The Face in the Water

Prajapati once said something, and the saying travelled.

"There is a Self that is free from evil, from old age, from death and from grief, from hunger and from thirst. That is what you must search for. Whoever finds it and understands it wins all the worlds and everything he desires."

The gods heard of it, and so did the Asuras. Both sides said the same thing: "Let us find that Self."

Indra set out from the gods and Virochana from the Asuras. They did not travel together or tell each other where they were going. But they arrived at Prajapati's door at the same time, each carrying firewood in his hands, which is how a pupil comes to a teacher.

They lived with him as students for thirty-two years. Then Prajapati asked, "Why have you two been living here?"

They repeated his own saying back to him. "We want that Self," they said.

"The person you see in the eye," said Prajapati, "that is the Self. That is the immortal, the fearless."

"And the one we see in water, sir, or in a mirror? Who is that?"

"The same one," he said. "Look at yourselves in a pan of water, and tell me whatever you do not understand."

They looked.

"What do you see?"

"We see ourselves, sir. All of us, to the hairs and the nails."

"Now dress well," said Prajapati. "Put on your ornaments, make yourselves clean, and look again."

They did. "What do you see?"

"Ourselves as we are, sir. Well dressed, adorned and clean."

"That is the Self," said Prajapati.

The two of them went away content.

Prajapati watched them go. "They are leaving without having found the Self," he said. "Whoever holds to this teaching, god or Asura, will come to ruin."

Virochana went home satisfied and taught the Asuras what he had learned: the body is the self, and the body is what should be honoured and served.

Indra was still on the road when a doubt stopped him. "If this self is well dressed when the body is well dressed," he thought, "then it is blind when the body is blind, and lame when the body is lame. It dies when the body dies. I see no good in this."

He picked up firewood and went back.

"You left content, with Virochana," said Prajapati. "Why have you come back?"

Indra told him.

"That is so," said Prajapati. "Stay another thirty-two years."

At the end of them he said, "The one who moves about happy in dreams, that is the Self."

Indra left content. But before he reached the gods he saw the fault. In dreams a man is chased and struck, and he weeps. He went back with firewood.

"That is so. Stay another thirty-two years."

Then: "When a man is so deep asleep that he sees no dream, that is the Self."

Indra left content, and again turned around on the road. "In that sleep he does not know himself, or anything else. He is as good as destroyed. I see no good in this."

"That is so," said Prajapati. "I will explain it to you once more. Stay five years."

That made one hundred and one years. Then Prajapati told him.

"This body is mortal, Indra. Death holds it. But it is the house of a Self that has no body and does not die. While that Self takes the body for itself, pleasure and pain have hold of it. When it knows it is not the body, they cannot touch it. The one who knows 'I am seeing' is the Self, and the eye is only for seeing. The one who knows 'I am thinking' is the Self."

That is what Indra took back to the gods.