The Story of the Monks Deshabhushana and Kulabhushana

Delighting Sita on the way with earrings of coral-red shoots and swings of forest vines, the three slowly reached Vamshasthalapura beside the Vamshadhara mountain, whose bamboo-choked slopes and lofty peaks cast a perpetual twilight, and found the king and people fleeing the city. They learned that for three nights terrible sounds from the peaks had shaken the earth, uprooted trees, stirred the lakes and deafened people, as if some evil god were at play there, so each evening everyone fled five kos (a measure of distance) away and returned in the morning.

Sita urged them to go with the people, but the brothers laughed that she was timid and resolved to stay on the mountain to discover whose dreadful sound it was; she followed, Rama holding her hand over the steep rocks, and walking between the two brothers she looked like a topaz between a sapphire and a moonstone. On the summit they found the monks Deshabhushana and Kulabhushana standing in kayotsarga (motionless meditation with arms hanging down), naked, free of delusion and knowing body and soul to be distinct, and they bowed and sat at their feet, reflecting that all worldly things are causes of sorrow and dharma alone brings happiness.

With a dreadful roar an asura arrived and illusory snakes, scorpions and pythons coiled over the monks; the brothers removed them, Sita washed the monks' feet with spring water and anointed them with sandal paste mixed with saffron and camphor, Lakshmana brought fragrant flowers for worship, the brothers played vinas and sang hymns that enchanted even the forest animals, and Sita danced in devotion like Shachi on Mount Sumeru. At nightfall the asura sent laughing ghosts, shrieking rakshasas, fire-breathing jackals, dancing corpses, rains of fire and blood, bone-adorned dakinis and trident-bearing pishachas, and shook the mountain with an earthquake, yet the monks remained absorbed in shukla dhyana (pure meditation), unaware of the assault.

Seating the frightened Sita at the monks' feet as her refuge, Rama and Lakshmana took up their bows and roared like thunderclouds, and at the thunderclap twang of their bowstrings the asura, named Agniprabha, recognising them as a Baladeva and a Narayana, fled and all his illusions vanished. At that very moment Deshabhushana and Kulabhushana attained Kevala Jnana (omniscience); gods of the four classes, humans and Vidyadharas came to worship, day and night ceased to differ near the Kevalis, and Rama asked why the asura had attacked them and why the two loved each other so deeply.

The divine voice of the Kevali related that in Padmini city ruled King Vijayaparvata with Queen Dharini, and his learned envoy Amritasura had a wife named Upabhoga and two capable sons, Udita and Mudita. Sent abroad on royal business, Amritasura travelled with his friend Vasubhuti, a brahmin infatuated with Upabhoga, who killed him with a sword at night, returned claiming he had been sent back and told Upabhoga everything, and she urged him to kill her two sons as well.

Udita's wife overheard this and warned her husband, for she already knew her mother-in-law's conduct from Vasubhuti's own wife, who had turned against her husband because of his adultery; Udita alerted Mudita and, recognising Vasubhuti's sword and certain of his father's murder, killed Vasubhuti. That brahmin, fallen through his sins of unchastity and violence, was reborn among the mlecchas (outcaste tribes) as a chandala.

When the radiant Acharya Mativardhana arrived with his sangha (monastic order) at the Vasantatilaka garden of Padmini, and the head nun Aryika Anudhara camped with her nuns in a nearby grove, the anxious garden-keeper asked the king whether to bar them, and Vijayaparvata replied that a place where sadhus stay becomes holy. Finding monks in standing and lotus postures, emaciated by fasts of two, three, four, five and ten days, a fortnight and a month, the king asked why one so radiant enjoyed no pleasures, and the acharya taught that life is as fickle as an elephant's ear, the body as hollow as a plantain stem and wealth a dream, described the filth of the womb, called the senses thieves of the treasure of dharma, and urged him to tame the elephant of the mind with the goad of knowledge, tie it to the post of detachment and win the imperishable city at the summit of the universe.

Hearing this, the wise King Vijayaparvata gave up his kingdom and became a monk, and Udita and Mudita too became monks; on pilgrimage to Sammeda Shikhara they lost their way in a forest, where Vasubhuti's soul, now a fierce Bhil, prepared to kill them, but Udita told Mudita to hold fast to forbearance, Mudita replied that the body is perishable anyway and this was Vasubhuti whom they had killed for their father's sake, and both stood in kayotsarga. The Bhil chieftain, a mleccha king, stopped him and saved them, because, as the Kevali told Rama, in Yaksha village two brothers, Surapa and Karshaka, had once paid a hunter to free a captured bird, and that bird became the mleccha king while the brothers became Udita and Mudita: whoever does good to someone receives good from him in return.

