King Janaka as a Male Chauvinistic Pig in Mahabharata

Mario Piantelli

University of Turin

I expressly selected this title, availing myself of a notorious feminist jargon in order to point
out how surprisingly one discovers, in a strange -and beautiful!- episode in Mahabharata, a
well-known personage like Janaka, King of the Videha-s, confronted with a mysterious
female ascetic, a certain Lady Sulabha, who puts him to shame as an instance of somewhat
stolid masculine pride. Such an occurrence stands indeed out as totally uncommon in Indian
classical texts, and understandably so, if one takes into account that King’s career, full of
paramount achievements both as a practical ruler and as a repository of the redeeming
Knowledge of the only Reality, the Supreme Brahman, the impersonal or super-personal
Absolute which is taught as the ground of the world of experience since Upanisadic times.

In point of fact, King Janaka figures already as a significant character in one of the most
ancient Upanisad-s, where our monarch is playing Maecenas to the sage Yajñavalkya, the
actual protagonist of those venerated texts. It is difficult to over-stress the position of this
illustrious figure in late Vedic literature: Yajñavalkya is there treated not as an occasional
instructor, but as the Teacher. We find him represented as a very mine of brahmanical lore.
That famous ritualist not only possesses the deepest knowledge of Brahman, but is fully
acquainted with each and every part of Vedic sacrificial lore as well as with the most secret
meanings thereof. While other distinguished figures are there to instill into the mind of
several characters some selected ideas concerning Brahman and other topics of importance,
Yajñavalkya, and he alone, seems to have got the whole picture in his deep and
comprehensive outlook. It is also difficult to over-stress the importance of King Janaka as a
well-learned monarch as well as a worthy interlocutor of that living Vedic encyclopaedia.
His very name appears to be employed in other parts of the early Upanisadic corpus as a sort
of proverbial paradigm of the learned and generous patron, who largely gives to the
Brahmans, to receive in exchange their precious sacred science. So one hears King
Ajatasatru of Kasi, who is also confronted with a learned teacher, taking Janaka as a well-
known example of such a royal donor; he says: "People keep telling me: -Janaka, Janaka!- I
too am King, I too can make gifts to cultivated Brahmans!"

King Janaka’s primary role is that of the earthly power that, through a clever combination of
enticing boons and pressing questions -always to the point-, allows the hearer of the
Upanisad to learn of the secret lore most jealously guarded by Yajñavalkya: that concerning
the Ultimate Experience Factor. He asks the sage about what actually is "light" for men, and
Yajñavalkya is compelled by a series of requests of ever more detailed instructions
eventually to reach to the highest level of "light", to wit the very splendor of Atman, the
transcendent non-objective "light" of the Interior Witness which is always present, even
when outer "lights" (the light of Sun, the light of Moon, the light of Fire, the "light" of the
Eyes, the "light" of Mind, that are conceived of as so many divine figures in Vedic
perspective) are absent. It is only thanks to Janaka that this profound revelation has taken
place.

With the development of Indian oral literature from the upanisads down to the later world of
epics - the anonymous itihasa-s -, King Janaka’s importance becomes, if possible, even
more widely felt. In the best-loved of these extensive compositions, Valmiki’s Ramayana,
Janaka –whose name, by the way, means "genitor" and is singularly apt to that role- is the
father to the heroine of the poem, the Lady Sita. We find him praisedas a powerful and wise
ruler of far-reaching fame. There also, by the way, our character proves to be fully aware of
his own manliness. In point of fact, he stresses the ideal of masculine vigor as the very core
of the Ksatriya character. He proclaims that his noble daughter Sita’s hand is only for that
Ksatriya prince, whose peerless virility can be regarded as the only proper dotage for her -
and himself. King Janaka is indeed deemed worth to be considered on a pair with the young
pair of heroes of the poem, the matchless Rama and his brother Laksmana, as well as their
Mentor Visvamitra. Witness the memorable scene in which Rama not only manages to tend,
but actually breaks God Rudra’s famed bow: then Janaka is the only one staying up, with
these very virile heroes, while every other Ksatriya noble falls down terrified by the sonic
bang of the event. This is certainly to be regarded as a definitive proof of his manly prowess
and impavidity. Besides, we are told that he has managed for one full year to withstand all
the Kings of India, who were fighting confederated against him due to his refusal of
conceding Sita’s hand to any one of their number, and -with the well-deserved help of the
powerful Rudra himself- eventually has succeeded into destroying their armies and utterly
humiliating them. So, the King of Videha-s is to be looked at as a true personification of
Ksatriya ethos in its wholeness: he not only is a wise King, even the wisest of them all, but
also a true he-man in royal attire, at a pair with the most renowned monarchs in Indian epic
tradition. There is even some connection of Janaka with sex to be found in this very episode,
when he mentions the way in which Sita was born. I quote his brief narration fin the
translation by Wendy Doniger: "Now, one day when I was in the sacrificial grounds, I saw
the ultimate celestial nymph, Menaka, flying through the sky, and this thought came to me:
‘If I should have a child in her, what a child that would be!’ As I was thinking in this way,
my semen fell on the ground. And afterwards, as I was ploughing that field, there arose out
of the earth, as first fruits, my daughter, who has celestial beauty and qualities, and can only
be won by one whose bride price is his manliness. Since she arose from the surface of the
earth, and was born from no womb, she is called Sita, the furrow."

