Yayāti's Realisation

In time Devayānī married the emperor Yayāti, for Shukrāchārya gave his special sanction and so set aside the scriptural bar to their union; and Sharmishṭhā, as the price of the reconciliation, came with her to Yayāti's palace as her handmaiden. And here the seed that had been planted by the forest pool grew into a bitter fruit.

For Sharmishṭhā, though now a servant, was a princess of royal blood, and one day she met Yayāti in secret and pleaded with him to take her also as his wife, arguing that she too was worthy of his love. And Yayāti yielded, and married her secretly, without Devayānī's knowledge, and she bore him children.

And when Devayānī at last discovered the secret marriage and saw the children, she was consumed with fury and went to her father; and Shukrāchārya, enraged that his daughter should be so wronged, cursed Yayāti on the spot with instant old age, so that the emperor, in the very prime of his manhood, was transformed in a moment into a decrepit, wrinkled old man.

Yayāti was devastated, and begged the sage for mercy, pleading that his desires were still unfulfilled, that he was not ready to be old. And Shukrāchārya relented a little, for the curse could not be recalled, but it could be shifted. If you can persuade one of your sons, the sage told him, to take on your old age and give you his youth in exchange, then the exchange will hold, and you shall have your strength again. So Yayāti went to his sons.

He called his five sons and appealed to their love, begging one of them to bear his old age and lend him their youth. And here the story tests each of them, and four of them fail the test. The eldest refused: the women and servants will mock me, he said, if I take on an old man's decrepitude; I cannot. The second refused: old age destroys not only strength and beauty but wisdom too; I am not strong enough to bear it. The third and fourth also refused, shrinking from the pitiable state of an old man who cannot even keep his own body clean.

Each had his reason, and each reason was the reason of self, of a young man unwilling to give up his own youth even for his father's sake.

But there was a fifth son, the youngest, Pūru; and Pūru did not refuse. He knelt before his father and spoke the words that set him apart. Father, what is this body of mine compared to your happiness? I gladly take your old age and give you my youth; let your desire be satisfied. And the moment Yayāti touched him, the exchange was made: the father was restored to the glory of youth, and the young Pūru was turned into a wrinkled, frail old man, who nonetheless ruled in his father's stead with wisdom and care.

And now Yayāti, young again, went out to do the thing the whole exchange had been for: to satisfy his desire at last. And here the story delivers its great teaching, and it is one of the deepest in the whole book, so let us follow it closely. For a thousand years Yayāti enjoyed the pleasures of the world. He roamed the earth; he gathered untold riches; he spent long years even in the pleasure-gardens of the gods, in the company of celestial nymphs; he denied himself nothing, and pursued every delight without limit for ten centuries.

And at the end of it, his desire was not satisfied. It was not even lessened. Every pleasure he seized had left him hungrier than before, for that is the nature of desire fed by indulgence: it does not cool, but burns hotter, as a fire flares higher the more you pour upon it.

Have you noticed this in your own small wantings? That the having of a thing we craved so rarely quiets the craving, but only teaches it a new shape to want in? Yayāti learned it on the grandest scale a soul has ever learned it: a thousand years of unlimited indulgence, and desire at the end of it as fierce as at the beginning, and himself no nearer peace than when he started. And at last, worn out with the endless futile chase, the great truth broke upon him, and he understood.

He went back to his son Pūru, and bowed before him, and made the declaration that is the crown of his whole story. Dear son, he said, sensual desire is never quenched by indulgence, any more than a fire is put out by pouring butter upon it. I had heard this said, and read it in the scriptures, but only now, after a thousand years of chasing, have I learned it in my own life. There is no object of desire on this earth, no gold, no wealth, no pleasure, no beauty, that can ever satisfy the endless hunger of the human mind.

Peace comes only when the mind grows still, when it rises beyond its likes and its dislikes, and rests in the silent contemplation of the eternal. Take back your youth, my noble son, and rule the kingdom well.

And Pūru received his youth again, and was crowned emperor of Hastināpura; and Yayāti, having learned at last the lesson of his whole long life, retired to the forest to spend his remaining days in meditation and detachment, and in the end attained liberation, mokṣha, the freedom he had never found in a thousand years of pleasure.

This is the great threshold of the Lunar Line, and the story sets it here at the beginning as a warning over the whole tale to come. For the Chandravamsha was a line of deep desire, and here, in Yayāti, that desire is followed to its very end and shown for what it is: a fire that indulgence only feeds, a hunger that no having can fill.

All the sorrows that are coming in this long story, the passions and the graspings and the ruinous choices of the generations, are in some sense the working-out of the truth that Yayāti learned and that his descendants would have to learn again, each in their turn, the hard way: that worldly conquest is hollow if it is not joined to the conquest of oneself, and that the only desire that can ever be satisfied is the desire that has learned, at last, to be still.