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Skandha 11, adhyayas 7-9 · Saptah day 7
King Yadu asks a carefree wanderer where his joy comes from, and hears of twenty-four teachers, among them a pigeon and a courtesan.
Krishna has just told Uddhava that the Yadus will soon be gone and the sea will take Dvaraka. Uddhava should not stay behind; he should give up attachment to his kin and wander with his mind fixed on the Lord. Uddhava protests that renunciation is hard for a mind tied to the senses. Krishna replies that, above all in a human birth, a person's own self is his teacher, ātmano gurur ātmaiva, able to work out by observation and reasoning what is good for it. Then he tells an old story.
King Yadu, the ancestor whose name Krishna's clan carries, once came upon a young brahmana wandering about without a care, an avadhuta, one who has shaken off the world's conventions. He was plainly learned and able, yet he lived like a child or a madman, and Yadu asked him why. Everyone around us, the king said, is burning in a forest fire of desire and greed, and you stand in it untouched, like an elephant cooling itself in the Ganga.
The avadhuta answered that he had learned from twenty-four teachers, and named them: earth, air, sky, water, fire, moon, sun, pigeon, python, ocean, moth, bee, elephant, honey-gatherer, deer, fish, the courtesan Pingala, the osprey, a child, a young girl, an arrow-maker, a serpent, a spider and a wasp. Then he took them one by one.
From the earth he learned steadiness. Creatures trample and dig at her and she does not move; a wise man harassed by others, knowing they act under forces they do not control, should not leave his path either. The mountain and the tree on her taught him to live for the good of others. The air passes over fragrance and stench and clings to neither. The sky holds everything and is touched by nothing; clouds drift through it and leave no mark, and so the self pervades bodies without being stained by them. Fire eats whatever it is given and stays clean. The moon waxes and wanes only in its phases; the changes from birth to death belong to the body, not to the self. The sun, seen in many pots of water, looks like many suns, and is one.
A pair of pigeons nested in the forest and raised their young tenderly, until a hunter netted the chicks. The mother flew into the net after them in grief, and the father, seeing his family caught, followed. The avadhuta's comment is severe: a person who wins a human birth, an open door to freedom, and then clings to home as that bird did, is like someone who climbs high only to fall.
The python lies still and eats what comes, as pleasure and pain come unasked. The ocean neither swells in the rains nor shrinks in summer. The moth dies in the flame whose form draws it. The bee takes a little from many flowers, as a mendicant takes a little food from many houses and the essence from many scriptures; but the bee that hoards dies with its hoard, and the honey-gatherer carries it off. The fish dies for the bait, and the avadhuta says the tongue is the hardest sense to master, since fasting quiets the others and only sharpens taste.
The longest lesson came from Pingala, a courtesan in the city of Videha. One evening she dressed and stood at her door waiting for a rich client. She went in and out until midnight, and her hope wore down into despair, and then into something else. She saw that she had ignored the beloved who is always near, within her, to wait for men who could give her nothing lasting. She gave up the hope and slept in peace. Her insight became a proverb: āśā hi paramaṁ duḥkham, hope is the greatest suffering, and to be free of it is the greatest happiness.
The osprey carrying a scrap of meat was mobbed by stronger birds until it let go, and then it was at ease. A girl at home alone, pounding rice for unexpected guests, was embarrassed by the clatter of her shell bangles and broke them until only one was left on each wrist; then there was silence. Where many live together there is quarrel, the avadhuta says, and even two make talk; the seeker lives alone. The arrow-maker, absorbed in his shaft, did not notice the king's procession go by. The spider spins its web out of itself and draws it back in, as the Lord makes the world and withdraws it. And an insect shut in by a wasp, thinking of the wasp in fear, comes to take its form: what the mind dwells on, it becomes.
His own body was a teacher too, he said, since it is born only to die. Then he went his way, and Yadu, Krishna says, was freed of attachment.
The story stands at the door of Krishna's longest teaching. Before he instructs Uddhava, Krishna shows him that the instruction was always in plain sight, in birds, rivers and a disappointed woman, for anyone whose own self has become his teacher.
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