Vipashchit: Four Directions, Four Incomplete Awakenings

Four Armies at the Borders

Rama had sat through days of this. In his father Dasharatha’s hall, Vasistha had been telling him that the whole visible world, solid or subtle, is a show the intellect puts on inside its own emptiness, the way a dream is put on, with no creator behind it and no creation in front of it. Rama wanted the measure of the thing. “Tell me again, sir,” he said, “how this ignorance works, the one that hides what is real behind what is seen. How far does it reach? And how long can it keep a man bound?”

“Those it has drugged take this earth and the elements for as lasting as they believe Brahma to be,” Vasistha said. “Hear a story about that.” In some corner of endless space there is another world, with its three lokas, the upper and the lower regions laid out as they are here. In it lies a stretch of country as lovely as this one, called the sama bhumi, the level land, where every creature ranged where it pleased. A city stood there, and a prince ruled it who was famous for his learning and spent his days among the learned men of his court. He was as handsome as a swan on a lake of lotuses and as bright as the moon among the stars; he had the dignity of Meru among mountains, and he presided over his council as its head. The bards ran out of verses before they ran out of his praises, and he was the firm patron of poets, the way a mountain shelters whoever takes refuge on it. His fortunes grew day by day and threw their light to every side, like beds of lotus opening under the first sun.

He was a prince of Brahminic faith, and he adored fire as the lord of the gods, with his whole heart, and recognized no other god as Agni’s equal. Conquering forces of horse, elephant and foot surrounded him, and his councilors stood around him the way whirlpools and rolling water girdle the sea. His great, unflinching army was posted to guard the four boundaries of the realm, and the capital sat in the middle of it like the nave of a wheel, with a spoke running out to each frontier.

Then one day a shrewd herald came in haste from the eastern border, with a message for the king alone, and the message was unwelcome. “May the realm never slip from the arms that hold it, as a cow is held to her post,” he said. “But hear what I have to tell you; it needs your thought. Your chieftain in the east has been snatched from his post by a fever, as though he had gone down to Yama’s country to conquer death at your command. Then your chief in the south marched out to put down the borderers there, and hostile forces poured onto him from the east and the west together and killed him. When he was dead the chieftain of the west set out with his army to take those provinces back, and the allied princes of the east and the south met him halfway there and put him to death on the road.”

He had not finished when a second emissary burst into the hall, driven by his own haste, with the rush of a flood coming through a breach. “The general of your forces in the north has been overpowered by a stronger enemy,” he said, “and driven from his post like an embankment broken down and carried off by the water.” The king wasted no time on it. He came out of his private apartments and gave his orders standing. “Summon the princes, the chiefs, the generals and the ministers. They are to appear here at once in full armor. Open the arsenal and bring out the weapons. Put on your mail and set the infantry on foot; number the regiments and pick out the best fighters. Appoint the leaders of the forces, and send heralds out on every road.” That was the royal command, given in haste, and it was carried out.

The warder came in, bowed low, and spoke with sorrow in his voice. “The chieftain of the north is waiting at the gate. He hopes to come into your sight the way a lotus waits for the sun.” “Go quickly and bring him to me,” the king said. “I want to hear from his own mouth what is happening in that quarter.” The man the warder led in bent before his lord, and the king looked at him. His whole body, every limb of it, was wounds and scars; he breathed hard, blood ran out of him, and he could barely hold himself upright. With the proper obeisance, in a faltering voice, his limbs twisting under him, he delivered his message. “The three other chiefs of the three quarters, with all the forces under them, have already gone to Yama’s realm, trying to conquer death at your command. When the clansmen saw that I was left to hold this side alone, they gathered in numbers and threw their whole strength at me. I got away from them to this palace with great difficulty, bloody and gasping, as you see. Punish these rebels. They are not invincible before your might.”

While the wounded man was still telling his story, another figure came through the door. “The hostile armies of your enemies,” he said, “as many as the leaves shaking on the trees, have settled in great numbers on the skirts of your kingdom, on all four sides of it.” He described what he had seen: chariots like cities on the move, horses whose froth flew off them like spray off the sea. He asked the king to march to the borders, and he left. The king, his ministers, the citizens and the sentinels on the walls were all struck with the same terror. The ministers had been in council, and they came with an answer.

The Offering to Agni

“We have consulted and we are agreed,” the ministers said. “The enemy cannot be met by any of the three means, peace, dissension or bribe. They have to be put down by force. When an offer of friendship does nothing and the offer of hostages fails too, there is no point proposing any other terms. Base enemies, foreigners of other races, great in numbers and in wealth, who know exactly where we are weak, are never won over by treaties or subsidies. The only remedy against this is to show them our valor. So let every effort go into strengthening the gates and the ramparts. Order our best men out onto the field, command the people to worship the gods and beg their protection, and let the generals sound the alarm on the drums and the trumpets. Arm the warriors and send them out; let the soldiers pour over the plains in every direction like the dark clouds of the deluge. Let the bows rattle in the air and the bowstrings twang on every side until the shadows of the curved bows darken the sky like clouds; let the strings flash like lightning, let the war cry roll like thunder, let the darts and arrows fall like rain, and let the gold rings in the fighters’ ears glare in the light of it.” The king heard them out. “Go, all of you, to the battle,” he said, “and do promptly whatever this hour needs. I will follow you straight to the field as soon as I have finished my bath and my worship of Agni.”

With everything waiting on him, he still found a moment to bathe, pouring potfuls of pure Ganga water over himself the way rain is poured over a grove. Then he entered his fire temple and worshiped the holy fire with all the reverence the shastras lay down, and standing before it he began to take stock of his life. I have led an untroubled and easy life, he thought, in pleasure and prosperity, and I have kept every subject of my realm secure, out to the sea. I have subdued the face of the earth and put my enemies under my foot, and filled the smiling land with plenty under the bending sky on every side. My fame shines in heaven like the clear, cool light of the moon, and the vine of my renown reaches the three worlds, like the three branches of the Ganga. I have poured out my wealth on friends and relatives and on worthy Brahmins as freely as I gathered it for myself, and I have quenched my thirst with the milk of the coconuts that grow on the edges of the four oceans. My enemies have trembled for their lives before me and groaned like frogs with their throats swollen, and my rule has reached the mountains on the islands in the distant seas. I have roved with bands of siddhas over the nine regions beyond the visible horizon and rested on the tops of the border mountains, as the flying clouds rest there. With a mind that knows, and a meditation brought to perfection, I have held my dominions whole and unimpaired, out of my good will toward the public good. I have put the lawless Rakshasas in chains and fetters, and I have kept my three cares, religion, treasury and enjoyment, within their proper bounds, so that none of them clashed with another.

“I have passed my life in the unbroken discharge of those three duties,” he said to the fire, “and relished it with joy and renown. But now hoary old age has come on me, like snow and frost fallen on a withered leaf and dry straw. Old age has come and blasted my pleasures and my efforts, and after all of it these furious enemies have overpowered me and are hungry for war. They have poured in on every side in vast numbers and the victory is doubtful. So it is better for me to offer myself as a sacrifice to the god of this burning fire, who is known to crown his worshiper with victory. I will pluck this head of mine and make an offering of it. Agni, I offer my head to you here. I give it as I have always given you my oblations; accept this one too, if my earlier offerings pleased you. Let the four urns of your fiery furnace yield four forms of me, with bright, strong bodies like the body of Narayana of the mighty arms. With those four bodies I will meet my enemies on all four sides and be invulnerable, like you, keeping my thought and my sight fixed on you.”

So saying, the king took a dagger in his hand and separated his head from his body with one blow, as boys nip a lotus bud off its stalk with their nails. The head became an oblation to the fire of dusky fumes, and the headless trunk of the self-immolated sovereign sprang up and flew onto the furnace after it. The sacred fire, fed with the fat and flesh of the royal carcass, yielded at once four living bodies out of its flames, since it is the nature of the good and the great to return fourfold, on the instant, whatever is given them in earnest.

