Ribhu

A boy is walking home past a small stone temple when something in him simply stops. He is a Brahmin's son, no older than the age when boys are still more interested in play than in prayer, and he has passed this shrine of Uma-Maheshvara a hundred times before. But today the Shivalinga inside catches the light differently, its surface so smooth and dark and lustrous that it seems to be looking back at him. He is holding a single flower, the kind of flower a child picks up without thinking, and before he quite knows why, he has walked in, set the flower on the linga's crown, folded his small hands, and begun to murmur the only words he knows for such a moment: Namah Shivaya, Namah Shivaya. Salutations to Shiva. Salutations to Shiva.

What happens next is the kind of thing that only happens to the utterly unselfconscious. A voice rolls out from the sanctum itself, mild and immense at once, the voice of Ashutosh, "the one soothed in an instant," the god who is famously the easiest of all gods to move to generosity. Girijapati, the Lord of the Mountain's Daughter, has been pleased by one flower and one unrehearsed prayer more than by the elaborate rites of men twenty times the boy's age. Ask, the voice says. Ask for a boon.

A grown man in that position asks for gold, for sons, for a kingdom, for the end of some disease. This child does something almost embarrassing in its innocence and almost unbearable in its depth. He presses his palms together and says, in effect: great lord, if there exists anyone in all the worlds greater than you, please, in your kindness, let this ignorant child see him. Not wealth. Not even liberation, as it is usually asked for. Just the truth of what stands, if anything does, behind the god who is already standing in front of him granting wishes.

It is worth sitting with how strange a request this is. It is not disrespect toward Shiva; if anything it is the deepest possible respect, because only a god as vast as Shiva could be asked such a question without flinching. And so, for a moment, even Girijapati has to consider it. This is a large boon to promise a child. And it is precisely in that pause, before Shiva can even answer, that Sri Hari appears, of his own accord, uncalled by any rite, needing no summons, because his own greatest devotee's word must not fall to the ground. Shiva himself is startled into wonder at the sight, moved to something between joy and awe in front of a small boy, and it is Shiva who turns and says: Child, this compassionate one, this refuge of the helpless, this ground on which all three worlds stand, this is the one you sought, and he has come not because of anything you did to deserve it, but for no reason at all except his own causeless grace. Blessed is your fortune. Blessed, truly blessed, are your mother and your guru who raised a child capable of asking for this and nothing less.

The verse the tradition places on Ribhu's lips at that moment does not read like theology so much as like someone thinking out loud in the middle of falling in love. He upon whose head all the gods bow their own heads: call him alone Ishvara among all who are called Ishvara. Among all things ever held dear, he is the dearest; among all things ever perfected, he is the very crown of perfection. Having seen such a one standing forever above my head, what else, the boy asks, could I possibly still want. There is a second image in the old verse that is harder to translate but easier to feel: a joy that had been sealed up inside him now tries to spill outward, and cannot really leave, the way sugar once dissolved into the Ganga can never again be pulled back out as sugar, indistinguishable now from the river itself. Ask him to describe it, the verse says, and he cannot get the words out; and if he somehow did get the words out, he would feel ashamed at how small they made it sound.

Both of them, Shiva and Hari, bless the boy with the boon of bhakti itself, not merely the darshan he asked for but the permanent capacity to love in this way, and then both vanish, leaving a temple, a wilted flower, and a child who is no longer quite the same child. This is the whole of the scene that Priyadas unfolds from what Nabhadas' terse mool verse only points toward in passing; the elaboration is the commentator's, but the shape of the teaching in it is entirely traditional: the one who asks for nothing but truth is given, as if incidentally, everything else besides.

Whether this temple-boy is one and the same as the sage whom later scripture remembers by the name Ribhu is not something that can be stated as settled fact; the sources do not join the two stories by name. But the resemblance is difficult to set aside. The Ribhu of the Vishnu Purana and of the Bhagavata is described as a mind-born son of Brahma, dispassionate from the moment of his birth, so thoroughly uninterested in the ordinary business of the world that he could not be persuaded even by his own father to take up the work of fathering creatures in turn, and who went instead to the Himalaya to sit at the feet of Shiva, from whom he received atma-vidya, the direct knowledge of the Self. If the boy at the linga and the renunciate rishi of later legend are indeed the same figure, then the temple scene reads like the seed from which the whole tree grew: even before he was capable of the philosophy he would later teach, he already had the one quality that philosophy cannot supply, an unwillingness to settle for anything less than the last truth.

That rishi Ribhu is remembered, by the Puranas' own account, as a formidable teacher in his own right. He took as a pupil a grandson of Brahma named Nidagha, son of the sage Pulastya, and settled him in a pleasant grove on the banks of the river Devika near the town of Viranagara, instructing him fully in the wisdom of non-duality. Ages later, when Ribhu returned to see what had become of his student, he found a comfortable householder, still capable in the scriptures, still devoted to his guru, but quietly sunk back into ritual and the habits of ordinary seeing. So Ribhu came to him disguised as a village rustic and, watching a king's procession pass with Nidagha, asked the simplest possible questions: which is the king and which is the elephant, and which is "above" and which is "below," and who is this "you" who sees, and who is this "I" who asks. Pressed by these questions past the point where the ordinary categories of up and down, self and other, could hold together, something broke open in Nidagha, and he fell at the feet of the stranger, recognizing his own guru. Know this whole universe, Ribhu told him then, to be nothing but the single undivided nature of the Supreme Spirit called Vasudeva. Then he departed as he had come.

A later and even longer telling of Ribhu's teaching survives as the Ribhu Gita, some two thousand verses forming the sixth section of the Shivarahasya Purana, set this time on the slopes of Himalayan Kedara rather than beside the Devika, where sage instructs sage in the single, endlessly repeated truth that the Self alone is real and nothing else has ever, even for a moment, existed apart from it. It is, by the testimony of those who loved him, one of the very first scriptures the young Ramana Maharshi turned to after his own awakening in Madurai, before he had even settled at Arunachala; for years afterward he and the devotees gathered around him at the ashram would sit together in the evenings, sometimes for two hours at a stretch, simply reciting its verses aloud, letting the same one point strike them again and again from a hundred different angles. Scholars in the twentieth century carried it into English so that it might go on being read this way.

So the arc runs, if it is indeed one arc, from a single flower laid without calculation on a polished stone in a village nobody now remembers the name of, to a mountain in the far south where seekers still gather at dusk to chant the very teaching that flower's devotion foreshadowed. Whatever the precise thread connecting boy to sage, the lesson the Bhaktamal preserves needs no genealogy to be true: ask for wealth and you may or may not receive it; ask, with a child's whole unguarded heart, only to see what is real, and something larger than the god you prayed to may well answer in person.