The White Island

'Grandsire,' said Yudhishthira, 'you have told me whom a king should honor and how the four orders should be kept. Tell me now the thing under all of it. Among all the gods there is one who is the refuge, the oldest, the one from whom the others come. Who is he, and how is he reached?'

Bhishma lay quiet for a while on his bed of arrows. 'I will tell you what was told to me,' he said, 'and to tell it properly I have to take you further north than any of your armies ever marched. There were three brothers once, sages, mind-born sons of the Grandsire himself. Their names were Ekata, Dvita and Trita. They had studied everything there was to study. They had performed the great sacrifices and completed them without a flaw, and they had been given the fruits of those sacrifices and found the fruits insufficient. What they wanted was not heaven. They wanted to see him.

'So they went north, beyond Meru, to the shore of the ocean of milk, and there they stood on one foot like pillars of wood for four thousand years, with one vow: to learn how Narayana might be seen. At the end of it a voice with no body spoke to them. North of the ocean of milk, it said, lies an island called Shvetadvipa, the White Island, and the men who live there are his and he is theirs. Go there.

'They went. Understand what that means. They went past the last of the inhabited kingdoms and past the last of the hermitages, past Meru where the sky turns on its axle, past the country where the sun does not properly set and the country beyond that where there are no landmarks at all, walking north on nothing but that voice's word. It took them a long time. When at last they reached the island, its radiance blinded them, and they could not see the one they had come for. They decided their yoga was not yet enough.'

'They did what men of their training knew how to do,' Bhishma said. 'They stood in austerity.

'They took no food. They took no water. They stood with their eyes fixed on the sky above that island and they held themselves there through the turn of the seasons, and then through the turn of the years, and then through the turn of a hundred years, which for such men is a length of time but not an impossible one. Their bodies wasted and were held up by will. They did not speak. They did not sit. They did not once look away.

'At the end of it they saw the men of that island at last, pale as the moon, facing north and east with joined hands, silently chanting. And then a light came, like a thousand suns rising together, and the white men ran toward it crying that they bowed down. It came without a shape, and it was so great that the three of them could not keep their eyes upon it. It swallowed the island. It swallowed the shore and the sea and the sages themselves, so that for a while none of them could see even his own hands. They stood inside that brightness and waited for it to resolve into a face, and it did not resolve. It simply burned.

'Then a voice spoke out of it, and what it said was not a refusal exactly, but it was the hardest sentence those three ever heard.

'You have come a long way, it said, and what you brought with you is not the coin that is accepted here. Austerity does not buy this sight. Study does not buy it. Sacrifice does not buy it. I am not seen by penance, nor by gifts, nor by the Vedas recited without number. I am seen only by the man whose mind has never been divided, who has worshipped me and nothing beside me for a long time. Go back where you came from. A task awaits you in an age that is still to come.

'And the light went out of the sky, and the three of them stood on that shore in the ordinary daylight with a hundred years spent and nothing in their hands, and turned south again.'

'A long age afterward,' Bhishma said, 'Narada came to the same shore, and came differently.

'He had been at Badari in the high mountains, where the twin sages Nara and Narayana keep their austerity, whose story you have already heard from me. Narada stayed there some while, and he watched Narayana at his worship, and one day the thing that had been sitting in him for years finally came out of his mouth. He said: you are the refuge of the worlds. Whom, then, are you worshipping? Whose name is it that you are saying?

'And Narayana answered him without evasion. He named the highest self, the imperishable one, and said that he and Nara worship that one, the self of all, and that there is nothing higher. Then Narada said he would go and see that original one for himself, and Narayana honoured him and said: Go.

'So Narada went, and here is the difference, Yudhishthira, and I want you to hold it, because the whole tale hangs from it. The three brothers had gone north to obtain something. They went as men go to a court where they expect their credentials to be honored, carrying a hundred years of austerity the way an envoy carries a sealed letter. Narada went north the way a man walks toward someone he loves. He had studied the Vedas and done his austerities and never told a lie, but he did not go to trade them. What he trusted was that he had worshipped the one god and never several. He had already been singing that name for longer than the three brothers had been standing on that shore, and he did not stop singing it on the road.

'He crossed the mountains and he crossed the sea of milk, and he came at last to Shvetadvipa, and stopped at the edge of it, because what he saw there stopped him.'

'The men of that island were the color of the moon,' said Bhishma, 'and they had no senses of the ordinary kind. They did not eat, so they had no need of the mouth as we use it. They did not smell, and had no need of the nose. They did not tire, and had no need of sleep. Their bodies were hard as adamant and light as nothing, and their heads were smooth and shining, and they received Narada with honour, and then turned back to the one thing they cared about.

'What they did have was direction. Every one of them stood facing the same point of the sky, and did not turn from it. They worshipped not with the lips only but with the whole body at once, hands lifted, faces raised, the entire frame bent toward that one place like grass under a steady wind. And they made a sound as they did it, all of them together, which Narada said afterward was the sound of a hundred rivers going into the sea, and every syllable of it was a name.

'Narada, who had come to look, found that he could not simply look. He put his hands together and he faced where they were facing and he worshipped with them, and he lost count of the days he stood there. He stood with his arms raised, bearing every hardship of that place, and he sang a long hymn made of the Lord's secret names, ending: I am your devotee, and I wish to see you with a single mind.

'And he was not blinded, as the three brothers had been. The one he had called on showed himself.'

'What he was shown,' Bhishma said, 'he could not afterward describe in a way that satisfied him, and Narada is not a man short of words. He said that the form had faces looking in every direction, and that each face was turned toward some part of the creation and was keeping it. He said there were eyes without number and feet without number and that the whole of it was made of light that did not hurt. He said that he understood, while he was looking, why the men of that island had no senses left. There was nothing on that island worth looking at with the eyes.

'And the lord of that place spoke to him, and what he said was this. You have seen what the three sons of Brahma could not see, and not because you are greater than they were. They came with penance, but none but the single-minded devotee can see me. You came with an undivided mind, and that is the only offering I have ever accepted. This is the ekantika path, the one-pointed way, and it is narrow and it is not difficult, and almost nobody walks it because almost nobody can bear to want one thing.

'Then he said the last part, and Narada carried it back to the world. Men call me Hari, and Vishnu, and Narayana, and Vasudeva, and Purusha, and the imperishable, and they quarrel over which of these is the true name and burn a good deal of their lives in the quarrel. Every one of those names is my name. There is no second god behind any of them for a man to be mistaken about. Whoever calls, in whatever word he was taught as a child, is calling me, and I hear it.

'Narada went back south to Badari, and he told it to Nara and Narayana, and it has come down from teacher to student since then until it reached me.'

Yudhishthira was quiet a long moment. 'A hundred years of standing,' he said, 'and it was the wrong offering.'

'It was not wasted,' Bhishma said. 'It was simply not the price. Nothing is the price. That is the good news in this story, and most men hear it as an insult.'