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

The Vetala's Questions

Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.70

The story · English

Vasishtha begins by telling Rama what freedom looks like. When the cloud of ignorance is blown away by clear reasoning, he says, life becomes no life and the mind becomes no mind. It settles back into the soul. The wise call this liberation. The ego, and the whole sense of me and the world out there, turn out to be like water in a mirage. They vanish the moment you look straight at them. Then he says he has remembered a story that shows this well, about a questioning vetala. A vetala is a night-roaming spirit that feeds on people. So Vasishtha settles Rama in to listen, and the story begins in the wild country of the Vindhya mountains.

A huge vetala lived there. He had once lived near a busy city, and the townspeople had offered him victims every day, so he was content. Even then he was not simply cruel. He never killed anyone without cause, and he kept to the ways of honest, fair-minded people, even while he prowled the streets hungry and thirsty. In time he left the city for a woody retreat. There he killed only when hunger pressed him hard and when he judged it fair to do so. He was a monster with a code of his own, and that matters for what happens next, because one night he met someone who could answer him.

On his rounds one night, the vetala met the ruler of the land, out walking alone. The vetala cried out in a terrible voice. "Where are you going, prince? You are in the claws of a monster. You are a dead man, and you are my meal for today." The ruler was not frightened. "Watch yourself, night-fiend," he said. "If you try to kill me unjustly, I will break your skull into a thousand pieces." The vetala answered calmly. "I am not speaking unjustly. You are a ruler, and a ruler must hear the request of anyone who asks. So hear mine. I have questions, and I think you can answer them."

The vetala laid out the riddles. "Who is the glorious sun whose rays glitter as particles through all the worlds around us? And what is the wind that carries these specks of stars through endless empty space? What is the one thing that passes from dream to dream, takes hundreds and thousands of forms, and never leaves its own original form?" He was only getting started. "What is the pith inside every body, wrapped in layer upon layer like the sheaths of a plantain trunk?" These were the first three, and the prince listened without a flicker of worry.

There were two more. "What is the atom too small for any eye to see, which still gives rise to this boundless universe, with its worlds and skies, its planets above and its mountains below, all of them smaller than that atom? And what is the formless thing that lies as marrow beneath the heaviest rocks, holding up all three worlds, heaven, earth and the regions below?" Then came the threat. "If you cannot answer, you will be the killer of yourself, because I will eat you this very moment. And in the end I will devour all your people, as death devours everyone in the world." The prince smiled, and when he opened his mouth to speak, his bright teeth lit up the pale sky.

He began with the sun, and he described the world as a tree. At first, he said, the world was a tiny seed in the divine mind. Around it grew a dozen layers, like skin and bark. From it came a vast tree with thousands of branches and enormous leaves. Within that tree were forests, and within the forests mountains, valleys, countries, islands, lakes and cities. Each wide region was a whole earth, and thousands of such earths made one cosmic egg. Thousands of eggs rested in a body of oceans. Whatever holds all those oceans is the god Vishnu. Whatever wears thousands of such gods like a string of pearls is Rudra. And whatever carries thousands of those great gods like hairs on its body is the supreme Lord of all.

"That is your sun," the prince said. "It shines in hundreds of divine persons, and they are all only sparks of its rays. Everything in the universe is a particle of that uncreated sun. It is the all-knowing soul, whose light of knowledge shows us everything. Without it, as without the sun, nothing would grow and nothing could be seen." Then he moved to the other questions. Time, space and force all come from pure intellect, the way air carries scents and dust. The supreme soul is like the wind that breathes those particles out, the way breeze carries fragrance from a flower. The soul moves through the dream of the world, passing from scene to scene, and it never changes itself.

"Think of a plantain trunk," the prince went on. "It is only folds laid over folds, with the pith hidden deep inside. Everything in the world shows its outer coats, while its real substance, Brahma, stays hidden within. Whatever one thing seems to come from another is just one fold growing from the one below it, and all the folds grow from the divine intellect at the bottom. No word, whether being, soul or Brahma, can really describe it. It is called a tiny atom because it is too subtle to perceive. It is called the base of mountains because it has no limit. It contains all the worlds as its smallest specks, as vivid as the scenes of a dream, and it has no shape of its own. It is neither this nor that."

The prince finished with the last answers. The three worlds, he said, are the soft inner bulb of that pithy intelligence, and that intelligence lives and acts in every world. All these worlds are shaped by its design, though it stays quiet in itself and shows endless beautiful forms. "Think of this in yourself, young vetala," he said, "and be at peace." The vetala said nothing. He stayed there, turning the words over in his reasoning mind. Slowly he grew calm, and he sank into steady meditation, so deep that he forgot his hunger and thirst altogether. The monster who had come to eat the prince was sitting in stillness, and the prince had not lifted a hand against him.

Vasishtha turns to Rama and closes the story. "That is how the vetala's questions went, and how the worlds sit inside the atom of the intellect and nowhere else." A world that lives in that small cell stops standing on its own once you reason it through, the way a ghost exists only in a boy's imagination. In the end only the one everlasting remains. So he tells Rama to draw his thoughts in, keep his soul within itself, do what has to be done without straining after it, and keep his mind as clear as open sky. A steady, fearless mind succeeds, as Bhagiratha's did. Through his calm and even temper, he brought the heavenly Ganges down to earth, and Sagar's sons dug the bay of Bengal.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Jivata's Dream · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.62
• Next: Bhagiratha Brings Down the Ganga · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.74
• All of Yoga Vasishtha · Ask Krishna about it

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