Bhagavatam · Ambarisha and Durvasa

The waters of the Ganga ran a little slow that morning, as though the river too had paused to listen. Parikshit looked toward Munivar Shukadeva. Six days had passed by now.

“Bhagavan,” he said, “yesterday you told me of that lord of elephants at whose cry Sri Hari mounted Garuda and came rushing. I have been a king. I have seen armies, I have seen weapons, I have even seen the force of an ascetic’s curse. But this one thing will not settle inside me. An unarmed devotee, who has neither an army nor tapas, on what strength does he stand?”

Shukadeva smiled, and into his voice came the warmth that rises whenever the katha of Hari is told.

“Rajan, the strength a devotee stands on belongs to the one at whose feet he has laid himself down. There was a king, Ambarisha. Listen: one day an angry muni came to test him, and in the end that same muni had to take shelter at that same king’s feet.”

Ambarisha was a king, and the master of so vast a realm that the earth of all seven islands was said to lie under him. Yet the moment he remembered Sri Hari, the whole kingdom felt to him like a fistful of dust. His mind stayed at Govinda’s feet, his speech on Hari’s glory, his hands in the service of the temple, and his ears thirsted only to hear the katha of Hari.

He had taken up a vow, he and his queen together, who was of one mind with him. A full year of it. On every Ekadashi a waterless fast, and on the Dvadashi the parana, the breaking of the fast, done by rule. No food, no water, until that hour came.

The year was nearing its close. That last Ekadashi of the month of Kartik went by, and Ambarisha kept the fast by rule through three nights. On the Dvadashi morning he bathed in the Yamuna and worshipped Sri Hari in the forest of Madhuvana, on whose ground the city of Mathura would one day rise. He bathed the image of the Lord as one bathes a king, with sandal and flowers and every rich thing, and clothed it, and laid before it robes and ornaments; then he honored the brahmins, though they wanted for nothing, and gave to them sixty crore cows, each with its calf, horns cased in gold and hooves in silver, draped in fine cloth. He fed the brahmins first, and with their leave he was making ready at last to break his own fast, when a guest arrived.

Durvasa the muni. At whose name even the realm of Indra would tremble. Whose anger slept like fire in his matted locks and could wake at any moment.

Ambarisha stepped forward and bowed, folding his hands. “Come, Munivar. Your feet have fallen in this courtyard; it is my great fortune. The meal is ready. Today is the day of my parana; we shall sit together.”

Durvasa was pleased. “Very well, Rajan. Let me first finish my bath and midday rites, then I will come. Wait until I return.”

He went off toward the Yamuna.

Ambarisha kept waiting. The hour slid on. Only half a muhurta was left of the Dvadashi now, a span of some twenty-four minutes, and the parana had to be finished while the Dvadashi still held; let that window close and a full year’s vow would go unfinished. Of Durvasa there was no sign anywhere.

Ambarisha looked toward his brahmin preceptors. “What am I to do? To eat before a guest is a dishonor to a brahmin, and the muni has not returned. Yet if the hour of the parana passes, a full year of tapas turns to dust. Dharma stands on both sides, and both seem to be breaking in my hands.”

Those brahmins, knowers of dharma, bent their heads together and considered.

“Maharaja, the shastra has a way through this. Take only a little water. The shruti says that drinking water both is and is not eating. By this the bound of the parana is kept, and the rule of eating with a guest is not broken either.”

Ambarisha remembered Sri Hari and touched a palmful of water to his lips. Even then he sat with folded hands, watching the road for the muni.

In that very instant Durvasa returned.

From far off he sensed that the king had taken water. And the fire that had slept in his matted locks woke in a single jolt. His whole body began to shake, his brows drew tight.

“Ambarisha! With me here, having invited me yourself, you began your meal without me? In the arrogance of your riches you forgot what a brahmin is. Today you will receive the fruit of this insult of yours.”

Ambarisha folded his hands and bowed his head, but said nothing. What he had done to keep the bound of dharma, he had no wish to defend before the enraged muni.

Durvasa tore a lock from his matted hair and dashed it to the ground in fury. From it rose a terrible Kritya, blazing like the fire of pralaya, a burning sword in her hand.

“Burn this king to ashes!”

Kritya, her sword raised, fell upon Ambarisha, and the earth shook with the stamp of her feet.

Ambarisha did not stir. He raised no weapon and did not step back. He only stood, remembering Sri Hari, his hands folded. Within him there was not a single line of fear, for the one who has given himself over to Govinda has nothing left to lose.

And just then the Sudarshana chakra of that very Sri Hari he remembered without pause appeared. Bhagavan had already set it to the guarding of his servant.

A whirling ring of fire, blazing like a thousand suns. Before its heat even Kritya’s burning form grew pale.

As fire burns to ash a snake that hisses in rage, so the chakra in a single moment burned Kritya to ashes.

Then Sudarshana turned toward the one who had sent Kritya.

Before Durvasa’s eyes, the death he himself had sent was now turning back toward him. From his mouth broke the words, “What is this!”

Ambarisha said nothing. Hands folded, head bowed, he stayed standing there. He neither stopped the chakra nor urged it on. Even in that hour there was not a single line of enmity in his mind toward the muni.

Durvasa flung everything aside and ran for his life.

