Suraghu and Parigha: From Kingship to Natural Samadhi

The Burden of Judgment

"Hear an old legend, Rama, that illustrates what I have been saying," Vasistha said. "It is the account of the Kirata chief Suraghu, and it is a marvel." Far in the north there is a tract of land that lies white as a heap of camphor under its snowfalls, and seems to smile the way a clear night smiles under the moon of the bright fortnight. It sits on the summit of the Himalaya and is called the peak of Kailasa, the seat of Shiva, chief of all peaks, where no mountain elephant roams. It is white as the bed of Vishnu in the ocean of milk, bright as Indra’s heaven, fair as the seat of Brahma at the center of the lotus, snow-white as the peak of Kedara that Shiva loves. Rudraksha trees wave over it, the apsaras parade across it, and the rays of its many gems make it look, from a distance, like the milky ocean in motion. The pramathas, Shiva’s rowdy attendants, and the other orders of demigods frolic there like the blossoms of the ashoka when the dancing girls kick them loose. Shiva himself wanders here and watches the waterfalls come out of the mountain’s caves and go back into them, as the moonstones in the rock melt and freeze.

In that country there is a stretch of ground enclosed by trees, by plants and creepers and shrubs of every kind, cut through by lakes and hills and rivers, and scattered with herds of deer of many species. Here lived a race of the Kiratas called the Hemajatas, as many as the ants at the foot of a big banyan. They lived like owls in the shade and the hollows of the trees. They ate the fruits and flowers and herbs of the nearest forests, and they lived by felling the rudraksha trees of Kailasa and selling the wood.

They had a chief, as noble in mind as he was brave against his enemies, the stretched arm of the goddess of victory held out over his people. His name was Suraghu. He was mighty in putting down brave and dreadful enemies, powerful as the sun, and in his frame as strong as the god of wind. He surpassed Kuvera, the lord of the guhyakas and keeper of all the treasure in the world, in the extent of his kingdom, his dignity and his riches. He was wiser than the teacher of the king of the gods, and more learned than the teacher of the asuras.

He did a king’s work: he gave rewards and punishments according to what each man seemed to him to deserve, and he was as regular in it as the sun is in making the day and running its course. And he thought about it. He turned over in himself the pain and the pleasure his punishments and his rewards caused his people, who were, under his justice, like birds caught in nets and taken out of their free flight.

"Why do I have to pierce the hearts of my people," he said to himself, "the way the press crushes sesame seeds for the oil? It is plain that every person feels pain and affliction the same way I do. Yes, they can all suffer. So I will stop inflicting it on them. I will give them riches and please everyone. But if I stop punishing the men who torment the good, the good will be wiped out by the wicked, the way a channel dries up for want of rain. What a painful place I am in, where punishing men and sparing them are both grievous to me, or please me and sicken me by turns."

His mind was so troubled by this that his thoughts churned his spirit the way water churns in a whirlpool. Then one day the sage Mandavya came to his house, the way the divine sage Narada drops in on Indra in his heavenly home as he travels through the regions of the sky. The king honored him with every reverence and then asked that great sage to remove his doubt, the way a gardener cuts down a poisonous tree with one stroke of the axe at its root. "I am supremely blessed, Mandavya, that you have called at my house. It has made me as glad as the earth is when spring arrives on it and gives a new bloom to a fading forest. Your visit has made me more blessed than the blessed. It opens my heart the way the rising sun opens the closed petals of the lotus. You know every truth, and your spirit is wholly at rest, so please remove this doubt from my mind, the way the sun drives the dark of night out with its first rays. A doubt festering in the heart is said to be the greatest pain a man can have, and the only place it is healed is in the company of the good and the wise. The thought of the rewards and the punishments I hand to my dependents torments my heart without a pause, the way the scratches of a lion’s claws go on hurting the bruised body of an elephant. Please take this pain from me and let the sunshine of peace and an even mind brighten the gloom I am in."

