Cūḍālā
Contents3 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

You Speak like a Child

Day after day she rested in the Self, free of passion and of the pairs of opposites, and in a short time she came to know all there was to know. Her beauty grew, and one day the king noticed it and smiled. You shine as if you had your youth again, slender one, he said. Have you drunk nectar? Have you won an empire? Have you gained deathlessness by yoga? What have you found that you never had before?

Cūḍālā answered him: I have given up this world, which looks like something and is nothing, and come to that which is no thing at all and yet is something; and so I shine. I am content with pleasures I have not enjoyed, as though I had tasted them; I neither rejoice nor grow angry. Alone, I delight in my own heart, open as space, and I take no pleasure in the games of kings. I am this, and I am not this; I am real, and I am not; I am everything, and I am nothing at all; and so I shine.

The king did not understand her. He laughed and said: You are talking nonsense; you are a child, daughter of a king. You delight in royal games; go on delighting in them. How can anyone shine who gives up what he can see and holds to nothing? You are a child, a simple girl; play on, lovely one. And he laughed aloud and went off to bathe at midday.

Alas, Cūḍālā thought, the king has not come to rest in the Self. He has not understood my words. And she went back to her own life.