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Skandha 1, adhyaya 6 · Saptah day 1
Narada tells Vyasa his own past life: a five-year-old boy who ate the remnants of sages, lost his mother to a snake, and heard the Lord.
Sitting beside the Sarasvati river at the hermitage of Shamyaprasa, the sage Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa — compiler of the four Vedas and author of the Mahabharata — has just heard his guru Devarshi Narada diagnose why his heart feels empty: he has not yet sung a work devoted wholly to the glory of the Lord. Before giving his final instructions, Narada offers Vyasa something far more persuasive than a philosophical argument. Beginning in the second half of chapter five (1.5.23) and continuing through the whole of chapter six (1.6.1–38), the celestial sage with the vina tells the story of his own previous birth.
Today Narada is revered across the three worlds as a mind-born son of the creator Brahma, a sage who walks unhindered through heaven and earth. Yet in the previous cosmic cycle (*purva-kalpa*), during the life of the earlier Brahma, he was not born in a royal palace or a high priestly lineage at all: he was the five-year-old son of a poor household maidservant (*dasi-putra*) working in the home of Vedic brahmanas.
During that earlier age, Narada tells Vyasa (1.5.23), a company of liberated sages (*yogis* and *bhaktas*) arrived at the house where his mother worked to spend the four months of the rainy season (*chaturmasya*), when swollen rivers make travel impossible for wandering mendicants. The household priests appointed the maidservant's little boy to wait upon these guests and attend to their daily needs.
Although he was only a child of five, the boy had an unusual steadiness about him (1.5.24). He held his senses in check, did not run off to play with toys or other children, spoke very little, and stood ready whenever the sages needed water, swept floors, or quiet service. Because he showed no favoritism or restlessness, the sages grew deeply fond of him and looked upon him with the natural compassion that characterizes true renunciants.
One day, with the explicit permission of those twice-born sages, the boy ate the remnants of food left on their dishes (*uchchishtam*) after they had finished their meal (1.5.25). That single act, joined with their daily company, worked an inward transformation: all the lingering impurities and restless tendencies (*kilbishas*) of his heart fell away, and his mind became as clear and transparent as theirs. Every morning and evening during those four rainy months, by the grace of those great souls, the five-year-old boy sat close and listened as they sang the enchanting, world-purifying stories of Lord Krishna (1.5.26).
As he heard them day after day, verse by verse, deep faith and love (*bhakti*) for the Lord awoke in him (1.5.27–28). First came a steady attraction (*ruchi*) for the Lord's name and form; then his intelligence grew completely immovable, and he saw directly that both his gross body and his subtle mind were merely coverings imagined through ignorance upon the eternal, self-luminous Brahman. Through the autumn and rainy seasons, listening continuously as the sages chanted the spotless glories of Hari, the boy watched the modes of passion (*rajas*) and darkness (*tamas*) dissolve inside him as the current of pure devotion took hold.
When the rains ended and the sages prepared to resume their travels, they saw how deeply the child was attached to them and how pure his heart had become. Out of overflowing kindness, before stepping across the threshold, they imparted to the five-year-old boy the most confidential knowledge (*guhyatamam jnanam*) taught by the Supreme Lord himself — the direct understanding of Bhagavan's personal glory by which a soul enters the presence of Vasudeva (1.5.29–31).
When Narada finishes that first part of his recollection, Vyasa is eager to hear the rest (1.6.1–4). What did a five-year-old boy do after those sages walked away into the world? How did he spend the remainder of his life, and how — when the entire universe was dissolved at the end of Brahma's cosmic day, when time swallows the memory of all beings — did his recollection of that childhood remained unbroken into the next creation?
Narada continues the story in chapter six (1.6.5–15). After the bhaktas departed for other lands, the boy remained behind in the brahmana household because of his mother. He was her only child (*ekatmaja*). She was a simple, unlettered woman, a dependent servant with no husband, no property, and no other refuge in the world. Bound by deep maternal affection (*sneha-pasha*), she poured her whole heart into looking after him. Even though she wished with all her heart to secure his well-being, she had no independent means of her own — for as Narada remarks (1.6.7), people in this world move like wooden dolls (*darumayiva yoshit*) dangling on the strings of Providence. Meanwhile the boy stayed at her side purely out of love for her, only five years old, not yet knowing regions, towns, or directions (1.6.8).
