The Three Unborn Princes

The Nurse Begins

Vasistha had just told Rama that the mind, its bondage, its liberation, and the whole unsubstantial world it builds were inventions that had come into fashion among men, like the story of the boy of old. Rama caught the phrase. “Then tell me the tale of the boy,” he said, “the one that illustrates the mind.” Vasistha agreed. There was once a silly, thick-headed boy, he said, who asked his nurse to recite him some pretty story to pass the time, and the nurse, glad to be asked, settled herself, put on her bright face, and began in a voice as sweet as honey. Her first sentence was already impossible.

Once upon a time, she said, there were three high-minded and fortunate young princes, famous for their virtue and their courage, who lived in a desolate country. The land was as vast and empty as the sky, and the three of them shone in it the way stars shine in the water that reflects them. Two of the princes had never been begotten and never been created. The third had never been in his mother’s womb.

The boy did not ask how a prince who was never created comes to be famous for his courage. He let the nurse go on, and the nurse went on, because once the three princes were allowed to exist everything they did could follow.

One day, she said, the three of them left their dreary home together to look for a better place to live. They had no companion. They went with heavy minds and faces full of grief, the way exiles look when they have been carried off from the country they were born in.

A Road Through Impossible Heat

They came out of that desert land with their faces set forward and went on together, three in a line like Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter standing in conjunction. Their bodies were as delicate as shirisha blossoms, and the sun, blazing on their backs, scorched them and dried them like leaves in the heat of a summer day. The burning sand singed their lotus feet. They cried aloud like tender fawns that have strayed from the herd, “Father, save us!” Blades of grass cut the soles of their feet, the heat loosened every joint in their bodies, and the dust that flew up from the ground settled over their fair skin, and still they walked, three young princes alone on a road with nobody behind them and nobody ahead.

Then they saw three trees standing together at the side of the road. They were plumed with flowering spikes and heavy with fruit and blossom hanging downward, and flights of birds rested in them and the fawns of the desert rested around them. The first two of these trees had not grown of themselves; men had raised them. The third, the easiest to climb, bore no seed and would never produce another tree.

The princes rested in the shade of them until the weariness of the road went out of their limbs, and sat there like the three gods Indra, Vayu, and Yama under the Parijata, the tree of paradise. They ate the fruit, which tasted like ambrosia, and drank its juice until they were full. Then they wove themselves chaplets of guluncha vine, put them on, and took to the road again.

The boy on the nurse’s knee had no quarrel with any of it. A tree that men had raised in a country where no one lived; a tree that gave fruit and would never give seed; three princes who had never been born eating until they were full. The nurse’s voice did not pause to notice the difficulty, and so neither did he, and the trees stood there in his mind as plainly as the room around him.

They had gone a long way when, at midday, they came to the meeting place of three rivers running with fast currents and swelling waves. One of the three was a dry channel. The other two were shallow, with barely any water in them, and the three riverbeds looked up at the sky like the eyes of blind men, with the eyeballs white and sightless in them.

The princes were running with sweat, and they went down joyfully into the channel that was nearly dry and bathed in it, as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, hot from their labors, bathe their limbs in the clear stream of the Ganga.

They played in the water there for a long while. They drank it in long drafts, and it was as sweet as milk, and it cheered them until their hearts were satisfied, and when the heat of the day had passed they came up out of the dry river and went on.

The New-Built City on the Hill

They walked on through the afternoon, and at the end of the day, with the sun going down, they came in sight of the place that was to be their home: a newly built city, standing far off on the height of a hill.

Rows of flags fluttered above it like lotuses floating on the clear blue lake of the evening sky, and from a long way off the princes could hear the citizens singing, a loud, carrying sound of many voices, the sound of a city that was already full.

Inside it they found three beautiful houses with turrets of gold and jewels that shone from a distance like the peaks of Mount Meru under a blazing sun. Two of these houses had never been built by any craftsman. The third had no foundation under it. It was the third the three princes went into.

They sat down in it, and walked about in it with happy faces, and in the course of their wandering through its rooms they came upon three pots as bright as gold.

