Bhagavatam · The Descent of the Ganga

When the horse could not be found at the sacrificial hall, an uproar broke out, for a horse sacrifice broken midway is a shame no king of that line could carry. 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 anything, they gouged the earth to its depths on every side, and the dust of their digging stood over the land like a second sky. 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. Sixty thousand men searching for one horse remade the map of the world.

Digging on and on, they came at last to a corner in the northeast, and there stood the horse, grazing as if nothing in the world had happened. Beside it, seated with his eyes closed, unmoving, still as the ground he sat on, 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, sixty thousand voices roaring as one, they rushed at the one silent figure, and their shadows fell across him like a single closing wave.

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 when he laid his theft at an innocent man’s feet, 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 under years of unquestioned strength, broke out from their own bodies, and in a single instant all sixty thousand were reduced to ash, mid-stride, weapons still lifted.

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. Hold the two pictures side by side, Rajan. 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 with drawn swords, never once knowing what he was.

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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, or wore cruelty like a mask he had chosen. He would fling the town’s children into the Sarayu to frighten the people, until at last his own father, out of duty to his subjects, cast him out. On his way from Ayodhya he drew the drowned children living from the water by his yogic power, set them down unharmed before their disbelieving parents, and then he was gone, leaving the town to wonder forever what he had really been. 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, and no messenger came, and no rumor either, 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, and the young man walked through the remains of his own family without knowing yet that he did. Near that ash stood the horse, and near the horse sat Kapila.

Anshuman’s heart was a generous one, and where his uncles had seen a thief, he saw at one glance what was actually sitting there. Reverence rose in him before any question could. 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.” The sage’s voice did not change, and the sentence he spoke next would rule that family for three generations. “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 with the throne itself, spoken over cradles and repeated at deathbeds: deliverance will come by the water of the Ganga, and by no other means. And the Ganga flowed in heaven, an entire world away.

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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, standing through the seasons with one 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, the debt still open. His son Dilipa took up the same austerities with the same longing, spent his own lifetime on them, and Dilipa too failed, and Dilipa too died. Two generations wore themselves away for the sake of one field of ash they had never seen with their own eyes, and both went from the world with empty hands.

Then came Dilipa’s son, Bhagiratha.

Years went by. Then one day, won over by the heat of his devotion, the goddess Ganga herself stood before him, the river of heaven wearing a form his eyes could rest on, water-light moving over her like a garment.

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

Bhagiratha opened his heart with great humility. He did not ask for sons, or empire, or years. “Devi, come down into the world of mortals. My forebears lie there, turned to ash, and they have waited three generations for nothing except 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 like a dropped pot and drive straight down into Rasatala, the deepest of the netherworlds, and be lost there, beyond the reach of your ash and everyone’s. And there is a second thing. Once I am on the earth, people will step into me to wash away their sins, every day, in every age, an unending procession of them. 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 loud half. The world’s gathered filth, once it was carried into her, would also need someone able to take it in and dissolve it, quietly, forever, with no one watching.

“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; there is nowhere you could fall that is not already him. Who else in all creation could take your fall upon himself?”

And then the hour arrived. Ganga came down out of the sky with the whole of her force behind her, a white column dropping out of heaven, force enough to break clean through the earth and pass out the other side. But Shiva stood waiting in her path, planted, unhurried, his face calm as a man waiting for rain. 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, and a great hush lay where the world had braced for its ending. 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, from the place where his world-measuring stride touched the very roof of the universe, 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, twice blessed before it ever met the earth.

Bhagiratha stood waiting below. Shiva loosened a single strand of his hair, one strand out of that endless tangle, and down it came a thin, gentled thread of the Ganga, falling at exactly the force the earth could bear and no more. The flood that could have split the world arrived as a stream a child could wade.

Now Bhagiratha went ahead in his chariot, and the Ganga came on close behind him, a river following a man the way a calf follows the one who freed it.

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, not daring to slow, not daring to look back. And close at his back the river ran on after him, bright and new on the old thirsty land, and every country she passed through was made holy in the passing, village by village, field by field, before her true errand had even begun.

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, gray and patient, untouched through all the years it had taken one family to answer for them.

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.