Mandavya’s Method

Mandavya did not offer to carry the doubt away for him. "It is by a man’s own exertion, his own self-reliance and his own help to himself, that the doubts of the mind are melted down like snow under sunshine. It is by his own discrimination that every anguish of the mind is quickly brought to an end, the way the thick mists and clouds are scattered in autumn. It has to be in his own mind that he considers the nature and the powers of his inner and outer organs, and the faculties of his body and his mind. Consider, in your own mind, questions like these: What am I? What are all these things, and where do they come from? What does this life of ours mean, and what is this death that waits on it? These inquiries will surely raise you to eminence."

"When you come to know your true nature by looking into the state of your own mind, you will stay unchanged by your joys and your griefs, the way a firm rock stands against wind and wave. As the mind is freed from its habitual restlessness and its feverish heat, it regains the tranquility it had before, the way a rolling wave returns to the still water it rose from. When the mind rests in the dispassion of the men who are liberated while they live, the jivanmuktas, every picture it has painted is wiped off it, the way the impressions of past lives are effaced when a new age of the world begins. Those who are free of passion are honored as the most fortunate of men on earth, and a man who knows this truth and stays in his own contentment is looked on by everyone as a venerable father."

"When you come to see the greatness of your own soul by the light of reason, you will find that you are of greater magnitude than the sky and the ocean put together, and that a mind which comprehends by reason holds more meaning in it than the unreasoning spheres hold. When you have reached that greatness, your mind will no longer dive into worldly affairs, any more than a big elephant can be swallowed by the hole a bullock’s hoof leaves in the mud. A base and debased mind plunges itself into the mean and vile matters of the world, the way a contemptible gnat drowns in a drop of water in a little hole. Little minds are led by their greed to wade into dirty affairs, like insects crawling in dirt, and their miserliness makes them covet every outward thing while they never look for their own inward good. Great minds decline to notice outward things, so that they may see the pure light of the supreme soul shining in themselves."

"The ore is cleaned and washed until pure gold comes out of it, and that is how long spiritual knowledge has to be worked at by a man, until spiritual light fills his soul. See everything of every kind, in every place, with one universal eye, with complete indifference to the varieties of its outward form and figure, and look on the whole of it with the eye of your soul fixed on the one universal soul that pervades it. Until you are free of your view of all particular specialities, you can have no sight of the universal spirit; it is after every particularity has disappeared that the breadth of the transcendental spirit is left. Until you are rid of all individualities, it is impossible for you to arrive at the knowledge of universality, and more impossible still to comprehend the all-comprehending soul of all. When a man sets out to know the supreme soul with his whole heart and soul, and sacrifices every other object to that end, then and only then is it possible for him to know the divine soul in its fullness. So give up seeking anything for your own soul. It is only by leaving all other things that you come to the sight of the best of things. All these visible objects that appear linked together by the chain of causes and effects are the creation of the mind, which strings them together the way a thread strings a necklace of pearls. What remains after the mind and the bodies it created have been expunged is the sole soul, and that is the divine soul, the paramatma."

That was the whole of the instruction. When he had given it, Mandavya withdrew to his solitary dwelling, the kind of place that suits holy saints and sages. And after the sage had gone, the king also went off to a lonely place, and there he began to reflect on the nature of his own soul and on the manner of his existence in this world and the next.

From Kingdom to Consciousness

He began with the largest thing he could see. "I am not in this mountain, and the mountain is no part of me. I am not the cosmos, and this world is not myself. This dwelling place of the Kiratas does not belong to me, and I do not belong to it. It is the consent of the people that has made me the ruler of this place. Without that election I am nobody here, and this place is nothing to me, though this city and this country should last forever."

"This city, so magnificent, with its high-flying flags and its groves and gardens and the crowds of my servants and the long train of horses and elephants and soldiers, is nothing to me. All of it was nothing to me before my election, and none of it will be mine after I am put aside. These possessions, these enjoyments, these consorts: they do not belong to me, and I do not belong to them. This government, with all its force and all its officers in the city, is nothing to me, and in reality I am nothing to it. We pay each other compliments that were added on from outside, and that is all."

