Janaka

In the morning King Janaka came to him with his ministers and his household, his priest walking before him, carrying a seat and many jewels, and bearing the water of welcome on his head. The king took the jewelled seat from his priest's hands and gave it to Śuka, his teacher's son, and honoured him as the scriptures say, with water for his feet, the water of welcome and a cow. Śuka accepted the honour, asked after the king's health, and sat down, and the king sat on the ground before him with folded hands and asked why he had come.

My father told me, Śuka said, that Janaka, king of Videha, for whom he performs sacrifices, knows the way of freedom, and that if I had any doubt, whether about the path of work or the path of renunciation, he would cut through it. So I have come at my father's word to ask you. What must a brahmin do in this world? What is freedom, and how is it reached, by knowledge or by austerity?

Janaka told him the life of a brahmin from his birth: the sacred thread and the study of the Veda, the service of the teacher and the student's vow; then marriage and the household fire; then, when he has sons and grandsons, the life of the forest; and last, when he has taken the sacred fires into himself and keeps them no longer outside, and stands beyond all the pairs, heat and cold, pleasure and pain, free of passion, the life of one who lives in Brahman.

But if knowledge has already risen, Śuka asked, clear and lasting in the heart, must a man still pass through the stages of life, and live in the forest?

Without knowledge, said Janaka, there is no freedom, and without a teacher there is no knowledge. The teacher is the ferryman and knowledge is the boat; when a man has crossed, he leaves them both. The stages of life were kept by those before us so that the worlds and their works should not be cut off. But a man made pure through many births may reach freedom in the very first stage, and once he has reached it, what use are the other three? Let him see the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self, and he is not stained, as a fish is not wet by water. As a lamp shows a house wrapped in darkness, so the lamp of understanding shows the Self.

I see all this in you, Janaka said. You know everything that is to be known. By your teacher's grace and your own learning you have gone beyond the world of the senses. Your knowledge is greater than you think, your way is higher, and your power is greater, and you do not know it. Some do not reach the goal though knowledge has risen in them, out of youth or doubt or fear. You have knowledge, your mind is steady, and you want nothing. You make no difference between pleasure and pain. You have no eagerness for dance and song, no bond to kin, no fear of what is fearful. I see you, fortunate one, holding a clod and a stone and gold as the same. You already stand in the very thing a brahmin's life is for, and in freedom itself. What else is there for you to ask?