Vasishtha and Karala Janaka

Yudhishthira came to the bed of arrows one morning with a request rather than a question. 'Grandfather,' he said, 'you have given me the duty of kings, the duty of men caught in calamity, the duty of each of the four orders. Give me now the thing that lies underneath all of them. Not a story with its lesson folded inside. The knowledge itself, counted out, with nothing added for the pleasure of hearing it.'

Bhishma took his time, as he took his time with everything now that the arrows had made time cheap. 'Then take the answer Vasishtha gave to Karala,' he said, 'for that king asked in almost the words you have just used, and he was answered without one ornament in it.'

Karala ruled in Videha and bore the royal name Janaka as all its kings did, though he was not the Janaka in whose hall Yajnavalkya once counted the fires of the body, nor the one whose court the wandering Sulabha entered to test. He came on foot to the hermitage of Vasishtha, and what he brought was not the usual request of kings.

'Holy one,' Karala said, 'I have heard the sacrifices praised, and the gifts, and the vows that thin a man to a shadow. I do not doubt any of them. But I have watched men perform all three and die frightened. Tell me what a person is, counted out from the bottom, and what stands at the top of that count, and whether anything stands beyond the top.'

Vasishtha, who had refused grander questions from grander men, did not refuse this one. 'You have asked for the enumeration,' he said. 'Very well. I will lay it into your hand the way a man counts coins into another man's hand, one at a time, naming each. But hear the warning first, because the warning belongs to the teaching and is not my modesty. The count is not the thing counted. What I am about to give you can be recited by a parrot, and held at the wrong hour it is worth precisely what a parrot's recitation is worth.'

Karala sat down on the bare ground of the hermitage and said that he would hear it anyway.

'Begin where everything begins,' Vasishtha said, 'at the unmanifest. Call it prakriti if you like the word. It is not a thing you can point at, because pointing needs a thing already unfolded, and this is what has not yet unfolded. Everything you will ever handle is folded up inside it the way a tree is folded inside a seed that shows you no leaf. That is the first.

'Out of it comes the great one, the mahat, which is the first stirring of intelligence before it has anything of its own to think about. That is the second. Out of the great one comes the sense of I, the ahamkara, which is the moment the stirring turns and says: this is mine, this is me, that over there is not. Every quarrel you have ever judged in your court was born in that third step, king, and nowhere else.

'From the sense of I come the five subtle elements, which are sound, touch, form, taste and smell considered before any ear or hand or eye has met them. Count them and you have eight. Then come the eleven organs: five by which a man knows, being ear and skin and eye and tongue and nose; five by which he acts, being speech and hand and foot and the two that empty and generate; and over them the mind, which is the eleventh and governs both companies like a minister who never sleeps. Count them and you have nineteen.

'Last, the five gross elements, space and air and fire and water and earth, which are the subtle ones grown coarse enough to bruise a man. Twenty-four.'

Karala counted them again on his own fingers to be certain. 'Twenty-four,' he said. 'And in all of that I have not yet found myself.'

'No,' Vasishtha said, and for the first time he sounded pleased. 'You have found the field. Now we will look for the one standing in it.'

'Everything I have counted so far,' Vasishtha said, 'either makes something or is made by something, and most of them do both. The unmanifest makes and is not made. The great one is made and makes. The sense of I is made and makes. The organs are made and make nothing further; they only carry. That is the whole machinery, and a machine is all it is. It runs whether you attend to it or not, the way your kingdom's mills grind whether or not the king has come down to watch.

'Now the twenty-fifth. He is called the knower of the field, and he is the one thing in the count that neither makes nor is made. He produces nothing. Nothing produced him. He does not act; he is present while acting happens. He does not decide; he is there when deciding is done. Take away every one of the twenty-four and he does not diminish. Add a kingdom to them and he does not increase.'

'Then what does he do?' Karala said. 'A king cannot easily respect what does nothing.'