"I think of myself as this body of mine, made of my legs and my hands and my feet, and I believe myself to be placed somewhere in the middle of them. But I can see that the body is made of flesh and bones, and that it does not constitute my rational self, which rises in the midst of it the way a lotus rises out of the water without being water. The flesh of my body is dull, gross matter; it does not make my soul, and my rational part is not this flesh. My bones are insensible things and are no part of a sentient soul. I am none of the organs of action, and they do not compose me, because every organic body is gross matter and gross matter is not the living soul. I am not the food that nourishes the body and does nothing for the soul. I am not any organ of sense, which receives material impressions and has no sensibility without the intellect behind it."

"I am not the mind, which is a passive agent and minds whatever is felt by it. It is called buddhi, the understanding, because it stands under all its outer and inner perceptions and conceptions, and it is the root of every worldly evil, because of the feeling of ego it carries. So I am neither the mind nor the understanding, neither the inner senses nor the outer organs of action. I am not the subtle inward body, and I am not its outward material form that moves itself about. I am something besides all of these, and that something is what I want to know. I see at last my intelligent living soul, which reflects on things that can be known and is called intelligence on that account. But this intelligent principle is roused into thinking by other things, by what it knows, so it does not come under the heading of atma, which is independent and is self-consciousness alone. So I renounce the knowable living soul too. I do not acknowledge this intelligence that knows objects as myself. At the end of everything, what is left to own as myself is the immutable and pure Intellect."

Something broke open in him there. "How wonderful, that after so long a time I have come to know the soul, and that I find it to be myself, the infinite soul, the Supreme Spirit that has no end. As Indra and the gods live in Brahma and are resolved into it, so the spirit of God passes through every material body, the way the string of a necklace passes through the holes of all its pearls. The power of the soul that is called intellect is pure and unsullied in its nature. It has none of the dirt of thinkable objects on it, and it fills infinite space with its immense figure. It is without any attribute, and it pervades every existence in its subtle form; it stretches from the highest heaven to the lowest deep, and it is the reservoir of all power. It is full of all beauty, and it is the light that lights every object for us; it is the connecting chain all the worlds are linked on, like pearls in a necklace. It is formless and it is capable of every form and every change, connected with all matter and conversant with all subjects at all times. It has no particular name or form, and it is taken to be varied into different forms according to the operations of the intellect. It takes fourteen forms in its cognizance of the fourteen kinds of beings held in the two wombs of the world, varied into all of them so that it can take account of everything that makes up the body of the natural world."

"The whole course of human happiness and misery is a false representation by the understanding, and the varieties of pictures in the mind are operations of the soul and its attribute, the intellect. So this soul of mine is the same as the all-pervading spirit, and this understanding in me is nothing other than that all-knowing intellect. It is this same mind that paints these imaginary images in the sensory of my mind and causes the error of my kingship in me. It is by the good grace of the Intellect that the mind sits in the vehicle of the body and ranges with joy among the sports and diversions of the varied scenes of the world. But this mind and this body and all these varieties are nothing in reality. The cruel hand of death destroys them all, and not a trace of them is left behind. This world is a stage, stretched out by the mind, which is its chief actor, and the soul sits silent, a spectator of the scene, under the light of the intellect."

