Viduratha: Memory, Death, and Padma’s Awakening

The King Who Had Lived Before

The day’s fighting had stopped, and the night had taken the field. The servants of Yama went over it the way marauders go over a town by daylight, and the naked, flitting ghosts made their feast of the carrion under a darkness so thick a hand could have closed on it. In the still hour, when the host of heaven itself seemed bound in sleep, a sadness stole over Lila’s husband, the warring prince Viduratha. He thought about what the morning would ask of him in council with his ministers, and then he went to his bed, which was as white as moonlight and as cold as frost, and his lotus eyes closed for a while in his royal camp, white as the moonbeams and wet with the dews of the night. Then the two ladies came out of their abode in empty space and entered the tent through a crevice, the way air enters the heart of a bud that has not yet opened.

Rama stopped the story there. “How is that possible? The goddesses have solid bodies, with a measured size. How could they enter the tent through one of its holes, a hole as small as the pore of a piece of cloth?”

“Whoever mistakes himself for a body made of matter,” Vasistha said, “has no way of passing through a small hole with that gross body of his. But the one who does not believe himself shut up in his body as in a cage, held back by it in his flight, who does not believe that he fills his frame or is measured by its length, and who has the true notion of the subtle spirit inside him, finds no impossibility at all in passing wherever he pleases to go. The one who sees his original spiritual state as the better half of his body can pass through a chink as a spirit does; the one who leans on the later half, the material body, cannot go beyond it even in the form of his intellect. Air never sinks and the flame of a fire never goes downward; in the same way it is the nature of the spirit to rise and of the body to go down, and the intellect turns whichever way it has been trained to turn. A man sitting in the shade has no notion of the feel of heat, and in the same way one man has no idea of the knowledge and thoughts of another. As a person’s knowledge is, so is his thought, and so is the whole manner of his life; and it is by ardent practice alone that the mind is turned to the right course. As the belief in a snake in a rope goes when a man is convinced of his error, so the bent of the mind and the course of a life are changed from wrong to right by the knowledge of truth. Knowledge gives rise to thought, and thought directs a man’s pursuits in life; even the young know that, and every person of sense.”

“Now, a soul that is like a being seen in a dream or formed in fancy, which is of the nature of air and empty space, is never stopped anywhere in its course; who can constrain the flight of his own imagination? There is an intellectual body that every living being possesses in every place, and it is known both by consciousness and by the feelings of our hearts. By the divine will the intellect rises and sets by turns: it was produced first in its natural, simple, intellectual form, and then, invested with a material body, it makes one person out of the two. Know that the three airy things, the spirit, the mind and space, are one and the same, all three pervading everything, while their receptacle, the body of matter, pervades nothing. Know this intellectual body of beings to be like the air, present with everything and everywhere, as your own desire of knowing extends over all things in all places and sets them before your knowledge. It abides in the smallest particles and reaches the spheres of heaven; it rests in the cells of flowers and delights in the leaves of trees.

“It takes its pleasure in hills and valleys and dances over the waves of the oceans; it rides on the clouds and comes down in the showers of rain and the hailstones of heaven. It moves at its pleasure through the vast sky and passes through solid mountains. Its body bears no break in it, and it is as minute as an atom, and yet it becomes as big as a mountain lifting its head to heaven, as large as the earth that is the firm support of all things; it looks at the inside and the outside of everything, and it carries the forests like hairs on its body. It spreads out in the form of the sky and holds millions of worlds inside itself; it becomes one with the ocean and makes the whirlpools into spots on its own skin. It is an unbroken understanding, ever calm and serene, in possession of its intellectual form from before the creation of the visible world, and being as all-comprehending as space itself, it knows the natures of all beings. It is an unreality, like the appearance of water in a mirage, and yet it shows itself as a reality to the understanding by its intelligence. Without it the thinking man is nothing, a son of a barren woman, a blank like the figure of a body seen in a dream.”

“What is this mind,” Rama asked, “to which you give so many powers, and which you then say is nothing? Why is it no reality, and how is it distinct from everything we see?”

“Every individual mind is endowed with these faculties,” Vasistha said, “except those minds that are swallowed up in the error that the outer world is real. All the worlds are of a longer or a shorter duration; they appear and disappear in their times, some vanishing in a moment, others enduring to the end of a kalpa. It is otherwise with the mind, and I will tell you its course. There is an insensibility that overtakes every man before his death; that is the night of his dissolution. When the shocks of delirium and death are over, the spiritual part of every man is regenerated anew in a different form, as if roused from a trance, a reverie or a swoon. And as the spirit of God takes on its threefold form, in the persons of Brahma and Viraj, after the dissolution of the world, to make it again, so every person receives again his threefold being, spiritual, intellectual and bodily, after his life has been ended by death.”

“Then if we believe ourselves reproduced after death by reason of our memory,” Rama said, “we must understand the remaking of every body in the world by the same cause. Nothing in it is uncaused, after all.”

“The gods Hari and Hara and the others,” Vasistha said, “who obtained the liberation of the bodiless at the universal dissolution, could not keep the memory that would cause their regeneration. But human beings, who have both their spiritual and their intellectual bodies entire at their death, do not lose their remembrance of the past, and they cannot have the final liberation that Brahma has unless they come to the bodiless state, which is open to everyone, in this life or after it, by the edification of the soul through the meditation of yoga alone. The birth and death of every other being like yourself are caused by memory, and by the want of that bodiless liberation. The living soul keeps its consciousness within itself after the pangs of death are over, and remains in its insensibility by virtue of its own nature. As the living principle begins to have its understanding, it becomes an intelligent being in possession of its consciousness, its sense of self, and the organs of perception and conception are added to it out of their subtle elements in the empty ether. That minutely intelligent substance is next joined with the five inner senses, which form its body, the spiritual body, the ativahika, which travels by will and is stopped by no wall. By its long association with the outer senses this spiritual being comes to believe itself a being of the senses, and then, imagining itself in that sensible form, it finds itself invested with a body of matter as beautiful as a lotus, as a man dreams of a fairy form in his sleep and takes the illusion for real. Seated in the embryo, it rests in one position for a time and swells like air until it is fully expanded, and then it looks out at the world where it was born to die, the way a person visits the land where he is destined to meet his death, and stays there to relish the enjoyments laid out for him.”

“But the spiritual man soon sees everything as pure emptiness, and his own body and this world as illusions and vain vacuities. He sees the gods and the dwellings of men, the hills and the heavens bright with the sun and the stars, as no more than abodes of disease and weakness, decay, and death and destruction at the end. He sees nothing but a sad change in the natures of things: everything that moves and everything that does not, great and small, the seas, the hills, the rivers and the peoples of this earth, and the days and nights themselves, all subject to decay sooner or later. The knowledge that I was born here of this father, that this is my mother, these my treasures, and these my hopes and expectations, is as false as empty air. That these are my merits and these my faults, these the desires I had at heart, that I was a boy and am now young: these are the airy thoughts of a hollow mind. This world is like a forest, Rama, in which every being stands like a separate tree; the dark clouds are its leaves and the stars its full-blown flowers. Walking men are its restless deer, the gods and demons of the air are its birds; the broad daylight is the flying dust of its flowers, and the dark night the deep cover of its grove. The seas are its rills and fountains, the eight boundary mountains its artificial hills, and the mind is the great tank inside it, full of the weeds and shrubs of human thoughts. Wherever a man dies he is changed in an instant to this state and sees the same things everywhere, and so everyone rises and falls without end, like the leaves of the trees in this forest of the world.

“Millions of Brahmas, Rudras, Indras, Maruts, Vishnus and Suns, with unnumbered mountains and seas, continents and islands, have appeared and disappeared in the eternal course of the world; no one can count the beings that have passed away, are passing and will have to pass, nor those in existence that have still to become extinct in the unfathomable eternity of Brahma. So there is no way to comprehend the stupendous fabric of the universe except in the mind, which is as spacious as infinite space itself and as variable as the course of events in the world. The mind is the empty sphere of the intellect, and the infinite sphere of the intellect is the seat of the Supreme. Know that the whirlpools and waves of the sea are of the same element as the sea in which they rise and fall, and yet they have nothing of the durable nature of the water, because they pass; so are the appearances the same as the one that underlies them, though none of them is a reality. The sphere of heaven is only a reflection of the intellectual sphere of the Divine mind, the bright orbs of the sky are gems in the bosom of Brahma, and its concavity is the cave of the mind of the Eternal One. The world, in the sense in which I take it, as the seat of God, is deeply interesting; in your sense, as a sober reality, it is not. So the words I and you refer, as I use them, to the intellectual spirit, and as you use them, to the living soul and the body.”

“So Lila and Sarasvati, in their intellectual bodies of empty space, were carried by the pure desire of their souls to every place without obstruction or interruption. The intellectual spirit has the power to present itself wherever it likes, on earth or in the sky, before things it knows and before things it wishes to know, and it was by that power that the two of them could enter the tent of the prince. The intellect has its way to every place and every thing over which it exercises its powers of observation, reflection and reasoning to their full extent. That is the spiritual and unconfined body, the ativahika, whose course no restriction of any kind can block.”

The moment the two of them were inside, the tent changed around the sleeping man. Its white vault looked like the vault of the sky with two moons risen under it at once, and the floor was a bed of lotuses. A cool fragrance moved through the camp as if a breeze had come off a grove of mandara flowers; it lulled the prince deeper, and it put every soldier in the camps around him to sleep. Then the moon-bright radiance of the ladies reached the prince alone, and he woke as if someone had sprinkled him with amrita.

He saw two apsaras seated on two stools, like two moons risen on two peaks of Meru. He looked, steadied himself, and rose from the bed the way Vishnu rises from his bed on the serpent. He went to them with long strings of flowers in his hands and offered them, flung handfuls at their feet, then left his pillowed couch in the middle of the hall and sat on the ground with his legs folded and his head bowed. “Victory to you both, bright as the moon,” he said. “Your light drives away every misery and evil and pain and pang of this life, and your rays, like the sun’s, clear the darkness inside me and outside me.” He poured more flowers on their feet, the way trees on the bank of a lake drop their blossoms onto the lotuses in the water.

Sarasvati wanted the prince’s pedigree spoken aloud, for Lila’s sake, and she put the wish into the minister who lay asleep nearby. He woke, saw the two nymphs plain before him, came forward bent low, and threw his own handfuls of flowers at their feet. “Tell us who you are,” the goddess said to the prince, “and when you were born here, and of whom.”