Then one night, when his mother stepped out into the dark courtyard to milk the household cow, her foot accidentally came down on a venomous snake lying on the path. Driven by supreme Time (*kala-chodita*), the serpent bit her, and she died on the spot (1.6.9).
The next line (1.6.10) is one of the starkest and most honest in the Purana: the five-year-old boy looked at what had happened, saw the sudden cutting of his last tie to the world as the compassionate grace of the Lord (*tad-anugraham manvanah*) who always seeks the ultimate good of his devotees, and set out alone toward the north.
He walked past prosperous kingdoms, busy cities, farming villages, pastoral cowherd settlements, mining camps, mountain valleys, gardens, and thick forests choked with bamboo and thorns (1.6.11–13). He waded across deep rivers and lakes where lotus pollen and swans drifted, until at last — exhausted in body and senses, hungry and thirsty — he came to a vast, uninhabited wilderness where only owls and jackals moved (1.6.14). He bathed in a river pool, drank its cool water, shook off his fatigue, and sat down in solitude beneath the shade of a pipal (*ashvattha*) tree to meditate on the Indwelling Lord inside his own heart, exactly as the wandering sages had taught him (1.6.15).
Sitting beneath the pipal tree with his mind gathered in devotion for the lotus feet of Hari, the boy felt tears of intense love and longing well up in his eyes; and slowly, smoothly, Lord Hari himself appeared inside his heart (1.6.16). Overwhelmed by a flood of sheer bliss that made every hair on his body stand on end, the child was completely swallowed in an ocean of joy and lost all awareness of both himself and the Object of his meditation (1.6.17).
And then, in an instant, the vision vanished. Seeing that the radiant form of the Lord — which takes away all sorrow and wears no mark of change — was gone from his heart, the boy jumped up from his seat in sudden anguish and restlessness, like a man who has just lost the greatest treasure in the world (1.6.18). Wanting desperately to behold that form again, he forced his mind back into his heart and strained to focus, yet try as he might, he could not see the Lord a second time; he sat trembling and unsatisfied like a chronically ill man (1.6.19–20).
As the boy struggled in the quiet forest, a deep, grave, and musical voice spoke to him out of the sky without a visible form (*gambhira-shlakshnaya gira*), easing his grief (1.6.21). "Alas, O child," the Lord said (1.6.22–25), "in this lifetime you will not be able to see me again. Why? Because I am almost impossible to behold for those whose inner vessels are not yet completely matured and whose lingering desires have not been burned clean by yoga. Listen why I showed my form to you just once: it was to kindle and sharpen your longing (*kama*) for me. Once a virtuous soul fixes their heart and desire firmly upon me, they gradually cast off every trace of material desire. By that short service you rendered to my saints during the monsoon, your intelligence has now been riveted to me without wavering. Even when you leave this frail mortal body, your memory of me will never fail by my grace, and you will become one of my eternal associates (*parshadas*)."
Having heard that voice from the unseen sky, the boy bowed his head in gratitude to the greatest of all mysteries (1.6.26). Free of shame, envy, and pride, chanting the holy names and glorious mysteries of Krishna, waiting patiently for his time to come as one expects a sudden flash of lightning, he wandered the earth contentedly until death arrived cleanly (1.6.27–28). At the moment his five-element body fell away, he received a pure, spiritual body fitting for an associate of Bhagavan, free from all karmic roots (1.6.28–29). When the cosmic ocean of dissolution swept over the three worlds at the close of the kalpa and Lord Brahma drew the universe back into himself to sleep, the former maidservant's son entered inside Brahma's inward breath; and when a thousand ages passed and Brahma awoke to create the world anew, Narada sprang directly from Brahma's senses alongside Marichi and the ancient sages (1.6.30–31). Ever since, by the unfailing grace of Mahavishnu, he moves unobstructed across the three worlds inside and out, carrying his God-given vina decorated with the musical scales (*brahma-bhushita*), and whenever he plucks its strings to sing the pastimes of Hari, the Supreme Lord immediately appears in his heart just as if he had been called by name (1.6.32–34). For those whose minds are constantly drowning in fears and cravings, Narada tells Vyasa in closing, singing the deeds of Hari is the single ship capable of carrying them across the ocean of existence (1.6.35).
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