He lost himself in sleep with a happy smile on his lips. So he continued his pleasant contemplation, from time to time filling his gourd with water or picking up fruit which had fallen to the ground at his feet. Each time he stirred with less and less pleasure, since the drowsiness of contemplation was more and more strongly mastering him, and since he had already eaten the fruit which was nearest to him, he had to exert himself to obtain them from the tree.
Finally he said to himself:
“I’m a foolish man far removed from truth, and that’s why I have such foolish cares. Isn’t it because this good deity is so slow with her revelations? Here before me on the tree is ripe fruit and my stomach is empty.... But doesn’t the law of necessity say: ‘where there is an hungry stomach and fruit, the latter must of necessity enter the former’?... So, kind necessity, I submit to your power.... Isn’t that the greatest blessedness?”
Thereupon he buried himself in complete contemplation like Darnu, and he waited for necessity to manifest herself. In order to facilitate her task, he held his mouth open facing the fig tree....
He waited one day, two, three.... Gradually the smile congealed upon his face, his body dried up, the pleasant rotundity of his form disappeared, the fat under his skin wasted away and the sinews stood out distinctly through it. When at last the fruit ripened and fell, striking Purana on the nose,—the sage did not hear it fall nor did he feel the blow.... Another pair of doves built a nest in the folds of his turban, fledglings peeped soon in the nest, and the shoulders of Purana were covered thickly with the droppings of the birds. When the luxurious vines had enveloped Purana, it was impossible to distinguish him from his companion—the obstinate sage struggling against Necessity from the good-natured sage willingly submitting to it.
Absolute silence reigned in the temple, and the gleaming idol looked down on the two sages with its enigmatic and strange smile.
Fruit ripened and fell from the trees, the brook bubbled on, white clouds sailed across the blue sky and looked down into the interior of the temple and the sages sat on without manifesting any signs of life—one in the blessedness of denial, the other in the blessedness of submission to Necessity.
V
Eternal night had spread its black wings over both and no living being would ever have known the truth which the two sages had perceived at the summit of the fifty joints of the reed. But before the last spark which illumined in the darkness the consciousness of wise Darnu had been finally extinguished,—he heard again the same voice as before: Necessity was laughing in the gathering darkness, and this laughter, taciturn and soundless, seemed to Darnu a presentiment of death....
“Poor Darnu,” said the implacable deity, “pitiable sage! You thought you could leave me, you hoped that you could lay aside my yoke and by turning into an immobile column purchase thereby the consciousness of spiritual liberty....”