It was the minister who answered, because that was his office. “It is by your favor that I am able to recite my prince’s line. There was an emperor of the line of Ikshvaku named Mukundaratha, who had brought the earth under his arm. His son was the moon-faced Bhadraratha; Bhadraratha’s son Vishvaratha was father of the famous Brihadratha; Brihadratha’s son Sindhuratha fathered Shailaratha, and his son Kamaratha fathered Maharatha. Maharatha’s son Vishnuratha fathered Nabhoratha, and Nabhoratha is the father of this my lord, who is known as Viduratha. He was born with all the great virtues of his father, as the moon came out of the milk ocean to shed its cool light on everyone. His mother Sumitra bore him as Gauri bore Guha. He was installed in the kingdom in the tenth year of his age, when his father went away to the austerities of an ascetic, and he has ruled it with justice ever since. Your coming here tonight is the blossoming of his good fortune. You, whose presence is hard to win even by long devotion and a hundred austerities, see before you Viduratha, famous lord of the earth, and today he is blessed by your favor.” He said that much and fell silent beside his king.

The two of them sat on the ground with legs folded in padmasana and palms joined, eyes lowered, and the goddess of wisdom told the prince to remember his former births by her inspiration. She laid her hand on his head. At the touch the dark veil of illusion and forgetting lifted from the lotus of his mind; it opened like a blossom and grew as clear as a cloudless sky, lit by the rays of what he had been. He remembered a former kingdom of which he had been the sole lord, and all his old play with Lila. The thought of those past lives carried him off the way a current carries a swimmer, and from inside it he looked at the world and saw a magic sea.

“By the goddesses’ favor I know this now,” he said. “But how can so much have happened to me in the course of one day since my death? I have passed a full seventy years of my life here. I remember many things I have done. I remember seeing my grandfather. I remember the days of my boyhood and my youth, and all the friends and relatives I had, and all the clothes, and the whole household.”

“Understand this,” the goddess said. “When the fit of insensibility that comes with death had passed, your soul went on staying in the empty space of the same place, and you are a resident of it still. This royal pavilion, where you think you are, stands in the empty space inside the Brahmin’s house in that hill country. It is inside that house that you see these other dwellings of yours set out before you, and it was in that Brahmin’s house that you gave your life to worshiping me. The shrine inside that house, on that same spot, holds the whole world you see around you. This camp of yours stands in the same place, inside the clear sky of your own mind. It is a false notion, picked up by your habit of thinking it, that you were born into your present state in the line of Ikshvaku. It is imagination that gave you a name, and ancestors, and a boyhood of ten years. That your father went off to the woods as an ascetic and left you the kingdom; that you brought many countries under you and rule them now as paramount lord; that you rule the earth with these ministers and officers, keep the sacrifices and judge your subjects fairly; that you have passed seventy years of your life and are now hemmed in by formidable enemies; that after a furious battle you have come back to this tent and sit here adoring the goddesses who have become your guests; that these goddesses will give you what you want, because one of them has given you the power to recall your former births; that they have opened your understanding like a lotus and you are about to be rid of every doubt; that you are at peace at last, and your long error about this world is gone forever: all of it is the mind.”

“You remember the acts and enjoyments of your past life in the body of Prince Padma, before death took you. Now you see in your own mind that this present life is a shadow of that one, the same wave carrying you on by its rise and fall. The mind’s current runs like a river and carries a man, like a weed, from one whirlpool into the next. The sun of the intellect goes under the mist of ignorance, and up comes this net of a world, which makes one moment look like a hundred years. Our lives and deaths are phantoms of imagination, castles we build in the air; the world is the illusion of banks and trees sliding past a man in a boat. In reality you were never born and you never died, at any time or in any place; you remain forever as pure intelligence in the stillness of your own soul. It is your all-seeing soul that sees everything inside itself. These hills and cities, these people and things, and we ourselves, are phantoms in the hollow vault of the Brahmin’s house in the hills.

“The kingdom of Lila’s husband was a picture of this earth, and his palace with all its grandeur sits inside that same hollow shrine; the known world is inside the empty sphere of that shrine, and it is in one corner of it that all of us are sitting now. And that sphere is as clear as emptiness itself. It has no earth in it, no house, no forest, hill, sea or river, and yet every creature roams about in it. There are no kings there, and no retinues, and nothing that kings have on earth.”

Viduratha heard that out and asked the question a king would ask. “If that is so, then tell me how I came by these dependants. A man is rich in his own mind and spirit; is that not ordained by the divine mind and spirit as well? If it is not, then the world must be a dream, and all these men and things the creatures of our dreams. Tell me what things are spiritually true and what are false, and how we are to tell the one from the other.”

“Those who have known the one thing worth knowing, and have taken on the nature of pure understanding, see nothing real in the world except the empty intellect inside themselves. When the mistake of a snake in a rope is removed, the fear of the rope goes with it; when the unreality of the world is known, the error of its existence stops. Once you know the water in the mirage is false you stop thirsting for it; once you know the dream was a dream you stop thinking yourself dead because you dreamed it.” The sage stopped there, because the sun was going down over Dasharatha’s court. The assembly rose with greetings on all sides and went to the evening ablutions, and met again when the sun came up and the dark had cleared.

Vasistha opened the next morning on the thing the goddess had left the prince holding. “A man without understanding, who has never met the all-pervading principle, takes the unreal world for real and as hard as diamond. A child is never free of his fear of ghosts until he dies, and the ignorant man never loses his belief in the world as long as he lives. A man who does not know what gold is sees a golden bracelet as a bracelet and never as gold; so the ignorant are led by shapes and never see what the shapes are made of. Know life as one long sleep, and this world, with you and me in it, as the vision of its dream. There is one all-pervading, quiet, spiritually substantial reality, an intellect no one can comprehend, an immense outspread emptiness, and the citizens you see in this visionary city are passing shapes of men, presented in your dream by that omnipotent Being.”

Rama cut in. “If the people seen in a dream are unreal, then tell me what fault in the embodied soul makes them appear as real.”

“The cities and houses seen in dreams are in reality nothing. It is only the maya of the embodied soul that makes them look as true as the ones seen in waking. Here is the proof. At the beginning of creation the self-born Brahma himself had the notions of all created things as visionary appearances, as in a dream, and they developed from there by the creator’s will; so the creator is as unreal as the notions in his dream. The world is a dream, and you and every other man have your sleeping dreams inside your waking dream of this visionary world. If the scenes of your sleeping dream have no reality in them, how can you expect those of your day dream to be real? You take me for a reality, and I take you and everything else for realities too, and so does everyone in this world of dreams.”

“If the two kinds of dreaming are alike,” Rama said, “why doesn’t the sleeper, when he wakes, think the visions of his dream as real as those of his day dream?”

“Day dreaming is of the same nature as night dreaming, and in both the objects look real; it is on waking from the one, as on the death of the day dreamer, that both visions are found to vanish into empty air. The things of your night dream have no place or time to exist in once you wake; the things of your day dream have none after death. There is one Intelligence that fills all space and appears as everything, inside and outside every body; it is only our illusive conception of it that shows it to us in different lights. As a man picks up whatever jewel he happens to find in a treasure house, so we lay hold of whatever we like out of what fills the vast Intellect.”

The goddess of intelligence, having sprinkled that much of her wisdom over the prince and watched the seed of true knowledge sprout in him, said the last thing she had come to say. “I have told you all this for Lila’s sake, Viduratha, and now we will take our leave of you and of these illusory scenes of the world.”

The prince answered her in the tone of a suppliant, which was new to him. “Your visit cannot go for nothing, Sarasvati, when even we poor mortals cannot withhold a gift from the people who come to us asking. I am going to leave this body and go to another world, the way a man passes from one chain of dreams into another. Look kindly on me, and grant the one favor I ask, since the great never scorn the prayers of those who ask them. Let this girl, my minister’s unmarried daughter, go with me to whatever region I am taken to, so that we may have the joy of each other’s company there.”

“Go now, Viduratha, to the palace of your former life,” Sarasvati said, “and reign there without fear, in the enjoyment of true pleasure. Our visits never fail to fulfill the best wishes of those who ask. Know this too. You are going to fall in this great battle, and your former realm will be given back to you exactly as it was before. Your minister and his maiden daughter will go with you to your former city, and you will enter your own lifeless body, which is lying in state in the palace. We will fly there ahead of you, like the winds, and you will follow with the minister and his daughter, like a man coming home to his own country. Your pace on that road will be slow or fast, the way horses and elephants and asses and camels are slow or fast; ours is nothing like any of those.” The prince and the goddess were still talking, pleasantly, as if the night were long, when a man on horseback rode up to the tent in a great hurry and in evident confusion.

Two Queens Named Lila

“I come to tell you,” he said, “that showers of darts and disks and swords and clubs are falling on us like rain from the enemy’s lines, and they are forcing in on us like a flood from every side. They are raining their heavy weapons down on us at their pleasure, like pieces of rock torn off the heads of high hills by a hurricane. And they have set fire to the city, our city that stood like a rock. It is burning on all sides like a forest fire, it crackles and roars, and it is bringing the houses down with a hideous noise. The smoke is heaving up like hills and has spread over the sky like the clouds of the flood, and the flame goes up so high it looks like a phoenix flying.”

While the marshal was still trembling through his news, a loud cry went up outside and filled the sky. Bowstrings drawn to the ear twanged, arrows loosed with full force rustled past, furious elephants roared and frightened ones shrieked; the citizens whose houses had burned to the ground raised a long halloo; embers fell and flew with a crackling sound, and the fire roared hoarsely as it fed. The goddesses and the prince and his minister heard and saw all of it from an opening in the tent. The city was ablaze in the darkness of the night. It looked like the fiery ocean of the last day, and clouds of enemy soldiers covered it with their flashing weapons waving on every side. The flame rose as high as the sky and melted the great buildings down like hills in the fire of the end; the heavens were hidden under rolling smoke, and the flames flashed through it like the golden peaks of Meru; cinders and sparks glittered like meteors and stars, and the burning houses and towers glared like mountains on fire. What was left of the army was hemmed in by the spreading flames, and the half-burned citizens, crying out, could not flee for fear of the enemy outside.

The fire went out when it had burned the royalty to ash, and the flame stopped when it had turned everything to cinders. Then the prince heard his own soldiers, who had seen their wives running from the flames. “Woe for the burning of our wives, who were as cool as frost to our bodies before, and whose ashes now lie in our breasts like lime. The smoke curls up like a long winding river in the air, and its black and white fumes look like the dark stream of the Yamuna in one place and the milky path of the heavenly Ganga in another. There are our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, relatives and nursing babies, all burned alive in the livid flames, and here are we, burning with grief for them in the houses the fire has spared. Boys abandoned by their parents in the dark are pierced by flying arrows or crushed under falling houses as they run through the streets. The weeping women pass like lotuses walking on land, and their tears fall from their lotus eyes like fluttering bees. And the bond of married love: the faithful wife never fails to follow her burning lord, and burns herself in the same flame with him.

