Cūḍālā
Contents8 of 14
  1. The King and the Princess of Surāṣṭra
  2. What Am I?
  3. You Speak like a Child
  4. The Powers She Did Not Show
  5. The King Goes to the Forest
  6. Eighteen Years
  7. The Boy from the Sky
  8. Kumbha's Teaching
  9. The Fire in the Hermitage
  10. Still as a Rock
  11. A Woman by Night
  12. Heaven Refused, and the Lover
  13. I Am Cūḍālā
  14. The Return

Kumbha's Teaching

Who are you, said Kumbha, and what are you doing on this mountain? I am Śikhidhvaja, a king, said he. I have left my kingdom and settled here, out of fear of the round of birth. But though I wander to the ends of the earth and practise the highest austerity, I find no rest. I wither here like a tree eaten hollow by worms; even nectar is poison to me.

Kumbha said: Even Brahmā has said that knowledge alone is the highest good. Why then do you stay in ignorance? Here a water pot, there a staff, there a grass mat: why do you take delight in this parade of useless things? Who am I? How did this world arise? How is it stilled? Why do you not look into these things, king? Why do you waste your life, fixed there like a worm in a stone?

Śikhidhvaja wept, and said: Today, after so long, I have been awakened by you, son of the gods. You are my teacher, my father, my friend. As your pupil I bow at your feet. Teach me Brahman, and quickly. I will teach you, said Kumbha, if you take my words without question, as a child takes his father's word. Whatever you tell me, I will take up at once, said the king.

Then Kumbha told him two stories. A man laboured long and won the wish-fulfilling gem; then he doubted it, and it flew away, and he took a piece of glass for the gem and left his home and wealth and fell into misery. A great elephant broke the iron chains that bound it, and spared the keeper who had fallen, and the keeper dug a pit and caught it again. The man with the gem is you, said Kumbha. The gem is giving up everything. You gave up your kingdom and your wife and your kin, but the thought of I and your anxious mind remained, and so true renunciation flew away and you took up the glass of austerity instead. The elephant is you, its tusks are dispassion and discernment, the chains are hope, and the keeper is ignorance, which you let fall but did not kill, so that it rose and drove you into this pit of austerity.

And why did you not accept what Cūḍālā told you? said Kumbha. She is foremost among those who know the truth. Whatever she says and does is simply true.