Vasudeva: From the Samanga to Shukra’s Return

Yama Reveals the Living Son

Bhrigu came out of his trance on Mandara after a thousand years, and no one bowed to him. His son Shukra should have been there; the boy had sat down to meditate beside him in the cave. What lay there instead was a frame of bones. The sun had dried the skin tight over it, worms moved in the sockets where the eyes had been, and the ribs stood up like the bars of a cage. The sage took it for his son’s corpse, and the grief in him turned at once into rage against the god of death. He gathered himself to curse. Before the words could leave him, Yama stood in the cave: armored, with six arms and six faces, his host at his back, the noose and the sword and the trident in his hands, and the voice that came out of that terrible shape was mild. “We honor you for your holiness,” Yama said. “Your curse does not frighten us. We are appointed to devour all beings, and you are destined to be devoured by us. Destiny herself ordained it; our own will has no part in it.” Then he asked Bhrigu to look at his own case as the sequence of his own acts, and spoke of the two bodies every man has, the frame and the mind, and said that it was the mind alone that had gone traveling.

The body on the cave floor had never left it, Yama told him. The mind had. It slipped out while Shukra sat in meditation and went up to the garden of Nandana in heaven, where it fell in with the apsara Viswachi, and in her company it believed it had passed eight cycles of the four Yugas before its merit ran out and it fell. After that the births came one upon another: a Brahmin in the Dasarna country, a king of Kosala, a hunter, a swan, a king of the solar line, a raja of the Pundras, a Vidyadhara, a sage’s son, a ruler in the land of Madra, a devotee’s son named Vasudeva on the bank of the Samanga; then a Kirata of the hills, a chieftain, an ass, a stalk of bamboo, a deer, a serpent, a cock, and a magician among the Vidyadharas, until the fire at the end of the kalpa burned that whole world away. In the new creation he was born the boy of a Brahmin, Vasudeva once more, and schooled in all the Srutis, and in time he went to the bank of the Samanga and gave himself to devotion there. That was where Yama’s account had reached.

“Your son is still at his austerities on the bank of that stream,” Yama said. “The waves run loud against the shore and the wind howls in from every side, and he sits through it without moving, his hair in matted braids, a string of rudraksha seeds in his hand, every limb held in check. If you want to know what passes in his mind, you will have to open the eye of your understanding and look into another man’s thoughts.” He said it, and the lord of the world, who sees everything at a single glance, made the sage dive. Bhrigu’s awareness went down into his son’s mind and found every thought moving there, as plainly as if it were reflected in the mirror of his own, and when he had seen it all he came back from the Samanga to the body he had left sitting on Mandara in Yama’s presence. He looked at the god and smiled. What he said next came out soft, with no heat left in it.

“You are lord of the past and the future,” he said. “Before you we are ignorant boys; your sight takes in the three times at one view. Whether this world is a real thing or no is the question that misleads the wisest of men, because it keeps changing its shape. You know what is inside it. To us it shows only its outer face, like a magic show. I knew perfectly well that my son is not subject to death, which is why it stunned me to see him lying there dead. I thought the imperishable soul of my son had been snatched away, and that is how I sank to the vile wish of cursing you for his untimely end. We know how things go in the world, and still joy and grief move us whenever fortune turns. Anger at wrongdoers and pleasure in the righteous have become the rule of the world. As long as we take the world for real we labor under what we must do and what we must refrain from; freedom from that error lifts every such load. And when we rage at death without understanding what it intends, which is only our good, the blame is ours. You have shown me my son’s thoughts, and by your favor I have seen the whole scene on the Samanga bank. Of the two bodies a man has, the mind alone goes everywhere, and it leads the outer one. The mind is the true body. It is the mind that makes us conscious of ourselves, and of the world outside.”

