Bhagavatam · The Tapas of Dhruva

Parikshit looked at the sage Shukadeva and said, “Bhagavan, yesterday you spoke of a child whose heart came to rest on the Lord. A question has stayed with me since. I have only a few days left, and I still wonder some nights what so little time can give a person. Suppose a boy were only five years old, and a single wound had set his heart on fire. Could a wound like that carry him the whole way to the Lord?”

Shukadeva was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Listen, Rajan. There was a boy named Dhruva, and his story begins in exactly that place, with a wound.”

Dhruva was five years old when he first understood that he had no one to call his own.

His father was King Uttanapada, a son of Svayambhuva Manu. The king kept two queens. The first was Suniti, Dhruva’s mother. The second was Suruchi, mother of Dhruva’s half brother Uttama.

The king loved Suruchi more. Suniti, whose son was Dhruva, was the less dear of the two. Every corner of the palace knew it, from the kitchens to the court.

One day King Uttanapada sat with Suruchi’s son Uttama on his lap, fondling him. At that moment Dhruva came up and wanted the lap too.

The king gave him no welcome.

Suruchi swelled with pride. She watched her co-wife’s son straining toward the king’s lap, and right there, with the king listening, she spoke to the boy in words steeped in jealousy. Her voice was gentle, and every word inside it was made to wound.

“Child, the royal throne is not for you. You are the king’s son, that much is true, but you never took shape in my womb. You are too young to understand that another woman carried you, which is why you reach for a thing so far beyond you. If you want the throne, then propitiate the Supreme Person, Narayana, through hard penance, and by his grace come back through my womb in another birth.”

The five-year-old could not follow all of it. He understood one thing clearly. In that lap there was no place for him.

A snake struck by a staff rears up hissing. In the same way Dhruva, cut open by his stepmother’s words, began to draw long, burning breaths of rage. His father watched the whole thing and said nothing.

Then Dhruva stepped back. He turned and ran, crying, toward his mother’s chamber.

Suniti saw him weeping and asked what had happened. The child told her everything.

Suniti went still. Word of what Suruchi had said had already reached her from others in the palace, and it had cut her just as deeply. Her patience gave way. She wilted like a forest creeper scorched by a running fire, and her eyes, lovely as a pair of lotuses, filled with tears. The boy’s sobs kept breaking against her chest, and she had no way to still them. She had been slighted herself. What place could she win for her son?

She drew a long breath and said to him, “Lala, never wish harm on anyone. Whoever gives pain to others has to swallow that same pain himself one day. What Suruchi said was not a lie. You will find no seat in that lap. There is another lap, though, where no one asks whose womb you came from. There a single cry is enough to win you a place. Your great-grandfather Brahma reached his own high station by worshipping the feet of Shri Hari, whom even the sages who have mastered mind and breath bow before. Your grandfather Manu won this world, and the next, and the release beyond both, in the very same way. Call on him.”

Dhruva looked at his mother. He had stopped crying. Something had settled in his eyes.

He touched her feet and said, “I will go.”

“Where?”

“There. Where you said. To find him.”

And the five-year-old set out. Alone. He left the palace and walked toward the forest.

On the road he met the sage Narada. Narada passed his hand over the boy’s head and tried to turn him back. “Son, you are still a child. This is an age for games. What can honor or insult mean to you now? When you are grown and the time for the deeper search arrives, take it up then. Yogis hold to their hard disciplines through birth after birth, and even they do not find the Lord’s road an easy one. Go home.”

Dhruva said only this: “The fire in me is burning today. Tomorrow it may go cold. I have to go today.”

Narada fell silent. He gave the boy the mantra, Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya, and taught him how to hold it in meditation. Then he said, “The road your mother showed you is the road of your highest good. Go to Madhuvana, on the sacred bank of the Yamuna near Mathura, and do your tapas there. Shri Hari is always present in that place. Bathe in the river, quiet your breath, and hold the Lord’s form steady in your heart.”

Dhruva found a spot at Madhuvana, on the bank of the Yamuna, and sat down.

He sat down, and he meant it. Month after month he gave up more. First food. Then water. Then he slowed the breath in his own body.

In the first month he ate only wood apples and jujube fruit, once every three nights.

In the second month, withered grass and leaves, once every six days.

In the third month, water alone, once every nine days.

In the fourth month, only the air he breathed, once every twelve days.

In the fifth month he mastered the breath itself and stood on a single leg, still as a post, unmoving.

His tapas grew so fierce that all three worlds began to shake.

When he pressed the whole earth down under his big toe, it tilted the way a boat lurches from side to side at every step of a great bull elephant climbing aboard. Dhruva’s mind sank so far into Shri Hari, the soul of the universe, that his own breath merged with the single breath of all creation. And the breathing of every living thing stopped.

The gods and the guardians of the worlds panicked and ran straight to Shri Hari for shelter. “Bhagavan, the breath of every creature has stopped at once. You are the refuge of all who come to you. Lift this from us.” The Lord reassured them and promised to draw the boy out of a penance that nothing else could break.

Then Vishnu came himself, riding on Garuda.

At that instant the form Dhruva had been holding in the lotus of his heart suddenly dissolved. He opened his eyes in alarm, and there stood the Lord in front of him, in that very form.

Vishnu touched the boy’s cheek with his conch, the conch that is the Veda made solid.

