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Skandha 5, adhyayas 7-13 · Saptah day 3
The king the land is named after renounces a kingdom, then loves an orphaned fawn so much that it costs him two more births.
Bharata was the eldest son of Rishabha, and the land is named after him: what had been called Ajanabha became Bharata-varsha. He married Panchajani, had five sons, ruled well, and performed the great sacrifices as worship of the Lord rather than as bargains for reward. When his time as king was done, he divided the kingdom among his sons and went alone to the hermitage of Pulaha, at Harikshetra, where the Gandaki river runs.
There he lived simply, worshipping the Lord with water, flowers, tender leaves and tulasi, until his heart melted and tears came unbidden. He had given up a kingdom, a family and every comfort, and the text is clear that he had done it fully.
One morning, after bathing in the river, he sat on the bank repeating his prayers. A pregnant doe came alone to drink. As she drank, a lion roared close by. In terror she leapt for the far bank; her fawn slipped from her womb into the current, and she herself, spent, crept into a cave and died.
Bharata lifted the motherless fawn from the water and took it home. He fed it, sheltered it, carried it, stroked it, played with it. Little by little its care became the centre of his day. His worship was cut short; he grew anxious when it strayed and caressed it like a child when it came back. He told himself this was his duty, that he alone stood between a helpless creature and death, and the text does not say the pity was wrong. What it shows is how pity turned into attachment, and attachment crowded out everything he had left the world to do.
Death came while the deer sat beside him like a son, and his last thought was of it. He was born a deer. But he kept the memory of his former life, and with it came sharp regret. He left his mother, went back to Pulaha's hermitage, lived alone on dry leaves, and waited for that body to end, which it did as he stood in the river.
In his next birth he was the son of a brahmana of the Angiras line, and he still remembered everything. Afraid of being caught again, he behaved like a fool: he seemed deaf, dull and unteachable. His father tried to teach him the Gayatri and failed. After the father died, his half-brothers set him to work in the fields and fed him whatever was left, and he ate it without complaint. It is the text's picture of a man gone so far inward that the world can no longer reach him.
Even a band of robbers who seized him as a human offering for the goddess Bhadrakali could not stir him; he let himself be bathed, garlanded and led to the altar in silence. The goddess herself burst out of the image and destroyed them.
Then Rahugana, king of Sindhu and Sauvira, travelling to Kapila's hermitage, was short of a palanquin bearer, and his men pressed this sturdy, silent man into service. Bharata walked with his eyes on the ground ahead so as not to tread on any small creature, and the palanquin lurched. The king mocked him: you must be very tired, he said, carrying this so far alone, thin and weak as you are. Then he threatened him with punishment.
Bharata spoke for the first time in that whole life. What you have said, he told the king, is true only of a body. Fat and thin, tired and fresh, bearer and king belong to bodies, and I am not the body. Rahugana got down from the palanquin and fell at the feet of the man he had insulted.
The teaching followed. The mind is the cause of bondage and of freedom. And this truth is not reached by austerity, by sacrifice, by giving, by Vedic study, or by worship of fire, water and sun, until one has been bathed in the dust of the feet of the great devotees. Then he told the king who he had been, and how a fawn had cost a royal sage two births.
So the episode ends with the lesson Bharata learned at such cost handed on to someone else. The fifth book is mostly a description of the cosmos, its islands, oceans and heavens, and this story sits inside it as its human centre: the namesake of the land itself, showing how slight a thread is enough to bind, and what it takes to get free.
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