MĀ MĀYĀ I LOVE YOU The Incredible Origins of the Mahābhārata (Part 2) Time passed. The kind king continued with his dhārmic ways as spelt out by the great seers. He obviously had all the good qualities that a king ought to possess but was at the same time addicted to the hunt. The queen though was not aware of the intensity of his devotion to this kingly sport. One day, when the time of her menstrual impurity had passed, she dutifully informed her husband and went to the river to cleanse herself. The husband knew that in accordance with the infallible laws of dharma, it was the ripe time for the queen to conceive and beget him a son. As he waited eagerly, he was visited by his elderly relatives who coaxed him to go hunting with them and for once he could not resist the temptation to leave while the queen was still away. As he wandered away into the distant countryside, the beauty of the deep forest overwhelmed him. The enchanting smell of wild flowers, the majesty of the virgin landscape, and the sweet songs of chirping birds were simply too much for his youthful heart to bear. Entangled by intense desire, he sat under a tree remembering his beautiful wife. Ah, how he longed to be one with her, deep in the embrace of an all-consuming love! Sighing heavily in the throes of passion, he was overcome by a crisis and as he came to he pondered at the problem he faced now. His wife was in season and he had unfortunately lost his seed here in the forest. But he kept his calm. Carefully wrapping the seed in a large leaf of a heavily-scented tree, he called to a hawk soaring high in the sky,” O dear friend, kindly take this offering to my wife who is in her season in my palace! I would be highly obliged.” And then he continued with his hunting games. As the hawk took charge of the seed and dutifully flew towards the kingdom, another hawk spotted the burden and thought it to be a piece of meat. The hungry bird dived at it and in the angry struggle that ensued the seed fell into the river Yamunā flowing below. At that very time a large fish was passing through; the seed fell inside its mouth and the fish accidentally swallowed it. Not knowing the nature of the thing it had swallowed, the fish went on with the seed growing inside its tummy. Ten months passed and one unfortunate day the fish was caught by a fisherman of a distant country who could not believe his luck as it was his largest catch of the season. Wondering at its bulging tummy, the poor fisherman was amazed to find a boy and a girl inside as he cut it open. The fish who was basically a nymph under curse was released from its miserable existence and the liberated soul flew happily back to heaven! The fisherman meanwhile remembered the good king of his country who despite marrying several times was still childless. Picking both the boy and the girl up, he ran to the palace and dutifully handed over the two to the king. The ageing monarch was happy to see the boy and immediately made him the prince completing all the necessary religious formalities after calling in the royal priests. It was certainly the happiest day of his life for he had now found a successor to the throne. But he refused to take charge of the girl because she had a sickening fishy smell. Rewarding the fisherman abundantly he ordered him to take the girl back with him and bring her up as his own daughter. The girl was nicknamed Matsyagandhā, the one with a fishy smell; but the foster-father was reluctant to accept this degrading name for an innocent child whom he had grown fond of by now. He instead called her Satyawatī, the “Truth”, and brought her up with the greatest love and care for he too did not have any child. As the girl grew up, she dutifully did the household chores and at the same time helped her father by ferrying people across the Yamunā in her small boat. Time passed the way it had to while she continued serving her foster father as usual plying a boat on the waters of the river Yamunā. One day a very great Yogī named Parāśara came to be ferried to the other shore. On seeing the amazingly beautiful Satyawatī with tapering thighs and a heaving bosom smiling at him, the sinless one was mastered by a passionate desire. Understanding the whole delicate situation the young but wise girl told the saint, “O blessed Yogi, pray do not do something that will bring shame on my family. Look at all those saints along the shores waiting to be carried across. They are all watching.” Thereupon the Yogī who possessed all the eight Siddhīs brought down a fog by which all was obscured but still shaking with fear, the beautiful Matsyagandhā said,” Know me to be a virgin maid under her father’s keep. Do not destroy something that cannot be restored.” But the sinless one who was totally overcome with an all-consuming desire, reassured