A story · Yoga Vasishtha · Yoga Vasishtha — Stories of Creation

Lila: The Other Vasishtha

Yoga Vasishtha 3.18

The story · English

Lila said, "I have much consolation in you, and now I will console my sorrowing heart." She signaled for the assembly to break up and rose from her royal seat. She went into the inner apartment and sat beside the body of her lord, hidden under a heap of flowers. There she began to think. "What strange magic this is," she said. "The people of my court appear outside me, just as I saw them seated inside me. The same high hills, the same wide forests of palm trees, both without and within. A mirror shows the hills just as they are outside it, and the mind shows the whole creation inwardly as it stands outwardly. I must call on the goddess of wisdom and learn which of these is illusion and which is solid reality."

So she worshipped, and the goddess appeared before her in the form of a young woman. Lila seated her on the high seat and sat low on the ground before her. "Goddess, clear my doubt," she said. "Your wisdom framed this universe in the beginning, and you know its truth. I saw the pattern of the world in the intellect, which is clearer than the sky and holds millions of miles in a tiny space. No words describe it. It is calm, cool light, without cover or support. It shows space and time and the course of events. Worlds appear both within it and outside it, and I cannot tell the real from the unreal."

The goddess asked what Lila meant by real, and what by unreal. Lila answered, "The real is this: I am sitting here, and I see you seated there. The unreal is how I saw my husband in the open sky a while ago, because emptiness has no limit of time or place." The goddess said that a real creation cannot make an unreal figure. Lila replied that unlike results often come from like causes: earth and a clay pot are the same stuff, yet one dissolves in water and the other carries it. The goddess agreed that helping causes change the effect, and asked what had brought Lila's husband to birth here. Lila guessed it was the swelling of his memory. "Memory is airy," the goddess said, "and what it makes is as airy as itself."

Lila asked how an unreal world could cast a false image of her husband. The goddess said, "Listen, and you will see this world is unreal, as you once took it for real." Somewhere in the Intellect, she said, stands a great fabric called the world, with the sky for its glass roof and Meru for its pillar. Its creatures are like ants in the corners, and the mountains are their anthills, as Brahma sees them. Living beings are worms in cocoons of their own making. Clouds are the smoke of the house, and the spirits of the air are like bees around honey jars. In one corner of this world, in a sheltered valley, there lived a Brahman.

His name was Vasishtha, like the great sage, and his wife was Arundhati, fair as the moon. They lived without sickness or fear, keeping the sacred fire and welcoming guests, on what their cows and fields gave. One day he sat under the sarala trees on his hill and saw the king pass below, going hunting. There were white fans, banners like a moving forest, umbrellas like a second sky, horses raising dust, elephants like towers, and gems flashing. The Brahman said to himself, "How lovely royalty is. When will I be lord of the ten directions with such a train? When will the scent of flowers drift into my own bedchamber?" And he set himself to hard austerities for the rest of his life.

In time illness broke his body, as sleet batters lotuses on a lake. Arundhati withered with fear, like a creeper when spring departs. She began to worship the goddess, who tells Lila, "That was me." Arundhati prayed that her husband's spirit might not leave the house after he died, and the goddess granted it. The Brahman died, and his spirit stayed in the empty space of his home. By the strength of his old desire, that spirit took the shape of a mighty man and became monarch of the three realms: a fire to his enemies, a steady Meru, a sun to the good, a giver of all wishes to those who asked. Meanwhile, grief split Arundhati's heart like a dry pod. She too died and found her husband's ghost, running to him like a river to the sea. Only eight days had passed.

The goddess told Lila, "That Brahman, who became a king, is your husband. Arundhati is you. You are the pair who now rule this realm, loving as doves and mighty as Siva and Parvati. I have shown you your past lives so you will know that the living soul is but air, and that belief in its solidity is an error. Wrong knowledge from the senses casts its reflection in the mind, and that is why you doubt which of two states is true. So the question has no better answer than this: every creation, seen or unseen, is equally unreal." Lila's eyes widened and her mind spun. "How can you say we are that Brahman couple, who are in their house, while we sit here in our palace?"

Lila pressed on. "How could the small room where my husband lies hold those wide lands and hills and the ten directions I saw in my trance? It is like shutting an elephant in a mustard seed, or a gnat fighting lions inside a nutshell." The goddess answered gently, "I do not lie. The law against untruth is one I establish, and if I broke it, who would keep it? The Brahman's soul saw this whole kingdom inside itself, in his own house, just as his departed spirit sees it now in empty space. You have forgotten your earlier lives, as you forget waking events in a dream. Hills and houses seen in that empty house were only the mind forming images, like a mirror. A mirage river's waves are as unreal as the mirage."

"This seat of yours, in this room," the goddess went on, "and you and I and everything around us are reflections in our own intellect. Our dreams, desires and fancies are the proof. The Brahman's spirit dwelt in his empty house with seas and forests inside it, as a bee sits in a lotus. The whole habitable globe sits in a small cell of the intellect, like a wisp of cloud in the sky, and every atom of it holds worlds within worlds." Lila asked, "But the Brahman pair died eight days ago, and we have reigned for years. How are we them?" The goddess said, "In truth there is no fixed space or length of time. We make the idea of a moment or an age just as we divide one spirit into me, you and him."

The goddess then described what happens after death. The moment someone feels the numbness of dying, they forget who they were and imagine a new self in the womb of emptiness. "This is my body. I am the son of this father, so many years old, and these are my friends." The mind presents it all, as in a dream, and soon the soul takes a new body and becomes a baby with new parents, all from earlier memory. Waking from it, it finds that a moment seemed an age. King Harish Chandra thought one night was twelve years, and a day seems a year to lovers apart. The visible world rests in the unseen spirit, as pungency lives in a pepper seed. The vision was Lila's meditation, in which her husband's memory showed her everything stored in it, for the intellect holds the images of all things.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Lila: The Grieving Queen · Yoga Vasishtha 3.15
• Next: Lila: The Journey Through Space · Yoga Vasishtha 3.23
• All of Yoga Vasishtha · Ask Krishna about it

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