Philosophy and Religion / Yoga Vāsistha / Yoga-Vāsistha (4): Sthiti-Prakarana

Válmiki

Yoga-Vāsistha, Book 4: Sthiti-Prakarana (On Ontology or Existence). Chapter 28 - The Renewed Battle of the Gods and Demons

Vasistha continued: Saying so, the god Brahmā vanished from the sight of the gods, as the wave of the sea retires and mixes with its waters, after having dashed and crushed against the shore.

The gods, having heard the words of Brahmā, returned to their respective abodes; as the breeze bearing the fragrance of the lotus, wafts it to the forests on all sides.

They halted in their delight-some houses for somedays, as the bees rest themselves in the cells of flowers after their wanderings.

Having refreshed and invigorated themselves in the course of time, they gave the alarm of their rising, with the beating of their drums, sounding as the peal of the last day.

Immediately the demons rose from the infernal regions, and met the gods in the midway air, and commenced their dreadful onset upon them.

Then there was a clashing of the armours, and clattering of swords and arrows, the flashing of lances and spears, and the crackling of mallets and various other weapons, as battle axes and discuses, thunder-bolts and hurling of rockstones and huge trees and the like.

There was also many magical instruments, which ran on all sides like the torrents of rivers; while rocks and hills, high mountains and huge trees, were flung and hurled from both sides, filling the earth with confused noise and rumbling.

The encampment of the gods, was beset by a magical flood of the demons, resembling the stream of the Ganges; while showers of firearms and missiles of all sorts, were hurled upon their heads from above.

Many big bodies of the gods and demons, rose and fought and fell by turns, as the elemental bodies of earth and the other elements, rise to and disappear from view by the act of Māyā or illusion. ¹

Big bombs broke the heads of mountains, and the earth became a vast sheet of blood like a sanguine sea. The heaps of dead bodies on both sides, rose as forests to the face of heaven.

Living lions with iron bodies, and rows of saw-like teeth and nails whit as Kāsa flowers, were let loose by the magic are to roam rampant in the airy field; devouring the stones, flung by the Gods and demons, and bursting out into shells and shots and many other weapons.

The serpentine weapons flew with their mountainous shapes in the ocean of the sky; having their eyes flashing with their venomous heat, and burning with the fire of the twelve suns on the last day of desolation.

The hydraulic engine sent forth floods of weapons, whirling as whirlpools, and sounding loud as the rattling thunder; and sweeping the hills and rocks in their current.

The stone missiles which were thrown by the Garūda engine, to the aerial battle field of the Gods, emitted at intervals water and fire, and sometimes shone as the sun, and at others became altogether dark.

The Garūda weapons flew and roared in the sky; and the fire-arms spread a conflict of burning hills above; the burning towers of the gods fell upon the earth and, the world became as unendurable as in its conflagration on the last day.

The demons jumped up to the sky from the surface of the earth, as birds fly to heaven from mountain tops. The gods fell violently on the earth, as the fragment of a rock falls precipitately on the ground.

The long weapons sticking to the bodies of the deities and demons, were as bushes with their burning pain; thus their big statures appeared as rocks decorated with arbours growing upon them.

The gods and demons, roving with their mountainous bodies, all streaming in blood, appeared as the evening clouds of heaven, pouring the purple floods of celestial Gangā (Mandākinī).

Showers of weapons were falling as water­falls or showers of rain, and the tide of thunders flowed as fast as the fall of meteoric fire in promiscuous confusion.

Those skilled in the arts, were pouring floods of purple fluids, mixed with the red clay of mountains, from the pipes of elephant's trunks; as they sputter the festive water of Phagua, mixed with the red powder (phāga) through the syringe (picakārī). ²

The Devas and Asuras, though worried by one another, did not yet give up their hope of victory, but hurled the weapons from their hands for mutual annoyance; and riding on the broad backs of big elephants, they wandered in the air, spreading their effulgence all around.

They then wandered in the sky like flights of inauspicious locusts, with their bodies pierced in the heads, hands, arms, and breasts, and filled the vault of the world like the flying clouds, obscuring the sun and the sides of heaven, and the surface and heights of the earth.

The earth was battered and rent to pieces by the fragments of broken weapons, falling from the waists of the combatants, who assailed one another with their loud shouts.

The sky rechoed to the thunder-claps of the mutual strokes of the weapons, the clattering of the stones and trees, and the blows of the warriors on one another, as it was the bustle of the day of universal destruction.

The disordered world seemed to approach its untimely end, by the blowing of the furious winds mixed with fire and water (as in the chaotic state); and -die many suns of the deities and demons, shining above and below, (as it is predicted of the dreaded last day).

All the quarters of heaven, seemed to be crying aloud, with the sounds of the hurling weapons, rolling as mountain peaks, roaring as lions, and borne by the blowing winds on all sides.

The sky appeared as an ocean of illusion, burning with the bodies of the warriors like flaming trees, and rolling in surges of the dead bodies of the gods and demons, floating on it like mountains; while the skirts of the earth, seemed as forest, made by the clubs and lances and spears, and many other weapons incessantly falling upon them.

The horizon was surrounded by the big and impenetrable line of demoniac bodies, resembling the chain of Sumeru mountain girding the earth; while the earth itself resembled the ocean filled with the mountainous bodies of fallen warriors, and towers of the celestials cities blown down by the winds.

The sky was filled with violent sounds, and the earth and its mountains, were washed by torrents of blood; the blood-sucking goblins danced on all sides, and filled the cavity of the world with confusion.

The dreadful warfare of the gods and Titans, resembled the tumults which rage through the endless space of the world, and that rise and fall with the vicissitudes of pleasure and pain, which it is incessantly subject to. ³

Footnotes

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