Mind you that Sita is a goddess in the Veda-s, where she is the furrow personified. The fact
that the King is her father is here not in doubt: she is conceived by this super-male’s semen
and apparently without a woman. We could wonder, by the way, who is actually the mother
of the Lady Sita. Is she the goddess Earth, who received Janaka’s semen? Or Menaka, the
very mother of the lady Uma, Siva’s own wife, who caused its ejaculation? We cannot
answer this question so easily. Possibly, as Janaka says, she had no mother, only a father,
like Skanda, the Lord of war, son of Siva, who is actually born from the divine semen
without without any female womb receiving it. So many different entities get this semen,
Fire, the Ganges, the Pleiades…, but no one in their number is actually conceiving from it in
a normal way!

You see that Janaka in the Ramayana is not so detached in regard of sex; the simple act of
looking at the Lady Menaka makes him nearly immediately to loose his sperm in the
ground. Of course this event can be explained without prejudice of the King’s virility: in
fact, like all celestial apsaras, Menaka displays a sex-appeal so formidable, that it is
impossible for a normal male to withstand its effects for more than a few minutes... And
Janaka is a normal male here, not a particularly controlled repository of transcending
wisdom. This, at least, is the appearance. But are we in a position to bring in an argumentum
e silentio? For in other texts such role is acknowledged to him as a matter of course.

There is a paradoxical ambiguity in this King: he is admittedly a wholly developed

personality, a "realized" man, and simultaneously his behaviour is ambiguously sex-
oriented, as it is plainly implied by his kingly condition. In Indian literature, monarchs are
always indulging in love sports, it is an important part of their character. So Janaka is
frequently confronted with situations in which this double role of his is put in question. The
very personality of Janaka is a big question mark to me.

Of course he is always under spotlights in Indian lore, as he is deemed an example of the

fact that some rare persons can stay in the world and get Moksa too. The well-known teacher
Ramakrsna, who lived in Bengal in XIX century, used to quote Janaka as an instance which
was always in the mouth of people trying to live in the world without abandoning the
pleasures thereof and claiming a renunciation that in reality they did not reach. This is
evidently the very problem that Mahabharata is confronting us with. Such ambiguous
character helps us better to understand the King’s psychology in the episode we are here
briefly to discuss. Mark that this episode is far from being an unique: in Mahabharata King
Janaka is introduced as a party in several other incidental dialogues, in order now to teach
and then again to learn, being confronted in the process with quite a few important figures.
One of these is Vasistha, who plays the instructor in a lengthy exposition situated near the
end of Santiparvan. That celebrated Vedic seer, whose memorable feud with Visvamitra
dates back to Rgvedasamhita, is also figuring in the first canto of Ramayana as a respected
purohita and guru at the court of Rama’s father, King Dasaratha, and shall be selected as the
Teacher in a medieval apophtegmatic classic as the monumental Yogavasistha. In the
Santiparvan dialogue, he imparts to Janaka a lot of -quite detailed!- notions concerning both
Samkhya and Yoga, dealt with in the peculiar way in which Mahabharata treats these
doctrines – that is to say, not as the normal, classical atheistic Samkhya doctrine, which is to
be found in the karika-s of Isvarakrsna and their commentaries, serving also as the
metaphysical background to the Yoga system codified in Patañjali’s sutra-s, but as a
different and indeed more complex theistic sort of Samkhya, possibly connected with the
Sastitantra, a lost treaty dealing with sixty different pre-classical topics, with a full
treatment thereof, whose content we are able to reconstruct in some measure from
quotations in the recently discovered commentary to Isvarakrsna called Yuktidipika.
According to an ancient tradition, the author of this Sastitantra was known as the "Five-
Tufted-One", Pañcasikha; who too, by the way, is playing the teacher to King Janaka in
another part of the epic, and whom in our episode, as we shall see, he is proud to refer to as
his guru. This kind of metaphysical erudition gained from the lips of distinguished ascetics
and Brahmans, together with a personal conduct embodying its principles, is what makes
our King a peerless repository of Ultimate Knowledge, in striking contrast with his worldly
role and commitments.

The narration we are concerned with today, is to be found in the three-hundred-and-eight

adhyaya of the Critic Edition of Santiparvan, whereas in the so-called Vulgata of
Mahabharata it is collocated in the three-hundred-and-twenty-sixth one. I shall quote here
occasionally also from the older translation of the Vulgata, which has just now been
criticized by my friend and colleague Alberto Pelissero, for the good reason that professor
Van Buitenen, the more reliable translator of the Critic Edition, died before being able to
print a rendering of his into English of Santiparvan. Be advised that this older translation is
also old-fashioned indeed, and abounding with forms and terms taken straight from Biblical
and Shakespearean English, which make it awkward to the ears of now-a-day students. Take
good note of this "newmanization", and please make every effort to be indulgent with an
elder Indian gentleman, who tried his best to sound dignified to Victorian ears. I shall also
avail myself, when useful, of the commentary by Nilakantha to the Sanskrit text of the
Vulgata, which in the case of our episode is not so different from the one established for the
Poona Critic Edition.

