79योगवासिष्ठ · The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha

attributed to Vālmīki, Kashmir, c. 950–1250 · Swami Venkatesananda, translator, The Concise Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, State University of New York Press, 1985

Linked to 18 chapters: supports 4 · contradicts 5 · mechanism 6 · same claim 5 · pairing 3

A prince comes home from a pilgrimage and stops eating. He is sixteen, the heir of Ayodhyā, and he will not say what is wrong. His chamberlain reports that he goes through the motions of bathing and resting like an automaton, that he spurns the palace dancers as tormentors, and that he is neither deluded nor enlightened. Summoned to court, Rāma delivers a speech that arraigns wealth, the life-span, egotism, the mind, craving, the body, childhood, youth, old age and time itself, and ends by saying that he has given up everything and gained nothing, like a tree cut but not severed from its root. Vasiṣṭha answers him, and the answer runs to twenty-nine thousand verses over thirty-two days. It is made almost entirely of stories, more than fifty of them, and they are the argument rather than illustrations of one. A queen meditates her way out of her own bedroom and finds that her kingdom is an event inside a dead brahmin's hut. A king shuts his eyes for less than an hour, lives seven years as an outcaste, and rides out the next day to meet his own children. A crow on Mount Meru explains where in the breath the thing that dies is not. What holds them together is one claim: the world is a thought, and the thinking of it is what is called creation. The renderings of verse here are made from the Sanskrit of the critical edition, whose chapter numbers differ here and there from the printed Yoga Vāsiṣṭha.

The text states a qualification that excludes people at both ends: he is fit to study it who feels "I am bound, I should be liberated". It also refuses to rest on authority. Even a young boy's words are to be accepted if they are words of wisdom; otherwise reject them like straw, though Brahmā the creator utter them.

On dispassion

Rāma's speech is constructed, not vented. He takes the goods of life in order and shows each consuming what it promises. Wealth is night to the lotus of right action and wind to the lamp of clear insight, and it seeks the man death has already chosen. The life-span is a droplet on a leaf, gnawed by the rat of time, watched by death as a cat watches a rat. Childhood, which people call happy, is subjection and nothing else, and a child's anguish at being refused is worse than a dying man's. Youth, dismissed in a litany of images each ending with the line that it does not please him, is a flash of lightning, a swell of wine, an embrace in a dream, a whirling firebrand. Old age is the royal attendant who walks in front of the king, death. Behind them stands Time, a gourmet who waits until the sun has ripened a thing and then eats it.

Two features decide what follows. Rāma names the mind as the cause rather than the sufferer: examined, the mind itself appears unreal; the three worlds exist because of it, and when it vanishes they vanish. He has reached the book's thesis before the sage opens his mouth, and lacks only a way to live in it. And his dispassion is not disgust at a misfortune — Vasiṣṭha marks the distinction and praises it, since dispassion born of discrimination is superior to dispassion born of a circumstance.

On the behaviour of the seeker

The second book establishes that knowledge worked out alone still needs confirming, and then destroys fatalism.

Vyāsa's son Śuka had reached the truth by his own contemplation and could not bring himself to say of it, this is the truth. He asked his father how the diversity of the world came into being; Vyāsa answered at length, and Śuka thought, all of this I knew already. Vyāsa sent him to king Janaka, who ignored him for a week at the gate, entertained him for a second week with dancers, and then said in one sentence what Vyāsa had said at length: this diversity arises from mental modifications and ceases when they cease. Śuka, hearing his own conclusion from someone else, was at peace. The moral is not that a teacher supplies knowledge, but that self-acquired knowledge lacks a certain finality, which is got socially.

The attack on fate is blunter than anything in the older Vedānta. What people call fate is the self-effort of a previous life, arriving as consequence.

The argument is empirical in the ordinary sense. No one has ever seen a fate; everyone has seen an action followed by its result. A man goes abroad by travelling and appeases his hunger by eating. If an astrologer predicts that a young man will become a great scholar, does he become one without studying.