“You have said it rightly,” Yama answered. “The mind is the true body of man. It is the mind that molds the body to its will, as a potter shapes a pot however he pleases. It frames a form and gives a person features he never had, and in a moment it destroys one that exists. Imagination gives a shape to airy nothing, the way children see ghosts in front of them in the dark. Everyone knows this power from his own dreams and delirium, from his misconceptions and every kind of error, from the magic cities and talismans he has seen. It is because men trust their eyes that they call the flesh the principal body and take the mind for a secondary part. It was the Divine mind that formed this world out of its thought, so the world is neither a substance in its own right nor nothing at all. The mind spreads itself in thoughts and desires into many forms, as a branch of a tree shoots out in blossom and leaf, and as a man sees two moons when his eye is pressed, so one mind appears as many in many persons. From the variety of its desires it perceives and produces the variety of things, pots and pictures and all the rest. The same mind thinks itself many by the diversity of its thoughts: I am weak, I am poor, I am ignorant. It becomes like the thing it dwells on. The thought that I am none of these forms I have feigned for myself, that I am of the form from which I come, makes the mind one with the everlasting Brahma, by stripping it of every other thought. Everything that springs from Brahma sinks into him at last, as the huge waves of the wide ocean rise only to settle back into the calm water beneath them. One who thinks himself a small ripple shrinks his soul to smallness. One who believes himself a great wave enlarges his spirit to greatness. He who thinks himself a little creature fallen from above to suffer in the world below is born on earth in exactly the form he took for his pattern, and he who thinks himself born to greatness, and rises early by his own energy, becomes as large as a hill and shines with the gems that grow on it. The man who thinks himself seated in the cool orb of the moon rests in peace; otherwise cares consume the body, as fire takes a tree on the riverbank. Some stand fixed and silent like forest trees, shuddering at the wildfire of the world though they stand beside clear running streams and on heights no fire can reach. Those who think themselves surrounded by worldly affairs are trees spread wide, waiting for the blast that will bring them down, and those who wail aloud at being broken by their misery are the loud waves breaking on the shore, their tears the spray.”

“Yet the waves are of no one kind,” Yama went on. “They are neither entities nor nothings, neither small nor large, neither high nor low; they do not live in the sea, nor outside it, nor the sea without them. They are the desires in the soul, rising and setting of their own accord. The dead are undying, since they die only to be born, and the living are not living, since they live only to die; that is the law of their succession, and nothing can turn it. As water is everywhere the same and clear, so the spirit of God is pure and whole in every place. That one self-same spirit is the body of God, the transparent Brahma, almighty and everlasting, and it is the whole world that seems to stand apart from it. Brahma the creator was produced in Brahma as a billow is produced in water. What is called the world is only an attribute of Brahma; there is not the slightest difference between the two. This plenitude is Brahma, and the world is nothing other than Brahma himself. Think on this, and let every other belief go. One eternal law presides over all things, and that one law branches into many and brings forth a hundred kinds of effect. The inert and the active both come from the same source, and the mind comes from the intellect of God; every desire is drawn by the mind from its exact pattern in the Supreme soul. It is Brahma that shows itself in the visible world, full of forms as the sea is full of surges; it takes every variety of form by its will to become many, as sea water throws up waves in itself and by itself, as one seed opens into branch and bud and leaf, fruit and flower, as one strong sunlight shows in a hundred colors on different bodies, as the colorless cloud receives the passing hues of the rainbow. From the active agent the inert proceeds without any second cause, as the active spider spins the passive thread and the living man brings on his own torpor in sleep. So the Lord makes the mind produce matter, and only for its own bondage, as he makes the silkworm weave the sheath that confines it. The mind forgets its spiritual nature of its own will and builds itself a strong prison, and when of its own free will it inclines to think of its spiritual nature, it is let out of the prison of the body and the bondage of the world, as a bird or a beast is let out of its cage and the great elephant is loosed from his fetters and his post. The mind slowly molds itself into whatever form it constantly dwells on; it draws from inside itself the power to be what it wishes to become, and once gained, that power sits as familiar on the soul as rain clouds on the sky in the wet season. There is no bondage and no liberation of the human soul, nor of the Divine Spirit; I cannot account for the use of those words among men. The unsteady mind has wrapped the steady soul in a sheath of error, as the cocoon wraps the sleeping worm. Every tie that binds the embodied soul to earth is the mind’s work, and every attachment to the visible world is born in it and stays in it, distinct from it as waves from the sea or beams from the moon. The Supreme spirit is stretched out as one ocean, stirred into myriads of waves. All who appear as Brahma, Vishnu and the Rudras, all who have become gods, all who are called men, are waves raised by the spirit beneath them, and so are Yama and Indra, the sun, fire, Kuvera and the rest; so are the Gandharvas and Kinnaras and Vidyadharas, rising and falling and lasting a while like the breakers. Some endure long, like the lotus-born Brahma. Some, the petty gods and men, are born to die in a moment, and some are dead as soon as they are born, like the mayflies and certain worms. Worms and insects, gnats and flies, serpents and great snakes rise in the ocean of the Divine Spirit like drops flung from its waves; men and deer, vultures and jackals are made on land and mountain, in forest and marsh. Some live long and some a short while, some with high aims and some caring for nothing except their contemptible bodies; some trust in their stability in this unstable world and are betrayed by it; some in poverty torment themselves with the thought that they are poor and wretched, weak and ignorant. Some are born as trees, and some have become gods; some are given moving bodies, and some dissolve like water in the sea. Some last as long as many kalpas, like the land and the sea and the mountains, and others return to the Supreme Spirit by the moonlike purity of their souls. All of it has risen from the ocean of Brahma like its own moving swell, and the intellectual consciousness in each body is what is called its mind.”

