Prologue
Attracted by the sublime beauty around a Himālayan cave, Nārada enters into a deep and long meditation. Sent by Indra to obstruct Nārada’s tapas, Kāmadeva fails in his attempts. Nārada forgives him and everywhere the event is celebrated as the protective act of the Lord to save his devotee. But Nārada sees the event as his own victory over lust and anger.
Puffed up with pride and hungering for recognition, he reports the event to Śiva, who advises him not to tell this to anyone else, especially not to Śrī Hari. But Nārada repeats his tale before the Lord anyway. The Lord smiles. He understands the problem and he plans to do something in order to bring his devotee back on the right path.
Śrī Hari’s Magic Kingdom
After blowing his own trumpet in Kailāsa and Vaikuṇṭha, Nārada felt it was high time he left on a tour of the universe. Now that he had scaled the pinnacle of glory and achievement, he felt it obligatory to go round and see if his help was needed anywhere.
Formerly Nārada did help people, but it was as an emissary of Hari. Now however a lot had changed. It was he in his own right who was going to help and bring succor to the needy. Nārada was no longer a representative of the Lord. If anybody, he was representing himself—and what a terrible self it was! A self bloated out of all proportion by unmitigated egoism, vanity, pride. When people begin to represent such a self, unhappiness can be the only result for them and sometimes also for those who depend on them.
Nevertheless, Nārada was a true devotee of the Lord. The present phase of his life was only an unfortunate aberration. “The doer of good never comes to grief,” promises Sri Krishna in the Gītā (6.40). The Lord wouldn’t allow his beloved devotee to come to grief. He would protect him. Thus begins the divine līlā of the Lord to rescue Nārada from the morass of spiritual degradation.
Through the inscrutable power of the Lord, an enchanting, golden kingdom sprung up out of nowhere along the route Nārada was going. Nārada was surprised to see this new place. He had traveled all over the universe many times before and was sure that there was no place he had not visited. But here was one place he did not remember ever having seen before. Surprised beyond measure, he decided to go there right away.
The place was indeed a paradise. Tall, palatial buildings, broad and spotlessly clean roads, colorful gardens abounding in trees and plants of every kind, attractive lakes with crystal clear water, rare species of birds and animals, healthy and cheerful men and women—just everything about the place was charming and alluring. It seemed to be a land overflowing with prosperity and happiness. Nārada saw that the whole city was in a festive mood. He inquired casually from a passersby and learnt that the princess of the kingdom was going to be married and the people were getting ready for the Svayaṁvara ceremony.
Nārada decided to visit the royal household. As the news of the sage’s arrival reached the king, he rushed to the palace gates along with the queen to welcome the holy guest. Nārada was received with all honor. The king himself washed the sage’s feet, worshiped him, and sought his blessings. He then called his family and they in turn prostrated before Nārada and sought his grace. Nārada was overwhelmed by their devotion. Then the king sent for the princess. “This is my daughter, Viśvamohinī,” he said to Nārada, as the young and attractive girl entered the room. “Please bless her. She is soon going to be married. Please tell us about her future.”
Nārada looked up and his breath was taken away by what he saw. Never before in his life had he seen anyone so beautiful and attractive. True to her name Viśvamohinī, the girl was indeed “one who could ensnare the whole world” by her beauty. Even before Nārada knew it, he had fallen headlong in love.
The girl bowed down before him and held out her hand. When Nārada saw the lines on her palm, he became even more excited. He saw that the husband-to-be of the girl would become immortal, none would be able to vanquish him in war, and he would command the love, adoration and service of all the beings in the universe.
Here is another instance of how Nārada’s egoism was playing tricks on his mind. The question is this: would Viśvamohinī’s husband have those extraordinary qualities before his marriage with her or were they to come to him because of his marriage with her? The truth was the former, but Nārada’s deluded mind replaced the reality of the present by hope for the future, and he believed that whoever married the princess would get those blessed qualities.
If Nārada had been in his right senses it would have been all too obvious to him that the princess was destined to marry one who already had those qualities, and the Lord was the only one who possessed those characteristics. The Lord was the one rightful suitor for the princess—and this was as it was meant to be, for in this kingdom projected by the Lord’s power, the princess was none else but an aspect of Lakshmi herself who had assumed the form of Viśvamohinī.
But Nārada was now inextricably enmeshed in the chain reaction described in the Gītā (2. 62-63). The sight of the princess had produced in him an inordinate attachment (saṅga) which gave rise to a strong desire (kāma) to possess her. Any hurdle in his path would have elicited only anger (krodha). Nārada was now in the grip of infatuation (sammoha) and the memory of right and wrong failed him (smŗti-vibhrama). His intellect became muddled (buddhi-nāśa). He was on the point of being completely destroyed when the Lord intervened to prevent the disaster, as we shall soon see.
