Tripura Rahasya on beauty and romantic love

Advaita Vedanta puts forth the simple premise that life is fundamentally suffering. This suffering shows up in our lives when we mindlessly pursue our desires. An area that ancient yogis and sages recognized held great potential for sorrow is the realm of love and sex. In this area of our lives, when we are unconscious, we allow attachment to calcify in the mind by replaying a memory of pleasure and superimposing our own imagination on top of that memory. Today I am sharing a story from an old scripture that illustrates this point.

In the Advaita (and Shakta) text Tripura Rahasya, we find the following story narrated by the beautiful, liberated yogini Hemalekha. She tells her husband Hemachuda of a king who is wedded to a beautiful princess he is very passionate about. This princess falls in love with a servant in the palace and runs off to make love to him every night. In an effort to deceive her husband, this princess gets him drunk every night and sends in a maidservant to take her place in bed. Night after night, this prince makes love to this maidservant, believing her to be his beloved wife. In his drunken stupor, he never realizes that the woman in bed with him is not his wife. During the day, he looks upon his wife longingly, remembering the nights he thought he’d spent in her arms, and falling deeper and deeper in love.