“To think of gods, demigods and men as distinct beings is a plain mistake,” Yama said, “for they are in no way distinct from the infinite ocean of Spirit they ripple on. It is our mistaken conception that draws a line between ourselves and the Supreme Soul, and the thought of being separate from it is the cause of our fall from our first holiness. We lie within the depth of the Divine Spirit and think we live outside it; that is what keeps us in darkness on the surface of the earth. Our consciousness of ourselves as Brahma, spoiled by the various thoughts in our minds, becomes the root of our activity, while the pure consciousness I am is free of all action and effort. The inward desire of the heart is the seed of earthly acts, and it sprouts like the thorny karanja, a handful of which fills a field with the rankest weeds. The living bodies scattered over the earth like pebbles roll about and lie down in their passing joys and griefs, one after another, because they do not know themselves. From the highest heaven of Brahma to the lowest deep there is a ceaseless undulation of the Divine spirit, like the swaying of wind, which keeps all beings wailing and rejoicing, dying and being born. Some souls are pure and bright, like the gods Hari and Hara; some are a little darkened, like men and the lesser demigods; some stand in greater darkness, like worms and insects; some in utter darkness, like the trees. Some grow far from the great ocean, like the grass and weeds of the earth; some are barred from rising, like dull stones and vicious snakes. Some have come to be with nothing except their bodies and do not know that death is undermining them, as a mouse burrows under a house. Some have crossed the ocean of Divine knowledge and become divinities in their living bodies, like Brahma, Hari and Hara; some with a little understanding have gone down into the deep of holy knowledge without ever finding its bottom or either shore; some have passed through many births with many still to come and have never once seen the light; some are tossed up and down like fruit flung from the hand, the ones flying upward going higher still and the ones going down falling lower and lower. Forgetting the Supreme felicity is what sends a soul roving through births of weal and woe, and knowing the Supreme ends the wandering, as the remembrance of Garuda destroys the deadliest poison. Among all these creatures, as numerous as the plants and creepers of spring, there are some among the Yakshas, the Gandharvas and the Kinnaras who have overcome the errors of their minds, weighed everything before and behind them, and live as liberated men in this world; there are others among the moving and the unmoving as unconscious of themselves as wood and stone, and many so worn down by error that they cannot judge for themselves. For those who have woken to sense there is the rich mine of the sastras, framed by the enlightened for the guidance of souls; the study of good works destroys the errors of the mind as the sun’s course across the sky destroys the night, and those who have failed to dispel their errors see the phantoms of them dancing like demons before their eyes, as in the frosty sky of winter. Every living body is subject to pain and pleasure, and it is the mind that constitutes the body; flesh by itself feels neither. This frame of flesh and bone and the five elements is a creation of the mind’s imagination, with no substance in it. What your son thought of in his mental body he found in that same body, and he answered to no one for whatever passed in his mind. Whatever a man wills in his mind comes to pass in a short time, and no outside agency is needed to bring it about; what the mind does in a moment, of its own accord and by its own desire, no one in the world has the power to do or undo at any time. The torments of hell, the bliss of heaven, the thoughts of birth and death are all fabrications of the mind, which labors under them. Why should I go on like the verbose writers? Let us go together, now, to the place where your son is.”