The king sprang out of the fire in four forms of his kingly appearance, each as luminous as the radiant body of Narayana when it first rose from the formless deep. The four bodies shone, and they came with their own crowns and ornaments and weapons already on them: armor and coronets, helmets, bracelets, fittings for every part of the body, necklaces and earrings that swung as they moved. All four princes were of one form, alike in every limb and measure, and all four sat on horseback like four Indras on four Uchchaihshravas, the horses’ ears pricked as if for a flight into the sky. Their long, capacious quivers were full of golden-shafted arrows, and their heavy bows and bowstrings were as long and strong as the war god’s. They rode elephants and steeds as well, and mounted war chariots and other vehicles, and they and the vehicles under them were alike proof against the enemy’s weapons. They had come out of the bosom of the sacred fire the way the submarine fire rises out of the ocean when oblations feed it; their flowering bodies on jeweled horses lit every side like four smiling faces of the moon, and they looked like Hara and Hari come out of fire and out of water.

Outside, the war had gone on without the king. The enemy had broken through to the city gates; the villages beyond the walls were being plundered and burned. Arrows went up in flights thick enough to hide the sun. Elephants went down with their riders and lay in the field for the Kabandhas and the Vetalas, the headless ghouls and the walking dead, who came out to feed, and the Rakshasas joined them. Women wailed in the streets, and the roads filled with people running. The brave live by dying there; the ones who run die by living. The war raged with the fury of the four elements at war on the last day of the world; the sky was one roar of drums and conches, of arrows and clashing arms; armor split on armor. The files of the royal army were breaking. They fell fainting in the field, lopped like leaves, mown like grass. Then the trumpets announced the king, with a peal that filled the quarters of the sky, and a treble roar answered them like the clouds of doomsday, splitting the sides of the highest hills and the rocky shores. The king issued forth on all four sides in his fourfold form, like the four regents of the quarters, like the four arms of Narayana reaching to four sides of heaven, and his fourfold forces of horse, elephant, chariot and foot came out of the city of palaces behind him into the open fields.

He saw how thin his own army was and how strong the enemy’s armament on every side, and he heard their clamor around him like the wild roar of the sea. Flights of arrows thick in the air looked like sharks moving in water; the elephants on the wide field were its heaving waves; the wheeling battalions were whirlpools; the chariots with their flags were ships under sail; the raised umbrellas were foam, the neighing of horses the blowing of whales. The field was an ocean of blood out to the horizon, and the broken weapons glittered in it like gems in the womb of the sea. Looking at that ocean of an enemy, the king thought of swallowing it as the sage Agastya had once drunk up the sea, and he remembered the airy weapon he carried, the wind missile that would scatter the cloud of hostile forces like a gale. He set it and aimed it at every side, as Shiva once set the arrow to his bow on Meru to destroy Tripura. He bowed to his god Agni and let it fly with all his strength, the wind bolt with its companion the cloud weapon, to drive the enemy’s fire off and put it out. From his octuple crossbow the weapons burst into a thousand terrible arms that ran out and filled the four quarters of the sky: darts and arrows, currents of iron spears and tridents, volleys of shot and rockets, torrents of mallets and discs and battle axes, streams of iron clubs and lances, floods of the short bhindipala arrows thrown from the hand or blown through tubes, nets that sprang shut, fire bolts and a profluence of lightning, scuds of flying swords, javelins, and huge snakes that had grown for ages in mountain caves. In no time the enemy was routed in all four directions like ash before a hurricane. Rain fell, and then snow; clouds like the clouds of the last day stood over the field, and villages burned along every road. The Cholas of the Deccan, crowded as the sandalwood of their own country, were felled by battle axes and driven off to the southern sea. The Persians flew like leaves, striking against one another in their madness. The Darads from the caves of the Dardura mountains were pierced through the chest and fled with their sorrow. Men of the Raivata hills, running by night, were waylaid by Pishachas and eaten. Those who fled into the tala and tamala forests met lions and tigers. The Yavanas of the western coast and of the coconut country were caught by sharks as they ran. The Shakas could not stand the black iron arrows for a moment; the routed enemy covered the three peaks of Mahendra with their black mail like the clouds of the rains; islanders died under the whirling discs and fled to the Sahya hills; the Gandharas took refuge with the Vidyadhara maidens; the Huns, the Chinas and the Kiratas had their heads struck off by the flying discs and blown away like lotus flowers in a blast. The Haihayas, running to the Himalaya, drank the juice of the pain-killing plant by mistake and grew as light as Vidyadharas and flew home. The men of Bengal showed their backs and fled to their houses; the Salvas, running under arrows and stones, fell into the waters that ringed their city and perished there with their whole host. Who can count the countless dead on every field and shore? The four forms of the king, one soul and one mind in four bodies, pursued the fugitives to the shores of the seas. There the provisions ran out, the weapons fell silent, the sky cleared, and the four stood looking at the ocean.

The Second Petition

The king’s companions showed him what lay along that coast and beyond it, as men who have traveled show a newcomer. There was the Rikshabana rock, and Mahendra, and the sandal forests of Malaya; Gandhamadana, Himalaya, Vindhya, Krauncha and Kailasa; Savara women in garments of leaves; the northern ocean, where the Jambu river pours the gold of Meru into the sea. In one grove a Vidyadhara girl was singing to her lover, whom a relentless sage had cursed to stand as a tree for twelve years, and they watched him released before their eyes. There was the Kaveri, and the Bela rock, and the Ghosha herdsmen; a lotus lake with its bees and swans; the crane, the kingfisher, the peacock and the chataka, and one of the companions said he knew how fish live, from the memory of a past birth as a fish. Another told of a lovelorn traveler who, far from home, asked a cloud to carry word to his wife and fell down as if dead; they laid him on a funeral pyre, and he felt nothing, lost in the thought of her, until the flames touched him and he cried out and they beat the fire down; and when he came home and described the burning ground to his wife, she fainted at the telling. Then the companions turned to the king. “Make this earth, out to the four seas on its four sides, your footstool,” they said. “Establish your rule over the potentates who escaped your valor; appoint rulers over all the provinces on every side and give them the forces and arms they need to keep order; and go on governing your realms with mercy and moderation.” So Vipashchit and his companions sat on the coast and did what was needed to establish his sovereignty. They chose sites and built houses, settled the boundaries of the provinces, and posted guards. Night came down like a cloud, and the people slept after their work and their rites.

“It is a wonder that we have come so far without any effort of our own,” they said to one another, amazed at how little time it had taken to reach the ocean, like river currents falling into it. “This speed has to be credited to the swiftness of the vehicles of the great god Agni. And how wide the view is: from one end of Jambudvipa to the far shore of the salt ocean, and from there to the islands in it, and other lands and seas beyond them. There are islands and seas beyond those, and others again beyond them. How many such can there be, and how many more? How inscrutable is the delusion spread before our minds. Let us pray to the god of fire, so that by his favor we may see everything on every side at once, without effort or pain on our part.” So they reflected on the god with one accord and meditated on him, each sitting in his own place. Agni appeared and stood before their eyes in tangible form. “Ask, my sons,” he said, “what favor you desire of me.” “Agni, you who stand beyond this visible, elemental world,” they said, “ordain that by the Vedic mantra and our purified minds we may know in our minds whatever can be known. Give us this great boon, the best of all: that by your light we may know whatever can be known by the outer senses, by the mind, or by our own self-consciousness. Let us see with our eyes the paths that lead the siddhas and the yogis to the sight of invisible things, and perceive in our minds what is imperceptible even to them. Let death not overtake us until we have reached the ways of the siddhas, and let your grace guide us on the paths where no embodied being can pass.” “So be it,” the god of fire said, and vanished from their sight on the instant, as the submarine fire flares and is gone in the sea. Dark night came down after him, and when it had fled in its turn the sunshine returned, and with it the king’s wish to survey the ocean.

In the morning they put the affairs of the state in order according to the law, and then they were seized with a hunger to see the sea, as if some force outside nature were pushing them, something only the authority of ministers could have held back, and nothing held them. Their mad ambition burned so hot that they forgot their love for their families. Wives and children wept in front of them, and they left them weeping. “We will see what there is on the other side of the sea,” they said, “and come straight back here.” They muttered the invocatory mantras of the fire god, and the god gave them the power to walk on foot, dry-shod, over the sea. Each of the four royal persons, with his companions around him, went to the border of his own sea and walked out onto the watery maze. They walked on the water as if on ground; the four bodies of the fourfold king met together in one place, and then at once they separated, each with all his forces. Marching over the vast expanse, surveying everything in the sea and on it, they disappeared from the sight of the people on the shore, as a spot of cloud vanishes in autumn.

