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Skandha 1, adhyayas 4-6 · Saptah day 1
The man who divided the Vedas and wrote the Mahabharata sits by the Sarasvati unsatisfied, until Narada tells him why.
Shaunaka next asks how the book came to be written. The answer begins with its author unhappy.
Vyasa, son of Parashara and Satyavati, was born as the third age of the world was giving way to the fourth. With a seer's eyes he saw what the coming age would do to people: shorter lives, weaker minds, less strength for long disciplines. So he did practical things. He divided the one Veda into four and gave each to a disciple: the Rig to Paila, the Sama to Jaimini, the Yajur to Vaishampayana, the Atharva to Sumantu. The histories and Puranas he gave to Romaharshana, the Suta's father. And for those the Veda did not reach, women, shudras and the twice-born in name only, he composed the Mahabharata out of compassion.
Then he sat alone at his hermitage on the bank of the Sarasvati and found that he was not at peace. He had kept his vows, honoured the Vedas and his teachers, and set out dharma in a form anyone could follow. Still something was missing. Perhaps, he thought, it was that he had not given enough room to devotion to the Lord, the dharma dear to the paramahamsas.
At that moment Narada arrived, his vina in his hand. He asked Vyasa how the man who had written everything could sit there like someone who had achieved nothing.
His diagnosis is direct. You have described dharma and the other aims of life, Narada says, but you have hardly sung the Lord's glory, and that is why your heart is not content. Words that do not sing of Hari, however elegant, are like a pilgrimage place for crows, where the swans never come. Words full of faults that name the Lord are heard and sung by the good.
Then comes the famous sentence. Even knowledge, Narada says, spotless and free of action, does not shine when it lacks devotion to the Lord. What then of action, which always brings pain, when it is not offered to him? He adds a sharper charge. In teaching dharma to people already attached to the world, Vyasa had given their attachments the authority of scripture, and they would take those parts for the whole. Now he should describe the Lord's deeds.
To make the point, Narada tells his own story.
In an earlier age of the world, he says, he was the son of a maidservant in a household of Vedic scholars. One rainy season a group of wandering ascetics stayed there, and the boy was set to serve them. He was very young, but not restless, and he did what he was asked. Once, with their permission, he ate the remains of their food, and his faults fell away. Every day he heard them sing the stories of Krishna, and a taste for those stories grew in him. When the season ended and they left, they taught the boy, out of kindness, the most secret knowledge.
Part of that teaching was how action can free instead of bind. A substance that causes an illness, Narada says, does not cure it by itself; but the same substance, prepared as medicine, does. Action binds, and the same action frees when it is offered to the Lord.
The boy stayed on because of his mother. He was her only child, she was a simple woman with no one else, and she held him with her love. He was about five. Then one night she went out to milk the cow, and a snake, driven by time, bit her foot. She died. The boy took it as the Lord's kindness and set out north alone.
He walked through towns and forests until he came to a quiet river. He sat under a pipal tree and meditated on the Lord in his heart, as he had been taught. Slowly the Lord appeared there. Then the vision was gone, and the boy, longing to see it again, could not. A voice spoke to him, gentle and without a form. In this life, it said, you will not see me again; one whose impurities are not yet burned away cannot. I showed myself once to make you long for me. Your mind is now fixed on me, and it will not fail.
The boy spent that life wandering and singing the Lord's names. When his body fell, and the universe was withdrawn at the end of a cosmic day, he entered Brahma with his breath. A thousand ages later he was born again from Brahma, with Marichi and the other sages. Now, he tells Vyasa, he travels everywhere with this vina, a gift from the Lord, and when he sings, the Lord appears in his heart quickly, as if he had been called.
Then Narada went on his way. In the next chapter Vyasa sits down in meditation by the same river and begins the Bhagavatam. That is the purpose of this episode. The book's author had to be told that he had not yet written it, and the one who told him was its first living proof.
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