The Signs of Approaching Death

Bhishma had just finished describing the man in Samadhi. He had said that such a man looks like the fixed and upward flame of a lamp that is full of oil and burns in a breezeless spot, that he is like a rock which a heavy downpour from the clouds cannot move in the slightest degree, that conches and drums and songs and a hundred instruments beaten and blown together leave him where he is. That was the summit of the teaching, and Yudhishthira sat at the foot of the arrows and waited to hear what could possibly come after it.

What came after it was the body, and the several doors out of it.

"All of this was spoken at Mithila," Bhishma said, "by Yajnavalkya to the king of the Videhas, whom men call Daivarati and Janaka. The king had asked him for the science of the Sankhyas and had been given it. He had asked for the science of the Yogins and had been given that too, and had been told that the two are not different, whatever the unintelligent may say. There was one thing left that a king asks last."

He let the sentence sit there.

"Where a man goes when he goes. And how he knows that he is about to go."

Yajnavalkya had answered both, and he had answered them in that order, and the order matters. He did not begin with the omens. He began with the geography, because a man who is told his signs before he is told his destinations is only being frightened, and a man who is told his destinations first is being prepared.

"Listen now to me, with attention, O king," the sage had said, "as to what the places are to which those who die have to go."

The teaching that followed is one of the strangest in the whole of the epic and one of the plainest. It says that the soul leaves the body through an opening, that there is more than one opening, and that the opening it chooses decides where it arrives. Nothing about the length of a life, nothing about the tally of a man's sacrifices. Only the door, and the region behind the door.

The king of Mithila sat still, and the sage began at the feet.

"If the Jiva-soul escapes through the feet," Yajnavalkya said, "it is said that the man goes to the region of Vishnu."

That is the first of them, and it is the lowest opening in the body, and it opens on the highest place named in the list. The reader who expects a ladder that runs from the soles upward, worst to best, is corrected in the first sentence. The order of the doors is the order of the body, not the order of merit, and the feet of a man are where Vishnu is.

"If through the calves," he went on, "it has been heard by us that the man repairs to the regions of the Vasus."

The Vasus are the eight bright ones, the deities of the elements and the shining things, and they are the household of Indra's world rather than its throne.

"If through the knees, he attains to the companionship of those deities that are called Sadhyas."

The Sadhyas are an old order of gods, older than most of the gods a man prays to by name, and the word Yajnavalkya used of them is companionship. Not the region of the Sadhyas. Their company.

"If through the lower duct, the man attains to the regions of Mitra."

Mitra is the lord of contracts and of the friendship that holds between men who have promised each other something.

"If through the posteriors, the man returns to the Earth."

There is no ornament on that one at all. He does not go anywhere. He comes back here, to the same ground, to be born on it again, and the sage names the door that sends him back without any comment on the sort of man it belongs to.

"And if through the thighs, to the region of Prajapati."

The lord of creatures, the maker and father of what breeds.

Six doors, and already the pattern that the whole catalogue will keep. The parts of the body that a man thinks least about, the ones he would be embarrassed to name in a hall, are assigned to gods, and one of them is assigned to the highest god in the list. Yajnavalkya was not building a hierarchy of shame. He was describing a house with many exits, and telling a king that he did not yet know which one he would use.

The sage came up the body.

"If through the flanks, the man attains to the regions of the Maruts."

The Maruts are the storm troop, the companions of Indra who come in a body and never singly, and the flanks of a man are where his breath moves visibly in and out when he has been running.

"If through the nostrils, to the region of Chandramas."

The moon. Hold that one, because the moon will come back at the end of this teaching wearing a very different face.

"If through the arms, the man goes to the region of Indra."

Of course he does. The arms are where a Kshatriya keeps everything he is, and Indra is the lord of that world, and the king listening in Mithila had spent his life being praised for the strength of exactly those two limbs.

"If through the chest, to that of Rudra."

The fierce one, the howler, the god whose region a man reaches through the part of himself where grief and rage both sit.

"If through the neck, the man repairs to the excellent region of that foremost of ascetics known by the name of Nara."

Nara is the eternal sage, the companion of Narayana, the first of those who have subdued themselves. It is worth noticing that his region is reached through the throat, which is the gate of speech and of food and the one part of the body that ascetics discipline before all others.

"If through the mouth, the man attains to the region of the Viswadevas."

The all gods, the general assembly, those who are worshipped together and not one by one.

"And if through the ears, to the region of the deities of the several points of the horizon."

The guardians of the quarters, one to each direction, which is a fitting destination for the two openings by which the world reaches a man from every side at once without his consent.

Thirteen doors named so far, and not one of them has been recommended. That is the discipline of this passage. Yajnavalkya is not telling the king which exit to aim for. He is telling him that the body he has been carrying is perforated with them, and that he has been living all his life in a room with many doors and no map of what lies beyond any of them, and that a map is now being given.

