Jadabharata

Of all the stories the Bhagavata Purana tells, none cuts closer to the bone of spiritual life than the story of Jadabharata. It is not a tale of failure. It is a tale of how even the highest attainment can be undone by a single thread of attachment, and how the soul, once awakened, will find its way back to the truth no matter how many births it must endure.

Bharata was the eldest of the hundred sons of Bhagavan Rishabhadeva, and the one upon whom the throne was placed. He ruled the earth with such righteousness that the land itself came to be called Bharatavarsha after his name. For a span that the Bhagavatam measures in tens of thousands of years, he governed his kingdom with justice and devotion, performing great yajnas and worshipping Bhagavan Vasudeva in every act of statecraft. He was not a king who happened to be a devotee. He was a devotee who happened to be a king. When the time came, Bharata did what few rulers in any age have done: he gave it all away. He divided his kingdom among his sons, left behind the marble halls and jewelled ornaments of sovereignty, and walked alone into the forests of the Himalayas. He settled at the ashrama of the sage Pulaha, on the banks of the river Gandaki. There, in a hut of reeds and grass, wearing bark cloth and matted hair, he worshipped Shri Hari with wild flowers, tulasi leaves, river water, and forest fruits. His heart softened into such continuous remembrance of the Lord that tears would flow from his eyes unbidden, and his body would break into ecstatic trembling. He had reached the stage the scriptures call bhava, the penultimate rung before prema.

Then one morning, as he sat by the river after his bath, a pregnant doe came to drink. A lion roared somewhere in the forest. Startled beyond measure, the doe leaped across the river in a single desperate bound. The effort was too much. A fawn slipped from her womb mid-flight and fell into the current. The mother collapsed on the far bank and died.

Bharata saw the tiny creature thrashing in the water and pulled it out. He carried it to his ashrama. He dried it, fed it, stroked its trembling body. What harm could there be in this? He was only showing compassion to a motherless animal.

But compassion, unguarded, became affection. Affection became attachment. Day by day, the fawn grew, and so did Bharata's absorption in its care. He would gather soft grass for it, protect it from wolves and tigers, pet it when it itched, and sometimes press his lips to its head out of sheer tenderness. When it wandered into the forest, he would pace and fret until it returned. When it slept beside him, he felt a warmth that his years of meditation had never produced. Slowly, imperceptibly, his daily worship slackened. His japa grew thin. His dhyana wandered from the lotus feet of Vasudeva to the whereabouts of a small deer. The Bhagavatam is merciless in its honesty here. Bharata Maharaja, who had renounced an empire without a backward glance, could not renounce a fawn. The scriptures call this the snare of sneha, the binding power of innocent love. It does not come roaring like a lion. It comes softly, like a fawn nuzzling your hand.

One day the deer did not return. Bharata searched the forest in anguish, calling out to it, stumbling through thickets, weeping. In that state of desperate longing, his body gave way and he died. And because the mind takes its last thought as a seed for the next birth, Bharata was reborn from the womb of a deer.

Yet the Lord's grace does not forget a devotee even when the devotee forgets himself. Because Bharata had accumulated so much spiritual merit across lifetimes of worship, he retained the memory of his previous birth even in the body of a deer. He understood exactly what had happened. He understood that one lapse of attention had cost him a human life. So this deer, unlike any other deer, left its mother and returned to Pulaha ashrama, where it lived out its days near the company of sadhus, listening to their recitations, grazing quietly at the edge of their gatherings, waiting for death to release it from this form.

When the deer body fell away, the soul that had once been Emperor Bharata took birth for the third time, now in the household of a devout brahmana. The brahmana had nine sons by his first wife and twins by his second, of whom the younger was this child. From the moment of his birth, Bharata remembered everything: the empire, the forest, the fawn, the deer body, the long penance of remorse. He resolved that he would never again allow attachment to take root. And so he adopted the most radical disguise available to a man who wished to be left alone. He pretended to be a fool. He would not speak. He would not respond to instruction. He ate whatever was placed before him, whether it was fine rice or rotting scraps. He did not bathe unless pushed into water. He sat where he was placed and stared at nothing. The world called him Jadabharata: Bharata the Inert.

His father loved him and tried to teach him the Vedas, but the boy showed no sign of comprehension. When the father died, his stepbrothers put him to work in the fields, guarding crops from birds and animals. They fed him broken grains and oil cakes. They treated him as one treats a simpleton who is useful only for hard physical labor. He accepted all of it without complaint, without resistance, without a flicker of resentment. Inwardly, he was an ocean of stillness. Outwardly, he was a scarecrow.

Then came the night that revealed who he truly was. A band of dacoits, worshippers of the goddess Bhadrakali, needed a human victim for their ritual sacrifice. They found Jadabharata sitting alone in a field, and his strong body and dull manner made him seem the perfect offering. They bathed him, dressed him in new cloth, smeared him with sandalwood paste, adorned him with garlands, and led him before the image of the goddess. Jadabharata submitted to every preparation without a word, without a tremor, as though being decorated for a wedding. When the leader raised his sword to strike, the murti of Bhadrakali split open. The goddess herself burst forth in blazing fury. She seized the sword and turned it upon the dacoits, slaying them where they stood. The Bhagavatam tells us that she did this because Jadabharata was a great friend of all living beings, an utterly sinless soul, and to harm him was to invite the wrath of the divine mother herself.

Jadabharata walked away from that scene as quietly as he had walked into it. He returned to his life of apparent stupor, wandering the countryside, eating whatever came his way, sleeping under trees. Then fate, or rather the Lord's intricate design, placed him in the path of King Rahugana of Sindhu-Sauvira. The king's palanquin bearers were one man short. They saw this strong, vacant-looking young brahmana by the roadside and pressed him into service. Jadabharata took up the pole. But as he walked, he watched the ground before him with exquisite care, stepping aside to avoid crushing ants and insects. Each small detour made the palanquin lurch. The king, irritated, shouted at him: "You fool, are you tired already? You have barely carried any weight. Your body is stout enough. What kind of laziness is this?"

And then the fool opened his mouth. What came out was not the babbling of an idiot but the most precise and luminous discourse on the nature of the Self that any king had ever heard. "You say I am stout, but stoutness belongs to the body, not to me. You say I carry a burden, but the body carries the palanquin, not the Self. You say I am tired, but the Self is never tired, never born, never diminished. You call me a bearer, but that is only a name given to a particular arrangement of earth, water, fire, air, and space. The palanquin is earth. The body is earth. The king inside the palanquin is earth imagining itself to be a king. Where in all of this is the Self?"

Rahugana was stunned. He climbed down from the palanquin and fell at Jadabharata's feet, begging forgiveness with folded hands. He asked the silent sage to teach him, and Jadabharata, seeing that the king's pride had cracked open to reveal genuine hunger for truth, continued to speak. He taught him about the wandering of the jiva through countless births, driven by the three gunas. He taught him that the mind, enslaved by its own projections, creates a world of suffering that has no more substance than a dream. He taught him that liberation is not something to be gained in the future but something to be recognized in the present, once the layers of false identification are seen through. Rahugana listened, and his life was changed.

Three births. An emperor, a deer, a fool. And through all three, the same soul burning its way back to God. The Bhagavatam does not tell this story to frighten us, though it is frightening. It tells it to show us that the path is real even when we stumble off it. Bharata fell because he let one small tenderness grow into a chain. But he rose again because the seed of devotion, once planted, cannot be destroyed. Not by death, not by an animal body, not by the scorn of an entire world that sees only a dullard where a paramahamsa stands.