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

Karkati: The Hungry Demoness

Yoga Vasishtha 3.68

The story · English

North of the Himalaya there lived a Rakshasi named Karkati. She was dark as ink and strong as a rock, tall enough to reach halfway to the sky. Her eyes blazed like fire, her nails glinted like sapphires, and a string of dried bones hung on her like a wreath of flowers. She was also called Visuchi, after the colic pain that always afflicted her. Above all she was hungry, and nothing could fill her huge belly. One day she thought of Jambudwipa, the land of men. If she could go there, she would devour them all in one sweep. But people were guarded by mantras, medicines and charity. So she decided to win what was hard to get through hard austerity.

Karkati climbed an inaccessible mountain on her hands and feet, bathed, and sat down to her devotion. Her eyes stayed fixed like two small suns. Days became months and months became years. She stood through heat and cold, as still as a black cloud, her hair rising toward the sky, her skin ragged in the wind. After a thousand years Brahma appeared to end her austerities and grant her reward. She bowed to him silently in her mind, and while she waited she settled on her wish. She would become hard as an iron needle, so thin she could slip into living creatures unseen, the way the scent of flowers enters the nose. Then she would drink their heart's blood.

Brahma saw her hidden motive, which did not suit a true yogi, and spoke in a voice like rolling clouds. He told her he was pleased and that she should rise and ask. Karkati asked to be turned into an iron needle. Brahma said, "Be it so. You will be a pin, and you will be called the colic pain, for the pain you give." He named her victims: the intemperate, the overworked, the careless, and people in unhealthy places. She would travel as wind in the bowels and cause bile and cramps. Then he gave a remedy for the wise, a mantra worn on the left arm as an amulet, to be spoken while rubbing the aching place and picturing the colic driven beyond the hills.

Brahma gave the amulet to the Siddhas who attended him, then vanished into the air and returned to heaven, where Indra welcomed him. Karkati began to change. The mountain-tall Rakshasi shrank to a tree branch, then to the height of a man, then a cubit, a span, a finger's length. She grew thin as a grain of corn, and at last thin as a needle. She kept a vow of silence. A light came toward her out of the sky, and the hair on her body stood up. Her senses were stilled, and she was only a small black needle, able to move through the air wherever she liked.

Here the storyteller pauses over her foolishness. She had wanted food, not the shape of a pin. Her heart wanted one thing and she had made herself into another, which was no use to her purpose. Even so, she soon grew used to being a needle. Now she moved as colic wind, seeking blood. Her body split in two halves, one fine as silk thread and one soft as cotton, and she ranged through all ten directions. She entered the sensualist, the weak and the overfed, and what began as colic turned to cholera. She also entered the lean, the healthy and the wise, and the wise drove her out with prayers, mantras and medicine.

She hid in dust, in sunbeams, in the threads of cloth, in dry riverbeds and marshes, in places thick with flies, bones and dirt. She lay among the poor and the naked, and in the stiff fingers of the cold. Like a tired bullock hauling its load through towns, she grew weary of her long roaming and lay down in some hidden place. The old needle, like a sewing needle, was dropped from the sewer's thread and lost. It was swept about like chaff, then picked up again and fed a scrap of thread, the way a parasite feeds on another's strength. So the colic feeds on the lean bodies of the poor, and the needle lives on the thin thread of the needy.

Then Karkati saw plainly the fault in her choice. Her heart was a needle's eye, fed only a bit of thread, and she began to repent. Yet she could not leave her nature behind. She kept on piercing hearts, hiding her head as robbers cover their faces. She entered weak and strong alike, as a needle stitches silk, linen and rough fibre. When pressed under the fingers, her griping let go, as the thread slips through the cloth. In the end the lost needle was found by a blacksmith and heated in the forge. The breath of the bellows sent it up into the air, and it vanished. Valmiki says the sun then set, and the assembly rose to its evening rites.

The next morning Vasishtha went on. For a long while Karkati had feasted on human blood. But she found her hunger had no limit, and a drop of blood no longer satisfied her. She began to grieve over the shape she had chosen. "What a wretch I am," she thought. "I gave up my great body, my dark cloud of a form, for something thin as a dry leaf. I gave up my dainty meals of flesh and fat." Now she dived in dirt, was trampled underfoot, hung up in smoke with the cloth, and buried in ashes by the road. She had no mother, no father, no friend and no home. She wanted to die, but death would not come to her.

She said she had thrown away a jewel for a bit of glass. Then she began to remember her old body: the arms that reached the clouds, the eyes that flashed like lightning, the white laughter that put the sun in shadow. She remembered her big belly, her black nails, her dances in the forest to the tabor, and drinking blood until she fell asleep. She asked when she would have all that again. "I destroyed my own bright body," she said, "by my bad choice of austerities, like someone who takes a poor salt of gold in place of gold itself." She called herself as foolish as an elephant, the gaja murkha.

Then she spoke to her own body, as to people who had left her. "O my arms, that broke mountain peaks, why can't you pluck the moon? O my eyes, that lit the darkest night, why don't you shine now? O my shoulders, are you broken down or worn out by age? O my moon-bright face, why don't you shine on me? O my hands, where has your strength gone, when a fly's foot can push me about?" She thought of her deep navel and her towering height, her mouth wide as the sky, and her heaps of meat. Now she had only a needle's hole and a drop of watery food. "Ah, how lean I have grown," she said, "but who is to be blamed for an act of my own doing?"

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Lila: The Dead King Wakes · Yoga Vasishtha 3.51
• Next: Karkati: The Needle's Penance · Yoga Vasishtha 3.72
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