There were five doors left, and they were all in the face and the skull.

"If through the nose, the man attains to the region of the Windgod."

Breath to the lord of breath, which is the neatest correspondence in the whole list.

"If through the eyes, to the region of Agni."

Fire to fire. The eye is the organ that the old teachers always assign to the fire god, because seeing was held to be a kind of burning, a light that goes out from a man and takes hold of what it falls on.

"If through the brows, the man goes to the region of the Aswins."

The twin physicians of the gods, the horsemen, the two who are always two, departing through the two brows.

"If through the forehead, to that of the Pitris."

The fathers. The dead of a man's own line, who wait in their own region and are fed there by their descendants, and whose place is reached through the part of the head that a son marks when he performs the rites for them.

"And if through the crown of the head, the man attains to the region of the puissant Brahman, that foremost of the gods."

There it ends. The last door is the top of the skull and behind it is Brahman, and Yajnavalkya does not linger over it or tell the king how to force it open. He simply closes the catalogue.

"I have thus told thee, O ruler of Mithila, the several places to which men repair according to the manner in which their Jiva-souls escape from their bodies."

Eighteen exits, from the soles to the crown. A man is not shown which one he will take, and the sage does not offer a technique for choosing. What the list does, laid out in a hall in Mithila in front of a king who had been given the Sankhya and the Yoga and everything else he had asked for, is make the moment of death concrete. It stops being an abstraction called the end and becomes an event with a location in the body, as particular as a door in a wall of a house a man has lived in for sixty years without ever counting its doors.

And then, without any change of tone, Yajnavalkya told him how a man finds out that the day is coming.

"I shall now tell thee the premonitory indication, as laid down by the wise, of those who have but one year to live."

The first sign is a star that goes missing.

"One who, having previously seen the fixed star called Arundhati, fails to see it."

Arundhati is the small companion star beside the seven of the Great Bear, the star that is shown to a bride on her wedding night because she is the wife of Vasishtha and the pattern of a faithful woman. Every married man in the audience had stood in a courtyard at night and had it pointed out to him. It is faint. It is exactly at the edge of what an ordinary eye can do. And the sign is not that the star is dim or that the night is cloudy. The sign is that a man who has seen it before, and knows where to look, looks there and finds nothing.

"Or that other star called Dhruva."

The pole star. The one fixed point in a turning sky, the star by which a traveller knows north and a sailor knows his course, and the same rule applies to it. Not that it has moved. That he cannot see it any more.

"Or one who sees the full Moon or the flame of a burning lamp to be broken towards the south."

The full moon with a piece missing out of its southern edge on a night when no eclipse is due. A lamp flame with a break in it on the south side. South is the quarter of Yama and of the dead, and the sign is that the two steadiest lights a man knows, the one in the sky and the one on his own floor, have both begun to fail in that direction only.

And then the fourth of them, which is the one that stays with a reader.

"Those men, O king, who can no longer see images of themselves reflected in the eyes of others, have but one year to live."

Stand close to a friend and look into his eye and there is a small figure of yourself in it. It is a thing anybody can check in a moment, on anyone, without instruments, and the sign is that it has gone. The man is still standing there. His friend can see him perfectly well. He simply no longer appears in him.

The signs of six months are not in the sky at all. They are in the man, and half of them are in his conduct.

"One who, being endued with lustre, loses it," said Yajnavalkya, "or being endued with wisdom loses it. Indeed, one whose inward and outward nature is thus changed has but six months more to live."

The two halves of that sentence are a pair. Lustre is the outward thing, the light that people say a man has when he walks into a hall, and wisdom is the inward one. The teaching does not say that a dull man or a foolish man is dying. It says that a man who had these and no longer has them is dying. The sign is subtraction, and it can only be read by someone who knew the man before.

"He who disregards the deities, or quarrels with the Brahmanas."

Here the omen has become behaviour, which is the hardest part of the passage for a modern reader and the most interesting. A man who has worshipped all his life begins to let the worship go. A man who kept the peace with the learned starts picking fights with them. In the old reckoning this is not merely a fault to be corrected. It is a symptom, in the way that a change in a man's colour is a symptom, and the wise are said to have read it as one.

"Or one who, being naturally of a dark complexion, becomes pale of hue, has but six months more to live."

Back to the body, and again the rule is change and not condition. Nobody is being told that pallor is bad. What is being described is a man whose own colour has left him.

Read the six-month signs together and they say one thing. At a year the omens are in the world outside him, in stars and moons and the eyes of other people. At six months they have come inside, into his skin, his mind, his temper and his religion. The distance is closing. What was being lost at the edge of vision is now being lost at the centre, and the men around him have begun to say to one another that he is not himself lately, without knowing that they are reading a calendar.

