Bhagavatam · Daksha and Sati

Parikshit looked at Shukadeva and asked with joined palms, “Bhagavan, yesterday you told those kathas of love in which the bhakta called and the Lord came running. But one thing still pricks me. The house where I was born, the father who dandled me in his lap: when these very people begin to revile my beloved, what is a person to do? My days are numbered, Munivar. I want the rule of that hour, the hour when the beloved’s honor must be held up in front of one’s own blood.”

Shukadeva stayed silent a while. Then he said, “Rajan, hear then the katha of Daksha Prajapati and his daughter Sati. There was a father who had fallen into the habit of counting bowed heads, and a daughter who kindled inside herself a fire no god had the means to put out.”

Daksha was among the sons of Brahma, a Prajapati, a maker of creatures. He was fond of his daughters, fonder of them than of almost anything he owned. Every step of the yajna sat in his memory, every mantra pitched exactly as high or as low as the shastra required. Under all that precision a small thing was quietly growing. The hunger for honor that pressed him from within had its root in the sight of bowed heads, and that same hunger would one day set him against his own child.

He had a daughter named Sati, the darling of the whole house, an innocent girl. From childhood one name had made its home in her mind, the name of Shiva. She performed tapas, and asked for that one alone as her husband, the one the world could never quite make sense of. Shiva consented. The two were married, and Daksha’s delicate daughter became the companion of Shiva.

The match never once settled in Daksha’s mind. A strange contradiction lived inside the father. He knew perfectly well that Shiva is the teacher of everything that moves and everything that stands still, free of all enmity, peace itself, content in his own atman, the deity the whole universe holds highest, and this knowledge galled him worse than ignorance would have, because beside such a son-in-law his own honor looked small.

Then one day the hour came that fanned the smoldering spark into flame. At a great sacrificial session of the Prajapatis, all the foremost brahmarshis, the gods, the munis, and even the deities who preside over the sacred fires had gathered with their followers. When Daksha walked into that assembly he blazed with his own tejas like the sun, and the gloom of the vast hall lifted before him. Struck by that brilliance, every member of the assembly rose from his seat with bowed head, all of them except two: Brahma, his father, and Mahadeva. Shiva stayed seated, eyes half closed, his mind sunk in a depth where no assembly, no Daksha, no anyone at all could reach him.

Daksha took the honor of the whole gathering the moment he entered. He bowed to Brahma, father of the world, and sat down at his bidding. But to find Mahadeva already seated, and to receive from him no rising, no gesture, not one sign of respect, this he could not swallow. The not-rising drove into his chest like a thorn, and the self-absorbed silence to which the whole of creation bent its head he took for a personal insult. He turned on Shiva a look so crooked it seemed he meant to burn him where he sat.

“Let the brahmin sages and the gods and the fire-deities hear me,” and Daksha’s voice did not pause. “I speak from plain good conduct, not from ignorance and not from spite. This shameless creature is dragging the clean fame of every lokapala into the dust; the arrogant man has trampled the road the virtuous walk. He became a son to me the day he took the hand of my doe-eyed daughter, a girl pure as Savitri herself, before fire and brahmins, as a decent man does. Yet he did not rise and greet me, did not honor me even with a word, when rising and greeting were the very least he owed. To this haughty, unclean man, who has thrown off every pious act and overstepped every bound of decency, I handed my girl against my own will, the way a fool might pour the Veda into the ears of a shudra.”

And what he said next numbed the very stones of that hall. “He roams the burning-grounds with bhutas and pretas, his whole body smeared with pyre ash, a garland of dead men’s bones at his throat, his matted hair flying loose. He carries the name Shiva, the auspicious one, and there is nothing auspicious in him. He is ashiva to the root, inauspiciousness itself. He is a drunkard, and it is drunkards he loves.” Even this did not empty his rage. He took water into his palm and pronounced the curse: from this day forward Bhava, lowest of the gods, would receive no share of any sacrifice beside Indra and Upendra, the younger brother of Indra who is Vishnu himself, and the rest of the gods. The elders of the assembly pressed him hard to hold back. He heard none of them, and he swept out of the hall in a fury and went home.

