Vedantic Tales: The Discipleship of
Sri Nag , The Cobra

For weeks Sri Nag lay immobile in the dark recesses of the temple. Slowly his bruises healed and his ribs mended. But still he lay quietly indoors or in the grasses close by the temple. The villagers, thinking him to be dead, now walked carelessly across his field. It was all he could do to repress the flame of his anger, to control the instant flexing of his muscles, the coiling of his body, the spring toward the trespassers, the strike. He would force himself to lie still, unnoticed, and to say his mantra out loud, his voice like the whisper of the wind.

Slowly the urge to give chase became less compelling, and slowly, also, his taste for mice and frogs left him. Simultaneously, almost without conscious thought on his part, the sense that the field was his exclusive hunting ground lost its once gripping possession of him. He had no desire to hunt; what, then, was a hunting ground? Who, then, were trespassers? And why, then, did it matter that villagers came and went? Toward whom was he once so angry? The-field began to take on a different aspect for him. It was no longer his; it was a beautiful place that he shared with its other life a life that seemed to be growing more and more exuberant. Gradually his depression lifted. But eating only fruit and roots, he grew ever more thin and depleted. He was too weak to shed his dull and tattered skin; nor did it feel too tight, for recently his body had not grown. Thus the months passed. He lay in the temple and sometimes outside in the sun, repeating his mantra, remembering the sadhu, driving all other thoughts from his mind. Indeed, those thoughts had quieted of themselves.

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