“He tasted the pleasure and pain of all those states in a moment’s thought of his mind,” Yama said, “and now he sits as a devotee on the bank of the Samanga under the spreading beams of the moon. His vital breath left his heart and became like a moonbeam sparkling in a dewdrop, and in that form it entered a womb.” The lord of death smiled to think of the course of nature, took Bhrigu’s hand in his own, and the two left the cave together like the sun and the moon setting out in company. “How wonderful the law of nature is,” Bhrigu said slowly, to himself, and rose higher and higher, as the sun climbs above the mountain it rises behind. With their luminous bodies they arrived over the Samanga and shone high above the tamala trees, two lights climbing the clear sky at once, like the sun rising with the full moon over a cloudy horizon. In Ayodhya the sun was going down behind the western hills while Vasistha told this, and the day departed to its evening service. Dasharatha’s court rose with salutations on every side to perform the evening rites, and at dawn the next day they gathered again.

The Descent to the Samanga

Vasistha took up the descent. When Yama and Bhrigu left the cavern of Mandara for the bank of the Samanga, the first thing they saw as they came down the mountain was a great light below them, and it rose from the bodies of celestial beings asleep in arbors of golden creepers. Birds played in the sprays the swaying creepers made under the open sky, and antelopes stood face to face, looking at each other with eyes like blue lotuses.

They saw Siddhas seated on stone seats on the high rocks, their bodies full of light and their eyes fixed on the spheres as if in challenge. They saw lords of the elephant herds, their trunks as thick as the trunks of palms, plunging into lakes carpeted with the flowers that fell without pause from the bending boughs, and mountain bulls dozing in a daze like drunkenness in person, their hides reddened with the dust of flowers and their tails flushed with the crimson pollen the breeze carried. The quick, lovely chowri deer dipped in pools of fallen blossom like fly-whisk bearers to the king of mountains. Kinnara boys sat on the tops of tall straight date palms and pelted one another with the fruit, which lodged in the reeds below as if the reeds had borne it. Big monkeys with hideous red cheeks leapt about and hid in the cover of the spreading creepers. Celestial women pelted the Siddhas with mandara blossoms, and the Siddhas sat wrapped in the tawny clouds that shrouded them like robes. The empty skirts of the mountain were as lonely as the paths of wandering Buddhist mendicants, and the streams at its foot glided under a cover of kunda and mandara flowers, as if they were running to meet the sea dressed in the yellow of spring. Trees garlanded with flowers swayed in the breeze like revelers drunk on the honey of the blossoms, the bees fluttering about them for rolling, dizzy eyes. The two walked here and there and admired the grandeur of the mountain, and at last they came down to the lower earth with its cities and human dwellings, and in a moment they stood on the bank of the Samanga, which ran with loosened flowers of every kind, as if the river itself were a bed of flowers.

Bhrigu saw his son on one of the banks. The body was another body, and the features were altered past knowing. The limbs were stiff, the senses at a standstill, the mind fixed in steady meditation, and he looked as if he had been at rest a long time, resting from the turmoil of the world. He had thought over the currents of the world, how they glide on with their joy and sorrow one after the other until a man, after long trial, is rid of them, and he had gone as still as a wheel that has spun itself out, at rest after its long whirling in the whirlpool of the world. He sat withdrawn like a lover who has retired to think only of the one he loves, his mind at rest after its wanderings, in a meditation without a shadow of doubleness in it, smiling with a cool indifference at everything mankind pursues. Freed of every concern, released from the enjoyments of life and out of the snare of desire and fancy, he rested in the supreme bliss of the soul, in the everlasting rest of God, the way a pure crystal takes the color of the gem beside it. Bhrigu looked at his son’s mind, calm and composed and awake, freed alike from the thought of what was desirable and from hatred of what disgusted him.

