky. With legs taller than the tallest tala and tamala trees she stalked over the burning earth and put to shame the largest trees that grew on it, which burned without being able to move. The long, flowing hair on her head reached and spread across the skies, and seemed about to make black vestures for the dark elephantine clouds moving about the empty air.

“She breathed from her nostrils a rapid gale that carried the mountains aloft in the air and blew great gales in the sky, resounding with loud peals from every side of its boundless spheres; the breath of her nostrils and her mouth blew in unison all about the circle of the universe and kept the great sphere in its constant rotation, as if in its harmonic progression. Then I came to see, as I looked at her with attention, that her stature was growing with her dancing, until at last I found it filling the whole space of the air and the sky. And as long as I went on watching her in her dance, I saw the great mountains hanging all about her body, as if they were a string of jewels around her person. The dark clouds of the deluge made a sable garb about her body, and the phenomena of the three worlds appeared as the various decorations that adorned her person. The Himalaya and Sumeru were her two silver and golden earrings, and the rolling worlds were the ringing trinkets and belts about her waist. The ranges of the boundary mountains were chains and wreaths of flowers on her person, and the cities and towns and villages and islands were like the leaves of trees scattered about her. All the cities and towns of the earth appeared as ornaments on her person, and all the three worlds, with their seasons and divisions of time, were ornaments and garments on her body. The streams of the holy rivers, the Ganga and the Yamuna, hung down as strings of pearls from the ears of her other heads, and the virtues and vices recorded in the shrutis were the decorations of her ears as well.

“The four Vedas were her four breasts, which exuded the sweet milk of religion in the manner of her sweat, and the doctrines of the other shastras flowed as milk from their nipples. The armor and arms and the various weapons she bore on her body, the sword and the shield, the spear and the mallet, decorated her person like wreaths of flowers. The gods and all the fourteen kinds of living beings were set as lines of hair on her person, in her form of animated nature itself. The cities and villages and hills that were situated in her person all joined in their merry dance with her, in expectation of their resurrection in the same forms again, and the unstable, moving creation that rested in her looked to me as if it were situated in the next world, dancing with joy in the hope of its revival. The chaotic Kali, having devoured and assimilated the world into herself, danced with joy like a peacock after gorging a snake in its belly and at the appearance of a dark cloud. The world went on remaining in her wide-extended figure and showing its real form there, as the shadow of a thing is seen in a mirror and the situations of countries are shown on a map. I saw her sometimes stand still, with the whole world and all its forests and mountains moving and dancing in her person, and all forms reduced into her and produced from her again and again. I saw the harmonious oscillation of the whole in the mirror of that person, and the repeated rising and setting of the world in that circle, without its utter extinction.

“I marked the revolution of the stars and the rising of the mountains inside its circumference, and I watched the throngs of gods and demigods assemble and disperse on her in time, as flights of gnats and flies are driven to and fro by the winds in the open air. All these heavenly bodies and these islands in the ocean moved around her like the flying wheels of a broken war chariot, and they whirled up and down about her like the rocks and woods in a whirlpool. She was clad in the robes of the blue clouds, furled and folded by the breezes of the air, and the cracking of wood and bones under her feet answered the sound of her footsteps and anklets below. The world was filled with the noise of the concussion and separation of its objects and the tumult of worldly people, appearing as passing shadows in a mirror, or as the entrances and exits of actors in a play. The high-headed Meru and the long-armed boundary mountains seemed to dance about her in their representations in the moving clouds, and the forest trees seen in the clouds seemed to perform their circling dance all around. The high-swelling seas heaved their waves to heaven, carrying with them the uprooted woods of the coasts, and then hurled them down and sank them in the waters below; the cities were seen rolling with a tremendous noise in the waters below, and no relics of houses and towers and the habitations of humankind were left beneath. As the chaotic night roved at random in this way, the sun and the moon with their light and shade found shelter in the tops of her nails, where they sparkled like threads of gold.