the frightened girl,” Do not worry, O innocent one! I will restore your virginity once my needs are satisfied and moreover I will also grant you a wish. Do ask for whatever you desire.” And when everything was over the girl begged him to rid her of the fishy smell that troubled her day and night. The great saint was only too happy to restore her virginity and rid her of the sickening smell that had been her curse since she was born. Instead he bestowed her with an enchantingly sweet smell that could be now smelt from a distance of many Yojanas. “Now onwards you will be known as Gandhavatī, O blessed little girl!” These were the parting remarks of Parāśara, the great, very great Yogī, as he alighted on the yonder shore. The young woman carried on her work as if nothing had happened and one fine morning, after nine months, she gave birth to a dark little boy on a small isle in the middle of the river Yamunā far from the sights of troublesome people who would have asked uncomfortable questions of an innocent girl. The boy that was born immediately got up as he was the saint Vyāsa, the wide one; and as he left the spot in a hurry, he told the surprised woman, “Mother, I have to go for I am duty-bound to work for the interest of mankind in general. But do not worry. Whenever you need me for anything you desire, just remember me and I shall be there.” Saying this he crossed over to the other side and vanished. Meanwhile, as promised by the great Yogi Parāśara, her virginity returned once more. This is the mind-boggling beginning of the Mahābhārata! This is the fantastic origin of Satyawatī who was Matsyagandhā and then became Gandhavatī after she was blessed by a sinless Yogī. This is the unbelievable story of the birth of Vyāsa, that incredible saint who compiled the Vedas and authored the Purāṇas while at the same time going on to become the real begetter of both the parties, the Kauravas and the Pāndavas, in that timeless story, Mahābhārata. What a story! What a myth! What a Reality! **************************************************************** It was getting darker now. Time had flowed past him as he lay immersed in meditation. The sage was a siddha with total control over his prāṇa. The anusandhāna of Ajapā Gāyatrī had continued uninterrupted as the vikalpas created the story within his fertile mind. With each apāna his breath naturally sounded ‘So’ and with the onset of prāṇa the other half of the mantra, ‘Ham’ reverberated in his consciousness effortlessly, going on from the Vaikharī through Madhyamā and Pasyantī to merge in the ether as Parāvāk. Straddling the worlds of Śuddhādhva and Aśuddhādhva, he could clearly see the reflection of Svātantrya Śakti within himself as it magically became Māyā and transformed the Undifferentiated Oneness into the Differentiated World. Māyā, the Great Mother! Māyā the Terrible Annihilator! Getting up slowly from his seat, he smiled to himself. He had for a long time struggled with the idea of trying to save the great mystic truths for posterity. But then the truths were highly complex, understood by a miniscule minority that had received the grace of Lord Śiva or a competent Guru and very rarely that of the Bhairava Śāstras themselves. Having realized their oneness with the great Lord, these blessed souls were mostly reluctant to pass on the realization to someone other than the spiritually competent disciples. Under these circumstances what was the way out? How could the general public remain interested in the truths of the Śaiva Śāstras? It was here that Lord Śiva, in one brilliant instant of Tīvra Śaktipāta, had bestowed upon him the capacity to create a living myth that would contain all the mystical truths in concrete form; in the characters and narratives of a great epic, at once enthralling in its vast sweep and at the same time deeply metaphorical for the ones caring to look beyond superficialities but not discriminating enough to experience the ultimate truth yet. For who was Satyawatī? Or rather who is this Timeless Satyawatī, the great Truth? It is none other than Māyā. The very circumstances of her birth are so fantastically mind-boggling and unreal, yet there she is, palpably Real, the ‘Truth’ for the ignorant ones, the Sakalas, totally under the sway of the three Malas, Āṇava, Māyīya and Kārma. Unreal in the final analysis but Real, the Truth, for the ones enmeshed in its web! And what is her job? She ferries people from one shore to the other. The ignorant ones obviously stay on this shore, the one full of the duality of pain and pleasure, of heat and cold, of virtue and vice and yes, of knowledge and delusion. Entranced by the sweet smell of Gandhavatī they go on wallowing in their agonizing world of duality unaware of the fact that basically she is Matsyagandhā, the one with a