“An elephant, his trunk burned as he broke the burning post he was chained to by the leg, ran raging to a lake of lotuses and fell dead in it. The sky has gone red with the fires, like the courtyard of Death dyed purple in joy to receive the souls of the dead. And this, the worst of it, the shame of the day: the royal women are being carried off by armed ruffians. Look at them dragged through the streets from their stately houses, strewing the road with the wreaths torn from their necks, their half-burned hair hanging loose, the jewels dropped from their wrists strewing the ground with gems. They fall in a body, their arms twisted about one another’s necks and the ends of their cloths tied to each other’s, and like that the ruffians drag them, their bodies mangled and bleeding. Ah, who will save them from this?” The soldiers said that last with piteous looks and tears as big as lotuses. So the goddess of royal prosperity herself, with her pendant locks and flowing garments and flowery chaplets and jeweled ornaments, was brought to her end like those women, after all her enjoyment of the pleasures of royalty.

At that moment the great queen came into Viduratha’s camp, in the full bloom of her youth, the way the goddess of grace alights on a lotus. She wore pendant wreaths of flowers and necklaces, and a train of young companions and handmaids came with her, every one of them terrified; her face was bright as the moon and her form fair as a lily, her teeth shone like a row of stars, and her bosom was heaving with fear. One of her companions told the king what had happened, and it sounded like demons falling on the apsaras. “This lady has fled from her apartments with us to take refuge under your arm, the way a tender creeper takes the shelter of a tree from a rough gust of wind. The ravishers are carrying off the wives of the citizens with their arms raised, like the swelling waves of the sea carrying away the arbors on the bank. The guards of the royal harem have all been crushed to death by the haughty marauders, as the sturdy trees of a forest go down in a tornado.

“Our armies, frightened of the enemy from far off, dare not approach the falling city, as no one goes to rescue a lotus bed from a flood under the threatening thunder of a rainy night. The enemy has poured into the city in terrible numbers, set it on fire, and stands shouting under the clouds of smoke with weapons brandished on every side. The handsome ladies are dragged by the hair out of the middle of their families, like screaming cranes caught and carried off by cruel fowlers and fishermen. We have brought this tender creeper to you, so that your might can save her from the same fate.”

The king looked at the goddesses. “I am going to the war from here now,” he said, “and I leave this lady of mine at your lotus feet, like a humble bee.” He rose in a rage from his seat and sprang like a lion out of its den when the tusk of a furious elephant has pierced and pressed it, and was gone into the dark.

The widowed Lila looked at the queen he had left behind, and what she saw was her own form and features, exactly, a true reflection of herself in a mirror. “Tell me,” the enlightened Lila said to Sarasvati, “how this lady here is exactly me. She is what I used to be. How did she come to be me? I see this prime minister, and all these soldiers and citizens, these forces and vehicles, the same as mine and standing in the same places, in the same way as before. How did they come to be set here? I see them as images inside and outside the mirror of my mind, and I cannot tell whether they are living beings or the false chimeras of my imagination.”

“Everything we perceive outside is the immediate effect of what we conceive inside,” the goddess said. “The outer world appears in an instant to each person in exactly the form and manner he has it as a notion in his intellect and mind; no distance of time or place, no cause in between, can make any difference. Whatever is within us appears without us, in dreams and desires and in every imagining and fancy. It is the fixed habit of your own mind that set these things before your eyes as realities, and you saw your husband in the very state you believed him to be in when he died in that city of yours. He is in that same place now, presented with the same objects of thought he had at that moment; whatever looks different proceeds from a turn his mind took in thinking it so before. As a dream proves to be nothing on waking, so waking is a dream, and nothing, at death. There is neither entity nor nonentity; the two appear to us as fallacies by turns. What neither was before a kalpa nor will be after one cannot exist today, or in any age gone or to come. That which is never nonexistent is the ever-existent Brahma, and he is the world; it is in him that we see everything rise and fall by our fallacy, and call it creation. The waves of the sea are nothing other than its water; so these created things exist and appear in Brahma only.

“Yet the word world is no empty word; it means all as contained in Brahma, and so it is real and unreal at once, like the snake in the rope. It is the false notion that makes the true rope look like an untrue snake, and so we take the divine Intellect, the first cause of everything, for a living soul like ours, by mistake; and that notion is what makes us think ourselves living beings. Our preconceived notions of ourselves set unrealities before us as realities: our former family and birth, the same occupations and professions, the enjoyments we had before and no longer have. That is how your former ministers and citizens are imprinted as realities in your soul, with the exact time and place and manner of their functions, as before. The idea of royalty is inherent in the soul of the prince, and it goes before him as his shadow in the air, with the same stature and features and acts and movements he had before. Know this world, Lila, as a shadowy reflection of the eternal ideas of God, caught and refracted in the consciousness of every living soul as in a prism. Here is the sky that holds the world that holds this earth, in which you and I and this prince are set, as reflections of the one Self. Know all of it to be inside the empty womb of the Intellect, and as tranquil and transparent as emptiness itself.”

“And know this,” she went on. “This Viduratha, your husband, is going to lose his life on this battlefield, and his soul will go to the tomb in the inner apartment and take up its former state there.”

The second Lila had been standing by. At the words she bent low before the goddess with her palms folded. “The genius of intelligence has always been adored by me,” she said, “and she visits me in my dreams at night. I find you exactly her likeness. So give me your blessing.”

The goddess remembered that faith and reliance, and spoke kindly to the suppliant standing before her. “I am pleased with you, my child, for your unfailing, unslackened adoration of me all your life. Now say what you ask.”

“Ordain that I may go with my husband, with this body of mine, to whatever place he is destined for after his death in the war.”

“So be it, my child, you who have worshiped me with all diligence and without fail, with flowers, incense and offerings.”

The second Lila was glad. The first Lila was puzzled, and it showed; the two of them stood there in the same face and had asked the goddess for opposite things. “Those who want the truth,” she said, “and those whose desires lean toward godliness, have their wishes granted at once and without fail. Then tell me why I could not keep company with my Brahmin husband in my body of the Brahmin’s wife, and had to be taken to him in that house in the hills after my death, in this present form.”

“Understand, Lila, that I have no power to do anything. Everything happens according to the desire of the living being. Know me only as the presiding divinity of wisdom; I reveal everything according to my knowledge of it. It is by the intellectual powers at work in every being that it reaches its particular end; according to the development of its mental powers in each state, it gets its object in the manner and in the state it aimed at. You won the powers of your understanding by your devotion to my service, and you always asked me to be freed from the flesh. So I woke your understanding in that direction, and by it you have come to your present purity. It was your constant desire for liberation that brought you to that state, by the enlargement of your intellect. Whoever exerts his bodily powers as his understanding directs is sure to gain his object sooner or later. Austerities and the worship of gods are as useless without the cultivation of the intellect as waiting for fruit to fall out of the sky. Without the cultivation of the intellect and the exertion of manly powers there is no way to success; so do as you choose for yourself. It is the state of a person’s own mind that leads the inner soul to the state it thinks about, and to the prosperity it attempts to get. So distinguish between what is desirable and what is disagreeable to you, choose what is holy and perfect, and you will certainly arrive at it.”

Outside, the fire had done its work and the fighting had moved out of the city into the field. In Dasharatha’s hall, Rama wanted the man. “Tell me what Viduratha did after he went out of the camp in that rage, and left the ladies and the goddess talking like that.”

The Last Battle of Viduratha

He left the camp with a great body of companions around him, Vasistha said, like the bright moon in a host of stars. He was in armor, belted and girdled, and in that martial dress he went out through the war cry of his men like Indra going to battle. He gave the soldiers their orders, heard how the battle lines stood, gave his captains their directions, and mounted his chariot. Its mountings rose like the pinnacles of mountains; five flags fringed with strings of pearls and gems flew from it, so that it looked like a celestial chariot; the iron hoops of its wheels flashed with golden pegs, and pearls hung from the long shaft and rang. Eight horses drew it, long-necked, swift and slender, of the best breed and the right markings, their manes hanging down their necks like fly-whisks and a white circle like the disk of the moon on each forehead; they ran as if to outstrip the wind and devour the air in front of them, and their hoarse neighing filled the eight directions. Then a great noise of elephants rose, like drums from the hollows of distant hills; the infuriated soldiers raised their clamor, their belt bells tinkled and their weapons clashed far out in the open air; bows crackled, arrows wheezed, armor jangled against armor; champions challenged each other, the wounded shrieked and the captives cried, and the sounds thickened until the night seemed packed solid with them. Dust flew up so fast and thick that it looked like the crust of the earth rising to block the sun’s path, and the great city vanished inside it. The burning lights went as dim as the stars at daybreak, and the darkness of the night grew as thick as the devils of darkness grow strong at night. The two Lilas, with the virgin daughter of the minister beside them, watched the great battle from the tent; the goddess had given their eyes the gift of seeing far.

The flash and clash of hostile arms in the city came to an end, as the flash and crash of the undersea fire is put out by the floods of the universal deluge. Viduratha collected his forces and, without weighing how much stronger the enemy was, pressed into the middle of them, as the great Meru rushed into the waters of the great flood. Bowstrings twanged with a clatter; the enemy came on in battle array like banks of clouds with rainbows in them; missiles flew like falcons, and the black steel waved with a dark glare from the slaughter it did; sword struck sword and flashed living fire; arrows hissed down like rain; two-edged saws went into the bodies of the warriors. The blaze of the weapons put the darkness to flight, and the whole army bristled with arrows like hair. Headless trunks walked about like players in the horrid ceremony of Yama, and the furies ran about the field like raving girls at a drunken revel. Elephants fought with their tusks and the stones from the slings streamed across the sky. Men fell dead like the dry leaves of a forest in a gale, and streams of blood ran across the field as if the heights of the war were pouring the floods of death down below. The blood settled the dust; the blaze of the weapons dispelled the dark; the clamor stopped in the intensity of the fighting, and the fear for life was lost under the stern resolve to die. It was fighting without a cry, like rain pouring in a windless sky, with the glitter of swords in the dark air like forked lightning in murky cloud. With the fighting at that pitch, the two Lilas turned to the goddess of knowledge. “Tell us what unknown cause is keeping our husband from winning this war, when he has your grace, and is driving back the enemy’s elephants in the fight.”