The first two broke into pieces as soon as they were lifted. The third turned to dust at a touch. The princes, who could see further than most, gathered up the dust and made a new pot out of it.

They were hungry young men, and in that pot they cooked a great quantity of grain, a hundred dronas less one, enough to feed them for the whole of their lives.

When the food was ready they invited three Brahmins to share it. Two of the Brahmins had no bodies. The third had no mouth to eat with. The mouthless Brahmin ate a hundred dronas of the rice, and the princes took what was left over for their own meal.

Refreshed by the leavings of the Brahmin’s dinner, the nurse said, the three princes slept that night in the house they had found, and in the morning they went out again, hunting for new homes. That was where she stopped.

The boy was glad. He had been given princes, a desert, trees, rivers, a city, and a feast, and he had taken every one of them, and the nurse had never once said a thing he could point to and call untrue, because she had never once given him the chance. Vasistha turned from the nurse to Rama. “That is the whole story of the boy and the three princes,” he said. “Now think over what it means, and you will come out of it wiser.”

How Acceptance Builds a World

“I told you this story in the middle of my lecture on the mind, Rama, because it will show you how the mind fabricates this imaginary world of ours. This airy castle of a universe, which everyone has agreed to take for a reality, is exactly like the old nurse’s tale: a false fabric spun out of imagination, and given a name and a shape. It is a display of our own thoughts and ideas, which show themselves to us according to the notions we hold about them while we think ourselves bound and while we think ourselves free.”

“Nothing truly exists except what imagination has made, and it is our own fancy that gives every object the strange particular shape it has. The heavens and the earth, the sky and the air, the rivers, the mountains, the quarters of the compass, all of them are creations of fancy, like the sights in a dream, which join and come apart and build their scenes out of nothing.”

“Think of what the nurse did. The princes were hers. The rivers were hers. The city they were going to live in was hers. Nothing stood behind any of them except her power to picture them and name them, and the boy’s willingness to take what she named. The visible world stands on the same ground. It is the production of the imaginative power of man, and of nothing else.”

“Imagination shows forth everything around us the way moving water shows the rising and falling of waves on the sea. The waves need no other substance than the water; the water simply moves, and there they are. It was the same power in God: in his omniscient, all-containing soul the ideas of things rose up first, and his omnipotence then showed them forth as real, as things that have been lying in the dark are brought into view by the light of day.”

“So understand this universe to be a net woven by imagination, and know that fancy is the most restless power your mind has. Press down the thickening phantoms your fancy keeps throwing up. Rest your whole weight on the one certainty there is, the unchanging soul of souls, and you will have your peace.”

Vasistha’s Direction to Rama

“The ignorant are at the mercy of errors their own false fancies cause,” Vasistha went on, “and the wise are entirely free of them. The ignorant take the perishable properties of things and hang them on the imperishable soul, and so fool themselves, the way children take their dolls for living men.” Rama stopped him there. “What is this perishable property that is imagined of the imperishable soul and laid on it? And tell me the other thing too: what is the misrepresentation that leads the mind to take an unreal world for a real one?” Vasistha answered him. “The soul keeps company with unreal and perishable things for so long that it comes to think it is one of them, and takes on itself the title of a perishable little self, an ego, as a boy who has frightened himself with his own thoughts takes a shadow for a real ghost. Since everything rests in one absolute reality, it is hard to say how anyone’s private ego ever came into fashion, or where it came from. There is no ego anywhere except that of the supreme soul. The unwise split it into a finite ego and an infinite one, a mortal soul and an immortal, the way a traveler in a sandy desert sees two rivers shining in the sunbeams where there is no water at all. The mind is a vast thing in this vast creation, and it depends for its support on the supreme soul as the waves depend on the water of the sea to rise and to stay. So give up your belief that the world is real, Rama, give up leaning on the baseless fabric of the universe, and lean with delight on your own clear sight of the one ground that holds it all up. Inquire into the nature of truth with your reason awake; free yourself of every error and every bias, and throw away whatever is false.”