A muni who had spent a whole lifetime in tapas, at whose anger the worlds would tremble, was now running for his own life. The chakra behind him, at the same distance, with the same heat.

He fled through the quarters, into the sky, over the earth, into the lower worlds of Atala and Vitala and the rest, into the ocean, into the guarded realms of the world-guardians, and up to heaven. He went and hid in a cave of Mount Meru. But wherever he went, right there he saw that unbearably fierce Sudarshana fastened behind him.

Beaten, he came to Brahma. “Pitamaha! Give me shelter, save me!”

Brahma raised his hands. “This is Sri Hari’s Sudarshana. When my own long age is finished, at the mere knitting of his brows the whole of my creation passes away. I, Shankara ji, Daksha, Bhrigu and the other lords of creatures, the rulers of ghosts and spirits, the chief of the gods, all of us carry his law on our heads like a burden and obey it. Where the chakra has gone to guard a devotee, I have no power to save the one who wronged that devotee.”

Durvasa fled to Kailasa and fell at Shiva’s feet. “Mahadeva! Save me!”

Shiva looked at him with compassion. “Muni, this is the weapon of the Lord of all, and none of us can bear it. Countless worlds as wide as this one rise and fall within him, and in them we are tossed about like small insects. Myself, Sanaka and his brothers, Narada, Bhagavan Brahma, Kapila, all of us are wrapped inside that one’s maya, and there is no strength in me or in anyone else to stop his chakra. Go for shelter to the one who loosed it, to him alone; he will bring about your good.”

In the end Durvasa went straight to Vaikuntha and fell at Sri Hari’s feet. “Prabhu! I am in your shelter. It was only because I did not know your supreme power that I offended your dear devotee. Save me from this chakra! At the mere utterance of your name even a soul in hell is set free.”

On Sri Hari’s face was a faint smile, with neither mockery nor anger in it.

“Munivar, I hold you in honor. But hear me. I am not my own master. My devotees have taken my heart into their hands, and I move at their will, like one who has given his freedom away. Set them aside and I have no wish even for myself, nor for Sri, the goddess who stands eternal at my side. How could I turn from those who have left wife and home, children and kin, their wealth, their own lives, their good in this world and the next, and taken me for their one shelter? They bind their hearts to me and look on every creature with a single eye, and by that love they hold me as a devoted wife holds a devoted husband. Filled with devotion, they do not reach even for the four kinds of liberation that service to me would win them; how then would they reach for anything that time can wear away? They are my heart, and I am theirs. They know nothing dearer than me, and I know no one dearer than them.”

“This chakra has gone out in the guarding of my devotee, and I cannot call it back by my own will. Force sent against the good turns on the one who sent it; your own blow has come home to you. Austerity and worship carry a humble man to the highest good, yet in a man who has let his humility go the same austerity turns against him. Return to the one for whom the chakra was loosed. Ask Ambarisha for forgiveness. He alone can give you peace.”

In that hour all his tapas seemed small to Durvasa. For a year he had been fleeing, and the refuge he had searched for through the three worlds lay at the feet of the very king he had tried to burn.

He came back to Ambarisha. The mouth from which curses had poured all his life was now bent over a king’s feet.

“O Rajan! Forgive me. Forget my offense. You alone can stop this.”

Ambarisha’s heart trembled. A brahmin, a muni, at his feet. He lunged forward and caught hold of Durvasa’s feet.

“Munivar, what are you doing! Rise. I am your servant.” The king’s own year had gone no more gently. He had waited at this very spot for the sage to come back, taking nothing but water in all that time, so that the moment his guest returned he could feed him at last.

Then Ambarisha, folding his hands, turned his face toward Sudarshana and offered it the praise that rises from the heart. “You are the fire and the sun, you are the moon and the lord of the stars. You are water and earth and sky and the wind, the things the senses reach for and the senses themselves. Hail to you, Sudarshana, wheel of a thousand spokes, dear to the deathless Lord, undoer of every other weapon; be gracious now, protector of the earth. You are dharma itself and speech that is true and kind and the eye that looks on all as one; you are the lord of every yajna and the yajna itself; you are the guardian of the worlds, the soul of all that is, the highest splendor of the Supreme Person. If ever I have served Hari with a whole heart, if he dwells in my very breath, then grow cool. Have mercy on this sage. Let it be well with him.”

The heat of the chakra grew calm, and it returned to Sri Hari. Durvasa’s life came back to him.

He sank down where he stood, spent, as though someone had wrung all the pride out of him from within.

“Rajan,” he said in a low voice, “today I have seen what a whole lifetime of tapas never showed me. How vast is the glory of the Lord’s loving devotees. You forgot the wrong done to you and prayed for the protection of the very one who had tried to kill you.”

“I had taken you for an ordinary king. I did not know that Sri Hari sits in his devotee’s heart himself.”

Ambarisha seated the sage with honor and fed him with his own hands, and Durvasa ate his fill. Content at heart, the sage blessed him: the women of heaven would sing this deed of his again and again, and the earth herself would carry his name. Then he asked the king to take his own food at last, and rose from that place up through the sky to the world of Brahma. Only when Durvasa had gone did Ambarisha eat, and what he ate was the food the brahmin’s own eating had made holy. So, after a year, he completed the parana he had held off all that while, and in everything that had passed he saw one thing only, the glory of the Lord.