A story · Yoga Vasishtha · Yoga Vasishtha — Stories of the World Going On

Shukra's Long Dream

Yoga Vasishtha 4.5

The story · English

Rama asked Vasishtha a hard question. How can the whole world appear so vividly inside the mind? Vasishtha answered that the world sits in the mind just as King Lavana's life as an outcast did, and just as Bhargava once believed he held every pleasure there is. True bliss, he said, belongs more to the mind than to possessions. Rama pressed him: why would a man longing for heavenly joy end up tasting earthly ones? So Vasishtha began the story of Bhrigu and Kala. On a table-land of the Mandara mountain, lined with tamala trees and flower arbours, the sage Bhrigu once practised hard devotion. His son Sukra came there too, handsome as the moon, and sat in his father's grove to meditate.

After sitting a long while under the shade of a rock, Sukra wandered down to the flowery plains. He roamed the bowers of Mandara in his youth, sometimes playing like a boy, sometimes sitting in stillness like his father. He had no worries, like a king who has beaten his enemy. Then one day he saw an Apsara, a heavenly nymph, travelling through the air. She wore wreaths of Mandara flowers, her hair stirred in the breeze, her ornaments jingled, and her scent drifted on the wind. Her glow fell over the land like moonlight. Sukra felt his hard heart give way. She looked at his face and fell in love with him too. He tried to check himself, but he lost his hold, and his mind filled with her.

From then on Sukra sat with his eyes closed and let a daydream grow. He imagined the nymph flying to the paradise of Indra, and himself following close behind. He saw gods crowned with Mandara blossoms, and heavenly women with eyes like blue lotuses. He saw winds carrying perfume, bees humming around Indra's elephant, and swans on lakes of golden lotuses. He heard singers, and saw Narada and Tamburu playing their lutes. Gods rested in arbours beside the heavenly Ganga. Then he thought he should pay his respects to Indra, and he bowed to him in his mind, as he would to his own father. Indra lifted him up, seated him beside himself, and said, "Your coming honours my heaven, Sukra. May you live long to enjoy it." All the gods greeted him, and Indra treated him like a son.

So Sukra, without ever passing through death, forgot who he had been. He left Indra's side and wandered through paradise, delighted with his own new body and eager to see its beauties, like a swan hurrying toward lotuses. In Indra's garden he found his beloved, her eyes like a young fawn's, her body slender as a tender creeper. She saw him too and lost command of herself. They melted toward each other like moonstone under moonlight. At night they were apart and mourned like the ruddy geese, and at dawn they were glad to meet again. Love's arrows struck her, and she trembled like a lotus in the rain. Night spread darkness over paradise, the crowds went home, and the two met alone in the grove.

She came to him like a peahen going out to meet a rising cloud, with sidelong glances. In her mind she saw a white hall with a couch at its centre, and Sukra entered it as Vishnu enters the sea with Lakshmi beside him. She spoke softly. "Look, my moon-faced love. Your brow is a bow bent to destroy me, and Cupid shoots from it at this lovesick girl. Protect me, for I have come to you for shelter. Good people relieve the suffering, and those who don't are the lowest of men. The sovereignty of three worlds is not so pleasing as the love of the beloved. I live on your touch as the night lotus lives on moonbeams. Hold me to your chest." She fell against him, soft as a flower, and they sank into love like two bees in a lotus.

Thus Sukra believed he lived in the pleasures of heaven. He wore garlands of Mandara flowers and drank nectar with the gods. He roamed the golden lotus lake of Manas Sarovara and the banks of the Mandakini with singers and Kinnaras. He swung in cradles of creepers with his beloved, spent moonlit nights in the groves of Kailasa, and decked her with lotus garlands on the slopes of Gandhamadana. In the dream he spent sixty years in the marshes of Mandara, half a yuga beside the milky ocean, and an unmeasured age in a garden of the Gandharvas. Then he dwelt in Indra's own heaven through many cycles of the yugas. But at last the merit of their deeds ran out, and they were sent back to earth.

They lost their heavenly forms, their seats and their vehicles. Sukra was struck with grief like a fallen warrior, and his sorrow broke him like a waterfall shattering into rills. Thin and sad, the two wandered the air like birds without a nest. Then their minds entered the moon's rays, came down as rain, and grew as plants. A Brahman in the land of Dasarna ate some of these plants, and Sukra became his seed and was conceived as his son. The boy grew up among sages and lived in the forests of Meru for a whole manwantara, keeping his holy vows. There he had a son born from a doe, who was his old beloved reborn, and he loved the boy so much that he neglected his duties.

He prayed constantly for the child's long life, wealth and learning, and gave up his steady faith. This slackening shortened his own life, and death took him easily. His worldly thoughts led him next to be born as the son of the king of Madra, and he ruled there for a long time, destroying all his enemies. When old age came, as frost stunts a lotus, a desire for the ascetic life released him from the throne. He was reborn as an anchorite's son and went to the bank of the winding Ganges to practise devotion, free of worldly cares. So, following the desires of his heart, the son of Bhrigu passed through one form after another, until at last he stood as a tree on the bank of a running stream.

Years went by as the tree stood there, and all this time his father was nearby. Then the tree withered under sun, wind and rain, and fell like a tree torn up by its roots. In every life his mind had hunted for fresh pleasures, as a stag moves from forest to forest for new grass. Birth and death had turned him round like a mill wheel, until he found rest on that cool bank. Now his bodiless spirit looked back over all its journeys, the real and the imagined. It remembered the first body on Mandara, burned down to bones and skin by the sun and the five fires of his penance. It remembered the breath that sounded like music, the sound of freedom from action.

The spirit remembered more. The body seemed to laugh at the mind sunk in worldly cares, showing its white teeth. The hollows of mouth, eyes, nostrils and ears showed how empty every body is, human or heavenly. It remembered the body wept as the sky rains after great heat, and revived in the breeze and moonlight as woods do in the rains. It had been washed by mountain waterfalls and covered in dust, bare as a withered tree, yet it stood firm against winter winds. Its face was faded, its belly shrunken, like the goddess of famine crying among howling beasts. Still, wild animals never hurt the hermit, who was free of passion and full of devotion. Weakened by fasting, with his mind fixed in prayer, Bhrigu's son lay on his bed of stones.

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