'He knows,' Vasishtha said. 'That is not nothing. It is the only thing in your kingdom that is not a transaction. Understand him this way. A lamp set down in a room does not join the quarrel in the room, does not take a side, does not grow angry when the furniture is thrown. It shows. When the quarrel is over the lamp is unchanged. And yet if you carried the lamp out, there would be no quarrel worth the name, only bodies moving in the dark, unwitnessed.

'The trouble is that the lamp forgets. Set a clear crystal beside a red flower and the crystal looks red, and if the crystal could think it would say, I am red, and it would grieve when the flower withered. The twenty-fifth sits beside the twenty-four and takes their color and says, I am hungry, I am a king, I am a man of sixty years.'

Karala said, 'Then I have found the top of your count.'

'You have found where nearly everyone stops,' Vasishtha said.

'Consider what the knower still carries,' Vasishtha said. 'He has put down the body, the organs, the mind, the sense of I in its ordinary form. He no longer says, I am a king, I am hungry. But he still says one thing. He says: I am the one who watches. That is the last possession, and it is the hardest to notice, because it does not look like a possession at all. It looks like the truth.

'Beyond him, therefore, is the twenty-sixth, and it is pure. It makes nothing, is made by nothing, and unlike the twenty-fifth it does not even hold itself apart to look. Call it the witness if you must call it something, but understand that the word is a concession to your ear. It is what remains when there is no longer anyone standing off at a distance to do the remaining.

'The twenty-fifth moves in it as a fish moves in water. The fish is not the water, and while the fish believes itself a separate creature swimming through a substance, the account is accurate and useless. But the twenty-fifth, unlike a fish, is capable of knowing what it is swimming in, and on the day it knows the twenty-sixth truly, it stops counting itself as another. It does not travel anywhere. It does not become larger. It loses the one thing it had, which was its separateness, and that loss is the whole of liberation.'

'Then the twenty-fifth is not the highest,' Karala said slowly.

'It is the highest of what can be counted,' Vasishtha said. 'The twenty-sixth is what is there when counting has stopped. This is why the wise call the knower unliberated so long as he stands proudly at the top of his own enumeration, congratulating himself on having climbed past twenty-four things. Pride in the ladder is the last rung, and it is the rung men die on. A man who has understood the twenty-sixth is no longer available to be flattered by his own understanding.'

'Now the part that matters,' Vasishtha said, 'and if you remember only one thing from this morning, let it be this and not the numbers. Everything I have counted is worthless to you unless your mind can hold it at the moment you die.

'Consider what that hour is. The breath is going out and not coming back in the same measure. The organs, all eleven of them, are pulling loose. The body that carried you is frightened, and fright is contagious to the mind that lives in it. In that hour a man's thought runs to whatever he has practiced running to: to a wife, to a son, to a field boundary in dispute, to an insult from thirty years ago that he never answered. It does not run to a doctrine he admired once in a hermitage.'

'Then give me the discipline,' Karala said.

'Sit alone, in a clean place, with the body held steady and unstrained. Draw the senses back the way a tortoise draws in its limbs, all at once and without argument. Let the breath come long and even until it stops demanding your attention. Then walk the count, from the unmanifest to the twenty-sixth, until you can walk it without stumbling in any condition at all: fed and hungry, praised and insulted, rested and exhausted, in health and in the first hour of a fever. Do it every day for years, so that the hour of death finds a road already worn smooth and does not have to cut one.

'A man who first tries to recall his knowledge on the day he dies is a man who first tries to string his bow on the morning of the battle. And remember what I told you at the start. A ladder is not a house. Nobody lives on a ladder. You climb it and you stand in the room it reached, and the man who spends his life polishing the rungs and reciting their number to visitors never once enters the room.'

Bhishma stopped there. 'You asked me for knowledge without ornament,' he said. 'That is it, whole. Do not do with it what kings do with knowledge, which is to admire it and set it on a shelf. Practice it at every ordinary hour, Yudhishthira, so that the last hour finds nothing left to teach you.'