Each definition is behavioural rather than devotional. Self-control is being neither elated nor depressed by what the senses bring. Contentment is renouncing all craving for what is not obtained unsought. Enquiry is the question who am I, and how has this come to be — and Venkatesananda's parenthesis is the sharpest gloss in the book: enquiry is not reasoning and not analysis, it is directly looking into oneself. Vasiṣṭha attaches a guarantee: practise any one of the four diligently and the others will be found in you.

On creation

The third book carries the doctrine, and states it before illustrating it. The world has not come into being, does not exist, and will not be destroyed, because nothing ever happened for it to be the result of. There is no cause and no effect; these are words, not facts. When Rāma objects that a bracelet is at least made of gold, Vasiṣṭha turns the image: the bracelet is made of gold, but gold is not made of bracelet.

The order of appearance is a sequence rather than a creation. Infinite consciousness regards its own intelligence in its own heart; at that moment an unreal division arises, and with it the notion of space, which then appears as the element space; that itself believes itself to be air, then fire, then water, then earth. At the same moment consciousness holds the notion of a unit of time equal to a millionth of the twinkling of an eye, and the whole scale up to an epoch unrolls from it. The jīva is a name for consciousness that has taken itself to be atomic; when it wishes to see, eyes are formed. Causation is replaced by coincidence, for which the text has a standing image it uses in three separate books: a crow alights on a coconut palm at the moment a coconut falls, and the two events have nothing to do with one another.

The inherited image is the rope taken for a snake, and the text uses it with one adjustment: both terms of the mistake are manufactured, and what replaces them is not a corrected object but a different kind of seeing.

Līlā

Queen Līlā, wanting her husband Padma to live forever, asked Sarasvatī that when the king left his body his soul should remain in the palace. Padma died of a battle wound. Sarasvatī told her to cover the body with flowers so that it would not decay, and then that there are three kinds of space — psychological, physical, and the infinite space of consciousness — and that the last can be entered by meditation. Līlā entered it and found her husband on a throne in another kingdom, surrounded by kings who adored him, and none of them saw her.

What she learns next is the text's central manoeuvre. The kingdom she has ruled all her life is itself an event inside somebody else's hut. In a corner of the Creator's mind there was a dilapidated shrine with the fourteen worlds for rooms, and in it lived a holy man named Vasiṣṭha with his wife Arundhatī. One day he saw a royal procession and wished to ride such an elephant. He died; his wife asked for the same boon Līlā had asked for; and out of that one wish he became king Padma and she became Līlā. It is eight days since this happened.

Līlā objects that she and her husband have lived a long time, and the answer is what the book turns on: time has no fixed span any more than space does, and in the twinkling of an eye the jīva undergoes the illusion of dying, forgets what came before, and begins to think I am so many years old. When the two women fly out to look, they travel millions of miles and remain in the same room on another plane of consciousness. In the innermost world they find king Viduratha, who asks how he can have died only yesterday and lived seventy years in this body. On her first visit Līlā was invisible, because she still held the notion I am Līlā.

The stories that follow

Karkaṭī, a famine-demoness who cannot eat enough, performs a thousand years of penance in order to become a living steel needle and so enter every heart at once — and discovers that a needle cannot eat a continent. The ten sons of Indu, judging that being a creator was the only office not cut short by time, sat contemplating I am Brahmā seated on a full-blown lotus until their bodies withered, went on standing through the cloudburst that ended the epoch, and at the next dawn were the creators. Ahalyā is punished by ice water, boiling oil, the legs of an elephant and the whip, and Indra tells her husband, laughing, that one may punish a body but cannot alter a mind saturated with something: the body does not create the mind, "the mind creates the body." Then there are the three princes of a city that did not exist, two of them unborn and the third not yet conceived, who ate the fruit of three trees of which two did not exist and the third had not been planted, and cooked ninety-nine minus a hundred grams of rice for three holy men, two without bodies and one without a mouth. A nanny tells that one to a little boy, and Vasiṣṭha says the creation of the world is no more real than the nanny's story.