This is the story. I am not going to give a full translation thereof, but shall just resume it,
allowing for a richer treatment of some points that seem worthy of our interest.

We are confronted, as usual in the Santi- and Anusasanaparvan of Mahabharata, with

pensive and anxious King Yudhisthira questioning his old quasi-grandparent Bhisma, who is
waiting for death lying on his bed made of arrows. And the King’s question here, from
Indian point of view, is very important indeed: to wit, is it possible for a man to keep the
style of life of a grhastha, with its duties and toils, and also to reach that exalted intuition
that brings with itself Liberation, Moksa? Did anybody ever live up to that standard? Did
anybody ever, without formally renouncing the world, unhindered by the restrictions of
ascetic life, succeed into reaching merely by his own understanding (buddhi) what is called
Moksatattva, the real essence of Moksa? "Without having renounced the life of a grhastha,
oh thou utmost Royal Seer of the Kuru clan, who ever succeeded into reaching through
discriminating faculty spiritual goals and the Reality of Moksa? Tell me!"

Note that the very possibility of such an achievement is generally denied by the technical
literature of the different Indian sects, prone as they are to consider asceticism as a
preliminary condition to the study of higher teachings, to say nothing of putting them into
actual practice. Only some "laity"-oriented schools of thought, like Mahayana ones, indulge
in allowing for a goodly measure of illumination in the case of uncommonly spiritual
worldly men, like, for instance, the well-known mythical Buddhist Maecenas Vimalakirti.
The elder Bhisma answers something like: "Well, there is the well-known case of Janaka,
yet concerning such instance one should mention the tradition (itihasa) they refer about his
dialogue or debate (samvada) with the Lady Sulabha". The "yet" is not there, but we are to
supply it, when we take into account how the dialogue develops: for actually Bhisma does
not clearly answer the King’s question. The episode apparently selected by him as a way of
illustrating the point ends by casting the shadow of a weighty doubt on the very quality of
Janaka’s spiritual attainment. Doubt, in one form or another, is always there in this story: to
begin with, doubt about Janaka’s claimed insight is in the mind of Sulabha, then doubts
about that Lady’s identity, spiritual state and worth arise in the mind of Janaka himself;
lastly, doubts about nearly everything concerned by our narration grows in the mind of the
person who hears it.

But who actually is this Lady Sulabha? Her very name, which literally means "Easy to
reach", but also "Who is provoked easily", is misleading: a sexual connotation interferes
with an overtone of mannishness, which is fully justified, for we shall learn she is actually of
Ksatriya stock. In her presentation by the elder narrator, Sulabha is a mysterious person
indeed, who "goes around the wide earth" apparently without occupying a recognized place
in social hierarchy. She is presented as a bhiksuki, literally a female ascetic living by alms, a
title held, but by no means monopolized, by Buddhist and Jaina nuns. She will also be called
bhiksuki by the King, as we shall see. Sulabha is also said to be steadfast in the practice of
Yogadharma, the Law of Yoga. This makes her one of those somewhat not institutional
figures who elsewhere are known as tapasvini-s, that is female ascetics who practice hard
penance techniques, Tapas, without an acknowledged traditional basis for their role, as
opposed to the fully institutional figure of the male sannyasin, "man of renounce" to the
world (sannyasa) whose life-style is regulated by a well-known set of rules. By the way,
Sulabha’s condition is a matter of some interest. Someone could try to bring in her
ambiguous role as a proof that women in the position of a sannyasin were actually present in
the particular historical context of our narration, roughly about the beginning of Christian
Age, and that the fourth stade of life was not reserved only to male persons, as it certainly
was understood to be in later times. Besides, the woman ascetic is possibly an old, indeed
very old person. We are able to infer this fact from her apparent connection with a different
episode in the Mahabharata, concerning another of Janaka’s most famous interlocutors
(there is a full Gita exposing their dialogue!), to wit the young Brahman Astavakra. In that
episode Astavakra, who is travelling in the Himalayas for an instruction trip that his would-
be father-in-law has forced on him, meets in a kind of fairy resort the ruler thereof, a strange
old Lady ascetic, who -we eventually come to learn- is actually the Northern Direction
personified. All the Directions of the compass are revered as Goddesses in Indian religious
perspective, but the Northern one is the most powerful and auspicious of the lot. Being
decrepit and totally unattractive, she vainly begs the deformed young Brahman for sexual
intercourse, in a series of witty scenes, where Astavakra tactfully manages to withstand her
passionate courtship. Only after quite an engrossing experience, in which she cares for him
as he were a baby with warm baths, massages and exquisite foods, the Lady ascetic
manifests herself to Astavakra’s diffident eyes as a youthful potential partner, both seductive
and very handsome, and in the process teaches him a much-needed lesson about women and
their ways. During this elder Lady’s courtship, she avouches herself as a noble and free
woman, lawfully entitled to dispose of herself so as to give to Astavakra her hand according
to the Gandharva form of marriage. This confident self-presentation on the part of the
Northern Direction disguised as a woman is -as we shall see- pretty similar to the one
uttered by the Lady Sulabh , so similar, in fact, that one can even suspect we are confronted
in the two episodes with one and the same elusive goddess. Like the Northern Direction,
who was assuming a new and more attractive aspect in her culminating revelation to young
Astavakra, we are told in our episode that the Lady Sulabh takes a "different form" (rupam
anyad), in order to visit King Janaka; this new appearance is described, presumably in
contrast with the former one, as young and beautiful, actually an "un-utmost" (anuttama)
one. There is literally no girl superior to her, i.e. more beautiful and desirable than she is!
This must be taken into account in order better to understand what follows: not only a
female ascetic, but a peerless beauty with superlative seductive charm is introduced in the
presence of the King; his self-control is severely tested already by her mere look. And she
takes this most endearing form "by Yoga" (yogatah), thanks to her Yoga-power. The Lady
Sulabh is so richly endowed with such power, that she makes the trip to Mithila "simply in
an eye-fluttering" (caksusnimesamatrena): that is to say, as quickly as an eye-lid takes to be
shut and open again, she is there, and immediately proceeds to enter the assembly in the
royal hall.

