He then stopped shaving himself and allowed the terrible knots called ‘Adai’ to grow copiously in the hairs that had grown very haphazardly on his face and chin. His enemies, who were waiting for such a fall of his, declared that he indulged in bestiality, was the enemy of scriptures, was responsible for the death of twenty innocent men, was the one who drove out his own wife to her parent’s home, and had been affected by the disease of profligacy. They charged him with the irreplaceable reprehension, expelled him from the palace, and banished him into the jungle. They rendered his two male children orphaned and drove them out along with him. Unable to pass his craft to his children, my great-grandfather left them ignorant. The priests traced out the entire palm-leaf manuscript that contained all his preaching, which served as the holy scripture to women, and destroyed it completely without leaving any traces. They enslaved the women, brought them under their control by way of obligating them not to shave off the thick hairs grown in their armpits and vulva, and thus made them suffer from the guilt of bearing bad odour. They gouged out mercilessly the eyes of those who were suffering from bad dreams and killed them. They announced the barbers were low-born, ousted them from the centre of the city, and got them settled near the cremation grounds so that they would live their remaining days by inhaling the stench of burning corpses. The king, who assumed the responsibility for the sake of his daughter and fell sick irreversibly bearing the sins of his wife, who had killed those twenty innocent hunters, was still ruling his country efficiently with the help of his daughter without losing his faith. He heard about my great-grandfather’s actions and their effects, felt helpless about how to stop the unwanted things from happening, and then started counting his final days by keeping his body ready to embrace death. He stopped the administrative engine of the country. The king’s son-in-law, who was declared as the royal heir after his marriage with the princess, expressed dismay that it was rather very difficult to bring good sense into the heads of intelligent men who went astray than to bring the boorish men who were causing poverty back to the track, and slowly gave up his responsibility towards the old city despite the repeated appeals from his wife, the king’s daughter. As the years rolled on, the trees and animals that had been hiding behind the walls of the old city, built on the destruction of forests, came out of their hideouts and began hunting the humans. Very soon, according to the rules of the universe, the walls began hiding into the trees, and the dense forest, which was once destroyed by the new city, had now re-established itself there. My grandfathers, who had been roaming in the cremation grounds after becoming demented and impecunious, could somehow save their lives from death by becoming hunters and getting along with the animals. They brought up their children like the way animals do in the forests.
***
The story narrated on the second day: (Or the story of exhalation) My great-grandfather says:
If the royal family hadn’t destroyed the dreams of an animal generations ago, perhaps I wouldn’t have got this opportunity to tell this story. It was reasoned that the bedroom of the king’s daughter had been existing in the dreams of the old tiger as its birth place for ten generations. Not only the bedroom of the king’s daughter, but you must understand that this city, my telling of this story, and you listening to it—all are happening in the dreams of the animals. My days of learning in the hermitage had taught me the entire certainty of this universe was nothing but the dreams of animals. Putting it in other words, the essence of my learning and the secret of this universe the humans are persistently searching for are this. The animals see this universe as their birthplace in their dreams. No sooner had they come out of the womb than the entire universe became a womb and engulfed them. It then becomes their permanent home. On this earth where the birds and termites want to build their own homes like humans, only the animals wouldn’t like to build homes for themselves. What one eats, what is eaten, what one drinks, what is drunk, inhalation, exhalation, the nostrils that breathe, the temperature falling upon the things, the things that allow the temperature to fall upon them, the one that sinks, the one that appears, and the moment of nothingness between sinking and appearance—all these are their dwellings in their dreams. The food into which the animal dips its face becomes its dwelling that accommodates the animal with love. The wind accommodates them in its vastness. During sexual intercourse, the male animal treats its sexual organ as its ‘self’ and the female sexual organ as its dwelling and thus gets settled by entering it. At the same time, the female tucks its body between the male’s legs and submits itself. Other than the possibilities of entering, coming out, appearing, and disappearing, any movements of this world that decide the gradings of upper or lower or equivalent will never occur in the dreams of animals. An animal that binds this universe with its memory before its birth will never forget the place it first fell onto with the dirt of blood and scent, even after its death. It is this world of dreams of animals are often described as the world of gods in the holy scriptures. Why don’t the gods pat their eyelids there? Why don’t they feel hunger and thirst? Why don’t the dead souls sleep there? When the gods left the worldly reality that clearly attests to their physical existence for the world, which had no fixed structure, God Almighty created the world of gods, which in itself serves their food, water, sleep, sight, time, and breath, apparently to prevent those gods from developing a suspicion about their physical existence. All my attempts, with my real-life experiences, to learn that secret, which still remained the essence of any craft being leant anywhere in the world, were full of pains and miracles. Only those who had understood the rules of this universe would believe that the melancholy of the old tiger, which stayed in the king’s daughter’s bedroom for ten generations, was not about wonder or mystery but about reality. So, it is necessary that I have to tell you about the dreams of animals before I resume narrating the story of the king’s daughter’s dreams. Let me use this opportunity to tell you the most challenging part of the story during my days in the hermitage. This story is about me, blessed by my master for having mastered the art of penetrating others’ sleep to see their dreams. This story is about the woman—who is listening to the story along with you—whom I married as a gift of my victory. This is the story that describes the glory of my master, who trained me to be an erudite man.
