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 manuscripts that contained all his preaching, which
served as the holy scripture to women, and destroyed them 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 as well, 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, it is the essence of the craft I have learnt. Further, it also
remains the essence of the secret of this universe the humans are searching for.
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 fewer moments
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. The animal enters the visual space and dwells
there. 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 or lateral movements 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 lymphatic
residue 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 neither a wonder nor a 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 dreams of the king’s daughter. 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 into 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 mortals don’t like to see the
universe but like to know about it. Knowing something ends up bringing in the
reality. 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 ought to 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 storey of the building and killed himself. He then
turned to his daughter and ordered that she should cover her breasts with
clothe when she appears in front of me. When I completed the first stage of the
final test, seven days were remaining for the full moon day 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 come infront of me only after covering her body parts with jewels that were not covered with clothes.
To be continued…