Yama looked at the meditator and said to the father, in a voice as hoarse as the sounding sea, “There is your son.” Then he said to Bhargava himself, “Awake,” and the word startled him out of his meditation the way the roar of a cloud rouses a peacock asleep through the summer.

He opened his eyes and lifted them, and saw the god standing with his father at one side, and the two of them, pleased at the sight of him, glowed in the face like the disks of the sun and moon. He rose from his seat of kadamba leaves and bowed to them. They seemed to him to have come like the gods Hari and Hara in the disguise of a pair of Brahmins. When the greetings had passed between them they sat down on a slab of stone, and they looked like the venerable gods Vishnu and Shiva seated on the pinnacle of Meru.

The Brahmin boy of the Samanga finished the muttering of his mantras and spoke, in a voice that fell like amrita, the water of life. “I am set free today at the sight of you, as if the sun and the moon had risen together to be seen at once. The darkness that ruled my mind, which no light of the sastras, no knowledge spiritual or worldly, not even my austerities could remove, is dispelled today by the light of your presence. A kind look from the great gives the mind as much joy as a draft of pure amrita gives the heart. Tell me who you are, whose feet have sanctified this place as the two glorious orbs of day and night light up the sky.”

“Remember the births that came before this one,” Bhrigu said. “Your understanding is clear enough to reach them.”

Memory Across Many Bodies

Bhrigu told him the state of his former birth, and the Brahmin boy remembered it at once by the clear sight within him. The remembrance of what he had been struck him with wonder, and he smiled, his face joyous and his heart glad, and pondered it, and then he spoke.

“Blessed is the law of the Supreme Being, which has no beginning and no end, and which is called destiny down here, and by whose power the world goes round like a wheel. I see my countless births, which I never knew about, and the innumerable accidents they were subject to, over a whole kalpa, from the first to the last. I have undergone great hardship, and I have known prosperity with all the toil it takes to earn it. I have wandered in one life after another, and I remember roaming a long time over the mountain country of Meru.”

“I drank water reddened with the pollen of mandara flowers and roved along the bank of the heavenly Mandakini, where the lotuses grow. I wandered in the groves of Mandara, through creepers that flower like gold, under the shade of the kalpa trees of Meru and over the flowered plains above and around it. There is nothing good or evil that I have not tasted, or felt, or done myself. There is nothing I have not seen and felt and known in my past lives.”

“Now I know what there is to know. I have seen the imperishable one in whom I have my rest. My toil is finished, and I have come to rest beyond the country of error and darkness.”

“Rise now, and let us go and see that body lying on the mountain Mandara, dried like a withered plant. I have no wish to stay in this place, nor to go anywhere of my own will; it is only to see the works of fate that any of us wander about. I will follow you, with my firm belief in the one Deity the learned adore. Let that be the one thing my mind desires, and I will act exactly as that belief requires.”

With their thoughts on the course of nature, the three of them, lovers of knowledge all, moved with their spiritual bodies from the bank of the Samanga. They climbed into the sky, passed through the pores of the clouds to the region of the Siddhas, and from there came down to the lower world and arrived at Mandara.

The Skeleton on Mandarachala

There, on a cliff of the mountain, Shukra saw the dried body of his former birth lying under the dark, dewy leaves of the trees. “Here is that shriveled body,” he said, “which you fed with so many delicacies once. This is the body my wet nurse anointed with camphor and agallochum and sandal paste. This is the body that used to lie on cool beds heaped with mandara flowers in the airy places of Meru. This is the body the women of heaven caressed so fondly, and it lies on the bare ground now, for creeping insects and worms to bite. This is the body that used to ramble in the sandalwood gardens, lying now a dried skeleton on the naked rock. This is the body that lies here past all feeling of delight in the company of the nymphs, withering away, unconscious of the actions and the passions of its mind.”