Janaka is seated there with his ministers (mantrin-s) and all the learned Brahmans, and that
unknown ascetic girl, so extraordinarily beautiful and so strange, makes her entrance. She
formally asks for bhiksa, food-alms, and the King, having contemplated her wonderful body
of superb youth and comeliness (param drstva saukumaryam vapus), is overcome by
astonishment (agatavismaya); he asks in his own turn: "Who is this Lady? Whose is she?
And whence did she come?". The question "Whose is she?" actually means: "Who has
authority over her, who is her father, or husband?". Note, by the way, that Janaka in our
episode is given the title of Dharmadhvaja ("He whose banner is Law"), an epithet deserved
by his acquaintance with traditional Law, about which the following development of the
narration will afford ample proof: as a monarch, he is of course to care for Dharma
intricacies, but his preoccupation with these is represented to be actually part of his
personality, not just of his kingly role. According to generally acknowledged authorities as
Manu’s Laws, in point of fact, a woman should never, at least in principle, be "hers own",
i.e. belong to herself only: she is supposed to belong to some male juridical subject; before
her first menses, she is her father’s, when sexually mature, she is her husband’s, when
eventually a widow, she is her elder son’s; she must never be allowed to be master-less,
even for a minute, under peril of corrupting society with sexual indulgence. So, who is this
beautiful girl’s owner? Mark that this was also the very first question put by Astavakra to
the elder Lady ascetic who was trying to gain sexual intercourse with him. In that context,
the question was calibrated to interpose a juridical barrier to that Lady’s undesired advances.
And a sexual overtone seems to be present here too. Asking whose actually a very sexy
female character is shows not only Janaka’s attention to Dharma, but that she is -perhaps
half-consciously- envisaged by him as a lawful or unlawful potential partner in coitus. The
King, notwithstanding the superior impersonal outlook due to his celebrated possession of
liberating Brahman-Knowledge, is already tempted… He is admiring her in the highest
degree, the text lets us infer, because of her wonderful body (vapus), because of her
extraordinary -and, as we were let know, alas! illusory- beauty. His response to her sex-
appeal is plain in that, without having got any notion about her, he not only gives her the
requested alms, but also applies to her the ceremonial pattern of guest-reception, usually
granted to a respected visitor, whose identity is fairly certain. A comfortable seat is provided
to the Lady ascetic, she is given water for washing her feet and rinsing her mouth; she is
lavishly treated with chosen food. Only afterwards, as Indian etiquette dictates, Janaka is
prepared to question her in order to learn who she is and the purpose of her coming. But,
before he is able to address her, she takes the initiative, a virile tract highly unseemly for a
women, even a powerful yogini as we have know she is.

She has come because she has a doubt, the narrator has said. Everybody in the tridandin
milieu is saying that King Janaka is actually a realized man. He has reached Moksa. Is that
possible when he is still playing the role of a monarch, very much in the world, very much
concerned with the duties of a ruler and also with the refined pleasures that a King is entitled
to enjoy in his daily life?

Now she immediately -and rudely enough!- tries to learn about Janaka’s actual spiritual
level by a new and different usage of her Yoga-powers. The text gives us a concise
description of the process:

"With her sattva" -a term which here means the highest and most subtle part of her mind
complex- "that Yoga-wise one reached inside the sattva" of the King (sattvam sattvena
yogajña pravivesa)". How? Hypnosis seems to be the answer: "With the rays of her two
eyes" she "having conjugated the rays of his two eyes (netrabhyam netrayor asya rasmin
samyojya rasmibhih)", had the King "bound with Yoga-bonds" (yogabandhair babandha).

