Bhagavatam · The Descent of the Ganga

Bhagiratha and the Descent of the Ganga

In the line of Ikshvaku there was a king named Sagara, and the story of how he came into the world is a bitter one. His father, Bahuka, lost his kingdom to his enemies and withdrew into the forest with his wife, and there he died. The widowed queen was carrying a child, and she made ready to follow her husband onto the funeral pyre, until the sage Aurva stopped her, for he knew she was with child. Her co-wives learned of the pregnancy, and out of jealousy they mixed gara, poison, into her food. The poison did the child in her womb no harm. He was born together with that poison still in him, and from it he took his name, Sagara, the one born with poison. That same Sagara grew to become a chakravartin, a monarch whose wheel turned to all four horizons.

Sagara had sixty thousand sons, a number so vast the mind grows tired merely counting toward it. On the counsel of his guru Aurva, and in the manner the sage laid out for him, the king worshipped the Lord, Sri Hari, who is the self of all and wears the form of every Veda and every god, through the great rite of the horse sacrifice. In keeping with the rite the consecrated horse was set loose, and wherever it wandered unopposed, that land was counted as Sagara’s.

Indra, king of the gods, could not bear the sight of it. He crept in and stole the horse away, hiding it far from the sacrificial ground.

When the horse could not be found at the sacrificial hall, an uproar broke out. The sixty thousand princes, all of them born from the womb of Queen Sumati, went out at their father’s command to search. They combed the whole earth. Wherever the horse was not to be found, there, in the full pride of their strength, they tore the ground open. With spades, with their bare hands, with the arrogance of men who had never once been refused, they gouged the earth to its depths on every side. They dug so deep into the breast of the earth that the sea came rushing in to fill the hollow, and that sea people call sagara to this day, after the very sons of Sagara who dug it.

Digging on and on, they came at last to a corner in the northeast, and there stood the horse. Beside it, seated with his eyes closed, unmoving, was the sage Kapila.

The princes saw the horse, and every ounce of arrogance in them boiled over at once. “Here is the thief,” they shouted. “Look at him, he steals our horse and sits down beside it, and now he shuts his eyes and plays the holy man. Kill him. Kill him where he sits.” Weapons raised, all sixty thousand of them rushed at the one silent figure.

The decisive detail is simple. Kapila opened his eyes. That was all. No curse left his lips. No word of anger. He only looked.

But Indra had already emptied those princes of their judgment, and the moment they raised their weapons against so exalted a soul they were, in a sense, already dead men. The fire of their own arrogance, of their own wrongdoing, which had been smoldering in them all along, broke out from their own bodies, and in a single instant all sixty thousand were reduced to ash.

Let no one imagine that a sage’s anger burned them. Kapila was the pure resting place of sattva, the Lord himself come down in the body of a seer, and a body like that sanctifies the world it touches. How could rage, that darkest turn of tamas, so much as be pictured in a man settled that deep in samadhi? Has the dust of the earth ever held a grudge against the open sky? What burned was the princes’ own pride, and nothing besides. This was the same Kapila who had launched upon the ocean of this world the vessel of Sankhya, the teaching by which a seeker ferries himself across the hard waters of birth and death. The sons of Sagara had dug an ocean of salt water and found only their deaths in it. The sage sitting in their path had set afloat a boat across a far wider sea, and they rushed at him without ever knowing what he was.

Sagara had another wife, Keshini, and by her a son named Asamanjas. This Asamanjas had been a yogi in an earlier birth and still carried the memory of it, yet in this life he fell in with bad company and turned cruel. He would fling the town’s children into the Sarayu to frighten the people, until at last his own father cast him out. On his way from Ayodhya he drew the drowned children living from the water by his yogic power and set them down unharmed, and then he was gone. His son was Anshuman, and Anshuman gave his days to the service of his grandfather Sagara.

When the sixty thousand did not return at all, Sagara sent Anshuman out along the path his uncles had dug, to find the horse. Anshuman walked the rim of that new sea. Miles of ash. Where sixty thousand strong young men had once marched, there lay now only dry gray heaps lifting faintly on the wind. Near that ash stood the horse, and near the horse sat Kapila.

Anshuman’s heart was a generous one. He came with no anger in him, only reverence. He bowed at the sage’s feet, folded his hands, and with a steady mind began to praise him, knowing him for what he was: the unborn, knowledge made dense and whole, the self seated in all selves. “Lord,” he said, “you stand beyond even Brahma. The greatest yogis cannot reach you though they sink whole lives into samadhi, so how should ignorant creatures like us ever know you? People bound to their bodies, their minds clouded by your maya, see only the things their senses reach for, and in deep sleep see nothing at all, and the whole time you are seated inside them as their very self, unseen. Today, at the sight of you, the tight cord of my delusion has been cut, the cord that feeds craving, and action, and the restless senses.”