The forces went with them, on foot over the whole watery road. The soldiers were well armed and guarded by mantras and amulets, and when the sharks took them, the sharks could not digest them; they were swallowed and spat out whole. Waves lifted them and carried them leagues in a moment. So the king’s companions crossed the ocean on foot, as other men cross it in fleets.

Four Journeys and Changing Bodies

So they went on, exploring what Ignorance had laid out before them, walking over the watery maze and the islands it held. They crossed an ocean to an island and went from the island into the sea again, and in this way, on foot, they passed over mountains and wildernesses in endless succession. Then, as the king was heading toward the western main, a voracious fish seized him and swallowed him, a fish of the undying breed of Vishnu’s own fish, and as fast as a boat on the Vitasta. The fish fled with him in its belly to the milky ocean, found him too hard to digest, and carried him in its bowels a great distance in another direction.

It bore him to the saccharine ocean in the south and cast him out on the island of the Yakshas, and there a Yakshi, by her skill in sorcery, overpowered him into loving her. He went east after that, and passing by the Ganga he killed a shark that had been pursuing him, and came at last to the district of Kanyakubja. Then he went north into the country of the Uttarakurus, and there he was lifted by his adoration of Shiva and freed from the fear of death in all his wanderings on every side of the earth.

Traveling long and far this way, by land and by sea, he was often attacked by wild elephants on the boundary mountains and, in the seas, gorged and disgorged again and again by sharks and alligators. Going west, he was picked up by an eagle and set on its back; the bird spread its golden pinions and carried him in an instant across the ocean to Kushadvipa. From there he passed to Krauncha-dvipa in the east, where a Rakshasa of the mountain seized him and devoured him, and he killed it afterward from inside by ripping up its belly and its entrails.

Roving in the south, he was cursed by Daksha, the king of that region, to become a Yaksha, and he stayed one until the king of Shakadvipa released him from that state some years later. Then he passed over the great and the smaller seas that lie in the north, and over the great frigid ocean, and came to the country of gold, where the siddhas of the place turned him to stone. He stayed stone for a whole century, until by the grace of his god Agni he was released from the siddha’s curse, and the siddha took him back into his favor.

Traveling east, he became king of the country of coconuts, and reigned there a full five years before he was restored to the memory of his former state. Passing to the north of Mount Meru, he lived ten years among the Apsaras in the groves of kalpa trees, feeding on the breadfruit of the coconut.

He went to Shalmali-dvipa in the west, which is full of the trees of that name, and lived there many years in the society of birds, having learned their language earlier, when Garuda carried him. Journeying on westward he reached Mount Mandara, green with its mandara forests, and stayed there one day in the company of Mandari, a Kinnara woman. Then he went to the Nandana garden of the gods, where the kalpa trees rise as high as the waves of the milky ocean, and stayed seven years among the woodland gods, sporting with the Apsara girls.

Through all of it he was one man, going west, then south, then east, then north, swallowed and cursed and crowned and set free in turn; and four bodies had walked out into four seas, each with an army behind him. Rama had been counting.

One Consciousness, Diverging Lives

“Tell me, sir,” Rama said, “do these different states and acts of the prince belong to one particular part of his fourfold body, or to all of them together, or to each one separately? It is as impossible for every part to do the same thing as it is for the parts of one person to do different things from one another.”

“Anyone who is conscious of his own identity, of its invariability and its indivisibility,” Vasistha said, “can still think of himself as another person doing other things. A man does it every night in his dreams. And it is the clearness of the soul that shows the abstract images of things inside itself, as it did in Vipashchit, the way a mirror shows the discrete figures of objects, of the sky and the sea, in its clear and empty breast. Mirrors made of the same metal reflect one another; so all things, which are really of an intellectual nature, reflect themselves in the intellect. Whatever object presents itself to any sense of any body is nothing other than that body’s own idea of it, condensed and made dense. The one and self-same thing appears as many, and the varied ones are the invariable one in reality. So whichever part of the prince was conscious of whatever presented itself at any time, that was the state of his being for that time. A yogi sitting secluded in one place sees everything present, past and future at one view; a prince sitting back in his palace manages the affairs of his whole domain; and Vipashchit went further and sent out his viceroys as limbs of his own body to every side. A cloud stretches itself to every quarter of the sky and does several things at once, quenching the parched earth, growing the crops, ripening the fruit on the trees. The lord God, the lords of men and the yogis all design and perform at one time the many acts of creating, preserving and running the world. The one and self-same Vishnu, with his four arms and as many forms, plays many parts, and separately, preserving the world on one hand and enjoying his fair consorts on the other. Two hands are enough for the ordinary business of life, and many arms are wanted to wield many weapons in a war. That is how the self-same monarch stood in his fourfold persons on all four sides of the earth. Each of them was stamped with the consciousness of being himself, and each played his part as distinct and apart from the others. They were all alike conscious of the pains and pleasures of lying down on bare ground, of passing to distant islands, of traveling through forests and groves and desert lands. They all remembered their journeys over hills and mountains and their voyages by water and by air; they knew how they had floated on seas and rested on clouds, how they had mounted the waves and ridden the back of the flying wind, and lain on the shores of seas and at the foot of mountains.”

And the prince went on. Going east into the land of the Shakas, he entered the enchanted city of the Yakshas at the foot of the eastern mountain, Udaya-giri, and their sorcery bound him so that he lay asleep for seven full years in a wood of leafless trees. When he rose from that drowsiness, he drank some mineral water and was converted to the torpor of a stone, and condemned to stay seven years more among the minerals of the earth. He was shut up in a cave of the western mountain, Astachala, which climbs to the clouds and is shrouded in darkness, and there he grew enamored of the company of Pishacha and Apsara women. He came to a region free from fear, where a high mountain rose with waterfalls on every side of it, and there he was lost in a forest of haritaki trees and stayed unseen for years. The prince who had been spellbound by the Yakshas traveled afterward to the frigid climate and was transformed into a lion, and roved the Raivata hills for ten days and nights. Deluded by the black art of the Pishachas, he was changed into a frog and lived as one in the caves of the golden mountain for ten years. He traveled to Kumarika and lived at the foot of the southern ridge of the Black mountain; going on to the Shaka country he was turned into a hog and lived 100 years in a dark hole in that shape. He lived fourteen years squint-eyed in the land of Marivaca. And the western form of the prince became a Vidyadhara by his skill in various lore, and took his pleasure to his full satisfaction under scented bowers, and passed his time in amusement.

The four persons of the prince also came to one another’s rescue. The one that had been turned into a tree in the vale of fearlessness in Shakadvipa kept itself alive by sucking the better water of the rock up through its roots; it was the western part of the royal person that came to the relief of that eastern part and released it, by the power of its incantations, from a vegetable state of seventy full years. The western person, passing to the frigid clime, was turned to stone by a curse of the chief of the Pishachas, and the southern person freed him by offering meat to the flesh-eating fiend. Another time the western person, settled beyond the western horizon, was changed into a bull by a female fiend who had taken the form of a cow, and it was the southern person who freed him at last. The southern figure of the prince was doomed to live as a demon on a mountain tree in Kshemaka, and a Yaksha prince finally freed him. And the eastern person was metamorphosed into a lion on a mountain in the province of Vrishaka, and the western one delivered him from it.

“How is it, sir,” Rama said, “that the single individuality of the prince, which is confined to one spot like a yogi’s, could be everywhere at the same time, and perform the various acts of different times and places at once, by the all-comprehending universality of the mind?” “Let the unenlightened think what they like about this world,” Vasistha said. “Attend to how the enlightened yogi sees it. There is no other essence than one universal Intellect; the phenomenal is utter nonexistence, and the creation of the world, created or uncreated, melts into nothing. That universal Intellect is the eternal residence of the universal soul and one with it. Tell me, who can obstruct, anywhere or by any force, the course of the great mind, which is everywhere and comprehends everything and shows itself in the endless varieties of its thoughts? What is ours, what can we call ours, when all these sights are shown in the supreme Intellect in all places and times, and all that is present, past and future is held in that one all-comprehending mind? Far and near, a moment and an age, are the same to it, and it never alters. All things are situated in the soul, and yet see what Ignorance does: they seem to be placed outside it, as we see them with our naked eyes. The universal soul appears in the universe as both the viewer and the view; how could the soul that is inherent in the apparent world take on a visible form in any way, except by the delusion of our understanding? So tell me, since nothing is impossible to the active agency of the Deity, to whom all things are alike possible at all times and places, what was impossible to the wise king Vipashchit, who was conscious of his own identity in all his four forms? The enlightened intellect of a yogi who has not yet reached transcendent unity with the Deity, and keeps the sense of his individuality, can still readily unite itself with the souls of others in all places. Nothing is impossible to the supreme soul. The half-enlightened soul, lingering between its knowledge and its ignorance, without transcendent wisdom, is confounded in its intellect about the true knowledge of things. A soul somewhat advanced in knowledge is said to have gone part of the way to perfection, and the four parts of Vipashchit, placed on the four sides, made up a perfect whole. Those four parts were so many states or degrees of perfection, which lit on Vipashchit like rays of heavenly light; and those states helped and healed one another, as the limbs of a body assist one another and supply one another’s defects.”

