The
goddess added, “Know further, O king, that you are destined to fall in this
great battle and that will have your former realm presented to you in the same
manner as before. Your minister and his maiden daughter will accompany you to
your former city and you shall enter your lifeless corpse lying in state in the
palace.
Vasishta
speaking:—
As the king and the goddess were going on with this sweet conversation, a man on horseback arrived before them in great hurry and confusion.
He
said, “Lord! I come to tell that the enemy is showering darts and discs, swords
and clubs upon us like rain, and they have been pressing upon us like a flood
on all sides. They have been raining their heavy weapons upon us at
pleasure, like the impetuous gusts of a hurricane hurls down fragments of rocks
from the heads of high hills.
Vasishta
said:— As the royal marshal was delivering this unpleasant intelligence with
trepidation, there arose a loud cry from outside that filled the sky with its
uproar: the twanging of bow strings drawn to the ears, the rustling of
flying arrows flung with full force; the loud roaring of furious elephants, and
the shrieks of frightened ones; All these were heard and seen by
the goddesses and the king and his minister from an opening of the tent. The
city was ablaze in the darkness of the night.
At
this moment King Viduratha heard a voice from his soldiers who saw wives
fleeing from the scorching flames. “O, the high winds that have blown flames to
the tops of our houses with their rustling sound and that have hindered our
taking shelter under cooling protection. Sorrow for the burning of our wives,
who (by pacifying the smart of every pain) were as cold as frost to our bodies
before, and whose ashes now rest in our breasts like the lime from burnt
shells.
Vasishta
said:— At this instant the great queen, who was in the bloom of youthful
beauty, entered Viduratha’s camp like the goddess of grace pops upon the lotus
flower. She was decorated with hanging wreaths of flowers and necklaces,
and accompanied by a train of her youthful companions and handmaids, all
terrified with fear.
Then
one of her companions informed the king about the fate of the warfare, which
resembled the onset of demons upon the apsara tribe. “Lord!” she said, “This lady
has fled with us from her harem to take refuge under your arms, like a tender
vine seeks the shelter of a tree from a rude gust of wind.
Hearing
this, he looked at the goddesses and said, “Now, I will go from here to war and
leave this my lady as a humble bee at your lotus feet.” Saying so, the
king rose in a rage from his seat and sprang like an enraged lion when pierced
and pressed by the tusk of a furious elephant.
The
widowed Leela saw the queen Leela to be exactly of her form and features, and
took her for a true reflection of herself in a mirror. Then the enlightened
Leela said to Saraswati, “Tell me, O goddess, how can this lady be exactly like
myself? She is what I have been before. How did she come to be like me?”
Saraswati
replied:— All our external perceptions of things are the immediate effects of
our internal conceptions of them. The intellect has the knowledge of all that
can be perceived in it, just like the mind has the impressions of mental
objects in itself.
The
external world appears in an instant in the same form and manner to one who has
its notion and impression in his intellect and mind, and no distance of time or
place or any intermediate cause can create any difference in them.
The
inner world is seen on the outside, like the internal impressions of our minds
appear to be seen outside us in our dreams. Whatever is within, the same
appears without, as with our dreams and desires and in all our imaginations and
fancies of objects.
So
there is neither any entity nor a non-entity either. Both appear to us by turns
as fallacies. For what after an kalpa one neither was nor will be cannot exist
today or in any epoch (yuga), whether gone before or coming afterwards.
That
which is never nonexistent is the ever existent Brahman, and That is the world.
It is in Him that we see everything rise and fall by our fallacy, and what we
falsely term as the creation or the created.
But
to say both real and unreal are Brahman is a contradiction. Therefore it is He
who fills the infinity of space and abides equally in all things and their
minutest particles.
Wherever
the spirit of Brahman abides, and even in the most minute living particle, It
views the whole world in Itself, like one thinking on heat and cold of fire and
frost has the same sensation within himself at that moment.
In
this manner, Leela, know this world is only a shadowy reflection of the eternal
ideas of God, and that this reflection is caught by or refracted in the
consciousness of all animal souls like in a prismatic mirror. Everything
shows itself in every place in the form in which it is. So whatever is in the
individual soul casts out a reflection of itself, and a shadow of it is caught
by the intellect that is situated outside it.
Love.