"One who sees the lunar disc to have many holes like a spider's web," the sage said, "or one who sees the solar disc to have similar holes, has but one week more to live."

The moon has come back, and it is not the broken moon of the year sign now. It is a moon full of small holes, and the image Yajnavalkya reaches for is a spider's web, which is the right image and a terrible one. A web is a thing made of gaps held together by threads. To see the moon that way is to see it as mostly absence, and then to lift the eyes the next morning and find the sun in the same condition.

These are the two great lamps of the world. In the year sign one of them showed a single break at its southern edge. In the week sign both of them have gone to lace.

"One who, when smelling fragrant scents in a place of worship, perceives them to be as offensive as the scent of corpses, has but one week more to live."

The second sign of the week takes the sense that a man trusts least and can argue with least. A place of worship is full of good smells, sandal and flowers and ghee and incense, and they are the same smells that have met the man at that door every year of his life. He walks in and they are the smell of dead bodies.

Not a stench in general. The scent of corpses, specifically, in the one building where a man goes to be reassured about the things this teaching is discussing.

There is an economy in how these signs are arranged that is easy to miss. The year takes the stars, the six months take the man's own bearing and temper, and the week takes the sun, the moon and the temple, which is to say everything a man had left to look at for comfort once his own body had begun to go wrong. One after another the reliable things are withdrawn, and the withdrawal is orderly, and it is always the man's perception that changes and never the thing perceived. The moon over Mithila was whole all week. Nobody else in the courtyard smelled anything but flowers.

The last of the omens are for the day itself, and they are given without any image at all. The sage stops making comparisons. He simply lists.

"The depression of the nose or of the ears. The discolour of the teeth or of the eye. The loss of all consciousness, and the loss also of all animal heat. These are symptoms indicating death that very day."

Six items, and every one of them is something a person sitting beside a bed can observe. The face falling in at the nose and the ears. The teeth and the eye going the wrong colour. The mind gone. The warmth going out of the body while the body is still breathing. Anyone who has kept a vigil for a dying man knows this list without having read it. It is the oldest clinical note in the literature, and it is set down in the middle of a discourse on Emancipation as if it belonged there, which it does.

Then two more, which do not belong to the sickroom.

"If, without any perceptible cause, a stream of tears suddenly flows from one's left eye, and if vapours be seen to issue from one's head, that is a sure indication that the man will die before that day expires."

Without any perceptible cause. He is not grieving. Nothing has been said to him. The left eye simply begins to run, and something like steam rises off the top of his head, and the crown of the head is the last of the eighteen doors, the one that opens on Brahman.

So the two halves of the teaching close on each other. Yajnavalkya opened with a body full of exits and no way of telling which would be used, and he ends with a man whose particular door has started to show.

And having come that far, having brought the king from a year down to a day, down to the hour when the heat leaves the hands, the sage did the thing that makes this passage a teaching and not a book of terrors.

He told the king what the year was for.

"Knowing all these premonitory symptoms," Yajnavalkya said, "the man of cleansed soul should day and night unite his soul with the Supreme Soul. Thus should he go on till the day comes for his dissolution."

That is the first of the two courses, and it is the plain one. A man who has counted the signs now has a use for every hour, and the use is Samadhi. Not more sacrifices. Not a pilgrimage undertaken in a hurry. The same practice he was told of before the omens were mentioned, done now without any of the excuses a man in good health has for putting it off.

Then the sage allowed for the other kind of man, and he allowed for him without contempt.

"If, however, instead of wishing to die he desires to live in this world, he casts off all enjoyments, all scents and tastes, O king, and lives on in abstinence. He thus conquers death by fixing his soul on the Supreme Soul."

He wants to go on living, and he is not told that the wish is unworthy. He is told the price. Every enjoyment goes. Scents and tastes are named because they are the two pleasures a man keeps longest, the flowers by the bed and the food he can still be tempted with. All of it is put down, and what he does with the time he has bought is what the other man does with the time he has accepted. He fixes his soul on the Supreme Soul.

The two roads have one surface. Whether he wants to die well or wants not to die at all, the practice does not change by a single hour.

"At last he attains to what is entirely indestructible, which is without birth, which is auspicious, and immutable, and eternal, and stable, and which is incapable of being attained to by men of uncleansed souls."

Bhishma stopped there, on the bed of arrows, and did not add anything to it for Yudhishthira.

He had been lying on that field since the tenth day of the war, holding his life in his own hands and waiting for the sun to turn north. Of all the men in that gathering he was the only one with no use for the catalogue. He did not need to look for Arundhati in the sky, or to search the eyes of the king kneeling beside him to see whether his own face was still in them. He knew to the day what remained, and he was spending it exactly as Yajnavalkya had told the king of Mithila to spend his.