The Yoga Vasishtha, a vast dialogue in which the sage Vasishtha instructs the young Rama, contains some of the strangest stories in Sanskrit literature, and the story of Queen Lila is among the most carefully built. Lila loves her husband, King Padma, and dreads outliving him. She worships the goddess Saraswati and receives a boon: when Padma dies, his spirit will not leave the palace. He dies, and Lila, grieving beside his body, asks Saraswati where he has gone. The goddess answers that he is right here, in the space of this very room, and offers to show her.
Within the room’s space, in awareness rather than in physical distance, Lila finds a whole world. In it her husband is King Viduratha, ruling a kingdom, surrounded by courtiers, far into a long reign. He died only moments ago in her world, yet many years have already passed in his. Saraswati then takes her further back, to the life before, in which the two of them were a poor brahmin couple in a mountain village; that life, in its own world, ended only days earlier, and their grieving children are still there. Three lives, three worlds, three rates of time, all nested in the same small space, the account says, because all of them exist in consciousness rather than in a container of space and time.
The full narrative is intricate, involving a second Lila, a war, and the death and rebirth of Viduratha, and any summary simplifies it. Its point, though, is stated plainly and repeatedly in the text. Space and time are not the fixed stage on which experience happens; they are part of what is experienced. A world, with its own history stretching back generations, can arise within awareness in an instant and seem entirely solid to those inside it. The Yoga Vasishtha calls the ground of all these worlds chidakasha, the space of consciousness, and treats every universe, including the one the reader lives in, as a similar arising.
Scholars date the text’s final form to somewhere between the sixth and fourteenth centuries, with little agreement, and it represents one especially radical strand of Vedantic thought rather than the tradition as a whole. That is worth keeping in mind before treating it as a statement of what every Hindu school believes. As an exploration of time, though, it goes further than the stories of Kakudmi or Narada. Those showed different rates of time in different places. Lila’s story questions whether time has any independent existence at all outside the mind that measures it.
Part 13 of 30 — Series V: What Time Is Made Of
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