Shri Pulaha Ji

An old man is walking alone up a mountain trail above the Gandaki, and he has already done the hardest thing a king can do. He has called his sons to him one by one, handed each a portion of the wealth and land his father and grandfather built, and told them plainly that no one is to come looking for him. Tradition remembers him as Bharata, son of the sage-king Rishabhadeva, a ruler so exact in his justice that some strands of the tradition say it is his name, not the more famous Bharata of Shakuntala's line, that the land of Bharatavarsha still carries. He is looking now for the barest possible shelter in which to spend what is left of his life doing nothing but remembering God. He finds it in a grove above the river where the rocks underfoot are strange, dark, and faintly spiraled, the shaligram stones that pilgrims still gather from this stretch of the Gandaki as self-manifest forms of Vishnu. The hill people call the place by an old name: the tapovan of the sage Pulaha, brother of the great Pulastya, twin hermitages so close together on this one tirtha that no one any longer says clearly where one rishi's ground ends and the other's begins. It is into a story that is not really his own, into an old sage's proven, tapas-warmed clearing, that Bharata walks to die well. What happens to him there will become one of the most retold cautionary tales in the whole Bhagavata Purana, and it happens nowhere else but on the ground Pulaha's austerities first made holy enough to hold it.

Who, then, was this Pulaha whose name the mountain kept? The Puranas agree that he was no ordinary birth. He is counted among the manasaputras, the mind-born sons that Brahma produced by will alone when the newly opened world had no other way of being peopled, and among the Saptarishi, the seven sages of the first age of Manu, and among the Prajapatis, the lords set over the different streams of creation (the texts do not agree on whether there were seven of these lords, or ten, or twenty-one, and it is worth saying plainly that they do not agree, rather than pretending a tidiness the sources themselves refuse). Some Puranas say he sprang from Brahma's navel, others from his outbreath, still others say he rose out of an ancient fire-offering with matted hair already hanging from his limbs; his brother Pulastya, by contrast, is usually said to have come from Brahma's ear. What no source disputes is the closeness between the two brothers, so close that Nabhadas's own root verse on Pulaha appears to have been lost or gone unrecorded over the centuries, and all that survives to us now is a single line of later commentary: that Shri Pulaha ji was the brother of Shri Pulastya ji, and that he too lived and acted exactly as his brother did. It would be easy to read that as the tradition simply running out of things to say about him. It is worth reading instead as its own kind of testimony, that here was a sainthood so completely poured into another's dharma that no separate biography was needed or perhaps even possible.

Even his household reflects this doubling. The Vishnu Purana gives him one wife, Kshama, whose very name means forgiveness, a daughter of Daksha, and through her three sons, Kardama, Urvarivan and Sahishnu; other tellings, such as the Saura Purana, keep Kshama but shift the children to Kardama and Ambarisha with a daughter named Pivari; the Bhagavata Purana, meanwhile, gives him a second wife entirely, Gati, daughter of the sage Kardama and Devahuti, by whom he fathered Karmashreshtha, Vareeyamsu and Sahishnu. It is worth pausing on the coincidence that one of Pulaha's own sons and his father-in-law from this second marriage share the single name Kardama; these are two different men many generations and several Puranas apart, and the repetition is simply how far back and how tangled these genealogies run, not an error to be smoothed over. Whichever list a reader prefers, the pattern underneath them is the same: a household ordered entirely around Kshama, forgiveness, and Sahishnu, patience, as if the sage had named his own children after the disciplines he had spent his tapasya acquiring.

And his fatherhood, in the telling of more than one Purana, did not stop at the human shape at all. From Pulaha, these texts say, came not only sons and a daughter but the kimpurushas, a people of the far Himalayan valley beyond the last ridge where age, sickness, and death are said not to follow, sometimes pictured with a lion's face set on a human frame; and, more startling still, some verses of the Vishnu Purana trace to him the lions, tigers, and wolves of the forests themselves. Whatever historical kernel lies beneath such a claim, the theological instinct behind it is worth sitting with: a rishi's tapas, in this telling, was never contained by the boundary of his own children. It overflowed into the wild, into every fierce and untamed thing that still, in its own manner, keeps to a law.

The story that has traveled furthest from that riverside hermitage, though, is not Pulaha's own but the one that unfolded as a guest inside it. King Bharata, having settled into the tapovan, gave himself entirely to worship, bathing at dawn in the Gandaki, gathering wild fruit and flowers, sitting for long hours before the household deity of that forest. One morning he came upon a doe, heavy with young, drinking at the river's edge, when the roar of a lion nearby startled her so violently that she miscarried her fawn into the current and died of the shock before Bharata's eyes. He lifted the trembling, motherless creature out of the water and carried it back to his hut, and from that single act of mercy grew an attachment that would undo years of hard-won renunciation. He fed the fawn by hand, worried when it wandered from his sight, wept when jackals howled near the clearing at night, and let his worship, his meditation, and finally his very thoughts narrow down to the safety of one small animal. When death came for him, it found an old ascetic whose last conscious thought was not of the Divine he had come to that forest to remember, but of the fawn he was leaving behind.

