रुद्राष्टकम्

The hymn sits in the Uttarakanda, the last book of the Ramcharitmanas, which Goswami Tulsidas began at Ayodhya in 1574 and finished some years afterwards. Tulsidas built that poem out of three conversations laid inside one another: Shiva telling the story of Rama to his wife Parvati, the sage Yajnavalkya telling it to the sage Bharadvaja, and Kakabhushundi the crow telling it to Garuda. The poet's own voice makes a fourth. The Rudrashtakam belongs to the third of these, and to a story Kakabhushundi tells about himself.

Garuda is the son of the sage Kashyapa and of Vinata, and he is the eagle Vishnu rides. He comes into this by way of a battlefield. At Lanka, Meghanada, the son of Ravana who is also called Indrajit, bound Rama and his brother Lakshmana in the nagapasha, a noose of living serpents. Garuda came, and serpents are what Garuda eats, and he freed the brothers in a moment. Then the doubt arrived. If the man he had just untied was God, how had a rope of snakes held him at all?

He took the question to Narada, the sage who goes everywhere. Narada sent him to Brahma. Brahma sent him to Shiva. And Shiva, who could have answered it himself, sent him up the mountain called Nilagiri to ask a crow. That is the shape of the joke Tulsidas is making, and it is a serious one: the question climbs through the three highest authorities available and is finally referred to a bird.

The crow is Kakabhushundi, and before he answers Garuda he explains how a crow came to know any of it. He was a man once. In the Kali age of a creation older than this one he was born at Ayodhya, of the fourth order, a shudra, and poor. He gave himself to Shiva early and completely, and what grew up beside that devotion was contempt for anyone devoted to anybody else. He would not hear the name of Vishnu, and would not hear the name of Rama. That is worth stopping on, because the whole poem about loving Rama is being narrated by a man who began by hating him.

Then the rains failed and Ayodhya starved, and Kakabhushundi walked to Ujjain, where there was food.

In Ujjain he attached himself to a brahmin, and the poem slows here to look at the man, because everything after it depends on what he was like. He was a devotee of Shiva, as his student was. But he had the one quality his student lacked entirely: he never spoke against anyone else's god. He took the young man in, fed him, taught him, and in time gave him the mantra of Shiva, and asked nothing in return for any of it. Tulsidas never gives him a name. He is the vipra, the brahmin, the guru, and nothing further, and the hymn recited across four centuries since is his.

What he got back was pride. A devotion fed by looking down on other people has an appetite, and it grows. Being given the mantra by a brahmin did not make Kakabhushundi humble; it made him certain. He began to hold himself above the other brahmins of Ujjain, and to nurse his old hatred of Vishnu with better arguments than before.

It came to a head in the temple. He was seated before the linga at his japa when his teacher walked in. The correct thing, and the obvious thing, was to stand. He did not stand. He did not pause, or look up, or acknowledge that the man who had given him the very words he was repeating had entered the room.

His teacher said nothing at all, then or afterwards. That silence is the hinge of the story, and Tulsidas lets it sit there without remark.

Shiva did not stay silent. A voice came out of the linga with nobody attached to it, and it was not gentle. It called Kakabhushundi a fool, and then it explained itself, which curses in these stories rarely trouble to do: if an offence against a guru goes unanswered, the whole path laid down in the Vedas is worth nothing, and so this one would be answered. Then it named the punishment, and took the shape of the punishment from the shape of the crime. You sat there unmoving, like an ajagara, a python, while your teacher came and went. Be one.

What the brahmin did next is the reason this hymn exists. He had been vindicated by God in person, aloud, in his own temple. He refused the vindication. He put his forehead on the floor before the linga, folded his hands, and began to argue with the god who had just taken his side.

He argued in eight verses, and they are strange verses to argue with. Almost nothing in them concerns his student, or the offence, or the curse. They are about what Shiva is, and most of what they say is what he is not: without form, without qualities, without alternation, wanting nothing, past speech and knowledge and the senses, the fourth state, space made of consciousness. Only at the very end, in the eighth verse, does the man singing admit that he has no technique and no standing and is being scorched by the ordinary business of birth and age, and ask to be protected. He never mentions Kakabhushundi in the hymn at all. He praises for eight verses, and then he asks.

Shiva was pleased, and told him to ask for what he wanted. The brahmin asked two things, and the order he asked them in is the whole of his character: first, devotion to Shiva's own feet, and only then that his student's curse might be shortened.

It was granted, and the terms are worth having exactly. The thousand births would still happen, because a curse spoken in that voice does not simply evaporate. But Kakabhushundi would not feel the pain of them, and would not lose his memory in the passage from one body to the next, and at the end of them he would arrive, of all places, at devotion to Rama. The sentence was left standing and the sting drawn out of it.

The rest took a long time. He was the python, and then a thousand other creatures, and he remembered every one of them. Born at last as a brahmin, he climbed Mount Sumeru to the sage Lomasha, who taught him the nirguna Brahman, the absolute without attributes, with great patience, and got back the same stubborn question every time about a dark-skinned prince with a bow. Lomasha lost his temper and cursed him to become a crow. Then Lomasha, who was also a decent man, was sorry, and called him back, and gave him the mantra of Rama and the freedom to die only when he chose to.

So the crow on Nilagiri is the man from the temple floor at Ujjain, carrying every birth in his memory, that one included. When Garuda reaches him at last and asks how a bird came to know what God is, this is the answer he gets: that the bird was saved by a hymn he had not earned, sung for him by a man he had not stood up for, whose name nobody wrote down.