Jada Bharata — who became a deer

A king grew so attached to a fawn that his next birth was a deer's

The man who left everything

Bharata was a great king — the son of Rishabha, and, by the text's account, the one Bharatavarsha is named for.

In good time he divided the kingdom among his sons and went to do solitary practice at the Pulaha ashram on the bank of the Gandaki river.

For years he did what was to be done — penance, discipline, solitude.

By the river

One day, while bathing, he saw a pregnant doe come to drink, and just then a lion roared.

She leapt in fright. In the leap her newborn fell into the river. The doe reached the far bank, but, distressed and exhausted, collapsed in a cave and died.

Bharata lifted the newborn fawn and raised it.

Exactly where renunciation was meant to be, attachment moved in. Bharata worried about it, searched for it, ordered his day around it; even in meditation his thoughts went to it.

He died with his mind fixed on that deer, looking for it — and was born as a deer.

But a fragment of his practice stayed with him, so he was a deer that remembered its past life. He kept near the ashrams of sages and let no new attachment form.

Jada Bharata

The next birth was in the house of a brahmin of the Angirasa line.

This time Bharata resolved that the world would not catch him again. He pretended to be deaf, mute and half-witted — "jada", inert.

People took him for a fool. He did any low work, ate whatever he was given, showed nothing.

After his father's death his half-brothers made him a farm ox.

Once, bandits who were devotees of Bhadra Kali seized him to sacrifice before the goddess for a son. As the sword was raised, the goddess herself burst from the image, in fury, and destroyed the bandits.

Bharata was unmoved the whole time, expecting nothing.

The palanquin

Rahugana, king of Sindhu-Sauvira, was on his way to see Kapila. He was short one bearer.

His men grabbed the large, healthy-looking "fool" by the road.

Bharata carried the pole, but stepped around every ant on the path, so the palanquin lurched.

The king threatened him, mocked him.

Bharata answered suddenly — in full, and clear. "The burden is not on me. The body carries the body. Fat and thin, king and bearer, living and dead — these are all conditions of matter, not of the witness that is watching."

The king leapt down from the palanquin and fell at his feet — asking, who are you.

Bharata's teaching went on into the tale of "the forest of the world" — a merchant lost in a wilderness of thieves, mirages, thorns and pits.

The point

In this whole book, every other devotee reaches God by wanting him.

Bharata's lesson is the other face of it — a person becomes what he attaches to, and if even a sage can be pulled back by one fawn, then no attachment is small.

He does not reach God by any grand devotion — he reaches him by refusing every hook the world offers, including the hook of being counted as someone.

Note: The Jada Bharata story is in the fifth canto of the Bhagavata Purana (chapters 7–14, mainly 8–13); the Vishnu Purana (2.13–16) has nearly the same form — the deer, the "jada" pretence, Rahugana, the discourse. That Bharatavarsha is named for this Bharata is the text's own claim; there are other Bharatas of the name. The human-sacrifice episode is in the text and is kept brief here — it is there to show Bharata's total evenness, not for the detail. This chapter is deliberately the quietest and plainest in the book, and it stands ninth so that there is a pause before the last loud chapter. This site's Vishnu-Puran epic also tells Jada Bharata.

Source: from the Bhagavata Purana, Jada Bharata — who became a deer