Kapila was pleased. “My child,” he said, “this horse is your grandfather’s sacrificial animal. Take it back to him. And hear this. Your uncles, who lie burned to ash in this place, can be delivered by the water of the Ganga, and by nothing else in all the worlds.”

Anshuman circled the sage in reverence, bowed his head to the ground, and led the horse home, and with it Sagara’s long-stalled sacrifice was at last completed. But that one sentence stayed behind in the family like a debt no one had the means to pay, handed down from father to son: deliverance will come by the water of the Ganga, and by no other means.

Sagara placed the whole weight of the kingdom on Anshuman and, wanting nothing further from the world and loosed from every bond, reached the highest state by the path Aurva had shown him. Anshuman ruled his years, then handed the throne to his own son and gave himself to fierce austerities, longing to bring the Ganga down to the earth. The day never came for him. His time ran out, and he died with the work unfinished. His son Dilipa took up the same austerities with the same longing, and Dilipa too failed, and Dilipa too died. Two generations wore themselves away for the sake of one field of ash, and both went from the world with empty hands.

Then came Dilipa’s son, Bhagiratha.

Two generations of unfinished tapas

Bhagiratha took up the austerity that had broken his father and his grandfather. Kingdom, comfort, sleep, he set them all to one side. He had understood something the others may have missed: that this was the work of asking, and that force had no place in it anywhere. His sixty thousand forebears had put their whole trust in the strength of their arms and had burned for it. Now a son of that same house stood with his arms hanging empty and his head bowed low, offering the one thing his family had never yet offered.

Years went by. Then one day, won over by the heat of his devotion, the goddess Ganga herself stood before him.

“I have come to grant you a boon,” she said.

Bhagiratha opened his heart with great humility. “Devi, come down into the world of mortals. My forebears lie there, turned to ash, waiting only for your touch.”

Ganga was quiet a moment. Then she spoke, and her words carried a warning folded inside the gift.

“Bhagiratha, when I fall from heaven to earth I will fall with a force that has to have someone to hold it. If no one holds it, I will split the earth open and drive straight down into Rasatala, the netherworld, and be lost. And there is a second thing. Once I am on the earth, people will step into me to wash away their sins. Where am I then to carry all that sin? In what am I to wash myself clean of it? Give this some thought before you answer.”

It was no ordinary question, and no fear lay behind it. The river wanted to know who would bear the weight of the filth that would be left in her, day after day, without end. Bhagiratha saw that catching a falling torrent was only half the matter. The world’s gathered filth, once it was carried into her, would also need someone able to take it in and dissolve it.

“Devi,” he said, “there are holy souls who have turned away from the world, who are quiet within themselves, settled in Brahman, wandering the earth and making holy every place they pass. When they bathe in you, the touch of their bodies will draw off all the sin inside you and soak it up, for in their hearts lives the Lord himself, the destroyer of every sin. Men will leave their filth in the river; the saints will lift it away.”

“And my force?” Ganga asked. “Who holds that?”

“Lord Rudra will hold it,” said Bhagiratha. “He is the very self of every living thing. As a whole sari is woven out of a single thread run through it again and again, so this entire universe is woven through and through with Shankara. Who else in all creation could take your fall upon himself?”

The torrent bound in his matted locks

So Bhagiratha turned to his austerities once more, this time to win the favor of Lord Shankara. It took only a few days. Mahadeva, who wishes the whole universe well, was quickly pleased, and he granted the king’s request in a single word. “Tathastu.” So be it.

And then the hour arrived. Ganga came down out of the sky with the whole of her force behind her, force enough to break clean through the earth and pass out the other side. But Shiva stood waiting in her path. Carefully, deliberately, he took the entire river upon his head and let it vanish into the vast tangle of his matted locks. A whole river poured into that thicket of hair and was swallowed, and the river entered the thicket of hair quietly, leaving everything intact. The grace that had leapt from heaven in one killing flood was gathered in and held, to be let out again at a measure the earth could survive.

The very nature of the water was changed by the passage. The stream had first sprung from the feet of the Lord himself, and now it had run through the matted hair of Shiva as well, and each touch had left it holier than before, until it was the most sanctifying water in the three worlds.

Bhagiratha stood waiting below. Shiva loosened a single strand of his hair, and down that strand came a thin, gentled thread of the Ganga, falling at exactly the force the earth could bear and no more.

The water that reaches the ash

Now Bhagiratha went ahead in his chariot, and the Ganga came on close behind him.

This was the sight for which three generations had burned themselves in austerity. A king on his chariot, driving at the speed of the wind, holding to the one road that led to the ash of his fathers. And close at his back the river ran on after him, and every land she passed through was made holy in the passing.

They came to the shore of that same sea, to the place where the Ganga meets the ocean, the spot where sixty thousand strong young men had once dug on and on until they turned to ash. The heaps of ash were lying there still.

The water of the Ganga moved forward and drew those gray heaps down under itself.

That was the whole of it. The touch of water alone accomplished it.

Read transcript