The Flood

The sage stayed in his own hermitage thinking of that one thing. He saw Hari everywhere, in fire and sun and moon, in water and earth, wind and sky, and in the hearts of all beings, and worshipped him in his heart, and sometimes, flooded with love, he forgot even to worship.

One day, as the sage sat at his evening worship on the bank of the Puṣpabhadrā, a great wind rose with a terrible roar, and behind it came dreadful clouds that poured down rain in streams as thick as axles, with lightning flashing through them. Then the four oceans came into sight, swallowing the earth from every side, their waves driven by the wind, full of fierce sea creatures and terrible whirlpools. The sage saw the world struck within and without by water and by lightning, and the earth sinking under the flood, and he was shaken with fear.

As he watched, the great sea, churned by the storm and filled from the raining clouds, covered the earth with its islands and countries and mountains. Earth and the middle air and heaven with all its stars, the three worlds and every quarter, went under. He alone was left. He wandered with his matted hair flying, like a man dull and blind, tormented by hunger and thirst, attacked by sea monsters, beaten down by waves and wind. Lost in a darkness with no far shore, worn out, he could not tell sky from earth. Sometimes he was caught in a great whirlpool, sometimes beaten by the waves, sometimes he was about to be devoured by sea creatures that were devouring each other. He knew grief and bewilderment, pain and pleasure and fear, sickness and death. Millions upon millions of years went by as he wandered there, his mind clouded by the māyā of Viṣṇu.