Nārada resorted to cunning. He thought it judicious not to reveal the truth about the princess’s future. He feared that her father might offer her hand in marriage to someone else. So Nārada told them some concocted tales about her future, blessed her, and hurriedly took leave of them.
Now the immediate goal before him was to make sure that the princess chose him, and not anyone else, as her husband in the Svayaṁvara ceremony. It seemed to Nārada that what he needed most was the Lord’s beauty. If he only had that, his goal would be accomplished easily.
There is a subtle reason why Nārada’s mind thought in that manner. Nārada was a handsome man with a pleasing personality. But desires had clouded his mind—and desires, specially those connected with lust, generate tremendous inner weakness, a sense of incompleteness, a sense of lacking. That is what Nārada was experiencing now. Physical beauty is one thing; moral beauty, quite another. The former is temporary, for it is only skin-deep, and sickness can disfigure and destroy it. Moral beauty, on the other hand, is the real beauty in a person.
Dr. Alexis Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology in 1912, had this to say about the beauty radiating from a person who leads a perfectly chaste and virtuous life:
“When we encounter the rare individual whose conduct is inspired by a moral ideal, we cannot help noticing this aspect—one never forgets it. This form of beauty is far more impressive than the beauty of nature. It gives to those who possess its divine gifts a strange and inexplicable power. It increases the strength of the intellect. It establishes peace among men. Much more than science, art and religious rites, moral beauty is the basis of civilization.” (From Alexis Carrel’s book, Man the Unknown, published in 1951.)
But Nārada’s mind had now come down almost entirely to the gross level, and physical beauty was all he could think of. What an irony of fate! The one who was boasting not too long ago of having conquered lust had now become a hopeless slave to it and, worse, was shockingly blind to the all-too-apparent irony involved.
It occurred to Nārada that Śrī Hari was his greatest benefactor and had great affection for him. So Nārada decided to go and request the Lord for his beauty. “He loves me so much. Surely he’ll do this for me,” Nārada said to himself. This reminds us of a common facet of human life. After his “victory,” Nārada had looked down upon Śrī Hari and had considered himself greater than the Lord. And now the same Nārada was proceeding towards Vaikuṇṭha to beg of the Lord, telling himself how beneficent the Lord had always been to him.
Isn’t this what many people do? In moments of success and glory people swear by self-effort, and in moments of need and desperation the same people miraculously develop great feelings of surrender to God and proclaim that nothing can be achieved without God’s grace. In Nārada’s life too we see the same phenonemon at work.
The Lord, to whom nothing is unknown, appeared now before Nārada just as the sage was frantically rushing towards Vaikuṇṭha. “Where are you going, my child?” the Lord said. “You look so disturbed.”
Nārada at once fell at the Lord’s feet and said piteously, “O Lord! You are the embodiment of beauty. Please share with me your beauty. I need it most urgently. I am your devoted servant and you’ve always had my welfare at your heart. I know you’ll do whatever would be beneficial to me.”
The Lord smiled. Yes, he would certainly do whatever was beneficial to Nārada. He said, Tathāstu (“Granted!”) and Nārada prostrated once more at the Lord’s feet. The Lord gently added, “If a patient asks for a wrong medicine, would the doctor give it to him? The doctor would always give the right medicine meant for the recovery of the patient.” If Nārada had heard this, he would have perhaps been cautious. But after hearing the Lord say “Granted!” his mind had wandered back once again to Viśvamohini, the Svayaṁvara ceremony, and the thought of the princess choosing him as her husband—and the Lord’s very clear note of warning fell on deaf ears.
This is what what many of us do. We are very selective: we choose and pick only the things that are convenient to us, the things that help us fulfill our desires, while we ignore the things which are inconvenient. Such philosophy of convenience is the greatest bane of modern times. Specially a beginner in spiritual life must learn to love “inconvenient” things. Early rising, a fixed schedule for prayer, worship, meditation, regular study of scriptures—all of this can be very “inconvenient” to one accustomed to a different lifestyle. But what chance have we if we ignore discipline because of its inconvenience?
It is, of course, true that in many cases such ignoring is not a fully conscious process. The human mind has the peculiar capacity to somehow justify even unjustifiable things. It is dangerous to rely completely on a mind which has not learnt to call a spade a spade. Hence the need for constant alertness, to make sure we are not hoodwinking ourselves by avoiding the inconvenient. Eternal vigilance, they say, is the price of liberty. How true it is!
After receiving the Lord’s form, Nārada left for the Svayaṁvara ceremony. How did that part of the story unfold? We'll see that next time.