“Then tell me,” Rama said, “why the fourfold king Vipashchit ran about on every side like an animal, if he was so enlightened in every part. Why did he not sit collected in himself, as he was?” “What I told you about enlightenment applies to yogis,” Vasistha said, “who, though their minds are made of many parts, stay sedate in themselves in the same state. The Vipashchits were not so wholly enlightened as the holy yogis. Being partly enlightened, they stayed in the middle state between the two, hanging between enlightenment and ignorance at the same time. They bore the marks of both at once: of the one by their discretion and discernment, of the other by the passions and affections of their minds, which led them along the two different roads, of liberation and of bondage. People who are always vigilant in their pious acts and still waver between temporal and eternal concerns, as the Vipashchits did in their whole course of action, cannot be perfect and esoteric yogis in this life. Devotees devoted to the worship of one particular deity, as the Vipashchits were devoted to the god of fire, are called dharana yogis. They are never the transcendent ones, the param yogis, until they reach transcendental knowledge, which removes avidya. The learned yogi sees no mist of ignorance between himself and the light of truth. The ignorant devotee is blind to truth, though his favorite deity may receive him into favor. The Vipashchits were all of them subject to ignorance, and they rejected the knowledge of the true soul by their attachment to gross material bodies, which are at best vain unrealities. So listen to what I will tell you now, about those who are liberated from their grossness even in their lifetime.”

“Yogis of course keep their knowledge of the concrete in conducting the outer affairs of life. Liberation itself is a virtue of the mind. It consists in freedom from subjection to gross matter, and it lives in the mind alone, never in the body or its sensibility. The body’s properties cannot be parted from the body, so the liberated soul is simply unattached to it, and the yogi never gives it a thought. His mind is never reunited with his body, any more than pollen rejoins the stalk it came from, though his body stays exactly what any worldly man’s body is. The bodies of both are equally visible to everyone; the minds hidden in them are another matter. The liberated soul cannot be seen by others, while the imprisoned spirit is known to everybody by its addiction to its bounded duties. A man perceives his own liberation the way he perceives the sweetness of honey: it is known to himself, from his own consciousness of pleasure or pain. It is the inward coolness of his soul and the indifference of his mind that make up his liberation while he lives. Neither the bondage nor the liberation of a soul can be known to another, whether you cut the body in pieces or set it on a royal throne. Laughing or crying, the liberated soul feels no pleasure or pain in it, because in both states it rests in the unalterable spirit of God. Such a man may seem to weep and never weeps in grief; he does not die with the death of his mortal body; he does not smile, though his face smiles, and is neither moved nor angered by anything, though he seems moved by affection and by anger. Undeluded, he sees the delusions of the world; unseen by anyone, he sees the failings of others. Everything is as nothing to him, like flowers growing in the garden of the sky. When Shiva ripped off the upper head of Brahma with the nail of his hand, like a lotus bud, Brahma neither resented it nor grew another head in its place, which he was well able to do; so the meek yogi stays unresentful at any harm done to him. Everyone gets what his fate allots him in payment for his past acts, and that fatality does not fall on mortals only. It binds the god Shiva to the sweet embraces of Gauri and to his melancholy contemplation forever, and it makes the milky ocean carry the ambrosial moon in its ample breast.”

“Good-minded men are seldom seen to give up their passions, though they could in their lifetime; they become dispassionate only at death, when the five elements of their bodies burn on the pyre. The man liberated while living gains nothing by doing anything and loses nothing by doing nothing. What does passion or dispassion avail, when what is fated in this life cannot be averted by any means? The god Hari, liberated while he lives, does not stop slaying the Asuras, or having them slain by the hands of Indra; he becomes incarnate to die himself or by the hands of demons, and he is born again and again, and grows, and is extinguished at last. So let a man stay in whatever state he is in, without any desire of his own, since Hari is without desire in himself, being pure Intelligence only. The lord of the day cannot restrain his body from its apparent course, though he is seated in his nirvana and has no wish to change his place. The moon seems to wane under her wasting disease, though she stays the same through all the ages of the world; so the soul of the liberated stays the same while his body decays with age. Fire is forever free in itself, because nothing can put out its latent heat; Marutta’s sacrificial butter and the seed of Shiva suppressed it for a while, and it revived as it was before. Brihaspati and Shukra, the preceptors of the gods and the demons, were liberated in their lifetimes, and with all their ambitions of preeminence they went about as dull, miserable men. The sage-king Janaka is perfectly liberated in his mind, and he is in no way loath to rule his princedom and crush his enemies in battle. Nala, Mandhata, Sagara, Dilipa, Nahusha and the rest were all liberated in their lives, and they reigned and ruled their realms with all the vigilance of sovereigns. A man acting wisely or foolishly in life is neither bound nor liberated by it; it is his ardent desire for the world, or his apathy toward it, that makes his bondage or his liberation. The demon princes Bali, Namuchi, Vritra, Andhaka, Mura and the others lived fully liberated, though they acted as unwisely as if their ambition and their passions had carried them away. So the presence or the disappearance of the passions in anyone’s conduct makes no difference to his spiritual character. It is the pure vacancy of the soul and the mind that makes a man’s liberation in this world. Possessed of the knowledge of God as pure vacuum, he is assimilated to the likeness of vacuity itself, and freed from the duality of thinking himself anything other than the divine spirit. He knows the phenomenal to be no more than a variegated rainbow reflected in empty air; as the colors shine in the rainbow in the field of empty air, so these myriads of brilliant worldly bodies are vacuous particles appearing in infinite space. This world is an unreality that appears as a reality; it is without beginning or end and seems to have both; it is a void that seems a substance; uncreated, and thought to be created; indestructible, and thought to be perishable. Its creation and destruction are events in the vacuous essence of God, as a post and a statue take shape in the substance of the wood. When the mind is freed from its imagination and drowned in samadhi, like a sleeper who stays awake, it comes to the sight of an even intellectual vacuity which swallows the sights of all the worlds. In that intense meditation the thought of duality is lost in the thought of unity, and the idea of oneness disappears in a vast void, and that ends in a state of conscious bliss. The perfect yogi stays with his mind as clear as the empty sky, holding the phenomenal in its ample sphere; he sits silent, as still and cold as a stone; he views the world in himself and remains quiet, in rapt amazement at the view.”

Four Deaths and Unequal Destinies

“Now tell me, sir,” Rama said, “what the Vipashchits did, cast into the seas and the islands and the forests of the different parts of the earth.” “Hear about the Vipashchits,” Vasistha said, “in all their wanderings among the forests of tala and tamala, on the hills and in the islands of the different sides. One of them, roving the western ridge of a mountain in Krauncha-dvipa, was crushed to death by the tusk of an elephant, as a tusk tears a lotus in a lake. Another was smashed in a fight with a Rakshasa, who carried his mangled body up into the air and threw it into the marine fire, where it burned to ashes. The third was taken up by a Vidyadhara into the region of the celestials, and there Indra, offended by the prince’s want of respect toward him, cursed him, and he was reduced to ashes. The fourth went to the farthest edge of a mountain in Kushadvipa, and a shark caught him on the seashore and tore his body into eight pieces. So all four lost their lives on all four sides, and they fell as sorrowfully as the regents of the four quarters fall at the last dissolution of the world.”

