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

Bhusunda Remembers the Ages

Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.19

The story · English

Bhusunda began with how he was born. The goddesses had been feasting and dancing, and their carrier birds caught the mood. The geese that carried Brahma's consorts drank the red blood of the goddesses' victims, got giddy, and danced through the air with Chanda, the crow who carried the goddess Alambusha. Down by a stream bank the geese grew bold, and that one crow became husband to seven geese at once. The geese became pregnant, and the goddesses finished their dancing and rested. Then they offered Siva his beloved Uma as his meal. He was furious when he understood. So the goddesses brought out of their own bodies the parts of Uma they had swallowed, and gave her back whole to be his wife again. Everyone made peace and went home glad.

The pregnant geese went to their goddess and told her their trouble. She spoke kindly. They could no longer carry her through the sky, she said, and should roam as they pleased until their burdens were delivered. Then she sank back into her meditation. The geese grazed in the lotus bed of Vishnu's navel, the very place where Brahma had been born, and in time they laid three times seven eggs. The eggs split open, and out came twenty-one brothers, the Chanda crows. They grew up there in the lotus bed until they could fly. Then they joined their mothers in serving the goddess. After long service she woke from her meditation, and out of her own good grace she gave them the gift of foresight, which freed them even in this life.

The young crows wanted only peace and solitary contemplation, so they went to their father, old Chanda, in the Vindhyan mountains. He embraced them, and the goddess Alumbusha looked on them kindly. Chanda asked, "My darlings, have you freed yourselves from weaving the web of desire? If not, I will ask my goddess to give you the knowledge that saves." They answered, "Father, by the goddess's grace we already know what can be known. We only need a good quiet place to meditate." Chanda said he knew one: Meru, the golden mountain at the pole, home of the gods and the keeper of earth's treasures. He described it as a pillar at the center of the universe, lit by the sun and moon as two lamps, with the stars hanging on it like garlands and the clouds waving over it like fans.

On a ridge in the north-east of Meru, Chanda said, stands a great kalpa tree, a whole world in miniature. On its southern branch, among gem-blossoms and moon-bright fruit, was his old nest, with a door bolted by jewels. He told his children to go and live there, where neither the gods nor anyone else could reach them, and they would have both a living and freedom. He kissed each of them and fed them. Then they bowed and flew, up through the clouds, past the sun and the fixed stars, to the heaven of Brahma. There they greeted Brahma's goddess and their goose mother, who blessed them and sent them on. They found the tree and the nest on Meru, and there they live apart, silent. Bhusunda then welcomed Vasishtha warmly and offered him a seat.

Vasishtha asked, "Where are your brothers? They must be as old and strong as you." Bhusunda answered that he was destined to stay alone and count the ages the way others count days. He had watched every younger brother fall like a straw and pass into rest. Vasishtha asked how he had lived through the great dissolution, with its raging wind, its burning sun, its freezing moon, its hail and snow, and how the kalpa tree had stood when every other tree was flattened. Bhusunda said his place was the open air, with nothing to hold him up, and no one noticed it or cared. Those who live there are free of disease and death. He trusted the peace of his own soul, took the unreal for unreal, wanted neither a long life nor death, and lived as long as he lived.

He said his mind stayed unruffled in dangers that shake ordinary people, as a crystal stays clean beside the blackest colors. The world looks smooth at first and proves frail as you go on. Life runs to eternity the way streams run to the sea, but he stood on the shore of that ocean and was not swept away. He held his life like an orchid on a branch, touching it lightly and unattached. He kept time by his breaths. He told Vasishtha that a visit from a sage like him was worth more than any pleasure, and compared him to a bee that sips the flowers of three worlds and makes honey. Then he spoke of the kalpa tree, which stood firm when the demon Heranyakha tried to hurl the earth into the abyss, when Varaha carried it on his tusk, and when the last fire came.

Vasishtha asked how Bhusunda himself survived when suns and moons fell. Bhusunda said that at the end of a kalpa he leaves his nest and hangs in the air, free of fancies, his body at rest and his mind free of wishes. Against the fierce suns he holds the power of Varuna's mantra, against the winds the parvati mantra, which makes him still as a rock, and over the flooded earth the vayu mantra, which keeps him aloft. Then he sleeps in the spotless spirit until Brahma begins creating again, and returns to his tree. Why do other yogis not do this? Destiny, he said, which no one can set aside. Then Vasishtha asked for wonders he had seen. Bhusunda remembered the earth bare, then ashes, then a time with no sun or moon, when Meru's gems lit one side of the valley. He remembered wars of gods and demons.

He remembered the earth with only plants, then only mountains, then heaped with the bones of dead Daityas. He remembered a time when darkness covered the deep and a time when Vindhya rivaled Meru. He remembered Brahmans given to wine, and an age when men were born without parents. He remembered the void before any world, before Indra or kings, and then Brahma dividing the worlds, and the birth of the sun and moon. Next came the slaying of Hiranya-Kasipu, the Vedas given to men, and the churning of the ocean. He had seen Vishnu on Garuda become Brahma on his swan, and then Siva on his bull. He named the seers, the goddesses, the demons, the kings, and the sages he had known. Then he told Vasishtha that he remembered his eight births too, from air, fire, water, empty space, and rock.

Bhusunda said he remembered ten creations in which people lived alike, and the earth sinking five times and being raised by Vishnu as the tortoise. He had seen the churning of the ocean twelve times, and Hiranyaksha throw the earth under the sea three times. Six times Hari came as Parasurama, a hundred times as Buddha, and three times as the man-lion. Siva destroyed the three cities thirty times, and ten Indras fell. He remembered eight battles between Hari and Hara. He remembered the Vedas being read differently in every age, and the Puranas swelling with additions. He remembered the great Maharamayana, in a hundred thousand verses, composed by Valmiki, and the Bharata by Vyasa, both now being forgotten. Vishnu was soon to come the eleventh time as Rama, and later at Vasudeva's house.

Bhusunda said the whole cosmos is no reality. It rises and sets in the conscious soul like waves on water, a bubble that bursts. The world is sometimes the same, sometimes partly changed, sometimes wholly. Each manwantara brings new friends, relatives, servants and a new home. He had lived by the Vindhyas, on Sahya, on the Dardura Hills, the Himalayas and Malaya, and at last on Meru, in a nest he had built on a mango branch. Destiny gave him the tree and keeps him in this body. Once there was no north or east, and even Meru stood elsewhere. Directions change with each creation, so nothing is certain except how we conceive it. The soul's vibration turns a son into a father and a foe into a friend. He had seen men become womanlike and women manlike, and the ways of one age appear in another. He remembered the changing borders, the costumes, fashions and amusements of men, through the endless run of days and nights.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Bhusunda, the Ageless Crow · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.14
• Next: Bhusunda's Secret of Long Life · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.24
• All of Yoga Vasishtha · Ask Krishna about it

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