Roberto Calasso - Ka

Then Jamadagni said: “What is the characteristic that sets us apart from every other being? And what is the knowledge that could only come from the Saptaṛṣis? For us the mind, the pure fact of being conscious, imposed itself with a conviction far greater than any other. Nature, in comparison, was an opinion. Or rather: nature was a flickering backdrop or momentary flowering or in any event something to treat with the same condescension that, in more recent times, would be reserved for hallucinations. The underlying implication was this: that everything, among the gods and before the gods, as likewise, in the end. among men, happened within the mind. Hence the first substance the world was made of must have been none other than that element from which the mind emerged. But what was that? A subtle heat, a hidden simmering, a burning beneath the surface, which sometimes flares up, with images, words, and emotions clutching at its seething crest, but above all: there blossomed the naked sensation of consciousness, like an incandescent point. All this we called tapas , ‘heat.’ Every story arises from tapas and is reabsorbed in it. The normal means of generation, at that time, was not sexual union. One used to say of countless beings that they were ‘born-of-the-mind.’ When the mind concentrated on a figure, tapas would feed it and its profile would emerge, perfectly formed: that was generation. Beings would arise from the tapas , grow in the tapas , multiform, impudent, airborne multitudes, rigid ascetics, celestial Nymphs. They came pouring forth on the scene as though in a market or at a fair. Then we grew tired. And another story began.

“Nothing is so subtly undermining for tapas as sex, because nothing has a greater affinity with it. In eros a body acts upon another body, and is acted upon by another body, in the same way that in tapas the mind acts upon the mind and is acted upon by the mind. Sexual union, this whole made up of elements that are each both active and passive, is the activity that most closely resembles the activity of the mind. What they have in common is tejas , the flourishing energy, of desire and knowledge. Two fires, which may from time to time become one. We lived suspended between the two. They alternated within us. Neither could go on forever. As Sāyaṇa observed, sex and asceticism were the ‘two ways’ ( ubhau varṇau , ‘the two colors,’ but varṇa also means ‘caste’) that the ṛṣi Agastya ‘cultivated.’”

When the ṛṣis turned their attention to the world, they would often display anger and lust. The immense tapas they had accumulated would boil over in all its turbulence. They could not have been less like those images people have of pious, pale, and passionless men. Rather you recognized them for their volcanic ferocity, a darting fury, blazing eyes. One common error was to imagine that they would also display the other passions to excess. Not at all: anger and lust, these and only these were their banners and their torturers. Why? The substance that burns in anger and lust is purest tapas , the substance the ṛṣis were made of. Giving way to anger and lust, they consumed themselves. Yet, were they not born-of-the-mind of Brahmā precisely so that they might be the first finally to penetrate a woman and generate those beings who would then inhabit the world? And what is the power that, like some cosmic police force, guarantees the order of the world against any and every violation, if not the anger of the ṛṣis , the ever-present threat of a curse that devastates and destroys like a gust of fire? Thus the ṛṣis lapses into those passions that destroyed their hoard of tapas amounted, perhaps, to nothing other than the continual renewal of the two supreme functions — creation and destruction — to fulfill which they had been called forth by Brahmā, the god they had previously called forth themselves.

It wasn’t only the gods who feared the anger of the ṛṣis. The rivers were afraid too. Once, Viśvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha had been quarreling from opposite banks of the Sarasvatī. The majestic flow of the waters was wounded by their shrill voices, lost in nature. Each was claiming that his own tapas was superior to the other’s. Vasiṣṭha’s smile was fierce: how could this impudent fellow, who wasn’t even a brahman, imagine he possessed a kind of tapas greater than his own? Didn’t he know — everybody knew — that Vasiṣṭha’s tapas was so strong it made it impossible for him to kill himself? Vasiṣṭha well remembered the day he had succeeded in scaling the summit of Mount Meru and, confident and eager as for an amorous encounter, at once leapt from the rock into the void. He longed for death as for the most exotic, the most unavailable of women, he would cling to her as he plunged through that immense expanse of air before his body, with supreme pleasure, crashed down upon the ground. But it was not to be. He fell on his back and found it caressed by the soft petals of lotus flowers, beneath which blossomed more lotus flowers, which rested on yet more lotus flowers. They formed a pillow that went deep into the earth. Ever more exasperated, he had tried to kill himself on a number of other occasions. He had thrown himself into the river Vipāśā, as a shapeless sack wrapped with ropes. But he emerged from the waters unharmed, unbound.

