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

Shikhidhvaja Leaves for the Forest

Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.84

The story · English

Prince Sikhidhwaja had lost his way inside his own mind. He had no spiritual knowledge to light it, and all his wealth only fed his restlessness, the way oil feeds a fire. He found some comfort in caves and beside waterfalls, wandering like a hunted animal. He still did his daily rituals, but only because his servants begged him to. He gave away land, gold and cattle, kept hard fasts, and made pilgrimages near and far. Nothing helped. He was like a miner digging barren ground for a mineral that was never there. One day, with his wife Chudala resting in his lap, he told her he was tired of royal pleasures, which had all gone stale. A silent hermit, he said, fears neither defeat nor loss. He asked her not to stand in his way.

Chudala answered gently. Every act has its season, she said, as flowers belong to spring and ripe grain to autumn. The forest is for the old and worn out, not for a young man. Let us stay home while we are young, she said, and grow grey together like a pair of herons, then leave together. A prince who abandons his people also earns a heavy reproach, and the subjects have a right to object. Sikhidhwaja replied that he had already gone from her in his heart. She was young and tender, he said, and a vine cannot take the axe. She should stay and rule. At midnight he slipped from the bed, told the guards to stay at their posts while he went to catch some robbers, whispered farewell to his kingdom, and walked into the dark. Twelve days later he reached the foot of Mandara mountain.

Near a ruined hermit's dwelling on Mandara, beside a stream and fruit trees, he built a bower of leaves. He made a bamboo staff, bowls for food and offerings, a water jar, and a rosary of strung seeds, and he laid out a deerskin for a seat. His days settled into prayer, mantras, bathing, flowers for the gods, and wild roots and fruit at evening. Back in the palace, Chudala woke to an empty bed that felt like a sky without sun or moon. She rose into the air by the power of her yoga and soon saw him below, wandering at night with a sword like a ghost. Her yoga showed her what fate had waiting for him, and that nothing could change it. So she turned back, told the court he had gone on urgent business, and ruled in his place. Eighteen years passed like this.

More years went by, until Sikhidhwaja was grey and old in his cell on Mandara. Chudala judged that his passions had cooled and that she was still young enough to reach him. She set out by night, flying past Siddha women hurrying to their husbands, through clouds where lightning looked back at its cloudy mate. Her own heart ached, and she scolded it. Perhaps he no longer wanted her at all, she thought, and had dried up like a withered tree. Then she decided to use her yoga to wake his mind and bring it back to rule beside her. She found the hut and knew him, though he looked like another man, thin and dark as a dry leaf. Grief filled her. She knew he would treat his wife as a silly girl, so she took the shape of a young Brahman boy, bright as gold and carrying a staff and water pot.

Sikhidhwaja stood up at once for the shining boy, took him for a god's son, and gave him a seat of leaves, flowers, water and a garland he had strung himself. He asked who the boy was and where he came from. The boy answered by telling how the saint Narada once saw a group of young women bathing in the Ganga beside his cave on the golden mountain. Their beauty overwhelmed him, and his composure broke. He turned pale and wilted like a cut creeper. Sikhidhwaja was astonished. How could Narada, a celibate sage free of desire, lose his balance? Kumbha explained that every living being, even a god, is made of both good and bad. Pleasure and pain follow each other like day and night, and the ignorant stay stained by every impression, while the wise do not.

Sikhidhwaja asked why people grieve over things that are past or not yet here. Kumbha said the soul is born into the body and its pains with the first breath, which is why a newborn cries. It is bound as long as it swings between pleasure and pain, and free when it learns that both are unreal and rests in stillness, like a lamp with no oil. He also explained, plainly, how the body obeys the mind when Narada's desire stirred. Kumbha then told his own birth. Narada steadied his mind and caught his fallen seed in a crystal pot. He set the pot in a cave on Mount Meru and filled it with milk by his will. He brooded over it like a bird on an egg, and in a month a fully formed boy came out, bright as the full moon. Narada taught him everything he knew.

Narada took the boy to his father Brahma, who set him on his lap, blessed him, and named him Kumbha, the pot, for the way he was born. Kumbha told Sikhidhwaja that the four Vedas were his playmates, the goddess Sarasvati was his mother, and the Gayatri hymn was his aunt. He roamed the world without any errand, never touching the ground or growing tired. That day he had simply seen the hermitage and come to meet its owner. Evening fell, and the talk paused until morning. Then Sikhidhwaja said that Kumbha's words had cooled his burnt soul and were worth more to him than a kingdom. Kumbha cut the praise short and asked him for his own story: who he was, how long he had lived here, and what he was after. Only the plain truth would do, he said, for an ascetic.

Sikhidhwaja said he was a ruler who had left his country out of fear of the world's traps and of being born again and again. He kept every rite and every vigil, yet he fell from one sorrow into a sea of sorrows. Kumbha then described a question she once put to Brahma, about whether to act or to pursue knowledge. Brahma had answered that knowledge is the highest good, but those without it must keep to their duties. Action with no clear aim bears no fruit, like kusa grass that flowers and never fruits. Sikhidhwaja objected that desire is only a mirage of ignorance, like a sea seen on desert sand, and that the wise are free of it. Kumbha agreed that knowledge is the chief good, then asked sharply why he, knowing this, still sat in such ignorance.

What are these pots and staffs and grass seats for, Kumbha asked, and why does he play at these games like a fool? Why not ask what he is, how the world arose, and how it will end? Why not sit with the learned and talk about bondage and freedom? Austerity alone, he warned, is like an insect that spends its life boring through stone. Hearing this, Sikhidhwaja wept until his face was wet. After a long time, he said, he was truly awake, and it was his weak judgment that had driven him from respectable company into the wilderness. He felt his sins washed away by the boy who had come to scold him. He bowed down at Kumbha's feet and asked to be taken as a pupil. Then he asked what knowledge could save him from misery.

Kumbha said she would tell him all she knew, and not waste her words as ravens crow over a headless body. Sikhidhwaja answered that he would trust them as he would the Vedas, even if she spoke without preparation. Kumbha replied that he should take her words the way a boy takes a father's, knowing they were meant for his good. He should listen with full attention, as one listens to music without asking about its rhyme or reason. Kumbha then said she would tell him a story of a man whose conduct resembled his own, and who was brought back to his senses after a long aberration.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: The Miserly Kirata · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.83
• Next: The Crystal Gem and the Elephant · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.88
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