“Understand that Viduratha’s enemy has solicited me again and again for victory in battle, and your husband never once asked me for it. He lives and enjoys his life as he wished it; his antagonist gains the conquest according to his own aim and object. Knowledge is contained in the consciousness of every living being, and it rewards each one according to the desire it is directed at. My nature, like that of everything, is as unchangeable as the heat of fire, which never turns cold. So the nature of Viduratha’s knowledge of the truth and his desire for liberation lead him to that, and never to victory. The intelligent Lila will be liberated with him; the unintelligent one will not, because by her nature she is still unready for that highest state of bliss. This enemy of Viduratha’s, the king of Sindhu, has long worshiped me for victory in war, and so the bodies of Viduratha and his wife must fall into his hands.” Then she turned to the minister’s girl. “You too will have your liberation like hers, in time. But before that, this enemy of yours, the king of Sindhu, will reign victorious over this earth.”

While the goddess was speaking, the sun came up over his hill to look at the wonder of the forces fighting. The thick mists of night went off like the hosts of the enemy, and left Viduratha’s forces glittering like stars at nightfall; hills and valleys, land and water came slowly back to sight, and the world seemed to reappear out of the dark ocean of the deluge. The rising sun’s rays poured on every side like streams of liquid gold and made the hills look like warriors smeared with blood. Helmets lifted their lotus tops; the pointed weapons stood as fixed as the horns of unicorns, and the flying darts flitted like butterflies. The bloody field was a picture of the red dawn and dusk, and the dead on the ground lay like motionless saints in their yoga; necklaces hung on breasts like snakes, armor covered bodies like the sloughs of serpents, flags flew like the crests of creepers, and the legs of the warriors stood like pillars in the field. The bands of Siddhas flew off out of the air with their leaders, to get clear of the weapons blazing up there in the sunrise like a city of gold on high. Streams of blood carried the dead away; big elephants floated lightly on the currents of it, the hair of the dead floated in it like weeds, and the floating disks glided like moons reflected in a purple stream. The ghosts and goblins of death made their horrible noise overhead, and below them the shining chariots of Sindhu and Viduratha moved with a loud rumbling, like the sun and the moon in heaven, each loaded with disks and rods, crowbars and spears and every missile besides, each surrounded by thousands of soldiers, each turning where it liked to the loud shouts of its retinue.

Then the two princes wheeled their chariots in circling rings across the ground, inside their phalanxes bristling with every destructive weapon, confronted each other, and, having met face to face, began showering arrows with the patter of hailstones. They threatened each other with the roar of surf and thunder, and the two lions among men shot their arrows at each other in their rage. They flung missiles shaped like stones and malls, sharp-edged disks and curved battle-axes, pikes and spears, bars and rods and tridents, some as bulky as blocks of stone; and these fell as thick and fast as rocks hurled down from high crags by a hurricane, and the meeting of the two armed powers was like the meeting of the Indus and the sea, with tremendous roaring and collision. Viduratha found the high-shouldered king of Sindhu in front of him, and his rage rose like the sun at its noon fury; the twang of his bow filled the air on every side and growled like the wind in a cavern; each arrow he loosed flew as thousands through the air and fell as millions on the ground, and Sindhu was every bit as expert, since both of them owed their archery to the favor of Vishnu. The second Lila, the native of that city, saw from the window her husband’s arrows rushing on Sindhu’s forces, and took it for the end. “Victory to you, Sarasvati,” she said, “and look, victory is waiting on my lord’s side; his darts are piercing the rocks and breaking them to pieces.” The goddesses looked at her sideways and smiled at her womanly tenderness. Sindhu’s fire swallowed the arrows; the cloud of weapons he sent up was driven back by Viduratha’s bolts.

Then the two kings took up the weapons their gods had given them, and the sky became a contest of gifts. Sindhu loosed the Gandharva missile, and Viduratha’s whole army stood spellbound where it was, every man except Viduratha; he loosed the counter-charm and his men woke. Sindhu sent serpent weapons, and snakes wound through the soldiers and spread their poison; Viduratha sent the Garuda weapons, and the great birds ate the snakes and were gone. Sindhu shot darkness; Viduratha answered with a shot as bright as the sun. Sindhu’s Rakshasa weapon filled the field with flaming fiends; Viduratha’s Narayana weapon put them out. Sindhu’s fire-arms burned the sky and the hill forests and whole legions to ash; Viduratha’s watery arms sent floods that drank the fire and swept Sindhu’s heavy-armed captains away with their war chariots. Sindhu dried the land with his drying weapon, revived his own men and left the other side fainting with fever; Viduratha bent his bow and called down clouds and rain and lightning until the ground was mud and Sindhu’s forces were drowning in it.

Then the icy winds of winter blew, and a gale rose that whirled the trees through the air like birds, dashed the soldiers to the ground and smashed the buildings to powder; that squall blew Viduratha and his whole force away like broken rotten wood on a flood. Viduratha, who knew his ballistics, hurled his huge heavy arrows, and they stretched themselves up to the sky and stood against the wind and rain like walls of rock, and the airy weapons were brought up short against them, the way the animal spirits are checked by the firm stoicism of the soul. Sindhu saw burning rocks falling out of the sky like leaves, and hurled his thundering weapons, and the bolts fell like flaming thunder from heaven, burned the rocks away as fire burns darkness, and hewed the heads off the hills. Viduratha sent the weapon of Brahma to quell the thunderbolts, and they jostled against each other and vanished in their own conflict. Then Sindhu cast the Pisacha weapon, black as darkness, and lines of horrid Pisachas ran out on every side and filled the sky with the dark of their bodies, and the daylight turned to the shade of night as if in fear of them.

They were as tall as columns of smoke and as black as pitch, and solid to the hand; lean skeletons with their hair on end and bearded faces, pale as beggars, moving about with bones and skulls in their hands, crueler than any sword or thunderbolt; the things that lurk in woods and bogs and on highways and pry into empty houses with open doors. They fell on what remained of Viduratha’s forces, who stood weaponless in the field with broken hearts, and the men were frightened to death: they dropped their arms and armor, stood petrified as if demon-struck, eyes staring, mouths open, hands and feet unmoving; they let their garments fall, loosened their bowels, and shook like trees in the wind. Then the line of Pisachas advanced on Viduratha to frighten him out of his wits, and he had the good sense to understand them as the conjuring tricks of magic. He sent the Rupika weapon in his anger, and it comforted his own army and deluded the Pisacha force. The Rupikas flew through the air with their hair on end and their terrible eyes sunk in their sockets; they were old, bulky and worn, with deformed backs and hips, human skulls in their hands smeared with blood and bits of half-eaten flesh in their mouths, and some had the faces of dogs and crows and owls.

They caught hold of the Pisachas the way men catch little boys, and joined with them as their consorts, and the whole crowd danced and sang hand in hand; they licked the blood from the wounds of the dead with their long tongues, and plunged into the pool of blood as happily as into a pond of ghee, rolling and jostling in the carrion until it swelled like the milk ocean churned by Mandara. Viduratha had met magic with magic; now, from a sense of being the weaker, he went further and sent the Vetala weapon, and the dead bodies, with their heads and without them, rose up in a body in their ghastly shapes, until the joint forces of Vetalas, Pisachas and Rupikas looked ready to destroy the earth. Sindhu was no slower with his magic: he hurled his Rakshasa weapon, which threatened to seize and devour the three worlds, and the Rakshasas rose as high as mountains like hellish fiends come up from below, and the roar of them and the war dance of their headless trunks terrified gods and demigods alike; the giddy Vetalas and Yakshas and Kushmandas ate the fat and flesh of the dead and drank the gory blood as their wine as they danced, and the hopping of the Kushmandas in the streams of blood threw crimson drops into the air that gathered into a bridge of red evening clouds over a sparkling sea.

The tide of war was rolling into a general massacre on both sides, and both monarchs began to think about saving their own forces from the ruin. The magnanimous king of Sindhu, who was armed with patience, called to mind the Vaishnava weapon, greatest of arms, as powerful as Shiva himself, and hurled it with the right mantra; it threw a thousand sparks of fire from its flaming blade on every side, and the sparks swelled into balls as big and bright as hundreds of suns, and some filled the whole field of the sky with thunderbolts as thick as blades of grass, and others spread battle-axes over the lake of heaven like a bed of lotuses, and they poured down pointed arrows in a net across the sky. Viduratha sent another Vaishnava weapon against it, to cancel the first and take away his enemy’s faith in his strength, and it sent out a stream of weapons to counter the other, currents of arrows and pikes and clubs and axes and missiles of every kind. The weapons struggled and jostled; they split the vault of heaven with their clatter and cracked like thunderclaps cleaving mountain cliffs; arrows pierced rods and swords, swords hewed axes and lances to pieces, pikes broke spears, swords shattered on maces, and whirling disks destroyed every other weapon, stunned the world with their noise and broke mountains with their strokes. The clashing weapons broke each other in numbers, and Viduratha defeated the arms of Sindhu, as the steadfast mountain defies the thunders of Indra. Then, as Sindhu stood still in defiance of his adversary, Viduratha lifted his own fire-arm and fired it with a thundering sound.

It set Sindhu’s war chariot alight like a heap of hay on a plain. The two kings went at each other, the one shooting his weapons like drops of raging rain, the other hurling his like the currents of a flooding river, until Sindhu’s chariot was ashes. He fled to the woods like a lion from its mountain cave and drove off the fire that pursued him with his aqueous weapons; then, on foot, he brandished his sword and in an instant cut the hoofs and heels of the horses of his enemy’s chariot, and hacked at everything in front of him like the lean stalks of lotuses. Viduratha came down from his chariot with his sword in his hand. Equally brave and equal in skill, they turned about in their rounds and scraped their swords into saws on each other, and with those toothed blades tore each other’s bodies like fish crushed under teeth. Viduratha’s sword broke. He dropped it and hurled his javelin, and it fell with a rattling noise on the breast of Sindhu, as a flaming meteor falls rumbling into the breast of the sea, and bounced off his mail plate. The shock made Sindhu throw up a flood of blood from his lungs, like the spout of water from an elephant’s trunk. The native Lila, watching, cried out to her sister Lila with joy. “Look, the demon Sindhu killed by our lion of a husband. Sindhu is slain by the javelin of our lion-like lord, like the wicked demon by the nails of the lion-god Narasimha, and he is spouting blood like the stream an elephant throws out of a pool.”

