Nachiketa Story
The story of Nachiketa is famous for all time. Here is a link to some details about this. It is from the Katha Upanishads.
Many people are mystified by the Upanishads. Some of it is so cryptic that to understand it one has to know the history of the period in which the principal ones were composed. There is also the difficulty of knowing which person had which idea.
However, the value can be extracted from this story if one takes into account the lifestyle of the time and the value of certain items by the people of the time.
The boy Nachiketa observed that his father, a brahmin named Uddalaka, offered some old cows for a sacrifice. This is astonishing because it means that in the area where they lived, people of the highest caste sacrificed cows, a species which are rated as being sacred today.
There is also a hint that there was human sacrifice at the time. When Nachiketa spoke to his father, asking about being given way for a sacrifice, the father refused to deal with the issue twice and then consigned the son to death, which to those people was a deity, not a dead body only, as we regard it today.
Being pissed off with his son for asking about being given away, the father assigned the boy to death itself, to the deity of death. This meant that the boy was consigned to be killed in a human sacrifice or by the mere utterance of a Vedic hymn.
It so happened that the boy’s body went into a coma. His astral body when to the astral dimension where humans go to be judged after death. It was for a time of three days and three nights. This boy’s astral body was in the astral dimension hereafter for that time, and then Death personified arrived there. The deity offered three wishes which he would fulfill because the body had to wait patiently for three days and three nights. This means that Nachiketa’s physical body was in a coma (samadhi) like a dead body back in the physical world.
Some people at the time, were so powerful, that the word of a father was such that it immediately took effect, so that Nachiketa’s physical body was immediately incapacitated as soon as his father consigned him to be the property of the deity of death.
The boy did not think out nor know what would actually happen. In fact, his name Nachi means one who does not know (no insight). But the boy had a keen intuition and he was not afraid to ask whatever came to mind.
Death personified gave the boy three wishes.
· be physical again and have a good relationship with his father who got irritated and consigned him to the deity.
· be proficient at the special fire sacrifice through which Nachiketa would go to heaven hereafter.
· understand details of the psychology of the self.
Here is a link to the story.