Here it should be noted that in ancient India the idea of visual perception was that the
caksus, that is the eye, considered not as the ocular bulb, but as a subtle indriya, a sense-
extension of mind-stuff, located therein, was thought to be conveyed to the external object
by way of an invisible ray of light, which came out from the pupil and embraced its target.
For instance, looking at a mountain, which is both big and very far, the light from one’s eye
comes out and envelops the whole landscape, bringing with it the sight-indriya
correspondingly expanded in its scope and made weaker in ascertaining details. Looking at
an ant, which is both small and very near, the light of one’s eye comes out and envelops that
single ant somewhat as a magnifying lens would do, allowing the sight-indriya to operate in
concentrated form as a focused ray, apt to reveal minute details of the insect. This indriya,
this sight-sense, which comes out from mind through the eye as a sort of tentacle and
reaches out to the object by the medium of the eye light-ray, makes up a connection between
mind and object, allowing the first to assume pro tempore the actual form of the second, in
order to ascertain its nature.

What happens here, according to the synthetic formulation on the part of our text, seems to
be something like a coming out like a tentacle, through the light-rays of both the eyes of
Sulabha, of her higher mind-functions, understood as a kind of mind-stuff (sattva), so to
reach the corresponding mind-stuff of King Janaka, and take control of it.

The bridge, as it were, for such an intimate mental contact is afforded by the actual
conjunction of her visual rays with his ones -called here a "conjugation" (samyoga, a term
that may convey a powerful sexual connotation)-, performing a kind of subjugation of the
partner who is the passive receptacle of this mind-through-eyes penetration.

Something like this peculiar technique has also been theorized in ancient Buddhist
scriptures; the Buddha, we are told in the Pali texts, makes use of it whenever appropriate, to
learn whether an interlocutor is at least potentially receptive to his teachings. Nay, the
Vimamsakasutta lets us know that, when confronted by some powerful ascetic who
likewise is able, through perceiving other people’s minds, to ascertain whether the Teacher
himself is actually a true perfect Buddha (Samyaksambuddha) or not, he voluntarily opens
himself to such an examination: he actually shows how that person is to sound his own
mind, to the utmost limit of his abilities, in order to learn if there are any impure elements in
the Teacher’s thoughts, if he has had the insight of Dharma a long time ago, if fear,
sensuality, inconstancy etc... have still any place in his motivations. The Buddha, of course,
could fight against such penetration, but he chooses not to do so. He freely allows to be
scrutinized just to present his doctrine in a better light to that learned yogin.
 We witness here a quite different attitude on the part of King Janaka, who hotly
resents such a way of learning whether somebody has reached or not true Knowledge and
the consequent Liberation, Moksa. By his later remarks, we understand that not only he does
not like this experience at all, but he feels that she is perpetrating some kind of sexual
aggression. Et pour cause: if the would-be scrutinizer is not spontaneously admitted to
execute his mental probing, such a procedure, implying as it does a violent violation of
privacy -and privacy of somebody whose high level of spirituality makes him doubly worth
of respect!-, is akin on the mental plane to an attempted rape on the bodily one.

For a brief moment Janaka seems astonished by the Lady ascetic’s intrusion, which has
taken him unaware, then his immediate reaction is aggressive: against (prati) her
penetration, he grabs her mental mood (bhava) with his own: "pratijagraha bhavena
bhavam asya", like a wrestler grappling with an adversary, blocking her penetration.

The way in which this invisible match takes place according to the narrator is very
interesting, but the interior vision that accompanies it is also worth of being taken into
account. We are told that, albeit there were many people present in the King’s assembly,
these only externally were able to see the woman ascetic and Janaka seated there, while
they, thanks to their mind contact, actually had a different perception of their own forms.

Janaka was naked, as it were, before the interior vision of Sulabha, without the chattra, his
royal umbrella, and other paraphernalia. The mysterious Lady was seen by him without her
tridanda, the triple stick insignia of her ascetic vows. A silent dialogue took place, that, as
usual in this kind of literature, is quoted in full. The King was at last in a position to
question her about her identity, about what she really was doing there, and whose she was.
She had declared that she had come to ask for alms, but her singular behaviour was far from
plane begging: she was evidently keen on getting something different and more significant
from her visit.

So Janaka first of all asks: "What is this carya, this conduct of the Bhagavati?". Now
"Bhagavati" is a very respectful term, roughly a semantic equivalent of "Respected She-
Teacher". We find this epithet employed for guru-s and gods: both Krsna and the Buddha
are qualified as "Bhagavat"-s in such capacity. This is a very humble way of addressing the
Lady ascetic; yet, after some lines, becoming a lot more self-assertive, Janaka shall be
calling her "bhiksuki", a less respectful epithet. The shifting between these two terms
reflects a contrast quite vivid in the mind of Janaka himself between the obvious spiritual
standing of the powerful woman ascetic and her apparently rude approach to him.

