CHAPTER X.
BHRIGU’S CONFERENCE WITH KÁLA OR DEATH.
Argument. Bhrigu’s grief at seeing the death-like body of his son.
Vasishtha continued:—After the lapse of a thousand years, the great Bhrigu rose from his holy trance (anaesthesia); and was disengaged in his mind from its meditation of God, as in a state of suspension or syncope of his holy meditations.
2. He did not find his son lowly bending down his head before him, the son who was the leader of the army of virtues, and who was the personified figure of all merits.
3. He only beheld his body, lying as a skeleton before him, as it was wretchedness or poverty personified in that shape.
4. The skin of his body was dried by the sun, and his nostrils snoring as a hooping bird; and the inner entrails of his belly, were sounding as dry leather-pipes with the croaking of frogs.
5. The sockets of his eyes, were filled with new-born worms grown in them; and the bones of his ribs had become as bars of a cage, with the thin skin over them resembling the spider’s web.
6. The dry and white skeleton of the body, resembled the desire of fruition, which bends it to the earth, to undergo all the favourable and unfavourable accidents of life.
7. The crown of the head had become as white and smooth (by its baldness or grey hairs), as the phallus of Siva anointed with camphor, at the Indu-varcha ceremony in honor of the moon.
8. The withered head erected on the bony neckbone, likened the soul supported by the body:—(either to lead or be led by it).