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

Vipashchit Becomes a Stag

Yoga Vasishtha 6.2.129

The story · English

Rama had heard how two of the Vipashchits were set free by the grace of Vishnu. Now he wanted to know what became of the two brothers who were still wandering. Vasishtha told him. One of them had spent so long learning to quiet his desires, and had travelled through so many islands, that he finally settled in one and found his rest in God. He let go of the outward show of the world, and now he sees millions of orbs turning in the open sky, and is lost in the sight. The other drifted close to the moon. He stayed so long beside the dark stag-shaped mark on its face that his own form changed to match. He became a stag, and he still lives as one on a hill.

Rama was puzzled. Four people with one mind and one longing, he said, and yet four different endings? Vasishtha answered gently. A desire never changes its nature, but it grows stronger or weaker as a life moves through different places and times. Whichever strand is strongest in a given moment is the one that comes to pass. So the prince's single longing split four ways. Two are still lost in ignorance, one became a deer, and one was freed. Vasishtha said that only the light of true understanding drives out that darkness, the way daylight scatters the night however deep it seemed. Then he told what the freed Vipashchit did. He was cast up on a golden coast beyond a far ocean of sweet waters, and he took it for the ordinary earth.

Beyond that shore he saw a great orb floating in emptiness, and he thought it must be the very emptiness of Brahma. There, because of his good deeds, he fell in with learned people. From them he learned to see the visible world as it truly is, and he melted into Brahma himself. At once his ignorance and his body fell away, the way a mirage sea vanishes when you walk up to it. Vasishtha added that ignorance is as old as Brahma, since knowing and not knowing always come together. The world seen as separate is a falsehood, but known truly, it is Brahma. Another Vipashchit kept wandering through the whole sphere of the universe for a thousand years and never reached the end of his ignorance.

Rama asked why that wanderer could never reach the edge of the universe or break through its dome. Vasishtha explained. When Brahma was first born in the cosmic egg, he cracked the shell with both hands into an upper half and a lower half. The upper half rose far up and the lower sank far down. On those halves rest the circles of earth, water and air, and between them lies the endless sky, which looks to us like a blue vault. That sky is pure void, the ground on which every other sphere rests. Vipashchit passed into it to measure ignorance and be rid of it. But ignorance belongs to Brahma, so it is as boundless as he is. The higher Vipashchit climbed, the more he found it stretched exactly as far as the worlds themselves.

Vasishtha summed it up. One was freed, one grazes as a stag, and two are still tied to old impressions, roaming worlds they take to be real. Rama asked where those worlds are, and how far. Vasishtha admitted that the worlds of the two roamers are hidden even from him, however hard he looks. The stag's hill is in a land no one on earth knows. Rama pressed him. If the prince was born and died in this world, how can he still be roaming in it as a deer? Vasishtha said he knows all things the way a whole knows its parts, because he has made himself one with the mind of God. All the prince's adventures were his own imagining, and all of it happened somewhere in this world. The Vipashchits wandered through empty air, and imagination has no walls.

Rama asked where the stag was now, what it was doing, and when it might remember its old life. Vasishtha replied that it was the very stag the ruler of Trigarta had given Rama, kept in his pleasure garden. The whole court was astonished. Rama sent his attendants to bring it, and they led it into the open hall. It was plump and tame, its body spotted like the night sky, its eyes wide as lotus petals and lovelier than any woman's. It saw the blue sapphires set around the court and ran to nibble them, thinking they were grass. Then it stared at the crowd with neck raised and ears up, and the crowd stared back, ears pricked, afraid it might leap. The king and his ministers wondered whether it was magic. Rama then asked how the prince could be freed from this shape.

Vasishtha said that a person is restored by the same road he first took. Vipashchit had been a worshipper, and by going back to the god he worshipped, his stag's body could return to its first form, pure gold. He promised to do it before all of them, and said the stag would walk into the fire on its own. He touched his water pot and murmured his mantras with steady attention, thinking of the god of fire. A flame sprang up in the middle of the hall with no coal or fuel, with only a low roar and no smoke. It glowed like a golden dome, red as kinsuka blossoms and the evening clouds. The crowd shrank back. But the stag, filled with its old faith, saw the god it loved and its sins seemed to burn away just from looking. Slowly it went forward, then leapt into the blaze like a lion on its prey.

Vasishtha saw in meditation that the prince's sins were burnt away. He called to the fire god, bearer of the offerings, to remember the prince's old devotion and give him back his handsome shape. Just then the stag burst out of the flame and ran toward the princes, quick as an arrow. It glowed like an evening cloud, and as they watched, it changed into a man, the way a cloud shifts its outline against the bright sky. First it looked like pure gold, and then like a handsome man. He shone like the sun, or the moon, or Varuna in the deep water. The sun was mirrored in his eyes, and the fire of his faith burned calmly there. Then the light went out of the hall like a lamp in the wind, and the man stood plainly, like a temple idol without its brightness.

He stood quietly with a rosary in his hand, a sacred thread on his chest like a gold chain, and a white robe made whiter by the fire. He looked like the moon rising. The courtiers cried out in wonder at his radiance, and because he was as bright as daylight they named him Bhasa, which means light, and the name stayed with him. He sat in thought and remembered everything from his past life and his old body, while the whole court sat silent, hardly moving. Then he rose, went to Vasishtha, and bowed with joy. He called him the giver of his life and of the light of knowing himself. Vasishtha raised him by touching his head and said, May your long ignorance end today and never return. Bhasa wished Rama victory and bowed to Dasaratha.

King Dasaratha rose a little from his seat and said with a smile, You are welcome, prince. Sit here. You have been through many hardships, so rest now. Bhasa bowed to the sages, Vishvamitra and the others, and sat on a cushion. Dasaratha then marvelled aloud. He spoke of the pain Vipashchit had suffered in ignorance, like a wild elephant chained at the feet by hunters. He spoke of how people suffer because they do not see clearly and believe the worlds, which only turn in emptiness, are real. How strange were those vast, distant worlds Vipashchit had crossed, and how hard the troubles he bore. And how wonderful, said the king, is the empty, thinking mind of the Supreme, which shows its own passing thoughts in the air as if they were solid and real.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Vipashchit Seeks the End of the World · Yoga Vasishtha 6.2.121
• Next: The Wonderful Carcass · Yoga Vasishtha 6.2.133
• All of Yoga Vasishtha · Ask Krishna about it

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