Then he came back to the thing that had sent him to Mandavya. "Alas. I find these painful thoughts of mine about the punishment and the recompense and the welfare of my people to have been all for nothing, because whatever is done for the body perishes along with the body. I am awakened to the truth now, and released from the mirage of the false views I held so long. I have come to see what is worth seeing, and I have found all that is worth having. All these visible things spread out through the universe are no more than false phantoms, thrown up by the vibrations of the intellect, and they do not last long. What good, then, were my punishments and my rewards to my people, which gave them their pain and their pleasure for a short time and led to no lasting welfare of their souls? What do these pains and pleasures mean to us, when both of them come from ourselves and are alike in the sight of God? I was ignorant of this truth all along, and now, by good fortune, it has dawned on me. What shall I do now, under the influence of this light? Shall I be sorry for it, or glad? What is there now for me to look at and to do? Shall I stay in this place, or go away from here? I see this wondrous sphere of the intellect shining on me now in its full splendor. I hail you, holy light, that I see blazing in front of me and can say nothing about. I am awakened and enlightened and have come to know the whole truth in me, and so I hail myself, alive now with infinity and omniscience." Freed from the paintings of his mind, cleared of the dross of sensible objects, released from the errors of the world, he rested in the lap of his tranquil soul as if in sound sleep, in utter oblivion of every impression, inward and outward.

Rule After Inquiry

Vasistha told Rama that this is how the lord of Hemajata reached the state of perfect felicity: by reasoning, the same road by which Visvamitra, the son of Gadhi, found his liberation in Brahma. He was no longer employed in the painful daily rituals that bring their practitioners misery over and over. He stayed, from then on, like the unchanging sun in the middle of the rotation of ever-changing days and nights.

He lived from that time without care or anxiety. He stood firm and unmoved in the middle of the righteous and the wrongful acts of his subjects, as a rock stands in the middle of boisterous waves that play about it and dash against it. He was not open to gladness or to anger at the conduct of others in their daily duties; he stayed as grave as the deep ocean under the heaving waves of his clamorous people. He subdued the actions and the passions of his mind the way a man does in sound sleep, and he shone with an unshaken luster, like the flame of a lamp in still air.

He was neither unkind to anyone nor ever kind. He was envious of no one and an enemy to no one. He was neither too wise nor unwise, and he neither sought fortune nor despised it. He looked on everyone with an even eye and in an equal light, carried himself with a steadiness that never wavered, and was as cool and gentle in his mind as the calm ocean and the gentle moonlight. Knowing everything in the world to be the working of the mind, he stayed quiet in every state of pleasure and pain, with his understanding sound.

His mind was enlightened, and his soul, absorbed, enjoyed its own stillness in every state of his life: it was full in itself when he sat and when he slept, and just as full when he moved about or did anything. He went on reigning over his realm for a full century with his mind unattached to the affairs of state, and his body and his intellect unimpaired to the end.

At last he quit the frail body he had lived in, of his own accord, the way a drop of dew lets go of the leaf when the sunbeams have filled it. His soul fled then on the wings of its intelligence to the first and final cause of causes, the way the current of a stream runs to the main ocean, breaking through the banks that held it on the way. Freed of any regret at leaving the body, released from the conditions of transmigration, the intelligent soul became one with the immaculate spirit and was absorbed in the Supreme One, the way the air held inside a pot mixes with the whole sky when the pot is broken.

"Do the same, Rama," Vasistha said. "Act as Suraghu acted, and rest yourself in the sole existence of the Supreme One, to cleanse your iniquities and be rid of every sorrow in this world. The mind stops panting and sorrowing once it has this universal sight in itself, the way a child stops being afraid of the dark once there is a lamp lit in the room. Suraghu’s discriminating mind found its rest in perfect tranquility, and he held to it as a drowning fool holds to a big bundle of straw. Keep this holy sight in view, preach this light to others, and go on enjoying this uniform samadhi in yourself, and shine before the world like a bright gem." Rama asked him, "Tell me, Vasistha, what is this uniform samadhi? Set my mind at rest; it is fluttering like the plumes of a peacock blown about by the wind." And Vasistha said, "Then attend to the rest of this marvelous story, of the enlightened and sagely prince who lived on the leaves of trees, and to the conversation that passed between two princes who were equally enlightened in their souls and settled in the same uniform quiet."

