Dasa’s First Encounter with the Yogi is a formative episode in Dasa’s childhood, when an accidental visit to a forest hermitage gives him his first powerful glimpse of a life beyond worldly appearances. The encounter is not a conversion or a settled doctrine: it begins as a bodily experience of awe, continues through humble acts of offering, and survives afterward as a dim possibility that the life he has lost might be replaced by the dignity of yoga.

The Forest and the Hermit

Dasa has been living among cowherds after being removed from the royal household as a boy. While searching for honey in a forest, he becomes absorbed in its interwoven sights and sounds and forgets his original purpose. A narrow path through tall ferns leads him to a many-trunked banyan and a small hut woven from fern leaves. Beside it sits a yogi, motionless, with his gaze turned inward. Dasa has seen holy men before, but this hermit’s stillness and secluded setting strike him as unusually compelling.

The force of the encounter is registered through Dasa’s perception rather than through explanation. He watches light move across the yogi and notices that the surrounding forest life—the birds, monkeys, and a bee settling briefly on the hermit’s face—seems separate from the man’s inward absorption. The yogi appears untouched by the world around him, as if rain and fire could not reach him. Dasa senses, without being able to formulate it as an argument, that the visible world might be only a surface over a more fundamental reality.

A Revelation Before Words

The yogi’s apparent freedom from ordinary sensation awakens in Dasa both fear and yearning. He intuits that the hermit has passed through the world of changing sights and sounds toward something essential and unchanging. This is not an intellectual conclusion: Dasa, though he has received instruction from Brahmans, could not explain the insight in words. It arrives as reverence, a physical shiver, and a desire for the kind of life the yogi seems to embody.

The scene also touches Dasa’s memory of his origins. The hermit strangely reminds him of his royal birth, though Dasa is now living with herdsmen and has nearly let his earlier life recede into something dreamlike. In the yogi he glimpses a different form of dignity and power, one not based on sovereignty. The episode thus links a lost worldly identity with the possibility of spiritual authority without resolving the contrast between them.

Dasa remains so absorbed that he cannot later say whether he watched for hours or for days. When he finally returns to the meadow, a herdsman’s question initially leaves him bewildered. He explains that he had gone looking for honey but was drawn to a hermit whose face seemed to glow. He wants to visit again and bring gifts, recognizing the yogi as a holy man even though he does not know how to address him.

Offerings and a Fading Trace

The herdsman advises Dasa to bring milk and sweet butter, and tells him that no greeting is needed: he should bow and leave the gifts. Dasa follows this practice. When he returns, the clearing is empty, and he does not venture into the hut; he places the offerings at its entrance and goes away. For as long as the herd remains nearby, he brings gifts each evening. On another visit he sees the yogi meditating again and stands in the same state of bliss, receiving what he experiences as strength and felicity from the hermit’s presence.

After the cowherds move on to new pastures, the memory persists for a time. Alone, Dasa sometimes imagines himself as a hermit and practitioner of yoga. But the dream gradually recedes as he grows into a strong young man and throws himself into the sports and quarrels of his companions. The encounter does not redirect his life immediately; its effect is quieter and more durable, a faint suggestion that yoga might one day offer a replacement for the princely life and sovereignty he has lost.

Meaning and Narrative Role

The episode’s importance lies in the difference between an insight briefly felt and a path actually followed. Dasa experiences the yogi’s stillness as a possible escape from the flux of ordinary appearances, yet he cannot sustain that perception as a conscious practice. His later life among the cowherds absorbs him again, while the memory remains as a residual longing. The story therefore presents spiritual aspiration not as a simple break with the world but as an impression that can fade, persist, and become meaningful only in retrospect.

The episode also establishes a recurring contrast between worldly identity and renunciation. Dasa has been separated from royal life, and the hermit makes another kind of existence imaginable; nevertheless, the child’s longing does not erase his attachment to ordinary pursuits. The encounter gives him an inward point of comparison, not an answer. Its open-endedness preserves both the attraction of yoga and the distance between Dasa’s first awe and any achieved spiritual discipline.