Srimad Mahabhagavatham : 4.4 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday, August 06,  2022. 07:50.

Chapter-4: The Stories of Siva and Sati, and of Rishabhadeva and Bharata-4.

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Recap :

Lord Siva's name also occurs in the Mahabharata. One day, when Arjuna was seated with Bhagavan Sri Krishna at the close of the day's battle, Arjuna queried Krishna, “Master, may I ask you a question?”

“Yes, ask,” replied Krishna.

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Continued :

“When I was engaged in battle with Drona and Karna, I saw some vague being moving about, not touching the ground. It was sometimes visible, sometimes not visible. It had ashes on its body, a serpent around its neck, and a trident in its hand. I could not make out what it was. It was an illusion before me. At the time I could not speak about this because I was engaged in war, but I remember this incident now and want to ask you what it was that I was seeing there,” said Arjuna

Sri Krishna said, “You are a blessed man to have that vision. It was Bhagavan Sankara himself, invisibly moving in the battlefield to help you. Otherwise, even with all your archery, with all your might and main, with all your knowledge and power, do you believe that you can face people like Bhishma, Drona and Karna? They are all a hundred times stronger than you. Siva, in his compassion, came uninvited to bless you because of your goodness. He did not engage in battle, and did not come to wage war with the Kurus, but his very presence was enough to paralyse the strength of all the Kurus. The odour emanating from his body was enough to cow down everybody and make them lose all their strength. Such is the glory of Siva, the great Sankara Bhagavan; and you had his darshan. Blessed you are, Arjuna! He is Ashutosh—immediately pleased. Ask, and it is given immediately. You did not call him, but he knew that you required help. Unsolicited, the great master, the great god, came to you. This is Tripurari, Mahadeva, Sankara, Rudra, Siva. He was in the air, moving about without touching the ground. His blessing is upon you.”

Here we have the central issue, practically, of the Fourth Skandha of the Srimad Bhagavata—among many other things, into which we will not enter here due to paucity of time.

We turn to the Fifth Skandha, which engages itself in the description of cosmic geography, and describes the denizens of the various planes and existences. 

It is not the geography that we read in schools and colleges, but the cosmic geography of the planes of existence, all which is given in majestic Sanskrit prose. The whole of the Srimad Bhagavata is in poetry; but here the author, Bhagavan Vyasa, turns his attention to majestic Sanskrit prose, which is a beauty in itself. A hard nut to crack is that style of Sanskrit prose found in the Fifth Skandha of the Srimad Bhagavata.

The highlighting katha in this Skandha is the stories of Rishabhadeva and Bharata. 

Rishabhadeva was a king who abdicated his throne and became an ascetic in the forest. The Jainas consider Rishabhadeva as their first Tirthankara because he lived like an utter renunciate who would not even wear clothes, which is the description of a Tirthankara in Jain literature. Digambara was the behaviour of this Rishabhadeva. Such was his austerity, such was the tejas that emanated from his person, such was the energy that was in his personality, that it is said that wherever he eased himself, that part of the earth would become gold. Wherever he went, people would run after him to find gold, and so he would hide himself. The fragrance of jasmine would emanate from his body, extending to distances of several miles, and wherever people smelled jasmine, they felt that Rishabhadeva was somewhere nearby. Such was his austerity, his yoga, his concentration on God Almighty, his meditation on the Supreme Bhagavan.

He had many sons. One of them was Bharata. Due to Bharata's lethargic attitude, people used to call him Jada Bharata. Bharata was also a king and, like his father, decided to abdicate his throne and go to the forest for meditation. He did years of tapas alone in the jungle, meditating on the Mahapurusha, Purushottama, Narayana.

One day an incident occurred. There was the roar of a lion, and all the deer in the forest ran helter-skelter in fear. A pregnant deer jumped across a stream, and due to that frightened jump, she dropped her baby in the water. Bharata saw this, as he had come to take a bath in the stream. It was a little fawn. Anybody who saw it would take pity on it. He took it, tenderly caressed it, and loved it because it was such a tiny, simple, innocent living being. But it so happened that his attention grew more and more towards this little deer. Whenever it was absent or not visible nearby, Bharata would worry about what had happened to it, that some animal may devour it. So often and so intensely did the thought of this little deer occupy him day in and day out that, unfortunately, when he departed from the body, his last thought was of the deer. Due to this concentration on the deer at the time of his death, Bharata was born as a deer.

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To be continued ...

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