The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 2 (of 4), Part 2 (of 2)Valmiki
Religion
The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 2 (of 4), Part 2 (of 2)
Valmiki
Hinduism -- Doctrines -- Early works to 1800; Religious life -- Hinduism -- Early works to 1800
25. He believed his dead body was beset all about by his kind friends,
weeping upon it with their sad and sorrowful countenances, and loudly
lamenting and crying over it like birds upon trees.
26. He thought his faithful wife sitting at his feet as handsome
lotus flower, and weeping as profusely with a shower of tears from
her lotus-like eyes, as the rushing of waters at the breaking of an
embankment.
27. His sorrowing mother with her loud wailing and mournful ditties,
was buzzing like the humming bee; and holding the chin newly over grown
with whiskers in her tender hand.
28. His friends were sitting by his side with their dejected looks, and
with trickling tears dropping down their faces and cheeks; and these
washed his dead body, as the melting dews on withered leaves, bedew the
parent tree.
29. The members of his body now ceased to befriend him, like strangers
who decline to become friends for fear of future separation, or turning
unfriendly ever afterwards in life.
30. The open lips leaving the teeth bare, seemed to deride at the
vanity of human life; as the white and bony teethed ascetics and cynics
do on fickleness of worldly events.
31. His mouth was as speechless, as that of a devotee in his
meditation; and the body was as motionless, as it was made of mud and
clay; it slept to wake no more, like a sage absorbed in his hypnotism.
32. It remained quiet with its lifted ears, as if to listen to the
cries and wailings of the mourning friends; in order to judge the
degrees of their affection and grief for him.
33. Then the relatives raised their loud lamentations, with the sobbing
and beating of their breasts, swooning and rising, and shedding floods
of tears from their leaky eyes.
34. Afterwards the sorrowful relations, removed the disgusting corpse
with their bitter cries for its funeral, seeing it no more in future in
this passing world.
35. Then they bore the body to the funeral ground with its rotten flesh
and entrails, and daubed all over with mud and dust, and placed it on
the ground, strewn over with unnumbered bones and skeletons, and dried
and rotten carcasses.
36. Flights of flying vultures shaded the sunbeams on high, and the
burning piles drove the darkness below; the fearful glare of open
mouthed jackals flashed on all sides, as they were flames of living
fire.
37. There the ravens were bathed in floods of blood, and the crows
dipping their wings in it; ravenous birds were tearing the entrails,
and the old vultures were entrapped in those strings.
38. The friends of the dead burnt the corpse in the funeral flame and
reduced to ashes; and the moisture of the body flew in fumes, as the
waters of the ocean are evaporated by the marine fire.
39. The burning wood of the funeral pile, consumed the dead body with
loud cracking noise; and the dry fuel of the pile, flashed in ambient
flames with curling smoke over them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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