Lavaṇa

King Lavaṇa was in court when a juggler waved a bunch of peacock feathers and offered him a horse. The king shut his eyes and sat motionless; no one dared disturb him; when he opened them he was trembling and did not recognise his own ministers. He then described the intervening hour. The horse had carried him into a desert and run off; he begged food from a dark girl who gave it on condition of marriage, and became a member of her tribe. He fathered four children, traded in meat, grew old and black as soot, and spent seven years at it. Then came a famine in which people chewed pebbles for meat, and his youngest child asked him for food, and he answered, eat my flesh, and the child said, give me; and he built a pyre to end it, and as he climbed on he found himself in court being hailed by everyone.

The ministers point out that the juggler took no payment and therefore cannot have been a juggler. Vasiṣṭha, who says he was in the court that day, explains that Lavaṇa had performed a great rite entirely in his mind for a year while sitting in his garden, that mental performance earns the fruits of the rite, and that the visitor was a messenger sent to test him. But the story does not end there. The next day the king rode south to see whether the places existed, found the very scenes and the very people, met his own destitute children, and met an old woman weeping for a husband and for a daughter who had married a handsome king. The text does not smooth this over. It offers three possibilities in a row — that the tribespeople had it in their own minds, that each saw what the other experienced, and that hallucinations become reality when enough people have them — and then asks the only question that matters: what is the truth of anything, except how it is experienced in one's own consciousness.

The seven steps up and the seven steps down close this book, and they are the nearest thing to a map the text provides.

The first stage is a question a person asks himself — why do I continue to be a fool — and the resolve to seek holy men and scriptures. The fourth is where turning away from sense-pleasure stops being an effort. Vasiṣṭha adds that the highest can be reached by anyone, including animals, because it involves only the rise of wisdom.

On existence

If the third book asks how a world appears, the fourth asks why it stays. Rāma proposes that the universe rests in seed form in the supreme being between epochs, and Vasiṣṭha rejects it: a seed and a sprout are both objects apprehended by the senses, and nothing subtler than space can house a seed. How can a tree spring out of the empty space in a jar. What holds the world up instead is repetition: as air passing over different flowers takes their scent, the mind entertaining different notions takes on those moods and makes bodies suitable to them. The conviction determines the action, and the action strengthens the conviction.

Śukra, a boy attending his father Bhṛgu through a long penance, sees a nymph in the sky, closes his eyes and follows her, and lives with her for a period equal to eight world-cycles before falling into a long chain of births. Through all of it the original body sits in front of his father, dried to skin and bone. Bhṛgu rises after a hundred celestial years, finds the corpse with worms breeding in its eye-sockets, and resolves in a rage to curse Time. Time appears in person, six-faced and six-armed: I am the consumer and you are our food, and this is ordained by nature, not by likes and dislikes. Every being has two bodies, physical and mental, and only mental actions are actions.

The most exact mechanism in the book is the pair of demon stories. Śambara, a magician-king, creates three fighters, Dama, Vyāla and Kaṭa. Having had no previous incarnation, they have no conditioning whatever; they do not know the meaning of victory or defeat, are not afraid of death, and cannot be killed. Brahmā gives the gods their order: in the course of fighting the ego-sense will arise in them, and then they will develop tendencies; without conditioning, even a mosquito becomes immortal; so do what you can to create in them the feelings of I and mine. It works, in a chain the text sets out step by step: I am, then this is mine, then a wish to prolong it, then fear, then flight. Śambara then makes a second three, identical except in one habit: whenever the ego-sense raised its head, they subdued it with the question who am I. They win, and when they are finally killed they are liberated on the spot, because there was no one there to die.

On dissolution

The fifth book is about quieting, and it distinguishes two ways of reaching it: following the path a teacher indicates, and having self-knowledge drop into one's lap. The central story is the second kind.

Janaka — the same king who had confirmed Śuka two books earlier — is walking in a pleasure-garden when he overhears perfected beings singing. They contemplate the self as what appears when seer and object meet without division, as the light that illumines everything that shines, and as the ground of all language, covering the alphabet from a to ha and indicated by the word aham, I. Then the reproach: people run after other things, having given up the Lord who dwells in the cave of the heart.