When word of the curse reached Nandishvara, foremost of Shiva’s attendants, he blazed. A servant’s anguish for his master shook in his voice as he turned it back on Daksha, and on the brahmins who had sat there nodding along. This fool, he said, who makes so much of a perishable body that he mistakes it for his very self, who hates the one being that hates nobody, who calls his own slavery to ritual by the name of wisdom: let him grow besotted with women, and let the head that carries such arrogance be turned forthwith into the head of a goat. And the brahmins who applauded him, let them stay chained to their rites and wander the world as beggars.

At that a whole party of brahmins in the hall caught fire, and out of them rose Bhrigu the rishi. He laid down a counter-curse, heavy and hard to lift as the rod of Brahma himself: those who keep the vows of Bhava, and those who trail after them, shall turn heretic and walk against the true scriptures; let them go about in matted locks and ashes and bones, prizing wine, and be lost to the Veda that holds society within its bounds. So it stood, Shiva’s gana on the one side and the brahmins’ fire on the other. And Shiva, while Bhrigu’s curse still hung in the air, rose with his people and left that hall, a heaviness settling on him that looked, for a moment, almost like grief.

The Prajapatis carried their long sacrifice through to its end, with Shri Hari as the deity they worshiped, and went their ways. In time Brahma set Daksha over all the Prajapatis as their overlord, and the honor swelled his pride past its old size. Denying Shiva and the other knowers of Brahman any share of the offerings, and scorning them as he did it, he performed first a Vajapeya sacrifice, and then set on foot the greatest rite of all, the one they call the Brihaspatisava. Every brahmarshi and devarshi, the fathers and the gods, arrived with their wives, all of them decked head to foot in jewels.

The gods went along the roads of the sky talking of that festival, and from their own mouths Daksha’s daughter Sati heard of the great sacrifice under way at her father’s house.

She saw whole flocks of the women of the sky passing close by Kailasa, the bright, rolling-eyed wives of gandharvas and yakshas, wearing polished earrings and gold at their throats, dressed to the last thread, seated beside their husbands in vimanas white as royal swans. The whole vault of the sky was decked with them, and at the sight of that decked sky there trembled inside Sati the threshold of her mother’s house, the one she had run across as a child.

She went to Shiva and for a long time could say nothing, and then softly laid the matter before him.

“Swami, they say a great sacrifice is under way at my father’s house just now. My sisters will come, each with her husband. My mother’s lap and my father’s, my sisters’ love, my aunts calling my name: my heart has strained toward them for so many days. You have set me in the left half of your own body and called me half of yourself. Say the word, and let us go too.”

Shiva looked at her a few moments, at the innocent longing standing in her eyes. And into his memory came the shaft-like words Daksha had thrown at him before the other Prajapatis, the words that had gone in and stayed. He smiled, and answered her.

“Devi, you are right that one may go to the homes of one’s own kin uninvited. But only when their minds are clean of the malice that arrogance breeds, and of the anger that comes of taking the body for the self. Learning, tapas, wealth, a fine face, youth, high birth: in a good man these six are ornaments, and in a wicked man they are the six edges of a knife, and your father has turned every one of them against us. A wound from arrows heals, Devi; a man can be treated and can sleep at night. The harsh words of one’s own people sink into the quick and ache there day and night. You are the most loved of all Daksha’s daughters, and even so you will get no kindness from him, because you are joined to me, and that joining is the thing that torments him. Do not go, and do not look on his face, nor on the faces of those who follow him. No good will come to you there.”

“But he is my father.” In Sati’s voice was the daughter’s stubbornness that no argument breaks. “The lap I grew up in, whether its threshold calls me or does not, my heart strains toward it. Let me go.”

Shiva said no more. He had seen that whichever way it fell out, her death was now certain, and the seeing of it closed his mouth. And she stood between two pulls, taking a step toward the door in her longing, turning back a step in her fear of him, until the longing to see her people and the ache of being warned away broke together and she wept. Then, shaking, she looked at her matchless lord once, as though she too would burn him with her eyes, and with her heart torn between grief and anger she turned from the one who had given her half of his own body, and set out for her father’s house.

His attendants could not bear to watch her go without an escort. Maniman, Mada, and the rest of Shiva’s own people, with the yakshas among them, fell in behind her in their thousands and set her upon Nandi, king of bulls, the lord’s own mount. Playthings, a myna bird, a ball, a mirror, a lotus; the white parasol, the chamara, garlands; dundubhi drums, conch, and flute: arrayed with all of it, riding in the honor owed a queen, since her lord is himself one of the guardians of the quarters, Daksha’s delicate daughter set out for her father’s city.

