A story · Yoga Vasishtha · Yoga Vasishtha — Stories of the Last Teaching

Vipashchit Seeks the End of the World

Yoga Vasishtha 6.2.121

The story · English

King Vipaschit and his companions sat down on the coast of the sea and set his rule in order. They chose places to live and built houses to suit their ranks. They marked out the provinces and posted guards to defend them. Then they went down into the ocean and crossed to the far side of the world, hoping to carry the king's glory to other lands. Night came down like one great cloud, and the people slept after their daily work and rituals. Waking in wonder, they asked one another how they had come so far in so short a time, like rivers running into the sea. They decided it must be the swiftness of the god Agni, the lord of fire.

Looking out, they saw Jambudwipa stretching to the salt ocean, and islands beyond it, and more seas beyond those. They said, "How many more must there be? How strange is this delusion spread before our minds." So they asked the fire god to show them everything at once, without effort or pain. They sat in their places and meditated on him together. Agni appeared in a form they could see and said, "Ask, my sons, what favor you want." They asked to know whatever can be known by the senses, the mind and self-awareness. They asked to see the paths of the siddhas and yogis, and not to die until they had reached those ways. "So be it," said Agni, and vanished like the fire under the sea.

Night followed the god and then fled in its turn, and the sun came up on the wide ocean. The king and his men set the affairs of the state in order by law. Then a longing for the sea pulled at them as if some force were driving them, and no minister could have held them back. Their ambition ran so hot that they left their weeping families behind. "We will see what lies on the other side of the sea," they said, "and come straight back." They murmured the mantras of the fire god, and he gave them the power to walk on the water as if it were dry ground. The king's four bodies met in one place, and then parted again with their forces.

They walked out over the waters until the people on the shore lost sight of them, as a small cloud vanishes in autumn. They crossed the sea as steadily as the king's elephants cross land on a long march. They climbed the waves like mountains and came down again, and crossed whirlpools as lightly as straw floats. Their weapons and charms protected them so well that sharks swallowed them and then spat them out again, unable to chew or digest them. The winds and waves carried them many leagues in a moment. The huge swells seemed like the elephants they used to ride at home, and the crashing waves looked like clouds flashing lightning. The roar of the sea did not frighten them. They stood like rocks, passed over it as over a sheet of cloth, and crossed on foot as other men cross in ships.

So they went on, looking at the world Ignorance had spread out before them, from sea to island and from island to sea, across many mountains and wildernesses. Then, heading west, the king was swallowed by a huge fish as fast as a boat on a swift river. It carried him to the milky ocean, but he was too hard to digest, so it took him on to the sugar ocean in the south and cast him up on the island of the Yakshas. There a female Yakshi enchanted him with her sorcery and he fell in love with her. He went east and, passing the Ganges, killed a shark that chased him, and came to Kanya Kubja. In the north, in the land of the Uttara-kurus, he worshipped Siva and lost all fear of death.

He wandered far by land and sea. Wild elephants attacked him on the border mountains, and sharks and alligators swallowed him and spat him out again. In the west an eagle set him on its back and carried him on golden wings to Kusa-dwipa across the ocean. From there he went east to Krauncha-dwipa, where a mountain Rakshasa ate him, and he killed it by ripping open its belly. In the south King Daksha cursed him to become a Yaksha, until the king of Saca-dwipa freed him after some years. Crossing the northern seas and the great frozen ocean, he reached the country of gold, where the siddhas turned him to stone. He stayed a stone for a hundred years, until Agni's grace released him.

Then he went east and became king of the country of coconuts. After five years there, he remembered who he had been. He crossed north of Mount Meru and lived ten years among the Apsaras in groves of wishing trees, eating coconuts and breadfruit. Going west to Salmali-dwipa, he lived among the birds for many years, since he had learned their language when Garuda carried him off. Farther west, on Mount Mandara, he spent a day with Mandari, a Kinnara woman. Then he came to Nandana, the garden of the gods, where wishing trees rose as high as the milky ocean's waves. He stayed a week with the woodland gods, playing with the Apsara women. That is where this part of his wandering ends.

Rama asked, "Sir, do these different states and deeds belong to only one part of the prince's fourfold body, or to every part? It seems impossible for all the parts to do the same thing, and just as impossible for one person's parts to act differently." Vasishtha answered, "Someone who knows he is one and undivided can still think of himself as another person doing other things, as a man does in a dream. The clear mind shows images of things within itself, as a mirror shows objects, sky and sea in its empty face. Whatever the senses meet is only the mind's own idea grown dense. The one appears as many, and all that variety is really unity. Whatever part of the prince was aware of something, that was his state at that time."

Vasishtha went on. "A yogi sitting alone in one place can see all that is past, present and future. A king sitting quietly in his palace can run his whole realm, and Vipaschit did it through viceroys, who were like limbs of his body. A cloud spreads across the sky and at once waters the dry earth and makes plants grow. Vishnu, one and the same, has four arms and many forms and does many things at once. Two hands do for daily life, but a soldier needs many arms for many weapons. So the king, with his four persons in four directions, knew himself as one, yet each acted separately. Each remembered sleeping on bare ground, crossing islands, forests and deserts, journeys over mountains, by water and by air, floating on seas and resting on clouds."

In the east, in the land of the Sakas, the prince passed into the enchanted city of the Yakshas at the foot of the Eastern mountain. Their sorcery put him to sleep for seven years in a wood of leafless trees. When he woke he drank mineral water and became stone for seven more years. Then he was shut in a cave on the western mountain, Astachala, and fell in love with Pisacha and Apsara women. He was lost for years in a forest of myrobalans. In the cold north he became a lion and roamed the Raivata hills for ten days. The Pisachas turned him into a frog for ten years, and in the Saca country he lived as a hog in a dark hole for a hundred years. At last, after fourteen years in the land of marivaca, his western form became a Vidyadhara through his skill in learning, and he lived happily under the scented bower of ala, passing his time in pleasure.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: The Great Stone and the Nymph · Yoga Vasishtha 6.2.56
• Next: Vipashchit Becomes a Stag · Yoga Vasishtha 6.2.129
• All of Yoga Vasishtha · Ask Krishna about it

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