“She was clad in the blue mantle of the clouds and adorned with necklaces of frost and icicles, and the worlds hung about her like the trickling dewdrops of her perspiration. The blue sky was the veil over her head, the infernal region her footstool, the earth her bowels, and the several sides of the compass so many arms on her; the seas and their islands were the cavities and pimples on her person, the hills and rocks her rib bones, and the winds of heaven her vital airs. As she went on in her dancing, the huge mountains and rocks swung and reeled about her gigantic body as her attendant satellites, and the mountain trees turning around her seemed to weave chaplets and dance about in congratulation of her beginning a new kalpa. The gods and demigods, the hairless serpents and worms and all the hairy bodies were all component parts of her body, and being unable to stay still while she was in motion, were all turning round with her. She wove the threefold cord of the sacred thread, made of acts, sacrifices and knowledge, which she proclaimed aloud in the thundering voice of the triple Vedas. Before her, in the infinite space, there was no heaven or earth, no up or down; the one became the other by its constant rotation, like the wheel of a vehicle. Her wide-open nostrils constantly breathed out hoarse currents of her breath, which gave rise to the winds of the air and their loud blowing and whistling, and her hundredfold arms, revolving in all four directions, gave the sky the look of a forest filled with the tall heads of trees and their branches, shaken by a furious tornado in the air.”

“At last my steady eyesight grew tired with watching the varieties of productions from her body, and their motions and movements, like the maneuvers of an army at war. Mountains were seen rolling as if by an engine, and the cities of the celestials falling downward, and all these appearances took place in the mirror of her person. The Meru mountains were torn and carried away like branches of trees, the Malayas were tossed about like flying leaves, the Himalayas fell like dewdrops, and all earthly things were scattered like straws. The hills and rocks fled away, the Vindhyas flew like aerial things in the air, the woods rolled in the whirlpools, and the stars floated on the sea of heaven like swans and geese on the lakes below. Islands floated like straws on the ocean of her body, the seas were worn like a circlet on it, and the abodes of the gods were like lotus flowers blooming in the great lake of her person. As we see the images of cities in our dreams and in the darkness of night as clearly as we see them in the fair daylight, so I saw everything in her dark body as vividly as it had shone in broad sunlight. All things, however immovable, the mountains and the seas and the arbors, seemed to be moving in her person and dancing about in it. So the wandering worlds danced about in the great circle of her spacious body, as if they were mere straws in the vast ocean of creation: the sea rolled on the mountain and the high hills pierced the hollow of the heaven above; the heaven with its sun and moon turned below the earth, and the earth with all its islands and mountains, cities, forests and flowering gardens danced in heaven around the sun.

“The mountains wandered with the earth through the surrounding sky, the sea passed beyond the horizon, the cities and all human habitations traveled through other skies, and the rivers and lakes passed through other regions, like objects reflecting themselves in different mirrors, and as swiftly as a leaf torn from a tree by a tempest is hurled on and carried far off to distant parts. Fishes skimmed through the desert air as they swim through the watery plain, and cities were set in the empty air as firmly as they are fixed on the solid earth; the waters were raised to heaven by the clouds, which the winds drove back again to pour their waters on the mountaintops. The groups of stars wandered about like the lights of a thousand lamps lit in the sky; they seemed to shed gems with their rays as they rolled, or to scatter flowers from every side on the heads of the gods and the aerial beings. Creations and destructions went with her like fleeting days and nights, like jewels of brilliant and black gems on her person; they were like the two fortnights, her white and her black wing on either side. The sun and the moon were the two bright gems on her person, and the clusters of stars her necklaces of lesser gems; the clear firmament was her white apparel, and the flashes of lightning the brocaded fringes of her garment.

