Pañcaśikha and Janaka on Old Age and Death
In the Śānti Parva of the Mahābhārata, in the Mokshadharma Parva (Chapter 319), Pañcaśikha Maharshi teaches King Janaka about jarā (old age) and mṛtyu (death), and why no worldly achievement can protect a being from them. The teaching dwells on how nothing that depends on conditions lasts. It shows that moksha through jñāna (knowledge) and vairāgya (detachment) is the one true answer to the human condition.
Setting
Yudhishṭhira asks Bhīshma how the greatest of human beings, those with rare wealth, long life, heroic deeds or deep learning, can escape jarā and mṛtyu. Is there any means of escape for the powerful, the rich or the long-lived? Bhīshma tells the dialogue of Pañcaśikha and Janaka as his answer. (Chapter 319)
Pañcaśikha’s opening: it cannot be prevented, only crossed
Janaka asked Pañcaśikha whether there was any way to prevent jarā and mṛtyu. Pañcaśikha gave an honest and unsparing answer: jarā and mṛtyu cannot be prevented. Days do not stop, months do not stop, nights do not stop. Birth, old age and death go on their sure course and have no fixed dwelling place. No being born into a body can prevent what the body brings.
Pañcaśikha then added at once that this does not mean there is no path. Moksha through jñāna is the path. It does not prevent death. It frees one from identifying with the one who dies. (Chapter 319)
The river of time
Pañcaśikha uses one of the most striking images in the Mokshadharma Parva. Beings are carried along in the kāla-pravāha (the river of time). In this river they struggle. They sink, they try to keep their heads above water, and they call out to their relatives. But no one who is in the river can lift another out of it. Relatives, wealth and fame are fellow travellers in the same river, swept along by the same current. They cannot save one another because they are all in the same flow.
The only way to “save oneself” is to know one’s own nature as the ātmā. The ātmā is not in the river. It is the ground of awareness in which the river of time flows. (Chapter 319)
Relatives and being alone
Pañcaśikha also teaches about human ties. In the flow of saṃsāra, who is truly one’s own? His answer is that no one is. The ties of this life are like travellers who happen to share a stretch of road. The distance they travel together is short, and before and after it each goes alone. A wife is not the same wife from birth to birth. Children are not the same children. The very idea of “mine”, mama, is a custom of the present life and not a truth of the cosmos.
This does not make ties meaningless. It puts them in their right frame. Love is real, but its object is the ātmā in the other person, not the body or the name. The saṃbandha (connection) at the level of the ātmā is eternal. At the level of nāma-rūpa (name and form) it is only for a time. (Chapter 319)
The only path: moksha through jñāna
Pañcaśikha gives the conclusion. Those who practise sarvatra-sama-darśana (equal vision in all circumstances, seeing the same ātmā in all beings) and who grow in viveka (discrimination between the eternal and the passing) are not caught by jarā and mṛtyu in the same way. They still meet them in the body. But their identification with the body, and so with its ending, has dissolved. The mano-maya ratha (the chariot of the mind) of attachment no longer runs. Jarā and mṛtyu touch the chariot, not the charioteer.
This is what Pañcaśikha calls “crossing jarā and mṛtyu“: not avoiding them, but ceasing to be identified with what they touch. (Chapter 319)
Sources
- Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Mokshadharma Parva, Chapter 319