Thinking about this, Vasiṣṭha became extremely gloomy. What had driven him so determinedly to seek his own death if not his desperation at the death of his hundred children? And who had brought about that slaughter if not the horrendous Viśvāmitra, now glaring at him from that small white patch on the opposite bank of the river?

Suddenly Viśvāmitra broke off shouting insults and ordered the river to snatch Vasiṣṭha in her waves and hand him over. Terrified, Sarasvatī obeyed. She tossed up Vasiṣṭha on Viśvámitra’s bank, while the latter hurried off to his āśrama . He was looking for a knife to cut his rival’s throat. Then Sarasvatī once again snatched Vasiṣṭha up in her waves, for she was afraid the ṛṣi might curse her. The river was seen to leave her banks behind and swallow up trees and meadows like a freakish snake. Then suddenly she went back to her bed, flowing coolly by, while the two ṛṣis once more crouched down on opposite banks and obstinately went on insulting each other. Vasiṣtha shouted to Viśvāmitra that he would never be able get beyond his dumb warrior mentality. True, it had served to terrify the gods. But it wasn’t enough to terrify Vasiṣṭha. He was not so ingenuous as the gods.

Indra was handsome, strong, and not without a dose of cowardice. The pressure of the missions assigned to him was making him uneasy. A hundred horses to sacrifice— and any number of monsters to slay. All over his skin, a thousand vulvas surfaced in delicate tattoos, each opening just a fraction, like a sleepy eyelid. They were a sign of servitude, the indelible signature of a priestly sarcasm’s response to his adulterous crimes. Those vulvas — or butterflies? — would ever remind him of a disastrous adventure.

One day, Indra began to buzz around the ancient hermitage of the ṛṣi Gotama. The sage had gone down to the river for his morning ablutions. His gloriously beautiful wife Ahalyā was sitting in a flowery clearing, rapt in thought, playing with some twigs. Disguising himself as Gotama, Indra went up to her. Mimicking the ascetic’s voice, he said: “Woman of admirable calm and slender waist, I wish to unite myself with you, for the pure pleasure of it.” Ahalyā looked up and immediately saw through the clumsy disguise, in which, rather than the solid build of Gotama, a bull among his fellow seers, Indra’s slimmer, adolescent body was all too evident. Bored with her life in the forest, she consented to the false husband’s proposal, but in such a way that the god would appreciate that she had immediately recognized whom she was dealing with and meant to be possessed by him, not her husband. She headed for the hut. Looking up at the sun, she worked out how long they had before Gotama came back, then concentrated on her pleasure. It was an angry, exhilarating coitus. The climax was scarcely over when, with one eye steadily measuring the progress of the sun, Ahalyā coldly pushed Indra away from her and steered him toward the door with her foot. “Go, my lord,” she said. “Protect me — and yourself.” Hair still tousled, Indra rushed out of the twig hut. But coming toward him with calm and heavy step was Gotama. He was shaking the water of his sacred bath from his polished skin, a bunch of herbs in his hand, and his penetrating eye quickly took in the god’s nervous gesturing. “O evil being,” said Gotama, shaking with anger, “this gross disguise deserves a solemn punishment.” Indra was petrified. Accustomed though he was to fighting monsters, cutting off their numerous heads and hurling lightning at their scaly backs, he felt lost before this massive man with his deep voice, weaponless and fearless, transfixing him with piercing eyes. Gotama walked up to Indra. One hand went down between the god’s thighs, closed around his testicles, tore them off, and tossed them on the grass. “Henceforth you shall eat the wind and sleep on ashes,” said Gotama. Then he turned to Ahalyā, who was watching, motionless. “Many an epic cycle shall pass before someone comes one day to free you,” he told her. Then Gotama went off alone, in search of a peak no woman had ever trod.