By the strict logic of what the mind dwells upon at the hour of death, Bharata was born again as a deer, on the banks of that same Gandaki, in the same forest that bore Pulaha's name. Because of the sincerity of his past devotion, he was allowed to keep the memory of his former life entire, a soul walking on four legs, wordless, grazing quietly apart from the herd, drawn back again and again to the very hermitage where he had lost himself. When at last that body too grew old, he walked deliberately into the river and let it go, and was born a third time, into a family of learned brahmins, carrying forward at last the lesson his second life had cost him so dearly. This time he refused every attachment before it could take root. He let himself appear dull, unkempt, and half-witted, indifferent to praise or blows, so that the world would leave him alone with what he had finally understood, and it is by that self-chosen disguise that history remembers him: Jada Bharata, Bharata the inert.

It was in that guise, years later, that he was seized off the road by the retinue of King Rahugana of Sindhu-Sauvira and forced, though clearly no laborer, to help carry the royal palanquin. Jada Bharata walked with such halting unevenness that the ride grew rough, and the king leaned out and mocked him for his weakness; what Rahugana could not see was that his bearer was pausing every few steps to look for ants on the path ahead of his own bare feet, unwilling even now, even under a king's abuse, to let his old vow of harmlessness break. Stung by the sage's calm, uncomplaining answer, more than by anything he had actually said, Rahugana climbed down from his own palanquin and fell at the feet of the man he had just been beating. What followed, by the river Ikshumati, was the very teaching Bharata had bought with two lifetimes of grief: that the body being carried is not the self who carries it, that a king's palanquin and a deer's four legs and a beggar's stumbling walk are equally borrowed garments, and that love itself, however innocent its object, becomes bondage the moment it is allowed to occupy the seat meant for God alone. None of it could have been taught, or perhaps even lived, anywhere but on the ground that Pulaha's own long tapasya had first set apart for exactly this kind of reckoning.

Pulaha's part in the wider story of the sages was rarely to speak first, and yet he was almost never absent when the sages had to act. When the young Parashara, discovering that a rakshasa had killed and devoured his father Shakti, kindled a sacrifice meant to feed the entire race of rakshasas into its fire as an offering of pure vengeance, it was the assembled rishis, Vasishtha, Atri, Kratu, Pulastya, and Pulaha among them, who came to the edge of that terrible yajna to stop him. It was Pulastya who found the words, that peace is the highest of all disciplines and that these creatures being burned were guilty of nothing but the family into which they had been born, but it was the combined and undivided weight of the sages standing together, Pulaha keeping his old place at his brother's side, that finally turned Parashara's grief back from hatred toward mercy. He performed the closing oblation, let the fire die, and was blessed in turn by the very sages he had almost defied. Pulaha added no separate speech of his own to that scene, as far as any surviving text records, and it is difficult, reading it, to feel that anything was missing; some kinds of intervention are made simply by the fact of standing there, refusing to let a friend commit an act he cannot undo.

A smaller, gentler image survives from the story of Vamana, the dwarf form Vishnu took to humble the otherwise generous King Bali. As the small brahmin boy was dressed and prepared before setting out to ask the emperor of the three worlds for nothing more than three paces of land, it was Pulaha who came forward and placed an akshasutra, a string of prayer beads, into the child-god's hands. It is a fitting gift from a sage remembered chiefly for constancy: before God went out to reclaim heaven, earth, and the underworld in three strides, it was a tapasvin's own rosary, an instrument built for nothing but the patient, repeated remembrance of the Name, that he carried with him.

Pulaha's own path to the highest knowledge is remembered as no less humble than his gift to Vamana. He is said to have gone in search of it not to an elder statesman of the gods but to Sanandana, one of the eternal boy-sages, the four Kumaras who wander the worlds forever young and forever free of worldly bonds, and to have received from that child the knowledge of ultimate Reality that no amount of ritual power could otherwise buy. And having received it, Pulaha did not keep it. He is said to have passed that same knowledge on to the sage Gautama, becoming one more unbroken link in a chain that runs, link after link, from the mind of Brahma down into the human world; a rishi, in this telling, is measured less by what he holds than by what he lets pass through him. Even today, in a narrow lane near Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi, not far from Swarga Dwar, there stands a small, easily missed shivalinga called Pulaheshwar, which local tradition says arose when Shiva, pleased by Pulaha's long tapasya, chose to remain there in stone forever; pilgrims are told that whoever bows before it in sincerity will reach the Prajapati realm reserved for those illumined by knowledge, a small, still-living thread connecting a name out of the first age of creation to a footpath crowded with the living and the dying of this one.

Set everything else aside and what is left of Pulaha's story is oddly consistent: a sage who fathered lions and deathless kimpurushas and also a household patterned on kshama and sahishnu, who gave the instrument of remembrance into God's own hands before God went to war, who stood wordless but present at the one moment his brother's mercy needed reinforcing, who received the highest truth from a child and refused to hoard it, and on whose one plot of forest a king's excessive, innocent love for a fawn became the sharpest teaching on non-attachment that the tradition possesses. Nabhadas, or whoever first set his verse down, apparently found nothing more urgent to record of him than that he lived exactly as his brother lived. Read after everything else that has survived about him elsewhere, that single line stops sounding like an absence and starts sounding like the whole teaching: that there is a kind of sainthood which asks for no separate name at all, only for a life so entirely surrendered to dharma that it becomes indistinguishable from the one who walked that path beside you. It is worth sitting with, tonight, whether one's own devotion could bear being described so simply, and so completely.