The moment she reached the sacrificial ground she read which way the wind was blowing. The brahmins raising the Veda chant were competing among themselves over who could sound the loudest. Brahmarshis and gods sat enthroned on every side, and vessels of clay and wood and iron and gold and hide stood here and there, and there was kusha grass strewn about. The smell of the havan, the crackle of ghee in the flames, the boom of mantras, and threaded through all of it a silence that had been spread out for her alone.

For fear of Daksha, no one there gave her the least sign of welcome, except her mother and her sisters. They saw her and ran to fold her in their arms, their throats stopped with tears of love, and pressed on her a seat, ornaments, clothes, sweet gifts, and their tender questions after her health. Sati took none of it. She would not touch the presents, would not sit in the high seat her mother and her aunts held out, would not answer even the kindest of her sisters’ questions, because behind her mother’s lap the whole assembly and her father’s own face were turned away from her, and on no altar of that yajna was there a single share set apart in her lord’s name.

She looked for her father in the crowd. The same face whose finger she had gripped while she learned to walk. She went up close and called him: “Father.”

Daksha turned his face away. He would not meet her eyes, would not speak her name, would not give her one word of welcome, and the turning cost him, because the girl in front of him was the one he had carried on his arm, and somewhere under the averted face the father who had dandled her was still alive. To keep that father down, he held his face harder away and let his silence be his answer, so the whole assembly could see it and so his own resolve would hold.

Sati looked at that turned-away face, half of it stiff with anger and half of it hidden somewhere she could not reach. She saw that on no altar of the rite was there a place for her lord, and that her own father would not so much as look at her. Her escort of ganas sprang to their feet at the insult, weapons out, ready to cut Daksha down; with a single word she held them back. Then the breath in her chest climbed once and came down very slowly. Her eyes filled, and she bound her lids shut and let not one drop fall. That tear would have been a tear for a father, and for the father who had called her lord inauspicious she refused to weep.

When she spoke, her voice did not shake, though anger ran under it, and it was so low that everyone had to fall silent to catch it.

“Father, there is no one in all the world greater than Bhagavan Shankara. No one is dear to him and no one is hateful; he is the atman of every living thing, the beloved of all, and he bears no enmity toward anyone. People of your kind can find a fault even inside another man’s virtues, while the truly great magnify the smallest good they find in anyone, and you have found fault even with a being like him. His is a name of two syllables, Shiva; let it fall from a man’s tongue even once, even by accident, and in that same instant every sin he carries burns to ash. And him you hate.”

Her hand came to rest, without her knowing it, on her own chest, as if something were breaking there that she wanted to hold together. “Hear the rule for a man whose master is being reviled in front of him. If he has no power to stop it, the least he owes is to cover his ears and walk out of that place. And if he has the power, he should cut out the tongue that speaks the blasphemy and then lay down his own life after it. There is no third road. You called my lord inauspicious. I have no power to still your tongue, so I will pay the other price. This body is his, half of his own body, and it was your blood that shaped it. To carry it any longer, now that it has heard him reviled and gone on breathing, shames me past bearing. The wise say a man is cleansed only when he brings up the tainted food he swallowed in ignorance, and so I give this body back.”

“And there is this too. When Bhagavan Shankara, teasing, calls me Dakshayani, Daksha’s daughter, the laughter will go out of me and this tie to you will rise in its place and my heart will sink into the ground. Before that day can come, I will be rid of this corpse-like body sprung from your limb.”

With that she turned her face from that assembly of enemies and sat down on the earth, facing north. All the rivalry of the courtyard, all the high pitch of the mantras, drifted off as though it belonged to some far country. She touched water and performed achamana. Then she drew her yellow garment close about her, shut her eyes, and set herself to leave the body the way the yogis leave it.

Nothing of the outside remained. Within, she made her seat firm, and joined prana and apana, the two airs that keep the breath coming and going, into one at the navel. Then she lifted the udana air from the wheel of the navel and settled it, slowly, with her buddhi, in the heart. In the heart, where her lord’s lotus feet had their home, that air rested a moment. Then she raised it by the path of the throat, carried it to the exact point between the brows, and held it there.

