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

Bhasa and Vilasa

Yoga Vasishtha 5.65

The story · English

Vasishtha spoke to Rama about a trouble that lasts as long as a person never looks inward. Until you break down your own restless mind and see your soul, you cannot shake off the sense of I and mine. Your misery has no end, he said. It is like a painted sun that never sets. It is as wide as an ocean, and its troubles come as endlessly as waves. The world looks as gloomy to such a person as a sky packed with dark rainy-season clouds. Then Vasishtha said he would tell an old story, a talk between two friends named Bhasa and Vilasa, in a place on the Sahya mountain. Listen, he said, and see what these two learned.

The Sahya mountain was mightier than the three worlds. Its height rose past the sky, and its foot reached the underworld. Waterfalls poured down it, flowers covered it, and precious stones lay in its bosom, guarded by mountain spirits. Cascades foamed, old bamboos whistled in the wind, bees hummed over blossoms, and Apsaras sang together on the peaks. Gods had their seats on its top, people lived at its foot, and snakes had holes beneath it. On the northern edge lay a lovely table land, shaded by fruit trees, with a jewelled lake fed by waterfalls, and the sage Atri kept his hermitage there. It was as pleasant as the moonlit sky.

Two wise hermits lived in that hermitage, as learned as the teachers of the gods and the demons. They were of one heart, and in time they had two sons, who were like two lotus buds in the same pond. The boys were named Bhasa and Vilasa. They grew up like twin saplings on their parents' arms, with one mind in two bodies. They were as joined as sesame seed and its oil, or a flower and its scent. They moved about the hermitage like two bees over one bed of lotuses. Soon they reached youth, and they shone like the sun and moon rising together.

Then their aged parents left their worn bodies and went to heaven, like a pair of birds leaving a broken nest. The two young men drooped like lotuses in a dried-up channel. Their strength drained from them. They performed the funeral rites and mourned for a long time. They wept and cried out in their grief, and then sat silent and still, like figures in a painting, with heavy hearts and sad faces. Sorrow of this kind comes even to the good and the great, and nobody can turn it aside. For the two brothers in spirit, the hermitage had suddenly become a very quiet place.

Afterward both of them took up hard austerities. They grew thin as withered trees in the forest and passed their time in a cool, numb indifference. They were like stray stags parted from each other, wandering far from home. Days and nights turned into months and years, until both were worn out by age, and nobody noticed them. They had not found true knowledge, so their austerities only broke their bodies and weakened them. At last, by chance, the two met again. Vilasa spoke first, with great affection. He called Bhasa the best fruit of his life, a sea of sweetness, and the dearest friend he had in the world.

Vilasa asked him, tell me where you spent all this time apart from me. Did your austerities bear fruit? Is your mind free of worry? Are you master of yourself, with knowledge of your own soul? Have you gained the reward of your learning, and have you found peace at last? Vilasa's own mind was troubled by the worries of the world. Bhasa, who had reached full knowledge, answered him as kindly as a friend answers his dearest friend. He said, I am glad we met today. But how can anyone hope for rest in a world full of strife and sorrow?

Bhasa went on. How can I rest while the passions in my chest are not tamed, and while I do not yet know the one thing worth knowing? How can we be calm while desires, hopes and fears fill our minds? We must pull them out like thorns with the spade of reason. Without knowing the soul, there is no cure for the mind's diseases, and no escape from the plague of the world. The poisonous plant of worldliness sprouts in childhood and puts out leaves in youth. It flowers in old age, and it never bears fruit before we die. The body decays like a withered tree, and relatives buzz around it like bees.

Look at our days and nights, said Bhasa. We take them for joy and good fortune, but they are only misery going round. We spend our lives chasing empty wishes and wasting time on trifles. The mind is like a wild elephant that breaks its chains of good sense and runs with other elephants of desire, never resting or sleeping. In old age, limbs drop like dry leaves, and nothing props up the spirit. The glow of the body fades. The mind, hurt by people's neglect, goes pale as a lotus under frost. The swan of life flies off from the drying channel of the body, and nothing holds it back.

Desire, he said, lies quiet in the old heart, like a snake that can no longer catch prey, or a frog that only croaks its complaints. Our wishes flutter like temple flags until the storm of old age tears them down. The world is a long chain, and the rat of death gnaws at the knot of life. Life's stream runs muddy with the foam of cares, with whirlpools of rebirth and the rough waves of youth. Friends and relatives flow on into the ocean of eternity, and nobody returns. The body, a fine tool for our duties, gets lost in the mud, and no one knows where. The mind spins like a straw in an eddy.

The mind, said Bhasa, flutters like a confused bird between what it did, what it does and what it will do, and it is caught forever in the trap of its own fancies. The thoughts that this one is my friend and that one my enemy are our worst enemies, tearing the heart like wind tearing the tender lotus leaf. The mind is swept into the whirlpool of care, dragged down and floating up like a fish on a hook. Taking the body for the self is the cause of all our woe, and so is taking others as our own. Every person, caught between joy and sorrow, is swept to age and death, like leaves blown off the high hills by the wind.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Suraghu, King of the Kiratas · Yoga Vasishtha 5.58
• All of Yoga Vasishtha · Ask Krishna about it

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