Freed from the ordeal, Udita and Mudita made pilgrimages to Sammeda Shikhara and other holy sites, kept the three jewels (right faith, knowledge and conduct) and died in samadhi (a peaceful, meditative death), going to heaven, while Vasubhuti's soul wandered through many lowly births, became a tapasa (a non-Jain ascetic) and through ignorant austerity was born as Agniketu, a cruel jyotishka (luminary) god. In Arishtapura, King Priyavrata had two queens, Kanakaprabha and Padmavati; Udita and Mudita descended from heaven as Padmavati's sons Ratnaratha and Vichitraratha and Agniketu as Kanakaprabha's son Anudhara, and Priyavrata, handing the kingdom to his son, fasted six days in a Jina temple and went to heaven on death.

Ratnaratha married Shriprabha, a princess lovely as Lakshmi, whom Anudhara also desired, so a new enmity was added to the old; when Anudhara ravaged Ratnaratha's land, the two brothers defeated and banished him, and he became a matted-haired, bark-clad tapasa, full of the poison of the passions. Ratnaratha and Vichitraratha ruled long, became monks, rose to heaven as gods and were then born to King Kshemankara and Queen Vimala of Siddharthanagara as the handsome princes Deshabhushana and Kulabhushana, whom the king entrusted to the wandering scholar Sagaraghosha until they mastered every science and art, knowing no one but their teacher.

‘We are those Deshabhushana and Kulabhushana,’ the Kevali said: hearing that their father had summoned princesses for their marriage, they rode out in splendour and saw at a palace window their own sister, Princess Kamalotsava, whom they had never known, and each desired her and resolved to kill the other if he married her, until bards hailed King Kshemankara and Queen Vimala, their god-like sons and their daughter Kamalotsava, lovely as Sarasvati, seated at the window. Horrified at the wickedness of delusion, they renounced the world and became Digambara monks despite their parents' grief, gained the power of flying through the sky, and their father, burning with grief, gave up food, died and became Mahalochana, the Garudendra (lord of the Garudakumara gods of the Bhavanavasi order), who now sat in that very assembly.

Anudhara the tapasa came with his disciples to Kaumudi city, where King Sumukha's dancer Madana, who had received right faith from Muni Sadhudatta, called his austerity mere hypocrisy and, to prove it, sent her daughter Nagadatta to his hermitage; infatuated, he followed the girl home at night to beg her mother for her, was tied up, seen bound by the king as had been arranged, and driven out in disgrace at dawn. Gautama tells Shrenika that the lustful neither see, know, fear nor feel shame and fall like a blind man into a well full of snakes; Anudhara died, passed through many low births, was born to a poor man who left home after his wife's quarrels, lost his mother when Bhils carried off the people of the land, became a tapasa and through ignorant austerity was reborn as the jyotishka god Agniprabha.

Once a disciple asked Anantavirya Kevali, who had attained omniscience after Munisuvrata's nirvana, who would next be such a saviour, and he named Deshabhushana and Kulabhushana; Agniprabha heard this and, perceiving the two meditating on this mountain through his perverted clairvoyance (kuavadhi), attacked them out of pride, to falsify the prophecy, and out of old enmity, then fled on recognising Rama as Baladeva and Lakshmana as Narayana. The Kevalis declared Rama a charama-sharira (one in his final body), destined for liberation in this very life, said their own omniscience had come amid the brothers' service as their ghatiya (destructive) karmas fell away, and taught that all hostility flows from past enmity, so beings should give up attachment and aversion.

Overjoyed, the Garudendra told Rama, light of the Raghu dynasty, that since he had honoured these monks, his sons in a past life, he would grant any boon; after a moment's thought Rama asked only that the god remember and protect them if ever they faced danger, and the Garudendra promised to stay near and defend them in every crisis as the gods' drums thundered. Hearing these past lives, some became monks and others took the vows of lay followers, and the Kevalis Deshabhushana and Kulabhushana wandered through towns, villages and mountains preaching the dharma.