March 14, 2026
yadā vanaṁ prayātastvaṁ tadā ‘jñānaṁ kṣatam tvayā
patitaṁ sanna nihataṁ manastyāgamahāsinā (14)
THE BRĀHMAṆA (CŪḌĀLĀ) continued:
Now listen to the significance of the second parable.
What was described as the elephant in the Vindhya hills, that you are on this earth. The two powerful tusks are viveka (discrimination, wisdom) and vairāgya (dispassion) which you possess. The rider who inflicted pain on the elephant is ignorance which caused you sorrow. Though powerful, the elephant was overcome by the rider: though excellent in every way, you are overcome by this ignorance or foolishness.
The elephant’s cage is the cage of desires in which you are imprisoned. The only difference is that the iron cage decays in course of time but the cage of desire grows stronger with time. Even as the elephant broke out of its cage, you abandoned your kingdom and came here. However, psychological abandonment is not as easy as breaking out of a material cage.
Even as the rider was alerted by the escape, the ignorance and the foolishness in you tremble when the spirit of renunciation manifests in you. When the wise man abandons the pursuit of pleasure, ignorance flees from him. When you went to the forest, you had seriously wounded this ignorance, but you had failed to destroy it by the abandonment of the mind or movement of energy in consciousness even as the elephant failed to kill the rider. Therefore, this ignorance has arisen once again and, remembering the way in which you overpowered the previous desires, it has trapped you in the pit known as asceticism.
If you had destroyed this ignorance once and for all when you renounced your kingdom, you would not have been trapped by this asceticism.
You are the king of the elephants, endowed with the powerful tusk of viveka or wisdom. However, alas, in this dense forest you have been trapped by the rider known as ignorance and you lie imprisoned in the blind well, known as asceticism.
O king, why did you not listen to the wise words of your wife, Cūḍālā, who is indeed a knower of the truth? She is the foremost among the knowers of the self and there is no contradiction between her words and her deeds. Whatever she says is true and is worth putting into practice. However, even if you did not in the past listen to her words and assimilate them, why did you not abandon everything in total renunciation?