After being cursed, Pariksit Maharaja did not go back to his kingdom. He went and sat on the bank of the Ganga where he left his royal dress, his bow and arrows, the crown and everything. He wore only his dhoti and he sat on the bank of the Ganges, facing that sacred river. In the meantime, all the great rsis and maharsis, realized souls and Vaisnavas like Narada, Vyasa, Agastya, Gautama, Vaisistha, Atri, Visvamitra, Parasurama, Parasara, Vira, they all came there. There was no computer system, no telephone or internet, nothing. So how did they know about this?
But yet, in a moment they all came there. Sages came from all over the world. Kasyapa rsi came all the way from the Caspian sea. Vasistha came from so far away, from Mongolia. So many rsis, about eighty-eight thousand rsis maharsis came from different parts of the world in a moment. We cannot imagine. So many brahma-jnani rsis, karmis, jnanis, tapasvis, yogis, they all came there and they were talking amongst each other. Pariksit Maharaja asked them very humbly, “I want to know that if a man is on his death bed and he is just now dying, what should he do? Also, if a man is not dying today or immediately but he will die tommorow, or the day after tommorow, or in one year, two years, four years, twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years, five hundred years, in lakhs years, in five lakhs year, or in koti crores of years, what should he do?”
Like us, within a hundred years, we must die. We hear of people who live to the age of one hundred. But it is very rare to live for more than a hundred and twenty years. Yet we hear that Indra and all others live for so many thousands and lakhs of years. More than them, Lord Brahma lives for so many yugas. Four yugas makes a catur-yuga, then so many catur-yugas makes one day and also one night of Brahma. Like this, there are so many lakhs and lakhs years in one month of Brahma, and then one month, a year, and after one year, a hundred years. So Brahma lives for so many lakhs and lakhs years.
But he will also die. So we will surely also die. But how can we escape from death? How can we be liberated and how can we be happy? Anyone told Pariksit Maharaja that, “We should meditate on brahma.” Anyone else told him, “Oh, you should do austerities.” “Oh, you should give lakhs and lakhs cows to brahmanas.” “Oh, you should go and take bath in the Ganges.” So all the rsis were telling him so many different things. But in the meantime, a sixteen year old naked, very beautiful young boy, being covered with dust, was coming into that assembly. He came near to Pariksit Maharaja, who stood up at once and folddeated his hands. Then Pariksit Maharaja went somewhat forward and welcomed Sukadeva Gosvami and gave him a very high asana.
[Spoken by Srila Gurudeva on December 3rd, 1998, Malaysia, published as part of the Bhakta Bandhav Anthology, Volume 25]