The King Who Became Parnada

There was a mighty king of the Plahvas, the Persians, named Parigha. He was a victor over his enemies and the support of his realm, the way the axle is the support of a carriage. He was joined to Suraghu in true friendship, as closely allied to him as the god of love is to the spring.

It happened at one time that a great drought came over the land of Parigha, and a famine followed it, like the final desolation of the earth that the sins of men bring on. It destroyed a great number of the people, who were worn out by hunger and weakness, the way a forest fire destroys the countless animals of the forest.

Parigha looked at this great disaster of his people and was overwhelmed with grief. He left his capital in despair, the way a traveler leaves a city that has burned to the ground. He was so sick in his soul at his inability to lift a calamity that could not be averted from his subjects that he went to a forest to give himself to devotion. He entered a deep wood, unseen and unknown by his people, and passed his time there in his disgust with the world, far away from mankind.

He gave himself to austere devotion in the cavern of a mountain and stayed sober-minded there, living on the dry and withered leaves of trees. Because he lived on dry leaves for so long, consuming them the way fire always does, the devotees gathered in that place gave him the surname of the leaf-eater, Parnada, and from then on the good royal sage went under that title among the holy sages in every part of Jambudvipa.

He kept up the most rigid austerities in this way for many years, and he attained divine knowledge, by his long practice of self-purification and by the grace of the supreme soul. He won his liberation by giving up enmity and the passions and affections, anger and pity and the rest of the feelings and desires, and by arriving at calmness of mind and an enlightened understanding. After that he wandered as he pleased through the whole temple of the triple world, earth and heaven and the regions below, and mixed in the company of the siddhas and the sadhyas, the perfected ones, the way bees mix with the swans around a bed of lotuses.

His wandering brought him at one time to the city of Hemajata, which was built of gemstones and shone as brightly as a peak of Mount Meru, the golden mountain at the center of the world. Here he met his old friend, the king of that city, and they greeted each other with a fondness that went both ways. Both had been delivered from the darkness of ignorance, and both were perfect in their knowledge of what can be known. "It is by our good fortune that we come to meet one another," each said to the other. They took each other in their arms with joy on their faces, and then they sat down together on one and the same seat, as when the sun and the moon stand in conjunction.

"My heart rejoices to see you with full satisfaction," Parigha said, "and my mind takes in a coolness as if it had plunged into the cool orb of the moon. An unfeigned friendship, like true love, shoots out in a hundred branches when the two are parted from each other, the way a tree growing by a pool stretches its boughs out on every side until the current washes it away, roots and all. The memory of the confidential talks and the merry sports and the idle games of our early days wakes up in me, my good friend, and those innocent joys are fresh in me again. I know well that the divine knowledge I gained by my long and painful devotion and by the grace of God is already known to you, from what the wise sage Mandavya preached to you. But let me ask. Are you set beyond the reach of sorrow, settled in your rest and your tranquility? Are you situated in the supreme cause of all, as firmly as if you sat on the unshaken rock of Meru? Do you ever feel that auspicious, self-gratifying grace in your soul, which purifies the fountain of your mind the way the autumn sky clears the springs of water on earth? Do you perform all your acts, as the ruler of your people, with a complacent air and a steady mind, as if you were discharging your duties for the good of mankind?"

"And do the people in your realm live in safety, enjoying their prosperity and their competence, free of disease and danger and the anxieties of life? Is the land plentiful in its harvests, and are the trees here bending with their fruit, and do the people enjoy the fruit of their labor and the objects of their desire? Is your good fame spread about in every quarter, like the clear and cooling beams of the full moon, and does it cover the face of the land the way a sheet of snowfall covers the ground? Is the whole space of the sky, in every quarter, so filled with the renown of your virtues that there is no gap left in it, the way the roots and stalks of the lotus overspread a tank and choke the course of its water? Do the young men and the maidens of your villages walk and stroll pleasantly over the plains and fields hereabouts, and do they sing your praises aloud in their songs? Does all welfare attend you in your prosperity, your wealth, your possessions and the produce of your fields? Do your family, your children and your dependents fare well in this city? Do you enjoy health free of every disease and complaint, and do you reap the reward of the meritorious acts you have done for this life and the next? Are you indifferent in your mind to the passing enjoyments that seem so pleasant for a moment and prove to be our deadly enemies at the end? Oh, it is after a very long separation that we meet again. It is my good fortune that rejoins me to you, the way spring comes back to the valleys with its green. There are no joys and no woes in this world like the ones that fall to the living in their unions with and separations from one another. Our circumstances are completely altered since we parted, and yet here we are, met again in the same unchanged state of mind, by some wonderful accident of destiny."

