Viśvāmitra said: “What we thought has been thought many times and in many places — and each of these thoughts, successive and coincident, is linked together in a single chain. But there is one thought that was our thought, insofar as it had never before been pursued so stubbornly, nor would be ever again, had never before achieved such sharpness, nor would ever after. One thought that was the arrow that buried itself within us — and that penetrated deeper and deeper into our brains and into every gesture we made. Until ultimately it became our only thought, ultimately would almost dull the minds it had too brightly illuminated. How to describe it? The recognition that the existence of the universe is a secondary and derivative fact with respect to the existence of the mind. Perhaps no more than its efflorescence. That’s how we speak of it today, but time ago we would never have used these words. Indeed, we wouldn’t even have understood them. Or we would have despised them. But that’s not the point… Let’s go back to where we were: for those brushed by the wing of that thought, the world was the same as before, nothing was the same as before. Nothing would ever go back to being as it had been before. Yet it is not a spontaneous, natural thought. A creeping oafishness is natural. And even we would sometimes have to struggle to rediscover that thought. Far easier to think of oneself as a ghost imprisoned in a box of skin and bone, surrounded by objects as stable as they are solid. But for anyone who opens his eyes on that other thought, all this falls apart and can never be restored.
“It was strange, how it happened. We forfeited history for that thought. As thought, the moment it took shape, a saber had swept down from the sky and cut off our hands. We were paralyzed in whatever action it was we had been involved in. Often they were violent actions, the actions of conquerors come down from the highlands and drought-stricken mountains into a plain too vast, too densely grown and torrid, that we were invading — and that would soon invade us. It was this thought that stopped us, nothing else. We went no further, or only sporadically, discovering new rivers and new forests, threatened by dark creatures lying in ambush in scrub and brushwood they knew so much better than we did. All of a sudden the impetus was gone. Something had distracted our attention, forever. Something that made everything else hollow. That didn’t mean we settled down to build palaces and temples, canals, gardens, cities with walls. Everything remained much as it was: a camp of nomad warriors who seemed suddenly to have forgotten their old habits, the fury of conquest.”
Then Jamadagni said: “What is the characteristic that sets us apart from every other being? And what is the knowledge that could only come from the Saptaṛṣis? For us the mind, the pure fact of being conscious, imposed itself with a conviction far greater than any other. Nature, in comparison, was an opinion. Or rather: nature was a flickering backdrop or momentary flowering or in any event something to treat with the same condescension that, in more recent times, would be reserved for hallucinations. The underlying implication was this: that everything, among the gods and before the gods, as likewise, in the end. among men, happened within the mind. Hence the first substance the world was made of must have been none other than that element from which the mind emerged. But what was that? A subtle heat, a hidden simmering, a burning beneath the surface, which sometimes flares up, with images, words, and emotions clutching at its seething crest, but above alclass="underline" there blossomed the naked sensation of consciousness, like an incandescent point. All this we called tapas, ‘heat.’ Every story arises from tapas and is reabsorbed in it. The normal means of generation, at that time, was not sexual union. One used to say of countless beings that they were ‘born-of-the-mind.’ When the mind concentrated on a figure, tapas would feed it and its profile would emerge, perfectly formed: that was generation. Beings would arise from the tapas, grow in the tapas, multiform, impudent, airborne multitudes, rigid ascetics, celestial Nymphs. They came pouring forth on the scene as though in a market or at a fair. Then we grew tired. And another story began.
“Nothing is so subtly undermining for tapas as sex, because nothing has a greater affinity with it. In eros a body acts upon another body, and is acted upon by another body, in the same way that in tapas the mind acts upon the mind and is acted upon by the mind. Sexual union, this whole made up of elements that are each both active and passive, is the activity that most closely resembles the activity of the mind. What they have in common is tejas, the flourishing energy, of desire and knowledge. Two fires, which may from time to time become one. We lived suspended between the two. They alternated within us. Neither could go on forever. As Sāyaṇa observed, sex and asceticism were the ‘two ways’ (ubhau varṇau, ‘the two colors,’ but varṇa also means ‘caste’) that the ṛṣi Agastya ‘cultivated.’”
When the ṛṣis turned their attention to the world, they would often display anger and lust. The immense tapas they had accumulated would boil over in all its turbulence. They could not have been less like those images people have of pious, pale, and passionless men. Rather you recognized them for their volcanic ferocity, a darting fury, blazing eyes. One common error was to imagine that they would also display the other passions to excess. Not at alclass="underline" anger and lust, these and only these were their banners and their torturers. Why? The substance that burns in anger and lust is purest tapas, the substance the ṛṣis were made of. Giving way to anger and lust, they consumed themselves. Yet, were they not born-of-the-mind of Brahmā precisely so that they might be the first finally to penetrate a woman and generate those beings who would then inhabit the world? And what is the power that, like some cosmic police force, guarantees the order of the world against any and every violation, if not the anger of the ṛṣis, the ever-present threat of a curse that devastates and destroys like a gust of fire? Thus the ṛṣis lapses into those passions that destroyed their hoard of tapas amounted, perhaps, to nothing other than the continual renewal of the two supreme functions — creation and destruction — to fulfill which they had been called forth by Brahmā, the god they had previously called forth themselves.
It wasn’t only the gods who feared the anger of the ṛṣis. The rivers were afraid too. Once, Viśvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha had been quarreling from opposite banks of the Sarasvatī. The majestic flow of the waters was wounded by their shrill voices, lost in nature. Each was claiming that his own tapas was superior to the other’s. Vasiṣṭha’s smile was fierce: how could this impudent fellow, who wasn’t even a brahman, imagine he possessed a kind of tapas greater than his own? Didn’t he know — everybody knew — that Vasiṣṭha’s tapas was so strong it made it impossible for him to kill himself? Vasiṣṭha well remembered the day he had succeeded in scaling the summit of Mount Meru and, confident and eager as for an amorous encounter, at once leapt from the rock into the void. He longed for death as for the most exotic, the most unavailable of women, he would cling to her as he plunged through that immense expanse of air before his body, with supreme pleasure, crashed down upon the ground. But it was not to be. He fell on his back and found it caressed by the soft petals of lotus flowers, beneath which blossomed more lotus flowers, which rested on yet more lotus flowers. They formed a pillow that went deep into the earth. Ever more exasperated, he had tried to kill himself on a number of other occasions. He had thrown himself into the river Vipāśā, as a shapeless sack wrapped with ropes. But he emerged from the waters unharmed, unbound.