“As she danced her giddy dance of destruction, she huddled the worlds under her feet as her anklets, raising a jingling like that of her trinkets. In her warfare with the jarring elements, which rolled on like the waves of the ocean and darkened the daylight like the waving swords of warriors, she listened to the tumult of all the worlds and their peoples. The gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, with the regents of the sun and the moon and fire and all the other gods and demigods who shine in their several offices, were all made to fly before her like a flight of gnats, with the speed of lightning. Her body is a gathering of conflicting elements and contrary principles, of creation and destruction, existence and nonexistence, happiness and misery, life and death, and all injunctions and prohibitions. The various states of production and existence, the continuance of action and motion and their cessation, which seem to take place in her body as in the bodies of all corporeal beings, together with the revolution of the earth and all the other worlds in the empty air, are all false delusions of our minds, since there is nothing in reality except a boundless vacuity. Life and death, peace and trouble, joy and sorrow, war and truce, anger and fear, envy and enmity, faith and distrust and every other opposite feeling go with this worldly life and dwell together in the same person, like the various gems stored in one chest. The intellectual sphere of her body teems with notions of multifarious worlds, which appear like phantoms in the open air, or like the fallacies of vision of a dim-sighted man.

“Whether the world is quiescent in the intellect or a passing phenomenon of outward vision, it appears both as stable and as moving, like the reflection of objects in a standing or a shaking mirror. All worldly objects are as fluctuating as the changing shows in a magic play; they forsake their forms and take others as quickly as the fickle desires of whimsical boys shift from one object to another. It is the combination of causal powers that brings about the production of bodies, and their separation that brings about their dissolution, as the gathering of grain makes a granary and the taking of it away makes it disappear. The goddess appears now in one form and then in another; now she becomes as small as a thumb, and in a moment she fills the sky with the bigness of her body. That goddess is all in all; she is changed through everything in the world; she is the cosmos itself and the power of the intellect also, and she fills the whole concavity of the sky with her form of pure vacuity. She is the intellect, which embraces all that is contained in the three worlds and in the three times, and it is she who expands the worlds that are contained in her, as a painter draws out the figures pictured in the receptacle of his mind. She is the all-comprehending, plastic nature or form of all things, and being one with the intellectual spirit, she is as calm and quiet as it is; and being uniform in her nature, she is varied into endless forms in the twinkling of her eye.

“All these visible things appear in her as marks of lotuses and carved figures are seen in a hollow stone; her body is the hollow sphere of heaven, and her mind is full of all forms, appearing like waves in the depth of the sea, or like the sights of things in the bosom of a crystal stone. In this way the very furious goddess Bhairavi, the consort of the dread god Bhairava, the lord of destruction, was dancing about with her fierce forms filling the whole firmament. On one side the earth was burning with the fire that issued from the eye on the forehead of the all-destroying Rudra, and on the other his consort Rudrani was dancing like a forest blown away by a hurricane. She was armed with many other weapons besides the ones I have named, a spade, a mortar and pestle, a mallet, a mace and others, which adorned her body like a garland of flowers, and in this manner she danced and scattered the flowers of her garlands on every side in her acts of destruction and re-creation, each a preliminary to the other. She hailed the god Bhairava, the regent of the skies, who joined her in the dance with his form as big and high as hers. May the god Bhairava, with his companion the goddess of the chaotic night, preserve you all in their heroic dance, to the beating of high-sounding drums and the blowing of their buffalo horn, as they drink their bowls of blood, adorned with wreaths of flowers hanging from their heads to their breasts.”

“Who is this goddess,” Rama asked, “who dances like that in her act of destruction, and why does she carry pots and fruits on her body as her wreaths of flowers? Tell me whether the worlds are wholly destroyed at the end, or whether they become extinct in the goddess Kali and reside in her person; and when does her dance come to an end?”