"Yes," Suraghu said. "The course of destiny is as crooked as a serpent’s, and there is no man who can see to the bottom of its mysterious nature. There is nothing impossible to destiny, which after so long a time has brought us together in one place, from two countries that lie so far apart. We are all in good health and prosperity here, and your graciousness has blessed us beyond measure. Look at us, purified and cleansed of our sins by your holy presence among us; the tree of our merits has borne the fruit of peace and satisfaction at the sight of you. We enjoy every prosperity in this native city of ours, and your presence here today has made it put out a hundred new shoots of joy and happiness. Your appearance and your speech have sprinkled this place with sweet drops of nectar, with joy and holiness, because the company of the virtuous is reckoned to equal the supreme felicity of man." They talked on. Then Parigha, who had come a long way with one question, took up again the old confiding tone of their friendship and asked it.

Does Samadhi Survive Action?

"Whatever acts of goodness are done by men of well-governed minds on this earth of strife, all of them come back to those men as happiness," Parigha said, "and the evil deeds of ungoverned minds come back as misery. So tell me. Do you rest in that state of perfect repose which is free of desire? Do you rest in samadhi, in the state they call the supreme quiet, paramopashama?"

Suraghu turned the question around before he answered it. "Tell me what you mean by the abandonment of all desires, and what is meant by this perfect stillness they call the supreme trance. Tell me, my high-minded friend, how a man can be called unentranced who is rapt in his knowledge of the supreme and at the same time attends to his worldly concerns. Men of enlightened understanding, however they may be employed in the observance of their usual affairs in the world, are still said to be enraptured by their knowledge of the oneness of the supreme soul. And on the other side, how can a man be called blessed whose mind is unsubdued and whose nature is untamed, even though he keeps his position in the lotus posture with his palms folded?"

"The knowledge of truth that burns away every worldly desire like straw: that is what is rightly called samadhi, the stillness of the soul. The sitting still and the keeping silent of the secluded devotees is a different thing. The knowledge that is attended by continued rest and self-content, and that gives insight into the nature of things, is called paraprajna, the highest knowledge, and samadhi, the repose of the soul, by the wise. The wise also call it samadhi when the mind cannot be moved by pride or enmity, when it stands as unmoved as a fixed rock against the howling winds of the passions. The mind is said to be in its stillness, too, when it is free of anxious thoughts and cares, when it knows the nature of the things it wants and is nevertheless free of its choosing and its aversion, its liking and its dislike. That is also called the fullness, the perfection, of the mind. And the mind of a great soul is said to stand in the stillness of samadhi from the moment it is joined to its understanding and acts together with it."

"But a pause of samadhi that is stretched too far, to a dead lock, breaks down of itself, the way the fiber of a lotus stalk snaps when a boy pulls it out too long. A dead and dormant stillness is the opposite extreme of the living quiet I mean. The sun does not stop giving its light to the other half of the world after it has set from giving the day to this half, and in the same way our intelligence goes on glowing after it has run its course in this life. The course of a stream never comes to a stop, for all the ceaseless gliding of its currents, and in the same way the course of our thoughts has no suspension from knowing further truths. Continuous duration never loses sight of the fleeting moments of time, and the eternal soul is never in abeyance from marking the passing thoughts of its mind. Time never forgets to run its accustomed course, and the intelligent understanding is never remiss in scanning the nature of the mysterious Intellect that guides it."