She went on, and her voice changed as she went. “But no. This Sindhu is trying to mount another chariot, though he is bleeding so hard from his mouth and nostrils that he wheezes. There, our lord Viduratha is breaking the golden mountings of that chariot down with blows of his mallet, the way the thunderclouds Pushkara and Avarta break down the golden peaks of Sumeru. And now Sindhu is climbing into yet another carriage they have brought him, decorated like the splendid seat of a Gandharva. Oh, now our lord is the mark of Sindhu’s mallet, flung at him like a thunderbolt. But look how he flies off and escapes the deadly blow. Bravo, how nimbly he has got back up onto his own chariot. But woe to me, Sindhu has overtaken him in his flight. He mounts his chariot as a hunter climbs a tree, and he pierces my husband with his pointed arrow as a bird-catcher pierces a parrot hidden in its hollow. Look, his chariot is broken down and its flags flung aside; his horses are hurt and the driver is driven off; his bow is broken and his armor shattered, and his whole body is covered in wounds.

“His strong breastplate is broken by slabs of stone, and his big head is pierced by pointed arrows. There he is, thrown down on the earth, all mangled in blood. See how hard it is to bring him back to his senses and set him in his seat, with his arm cut off and bleeding under Sindhu’s sword. Blood is gushing out of his body like a red stream from a hill of rubies. Woe is me, and cursed be the sword of Sindhu that has brought this misery on us. It has severed his thighs the way they cut a tree through with a saw, and lopped off his legs like the trunks of trees. Ah, it is I who am struck and wounded and killed by the enemy. I am dead and gone and burned away with my husband’s body.” As she said it she began to shudder at the sight of her husband’s body, and fell senseless to the ground like a creeper cut off by an axe.

Viduratha, mutilated and disabled as he was, was rising to strike the enemy in his rage when he fell out of his chariot like an uprooted tree. His charioteer lifted him back into it and turned to make the retreat. At that instant the savage Sindhu struck a saber across his neck, and then chased the chariot that carried the dying monarch back toward his tent. The body of Padma, who was Viduratha, was laid like a lotus in the presence of Sarasvati, who shone there with the splendor of the sun; and the elated Sindhu was kept from entering that abode, like a giddy fly from a flame. The charioteer came into the tent and set the body on its death-bed, mangled and smeared with the blood that ran from the pores of the severed neck, before the goddess, and from there the enemy went back to his camp.

The cry that the king was killed ran through the city. Carts loaded with household goods, women wailing, girls seized on the road, looting everywhere; the treasury broken open; chandala freebooters in the palace; the royal women dragged by their hair out of the seraglio. The chiefs assembled, and the ministers announced the installation; the coronation of Sindhu’s son went forward to loud shouts of victory, titles were handed out to the victors, and the royal party fled to the villages and was hunted and pillaged there. Trumpets proclaimed Sindhu’s victory and his sole sovereignty over the whole earth. The high-shouldered Sindhu entered the capital like a second Manu, received the tribute that poured in, issued his edicts, struck coins in his own name, set his ministers over the provinces as commissioners, and held a rod like Yama’s over the country until the risings died down and the breeze off the Malaya hills cleared the air of carnage. None of that reached the inside of the tent. The second Lila lay where she had fallen and did not stir. The first Lila sat by the bed and watched her husband’s breath come and go.

The Road to Yama

“Look,” Lila said to Sarasvati, with her husband senseless in front of her and about to die. “My husband is about to leave his mortal body in this terrible war, which has laid waste his whole kingdom.”

“This combat you saw fought with such fury, and lasting so long in the field, was fought neither in your kingdom nor in any part of this earth,” the goddess said. “It happened nowhere except in the empty space of the shrine that holds the dead body of the Brahmin, and there it appeared as the phantom of a dream. This land that looked like the realm of your living lord Viduratha lay, with all its territories, in the inner apartment of Padma. And it was the tomb of the Brahmin Vasistha, in the hill village of Vindhya, that showed all these shifting scenes of the mortal world inside itself. These things we see here as realities, these bodies of mine and yours and this Lila’s, this earth and these waters, are just the same as the phantoms rising in the tomb of the dead Brahmin of the hills. It is the soul that presents the images of things; nothing outside, which is wholly unreal, can cast its reflection on the soul. There is no error or illusion anywhere except in the misconception of the observer. Error consists in taking the unreal for the real, and in thinking the viewer and the view different from each other; remove that distinction and you have the knowledge of unity. Many worlds are contained in a grain of the mind, as the long leaves of the plantain are contained in one of its tiny seeds. Now: this Lila, your co-wife, has already gone to the world that holds the tomb of Padma, before the spirit of Viduratha could reach it. The moment she fell in her swoon in your presence, her spirit was carried to him and set at his side.”

“Tell me how this lady was given my form here,” Lila said, “and how she has been carried over and set beside my dead husband as my co-wife. Tell me in short what form the people in Padma’s house see her in, and how they are speaking to her right now.”

“Hear in brief the life and death of this Lila, who is an image of yourself. It is your husband Padma who sees these illusions of the world spread out before him in that same tomb, in the person of Viduratha. He fought this battle as you saw him in his reverie, and this Lila who resembles you was likewise a delusion; his men and his enemies were illusions, and his death at the end is as illusory as a phantom of the imagination. It was his self-delusion that showed him this Lila as his wife, and it is the same trick of a dream that deludes you into believing yourself his consort; and I rely on my own existence in a like state of dream. This queen Lila sitting here in her youthful beauty, smiling so charmingly, her voice like the notes of the kokila, her lips as red as two ripe bimba fruits: this is a form of you, the one you wished to be in order to please your husband, and it is the very figure of your own self that you are looking at with such wonder. It was the thought of his sure death, and the mistaken conception of his soul passing into the body of Viduratha, that set before Padma your desired form of the youthful Lila, the idol of his soul.

“So you were seen by him and he was seen by you, each according to your desires; both of you have the same unvarying soul that pervades all space, and you are made to see each other in your own ways. When this pair lay in their death-like insensibility they saw all these phantoms in their inner souls, by their reminiscence and desires: that such and such were their fathers and mothers, that they lived in such places, had such property, did such acts, that they were joined in marriage; and the multitude they saw in their minds looked real to them for the time. And it was in this deluded state of Lila’s mind that I was worshiped and prayed to by her, for the boon that she might never become a widow; and it was by that blessing of mine that this girl died before her husband’s death, to escape the curse of widowhood. I am the progeny of Brahma, the totality of the intelligence that all beings share, and so she adored me as her Kula Devi, the tutelary divinity. At the last her soul left her body and fled with her mind in the form of her vital breath, out through her mouth. Then, when the insensibility of death was over, she understood in her intellect that her living soul was set in the same empty space as the departed spirit of Padma, and her reminiscence pictured her in her youthful form, in the same tomb, with all her graceful blandishments about her, for the gratification of her husband.”

With the goddess’s blessing on her, that Lila set out in her fancied body to meet her royal husband in heaven beyond the skies. In her spiritual form, as light as air, she flew merrily as a bird, wafted upward by the desire to join her beloved lord. Ahead of her she met a girl, sent by the goddess of wisdom, who seemed to step out of the best model of her own heart’s desire. “I am the daughter of your friend Sarasvati,” the girl said, “and I welcome you here. I have been waiting on your road through the sky for you.”

“Lead me to my husband’s side. A visit from the good and great never goes for nothing.”

“Come, let us go there,” the girl said, and stood in front of her, looking forward along the way. They went on together and came to the doorway of heaven, which was as broad as the open palm of a hand and marked with lines like the lines in palmistry. They passed the region of the clouds and overstepped the tracks of the winds; they went beyond the orbit of the sun and reached the stations of the constellations; from there they passed through the regions of air and water, Indra’s world, to the abodes of the gods and the Siddhas, and crossed the seats of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva to the great belt of the universe. Their spiritual bodies pierced through its opening the way the dampness of ice water passes out through the pores of a tight water jar; and the body of Lila was of the form of her mind, which was of the nature of its own bent, and these wanderings took place inside it. Beyond the limit of the mundane sphere they found an empty space as wide as the scope of the great intellect, which the swift Garuda could not cross in millions of kalpas, and in it an infinity of shapeless, nameless worlds, scattered about like the countless fruits in a great forest.

They pierced the rim of one of the orbs in front of them and went inside it as a worm creeps into a fruit it has bored, and that brought them back by the same spheres of Brahma and Indra and the rest to the globe below the starry frame. Here they saw the same country, the same city and the same tomb as before, and went in and sat down beside the corpse of Padma under its heap of flowers. At that point Lila lost sight of the heavenly girl who had been her companion; she had vanished like a phantom of her illusion. She looked at the face of her husband lying there in his bed as a dead body, and knew him by her own right judgment. “This must be my husband,” she said, “my very own husband, who fell fighting Sindhu and has come now to this seat of the departed heroes, where he rests in peace. By the grace of the goddess I have arrived here in person, and I count myself truly blessed to find my husband here in his own figure too.” She took up a beautiful chawri and began to wave it over his body, the way the moon moves across the sky over the earth.

The waking Lila wanted the rest. “Tell me how the dead king and his servants and handmaids accosted this lady, and what they took her to be.”

“It was by our gift of wisdom to them that this lady, that king and those servants found themselves sharing the one and same intellectual soul in which they all subsist. Every soul is a reflection of the divine intellect, and by his fixed decree each represents the others to itself as refractions of the same, or as shadows in a magic show. So the king received his wife as his companion and queen, and his servants as cognate with himself, and saw no distinction between any of them.”

“Then why did that Lila not meet her husband in her own person, according to her request and the boon you granted her?”

“It is impossible for unenlightened souls, like that of the young Lila, to approach holy spirits in person; those are visible and accessible only to the meritorious, and gross bodies can no more reach them than a shadow can reach into sunlight. It has been the established law from the beginning of creation that intelligent souls can never join with dull beings and gross matter, as truth can never be mixed with falsehood. As long as a boy is possessed by his notion of a ghost, it is vain to convince him that goblins are chimeras of his imagination; as long as the feverish heat of ignorance rages in the soul, the coolness of the moon of intelligence cannot spread over it; as long as a man believes himself made of a corporeal body and incapable of rising into the higher atmosphere, there is no way to make him believe otherwise. It is by knowledge and discrimination, and by one’s own merit and divine blessing, that a person acquires a saintly form and rises with it to the higher region, as you have done with this body of yours. The effect of a blessing or a curse on anyone is nothing other than his obtaining the state he desired or feared to have. As the false snake in the rope has no motion or action of a snake, so the unreal views of Lila’s husband and the rest were the motionless images of her own imagination; our notions of all these worlds are products of our reminiscence, no creation of Brahma or any other cause, simple productions of our desire. Those who know the knowable God and rely on virtue can go to the spiritual worlds, and no one else. Lila, ignorant of the knowable and unpracticed in the highest virtue, could go no further than the city of her lord, which she carried in her heart.”