Then, without waiting for an explanation -or since she kept a puzzling mental silence, not
deigning to deliver it-, the monarch proceeds to substantiate his claim to wisdom, disclosing
how he has reached his Illumination. He mentions his teacher Pañcasikha and the maxims
that he received from him, in order to show how it is possible that a King, who admittedly is
fully immersed in the pleasures and duties of his mundane condition, can yet be freed from
Ignorance’s bonds. Chattra and scepter do not matter at all in this respect, he explains,
because true Renunciation to the world is actually an internal matter, not the demeanour
consisting in bringing the tridanda or sporting the yellow or red vest of the ascetic, like her;
that is but the external sign of Renunciation, which should really consist in utter detachment
in regard of body pleasures and attachments, a goal reached thanks to the instructions that
only the guru can give. Such deep teaching is what actually makes the difference between a
normal human being and a Realized One.
Together with these remarks, he also blames her for the affectation of her ascetic condition;
in so many words, he says something like this:

"Do you think that the fact that you are exhibiting the kamandalu and the tridanda makes
you a liberated person? It is jñana, it is gnosis which makes the difference. This jñana I
have got, I look with equal eye to the friendly woman who smears my left arm with sandal
paste and to the male foe that wounds my right one with his sword. Have you got it too ?"

After he has started criticizing her, Janaka continues with a harsh reprimand for her
improper invasion of his privacy, which is undoubtedly full with sexual implications. So the
King mentions her delicate, beautiful and alluring young person, insinuating that it is
incompatible with an ascetic’s restraint; their very mental contact has strong sensual
underplays, in utter opposition to her professed vow of chastity, with the consequence of a
fall from her high spiritual standard. He tops his elenchus by bringing in several points of
law, each and everyone of them being based on varieties of sexual misbehaviour –after all,
he is well-known as an expert of Dharma…

The first sin of Sulabha, Janaka contends, is against Varnadharma: by her uninvited
intrusion, she is bringing about something like a mesalliance, mixing together people
belonging to different hierarchical compartments of Indian society, the Varna-s, she
presumably being a Brahmani, an exponent of the first Varna, while he is of Ksatriya stock.
According to generally accepted rules, there should not be a yoga, a sexual union, of these
two; such connection has nevertheless taken place in the moment she entered his body with
her mind. Note here that penetrating somebody, even if just by mind contact, is a manly act,
and our virile King was paradoxically reduced to a passive feminine condition by Sulabha,
herself a sort of mannish female personage, when trying to impose her Yoga-powers on him.
This is not only against Varnadharma, it is against nature! "Look here," he substantially
says "what you brought about is highly indecent. How did you dare to commit a penetration
(pravesa) of my very self? You, a mere female, took the initiative to enter the heart of a
male!" This inversion of sexual roles, a much-deplored (and much-coveted!) transgression
of Indian sexual mores, is not explicitly stated, but it is easily understood by the context.
The overtones of the Kung’s remarks are clear: "Look, you are a Brahmani (a term also
feminine in gender), and I am Ksatriya (a masculine term)". He is implying that by
transgressing the boundaries of Varna-s, she is also transgressing the boundaries of her
submissive feminine sexual role.

The second sin he reproaches to the Lady ascetic, is Asramasamkara, the confusion of
Asrama-s or stages of life. He brings her position out more or less in these terms: "You, who
have dared to enter my kingdom, my capital city and my very heart, are in the life-stage of a
person practicing Moksadharma, whereas I am in that of a grhastha, a householder." She is
living inside the pale of the rules set for the institutional pursuing of Moksa, which should
exclude by a matter of course such invasions as she has performed. We have already
observed that her position as a bhiksuki is fraught with ambiguities. Here the king seems to
think her vows equipollent with those that distinguish the asrama, the stage of life, of the
sannyasin, an indigestible notion in the traditional hindu milieu’s outlook of later times.
Please note that here Janaka maintains, presumably for the sake of the argument, that he
himself is in the third stage of life, institutionally not connected with the pursuit of Moksa,
yet he has just claimed to have actually reached Moksa, an experience that should have put
him above such stage. Anyway, the implication of his line of thought is, that the attainment
of Moksa is not a goal exclusively fit for the sannyasin-s: on the contrary, it is available,
even if in only in some extraordinary instance, for people belonging to any asrama.
The third sin that perhaps is imputable to the Lady ascetic is Gotrasamkara, a mixing of
people from the same Gotra, that is descending from the same brahmanic patrilinear clan.
Janaka does not know whether she actually is descended of his same Gotra, or a different
one; if the first is the case, her intrusion into his body is not only highly improper, but highly
sinful: something to be considered under the same light of incest.

The fourth potential sin she is committing, is against wedding-Dharma. If she has a
husband, and that husband is still in life elsewhere, she is actually indulging in a kind of
adulterous intercourse.

We have so four different sins she may be charged as being guilty of: where does she finds
the impudence to behave in such a way ? And this is not the end of the King’s argument.
"Let us suppose" he more or less continues "that you are a person who is her own owner,
who can therefore be considered free in her selection of a partner. This would not diminish
the gravity of your actually forcing an intercourse with me, an action denied to a person who
claims to have renounced the world. You indulge in the practice of Yoga to put yourself in a
dominating quasi-sexual position, a fact that ultimately shows how you are not detached at
all, but an ambitious upstart yogini, who for some unclear reasons tries to win respectable
spiritual people like me by ruthlessly employing both her charms and her yogic powers. A
sterile endeavour, indeed, this one! Do you really think you have succeeded into tempting
me with your comeliness and improper intimacy?".