“My poor pitiable body, how do you rest here in peace, forgetful of the delights you had in every stage of life, insensible to the thought of the pleasures and amusements you once knew? You have become a dead corpse, dried by the sun, so hideous in your frame of bones that the change in you frightens me. I am afraid to look at this body in which I took so much pleasure once, and which is now reduced to a skeleton. I see the ants creeping over this breast of mine, which was hung once with necklaces studded with gems like stars. Look at what remains of a body whose look of molten gold drew the hearts of beautiful women; it carries nothing now except a load of dry bones. Look at the stags of the forest running in fear from the wide-open jaws and withered skin of my carcass, whose horrible mouth frightens the timid fawns in the woods.”

Then the lament turned. “I see the hollow of the belly of this withered corpse filled with sunshine, as a man’s mind is filled with knowledge. Lying flat on the mountain stone, my dried body is like the mind of the wise, humbled by the sense of its own unworthiness. It seems to be wasting itself like an ascetic in his trance on the mountain, dead to color and sound, to touch and taste, freed from all its desires and passions. It is freed from the demon of the mind, and it rests in its felicity without any dread of the turns of fate and fortune, or fear of falling. The felicity that comes to the body when the demon of the mind goes quiet cannot be had from possessing the whole vast dominion of the world. See how happily this body sleeps in the forest, freed from all its doubts and desires, released from the net of its fancies. A body is troubled like a tall tree by the restlessness of the apish mind, and the mind’s agitation hurls it down like a tree torn up by the roots; set free from the impulses of that mischievous mind, this body sleeps in its highest and perfect felicity, released from the jarring broils of the world, which clash like the roaring of lions and elephants locked in fight. Every desire is a fever in the breast, and the mass of our errors is the mist of autumn, and there is no release from these for anyone except by dispassion of mind. Those who have had the greatness of mind to lay hold of tranquility have gone beyond the bounds of worldly enjoyment. It is by my good fortune that I have come upon this body of mine resting in these woods without its troublesome mind, freed from all its tribulations and feverish anxieties.”

Rama, listening in his father’s court, stopped the telling with a question. “You have already told how Shukra passed through many births in different shapes and felt every chance of good and evil in them. Why, then, did he grieve so much for this one body, the one Bhrigu begot, and disregard all the others and the pains and pleasures that went with them?”

“Rama,” Vasistha answered, “the other bodies of Shukra were creations of his imagination. The body of Bhargava, the son of Bhrigu, was the actual one, produced by the merit of his earlier acts. It was the first body he was born with by the will of his Maker: it was formed first as subtle air, then changed into the shape of wind, and that wind entered Bhrigu’s heart in the flow of his vital and circulating breaths, and joined in time with his seed, and formed the germ of Shukra’s body. That body received the Brahminical sacraments and became the father’s companion, and at last, over a long time, it was reduced to a skeleton. Because this was the first body Shukra had received from Brahma the creator, he lamented so much over it.”

“Dispassionate and free of desire as Shukra was, he still sorrowed for his body, as everything born of flesh does. That is the way of all flesh, whether the body belongs to a wise man or a fool, whether the man was mighty or not. Those who know the course of nature and those who are ignorant of it, down to the brutes and beasts, are all subject to the course of the world, as if bound in the net of fate and liable to grief. The wise and the unwise stand on the same footing in their nature and their habits; it is only the difference in desire that sets one apart from the other, since letting go of desire or being bound to it is what frees a man or holds him in this world, and it is the greatness of their aim that sets the great apart from the mean-minded. As long as there is a body there is the feeling of pleasure in pleasure and of pain in pain, and the mind that calls itself unattached and unaffected by them is putting on a show of wisdom. Even great souls are seen to be happy in pleasure and sorrowful in pain, and to look wise in their outward circumstances. The sun’s reflection shakes in the water; the fixed sun himself does not. So the wise are moved in worldly matters while they stay firm in their faith in God, and the wise man who has rid himself of worldly concerns still behaves in them like the unwise. He is free who has the freedom of his mind, though his body is in chains, and he labors in bondage whose mind is held by error, though his body is free. The causes of happiness and misery, of liberty and bondage, are the feelings of the mind, as the sun’s beams and the flame of fire are the causes of light.”