Janaka goes back to the palace, dismisses his attendants and shuts himself in. The soliloquy that follows is the finest writing in the book. I am bound without a cord, he says; I am tainted without impurity; I am fallen though remaining at the top. The pores of the earth are filled with the dead bodies of beings, and that is why it looks solid. Intention is the seed of the world-appearance, and I shall dry it up. I shall slay this thief, the mind, who has stolen my wisdom.

Then the bodyguard comes in and says that the bath is prepared, the priests are waiting, and noble men are never unpunctual. Janaka ignores him. What he concludes, after considering renunciation and rejecting it, is the position the whole book has been building towards: what difference does it make whether I am ceaselessly active or idle, since nothing here endures either way. And when the mind stops saying I do this and I enjoy this, action becomes non-action. He rises, goes to his duties, and performs them as if in deep sleep though wide awake. Nothing outward changes. Vasiṣṭha's conclusion is the most self-undermining sentence a scripture can contain: self-knowledge is not had from a teacher, nor from scripture, nor from good works, but only by enquiry inspired by the company of the wise.

The other stories test the claim from other sides. Puṇya and Pāvana are brothers whose parents die on the same day; the one who does not grieve recites what his brother has been — a swan with swan-relatives, a tree with tree-relatives, a prince, a donkey, a fly, an ant — and asks whom he is supposed to mourn. Bali remembers his father's allegory of a king who sits silent while his minister does everything: the king is the self and the minister the mind, and the practice must be twofold at once, because until the king is seen the minister is not conquered and until the minister is conquered the king is not seen. Gādhi, immersed in a river for a moment, lives an outcaste's whole life and eight years on the throne of Kīra; afterwards a passing guest tells him the same story as news, and two populations he travels to confirm it — and the Lord's explanation is that the confirmation was illusion too, and also that the man Kaṭañja probably did exist and had merely got reflected in him.

Vītahavya, leaving the body after three hundred years of samādhi, says farewell in turn to attraction, hate, pleasure, sorrow, craving, delusion, the cave and his walking staff, thanking each; he thanks sorrow for having driven him to the quest. Suraghu, a hill-king troubled by the thought that the rewards and punishments he hands down will come back to him, subtracts the mountain, the tribe, the kingdom, the family, the body, the mind and the ego-sense until only the knower is left — and then subtracts the knower too, because whatever is an object of knowledge is not the self. He gives the book's definition of samādhi: the enlightened are forever in it even when engaged in the world, and one whose mind is not at peace does not get it by sitting in the lotus posture.

On liberation

The sixth book is nearly as large as the other five together, and it changes register. Vasiṣṭha stops arguing and hands over instruments.

The first is Bhuśuṇḍa, a crow on a wish-fulfilling tree on Mount Meru who has outlasted everyone in heaven or on earth. His origin is deliberately squalid — attendant goddesses got drunk, swans mated with a blue crow, twenty-one eggs were laid — and his memory is long: eleven thousand years in which lava covered the earth, ten thousand in which it was covered with the corpses of demons, ten complete creations remembered. He survives each dissolution by a counter-elemental contemplation: when twelve suns burn, he contemplates Varuṇa, lord of waters; when the wind uproots mountains, the mountain; when the flood comes, the wind.

Asked how he has lasted, he answers with the breath, and the account is precise. Prāṇa is a flame and rises from the heart-lotus, ending twelve finger-breadths outside the body at a point called the dvādaśānta. Apāna is water, and arises exactly where prāṇa ended, coming down again into the heart. Between them are two junctures where neither is moving: when prāṇa has ceased and apāna has not risen, and when apāna has ceased and prāṇa has risen only a little. Those are the kumbhakas, and they happen by themselves in every breath of every person.

His own summary is not technical at all: he does not contemplate past or future, does what has to be done without thinking of results, praises and censures nobody, sees one substratum in wood, a beautiful woman, a mountain, ice, fire and space, and looks at a worn-out thing with fresh eyes as if it were new. That, he says, is the secret of his longevity.