Through all of it her attention strayed nowhere. She kept gazing at the lotus feet of her jagadguru Shiva, the teacher of the whole world, and gazing she forgot she was Daksha’s daughter, forgot there was an assembly, a father, an insult at all. Even the last grain of “I am Daksha’s daughter” melted away in that dhyana, and she came clean of every stain.

Then, from within her own self, she called up air and fire together, and there rose the fire of samadhi that no outer spark can touch. First a warmth ran through the body; then the warmth became flame. For one moment her body went perfectly still, and in that same moment the samadhi fire that had risen from within closed around it on every side.

Daksha stood staring. The gods stood staring. The brahmins’ raised voices broke off in the middle of the mantra, and only the sputter of ghee was left.

Sati’s body was burning, and her face stayed sunk in the peace that comes to a mind gone deep into Shiva’s name. Her lips never once quivered. On her brow, where her prana had rested only moments before, not a single crease rose. In a little while all that was left of her was a heap of ash.

Over that whole courtyard fell a silence so complete that each man could hear his neighbor breathe. Then the silence tore. A terrible clamor spread across sky and earth alike, and out of every direction came one cry: “Alas, stung by Daksha’s cruel words, Sati, beloved of the god of gods, has given up her life. Look at the wickedness of this lord of creatures, father of all that moves and stands still, who slighted his own high-souled daughter until she died of it, and did not lift a hand to stop his child even as she made ready to die.”

In that instant the thousands of Sati’s parshadas, who had watched her turn to ash, rose again with their weapons to kill Daksha. Then Bhrigu the rishi, reciting the Yajurveda mantras that have the power to destroy those who wreck a sacrifice, poured an oblation into the southern fire, the dakshinagni, and out of that oblation there rose in their thousands the blazing gods called the Ribhus, who had won the sphere of the moon by the strength of their tapas. Charged with the fire of Brahman and armed with burning brands, they fell upon the ganas, and all of Shiva’s pramathas and guhyakas broke and scattered and fled.

But this yajna of Daksha’s was far from finished. The news climbed to Kailasa. Narada’s telling was not even out of his mouth when Shiva’s body shook, the same body whose stillness Daksha had taken for his own insult.

Onto his face came the wrath before which the three worlds tremble. Biting his lip, he reached up into the heavy load of his matted hair, tore loose a single lock that shone like a stroke of lightning, sprang to his feet, laughed once with a roar out of the deep of his chest, and dashed the lock to the ground with all his strength.

From that lock rose a colossal being, its figure touching the sky, dark as a raincloud, with a thousand arms, three eyes bright as the sun, fierce teeth, matted hair burning like flame, a garland of skulls at its neck, and every kind of weapon lifted in its hands. Virabhadra. He folded his palms and asked, “What is your command?” and Shiva said, “You are a part of my own self, valiant Rudra. Lead my hosts against Daksha. Make an end of Daksha, and of his sacrifice.”

Virabhadra lifted a trident that could kill even Death, thundered, and ran for the sacrifice with the roaring army of Rudra’s ganas at his back. At Daksha’s ground they first saw only a darkness in the north, a rising dust, and no one could name it. It was Prasuti, Daksha’s own wife, who spoke the truth of it: this is the harvest of the wrong my husband did, who shamed his innocent daughter to death before the eyes of her sisters. Then the host swept in. Dwarfish, alligator-faced, weapons high, they overran the whole sacrificial ground. They broke the beams and pulled down the pavilions, put out the sacred fires, smashed the vessels, fouled the offering-pits, and scattered the priests.

And they came for the men who had stood by while Shiva was slandered. Maniman bound Bhrigu; Chandisa fell upon Pushan; Nandishvara himself seized Bhaga; and Virabhadra took Daksha. Then Virabhadra went among them and did justice. He tore out the moustache and beard of Bhrigu, who had sat in that assembly and laughed at Shiva, stroking his beard as he laughed. He knocked Bhaga to the ground and plucked out his eyes, the eyes that had winked their approval while a god was reviled. He dashed out the teeth of Pushan, who had laughed and shown those teeth at the same slander.

The priests and the gathered guests, pelted with flying stones, ran for their lives in every direction, and the rishis went and hid behind the altars.

