Every tradition that thinks in long cycles eventually needs a witness who has lived through them, and this one has a crow. Bhushunda, usually called Kakabhushundi, the crow Bhushundi, appears in two very different texts. In the Yoga Vasishtha, the sage Vasishtha travels to find him on the northern peak of Mount Meru, perched on a wish-fulfilling tree, and asks how old he is. The crow’s answer is measured not in years but in world-ages: he has watched the universe dissolve and re-form many times, and seen the same events recur with small variations, among them the story of Rama, which he says he has seen take place again and again across the cycles.
Vasishtha asks the obvious question: how has he survived the dissolutions that end everything else? The crow’s answer is one of the Yoga Vasishtha’s most practical passages. He attributes his longevity not to a boon or a divine favour but to a practice of attention to the breath, watching the movement of prana and apana and resting in the still point between the in-breath and the out-breath. When the worlds are withdrawn, he says, he withdraws into that stillness, and when they return, he returns with them. Time, in this account, cannot reach what has learned to rest where time does not move.
The crow appears again, centuries later and in a very different register, in Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas. There Kakabhushundi is the narrator of the Rama story to Garuda, the eagle who carries Vishnu and who, troubled by doubt, has come to learn. The crow explains that he was once a human devotee, turned into a crow by a sage’s curse for his arrogance in argument, and that the curse became a blessing because it let him live on, hearing and telling the story of Rama without end. The Hindi poet’s crow is a figure of bhakti rather than breath-control, but the two portraits agree on the essential point: the witness of the ages is the one who has found something in himself that the ages do not touch.
There is also a quieter idea in the crow’s claim to have seen the Ramayana happen many times. It suggests that the great stories of the tradition are not single historical events but patterns that recur in every cycle, the way seasons recur in every year. That fits the tradition’s own acknowledgement that the Ramayana exists in many versions, and it offers a gentler way of holding the differences between them: each telling, like each cycle, is the same story taking a slightly different shape.
Part 14 of 30 — Series V: What Time Is Made Of
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