Perhaps this is why Vasiṣṭha always lived in the greatest intimacy with Urvaśī, even if he never so much as touched her body. As for Varuṇa, being his son is a dangerous business. Often Varuṇa will generate in order to kill. Vasiṣṭha knew that, but he was proud of it too. He would always remember the time he had been alone with Varuṇa in the midst of the ocean. Once, at night, he entered his father’s palace by one of its hundred doors. He ran along everidentical corridors, as though in a mirror. He knew that no living creature had ever set foot here. He wasn’t looking for anything. He just wanted to be able to say: “I’ve been in my father’s house.” But while he ran he felt the terror of the cattle rustler upon him; his throat was dry. And when the cord of a snare tugged at his ankle, he was brought down like a cattle rustler. He didn’t even see his father. He found himself outside, propped against a wall like a bloated, worn-out goatskin, an old man suffering from dropsy. His father’s waters again. Everybody hurried past on the road to the market, the way one does hurry past the disfigured and useless, while his damp and flabby lips still whispered the words of ciphered hymns.
Viśvāmitra, Jamadagni, Bharadvāja, Gotama, Atri, Vasiṣṭha, Kaśyapa: who were they? The first ṛṣis, the Saptarṣis, the Seven Wise Ones crouched on the seven stars of the Great Bear, the Progenitors, sons born-of-the-mind of Brahmā. Or again, in another aeon, those who composed the body of Prajāpati, which preceded Brahmā. The ṛṣis didn’t write the Vedas, they saw them. Which is why they were sometimes called the “Vedic seers.” To Viśvāmitra tradition ascribes many hymns of the third and fourth manḍala of the Ṛg Veda; to Vasiṣṭha, Ṛg Veda 7.2 and other hymns of the seventh maṇḍala; to Bharadvāja, hymns 6, 17, 18, 22, and 30 of the sixth maṇḍala. Jamadagni is said to have seen hymn 10.128 while arguing with Vasiṣṭha. The virāj meter is also ascribed to him.
The ṛṣis were sometimes called vipras, a word that suggests vibration, throbbing, trembling. Motionless, shut up in the cage of the mind, they vibrated. They fed tapas within themselves. This was their only conceivable activity. When they sacrificed, around their sacrificial pole, around the strangled victim, around their gestures, their oblations, around the flame, a burning canopy would form, separate from the world. And they would stay under that canopy a long time, days perhaps, perhaps weeks — then later it moved inside them when they were on their own. But can one speak of before or after? The sacrificial fire lights up because the heat of tapas is already there — and the heat of tapas grows because the sacrificial fire is already there. Here, as sometimes happens between gods, generation is reciprocal.
The word ṛṣi indicates an effort, a friction that unleashes heat. And what is the matter that one acts upon in immobility and that produces at once both light and heat? The mind. One operates on the mind with the mind. What else is there, after all? The world, nature, is a rare occurrence, a variation of the mind. So thought the Saptarṣis, born-of-the-mind of Brahmā. They had never dwelled in a womb, they didn’t know what it meant to be born from a woman’s belly. To live, for them, meant to ply the mind, the same smooth way they plied the skies back and forth between earthly valleys and the pinpoints of the Great Bear.
The Vedic hymns are not of human origin; they are apauruṣeya, “not from man,” not attributable to anyone who might have composed them. Or, alternatively — and this is the doctrine the Sāmkhya later espoused — there was a person behind them: the primordial Puruṣa. But even he didn’t compose them. The hymns emanated from him like exhaled breath.
Sitting immersed in tapas, the ṛṣis saw the hymns. Syllable by syllable, they appeared, then faded. At first, the hymns were disseminated everywhere, like plants. Much later, at the dawning of a new age that would no longer want hymns but stories, someone split them up into groups and collected them. Ṛg Veda Saṃhitā, “Collection of the Knowledge Made of Hymns”: such is the title under which they have come down to us. Each of the central books, from the second to the seventh, associated with a ṛṣi: Gṛtsamada, Viśvāmitra, Gotama, Atri, Bharadvāja, Vasiṣṭha. To them, or to other ṛṣis descended from them. That’s why they are called the “family books.” It was Vyāsa who arranged them in this way. He gave his life to this work of devotion and philology before embarking on the Mahābhārata, which he dictated to Gaṇeśa, who crouched in a corner, with his soft, young man’s arms and wrinkly elephant’s head with a broken tusk, like some toy left over from an earlier generation of children.
Atri said: “Our eyes, the eyes of the Saptarṣis, which now flicker from the stars of the Great Bear, were ever wakeful over all that happens. That something merely happens is pointless. But that something happens and a watching eye gathers it into itself is everything. Thus we came before the gods. Thus do we keep our watch after the gods. The gaze came before the scene. The world didn’t exist then. But it didn’t not exist either. It was the mind, if anybody knows what that might be. It was our mind. We seven, already old, yet unique and first among beings, watched each other. We were eyes watching other eyes. There was nothing else to let itself be watched. And we knew: we haven’t the strength, alone, we beings who are entirely mind, to bring into existence, to make existence exist, unless we compose something that goes beyond he who watches. It was time for vision to split away from the seer. We watched each other and said: ‘This way we will never exist. This is not existence. What’s required is for someone to be composed of us.’ Then, in the silence, we began to burn. The mind concentrated on a fire — and we were the substance that that fire consumed. That’s why we were called ṛṣis: because we consumed ourselves: riṣ-. Whom did we want to compose? A person, the Person: Puruṣa. Who was he? An eagle with wings outspread. Two of us squeezed ourselves in above the navel, two below the navel, one was a wing, one the other wing, one the claws. All the flavor of life we had within us we brought together above, in the bird’s head. That Person, that Puruṣa, became the Progenitor, the Father, Prajāpati, became this altar of fire, which we are bound at every moment to construct.”
Kaśyapa said: ‘In what are you experts?’ they asked us. In the sensation of being alive. We are wakeful — or, if you like, we vegetate. Vajra, the lightning flower, the ultimate weapon of the gods, is connected with vegeo, ‘to be wakeful, vigilant,’ from which we have wacker, wach, and wake, ‘awake.’ The lightning is the lightning flash of wakefulness. ‘Vegetation’ and ‘wakefulness’ share the same root. That which every instant implies, which every instant conceals, as the mind’s mill grinds out its images, that was our place, our sabhā where we meet and clash, where we recount our terrestial incursions, without ever having to leave our post between these columns.”