“Let her be where she is,” the waking Lila said. “I will ask you about other things. You see here that my husband is about to die, so tell me what I must do now. Tell me the law of the being and the not-being of beings, and what the destiny is that destines living things to death. What determined the natures of things; what made the fire and the sun warm and gave the earth its stability; why is coldness confined to the frost; what forms the essence of time and space; what makes some things solid and others thin, trees and men tall above grass and brambles, and why do so many things dwindle and decay in the course of growing?”

“At the universal dissolution of the world, when everything is dissolved in the formless void, there remains only the essence of Brahma, in the form of the infinite sky stretching beyond the limits of creation on every side. The primary laws the creator appointed to all things at their first creation continue invariably in force to this day; the minds of all turn as the divine mind willed, and nothing has the power to forsake its own nature. But know first of all that the world is no created thing. All that appears to exist is a display of the notions in our consciousness, like the appearances in our dreams. Now hear me on death. Death is destined for our good, in that it leads us to the enjoyment of the fruits of the acts of this life. Our lives are destined at the beginning to run to one, two, three and four centuries in the Kali, Dvapara, Treta and Satya ages of the world; it is by place and time, climate and food, and our good or bad actions and habits, that a human life rises above those limits or falls below them. Falling short of one’s duties shortens life, excelling in them lengthens it, and a middling conduct keeps it within its proper bound.”

“Tell me a little more about death,” Lila said. “Whether it is a pleasure or a pain to die, and what becomes of us after we are dead and gone from here.”

“Dying men are of three kinds, and have different ends at their death: the ignorant, those practiced in yoga, and the reasonable and religious. Those who practice the dharana yoga can go wherever they like after leaving their bodies, and the reasoning soul is likewise at liberty to range anywhere. The man who has practiced neither dharana nor reasoning, and has no certain hopes of the future, is called the ignorant sot, and he meets the pain and pangs of death. The unsubdued mind, full of desires and temporal cares, is as distressed as a lotus torn from its stalk, and feels a fire burning inside it at the moment of death. At the moment when the last gurgle of the throat chokes the breath, the eyesight dims and the face fades, and the rational soul grows hazy in its intellect. A deep darkness spreads over the dimming sight, and stars twinkle before it in daylight.

“An acute pain seizes the whole frame; the earth turns to air and the dying man seems to be moving through mid-air; the sphere of heaven revolves in front of him and the tide of the sea seems to carry him off; now he thinks he is falling into a dark pit, now lying in the cavern of a hill; he wants to cry out his torments, and his speech fails him. He wants to tell his friends about the evils of life and of this world, and he is carried away from them as fast as a stone from a sling, dragged along like a beast by its halter, through endless space and all its whirling vacuities, looking, as it were, for a place free of the vicissitudes of earth and ocean. By degrees the objects of his senses grow as faint to his failing organs as the landscape fades at sunset; he loses the memory of past and present, like a man who cannot find the points of the compass after the evening twilight is gone. The vital breath stops circulating through the body, and there follows the collapse called murchha, the swoon; and when that has reached its height, the body becomes as stiff as stone.”

“But tell me why these pains and agonies overtake the body when it still has all its eight organs entire.”

“It is the law appointed by the author of life from the first, that such and such pains fall to the lot of living beings at such and such times. The primeval sin springs of itself, like a plant, in the conscious heart of man, and subjects him to his doomed miseries, which have no other intelligible cause. When disease and its pain keep the lungs from taking in and letting out the air, all pulsation stops, the pulse sinks and goes still, and the body is said to be senseless and the life extinct. I too will die away at my destined time, and my consciousness of former knowledge will be fully awake at the hour of death; the seed of my innate consciousness, the soul, is never destroyed with my life and body. Consciousness is inward knowledge, imperishable in its nature, and so it is free of birth and death. The soul is nothing other than the intellect, which is never destroyed anywhere by anyone. Say then whom and what you call dead today. Millions of living bodies are dying every day, and the intellect remains imperishable. The living soul is only the principle that is conscious of its various desires, affections and passions; so there is no one who dies, and no one who is born at any time; it is only this living principle that goes on revolving in the deep eddy of its desires. The recluse who flies from the fears of the world as foreign to his soul, and has none of its false desires rising in his breast, is liberated while he lives and assimilated to the true One.”

“And tell me, to instruct me, how a living being comes to die and to be born again in another form.”

“When the action of the heart stops and the lungs no longer breathe, the current of the vital airs is utterly stopped and the living being loses its sensibility. But the intellectual soul, which has no rise and no fall, stays the same as ever, as it abides in all moving and unmoving bodies, and in air and water and fire and vacuum. The body is then called an inert corpse; the soul is no corpse. The breath mixes with the air, and the soul that has no desires flies to the mode of the discrete and self-existent soul. The soul that keeps its desires, and is called the jiva, is otherwise than the atman; it remains in its sepulchral vault under the same atmosphere as the soul of Padma, which you saw hovering about his tomb. After the departed spirits leave this visible world they see the many scenes and sights that their desires set before them, like visions in a dream, and find themselves in a new body soon after the insensibility of death is over. The departed spirits are classed in six orders: the great, the greater and the greatest sinners, and the three degrees of the virtuous. Some of the most sinful lose the remembrance of their past states for a whole year, and stay insensible inside themselves like blocks of wood or stone; rising after that, they are doomed to the endless torments of hell, which the hardness of their earthly-mindedness has brought on them; then they pass through hundreds of births, from misery to misery. The souls of the least sinful take on, soon after death, some perfect human form, to enjoy the fruits of their desire on earth. The best and most virtuous find themselves soon after death in heavenly abodes, by reason of their continued thoughts of them.

“So the dead picture to themselves one of these states, according to their own leaning, after they recover from the collapse of death. Having thought themselves extinct at first, they feel themselves revived when the offering of food is made to their departed spirits by their surviving heirs. Then they fancy they see the messengers of death with nooses in their hands, come to fetch them to the realm of Yama, and they go off with them, with the provision for one year that was offered at their shraddha. The righteous are carried in heavenly chariots to the gardens of paradise which their acts have won them; the sinful soul meets ice and pitfalls, tangled thorns and iron spikes on its passage; those of the middling class have a clear paved passage, with soft grassy paths shaded by cool arbors and spring water on both sides. On arriving there the soul reflects within itself: here am I, and there is Yama, the lord of the dead; the other is the judge of our actions, Chitragupta, and this is his judgment given on my behalf. In Yama’s court the soul is pronounced to reap the reward of its acts, and it ascends to the blissful heaven above or descends to the painful hell below; and afterwards it is doomed to wander this earth again. It is carried in the seed of man into the womb, is born well-formed or deformed according to its past deeds, feels youth come over it and old age deface it, dies again, and finds itself, as in a dream, taking a new form; and so it goes on conceiving its transmigration in endless births, until its final liberation from this changeful state.”

“Tell me kindly how this misconception of its changeableness first came on the soul in the beginning.”

“In the beginning God conceived himself as the lord of creation, Brahma, and then, as if in a dream, saw in himself all the forms as they continue to this day; they were manifested in the divine spirit first as his will, and then shown in the phenomenal world as reflections of the same. Some of them are called living beings, which move their limbs and live by the air they breathe; the vegetable creation has its inward sensitiveness and no outward motion, and takes its sustenance by the roots. It is according to one’s estimation of himself that a being has its own desires and the particular form of its body; the vegetable world stays fixed from its own sense of immobility, and rocks and minerals stay inert from their inborn sense of inertness. I have told you all of it: the nature of things in the world, and how unrealities come to look real to us. And look here: this king Viduratha is about to breathe his last, and the garlands of flowers heaped on the corpse of your husband Padma are at this moment being hung on the breast of Viduratha.”

“Tell me by what way he entered the tomb of Padma, and how we may go there too, to see what he has been doing in that place.”

“Man goes to every place by the way of his desires. We will go by whatever way you like, because the bond of our friendship makes no difference in our choice and desires.” The princess Lila, her pain eased by the telling and her inner sight brightened by the blazing sun of spiritual light, saw the senseless and unmoving Viduratha breathe out his last expiring breath. His eyeballs rolled back; his lips and cheeks and his whole face went pale and dry, and only a slender thread of breath was left in him. There is no need of a long description when it can be said in short: his life quit his body as a bird flies off far from a falling tree. The two ladies, with their divine eyesight, saw his animal spirit flying upward in the sky in its aerial form, and his consciousness vanishing like the scent of a flower on the wind. His living soul, joined to its spiritual body, began to fly higher and higher, led by its inward desire and expectation of rising to heaven, and the two ladies went after that conscious soul like a pair of female bees pursuing a grain of perfume carried far off on the wings of the wind. Then, a moment after the fainting fit of death was over, the conscious soul was roused from its insensibility, like a fragrance expanding on the breeze.

It saw the porters of death carrying away the souls of the dead, who had resumed their grosser forms by means of the food offerings their kinsmen had made to their ancestors. After a long year’s journey on the way it reached the distant abode of Yama, hoping to reap the reward of its acts, and found the gate fast beset by beasts of prey. Yama, on seeing the departed spirit brought before him, ordered its foul acts to be found out, all along its lifetime. The prince’s spirit was found spotless, ever inclined to virtuous acts, and nourished by the grace of the goddess of wisdom; and Yama ordered it released, to re-enter its former dead body, which lay buried under the flowers in the tomb. It was let fly along the ethereal path with the swiftness of a stone flung from a sling, and the living Lila and the goddess followed it through the air. Sailing through the sky, the living soul of the king never noticed the forms of the two ladies that followed it, though they saw it all along its course. They traversed many worlds and soon passed the bounds of the extra-mundane systems, until they came to the solar world and descended from there onto this orb of the earth. The two self-willed forms, with the living soul of the king, arrived at the royal city of Padma and entered the apartment of Lila, in a trice and of their own free will, as air passes into flowers, and sunbeams into water, and scents into the air.

Rama stopped him there. “How was it that they entered the house adjoining the tomb, and how could they find the way to it, when one of them had been dead a long time and all three were bodiless vacuity?”

“The tomb of the prince’s dead body was impressed in his soul and was the object of its desire, and so it led his spirit to it without his noticing, as if by inborn instinct. Who does not know that the endless desires sown in the human breast, like the countless seeds of a fig, come of their own nature to grow into big trees in their time? A man standing in one country sees inside himself his house in a far distant land; so the soul sees the objects of its distant desires forever present before it, though it goes through a hundred births.”

“There are many people who are free of any desire to receive the funeral cake,” Rama said. “Tell me what becomes of the souls who get no cake offering at their shraddha.”