The second instrument is a demolition of worship from inside it. Vasiṣṭha asks Śiva how the Lord is to be worshipped and is told that God is not Viṣṇu or Śiva or Brahmā, not the wind or the sun or the moon, not the brahmin or the king, not I or you, but that splendour which is not made and has neither beginning nor end. Then the part that bites: the Lord is to be worshipped with whatever arrives unsought — with the enjoyments of the body, with illnesses and every sort of suffering, with life and death and dreams, with poverty and prosperity, with fights and quarrels as well as with sports, with pleasures whether the scriptures sanction them or forbid them. The discipline attached is one sentence: never make the least effort to attain what you do not possess.

The image the book relies on is a rock, soft, omnipresent and eternal, inside which countless lotuses blossom; their petals sometimes touch and sometimes do not, some face down and some face up, some have roots intertwined and some have no roots at all; all things exist within it, though they do not. The rock is consciousness, and it is rocklike in being homogeneous. Even if a sculptor carves forms in a rock it is still rock; the names and forms of this universe exist in consciousness as figures exist in uncut stone.

Rāma points out that Vasiṣṭha had told him earlier to enquire into ignorance and now says ignorance does not exist. Vasiṣṭha admits the pedagogy: you were not fully awakened then, and words like ignorance and jīva were invented as aids for the unawakened. The word Venkatesananda renders as aids, the text glosses as also meaning trick.

Śikhidhvaja and Cūḍālā

The longest story in the book is about a teacher who cannot be heard. King Śikhidhvaja of Mālva married Cūḍālā of Sauraṣṭra, and both began to ask what there is in the world which, once had, keeps the mind from sorrow again. Cūḍālā worked it out first, alone, by elimination: the body is inert, the senses depend on the mind, the mind is prompted by the intellect, the intellect is directed by the ego-sense, the ego-sense is conjured up by the jīva as a child conjures a ghost, and the jīva is consciousness aware of itself as its own object.

She told her husband, and he laughed. You are childish and ignorant, my dear, and surely you are prattling. Then, worse: never mind, enjoy the pleasures afforded to you. He went out of the inner apartments, and Cūḍālā thought it a pity and went back to her work. Everything that follows is the consequence of that refusal.

She acquires the ability to fly and to enter other bodies, and judges it unwise to show him. He announces that he is going to the forest; he tells her she is a child and orders her to rule. That night he leaves and builds a hut on Mandara mountain with a bamboo stick, a water pot, a rosary and a deer skin. She finds him, looks ahead with psychic vision, sees everything as it is destined to happen, bows to it, and flies home to run the state. They do not see each other for eighteen years. When his mind has ripened she comes to him at night, finds him emaciated and darkened as if he had bathed in a river of ink, and takes the form of a boy brahmin named Kumbha.

Kumbha tells him two stories. In the first, a rich man performs austerities for the wish-fulfilling jewel; it appears almost at once, within reach, and he cannot believe it, because the scriptures say it takes a lifetime of striving; he does not pick it up; it goes; the celestials throw a piece of glass in front of him instead, and he snatches that up and goes to the forest to suffer. In the second, a caged elephant breaks out, its rider falls in front of it, and the elephant, overcome by pity, spares him; the rider digs a pit, and the elephant is back in chains within days. The jewel is total renunciation, which Śikhidhvaja had when he left the empire, and the glass is the asceticism he picked up instead. The elephant is him, the rider is ignorance, and the cage is desire — an iron cage decays with time, but the cage of desire grows stronger. Then the sentence the story exists for: why did you not listen to the wise words of your wife Cūḍālā, who is a knower of the truth.

There follows a staircase. He says he has renounced kingdom, palace, country and wife; those were never his, so renouncing them is not renunciation. He renounces the forest; not yours. He cleanses his heart of the idea that the hermitage is his; not yours. So he burns everything in the hut, the rosary first, because he is done with the delusion that repeating a mantra is holy. Kumbha says: still not everything. He resolves to destroy the body and is stopped. The one thing to be renounced is the mind, and the instrument is the question who am I. Kumbha adds the qualification that keeps the book from nihilism: only creation is negated, not what is — the false thing is the limiting adjunct, the mind.

