The Child on the Banyan Leaf

Once, as he wandered, he saw a young banyan tree on a rise of earth, lovely with fruit and new leaves. On its north-eastern branch, lying in the hollow of a leaf, was a child, whose light swallowed the darkness.

The child was dark as a great emerald, his face a lotus full of beauty, his neck like a conch, his chest broad, his nose fine and his brows lovely. His curls stirred with his breath; his ears were shaped like conches and coloured like pomegranate flowers; his smile was nectar, touched with the red of his coral lips; the corners of his eyes were red as the heart of a lotus, and his glance and smile stole the heart; his belly was like a leaf and his navel deep, and the folds of his belly trembled with his breath. He had taken hold of his lotus foot with his lovely fingers, put it in his mouth, and was sucking it. And the best of brahmins looked on him in wonder.

At that sight his weariness left him. The lotus of his heart and the lotuses of his eyes opened with joy, and the hair stood up on his body. Wondering who this could be, he went forward to ask the child. At that moment the child breathed in, and the sage was drawn inside his body like a gnat. There he saw the whole world laid out as it had been before the flood: sky and heaven and earth, the stars, the mountains and oceans, the islands and countries, the quarters, the gods and the demons, the forests and rivers, cities and mines, villages and cowherds' stations, the work of every class and stage of life, the great elements and all that is made of them, and time with its ages and aeons. He saw the Himālaya, and the river Puṣpabhadrā, and his own hermitage, and the sages there.

As he looked on all of it, the child breathed out, and he was thrown back into the waters of the flood. There again was the banyan on its rise of earth, and the child lying in the hollow of its leaf, looking at him from the corner of his eye with a smile full of love. Mārkaṇḍeya ran forward in great distress, longing to embrace him, the one who had entered his heart through his eyes. At that instant the child vanished, as swiftly as a thing vanishes that was made by one with no power to keep it. After him the banyan vanished, and the water, and the drowning of the worlds, and the sage found himself sitting in his own hermitage as before.