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Skandha 4, adhyayas 25-29 · Saptah day 2
A king finds a city with nine gates, falls in love with its queen, and forgets the friend he left at the door.
King Prachinabarhi had performed so many sacrifices that the kusha grass spread for them, its tips pointing east, covered the earth. Narada came to him and asked what good he expected from all that ritual. He pointed out the animals the king had slaughtered in sacrifice, waiting in the next world for him with their horns. And then he told him a story.
There was once a king named Puranjana, famous everywhere. He had a friend called Avijnata, the Unknown, whose name and doings no one knew. Puranjana set out to find a place where he could live and enjoy himself, and he went without his friend.
He searched the whole earth and found nothing that suited him, until, south of the Himalayas, he came upon a city with nine gates. It had walls and towers, gardens and lakes, and in its garden he met a young woman of startling beauty. She came with ten attendants, each followed by a hundred companions, and a serpent with five heads guarded her on every side.
Puranjana asked who she was. She did not know, she said, who had made her or who her parents were. She knew only that she lived in this city, and he was welcome to share it with her for a hundred years. He went in.
The text names the nine gates with care, seven above and two below, each opening onto a road to some country of enjoyment, and Puranjana went out by each in turn with a companion, to see, to smell, to taste and speak, to hear. And he lived entirely by the queen's moods. When she drank, he drank; when she ate, he ate; when she wept, he wept; when she laughed, he laughed. He was, the text says, like a pet animal made to follow.
He went hunting and came home to find her lying on the ground in anger, and he begged her forgiveness. The years went by in pleasure. He had eleven hundred sons and many daughters, married them, saw his line multiply, and grew old without noticing.
Then a Gandharva king named Chandavega attacked the city with three hundred and sixty Gandharvas and as many Gandharva women, some light and some dark, and began to plunder it. With them came Kalakanya, the daughter of Time, whom no one in any world would marry, and the Yavana king Bhaya, who had taken her as his sister, together with his brother Prajvara. They set the city alight. The five-headed serpent fought them and weakened. Puranjana, clinging to his wife and children to the end, was dragged out by the Yavanas. The friend he had left behind never entered his mind.
Because he died thinking of his wife, he was born a woman, the daughter of the king of Vidarbha, and was married to the devout king Malayadhvaja. When her husband died in the forest, she built his pyre and was about to enter it. An old brahmana came up and asked her who she was, and whether she remembered him: her friend of long ago, whom she had left to go looking for pleasure on earth. You were never this woman, he told her, nor that man. You and I are two swans who once lived together on the Manasa lake.
Only now does Narada explain, and the story turns over like a coin. Puranjana is the living self, the one who makes a city, a pura, and lives in it. The city of nine gates is the body: two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, the mouth, and the two gates below. The beautiful woman who does not know her own origin is the intelligence, which teaches a person to say "I" and "mine". Her ten attendants are the senses. The five-headed serpent is the life-breath with its five currents. The hunting is the restless work of the senses. Chandavega is time, the year, whose light and dark soldiers are its days and nights. Kalakanya is old age, whom no one welcomes. The Yavana king is death, and his brother is fever. And the unknown friend is the Lord, who stays beside the self through every birth, whose name, form and deeds the self never learns while it is busy with the city.
Narada closed with a picture the king could not mistake: a deer grazing in a garden of flowers, its ears full of the humming of bees, while wolves wait in front and a hunter takes aim from behind. Prachinabarhi understood. He left his kingdom in the care of others and went to the hermitage of Kapila.
In the design of the fourth book, this allegory comes after many lives of kings and turns their story inward. Daksha, Dhruva and Prithu each ruled something. Puranjana shows what ruling is underneath: a self that came looking for a city to enjoy, and walked away from the one friend who had always been beside it.
Opening your Sanatani workspace