“Neither is he a male nor is she a female,” Vasistha said, “and there was no dancing of the one and no duality of the two in their spirit; such is their unity, and such the nature of their action of destruction; neither of them has any form or figure of its own, except that they are personified so. That which is without beginning or end is the divine Intellect alone, which, in the manner of infinite vacuity, is the cause of all causes. It is the uncreated and endless light that exists from eternity and extends over all space. The calm and quiet state of that ethereal space is known as Shiva, the tranquil, and its change to confusion at the end is named Bhairava, the dreadful. It is impossible for the pure and formless intellect to remain alone and aloof from its association with plastic nature, as you are not likely to find any gold that exists without one form or another. Tell me, you who know, how the intellect can subsist without its intelligence, and where a pepper can be had without its pungency. Consider how there can be any gold without its form of a bracelet or some other, and how a substance can exist without its substantial property or nature. Say what the extract of the sugarcane is unless it has its sweetness; you cannot call it the juice of the sugarcane unless you find the sugar’s flavor in it. When the intellect is without its intellection you cannot call it the intellect anymore; and the empty form of the intellect is never liable to any change or annihilation.

“Vacuity admits of no variety besides keeping the identity of its own emptiness, and in order to take on a diversity the void must remain a void as ever. So the unchanged and unagitated essence, which is essential to it, must be without beginning and without limit, and full of all potency in itself, since vacuum is the medium both of creation and of annihilation. And so the creation of the three worlds and their destruction, the earth, the firmament and the sides of the compass, together with all the acts of creation and destruction, are the indiscriminate phenomena of vacuum. All births, deaths, delusions and ignorance, being and not being, knowledge and dullness, restraint and liberty, and every event good or evil; knowledge and its want, the body and its loss, the passing and the lasting, mobility and inertia, and I and you and he; all good and evil, goodness and badness, ignorance and intelligence, with the durations of time and space, substance and action, and all our thoughts, fancies and imaginings; the sight of the forms of things and the thoughts of the mind, the action of the body, understanding and the senses, with the elements of earth and water, fire, air and vacuum extending all about us: these and all others proceed from the pure intellectual vacuity of the Divine spirit, which resides in its empty form in everything and is always without decay and decrease. All things subsist in pure vacuum and are as pure as the void itself; there is nothing besides this empty air, though they appear as real as a mountain in our hollow dream.

“The intellectual spirit, which I have called the transcendent void, is the same that we call jiva, the sempiternal, and Rudra, the august. He is adored as Hari or Vishnu by some, and as Brahma, the great progenitor of men, by others; he is called the sun and the moon, and Indra, Varuna, Yama, Viraj and the god of fire too. He is the wind, the cloud and the sea, the sky, and everything that is or is not, all that manifests itself in the empty sphere of the Intellect. In this way all things, appearing under different names and taken for true by the ignorant eye, vanish into nothing in their spiritual light, which shows them in their pure intellectual natures. In the understanding of the ignorant the world appears apart from the spirit; but to the intellectual soul the vacuity of the intellect is known to be situated in the Divine spirit, and so there is no distinction of unity and duality for the knowing mind. The living soul is tossed about like a wave in the ocean of the world, and runs the course of its repeated births and deaths in it, until it comes to know the nature of the supreme spirit, when it becomes as immortal and perfect as the eternal soul and one with it. By this knowledge of the universal soul the human soul reaches its perfect tranquility; it finds itself no longer the fluctuating wave in the ocean of the world, and views itself and everything else as calm and quiet as the eternal and infinite spirit of God.”

“I have already told you that Shiva is the representation of the empty intellect; but Rudra, whom I have described as dancing about, is not. The form attributed to him, and to the goddess Kali, is not their real figure; it is a representation of the grosser aspect of the intellectual vacuity, which is of a dark complexion. With my clear intellectual vision I saw that sphere of the intellect in its clear and bright light, as the body of Shiva, but it did not look so to others, who in their ignorance saw it as dark as the black complexion of the goddess at his side. I saw at the end of the kalpa the two specters of delusion appearing before me, the one the furious Rudra and the other the ferocious Bhairava, and I knew them both to be delusion, creatures of my mistaken fancy. The great chasm that is seen to exist in the empty sphere of the Intellect is the same that is conceived under the idea of a vast void and represented as the dreadful Bhairava. We can have no conception of anything without knowing the relation between the term and what it signifies, and it is for that reason that I have related this to you as I found it.