Listen to me. The general rule is, the things that we are not aware of are being seen in the dreams. The humans don’t like to see the universe but like to know about it. Knowing something ends up bringing in the reality. The man created language by streamlining the elements of sounds in order to know the things. The animals do not know language. So, they never try to understand the universe around them. The place where no efforts are made will have the perfect vision. The animals never distinguish this world the way humans do—with the binaries of vision and awareness to distinguish it into dreams and real worlds. Since seeing is the character of dreams, the reality the humans ever tried to understand remains the dream of animals. It was why the treatises of dreams had insisted that those who wanted to test their limitations in the art of penetrating others’ dreams must first penetrate the dreams of animals to realise the reality of this universe through the eyes of animals. This test would be rather very difficult. The one who wished to enter this test would have to pass through it in three stages. In the first stage, he had to know what the animals see in their dreams. In the second stage, he would assess the nature of movements in the scenes occurring in the dreams. In the third stage, the last and extremely difficult one, we know how the animals perceive this universe in their dreams. When I entered the dreams of a cow once, given to me for this experiment as ordered by my master, it took me one hundred and eighty days to get over with the first stage of knowing how the cow converted the reality based on language into a ‘languageless’ pure entity before perceiving it in its dreams. You can understand how difficult it is! When the words ascribed to the things are separated from them, the light and the scent that were earlier separated from them and converted into memories will all come back to them. After an arduous journey during the winter through the dreams of the cow, keeping myself alive from the possible asphyxiation amid the swirls and density of its dreams, I told my master that those dreams were a mixture of complex colours that enabled one to realise the purity. My master said that I had passed the first stage of the test successfully and hugged me as his eyes welled up with the tears of grief, mourning the death of his first disciple, who jumped from the fourth story of the building and killed himself. He then turned to his daughter and ordered that she should cover her breasts with clothe when she showed up to me. When I completed the first stage of the final test, the full moon day was running short of seven days to bloom in its fullness in the east. I was given two days of rest. I started my fasting for the next five days as directed by my master. After that, on the full moon day, I entered the cow’s dreams once again in order to pass the second stage of the test.
The world was created in the beginning by the God almighty as a wordless, magnificent, unending dream. The man could reach this god’s world of dreams that has been hidden under the real world only after his death. But the animals, the blessed ones, though having inferior intellect than men, are able to perceive the world of God while being alive without having to stoop with the burden of the enormity of knowledge. That world has different amazing shades. The time and place in the world of dreams are different from the time and place of the real world, as the things there won’t move the way they do in the real world. In the real world, man creates meaning with words. The meanings create reasons. The reason creates physically visible things. The things cause the effects. The effects give birth to words that create reasons and meanings. Since the things are associated with other things, both horizontally and vertically bound by reasons and effects, like a chain, the scenes are visible to human eyes as horizontal and vertical movements. But in the view of animals, which just see this universe as dreams, the world neither moves right to left nor left to right nor top to bottom nor bottom to top. When I narrate all these, my eyes grow teary as I am reminded of God’s compassion and sagacity in making the animals’ faces cone-shaped, looking downwards, unlike the flat faces of humans. The humans who have flat faces to see the things with both eyes simultaneously won’t have the problem of seeing two different things simultaneously that are potentially confusing to one’s understanding. One vision—one understanding—is the basis of knowledge. But the animals with their eyes on both sides of their faces, seeing two different views at the same time, wouldn’t be able to correlate them to understand it, and hence they are unable to produce a language. Viewing many things at the same time does remain the basis of sight without words. During the second stage of the test, I saw the view that appeared on the right moving to the left of the cow given to me for the experiment and the appearance of a new view on the right to fill the space left vacant, and the view that disappeared on the right was now sitting on the left view, which the cow was already seeing. After understanding that the dreams in animals produced in complex colours and scents, unlike in the real world, are moving from inside and appear outside and then disappear inside again, I reached my master’s hermitage after a gruelling effort of sixty days to come out of the cow’s dreams, went to him,, and told him that I had understood its causes the way I could explain it to you. He then told me that I had passed the second stage of the test successfully as tears fell down from his eyes, thinking about his second disciple who found succour in the thick jungles of Kashi. Also, he kindly instructed his daughter to cover her parts, that were not covered with clothes, with jewels when she showed up to me.
To be continued…