“When they had been reduced to vacuity in the vast vacuum, their empty, self-conscious souls were led by the memory of their former states to look at the earth they had been so attached to. They saw the seven continents with their belts of seven oceans, and the cities and towns that decorate them everywhere. They saw the sky above, with the orbs of the sun and the moon for the pupils of its eyes, and the clusters of stars hanging like chains of pearls at its neck, and the flaky clouds for its folded vest. With the intellectual eye they saw the stupendous bodies that rose out of chaos at the turning of past kalpas and filled the whole width of the sky with their gigantic forms. Possessed of consciousness in their spiritual forms, they came down to observe the ways of the elemental bodies laid out before them. All four Vipashchits were driven by their old impressions to the same inquiry: how far does the ignorance extend that makes people believe the body is the soul, for want of knowing the spiritual soul? They roved from one continent to another to see in what part of this ideal globe that ignorance was seated most firmly, firmly enough to give it the look of a visible substance.”

“Then, passing over the seven continents and the seven oceans, the western Vipashchit happened to meet the god Hari standing on a parcel of firm land. He received from him the incomparable knowledge of divine truth, and he stayed in samadhi on that spot for a full five years. Finding his soul full of the divine presence, he gave up even his spiritual body and fled, like a breath going out, into the transcendent vacuum of final extinction, nirvana. The eastern Vipashchit was translated to the region of the moon by his adoration of that luminary, and seated beside its full bright orb for his purity and his piety. And the prince, set in that exalted sphere, went on forever afterward lamenting the loss of his former body. The southern prince, forgetful of his spiritual nature, thinks himself to be reigning in Shalmali-dvipa, busy with the investigation of outer and sensible objects.”

“The northern one, dwelling in the limpid waters of the seventh ocean, thought himself swallowed by a shark, which held him in its belly for a thousand and one years. There he fed on the bowels of the shark, and that killed the animal in a short time, and he came out of its belly as if it had given birth to a young shark. Then he crossed the frigid ocean of snows and its icy tracts, which stretch 80,000 yojanas, and came to a spot of solid gold, the haunt of gods, 10,000 yojanas across, and there he met his end. In that land the prince Vipashchit attained the state of a god, the way a piece of wood turns to fire in a burning furnace.”

“As one of the principal gods he went to Lokaloka, the polar mountain that surrounds the globe of the earth the way an aqueduct girdles the base of a tree. It rises 50,000 yojanas high, with the inhabited earth on the side that faces the sunlight and eternal darkness reigning on the other. He climbed to the top of the polar mount, which pierces the starry sphere, and as he sat there the people below saw him as a star. Beyond that spot, far from the highest mountain, lay the deep, dark abyss of infinite void. There the globular form of this earth ends, and beyond it is the vacuity of the sky, of fathomless depth and impenetrable darkness, a darkness the color of a swarm of black bees, the shade under tamala trees. There is neither stable earth nor any moving body under that extended sky; the great void has no support, and it supports nothing at any time.”

“Please tell me, sir,” Rama said, “how this globe of the earth is placed, and how and where the polar mountain stands on it, and whether the stars revolve around it.” “As boys build their fancied castles in empty air,” Vasistha said, “so this world is the creation of the imagination of Brahma’s mind, and nothing more. As a dim-sighted man sees the shadow of the moon and other false sights before his eyes, so the creative power, Brahma, sees at the beginning the phantoms of the phenomenal world in the vacuity of its Intellect. As an imaginary city sits in the mind and is invisible to the eye, so the notion of the world is set in the intellect and never shown in actuality. Whenever anything is reflected in the mind, rising on its own from past reminiscence, it presents itself before the sight then and there, as in a dream; and as thoughts and notions rise and subside continually in the mind, the earth and the heavenly bodies seem to revolve without pause in their spheres. The world is entirely nonexistent to dull and inanimate beings, visible to those with eyes, invisible to the blind, unknown to those born blind; it is perceptible only in the manner in which it is presented in the mind. The world has light and darkness through the presence or absence of the sun, and beyond that there is the great abyss of vacuity, a vast expanse of darkness except where there is a glimpse of zodiacal light. The polar circle is called the polar mountain from the protuberance of the poles at its two ends, and it is called Lokaloka, light and no light, because the sun’s course runs toward it or away from it. Beyond the polar circle, far from the sphere of the sky, is the sphere of the starry frame, which revolves around them at a great distance on all ten sides and girds the firmament from the heavens above to the infernal regions below; it turns around the polar circle of the earth as it appears to our imagination, and in no other way. The sphere of the stars is twice as far from the poles as the poles are from the middle of the earth, the way the crust of a ripe walnut stands off from the sheath of its seeds. There is another sphere of the heavens beyond the starry frame and twice its extent, lit by the zodiacal light, and beyond it reigns thick darkness. At the end of that sphere is the great circle of the universe, half of it stretching above and half below, holding the sky in the middle: the Brahmanda, the mundane sphere. It extends millions of yojanas and is compact with all its contents, and it is a mere work of imagination, formed of vacuity in the immensity of vacuum. There is no upward and no downward in it, and no planetary body actually ascends, descends or stands still. These are manifestations of the intellect, which exhibits these variations in the workings of the mind.”

“I have told you all of this from my own perception of it, and from no guesswork of mine,” Vasistha said, “because it is by means of their purely intelligent bodies that yogis like us have come to the clear sight of these things in nature, which are otherwise unknowable to the material body or mind. The world I have spoken of appears to us as it does in a dream, and in no other aspect; it is the business of the learned to speak of its situation, and of what relates to that. There are two poles, two Merus, at the farthest ends of the north and the south of the world, and they limit the earth with its seven continents and seas; the learned inquire into the endless kinds of beings that lie between them, varieties well known to the people of those parts and unknown to us here. Now hear, Rama: the whole body of water on earth is ten times the extent of the two continents it surrounds. The two continents draw the surrounding waters to them as a magnet draws needles, and the water in its turn holds up the continents and the islands as a kalpa tree holds its fruit; so everything on earth falls down on it as fruit falls to the ground. Far below the surface of the water there is a latent heat, burning forever without fuel, as still as air and as clear as flame. At ten times that distance there is the vast region of air, and as many times beyond that, the open space of transparent vacuum. At a great distance from that is the infinite space of the vacuity of the Divine spirit, which is neither dark nor bright and is full of Divine Intelligence. That endless void of the supreme spirit is without beginning, middle or end, and it is named the universal soul, the great Intellect, and perfect bliss. There are myriads of orbs in the distant parts of those spheres, which appear to view and disappear from it by turns; in reality nothing appears or disappears in the uniformly bright soul of Brahma, where everything continues as it is through all eternity. I have told you now about the phenomenal worlds that we can perceive. Hear what became of Vipashchit in the polar region.”

“Led by his former impressions and his old habit, he kept wandering about the top of the mountain, as he had always done, and afterward he fell into the dark and dismal pit there. He found himself lying as if dead at that spot, when the birds of the air, as big as mountain peaks, settled on his dead body and tore it to pieces and devoured it at last. Since he had died on the holy mount and had a spiritual body of his own, he felt none of the pains and pangs that are inevitable when a material body is lost; he kept his clear consciousness all the while. Yet because his self-consciousness had not reached the transcendent perceptivity of his soul, he remembered the grossness of his past acts and deeds and felt them, as any living body would.” “How is it possible, sir,” Rama asked, “for the mind without a body to perform the outward actions of the body? And how can our spiritual consciousness have any kind of perception of anything?” “As desire drives the home-keeping man out of his house,” Vasistha said, “and as imagination leads the mind to many places and objects, so the mind of this prince was led from place to place, as his reminiscence painted them before it. As the mind is moved and led by delusion, by dream, by imagination, by error and misapprehension and by the recital of stories to believe in things, so the mind of the prince was led to credit whatever appeared before it. It is the spiritual body, the mind, that is subject to these fallacies, and never the corporeal body; and in the course of time the human mind forgets its spiritual nature and thinks of itself as material. When those fallacies disappear, as the mistaken snake disappears from the rope, only the spiritual body is left in place of the corporeal one. Consider it well, Rama: the spiritual body is the only real substance, because everything that seems to exist here apart from the intellect is no existence at all. As a man’s mind, going from one place to another, passes quietly over the places between and is quite unconscious of them, so the intellect passes to endless objects without ever moving from its fulcrum or changing itself into any other form. Say then, where is there a duality, and what object deserves your friendship or your enmity, when the whole totality is one infinite Deity, known as the transcendent understanding? The transcendental understanding is that calm, quiet state of the Intellect which is without the workings of the mind; and though the prince Vipashchit was settled in his spiritual body, he had not yet reached that state.”