“Whatever idea is conveyed to the mind by the significant term, know, Rama, that the very same is presently presented to the outward sight by the power of delusion, as a magical appearance. In reality there is no destruction, and no destructive power of Bhairava or Bhairavi; all of these are erroneous conceptions fleeting through the empty space of the intellect. These appearances are like the cities seen in our dreams, or a war shown in our fancy; they are like the utopian realms of a person’s imagination, or the fits of feeling that come over us at some heart-stirring description. As a fairy castle is seen in the field of fancy, and strings of pearls hang in the empty air, and mists and vapors darken the clear atmosphere, so troops of fallacies fly all about the firmament of the intellect. But the clear sky of the pure intellect shines of itself in itself, and when it shines in that state it shows the world in itself. The soul shows itself in its intellectual sphere the way a figure is seen in a picture, and the soul manifests also in the raging fire of the final destruction.

“So far I have told you of the formlessness of the forms of Shiva and his consort Shivani; hear me now on their dance, which was literally no dancing at all. Sensation cannot exist anywhere without the action of the power of intellection, as it is not possible for anything to be a nothing or to appear otherwise than what it is. So the powers of sensation and perception are naturally united with all things, as Rudra and his consort are blended together, like gold and silver appearing as one and the same metal. Whatever is sensation, and wherever it exists, the same must be a sensible object, and have action or motion for its natural property. Whatever is the action of the Intellect, whose consolidated form is called by the name of Shiva, the same is the cause of our motions too, and since these are moved by our will and our desires, they are called the dance, the vacillations, of the intellectual power. So the furious form of Rudra, which the god Shiva takes on at the end of a kalpa, and which is said to dance about at that time, is to be known as the vibration of the divine intellect.”

“This world being nothing in reality,” Rama said, “in the sight of the right observer, and whatever remains of it in any sense being destroyed as well at the end of the kalpa, how does it happen, at the end of the kalpa, when everything is lost in the formless void of vacuity, that this consolidated form of the intellect known as Shiva remains and thinks in itself?”

“If you entertain that doubt, Rama, then hear how you can get over the great ocean of your doubts about the unity and the duality of the deity. All things being extinct at the end, there remains the thinking, subjective intellect alone, with nothing objective to think upon. The subjective soul then thinks of nothing, and remains quite tranquil in itself, like the unmoving and mute stone, resting in the solid vacuity of its omniscience. If it reflects on anything at all, it is only on itself, because it is the nature of the intellect to dwell calmly in itself. As the intellect shows itself the inner city it sees within itself in a dream, so there is nothing in real existence anywhere except the knowledge of it, which is inherent in the intellect. The divine soul, knowing everything in itself and in its empty intellect, sees the manifestation of the universe at the time of creation by the simple development of itself. The intellect develops itself of its own nature within its empty cell at first, and then in a moment it envelops this erroneous universe in itself, at its will, at the time of destruction.

“The intellect expands itself in itself in its natural state of vacuum, and devolves itself likewise into its conceptions of I and you and all the rest, which are only false ideas and creatures of its imagination. So there is no duality and no unity, nor an empty vacuity either; there is neither an intelligence nor the want of it, nor both together; and so there is neither my I nor your you. There is nothing that ever thinks of anything, and nothing whatever that is thought of as an object of its own nature; so there is nothing that thinks or reflects, and all is rest and silence. It is the unalterable steadiness of the mind that is the ultimate samadhi, the perfection of all the shastras; so the living yogi ought to remain in his meditation like the mute and immovable stone. Now, Rama, go on discharging your ordinary duties, as they are laid on you by the rules of your race; but stay quiet and steady in your spiritual part, renouncing all worldly pride and vanity, and enjoy a peaceful composure in your mind and soul, like that of the serene and calm and clear concavity of the sky.”

“Tell me,” Rama said, “why the goddess Kali is said to be dancing about, and why she is armed with an axe and other weapons and arrayed in her wreaths of flowers.”