And he concludes, to quote the Indian newmanized translation: "That association <…> of
man and woman when the latter, herself coveting, fails to obtain an individual of the
opposite sex that does not covet her, is, instead of being a merit, only a fault that is as
noxious as poison. Do not continue to touch me. Know that I am righteous. Do thou act
according to thy own scriptures. The enquiry thou hadst wished to make, viz., whether I am
or am not emancipated, has been finished. It behoves thee not to conceal all thy secret
motives. <…> It behoveth thee, therefore, to apprise me of the order to which thou
belongest by birth, of thy learning and conduct and disposition and nature, as also of the
object thou hast in view in coming to this place."

Note that Janaka is making use in his somewhat windy harangue of a language that the very
narrator, here the elder Bhisma, strongly disapproves of. Bhisma says that these words were
improper and rough and he was ill-treating the Lady ascetic without any justification by
addressing her in such a braggadocio. Wounded male pride seems bound to beget nastiness,
even in yhe case of admittedly superior characters.

During all this onslaught, Sulabha stands silent and completely peaceful; she is not disturbed
by any of the King’s remarks. When he is finished, she does not care to answer straightway
back: instead, she starts a long talk about a lot of different subjects, beginning with the way
in which a proper speech like hers should be –and shall be- delivered, continuing with a
presentation of the way in which the body of a human being is conceived and passes through
the several stages of the embryo till it is born, and quoting by the way a whole set of
precepts of Ksatriya lore about regiment of a kingdom. By these detailed technical
excursuses we learn that she is not only a very powerful yogini, but also something like a
professor: the scope of her learning is encyclopedic, enabling her to deliver lessons ex
cathedra even to Janaka, who is far from unlearned. One can divine that the King is not only
astonished by this exhibition of knowledge on the part of a mere woman, but also very much
uneasy about what she is silently hinting at by her longwinded answer. While ostensibly
proving she is also good at the peacock display he has been trying to impress and intimidate
her with, the Lady ascetic implicitly points out that he was acting more like a showing off
male than like a man of knowledge.

By accepting, as it were, to measure swords with Janaka on the ground of erudition, she in
the same breath derides his male vanity, reproaches her would-be castigator for letting
himself to be mislead by her luscious disguise, and makes an utter fool of him for reacting
on the base of social and sexual roles to the approach of a fellow Liberated One who was
simply trying to ascertain his true worth.

She comes at last, after a lot of didactic excursuses, to criticize him on the same
conventional base he was starting from: "What took you", she asks "to publish to each and
all these respectable people around here, all these wise Brahmans that are gracing your
assembly with their august presence, that, through my Yoga powers, there has been a very
intimate contact of us two, a male and a female? They did not know the fact before your
mentioning it! This was grossly improper on your part. Besides, this actually shows that you
are still very much bound to your sexual masculine role’s prejudices. In reality, when
Knowledge comes in, there is neither male nor female, neither varna nor asrama. You were
quoting so many Dharma rules pertaining to several bodily conditions, while body is out of
question, whenever insight of Reality is concerned. You should know, since you claim to be
a "realized person", that man’s true self, Atman, is completely different from body, and what
happens to the latter, being but exterior, does not concern Atman at all."

Now perhaps I should try to explain to you the key notions about Atman. Given the small
time at our disposal, it is more advisable just to simply tell you what Atman is not.

First of all, let me repeat that Atman is not body. Mind you, our term in fact used to be
employed to denote body in ancient Vedic times, just as it was occasionally kept in its Indo-
European etymological sense of "breath". For instance, it is said in a Rgvedic hymn to the
Wind, Vata, that he is the Atman of the Gods. It is probably in this capacity that we already
find it here and there used as a substitute of the defective reflexive pronoun sva. Anyway,
since Upanisadic times our term is mainly a label for the real identity of man, an identity
that is not bound any more to the restricted limits of the body. So true self is felt to be
extraneous to rules about its purity and its behaviour, be it concerning either sex, or cast, or
stage of life.

Secondly, Atman is not mind, since mind is bound to change at every moment, and we
differently feel it in different times and circumstances. Albeit a structural component of
human person more intimate than body is, mind is still something exterior to Atman.

It can be assimilated to a kind of interior theatre, the happenings in which –hope, distress,
anger, desire, fear, our very thoughts- we can witness. And this very fact shows that the
spectator inside the mind spectacle is different from it.

Thirdly, Atman is not the even more intimate consciousness horizon of blessed
indistinctness that comes to people in Samadhi, that is in the moment in which we are totally
unified with the object of meditation, because Samadhi comes and goes, because Samadhi,
which can be there and then again not be there, is also something exterior to our self,
whereas Atman by definition is, and cannot help being, always there.

