Cūḍālā
Contents10 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

Still as a Rock

Kumbha taught him long, how Brahman is neither cause nor effect, and the world was never made; until the king cried out: I am awakened, blessed one! Homage to myself! I am still, I am quenched, I stand wholly at rest; I do not go, I do not rise, I do not set. You are free this very moment, said Kumbha, free while you live.

When Kumbha had taught him that the mind is ignorance, and how those who are free live and act, he said: I am going to heaven now. At this festival the sage Nārada will be in the assembly of the gods, and if he does not see me there he will be angry. Live like this always. And as the king, flowers in his hands, bowed to answer, Kumbha vanished. What a wonder of fate, thought the king, that I have been awakened by Kumbha, after so long. How cool and pure and peaceful my path is now. And he fell silent, as if carved out of the mountain, and entered deep absorption.

Cūḍālā, unseen, crossed the sky, cast off the boy's form she had made by māyā, and took back her own. She went to her city and did the work of the kingdom. After three days she became Kumbha again and came back, and found the king as still as a tree. Why should he give up his body now and die? she thought. Let him live a while yet, in the kingdom or in the forest, and then we two, alike, will leave our bodies together. Or why should I wake him at all? I too could leave this body. But first she looked to see whether any remnant of pure being, the seed of awakening, remained in him, and by touch and discernment she found it still in his heart.

She roared a lion's roar again and again, and shook him, and threw him down, and still he did not wake. So she left her own body, entered the pure consciousness that fills everything, stirred a pulse of awareness in him, and came back to her body as a bird returns to its nest. Then, as Kumbha, she sat on a bed of flowers and sang the Sāman, the chant of the Veda, her voice like a swarm of bees, and he woke like a lotus in spring. How fortunate I am, he said. The sage has come back of his own accord. I have no kinsman like you in all the world. This forest and these trees and I, your servant, are yours; if heaven does not please you, stay here.