“It is the vacuum of the intellect that is called both Shiva and Bhairava,” Vasistha said, “and it is this intellectual power or force, which is one with it, that is called Kali and its consorting mind. As the wind is one with its vacillation and the fire is one with its heat, so the intellect is one with its oscillation. As the wind is invisible even in its vacillations, and the heat unseen even in its act of burning, so the intellect is imperceptible in spite of its acting, and so it is called Shiva, the calm and quiet. It is because of the wondrous power of his vibration that he is known to us, and without it we could have no knowledge of his existence; know this Shiva, then, to be the all-powerful Brahman, who is otherwise a quiescent being, unknowable even by the learned and wise. His oscillation is the power of his will, which has spread out this visible appearance, as it is the will of an embodied, living man that builds a city according to his thought. It is the will of Shiva that creates all this world out of its formless state, and this creative power is the Intelligence of God and the intellection of living beings. This power takes also the form of nature in her formation of the creation, and is called the creation itself, because she takes on herself the representation of the phenomenal world. She is represented with a crest of the fire of the sea on her head, and dry and withered in her body; she is called a fury for her furiousness, and the lotus-like for the blue-lotus complexion of her person.

“She is called by the names Jaya and Siddha, victory and fortune, because victory and prosperity go with her at all times. She is called Aparajita, the invincible, and Virya, the mighty, and Durga, the inaccessible, and she is renowned as Uma, because she is composed of the powers of the three letters of the mystic syllable Om. She is called Gayatri, from being chanted by everybody, and Savitri, from being the mother of all beings; she is named Sarasvati likewise, for giving us insight into whatever appears before our sight. She bears the name Gauri from her fair complexion, and Bhavani from being the source of all beings and from her association with the body of Bhava, who is Shiva; she is also called the letter A, to signify that she is the vital breath of all waking and sleeping bodies. Uma means moreover the digit of the moon, which lights the worlds from the forehead of Shiva; and the bodies of the god and the goddess are both painted black and blue, because they represent the two hemispheres of heaven. The sky appears dark and bright from the two complexions of these divinities, who are situated in their empty forms in the bosom of the great vacuum itself. Though they are formless as the empty air, they are conceived as the firstborn of the void, and they are figuratively attributed with more or fewer hands and feet, and with as many weapons held in them. Now know the reason for attributing to the goddess her many weapons and instruments: it is no more than to represent her as the patron of all the arts and their employments.

“She was one with the supreme soul, as its power of self-meditation from all eternity, and she took the shapes of the acts of sacred ablution, religion, sacrifice and holy gifts as her primal forms in the Vedas. She is of the form of the blue sky, comely in appearance, and she is the beauty of the visible things; she is the motion of all objects, and the varieties of their movements are the various modes of the dancing of the goddess. She is the agent of Brahma in his laws of the birth, decay and death of beings, and all cities and countries, mountains and islands hang on her agency like a string of gems about her neck. She holds all the parts of the world together by her power of attraction and infuses her force into them all as momentum, as if into the different limbs and members of her body, and she bears the various names of Kali, Kalika and the rest according to her several functions. As the one great body of the cosmos she links all its parts together, like her limbs to her heart, and moves them all about her, though this formless body of force has never been seen or known by anyone. Know this ever-oscillating power to be never different from, or unconnected with, the quiescent spirit of Shiva, the changeless god; and do not think the fluctuating winds ever apart from the calm vacuum in which they abide and vibrate forever. The world is a display of the glory of God, as the moonlight is a manifestation of the brightness of that luminary, which is otherwise dark and obscure; so the lord God is always tranquil and quiet, without any change or decay, apart from his works.