"The thoughts of an intelligent being run in as quick a succession as the turning parts of time, and that is the state of a mind that wanders at random and is not settled on the sole object of its meditation. A lifeless soul perceives no external object, and a soul unconscious of itself has no knowledge of the course of time, as in sleep, delirium and insensibility. There is no skilled man in the world without some skill or other, and there is no intelligent being here without knowledge of his soul and consciousness of himself. I find myself enlightened and wakeful, pure and holy, at all times. My mind is tranquil and my soul is at rest on every occasion. I find nothing that intercepts the sweet repose of my soul, which has found its anchorage in uninterrupted communion with the holy spirit. So my mind is never without its quiet at any time, and it is never unquiet at any moment, because it is wholly given over to spiritual meditation. I see the all-pervading and everlasting soul in everything and in every way, and I do not know whether to call it rest or unrest in my soul, which has found both its quiet and its employment in perpetual meditation on the Divine Spirit. Great men of quiet spirit continue always in one even and uniform tenor of mind. So the difference between the rest and the restlessness of the soul is a verbal distinction, and the two words carry no shade of difference in what they mean."

Parigha looked at the man beside him on the seat and saw the answer in him before he had finished weighing it. "I find you truly wise and enlightened in your beatitude, Suraghu. You shine like the full moon with your inward coolness. I see in you the fullness of sweet delight and the shadow of prosperity resting on you, and you are as graceful as the water lily, with that pleasing, cooling face. The clearness and the extent and the fullness and the depth of your understanding give you the look of the deep, clear, wide ocean once the loud winds and waves have stopped disturbing it. The pure and full delight of your inward soul, free of the cloud of egotism, has the grace of the clear expanse of the autumn sky. I see you composed in your mind in every place and contented at every time, and you are free of the passions, and all of this together gives you a grace there are no words for. You have passed beyond the bounds of knowing what is good and what is evil in this world, and your great understanding has acquainted you with everything in its entirety. Your mind is cheered by the knowledge of all existence and nonexistence, and your body is freed of the evil of repeated birth and death, the common lot of every being. You have gleaned the truth out of whatever is untrue, and you are as sated with your true knowledge as the gods were when they drank the water of immortality they churned out of the brackish water of the ocean."

Nothing Independent to Grasp

"There is nothing in this world, Parigha, that we could choose as inestimable to us," Suraghu answered, "because everything that shines and glitters here is nothing in reality and has no intrinsic value. And since there is nothing here that is desirable to us, there is nothing that is disgusting to us either, because the want of a thing implies the want of its contrary."

"The idea that most worldly things are mean, and the idea that some of them, on particular occasions, are great, have both weakened in my mind and been wiped out of it. It is time and place that give importance to an object, and time and place that lower the best of them in our estimation; so it behooves an intelligent man to be lavish neither in praise nor in dispraise of one thing or another. We praise or dispraise a thing according to our estimate of it, and we esteem whatever is desirable to us, and the most intelligent are the ones who give their preference to what is best and of the greatest good for us."

"But this world, with all its woods and seas and mountains and living creatures, presents us with nothing that is to be desired for our lasting and substantial good. What is there that we should desire, when there is nothing in this world worth desiring, except bodies made of flesh and bone, and wood and stone, every one of them worthless and frail?"

"As we stop desiring, we get rid of our fawning and our hatred as well, the way the setting of the sun takes both the light and the heat away with it. It is useless to go on expanding on the subject. It is enough to know this truth for our happiness here: to have our desires under subjection, and an evenness of mind under every condition, with inward placidity and regard for everyone alike."

When Suraghu and Parigha had ended their discussion of the errors of this world, they honored one another with the respect due between them, and each went back gladly to his duties for the day. "Now, Rama," Vasistha said, "you have heard the whole of this instructive dialogue between them. Try to profit by it, and turn it over in your mind until it is yours."