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The history of Ajāmila is described in detail by Prabhupāda both in the Sixth Canto of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam and in the book A Second Chance. Most of us know the basic history: In his youth, he was a pure brāhmana who worshiped Lord Viṣnu, but he fell into a degraded life after seeing a prostitute embracing a drunk man on the side of the road.
Considering he was practicing devotional service since early life, how did Ajāmila fall so easily? A woman and a man embracing is a common scene nowadays. For most of us, it doesn’t seem like anything special. How is it that it had such a profound effect on Ajāmila, to the point of making him abandon his young wife and elderly parents and give up all religious principles to live with a prostitute? Does it mean that living a guarded life can actually prove a disadvantage in the long run?
One point to consider is that Ajamila was able to remain pure in part of his life, something that not many of us can claim. Most of us never really reach this stage of purity at any stage of our lives. We are bombarded by sexual stimulation since we are children and later get involved with different bad habits, including intoxication and promiscuity, which we have difficulty abandoning later, even when we start practicing Krsna consciousness. We may be able to restrict ourselves from grossly breaking the spiritual principles, but mentally we are often still meditating on these things.
A second point is that the fall of Ajamila is actually quite similar to something that is very common nowadays: divorce and remarriage. It’s mentioned in the verses that Ajamila married the woman with whom he became involved. Putting it in modern terms, therefore, he abandoned his first wife and married another. Something common nowadays.
One can argue that he remarried a degraded woman, which is later pointed to by the Yamadutas as a reason for taking him to hell. However, there is also a nuance here: the woman with whom Ajamila got involved is mentioned as a “prostitute” in the text, following the context that is used for the word in other passages of the scriptures. She was not selling her body but was some kind of unmarried young woman from a lower social class who was having affairs with different men. In other passages, she is described as a “sudrani” and as a “maidservant,” which gives us a bit more context. According to the strict Vedic principles, she was considered a prostitute, but in modern terms, she was more like what we call a free woman.
Ajamila saw her with the drunken man and apparently understood the situation, seeing that if he offered her something better, she would probably come to him. He thus offered her a job as a maidservant in his house, which she gladly accepted. Once they were living under the same roof, it was easy for him to get involved with her. We don’t know how long this process took. It’s described that Ajamila at first tried to resist, using the spiritual knowledge he had gotten to try to control his mind and so on, but ultimately he was unsuccessful. Maybe Ajamila attempted to resist at first, but after meeting the lady again in different situations, his resistance was eventually broken. Perhaps the lady didn’t have a place to live, and he thought it would be pious to give her shelter and a job. We can only speculate, since such details are not included in the narration, but we can imagine that it followed the principle of fire and butter. Ajamila tried to resist, but gradually he got involved with her.
In this way, it’s not that Ajamila immediately went from his pure life to a life of crime; it was a gradual process that took several weeks, or months, possibly even years.
Therefore, the fall of Ajamila didn’t happen just because he saw a man and a woman embracing, but because he saw a woman he was attracted to in a lascivious situation. That woman was available, and there was a good possibility of him getting involved with her. That’s actually quite a common situation.
Another point is that Ajamila was a high-class man who was young and beautiful. He had a privileged position in society and was relatively wealthy. For most men nowadays, the only thing that prevents them from having affairs with different women is the lack of opportunity. Unfortunately, that was not the case for Ajamila.
A third point is that before meeting the maidservant, Ajamila was having a sexual life with his brahmana wife following religious principles, but somehow the idea of being involved with a lascivious woman sounded more attractive. Eventually, he completely lost his intelligence and left home, taking all valuables with him to live with this woman. He didn’t even care that he had a young wife and elderly parents who depended on him.
This shows us the importance of the principle of “no illicit sex.” If one can abstain completely from sexual life and remain a celibate, going directly from the stage of brahmacary to sannyasa, this is generally considered better, but if one has a need for romantic affection, this should happen within the context of family life. A good reference in this context is ŚB 3.14.20:
“As a fort commander very easily conquers invading plunderers, by taking shelter of a wife one can conquer the senses, which are unconquerable in the other social orders.”
In his purport, Prabhupāda mentions:
“The bodily senses are considered plunderers of the fort of the body. The wife is supposed to be the commander of the fort, and therefore whenever there is an attack on the body by the senses, it is the wife who protects the body from being smashed. The sex demand is inevitable for everyone, but one who has a fixed wife is saved from the onslaught of the sense enemies.”
The history of Ajāmila can be thus studied as an example of a failure in applying this principle. As long as he was with his wife, he was leading a pious life, but as soon as he got involved with sex life outside the family, his problems started.
The next issue was that, unlike his legal wife, this woman was not with Ajamila because of love and was not duty-bound to him. She was hanging out with him just because he was giving her facilities in the form of presents and so on. After they went to live together, he was also maintaining a house with a good standard of living, which resulted in mounting expenses.
The valuables Ajamila took with him quickly ran out, and thus he started getting money by any possible means. He somehow learned to gamble, and when even that didn’t prove sufficient, he resorted to stealing, kidnapping, and even killing. Money was a necessity because if the money ran out, the woman would leave him.
This is, of course, very condemnable, but that’s another field where we may not have the high moral ground we may like to think. Most of the available jobs nowadays would be classified as ugra-karma by Vedic standards. We work for companies that are literally destroying the planet and killing millions of animals and people due to pollution and other issues. We may not be the ones doing the killing, but we are participating in it indirectly. Apart from that, most investments nowadays are a form of gambling.
Apparently, Ajamila still had some vestige of religious consciousness, because he married this woman and was maintaining their ten children. He was not resorting to abortions. This is actually quite pious by modern standards.
The maidservant also seems not to be too bad by modern standards. At least she was cooking for him and taking care of the children, things that not all modern women accept to do. It’s also not mentioned that she continued to have affairs with other men; therefore, we can reasonably presume that once they got married, they worked as a regular couple, with a growing family.
One conclusion, thus, is that we shouldn’t look down on Ajamila, because most of us may have similar stories. Ajamila was, in some areas, reasonably pious by modern standards, raising ten children and keeping his second marriage until the end. Taking everything into account, they were not very different from many modern couples.
The main lesson of this history, however, is about the potency of the holy names. Despite his mistakes, Ajāmila chanted the holy names at the last moment by remembering his youngest son, whom he had named Narayana. Even though he called his son, Lord Narayana immediately heard his name being called and immediately dispatched a team of Viṣnudutas to protect him. The yamadutas were already snatching the soul out of the body, but the Viṣṇudutas checked them in an amazing philosophical exchange that is described in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam.
The result is that this chanting freed Ajāmila from his accumulated karma and restored the original duration of his life. In this way, he was returned to his body with ten more years to live. Purified, he broke with his bad habits and moved to a temple of Lord Viṣnu, where he spent the last years of his life chanting and performing devotional service. In the end, the same Ajāmila who fell with the prostitute and committed so many mistakes went back to Godhead with the same Viṣnudutas who had previously saved him.
You can find a discussion of what exactly “illicit sex” means in the context of the teachings of Śrīla Prabhupāda in this other article:
Another article you may find interesting:
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