The story

Seven days earlier, a brahmana's son had cursed King Parikshit to die by the bite of the serpent Takshaka on the seventh day. The king had gone to the bank of the Ganga to fast, and there Shuka had come and spoken the Bhagavatam to him. Now the seventh day had arrived, and Shuka gave his last instruction.

It is short and very direct. Give up this beast's thought, he told the king, that you are going to die. You were not born when this body was born, and you will not perish with it, any more than fire perishes when the wood it burns is gone. The body comes and goes like a seed and its sprout, or like a body seen in a dream. When a pot breaks, the space inside it is simply space again. It is the mind that builds bodies for the self, and the self is not touched by them.

So, Shuka said, rest your mind in this: I am Brahman, the supreme abode, and Brahman, the supreme abode, is I. Then, when Takshaka comes and strikes your foot with his poisoned fangs, you will not see your body, or the world, as anything apart from yourself. Then he asked, as a teacher asks at the end of a long lesson, whether there was anything more the king wished to hear.

Parikshit's answer is the reply of someone who has nothing left to ask. He said he had reached the goal. Shuka had shown him the Lord, who has no beginning and no end, and he felt no fear now, of Takshaka or of any other death. He had entered Brahman, he said, and asked only for leave to fix his mind on the Lord and let his life go. Shuka gave it, and left with the other sages who had gathered there.

The king sat down on the bank of the Ganga, on a seat of sacred grass with its tips pointing east, and turned to face the north. He drew his mind into the self and grew as still as a tree stump.

Takshaka, meanwhile, was on his way. On the road he met Kashyapa, a brahmana skilled at curing poison, who was going to save the king; Takshaka gave him wealth and turned him back. Then the serpent took the form of a brahmana, which he could do at will, and in that form he came up to the king and bit him. The Bhagavatam says nothing about how guards were passed. It gives only the disguise, a figure no one at that gathering would have thought to stop. The fire of the poison burned the king's body to ashes while everyone watched, and a cry of grief went up across earth and heaven. The gods beat their drums, the gandharvas sang, and flowers fell. Takshaka had come for a man, and found a man already free.

The story does not end with the king. His son Janamejaya, furious, began a great sacrifice in which serpents were drawn into the fire one after another. Takshaka, terrified, fled to Indra for shelter. When the king saw that Takshaka did not fall, and learned where he was hiding, he told his priests to bring Takshaka down along with Indra himself, and Indra's seat began to shake. Then Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods, came and stopped him. This king of serpents, he said, is not yours to kill. Every being meets life and death through its own past deeds; serpents, thieves, fire, lightning, hunger and disease are only the means. Your father met his own destiny, and many serpents who did him no harm have already burned in your fire. Stop. Janamejaya listened, ended the sacrifice, and honoured Brihaspati.

That is the frame of the whole Bhagavatam closing. The work began with a king who had seven days to live and asked what a dying man should do. It ends that frame by showing the answer working: the death comes exactly as foretold, and it no longer means what it meant on the first day. Brihaspati's words to the son then turn the same lesson outward, from the man who has accepted death to the man who wants revenge for it.

Who appears, and what it shows

• Parikshit — Saved by Krishna in his mother's womb, cursed to die in seven days, he spends the week asking the questions the book answers.
• Shuka — A sixteen-year-old sage so free of the world that women bathing did not cover themselves — and the one voice that tells the whole book.
• Theme: Time and dissolution
• Theme: Detachment

Keep reading

• The Kali age foretold — Skandha 12, adhyayas 1-3 — Shuka describes an age when wealth decides virtue and a thread decides caste — and names the one great gift it holds.
• Markandeya sees the dissolution — Skandha 12, adhyayas 8-10 — A sage asks to see the Lord's maya, is swept into a flood that drowns the worlds, and finds a child asleep on a banyan leaf.

Questions to explore

• What was Shuka's last instruction to Parikshit?
• How did Takshaka reach Parikshit despite the guards?
• Why did Janamejaya stop his snake sacrifice?