“For want of that percipience his mind was on the stretch, and with his spiritual body he saw a dark gloom, as it appears to a fetus confined in the womb. In that gloom he saw the mundane egg split in two and the surface of the earth lying in the lower half of it, a solid substance as bright as gold, extending millions of yojanas. At the end of that he saw the waters, eight times the extent of the land, forming in their crusts of ocean the two halves of the earth. Passing over that, he reached the region of light, blazing with the sun and the stars and throwing out flames of conflagration from the vault of heaven. He passed the region of fire without being burned or hurt in his spiritual body, and his mind led him to another region, where he thought and felt himself carried aloft by the winds toward his former home. As he was carried along he felt that his body was spiritual, since what is there besides the mind that can carry anyone from one place to another? With that conviction the patient prince passed over the region of the winds and came at last to the sphere of vacuum, ten times the extent of the one before. Passing over that, he found the infinite space of the vacuum of Brahma, in which everything is situated and from which everything has come, which is nothing and yet something, of which nothing can be known or said. Moving along that empty air he was carried farther and farther on his aerial journey, until he thought he could see from there all the other spheres, of earth and water, of fire and air, which he had crossed before. There were formations of worlds there again, repeated creations and dissolutions of them, trains of gods and men and hills and all other things going on in endless succession, a recurrence of the primary elements taking substantial form, repetitions of creation, reappearances of worlds and of the sides of the compass. So the prince is still going on in his journey through the infinite void of Brahman, and finds the succession of creations and dissolutions in it without end. He has no rest from his wanderings, because of his conviction and his habit of thinking the world real; nor is he rid of his ignorance, which is from God also. Whatever you view in your waking or see in your dream is the perspicacity of the Divine soul, which displays these sights in itself forever. This world is an apparition of our ignorance, like the specters seen in deep darkness; know that it is the transparent intellect of God that represents it so, and will always do the same. And since the dark sight of the gross world and the clear light of its transparency both proceed alike from the self-same mind of God, it is impossible to say whether it is the one or the other, or both alike. So, Rama, this prince, uncertain of the transparency of the Divine spirit, has been wandering forever in the dark maze of the worlds he preconceived, as a stray deer roves in a tangled wilderness.”

The Deer in Rama’s Enclosure

“I have heard of the liberation of two Vipashchits by the grace of Vishnu,” Rama said. “Now I want to know what became of the two brothers who have been wandering everywhere.” “One of those two,” Vasistha said, “learned by long habit to subdue his desires, and after wandering through many islands he settled at last in one of them and found his rest in God. He has given up the sight of the outward livery of the world, and he sees millions of orbs rolling in the vacuity, and he is still rapt in the view. The other was released from his personal wanderings by staying in the neighborhood of the moon, where his constant association with the stag-shaped mark on the disc of that luminary changed his form into the form of that animal, which he still keeps, in his place on a hill.”

“How is it, sir,” Rama said, “that the four persons of Vipashchit, with one mind and the same desire and the same aim in view, could differ so much in their acts that such different results of good and evil came to them?” “The habitual desire of a person varies according to the different states of his life,” Vasistha said, “in the course of time and in different places. It grows weaker and stronger in degree, though it is never changed in its nature. It is according to circumstances that the self-same desire or object is modified into different forms, and whichever of those is greatest in intensity takes precedence over the others and comes to pass in a short time. In this divided state of their desires the four persons of the prince arrived at four different states in their modes of life: two of them sank into their ignorance, the third became a deer, and the last gained his liberation. The two have not yet come to the end of their nescience; they have been groveling in darkness through their blindness to the light of truth, which can hardly dispel a darkness that ignorance keeps spreading. It is only the light of philosophy that drives off the gloom of ignorance, and then, however deep its roots, it flies far away, as the shade of night is dispersed before the light of day.”

“Attend now to what this Vipashchit did in the other world, where he was cast up on the coast of gold, across the far ocean of sweet waters, which he mistook for the habitable earth. Beyond it he saw an orb in the vacuity of Brahma, which he took for the vacuum of the great Brahma himself. There his excellent virtues led him into the society of the learned, and learning from them to see the visible world in its true light, he was merged into the state of Brahma himself. No sooner had he arrived at that state than his ignorance and his body disappeared from him, as the sea in a mirage vanishes before a closer view, and as falsehood flies before truth. So I have told you all the acts of Vipashchit, and about the eternity of ignorance, which is as old as Brahma because it is coeval with him. See the millions of years that have been passing in eternity, and the mind by its nature is quite unmindful of their course and their number. As the knowledge of horses is said to be false when it is really known, so the knowledge of the world as a separate existence is a falsity, and truly known, the world is found to be Brahma himself. There is no difference between avidya and the essence of Brahma, because the one subsists in the other; Brahma is the perfect Intellect himself, who shows the differences in the modes of intellection. Another Vipashchit, wandering all about in the universal sphere, could not come to the end of his avidya in the course of a millennium.”

“How was it, sir,” Rama said, “that he could not reach the farthest pole of the universe, or pierce its vault and get out of it? Please explain this to me fully; you have not done so yet.” “When Brahma was first born in the mundane egg,” Vasistha said, “he broke the shell with both his hands into an upper and a lower half. So the upper valve of the shell rose far above the lower, and the lower valve sank as far below the upper. The circles of earth, water and air rest on those valves, and the two valves in turn serve as bases for the other spheres. In the midst of these is the vacuous sky, infinite in its extent, which appears to us as the blue vault of heaven. It is bounded by no circle of earth or water; it is a pure void, and the basis of all the other spheres that rest on it. He passed by that way into the infinite void, where the circles of the starry frame revolve, to examine the extent of ignorance and to obtain his release from it, as he had been taught to do. But this avidya, this ignorance, being coalescent with Brahma, is as infinite as the Deity himself, and there she is as unknowable as God, for no one yet has been able to know her nature. Vipashchit, mounting farther and higher in the heavens, found the nature of avidya to be coextensive with the whole extent of the worlds through which he traveled on high. So now see how one of these persons was liberated, and another is grazing about as a stag; and see the other two bound fast to their former impressions, and constrained to rove about the worlds they took for realities in their ignorance.”

“Tell me kindly,” Rama said, “where, and how far away, and in what sorts of worlds these Vipashchits have been roaming without any rest. At what distance are those worlds where they are born over and over again? All of this is very strange to me, as you have told it.” “The worlds to which the two Vipashchits have been carried, and where they have been roving, are quite invisible to me,” Vasistha said, “for all my efforts to look into them. And the place where the third is roving as a deer is also in a land that no one on earth knows.” “You said, sir,” Rama said, “that the Vipashchit who is transformed into a deer has been roving on a hill. Tell me, then, where that hill is, and how far it is from here.” “Hear how far from here that world is, into which Vipashchit entered after passing through the vast vacuity of the supreme spirit, and where he has been wandering in the form of a deer. Know it to be somewhere amidst these three worlds, where he has been roving as a stray deer; because this is the vast vacuity of the Divine spirit, in which all these worlds are scattered at great distances from one another.” “How is it consistent, sir,” Rama said, “to say with good reason that Vipashchit was born and died in this world, and is still roving in it as a deer?” “As the whole must know all the parts of which it is composed,” Vasistha said, “so I know everything, everywhere, that is situated in the all-comprehending soul of God, to which I have assimilated myself. I know the absent, all things past and future, and all that is destroyed, and all the forms of things, small or great, interwoven together and shown before me as if they were the growth of this earth of ours. So all that I have told you about the adventures of the prince was the work of his fancy, and it took place in some part of this world, where he lived and died. The Vipashchits all wandered through the other worlds in empty air, and all of that was the work of their imagination, which has no limit to its flight through boundless space. One of them has happened to be born here as a deer, in the dale of a mountain, somewhere on this earth. The place where the prince is reborn in his form of a stag, now that all his wanderings in other spheres are over, is on this orb of earth, where he has been set down on a certain spot by an act of unaccountable chance, the crow and the palm fruit.”

