When Subhadrā left, the Buddha saw Ānanda was puzzled. The Buddha said: “Ānanda, don’t be surprised that I spoke to Subhadrā. One day, when I was king of the deer, the forest where we lived was set on fire. All we could hear around us was the desperate bellowing of our relatives and friends scorched by the flames. All the deer crowded together — and there was only one way out. Someone would have to lie down and form a bridge so that the others could escape by running over him. I lay down to make a bridge for them. Subhadrā was the last of the deer to pass over me. There will be no more now.”
The Buddha’s last words were: “Act without inattention.”
XV
The earth, a lotus leaf, drifted on the waters. The “flower,” puṣkara, is also a “stronghold,” pūṣkara, say the gods, “who love what is secret” and thus play with the sounds of words. And it is also the “nest of the waters.” Life: an intermittent fever between long lapses of quiet, when the leaf wandered on the liquid surface. That leaf was a bed, a pallet. Who slept on it? The drowsy god, who had just created or fought his enemy or descended into the world in some form or other. The vegetable filaments could become a snake’s coils, twined together as though in a basket. Softly stretched upon them was Viṣṇu.
The beginning: something not to be found in nature. The first distinct image was that of Viṣṇu drifting on the waters, his head reclined on Śeṣa. In the image that precedes all others, Viṣṇu was already resting on the past. The first world was always at least the second, always concealed within it another that had come before.
Śeṣa was also śeṣa, the “residue” one meets every day: food leftovers, remainders in division, the remnants of our actions, which are still there even when the fruit of the action has been consumed, on the earth and in the sky. From that residue new life develops. The new is an old, old lump, which refuses to dissolve.
Residues are ubiquitous. They hem us in on every side. The crucial thing is how we deal with them: do we eliminate them? cultivate them? Sometimes they contaminate, sometimes they enhance. “On the residue are founded name and shape, on the residue is founded the world.” Not only is the world founded on the residue but the world is the first of all residues, broken off from something immensely more vast that in its overabundance could not bear to remain whole. “This is the world,” thought the ṛṣis.
“In the beginning, only the Self (ātman) was this (idam, the world). Nothing else flickered an eyelid.” If we don’t really know, and we can never really know, what the ātman is, what the Self is, here we find a hint. Only what is conscious blinks, only what is inhabited by a mind. Thus “this,” and hence the world, was the mind, before it came to be called “the world.” Rather than a laborious process, the passage from what happened before creation to what happened afterward was a flickering of eyelids. It separated the quiescent world from a world that was looking at something. Creation was the looking. To measure life on earth one had to know the relationship between the lotus leaf and the waters. The liquid expanse was the iris, which surrounded the pupiclass="underline" the flower. When Urvaśī appeared in the form of a swan, on the waters of the pond Anyatahplaksā, one of the six Apsaras escorting her was called Hradecakṣus, the Eye of the Pond.
Viṣṇu’s belly was bare, burnished. One day a lotus stalk sprouted from his navel. That stalk belonged to him, just as much as his pink nails. It had the same porosity as his skin. It grew from his body, up to its flower. Everything else was a consequence. With something incongruous and disconnected about it, like all consequences, like all worlds, forgetful of their origin.
An unexpected excess of sattva, of “being”—like a shove, a spurt, a sigh — awoke the young Viṣṇu as he drifted in silence, aimlessly. It was enough to let him see that the world was empty. Again that nameless thrust. Amazed, eyes half closed, Viṣṇu realized that a stalk had grown in the void. Where from? He looked down, following the stalk. Then Viṣṇu saw that that strange filament, upright and slightly curved, was sprouting from his navel. His eye followed it up to where, at the top, lotus petals were opening to the sky. And there, sitting on the corona, he caught sight of Brahmā with his four heads, looking puzzled. He too was gazing around, like a ship’s topman. And he could only confirm that the world was indeed empty. Except for that body supine on the waters, whence arose — Brahmā thought — his own delicate, hanging abode. Viṣńu and Brahmā ignored each other, each believing he was everything.
Brahmā said: “Interrupting a deep sleep is like interrupting two lovers in their coitus.” The world begins with the interruption of a sleep. Which is why wakefulness is the only proof of existence. And why the world is fragmented and cannot achieve fullness. And why it constantly seeks to reconstruct fullness. In vain, because the discontinuous will never pass over into the continuous. Mathematics tells us that, last outpost of all that is.
The watery expanse was endless in all directions. Only in one remote point could something be seen rising from it. Getting closer, you could make out a tree, but so thick and huge as to look like a mountain. Hidden among its branches, which formed an enameled pavilion, Garuḍa awoke. In his claws he held hymn number 121 of the tenth book of the Ṛg Veda. His eye settled on the very syllable from which everything had issued forth. Ka. But when had that happened? And was it still happening? A moment ago, or in another aeon? The rest followed from it. And then the same question came back: who is who? He lifted his beak, sucked in the air that filtered through the foliage. Once again it was time to take flight.
A Note on Sanskrit Pronunciation
The vowels are given their full value, as in Italian, with the exception of the short a, which is more like the u in but. Thus long ā is pronounced like the a in father, i as in fit, ī as in machine, u as in put, ū as in rule, e as in the Italian nero, o as in the Italian tenore, ai as i in bite, au as ou in found. Ṛ and ḷ are also vowels and are generally pronounced as r followed by a very short i or u, somewhat like re in pretty; and as le in little, or in the French table.