Dasa and the reclusive yoga master's master-apprentice relationship

Dasa’s relationship with the yogi is a passage from distant reverence to intimate discipleship, formed less through explanation than through repeated acts of service, silence, and a startling lesson in Maya. First glimpsed beneath a banyan tree, the yogi seems to Dasa a figure of concentrated spiritual power; years later, when the fugitive returns to the same forest, the old man’s laughter unsettles the story Dasa tells about himself. The relationship reaches its decisive form when Dasa comes back from the spring with water: the yogi recognizes him as a disciple with a look, and Dasa’s remaining life belongs to the forest and to service.

First Encounter and Childhood Reverence

As a boy, Dasa discovers the yogi while following a narrow path through tall ferns. Beneath a many-trunked banyan stands a small hut woven from fern leaves, and beside it the old man sits motionless, straight-backed, his eyes open but turned inward. Dasa recognizes him as a holy man, yet this particular ascetic seems rarer and more venerable than others he has seen. The yogi’s stillness and concentrated presence make an impression so strong that Dasa does not dare cross the invisible distance around him with a greeting.

Dasa’s first approach is indirect and deferential. He brings gifts, and another herdsman tells him that there is no need to address the yogi: he should simply bow and leave them before him. Dasa follows this counsel, laying the gifts at the hut’s entrance rather than entering. While the herdsmen remain nearby, he returns with offerings each evening and once visits in daylight, finding the yogi again absorbed in meditation. Standing near him, Dasa feels himself receiving strength and felicity from the old man’s presence.

The encounter leaves a trace that outlasts the boy’s stay in the area. After the herd moves on, Dasa sometimes imagines himself as a hermit and practitioner of yoga. Those daydreams fade as he grows into a strong young man drawn into the sports and brawls of his companions, but an inkling remains: the lost sovereignty of his princely birth might someday be replaced by the dignity and power of yoga. In retrospect, the first meeting gives his later return to the forest the quality of a remembered possibility becoming real.

Return to the Forest and Life of Service

Years later, after fugitive life has left Dasa exhausted and frightened, he finds his way back to the yogi’s hut. The old man is still sitting motionless before it. To Dasa, the place seems untouched by the time and suffering he has endured; he feels again the admiration, love, and longing that had marked his childhood encounter. Before asking to stay, he enters the nearly empty hut, takes an empty pouch, gathers food, and fills the yogi’s water gourd.

Dasa remains beside the ascetic and makes himself useful without knowing whether the old man has truly noticed him. He renews the leaf pallet, finds food for them both, repairs the hut, and begins building a second one nearby. He lives like a servant in the presence of a nobleman, or like a small tame creature scarcely noticed by its human companions. The arrangement offers relief from the fear and remorse of his life as a fugitive: his sleep is no longer troubled by frightful dreams, and for stretches of time he forgets what has happened.

The closeness is therefore initially an asymmetrical one. Dasa longs to be accepted and initiated into the secrets of a hermit’s life, but the yogi gives him no clear assurance and appears not to notice him. Dasa tries to imitate the old man’s posture and inward gaze. His body quickly rebels: his back aches, his limbs stiffen, mosquitoes and itches force him to move, and the hoped-for stillness will not last. At rare moments, however, he feels an airy lightness, as if body and soul might shed their weight and share in a purer, timeless existence. Those fleeting experiences sharpen his desire for a teacher even as the yogi’s reserve leaves him unsure how to ask.

Confession, Laughter, and the Lesson of Maya

Dasa’s attempt at ascetic discipline falters when dreams of Pravati and memories of fugitive life return. Restless and ashamed of his inability to sit still, he watches the yogi in meditation. One day, as the old man rises and turns toward the hut, Dasa steps into his path. He has waited a long time for this chance and speaks with the courage of fear, asking forgiveness for disturbing the yogi’s peace and explaining that he wants to become like him.

The confession recounts Dasa’s reversals: born a prince but cast out to become a herdsman, he grew up strong and happy, then left the herdsmen to seek Pravati’s hand. He believed she loved him and returned each evening to her arms. When the Rajah took Pravati, Dasa says, the pain transformed his life; he killed the Rajah, became a fugitive, and reached the forest unable to endure his existence. He presents himself as a foolish man and killer, afraid that he may still be caught and executed, and asks for a way out of his suffering.