despicable fishy smell to be abhorred and avoided if one wants to enter the realm of the Truth. Even the virginity that she presents Śāntanu with is not true, yet the deeply Sakala Śāntanu is carried away and thereby goes on to create the mythical world of Māhābhārata where ultimately the forces of Light and that of Darkness fight their eternal battles. On the one hand, there are the sons of the blind Dhritrāṣtra, the hundred ones, or rather the ‘hundreds’ of blind Vrittis; on the other, there are the five sons of Light, the ‘pale-hued’ Pāndu, representative of the Jnānendriyas that have to conquer these forces of darkness, the Vrittis, the harbingers of a painful duality, the progenitors of a differentiated world of suffering. But then Satyawatī also carries Yogīs to the yonder shore, the one beyond all duality, and shows them her real face; the one of Svātantrya Śakti, the Spandana, the Vimarśa of the ineffable Śiva! She also decides to ferry, in one act of immense Śaktipāta, Rṣi Parāśara, an imperfect Yogī, who has gone beyond being a Sakala Pramāta but is hovering between the states of Pralayākala and Vijnānakala, having conquered Kārma Mala but not able to see through the Māyiya and Āṇava Malas. But then before doing so, she once again makes it a point to reveal her immense binding powers to the great Yogī as she entices him with her supreme beauty to commit one final act of indiscretion before taking him across to the yonder shore! And who is conceived from this indiscreet union on the boat while it is being plied in the middle of Yamunā?—it is the great seer Vyāsa, meaning the one with a lot of width stretching across and straddling both the Real and the Unreal. He is fittingly given birth to by Satyawatī on a small isle in the middle of the vast Yamunā away from both the shores! He then becomes the one who, as a collector of the Vedas, author of the Purāṇas, etc., provides the world with its literature of revelation, and at the same time, as the actual begetter of the two families of Light and Darkness, produces even on this hither shore of duality, an essentially revelatory history, which, if read as merely factual, obscures the Ultimate Reality and read as a metaphor, liberates! Sandhyā was approaching. The day was slowly handing over the reins of Time to night. It was time for the sage to leave Vyutthāna and enter Samādhi once more. Sitting in padmāsana once again, he drew in the world deep into his Self through the powers of anusandhāna and left the world of Aśuddhādhva once more. As he ascended the Timeless world of Śuddhādhva, the mantras accompanying him too started to attain different hues. Ascending first to the state of Śuddha Vidyā, he became the Mantra Pramāta as he entered an unstable state where his consciousness hovered between experiencing the Truth of the whole universe and that of himself as the Reality though all the time remaining full of consciousness, full of bliss, full of a supreme will, full of knowledge, and full of action. The mantra that reverberated spontaneously within him was ‘aham aham, idam idam’. Gradually he rose to the level of Īśvara, becoming the Mantreśvara Pramāta as the mantra ‘idam aham’ started to repeat itself within his being. His consciousness was more stable now and though he could still feel the universe as one with himself, it had lost the touch of Reality that it possessed earlier on. The Jīva was slowly getting united with Śiva. The Samādhi of the sage was getting deeper as he now rose to the state of Sadāśiva and became the Mantramaheśvara Pramāta. Full of a profound bliss, overflowing with complete knowledge, a perfect will and capacity to act while remaining absolutely conscious in the supreme sense, the mantra ‘aham idam’ started to reverberate of its own accord. He found out that the Self pervaded the whole universe now while in the previous state of Īśvara where he was the Mantreśvara Pramāta, the experience was of the Universe being within the Self. It was night time now. With darkness enveloping everything outside, the world of objects apparently got dissolved into a pitch-dark blackness. But this was the darkness of Tamas that Sakala Pramātas experienced everyday. Meanwhile, the sage had ascended to the ineffable last state of Śiva where also the differentiated world dissolved in an Undifferentiated Unity. But the resemblance ended here. The sage was full of Prakāśa and Vimarśa beyond the three Gunas of Sattva, Rajas and Tamas, as Thisness melted into I-ness and everything became Purṇāhantā, the Anuttara, the Indescribable Beyond! Images: 1. (Satyawatī and Śantanu): Courtesy, hegreatindianepic.wordpress 2. (Maya, the great Illusion): Courtesy, eso-garden
Posted on: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 15:00:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015