“If that is so,” Rama said, “then tell me, sir, in what region of this earth, on what hill and in what forest this stag is placed at present. What is it doing now, and how does it nibble the grass in the green plain, and how long will it be before that veteran seer comes back to the memory of his former state and his past actions?” “It is the same stag,” Vasistha said, “which was presented to you by the ruler of the province of Trigarta, and which is kept close in your pleasure garden for your sport.” Rama was astonished, and so were all the people sitting in the court, to hear the sage say so, and he ordered the attendant lads in the hall to bring it before him there and then. So the stag was brought and set before the open court, and the court people found it plump and fat, and quite tame and gentle, content with its own state. Its body was spotted all over, as with the stars of heaven, and its eyes were as long as the petals of lotus flowers, and handsomer by far than the eyes of beautiful girls. It looked with timid glances at the blue sapphires that decorated the court, and ran to bite them with its open mouth, taking them for blades of grass. Then, as it gazed at the assembly with its neck raised and its ears up and its eyes staring in fear, the assembly raised their heads and pricked up their ears and looked at the animal with their eyes wide, afraid it would leap and jump on them. At last the king and all his ministers and courtiers were amazed at the sight of the animal, and thought that what they saw before them was all a magic. The wondering eyes of the assembled people and the shining gems on the persons of the princes made the court hall look as if it were studded all around with full-blown lotuses.

Fire and the Name Bhasa

Rama asked Vasistha by what means Vipashchit could be released from the shape of a brute and restored to his human form. “The way by which a person has had his rise,” Vasistha said, “is the only means that leads to his success, his welfare and his happiness in life. Vipashchit was a worshiper of fire, and it is only by re-entering the refuge of that deity that his changed form of a stag can be altered and restored to its former figure, of bright, unalloyed gold. I will try the means of his restoration now, in your presence, so that all of you can witness it with open eyes; and this stag will enter the fire of itself before your sight.” Saying so, the benevolent sage touched his water pot with his hand and muttered his mantras over it in the proper form. He thought intently on the god of fire with his flashing flames all around him, and at once, on that reflection, a blaze of fire sprang up in the middle of the royal hall. It was a pure flame, kindled without coal or fuel, burning with a rumbling noise and giving off no smoke, no soot, no cinder. Brighter and brighter it burned in its beauty and shone like a dome of gold, shedding a golden luster all about, flushed like the kinsuka blossom and glowing like the evening clouds. The assembled host drew back from the spreading flame. The stag flushed with the fervor of its old faith at the sight of its adored deity standing before it. As it looked at the fire with that ardent longing, it was rid of its sins, as if the flames had burned them away, and then it advanced slowly toward the blaze and leapt into the middle of it, as a lion springs on its prey. At that moment the muni turned his mind to meditation and found that the prince’s sins were burned out of his soul, and he addressed the god. “You who carry the sacrificial butter to the gods, recall the past acts of the prince, in his faith toward you, and kindly restore him to his former handsome figure.” As the sage was praying in this way, he saw the stag released from the flame and running toward the assembled princes with the speed of an arrow flying to its mark. Having entered the burning fire, it appeared as a flaming body, and the assembly saw it as a form as bright as an evening cloud. So the stag was changed into the form of a man before the eyes of the princes, as a patch of cloud takes another figure against the bright vault of heaven. In the flame it was seen to take a figure of pure gold, which afterward took the form of a man of handsome shape and appearance. He looked like the orb of the sun, like the disc of the moon in the sky, like the god Varuna in the waters of the deep, like the evening cloud or the rising moon. The sun was reflected in the pupils of his eyes as it is reflected on water, or in a mirror, or in a bright gem, and the fire of his faith blazed serenely in the sockets of his eyes. Shortly afterward the blaze of light vanished from the court, as the light of a lamp is blown away by a breath of wind, as the tinge of evening clouds goes out of the sky under the shades of night. The man stood plainly in the hall then, as the idol of a deity stands in a dilapidated temple, as an actor stands behind the scene without his costume. He stood silent, holding a rosary in his hand, his sacred thread hanging like a chain of gold at his neck, in a robe of pure white blanched by the fiery heat; he looked like the bright moon rising before the assembly.

At the brightness of his person and his dress, the courtiers all cried out as one, “The luster of him!” and because he was as lustrous as daylight, everyone called him Luster. The courtiers confirmed it: since he is as bright as brightness itself, let him be styled the bright one, Bhasa; and that was the name he bore ever after. He sat in the hall in a meditative mood and remembered all the incidents of his past life and his former body. The assembly was struck with wonder and sat motionless and speechless, lost in thought, while Bhasa went over the adventures of his past life in his mind. After a short while the prince rose from his reverie and came forward to the assembly under his newly won name. He went first to Vasistha and saluted him with delight. “I bow before you, sir,” he said, “as the giver of my life and of the light of the knowledge of myself.” Vasistha raised him by laying a hand on his head. “May your protracted ignorance, Vipashchit, be dispelled this day and forever after.” “Victory to Rama,” said Bhasa, and bowed to Dasharatha, who rose a little from his seat and greeted him smiling. “You are welcome, Bhasa. Be seated on this seat. You have wandered through many hardships of the world; take your rest here now.” So addressed by the king, the prince who now bore the name of Bhasa made his salutation to the venerable sages, Vishvamitra and the others, and took his seat on a cushion.

“The pains that Vipashchit has undergone so long,” Dasharatha exclaimed, “under the thraldom of Ignorance, like a wild elephant with its feet in fetters, tied by ruthless hunters. To what miseries a man is exposed, for want of precise understanding, by his false knowledge of the reality of these worlds, which are seen revolving in empty shape. How wondrous these worlds are, so vast and so remote, which Vipashchit has traversed, and how incredible the pains he has passed through for so long. How wonderful is the nature and the glory of the inane Intellect of the vacuous spirit of the Supreme, that exhibits in empty air the blank thoughts of its all-comprehending mind as sole and substantial things.” And then: “I understand that Vipashchit acted unwisely in taking such pains, in his wanderings, for a knowledge of the spheres; it is all in vain to inquire into unrealities and useless matters, and it was his ignorance alone, his avidya, that drove him to the search.” The sage Vishvamitra, sitting beside the king, opened his mouth on the subject. “There are many such men,” he said, “who, without good understanding and for want of the best knowledge, are apt to think that everything can be known by them. That is how the sons of king Vatadhana have been wandering, in this same way and for a great many years, in search of true knowledge over the whole earth, without ever arriving at it. They have been employed in exploring the limits of this earth with ceaseless toil and unwearied labor, as a river runs its course forever. This great world, the earth, is set like an orb in the air, like the imaginary tree boys grow in the sky, like a toy ball of fanciful Brahma rolling about in empty air. As ants creep about a ball of sugar without falling off it, so all living bodies move about their support, this earth, held up in empty air. Those on the lower surface of the globe move about as upright as those on its upper side. The sun, the moon and the planets, with the starry frame and the heavenly stream, are drawn to turn around it without pause and without ever touching it. The sky girds it on every side, though the firmament seems to be above our heads and the earth below our feet, and the region any creature flies toward is called the upper sky, whichever side of the globe it is on. On some part of this earth there is a warrior race by the name of Vatadhana, and three princes were born to that royal family in days of old, and are said to be living still. They were firmly intent, like Vipashchit, on knowing the limits of the visible world, and they set out to explore them with a firm, unfailing resolution. They passed from land to water and from the waters to other lands again, and so they passed many lives and ages in their repeated inquiries, with bodies renewed in birth after birth, because the steady pursuit of one life follows a man into the next. Wandering forever over the earth this way, like ants moving on a sweet cake, they found no end of it and reached no other spot beyond it, even in their thought of another one. They are still turning around it in the air, like busy ants about a roll, and they are still at the same search without tiring of it; because whoever stands on any part of the globe thinks of it as the uppermost, and all the places around it as lower, and so do the antipodes below think themselves uppermost. Then they said among themselves that if they could not find the end of the earth by all their toil, they must give up the pursuit and remove themselves elsewhere. So it is with this world, Dasharatha: it is no more than a display of the thoughts of Brahma, a work of the mind alone, a delusion like a protracted dream. The mind is the supreme Brahma, and Brahma is the self-same with his own mind; there is no more difference between them than between open air and the sky. The intellect operates in itself like running water in whirlpools, and as the eddies and their swelling bubbles are nothing other than the water, so the operations of the mind are modifications of the mind itself. The sky, which is vacuum and was a void at the beginning, shows itself in the form of the world, which is neither created nor ever destroyed. Whatever the intellect suggests, from its preconceptions and predilections, the mind obeys, and goes on viewing the outer world as it has always existed in thought. There is an atom of the divine Intellect, and in it an infinity of minuter atoms in the shape of ideas, as there are innumerable stones in the body of a rock; they reside in the spirit of God, as translucent as the divine spirit, and they have no independent life, since nothing is separate from the supreme spirit. So this world is the manifestation of the Divine Mind, and it is strange that the human soul should sorrow for its degradation and think itself a different thing, when it is inseparable from the one universal soul. Now let the prince called Bhasa, who was once known as the mighty monarch Vipashchit, tell us what other strange things he remembers seeing in all his wanderings through the worlds.”