“The man who has the desire of receiving that food settled in his heart, and thinks of it as offered to him, is surely benefited by its offering. The thought of having received the pinda makes a man sapinda, though it is never actually offered to him; and the thought of not being served with it makes a sapinda a nispinda. It is the desire of all living beings to be such and such as they have it in their hearts, and that is the cause of their becoming so in reality. It is a man’s thought that makes poison taste like nectar to him, and his very thought that makes an untruth seem true. No thought ever rises in anyone without some cause or other; so the desire that is inherent in the spirit is the sole cause of its regeneration on earth. Nobody has ever seen or heard of an event occurring without its proper cause, except the being of the Supreme Being, the causeless cause of all beings.”

“How can a spirit that is conscious of its own demerit foster any desire for its future good,” Rama asked, “and how can it profit by the pious works of others for its salvation? Do the pious acts of others, offered to the departed, go for nothing?”

“A desire is naturally raised in a person at its proper time and place, by the application of the appropriate acts and means, and the rising of the desire necessarily overcomes its absence. The pious gifts made on behalf of the departed souls accrue to them as their own acts, and the sense they thus acquire of their worthiness fills them with better hopes and desires for their future state. As the stronger man gets the better of his adversary, so the later acts of piety drive the former impiety out of the spirit; that is why the constant practice of pious acts is so strictly enjoined in the shastras.”

“If the desire is raised at its proper time and place, how could it rise in the beginning, when there was no time and no place? How could the will rise at first without any accessory cause whatever?”

“It is true, Rama, that there was neither time nor place in the beginning, when the Spirit of God was without its will. And there being no accessory cause, there was not even the idea of the visible world, nor was it created or brought into existence; and it is so even now. The phenomenal world has no existence, and all that is visible is the manifestation of the divine Intellect, which is everlasting and imperishable. I will explain this to you afterwards in a hundred different ways, and it is my main purpose to do so; but hear me now on the matter in hand.” Having got into that house, they saw its inside decorated with chaplets of flowers as fresh as the spring season. The inmates of the palace were quietly employed in their duties, and the corpse of the king was laid on a bed of mandara and kunda flowers, the sheet over the body strewn with wreaths of the same, and the auspicious pots of water by the bedside; the doors of the room were closed and the windows shut fast with their latches; the lamps cast a dim light on the whitewashed walls, and the corpse lay like a man asleep, with no breath at his mouth or nostrils. The full bright moon was shining, and the beauty of the palace put the paradise of Indra to shame; it was as charming as the pericarp of the lotus of Brahma’s birthplace, and as silent as a dumb thing.

They saw there the younger Lila of Viduratha, who had arrived after her own death and before the death of that king. She was in her former habit and mode, with the same body and the same tone and tenor of mind, as beautiful in every feature as when living; she wore the same clothes as before, the very same ornaments on her person, with this difference, that she was sitting quietly in one place, and no longer moving about as she used to. She kept flapping her pretty chawri over the corpse of the king, gracing the ground below like the rising moon brightening the skies above. She sat quiet, her moonlike face resting on the palm of her left hand, and decorated with shining gems she looked like a bed of flowers with new-blown blossoms on it. Her eyes were fixed on the face of her husband, as if she were pondering his future well-being, and a melancholy like that of the waning moon was spread over her face at the thought of his present woeful state. They saw the damsel. She had no sight of them, because their trust was in truth and they saw everything clearly, while her views lay elsewhere and she could not make out their spiritual forms. “You have said,” Rama put in, “that the former Lila went there in her reverie and her spiritual form, by the favor of the goddess of wisdom. How do you now describe her as having a body? I want to know how and from where it came to her.”

“What is this body of Lila’s, Rama? It is no more true than a false imagination of her gross spirit, like water in a mirage. It is the spirit alone that fills the world, and all bodies are creations of the fancy. The same understanding Lila had of herself to her end accompanied her into her future state, and the same notion of her body followed her there, though the body itself was reduced to dust, as ice is dissolved into water. Spiritual bodies are also liable, sometimes, to fall into error and think themselves corporeal bodies, as we mistake a rope for a serpent. Whoever thinks himself to have become a stag in his dream has no need to go looking for another stag to compare himself with.”

“If the bodies of yogis are of a spiritual nature, how is it that they are seen walking about in the sight of men?”

“The yogi may take various forms on himself without the destruction of his former body, as the human soul may think itself transformed into a stag in a dream, without any change in its spiritual essence. His spiritual body is invisible to all, though it may appear visible to their sight; it is like the particles of frost seen in sunbeams, or a white spot in an autumn sky when there is no frost and no cloud in it. Nobody can easily discern the features of a yogi’s body, nor are they discernible by other yogis; they are as imperceptible as the features of a bird flying in the air. It is from an error of judgment that men think some yogis dead and others living, when their spiritual bodies are never subject to death or to common sight.”

“Does the embodied soul take the spiritual form, or is it something other than this? Tell me, and remove my doubt.”

“I have told this to you repeatedly, Rama; how is it that you do not understand it yet, that there exists only the spiritual body, and the material form is nothing? It is by the habit of constant meditation that you must know your spiritual state and subdue your sense of corporeality; as you abstain from the one, you attain the other. Then there will be an end of your sense of the gravity and solidity of objects, like the disappearance of the visions of a dreaming man when he comes to wake. Everybody must take up his spiritual frame afterwards; the yogi finds it in his lifetime, by the enlightenment of his intellect. The notion of the corporeal body is a fallacy, like that of the snake in the rope; nothing is lost by the loss of this body, and nothing gained by its production and regeneration.”

“Now tell me what the inmates of the house thought this Lila to be, whether they saw her as an embodied being or a bodiless apparition.”

“They took the sorrowful queen for some friend of the king, come from some place they knew not what or where. They did not care to examine the matter, because it is the nature of the ignorant, like that of brutes, to believe what they see without investigation. As a stone flung at random flies off from its mark, so the brutish and ignorant go astray from hitting the true mark of a thing set before them.”

“Then tell me where the hill we dream of is hidden when we wake,” Rama said, “and remove my doubt, as the wind disperses the autumn clouds.”

“All things appearing in our dream or residing in our desire, the hill and the rest, are absorbed into our consciousness, from which they sprang, just as the motion of bodies subsides into the air that gave the vibration. We do not find our dreams and desires distinct from our consciousness of them; they belong to it the way fluidity belongs to water and motion to the air. There is no difference whatever between the dreaming and the waking states; in a dream we see a false city appearing to view, and in waking you see the unreal world standing like a reality before you. As the hill in a dream disappears at once into airy nothing, so the material world disappears into nothing, sooner or later, by thinking on its nullity. A yogi is seen by some to mount into the air, and by others as a dead body lying on the ground; and it is according to one’s belief in his spiritual or his material body that each one sees him in his own way.” In the room, the fan went on moving over the king’s face.

Padma Opens His Eyes

Then the goddess of wisdom stopped the course of Viduratha’s life, as we stop the flight of our minds at will. “Tell me, Sarasvati,” Lila said, “how much time has passed since the king’s body was laid in this tomb and I went into my deep meditation.”

“A month. Your maidservants have been waiting here all that time, watching over your body, which they thought lay asleep in the room. Hear what became of that body. It rotted in a fortnight and went up into the air. When the royal ministers saw your lifeless corpse lying as cold as frost on the ground, and drying out like a log of wood, or like a withered leaf on the floor, they thought you had died by your own hand, and they carried the rotting thing out of the room. They laid it on a heap of sandalwood, set fire to the pile with sprinklings of ghee, and burned it to ashes in a short while. Then the family raised a loud cry that their queen was dead, wept bitterly for a time, and performed your funeral rites. So when they see you come here in your same body, they will be astonished, and think you have come back from the world of the dead.”

“When you appear before them in this purer, spiritual form, they will stare. You do not have your former form now; it has changed to a purer one, agreeable to the tenor of your mind, to the desire in your heart. Everyone sees everything outside himself according to his inward feelings; children who have a fear of devils at heart see shadowy ghosts all the time. You are an adept in spirit now, with a spiritual body on you, and you have forgotten and forsaken your former body with all the desires that were born with it. The intelligent see material bodies as autumn clouds, with no substance and no rain in them; once the spiritual state is reached, the material body is an empty cloud, a flower without its scent, and a person of pure desire who is conscious of reaching it loses the memory of the material body as a youth forgets his embryonic state. Today is the thirty-first day since we arrived in this place, and this morning I put the maidservants here into a deep sleep. Now, Lila, let us go before the wilful Lila and show her, as we choose, the form of the truthful Lila, and her manner and conduct toward you.” They wished themselves to be perceived by the wilful Lila, and stood manifest to her sight in their ethereal forms, the goddess and the dame she had inspired.

The Lila of Viduratha stared at them, and found the room lit up by the full luster of their bodies. The apartment seemed lit by the bright orb of the moon; its walls looked washed over with liquid gold and the floor paved with ice, and everything was full of splendor. She looked from the brightness to the goddess and the other Lila, rose respectfully, and fell at their feet. “Victory to you both,” she said, “who have blessed me with your visit. You know everything, so you know that I came here first, to prepare your way, to sweep your path.” They received her graciously, and then all three sat together on a bed in their youthful bloom, like luxuriant creepers on the snowcapped top of Meru. “Tell us, daughter, how you came here before us, how you have been, and what you saw on your way.”

“When I lay senseless on that spot, at the shock of my death, I was wrapped in darkness like the new moon, and I felt myself burned away by the flame of a conflagration. I had no sense or thought of anything good or bad, and I lay with my eyes shut under their lids. Then, when I had recovered from the anesthesia of death, I found myself in a new body, just as I had been before, and carried at once into the middle of the sky. I mounted the vehicle of the winds and was borne like a fragrance through the ether to this mansion. I found the house guarded by its warders and lit with lamps, with a costly bedstead set in the middle of it. I have been looking at this corpse as my husband Viduratha, sleeping here with his body covered under the flowers, like the god of spring in a flower garden. I thought he was taking his rest after the fatigue of the war, and I did not like to disturb him. Now I have told you everything I have seen and thought since I was restored to my new life.”

“Now I tell you, Lila, with your beautiful eyes and your walk like a swan’s, that I am going to raise the king’s body to life from the bed it lies on.” She breathed the breath of life as a lotus lets off its fragrance, and it went into the nostrils of the corpse the way a creeping plant crawls into a hole. It passed through the vital sheath into the heart as wind passes into the hollow of a bamboo, and the breath of life was laden with desires, as the waves of the sea sparkle with pearls. The infusion of life brought color back to the face and body of King Padma, as rainwater refreshes a fading lotus in a single draught. By degrees the members of his body were renewed, like a garden when its flowering season returns, or the sides of a hill greening over with fresh bushes and creepers; his person shone like the moon with all its digits full, lighting the whole world with the beams of its radiant face; his limbs grew as tender and dewy as the branches of trees in spring and took back their bright golden hue, like the flowers of the season. He opened his eyes, as clear as the sky, their two pupils rolling like two orbs of light. He raised his body as the Vindhya mountain lifts its head, and in a grave, hoarse voice he called out: “Who waits there?”

