You Are Pure, You Have No Name

He told his parents all of it, how the slender one had been won back after she died. Madālasā bowed at the feet of her husband's father and mother and greeted her kinsmen as before, and the city held a great festival. For a long time the two of them took their delight together beside mountain waterfalls, on river banks, in forests and gardens.

After many years King Śatrujit, having ruled well, came to the end of his time. The citizens anointed Ṛtadhvaja king, and he protected his people as his own sons.

Madālasā bore a son, and the king named him Vikrānta, the Bold. The servants were delighted, and Madālasā laughed. Then, as the baby lay on his back crying, she began to sing to him in the guise of a lullaby, telling him that the body and all it feels belong to the elements it is made of, and not to him:

You are pure, my child; you have no name. A name was made up for you just now, out of fancy. This body of five elements is not yours, and you are not its. Why do you cry?

It is not you who cries. The sound is born of itself and has only found its way to a king's son. The qualities, and the lack of them, that are imagined in all the senses belong to the elements.

Elements wasted away grow strong again by elements, as a man's body here grows by food and water and drink. But whose is the growing? There is no growing for you, and no wasting.

This body is a cloak you wear, and it is wearing out. Do not be deluded by it. Deeds good and bad fastened it on you, deeds deluded by pride and the rest.

This one you call father and that one son, this one mother and that one wife, this one mine and that one not mine; and so you make much of a mere heap of elements.

A deluded mind takes its pleasures, which are sorrows and bring sorrow, for happiness, and in its ignorance takes those very sorrows for joys.

Laughter is a showing of bones; a woman's dazzling eyes are a threat; the swelling of her breasts and the rest is dense flesh. Is woman a place of delight? Is she not hell?

The carriage stands on the ground, the body sits in the carriage, and in the body sits another, the person. Yet a man does not think of the carriage as his own the way he thinks of his body. Alas, this is delusion.

Day after day, as the child grew, she led him with her lullabies toward an understanding free of the sense of mine. As his strength and his mind grew, he came to know the Self through his mother's words, and taught in this way from his birth, he set no mind on the life of a householder.

A second son was born. The king named him Subāhu, the Strong-Armed, and Madālasā laughed, and she taught him in the same way from infancy, and he too came to understanding. A third son was born. The king named him Śatrumardana, the Crusher of Enemies, and Madālasā laughed for a long time; and he too, awake from childhood, did his work without desire and did nothing for gain.