“There is not the least shadow of fluctuation in the supreme soul; it is the action of this agency that appears to be moving us. That is said to be the tranquil spirit of Shiva, the god, which turns back from action and reposes in its understanding, apart from the active energy that possesses the intellect as its goddess. The intellect reposing in its natural state of understanding is styled Shiva, but the active energy of the intellectual power is what passes under the name of the great goddess of action. That bodiless power takes on the imaginary forms of these worlds, with all the peoples visible in them in the daylight. It is this power that supports the earth with all its seas and islands, its forests, deserts and mountains; it maintains the Vedas with their branches and their subsidiary branches, the shastras, the sciences and the psalms. It ordains the injunctions and prohibitions of the law and gives the rules of auspicious and inauspicious acts and rites; it directs the sacrifices and the sacrificial fires and the modes of offering cakes and oblations. This goddess is adorned with the sacrificial implements, the mortar and pestle, the post and the ladle and the rest, and she is arrayed with the weapons of war as well, the spear, the arrows and the lance; she is arrayed with the mace and many missile weapons too, and accompanied by horses and elephants and valiant gods. In short, she fills the fourteen worlds and occupies the earth with all its seas and islands.”

“I will ask you now,” Rama said, “whether the thoughts of creation in the divine mind subsisted in their ideal forms in the Divine soul, or whether they were incorporated in the forms of Rudra, which are false and fictitious.”

“Rama, she is truly the power of the Intellect, the divine mind, as you have rightly said; and all these things that are being thought of by her are all true as her thoughts, though not in their visible appearances. The thoughts that are subjective and imprinted on the inner intellect, from preconceived desire or reminiscence, are never untrue, just as the reflection of our face cast in a mirror from outside cannot be a false shadow. But those thoughts are false which enter the mind from outside, like the whole city of our desires and false imaginings, and the fallacies of these are removed by our right reflection and our sound judgment. In my opinion the firm belief and persuasion of the human soul in anything whatever is reckoned as true by everyone, like the picture of a thing in a mirror, the representations of things seen in a dream, the forms of things seen in a picture, and the creatures of our imagination, which are all taken for true and real by everyone for the time, and for their serviceableness to him. You may object and say that things absent and at a distance from you are in no way serviceable to you, and yet they cannot be said to be nonexistent or unreal, because they come into use when they are present before us.

“As the productions of a distant country become of use when they are brought before us, so the objects of our dreams and thoughts are equally true and useful when they are present in view; and so every idea of a definite shape and signification is a certain reality, as is that of the goddess Kali. As an object or its action passing under anyone’s sight is believed true by its observer, so whatever thought passes in his mind is thought true by him; but nothing that is seen or thought of by one person is ever known to or believed by anyone else, or counted as true by him. It is therefore in the power of the Divine Intellect that the embryo of the creation is contained forever; and the whole universe is ever existent in the divine soul, wholly unknown to others. All that is past, present and ever to be in the future, together with all the desires and thoughts of others, are forever really existent in the divine spirit, or it would not be the universal soul. It is the adepts in yoga alone who acquire the power of prying into the hearts and minds of others, as others come to see different countries by passing over the barriers of hills and dales. As the dream of a man fallen into deep sleep is not disturbed by the shaking of his bed, so the fixed thoughts of a person are never lost by his removal from one place to another.

“So the movements of the dancing body of Kali, the creative energy of God, cause no fluctuation in the world that is contained within it, just as the shaking of a mirror makes no alteration in the reflection cast on it. The great bustle and commotion of the world, though it seems as real as anything, is a mere delusion in sober reality, so it is all the same whether it moves or does not move at all. When is the dreaming scene, the city seen in our dream, said to be a true one, and when is it pronounced false; when is it said to exist, and when to be in ruins? Know the phenomenal world set out before you to be mere illusion, and it is your sheer fallacy to view the unreal visibles as sure realities. Know your conception of the reality of the three worlds to be as false as the aerial castle of your imagination or the air-drawn city of your fond desire; it is like the vision in your dream, or any conception of your error. That this is I, the subject, and the other is the objective world, is the interminable error that binds the mind fast forever; it is a gross mistake, like that of the ignorant who believe the endless sky to be bounded and take it for black or blue; but the learned are released from this blunder and rest in the only existent One.”