The yogi listens with downcast eyes. Then he opens them, studies Dasa’s face, and begins to smile and laugh. He shakes his head and says, “Maya! Maya!” The sudden laughter, breaking through his usual impassivity, gives Dasa no settled answer. He cannot tell whether it is benevolent or mocking, comforting or condemning; whether it rejects him, dismisses him, or invites him to share the yogi’s way of seeing.

Dasa spends the night turning over both the laugh and the word. He understands Maya as a name for the life he has described: his youth, Pravati, love and its pleasures, and the bitter misery bound up with them. From the yogi’s perspective, human life appears as an illusion or spectacle, bright in appearance but not to be taken seriously. Dasa cannot yet adopt that view. His memories have returned in full, and the forest has been an asylum where he recovered and gathered strength, not a place where he has learned the yogi’s art. He decides he should leave rather than remain indefinitely in hiding.

The Water Gourd and Acceptance as Disciple

Dasa means to depart at dawn, but wakes after the sun is already high. He waits for the yogi to finish meditating and walking, because he does not want to leave without saying goodbye and still has a request to make. When the master rises, Dasa again blocks his way, bows, and persists until the yogi turns an inquiring look toward him. Dasa says he is going and will no longer disturb the old man’s peace, but asks to be taught more about Maya.

The yogi answers not with an explanation but with a task. He holds out the water gourd and gestures for Dasa to wash his hands. After Dasa obeys, the old man empties the remaining water into the ferns and gives him the gourd to refill. Dasa goes down the familiar footpath to the spring, carrying it to the pool that has so often reflected deer, treetops, and sky. As he bends over the water, he sees his own face and feels uncertain. Though he has chosen to leave, it pains him that the yogi has not asked him to stay.

The errand becomes the setting for the lesson Dasa requested. As he returns to consciousness after what seems to him to have been a life of sovereignty, love, war, loss, and imprisonment, he finds himself in the forest with the gourd still in his hands. The spring, fern thicket, hut, and waiting yogi surround him as before. He realizes that he has neither been a Rajah nor a father, and that the life he experienced was Maya. The vision has encompassed imagined riches and responsibilities as well as jealousy, battle, bereavement, and despair; to dismiss it as simply nothing would miss the force of what he has undergone.

Shaken, Dasa trembles so violently that water spills over the gourd’s rim onto his feet. He wants to stop the wheel of life and extinguish himself, but sees no escape in death: unconsciousness or sleep is only a pause before the flood of life resumes. Instead, he remembers the practical errand. The yogi asked for water; obeying and serving seem easier and less destructive than taking command or responsibility. Dasa fills the gourd again and returns to the hut.

Discipleship and the Relationship’s Ending

When Dasa reaches the hut, the yogi receives him with a look that is questioning, compassionate, amused, and quietly complicit. It holds both the perspective of an older boy watching a younger one return from a difficult test and the recognition that Dasa has lived through what seemed to be an entire life. The apparent absence of more than a short interval and the scale of Dasa’s inward ordeal meet in that glance: he has been gone only briefly, yet has tasted a principality, a family, war, loss, and the turning wheel.

The narrative does not present the yogi’s lesson as a spoken doctrine or spell out every implication of Dasa’s experience. Instead, the old man’s look confirms that a relationship has come into being between master and disciple. That recognition quiets Dasa’s fruitless thoughts and binds him to discipline and service. The bond that began when a child left offerings at the entrance to the hut now has a definite form, though it remains expressed through gesture rather than instruction in words.

The account closes by refusing to narrate the rest of Dasa’s life: what follows takes place beyond the realm of pictures and stories, and he never again leaves the forest. His discipleship is thus both an arrival and an ending. The yogi accepts him not at the height of a heroic achievement, but after Dasa has been shaken by the apparent impermanence of everything he thought he had lived through and has chosen the modest, concrete act of carrying water. Their relationship makes service the visible answer to a lesson that cannot be reduced to an explanation of Maya.