“I have seen many sights,” Bhasa said, “and wandered untired through many regions, and I remember the many turns of fortune I have felt. Hear, Dasharatha, how much I have known and felt in my course through the remote regions of the spacious firmament on high; know the joys and the griefs I have enjoyed and suffered in my transmigrations, in different bodies and distant worlds, over a time longer than memory. It was by the favor of the god of fire, and by the good and bad turns of fate, that I saw a great many scenes in my course through various forms and lives, like water revolving in a whirlpool, with a calm, constant and resolute mind. Driven by past reminiscence and misled by the mistaken view of visible things, my firm zeal pushed me to inquire into all worldly things, in the different forms and changes of my body. I was a tree for a thousand years, my senses undeveloped, feeling the rigors of every climate and season inside me, with no mind and no act of mind except drawing the sap of the earth up through my roots and spreading myself into fruit and flowers. I was a mountain stag for 100 years, my skin the color of gold and my ears as flat as the leaves of trees; I fed on blades of grass, I was charmed by every kind of music, and being the weakest of all the animals of the forest I could do no harm to anyone. I lived half a century as a sharabha, the wild beast with eight legs; I lived in the caves of Mount Krauncha, and I brought on my own death by falling from a crag in an attempt to fight the raining clouds overhead. I was born once as a Vidyadhara and lived on the tableland of the Malaya mountains and in the happy bowers of Mandara, fragrant with sandalwood and kadamba flowers; there I breathed air perfumed with agaru and enjoyed the company of the Vidyadhara women. I was born as a cygnet of the swan of Brahma and tasted the honey of golden lotuses for more than a century, sporting on the banks of the heavenly stream Mandakini on the celestial mount Meru. For 100 years I stayed beside the milky ocean, feeling the cool breezes carry the moisture of its waves and the fragrance of the forests, and listening to the songs of the singers of spring, which go to banish the infirmities and sorrows of life. I was born once as a jackal in the woods of the Kalanjara mountains, roaming the blossoming gunja and karanja forests; there an elephant trod me down, and as I was about to die I saw that elephant killed in his turn by a lion. I was transformed at one time into a celestial nymph, and a siddha cursed me to live alone in some other sphere, where I stayed half a yuga on the Sahya mountain, smiling with the blossoms of santanaka bowers. Next I lived as a raven, in my nest among the karavira plants on the marshy ground at the foot of a mountain, and there I passed a solitary life of 100 years with a fearful breast and endless scrambling on the dreary rocks. I saw a level plain somewhere, with shady bowers of forest creepers under sandal trees, and women amusing themselves there on swings, like fruit on the branches, and passing siddhas carrying them off. Another time I passed my days as an anchorite in the shade of kadamba trees at the foot of a mountain, where I lived in meditation on the single object of my devotion, and so foolishly met my end with the pain of never meeting it.”

“I saw this universe full of beings, filling it as fish people the ocean on every side; the air, the sky and the light are all inhabited, as this earth of ours is. There is another wonder that fills the universe as the shadow of the sky fills the ocean; it pervades air, water, sky and light, and every form of thing on earth. I saw another wonder, a woman who held the three worlds in her ample womb, and was pictured over with the forms of hills and all things, like their reflections in a mirror. I asked her, ‘You of the great body and the great belly, tell me who you are.’ ‘Know me, sir,’ she said, ‘to be the pure and clear Intellect, which contains all these worlds within herself. As you see me so wondrous in my form, so you must know all things in the world to be of the same kind; people who view them in their natural form find them otherwise, unless they look into them in their spiritual light, when the gross forms vanish into nothing.’ These numberless beings on earth are continually hearing, even without the directions of the Vedas and the shastras, a warning voice rising from some part of their bodies, telling them what is right and what is wrong for them to do; nature reigns over all the elements like that unstruck voice, the anahata, and no one can assign any cause for the elements’ hidden motion except delusion, maya. I once went to a place where there were no women to be found, and the people had no desire for them, and yet many of the living there were passing away fast and many others newly coming into existence. I have seen portentous clouds in the sky charging against one another with a jarring noise, and pouring down with their rain fragments of things on every side, which men picked up and used as weapons. I have seen, somewhere, earthly cities and buildings passing on an aerial course through a mist of thick darkness, and then vanishing in the air and turning into your habitations here below. I saw all these men and gods and reptiles leave their differences of species and become one kind in common with all other beings, because all things proceed at first from vacuum and return to it at last. I saw a spot that was full of light, shining brightly without sun, moon or stars; I remember well that effulgent glory, before which there was neither darkness nor day and night, and nothing else in existence. I saw a place never seen before, without gods or demons, men or animals of any kind, without the vegetable creation or the habitation of any being, a world where the present and the future and all the worlds are blended into eternity. In short, there is no place I have not seen and no side of the compass where I have not been; there is no act or event I have not known, and nothing is unknown to me that is unknown to the knower of all. I remember hearing the jingling of Indra’s armlets, like the rattling of the clouds on high, like the jangling of the gems that glistened on the peaks of Mount Mandara as it shook in the churning of the milky ocean. It was once at the foot of Mount Mandara that I lived as a siddha under a shady bower of mandara trees, and I had been sleeping in the sweet embrace of an Apsara named Mandara, when the current of a river carried us both away, as it carries off a straw. I held my partner up as she floated and asked her how this could have happened, and she answered me with trembling eyes: ‘It happens here at the full moon that this mountain, which is sacred to the moon, lets out its streams, and they rush out as fast as women run to meet their lovers when the moon rises. In my rapture in your company I forgot to tell you.’ So saying she lifted me up and flew with me into the air, as a mother bird mounts into the sky with her young. I was carried to the top of that mountain, and I stayed there seven years, my body dried and unsoiled, as a bee stays unsullied on the pericarp of a lotus growing in the bed of the Ganga. From there I saw other worlds beyond the starry circle, one enclosed in another like the coats of a plantain stem, bright by their own light and peopled by luminous bodies. There were no distinctions of direction there and no division of daytime, for want of a sun; no shastras or rules of conduct, no Vedas for religious guidance, no difference of gods and demigods; the whole was bright with its own light. I was next born as a Vidyadhara and lived twice seven years as an ascetic under the name of Amarasoma, in a grove of kadamba trees at the foot of a cloud-capped mountain that the aerial chariots of the celestials visited for their sport. Then, by the favor of the god of fire and the fervor of my desire to see the whole range of the delusion of avidya, I rose from earth to heaven with the force of Garuda, the bird of heaven, and passed through the infinite space spread all around; and from there I saw numberless elephants and horses, lions and deer, and woods and forests full of beasts and birds, all moving along in the form of clouds below. Once I felt myself fall, away and far from the solar world; it seemed an ethereal ocean inhabited by stars, and I was placed among them as one, conscious of my fall and of the passing of time. With only that consciousness, I felt myself sinking into sleep from fatigue, and in that sound sleep of my body I thought I saw the sensible world in my mind, as if I were awake: the same world again within the horizon, and the same Mount Mandara of the gods in the middle of it, while I fluttered in the midst of its abyss like a bird on a slender twig, shaken and tossed by the wind. I saw with my eyes to the utmost extent of the sensible world, and again and again I was led to the sight of visible things and the enjoyment of sensible things only. So I passed a long series of years viewing the visible and the invisible, in my waking and in my dreaming, passing along the passable and the impassable paths of this world and of others. I could not find anywhere the limit of this avidya, this Ignorance, which showed me only the visible, in waking and in dreaming, in this world and in the others. It is a fallacy that has taken possession of our minds, as the apparition of a goblin takes deep root in the breasts of boys. We find our pleasures and pains arriving every moment with the changes of time and place, as constant as the currents of rivers, ceaselessly succeeding one another. And I remember seeing a world with every kind of moving and unmoving being in it, and in the middle a green mountaintop, rustling in the breeze and shining of itself, without the light of the luminaries. That mountain peak is a delight to solitary recluses; it is wholly free, alone, unlimited, beyond all fear of change or decay. I have never seen in this bright world a glory to compare with that divine effulgence.”