“So the goddess went on dancing with her outstretched arms, which with their movements seemed to make a shaking forest of tall pines in the empty sky. This power of the intellect, ignorant of herself and ever prone to action, went on dancing about with her decorations of various tools and instruments. She was arrayed with every kind of weapon in all her thousand arms, the bow and arrows, the spear and lance, the mallet and club, the sword and every sort of missile; she was conversant with all things in being and not in being, and busy at every moment of passing time. She held the world in the vibration of her mind, as airy cities and castles consist in the power of imagination; it is she herself who is the world, as the imagination itself is the imaginary city. She is the volition of Shiva, as fluctuation is innate in the air; and as the air is still without its vibration, so Shiva is quite quiet without his will or volition, represented as his female energy in the form of Kali. The formless volition becomes the formal creation in the same manner as the formless sky produces the wind, which vibrates into sound; so does the will of Shiva bring the world out of itself.

“When this volitive energy of Kali dances and sports in the void of the Divine mind, the world comes out all at once, as if by the union of the active will with the great void of the supreme Mind. Touched by the dark volitive power, the supreme soul of Shiva is dissolved into water, just as the fire under the sea is put out by its contact with the water of the sea. No sooner had this power come in contact with Shiva, the prime cause of all, than the same power of will inclined and turned to take the shape of nature and to be converted into some physical form. Then, forsaking her boundless and elemental form, she took on herself the gross and limited forms of land and hills, and then became of the form of beautiful arbors and trees. After taking various other forms, she became the formless void and became one with the infinite vacuity of Shiva, just as a river with all its headlong velocity enters the immensity of the sea. Then she became one with Shiva by giving up her title of Shiva-ship, and this Shiva, the female form, became the same as Shiva the prime male, who is of the form of the formless void and perfect tranquility.”

“Tell me,” Rama said, “how that sovereign goddess Shiva could obtain her quiet by coming in contact with the supreme god Shiva, and forget her former activity altogether.”

“Know, Rama, the goddess Shiva to be the will of the god Shiva; she is styled nature, and famed as the great Illusion of the world. And this great god is called the lord of nature, and the prime male too; he is of the form of air and is represented in the form of Shiva, which is as calm and quiet as the autumn sky. The great goddess is the energy of the Intellect and its will as well, always active as force put in motion; she abides in the world in the manner of its nature, and roves all about in the manner of the great delusion. She ranges throughout the world as long as she is ignorant of her lord Shiva, who is always satisfied with himself, without decay or disease, without beginning or end, and without a second to himself. But no sooner is this goddess conscious of herself as one and the same with the god of self-consciousness, than she is joined with her lord Shiva and becomes one with him. Nature coming in contact with the spirit forsakes her character of gross nature and becomes one with the sole unity, as a river is incorporated in the ocean. The river falling into the sea is no longer the river but the sea, and its water joining the seawater becomes the same briny water. So the mind that inclines toward Shiva is united with him and finds its rest in him, as iron is sharpened by returning to its quarry, as a knife is sharpened on the whetstone.

“As the shadow of a man entering a forest is lost among the shade of the wilderness, so the shades of nature, the natural propensities, are all absorbed into the shade of the Divine spirit. But the mind that remembers its own nature and forgets that of the eternal spirit has to return again to this world, and never attains its spiritual felicity. An honest man goes on living among thieves while he takes them for honest men; the moment he learns what they are, he shuns their company and leaves the place. So the mind lives with unreal dualities as long as it is ignorant of the transcendent reality, but as it becomes acquainted with the true unity, it is sure to be united with it, forsaking its dualistic creed. When the ignorant mind comes to know the supreme felicity that attends the state of its self-extinction, its nirvana, it is ready to resort to it, as the inland stream runs to join the boundless sea. So long does the mind roam bewildered in its repeated births in the tumultuous world as it does not find its ultimate bliss in the Supreme, to whom it may fly like a bee to its honeycomb. Who is there that would forget his spiritual knowledge, having once known its bliss; and who is there that forsakes the sweet, having once tasted its flavor? Say, Rama, who would not run to relish the delicious draught that pacifies all our woes and pains, prevents our repeated births and deaths, and puts an end to all our delusions in this darksome world?” That was the end of the world the woman had called home. Vasistha turned back to the stone.