“Your commands,” the two Lilas answered together, and he saw two Lilas in attendance on him, bending low at his feet. They were of the same form and features and of the same bearing toward him, alike in voice and action, alike in their joy and gladness at his rising. He looked at them. “What are you, and who is she?”

“Deign to hear what I have to say,” the elder Lila answered. “I am Lila, your former consort, joined with you as two in one, the way sounds and their senses are combined together. The other Lila is a reflection of myself, cast by my own free will for your service. The lady sitting here beside the bed is the goddess of wisdom, the blessed Sarasvati, mother of the three worlds; set her on the golden seat in front of you. It is by virtue of our great merit that she has shown herself to our sight, and brought us back from other worlds into your presence in this place.” The lotus-eyed king rose from his seat, and with pendant wreaths of flowers and a strap of cloth hung about his neck he prostrated himself at her feet. “I hail you, divine Sarasvati, who confer every blessing on mankind. Deign to confer on me the blessings of understanding, and riches, and a long life.”

The goddess touched him with her hand as he spoke. “Be my son, possessed of the blessings you asked for, and win your blessed abode hereafter. Let all evils and evil thoughts be far from you, and all your discomforts be driven out of this place; let an everlasting joy settle in your heart, and a thick population fill your happy realm. May all prosperity attend you forever.”

“So be it,” said Sarasvati, and disappeared into the air; and the people rose in the morning with their king alive. He embraced the reborn Lila and she embraced him, and they were exceedingly glad to have come back to life. The palace filled with loud acclamations of joy, like the noise of a giddy revel, and the citizens were full of mirth and song and music; shouts of victory and huzzas resounded in the air, and the people, elated, thronged the royal courtyard to see their king. The Siddhas and Vidyadharas dropped handfuls of flowers from above; drums and kettledrums, trumpets and conches sounded on all sides; the elephants roared outside with lifted trunks, and crowds of women filled the inner court with their rejoicing. Men bearing presents to the king collided with one another; others moved gracefully about with flowery chaplets on their heads; the red turbans of joy on the chiefs and the host of citizens, and the waving reddish palms of the dancing girls, filled the sky with a bed of red lotuses, and the ground was strewn with rosy flowers by the reddened soles of the dancers, whose pendant earrings waved in the air like golden flowers and whose silken veils glittered in the courtyard like so many moons.

Then the people went home to their houses, loudly applauding the queen’s return with her husband from the other world. King Padma heard of his own adventures from the hearsay of his subjects, made his purifying ablution with the waters of the four seas of the earth, and the royal ministers and the ministerial Brahmins joined together in his installation, like the synod of immortals meeting at the inauguration of Indra. The two Lilas stayed in company with the king and told him with delight their adventures and the wisdom they had gathered on the way; and so, by the grace of the genius of wisdom and their own experience, King Padma and his two queens obtained a prosperity equal to that of the three worlds. The king, full of the wisdom the goddess had given him, went on ruling his kingdom for thousands of years in company with his consorts. They reigned on earth in their state of living liberation for myriads of years, and then, receiving the perfect knowledge of the holy Siddhas, they became wholly liberated after their deaths. The happy pair had reigned jointly over a delightful realm of ever-increasing population, graced by learned men and righteous people who knew their own rights and their duty of doing good to all mankind, and then they were freed from the burden of their state affairs forever.

Rama’s Question: The Time of Three Lives

“I have told you this tale, Rama,” Vasistha said, “to remove your error about the phenomenal world. Keep this tale of Lila in mind, and give up your misconception of the gross material world. The substantiality of phenomena is a nullity in itself, and needs no labor to invalidate it; it is hard to disprove a reality, and there is no difficulty in effacing a falsehood from the mind. True knowledge consists in seeing the visibles as void, and knowing the one vacuum as the sole unity and real entity, and one loses oneself at last in that infinite vacuity. When the self-born Brahma created the world from nothing, without the help of any material or elementary body, plainly there was an eternal void, and all these are manifestations of the vacuous soul. The same creative soul has spread the seeds of its consciousness in the stream of creation, and they produce the images that appear to us without cease, unless we take the pains to repress them. The appearance of the world is a perspective of the sphere of the divine intellect, contained in the small space of the human intellect within the soul, as in a transparent grain of sand. That being so, say what the essence of this erroneous conception is, what our desires or reliance in it can be, and what destiny or necessity could even mean. This entire whole that the eye sees is a false appearance, like magic, and there is no truth or substance in a magic show.”

“What a wondrous exposition of the world you have given me,” Rama said. “It refreshes my soul the way moonbeams revive blades of grass that a fire has burned down. After so long I have come to know the truly knowable: what it is and how it is, and the manner in which, and whence and when, it is to be known. I have my peace and rest in pondering this wonderful theory, and your elucidation of the doctrines of the shruti and the shastras.”

“But tell me one thing, to remove a doubt, since my ears are never satisfied with drinking the nectar of your speech. Tell me the time that passed during the three births of Lila’s husband. Was it the length of a day and a night in one case, and of a month in another, and a whole year in the case of Viduratha? Or did any one of them live for many years? And were they of short or long duration by the measure of men, or of gods, or of Brahma? Please tell me this, because a little hearing is not enough for me, as a drop of water is not enough to wet the dry soil in the heat of summer.”

“Understand, Rama, that whoever thinks of anything in any manner at any place or time comes to feel the same, in the same manner, in the same place and time. Take the destructive poison that becomes ambrosia to the venomous insects that feed on it; take an enemy who turns into a friend by your friendly behavior toward him. The manner in which all beings consider themselves and everyone else for any length of time, that is what they seem to be, by their mode and habit of thinking, as if by an act of destiny. When our consciousness represents the twinkling of an eye as a kalpa, we are led to believe a single moment an age of long duration; and when we think of a kalpa as a twinkling, the kalpa passes as a moment, as a long night of unconscious sleep seems a moment on waking. The night is a long age to the long-suffering sick, and a moment in the nightly revels of the merry; a moment is an age in a dream, and an age passes off as a moment in insensibility. The notions of the resurrection of the dead, of transmigration and rebirth in a new body, of being a boy or a youth or an old man, of traveling to places hundreds of leagues away: all of these are the phenomena of sleep, and retrospective views in a dream.

“King Harishchandra is said to have thought a single night a dozen years, and Prince Lavana to have passed his long life of a hundred years as the space of a single night. What was a moment to Brahma was the whole lifetime of Manu; what is a day to Vishnu is the long lifetime of Brahma; the whole lifetime of Vishnu is one day of the sedate Shiva, because one whose mind is motionless in fixed meditation is unconscious of the change of days and nights and seasons and years. There is no substance and no substantive world in the mind of the meditative yogi, and to him the sweet pleasures of the world taste bitter; the bitter seems sweet by being thought so, and the unfavorable favorable, by being taken in their contrary senses. So it is by habitual meditation that we gain the abstract knowledge of things, as on the other hand we forget what we learned for want of going over it. Those who think find everything at rest, while the unthinking fall into the errors of the revolving world, as a passenger in a boat thinks the land and the objects on the shore are receding and revolving around him.

“It is memory that raises the dream as her consort, and represents things as the thoughts of the waking state presented them to her. The dream is as unreal as empty vacuity, abiding in the hollow of the intellectual soul; it spreads over the mind like the shadow of a cloud and fills it with images like a puppet show under a magic lantern. Know the phenomena of the revolving worlds to be nothing more than the vibrations of the mind in the empty space of the soul. The waking man sees the wondrous world in front of him, and so does the sleeping man, and both of them are like the insensible pillar that finds the images of statues carved on it. This waking world is asleep in the soul of Brahma and rises in his mind as the vegetable world springs from the sap hidden in the earth; creation lies hid in the supreme spirit and springs from it, as the brightness of gold ornaments is contained in the metal and comes out of it. The visible world stands to the bodiless, undivided spirit of God as a man fighting in a dream stands to his antagonist, each believing in the reality of the other while both are unreal in their bodies. Except Brahma, the all, there is no other cause; the divine Intelligence is the only cause and constituent of what it produces.”

“But what cause was it,” Rama asked, “that represented the citizens, counselors and ministers of Viduratha’s royal house to Lila’s vision as well, in the same way as her lord the king, who was alone the object of her thought?”

“All other thoughts are associated with the principal one in the intellect, the way the high winds come along with the storm. The association of thoughts follows in a long, perpetual train, and that is what caused the succession of sights of the ministers, citizens and subjects of the king in Lila’s vision, one after another. The thought that the king was born of such and such a family naturally brought in the thoughts of his palace and city and of those who lived in them. It is vain to inquire into the cause and manner of the intellect’s being combined with its thoughts at all times; it is called the gem of thoughts, the chintamani, and it must always be accompanied by its radiating thoughts, as a brilliant gem by its rays. Padma thought to become a king like Viduratha, in the proper discharge of the duties of his royal house, and that constant thought of himself as such cast the mold of the mind and manner of Viduratha upon him. All animate beings of every kind are models of their own thoughts, like mirrors showing their inward reflections to the sight. The mind that is fixed in the meditation of God and stays unshaken in the turmoil of the world is full of perfect rest, and keeps the composure of the soul until its final liberation from the bondage of the body; but the thoughts of the fluctuating enjoyments of this world are represented one after another in the mirror of the mind, like the shadows of passing scenes on a looking glass.

“It takes a great force of mind to overcome its worldly thoughts and turn them into the channel of truth, as the greater force of a river’s main current carries its tributaries to the sea; and when worldly and spiritual thoughts press the mind with equal force both ways, it is the greater force that leads it on, one way or the other. All of it is the empty sphere of the Intellect, quiet, without basis or substratum, peopled and filled by nothing except its own native thoughts. There really exists only one omnipotent, all-pervasive Spirit, which shows itself in diverse forms like the flowers, fruits and leaves of a tree, all appearing from the selfsame trunk. Whoever knows the uncreated Brahma to be the measurer, the measure and the thing measured, all one and himself, can never forget this certain truth of unity, nor fall into the error of a dualism of cause and effect. There is one Being, holy and without beginning, who, though he appears in the forms of light and darkness and of space and time, never rises or sets anywhere; he remains like a vast expanse of water showing itself in its waves and currents. The notions of myself, yourself and the objective world are effusions of our perverted understandings, and it is ignorance only that shows the One as many inside the sheath of the mind.”