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

The Bel Fruit and the Stone

Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.45

The story · English

Vasishtha turned to Rama and said, "Listen now to a pleasant story, one that has never been told before. I will tell it briefly, for your instruction and your delight." Somewhere there is a bel fruit, a vilva, so large that it measures many myriads of miles across. It is so solid that it does not ripen or rot in all those ages. Its flavour is lasting, sweet as honey, sweet as the nectar of the gods. Though the fruit is ancient, it grows fresher every day, like the crescent moon growing toward full, and its leaves are always new and bright. That is where the tale begins, Rama, with a fruit that is old and always young, and so large that nothing around it can be called large.

The tree stands in the middle of the universe, the way great Meru stands in the middle of the earth. It is as firm as the Mandara mountain, and not even the winds at the end of an age can shake it. Its root is the foundation of the world and spreads without limit in every direction. Inside the fruit lie millions of worlds, its countless seeds. Next to the bulk of the fruit they look like specks of dust at the foot of a mountain. Every taste the six senses can enjoy is found in it. It is never green and never falls overripe. It is ripe by its own nature, and no age or accident spoils it. Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra are not as old as this tree, and they know nothing of its root or its size. No one has seen its sprout or its flowers. It has no trunk and no branch, and no one has watched it grow, change or fall.

Vasishtha went on. This fruit is the best and greatest of all fruits, and it has no pith and no seed of its own, so it is always sound and clean. It is as dense inside as a stone, and yet it pours out bliss the way the moon pours out cool light. It delights every being. It is the rock of all safety, and its marrow sustains every living soul, each soul being a fruit of its own earlier actions. That marrow is the Infinite Spirit of God, kept in this small bel fruit, which stands for the human soul and the divine one alike. Then Vasishtha described how the trouble starts. The thought "I am this" gives a gross form to what is unreal, as fear of a ghost gives the phantom an ugly shape. The mind invents differences where none exist, and then believes in what it has made.

In this way, said Vasishtha, consciousness comes to stretch itself out. Though the soul's own nature is never used up, awareness that was gathered into itself now sees a world, with all its bustle, inside its own stillness. It sees empty space on every side. It counts the passing parts of time. It imagines a destiny that rules all things, and it learns what action is. It finds the world reaching as far as a person's wishes, and the sky as far as desire. It learns love and hatred, liking and dislike. It knows "I" and "you," and forgetting that it is the knower, it begins to see itself as an object. It looks up at the high worlds and, though it is as high as any of them, feels far below. It notices what lies in front, beside, behind, near and far, what is present, what is past, what is still to come. Having lost its view of everything at once, it now sees only in part.

So the whole world appears to consciousness like a playhouse, with figures shining like lotuses on a lake. Our awareness sits in the heart, as in the seed cup of a lotus, with endless desires budding around it, and it watches the worlds turn like beads on a rosary of lotus seeds. In its hollow, like the sky, roam the great Rudras, falling like comets with flaming tails. Meru stands in the middle, like the bright centre of the flower. Immortals gather on its moon-crowned peak like bees seeking the honey the moonbeams drip. Here is the tree of paradise, heavy with fragrant blossom. There is the deadly tree of the old world, scattering pollen that stands for the worldly acts leading to hell and rebirth. Here the stars shine along the bank of the ocean of Brahma, and the milky path glitters across the open sky.

Here, said Vasishtha, roll the waves of ritual acts, with sharks hidden in them, and there are the whirlpools of worldly deeds that spin people through endless births. Here the lake of time winds on forever, with the broad sky as its blossom, moments and ages as its petals, and sun, moon and stars as its filaments. Here it sees bodies full of health and sickness, old age, decay and the pain of death. There it sees the scriptures arguing with one another, some people glad in true knowledge, others wandering in the dark of ignorance. All this is the pulp of the vilva fruit, made of desires and the empty marrow of false imagining. Yet it also sees many who are calm, cool and free of wanting, who do not care what is done or left undone. This one consciousness shows all these faces, yet she is neither one nor many. She has only one true form, which is peace.

Rama answered, "Venerable sir, you know the substance of all truths. I understand that the bel fruit stands for the compact intellect, the one thing identical with itself. The whole fullness of existence, with I, you, this and that, is the substance of that intellect, and nothing in it is truly separate." Vasishtha replied, "Just as the universe is likened to a gourd holding mountains and all else inside, so the intellect is like the bel fruit, holding even the universe as its kernel. Yet it is not literally a kernel in a shell. The world decays and dissolves in time, and the everlasting mind of God never does." He added that the intellect is also like a block of stone with figures asleep in it, and he began a second story. "Somewhere there is a huge stone, solid, bright, cold and smooth to touch, that never wears away or grows dim."

Inside this stone, Vasishtha said, lies a clear lake with full lotuses and countless water-lily buds, and many other plants with long leaves, paired leaves, raised or drooping flowers, some on shared stalks and some alone, some hidden and some in plain view. Some have roots in their seed cups, some have roots on top of trees, and some have no roots at all. Conch shells lie about, and diseases are scattered everywhere. Rama said, "All this is true. I have seen this great stone, the salgrama, in my travels. It sits in a shrine of Vishnu among lotus flowers." "You are right," said Vasishtha, "and you know its inside. But do you know the stone of the divine mind, with no hole and no hollow, which holds the universe and gives life to every living thing? Not the dull, lifeless salgrama that people worship as its symbol."

That stone, Vasishtha said, holds all things in its solid heart as nothing, as ideas and not as substances. It is called a stone because it is solid, tight and cannot be divided. Though it is dense, it holds every world, as the infinite sky is filled with fine air. There is no hollow in it that something does not fill. As people paint lotuses and conch shells on blocks of stone, the restless mind paints countless pictures on the stone of the soul, which is itself blank and clear as crystal. Things seem separate, but they are all raised from one stone. A carved lotus is not apart from the stone, and no part of existence is apart from the divine intellect. Worlds are linked in it like clusters of carved lotuses, or like seeds packed in a long pepper. They neither rise nor fall there, but stay as firm as the kernel of a bel fruit.

Vasishtha continued. The changing worlds do not make the Infinite Mind changeable, since a container need not share the nature of what it holds. All change settles back into the divine intellect as waves and drops sink into the sea, and the only change in the Supreme is its taking all finite things into its infinity. The word that brought forth all things also brings their changes and endings, so the word "change" has no real meaning. The pith of the fruit is the fruit itself, and the cosmos is the gist of the solid intellect. The three worlds lie one under another in the unity of God, like sleeping carved lotuses and conch shells in a stone. There is no beginning or end to the world's course. Figures in stone have no motion of their own, and so the world's agents have no action, and the world is never made or destroyed. Everything stays as fixed in God's mind as an image cut in rock. The changes we see are only the wanderings of our mistaken fancy. Seen in the true light, there is neither body nor change.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Bhusunda's Secret of Long Life · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.24
• Next: Arjuna, as Vasishtha Foretells It · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.52
• All of Yoga Vasishtha · Ask Krishna about it

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