“Why do you think the unconfined soul is shut up inside a body? It is useless to imagine the infinite confined in any place. To take the one as many is to cut the Supreme Spirit into pieces and invent a variety in it, and since the divine essence is spread equally through everything, no one can say it is present in this thing and absent from that. When the body is hurt, people suppose the soul is hurt with it, and no pain, no injury, no sickness of any kind can touch the soul, which does not change. Hurt the body, weaken it, destroy it, and the soul takes no injury, as when a blacksmith’s bellows burn, the air that filled them escapes unburned. Whether the body lasts or falls is no matter to us, as a flower that is crushed leaves its fragrance in the air. Let pain or pleasure fall on the body like dewdrops on a lotus leaf; it can trouble us no more than the fading of the lotus troubles the bee in the air above it. Let the body rise or fall, or go up in smoke and mix with the wind; these changes of its shape have no effect whatever on the soul. The body is joined to the soul as a cloud is joined to the wind that moves it, as the lotus is joined to the bee that lands on it. If the mind, which is part of every living body, is untouched by the body’s pain, how could the intellect itself, which lives in the soul, ever be subject to death? And if you know the soul to be indestructible and inseparable from anything, Rama, what reason have you left to grieve over the supposed parting or disappearance of the spirit that fills everything? When the body is destroyed the soul leaves it to dwell in the boundless space of the open air, like the wind mixing with the sky after the clouds have scattered, like the bee rising into the air when the lotus has withered.”

“Even the mind is never loosened from its enjoyments until the knowledge of truth burns it down; why speak, then, of the soul being annihilated? The perishable body and the imperishable soul go together like a vessel and the fruit it holds, like a pot and the air inside it. As a plum is held in the hand or dropped into a pit, so the empty, spacious soul is set in the body or let go of it. When a pot breaks, the space inside it mixes with the air; when the body dissolves, the soul stays unhurt in open space. The minds and bodies of living beings are forever slipping away from their homes and hiding under the shroud of death; why should we mourn for such runaways? Men watch others die and vanish every day of their lives, and no fool learns from it to think for himself; he only fears to die like all the other fools. So give up your selfish desires, Rama, and know the ego for the lie it is. Break the bond of the body and fly upward, as a bird that has just grown its feathers flies up and leaves the nest behind.”

“It is an act of the mind that leads us toward good or toward evil, and it is another function of the same mind to build the false fabric of the world, the way appearances build themselves in a dream. Our incorrigible ignorance stretches these pictures out for nothing except our misery, and our half-knowledge shows us these falsehoods as real things. It gives us a dim sight, as when we look at a sky dulled by mist, and it is the mind’s nature to see objects wrongly. The dull, unreal world appears real to us, and the imagined duration of the universe is a dream drawn out through a long sleep. The thought of the world is the cause of its existing in form at all, just as the blinking of an eye shows a thousand disks of the sun and moon in a clear sky. So set your reason to work, Rama, and melt the formal world out of your mind, as the sun melts snow with the heat of its rays. A man who wants to be rid of the cold gets his wish at sunrise, and a man who wants to pull down his mind succeeds when his reason rises. As ignorance grows it brings a train of errors and evils nothing can get through, and it casts a spell around itself, as the sorcerer Samvara showered a rain of gold dust around him. The mind makes the road to its own ruin by its worldliness and brings its own catastrophe on itself by everything it does. It cares for nothing except saving itself from destruction, and it is fool enough never to see its own death coming. By its restless desires it hurries itself to a painful death, which reasonable men avoid by governing the mind. A mind purified by reason is purged of its wantings and its refusals, and gives itself up to the will of the divine soul, which stands before it always. To curb the mind is the soul’s greatness, and it is the way out of pain. Restrain your mind, then; do not give it a loose rein. This world is a vast wilderness, full of forests of weal and woe and ringed on every side by the dragons of disease and death, and the unreasoning mind is the rampant lord of that waste, driving us at every moment into one danger after another.” As the sage finished, the day went to its end and the sun leaned down to the west for its evening worship. The assembly broke up with salutations all around, and when the night had passed they met again and greeted one another under the rising sun.