And Daksha. The head he had carried so high while he scorned his daughter and her lord, Virabhadra set his foot on the man’s chest and went to take that head with a sharp blade, and could not cut so much as the skin of it. He stood a long moment, wondering, and then he remembered how the sacrificers wrenched the heads from their animals, and he tore off Daksha’s head the way an animal is killed at a yajna, and flung it as an offering into the southern fire. Then he set the whole hall alight and went back to Kailasa.

The gods who had scattered under that host came limping to Brahma, their limbs broken by trident and mace, and laid the whole ruin before him. Brahma had not gone to Daksha’s sacrifice, and neither had Narayana; both had seen from the first where it would end. Now Brahma told the gods the plain truth. The fault was theirs and Daksha’s, he said, for they had shut Shiva out of the share that was rightfully his, and there was one road back and no other. They must go to Kailasa and take hold of Shiva’s feet with a guileless heart, because a world whose greatest power is left burning in his grief is a world already lost.

So Brahma led them up to Kailasa, and they found Shiva where all his wrath had never reached, seated in deep peace under a great banyan tree, expounding the nature of Brahman to Narada, with Kubera and the perfected sages gathered about him. Seeing Brahma come, he rose and bowed his head to him. Brahma praised him and asked for his mercy: let the sacrifice be revived, let the broken be made whole again, and let Shiva take at last the share that had always been his.

Shiva laughed, and there was no grudge left in the laugh. “I keep no account of the wrongs of fools whom the Lord’s maya has blinded,” he said. “I struck them only to teach them.” Then he set the terms of his mercy, and they were terms that fit each man’s crime. Daksha, whose own head was ash in the fire now, would carry above his neck the head of a goat. Bhaga, who had winked while a god was slandered, would look on his share of every offering through the eyes of Mitra. Pushan, who had laughed and bared his teeth, had lost them for good, and would grind his food ever after with the sacrificer’s own teeth. Bhrigu would wear a goat’s beard in place of the one that had shaken with his laughter. The priests whose arms were broken would work with the arms of the Ashvins, the twin physicians of heaven, and what was left of the sacrifice would be Shiva’s share at last.

They went back to the burned ground and joined a goat’s head to Daksha’s trunk, the very head Nandishvara had named for him in that crowded hall. Rudra turned a kind glance on the man, and Daksha rose as a sleeper rises, and the first thing his eyes found was Shiva standing in front of him. The old hatred drained out of him the way a pool clears in autumn. He tried to shape words of praise and could not, because in that same moment he remembered the daughter he no longer had, and his throat closed on the tears. The man who once counted bowed heads stood there now with a goat’s head bowed low, weeping for Sati, and only after a long while could he steady himself and speak his praise of Shiva.

Then Daksha took up the broken rite again. He offered into the fire the oblation set apart for Vishnu, and as he stood holding his mind steady on the Lord, the Lord came. Sri Hari appeared before them in person, borne on Garuda, so bright that the light of every being present went dim, dark of hue, girded in gold, crowned like the sun, his eight arms bearing the conch and the discus, the mace, the lotus, the bow, the sword, the arrow, and the shield, Lakshmi resting at his breast, a garland of forest flowers on him, a white parasol like a moon above his head. Brahma rose and bowed, and Indra bowed, and Shiva himself bowed, and the whole assembly bent with them.

Then Vishnu spoke, and what he said was the thing the whole ruin had been waiting to hear. “I am the one cause of all of this,” he said. “I am Brahma, and I am Shiva. I am the Self, the Lord, the witness of everything that is done. Under my own maya I make the worlds, and hold them, and take them back, and I wear the name Brahma or Vishnu or Rudra as the work of the hour requires. Only a fool looks at the three of us and counts three strangers. A man does not take his own head or his own hands for a stranger’s, and the one who is truly mine does not take any living creature for something set apart from himself. Whoever sees no gap between us three, who are one being and the very self of all that lives, comes home to peace, Daksha.”

Daksha worshiped Sri Hari through the rite sacred to him, and the other gods through their own rites, and the yajna he had begun in pride was carried at last all the way to its end, with the Lord himself its worshiped deity.

Shiva looked a long while at Sati’s ashes, and then turned back toward the Himalaya.

In time that same Sati was born again as the daughter of Mena and Himavan, lord of the snows, and grew up to become, once more, the companion of that same Shiva.