“So conform to the custom of society in your outward conduct, Rama, and stay indifferent to every worldly concern in your inward mind. Stay true to yourself by giving up your concerns in the world, and go on discharging every duty in it by the acts of your body. Watch the inward sorrows and the diseases of the body, the dangerous whirlpools and pitfalls on the course of your life, and do not fall into the black hole of selfishness, which gives the soul its greatest anguish. Mix with nothing, and let nothing mix with you; be of a purely enlightened nature and rest content in your inward soul. Think of yourself as the pure and holy spirit of Brahma, the universal soul and maker of all, the tranquil and uncreated All, and be happy forever. If you can rescue yourself from the great gloom of egotism and arrive at pure indifference to all objects, you will certainly become great in mind and soul, and the object of universal veneration.”

On the cliff of Mandara, the god Yama cut across Shukra’s long lamentation, in words as deep as the roaring of a cloud. “Now, Shukra, cast off this body of the Samanga devotee and enter this dead body, the way a prince enters his palace. With this first-born body you will perform austere devotion, and by the virtue of it you will obtain the preceptorship of the Daitya tribe. Then, at the end of the great kalpa, you will have to put off your mortal body for good, as one throws away a faded flower. Having attained living liberation by the merit of your earlier acts, you will continue forever as preceptor to the leader of the great Asuras. Farewell. We go now to our own dwelling. Know this for certain: there is nothing the mind desires that it cannot accomplish.” With that the god vanished from before the weeping father and son and moved through the burning sky like the sun, the dispenser of light.

Shukra Returns

When the god had gone to his own place and taken up his destined state among the gods, the two Bhrigus stayed where they were, turning over the inexplicable and unalterable course of destiny. Then Shukra entered his withered corpse, as the season of spring enters a faded plant to dress it again in its green and its returning blossom.

The Brahmin body of the Samanga fell to the ground at once, staggering the way a tree goes down when it is felled or its roots give way, and in a moment its face and limbs were disfigured. The old sage Bhrigu, finding the dead body of his son brought back to life, sanctified it with propitiatory mantras and sprinkled it with water from his kamandalu, the water pot he carried for his rites.

The veins and arteries, every cell and cavity of the dead body, were supplied again with circulating blood, as the dry beds of rivers fill again with floods in the rains. Filled with blood, the body put out its limbs in bloom, like lotuses growing in rain-fed lakes and new shoots and buds bursting in the plants of spring. Shukra rose from the ground breathing the breath of life, like a cloud carried up to the sky by the force of the wind.

He bowed down to his father, who stood before him in his holy figure, as a rising cloud clings to and kisses the foot of a tall mountain. The father embraced the revived body of his son and shed a flood of tears over him, as the high-risen cloud washes the mountain top with its showers. Bhrigu looked with affection on the old body of his son risen new, and smiled to see the body he had begotten brought to life again; he was glad to know him as the son born of himself and to find his own features grafted on him. The son and the father graced each other with their company, as the sun and a lake of lotuses rejoice to see one another after the shade of night, like a loving pair of swans when the night of their separation ends, like a joyous couple of peacocks at the approach of the rain clouds.

The two sat awhile on the spot, resting now that all their toils and troubles were at an end, and then they rose to the duties at hand. They set fire to the body of the Samanga Brahmin and reduced it to ashes. Who is there among earth-born mortals who ought to set at naught any of the customary usages of his country?

Afterward the two devotees, Bhrigu and Bhargava, went on living in that forest like the two lights of the sky, the sun and the moon. They continued as living liberated guides of men by their knowledge of everything there is to know, keeping the equanimity of their minds and the steadiness of their dispositions through every change of time and place, of fortune and circumstance.

In the course of time Shukra obtained the preceptorship of the demons, and Bhrigu kept his patriarchal rank and authority among the sons of men. So the son of Bhrigu, who was born as Shukra at first, was led step by step out of his holy state by his thought of the heavenly nymph, and subjected to the many states of life to which the bent of his mind inclined him. And in Dasharatha’s court Rama already had his next question ready: why did the imaginings of others not carry the same result as those of the son of Bhrigu?