The last movement is a test, and it is domestic. Kumbha invents a curse from the sage Durvāsa which turns him into a woman every night, and Śikhidhvaja's reaction is the point: one's fate affects only the body, not the embodied one. They marry. Then she conjures Indra with an invitation to heaven, and he declines — to me heaven is everywhere and nowhere. Then she conjures a pleasure garden and a young man more beautiful than himself, and appears in his embrace where her husband will find her. He finds them, is not agitated, and turns to go. She drops the form and stands there as Cūḍālā. His speech of gratitude is long; she deflects it. When I saw you performing meaningless austerities my heart was pained, and I relieved that pain by waking you; it was for my own joy, and I do not deserve any praise for it. Asked what they should do now, she says they should be what they are at the beginning, in the middle and at the end — king and queen — and abandon the one thing that remains, which is delusion. She crowns him emperor; he rules ten thousand years and goes out like a lamp without oil.

The book ends with Rāma absorbed and the assembly unable to rouse him. Viśvāmitra asks Vasiṣṭha to bring him back, because he still has a great deal to do for the three worlds. Vasiṣṭha enters Rāma's heart through the suṣumṇā, the breath begins to move, and Rāma opens his eyes and says that there is nothing he should do or should not do, but that his teacher's words are to be honoured. The book that spent thirty-two days proving that the world is a thought ends by sending its pupil back to govern one.

Since 1985

The largest change since this abridgement appeared has been to the text's own history, and it reverses what Christopher Chapple told readers in his introduction. He reported the view, taken from T. G. Mainkar, that an original work of Vasiṣṭha had been expanded first into the Laghu-Yogavāsiṣṭha, also called the Mokṣopāya, and then into the large Yoga Vāsiṣṭha. A project at Halle-Wittenberg and Marburg, led by Walter Slaje and Jürgen Hanneder, has since produced a critical edition of the Mokṣopāya from Kashmirian manuscripts and established something different: it is not an abridgement of anything. It is an anonymous Kashmirian work of about the tenth century, and the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha is a later redaction of it, made between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, in which the text was fitted out with Vedāntic and devotional apparatus it did not originally have. The critical volumes appeared between 2011 and 2019, together with the commentary of the eighteenth-century Kashmiri Bhāskarakaṇṭha. What the abridged Yoga Vāsiṣṭha offers is therefore the orthodox recension of a work that was, in its first form, conspicuously unorthodox — which fits the text's own refusal to treat revelation as decisive.

The doctrine has always sat awkwardly in Vedānta. The text is an early statement of what later writers called dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi, the position that seeing is creating, and Prakāśānanda cited it in the sixteenth century in exactly that cause. Its resemblance to Yogācāra is close enough that Chapple noted the parallels with the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra: both make mind a creative force, both deny the independent reality of appearances, both hold that purifying past impressions is what liberation consists of. Whether that makes it a Hindu text with Buddhist borrowings or the reverse is unsettled, and the Kashmirian origin has since supplied a third candidate in the Trika Śaivism of that region. Compared with Gauḍapāda's Mandukya Karika, which argues the same non-origination from four states of consciousness and a handful of similes, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha argues it from narrative, and gets further with the problem of how an unreal thing can be reliably shared. Compared with the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā, which denies that any practice could make one free, it is much more willing to prescribe. And compared with the Pañcadaśī, it declines to be systematic — Vasiṣṭha admits outright that the terms he used two hundred pages earlier were scaffolding for a pupil who was not ready.

What has held up best is the part that needs no metaphysics. The insistence that fate is a name for one's own past conduct, and that no one has ever observed a fate, reads now as it must have read then. So does Suraghu's claim that a man engaged all day in the world can be in samādhi while a man in the lotus posture may not be. So does Janaka's morning, which answers the objection that the doctrine must lead to withdrawal. What has aged is the machinery around it — the cosmologies of world-cycles, the psychic powers catalogued at length in the Cūḍālā story, the graded merits assigned to thirteen seconds of meditation. The text half-knows this. It says of its own illustrations that they were used with a definite purpose and a limited intention, that they are not to be taken literally, and that their significance is not to be stretched beyond the intention. And it says what it wants done with all of it in the plainest words in the book: "this world-appearance is like a long dream. Wake up, wake up."