So, Yajñavalkya said in the assembly of King Janaka himself that Atman is actually "Neti
neti", that is to say it is neither this nor that. It is something that we can show only by
denying each and every thing that pertains to objective world. As opposed to such, Atman is
pure subject and since subject is the necessary precondition of our experience, nay of our
being there in order to experience, nobody is, even for a minute, without Atman. Atman is
what allows people to live, to understand, to be conscious, without being himself -or better
itself!- concerned with what happens to the several empiric subjects. When somebody is
identified with Atman, as the Lady Sulabha points out, he cannot identify himself any more
with the fact of being a King, of being a male person, of being a Ksatriya and therefore he
cannot charge her of sins like the mixing of castes, mixing of Gotra, and so on. There is
neither Gotra nor cast for Atman, there is absolutely no role limitation for it. Neither there
truly is a plurality of Atman-s.

As the old-fashioned English prose of the old Indian translator has it, the concluding
remarks of the woman ascetic eloquently stress the point: " O King of Mithila, I am staying
in thee without touching thee at all even as a drop of water on a lotus leaf stays on it without
drenching it in the least. <…> My body is different from thine. But my soul is not different
from thy soul. When I am able to realise this, I have not the slightest doubt that my
understanding is really not standing in thine though I have entered into thee by Yoga. <…>
How then can an intermingling of orders be possible in consequence of this union of myself
with thee?" Then, at last, having denounced their superficiality and pointlessness, she deigns
to answer the King’s questions about her personal background: he should not be assuming
that she is a Brahmani, nor somebody of inferior birth: she actually is his savarna, a
Ksatriya like him, born by a pure womb, a daughter to the famous Royal Seer Pradhana,
who should be well-known to him, Sulabha by name. To the sacrifices of her ancestors god
Indra and other divine figures were in the habit of visibly attending, so she has grown in the
pride of her blood, with the firm belief that absolutely no man could be a bridegroom worth
of her. Hence her ascetic vows. As to leaving Janaka alone, that is not her intention: "Well"
she declares "I have asked you the hospitality that a Bhiksu (note that she here employs the
masculine gender to speak of herself ) is entitled to ask for one single night, and for this
single night I shall stay inside your heart (which is the King’s sattva, the word here does not
mean the actual body organ, but the interior part of the mind). Only after the whole night is
past I shall go away." The King did not know what to answer to her and he stayed in silence,
he was completely cowed by the Lady ascetic lesson.

This time spent by Sulabha inside Janaka’s heart is a strange and intriguing detail. Having
made her point, we should expect that she had left him as quickly as she came. Evidently
there is here something more than what the text cares to express. The quasi-coitus of our
characters is so important an experience, that it invites some lenghtening. Does she find in
the King some spiritual depth of which she was not immediately aware? Or, against her
proclaimed lack of sensuousness, does she positively enjoy their weird coming together?
Perhaps a key better to understand the situation is afforded by a further development of
Janaka’s illumination. He, as we observed, is nearly always presented as somebody who
needs getting his spiritual learning from other people; only in some connections he is said to
have reached Moksa by himself; for instance, we find a very interesting version of the tale of
his awakening in the Section on Knowledge of Tripurarahasya, a well-known Tantric text
much later than the Mahabharata, which, by the way, has been translated into Italian by
Alberto Pelissero. Here Janaka is introduced as actually narrating how he spontaneously,
without a teacher, attained ultimate Knowledge. I am quoting from a very literal English
translation, which is to be found in Ramanasrama at Tiruvannamalai in South India: "The
acutely intelligent can accomplish the purpose in a trice. <…> Realisation of truth requires
no effort on their part. Take my case for instance. On a moonlit summer night, I was lying
drunkenly on a downy bed in my pleasure garden in the loving embrace of my beloved. I
suddenly heard the sweet nectar-like songs of invisible aerial beings who taught me the
oneness of the Self of which I was unaware till that moment. I instantly thought over it,
meditated on it, and realised it in less that an hour. For about an hour and a half I remained
in Samadhi <…> I regained consciousness and began to muse over my experience ‘Oh
wonderful! How full of bliss I was! It was extraordinary. Let me return to it.’ <…> As soon
as I had decided on and attempted to turn my mind inward, another bright idea struck me:
‘What confusion I am in! Although I am always in the perfection of Bliss, what is it I want
to do? <…> How can Samadhi be brought about when I am already in the perfection of
bliss, for the Self is Bliss-Consciousness, even more perfect than infinite space?’ "

Here Janaka says he was reaching Knowledge in the very act of sexual congress, when the
unity of Atman was hinted to him with a beautiful song by some invisible beings. He gives a
detail that concerns us in this connection: for a full hour and an half, presumably still during
his sexual congress with the anonymous beloved, he recounts to have been engrossed in the
comprehension of the message he received. All alone -one is never so much alone as when
in congress with somebody completely out of the pale of one’s attention…- he is thinking
about Atman and in the end he realizes it. So, you see, the connection of Janaka with sex is
there, even in the moment of his knowledge. They coexist. Perhaps there is also some
feedback effect in their coexistence. Why it could not be the case also with Sulabha
intimately penetrating him for a whole night?