At the touch, speech shaped by the Vedas woke in Dhruva. With deep love and a steady heart he began to sing the praise of Shri Hari.

Vishnu smiled and asked, “What do you want?”

Dhruva had come all this way to ask for a throne higher than his brother’s. He said, “Lord, I came to ask you for a royal seat.”

Vishnu laughed, with great tenderness. “The thing you came for, you will have. You will win the kingdom, and for thirty-six thousand years you will hold the earth in dharma, your powers undimmed to the end. And something far greater is coming to you as well. A place from which you will never be moved. A single star, fixed in the sky, and around it the planets, the lunar mansions, and the whole host of stars will wheel forever, keeping it always to their right, the way bullocks tied to the post at the center of a threshing floor circle round and round. Even the seven seers will turn below it. That station will outlast the dissolution of the worlds. That Dhruvaloka I give to you. And when the time comes, your father too will place the throne in your hands and leave for the forest.”

And it happened exactly so.

Dhruva turned for home. On the road his heart grew heavy. In only six months this child had reached the very feet of the Lord, and he had used that moment to ask for a thing that rots. The wound his stepmother had made was still raw in him, and so, standing before the Lord who ends all bondage, he had not once thought to ask for freedom.

He began to reproach himself. “Look at my foolishness. A pauper wins over the emperor of the whole earth and then begs him for a few broken grains of rice. I did the same. From Shri Hari, who gives the soul its own bliss, I asked for high seats that feed nothing except pride. From the Lord who cuts the bonds of the world, I asked for the world itself. I would not even believe Narada when he told me the truth. And in my heart I went to war against my own brother, an enemy I invented, the way a sleeping man dreams up a lion and shakes with fear at a shape that is only himself.”

News of the boy’s return reached King Uttanapada, and at first he could not believe it, any more than a man believes a tale of the dead coming back. “How could someone as wretched as I am have such luck?” Then he remembered that Narada had foretold this, and joy overtook him. He loaded the messenger with a costly pearl necklace and rode out from the city to meet his son, surrounded by brahmanas and the elders of his house and his ministers, with conches blowing, kettledrums sounding, and Vedic hymns chanted around him.

His two queens, Suniti and Suruchi, rode out too, with prince Uttama. When the king saw the boy near the gardens, he sprang down from his chariot and hurried to him, and folded in his arms the child whom the touch of Vishnu’s feet had washed clean of every sorrow. He smelled Dhruva’s head again and again, the way a father does, and bathed him in tears.

Dhruva bowed at his father’s feet, and then bent low before both his mothers. Suruchi, the stepmother whose words had sent him into the forest, lifted the boy who had fallen at her feet, pressed him to her breast, and said in a voice thick with tears, “May you live long.”

Uttama and Dhruva threw their arms around each other and wept. Suniti held the son who was dearer to her than her own life, and milk flowed from her breasts, wet with her tears of joy. The people of the city blessed her and said the son she had lost had come back to wipe away her grief.

The king seated Dhruva on a she-elephant beside Uttama and entered his capital, Barhismati, to the cheering of the whole city. The streets had been washed and sprinkled with sandal water, the gateways hung with plantain trunks and young areca palms, with lamps and mango leaves and strings of pearls. The women of the city showered the boy with white mustard, unbroken rice, curds, and blades of durva grass as he passed, and with their blessings ringing after him Dhruva walked into his father’s palace.

When Dhruva had grown, and had won the trust of the ministers and the love of the people, the king made him sovereign of the whole earth. Then Uttanapada, feeling his years and weary of the pleasures of the senses, turned his mind to the Self and left for the woods.

In time Dhruva married Bhrami, daughter of the Prajapati Shishumara, and had sons of his own, Utkala among them. He ruled the earth in dharma.

Then a heavy blow fell. His half brother Uttama, still unmarried, went hunting on the Himalaya and was killed there by a Yaksha stronger than he was. Suruchi, searching the forest for her lost son until grief drove her past reason, walked into a wildfire and was gone.

When the news of his brother’s killing reached Dhruva, rage and grief and turmoil rose in him together. He mounted his war chariot and drove north, into a valley of the Himalaya, to Alakapuri, the city of the Yakshas, crowded with Guhyakas and haunted by spirits. He blew his conch until the sky and the four directions rang with it.

The Yaksha warriors poured out of the city with their weapons raised. Dhruva met them, three arrows to each man. Then a hundred and thirty thousand of them turned on him at once and rained down clubs, swords, lances, pikes, axes, and javelins, until he and his chariot vanished under the storm of iron the way a hill disappears in a downpour. From above, the Siddhas cried out that the sun of Manu’s line had set. A moment later his chariot broke back into view, like the sun coming out from behind mist, and he tore their ranks apart.

The Yakshas who were still alive fled the field. Dhruva held back from entering their city, wary of what tricks such creatures might keep in reserve. He was right to wait. The Yakshas loosed their sorcery. The sky went black and cracked with thunder. Rains of blood and filth came down, and headless bodies dropped out of the air. A mountain appeared overhead and poured down maces and boulders. Serpents rushed at him hissing, fire in their eyes, and behind them came mad elephants and lions and tigers, and then an ocean itself, rising on every side to drown the earth. The hermits who had gathered to watch prayed aloud for the boy, calling on the name of Vishnu to carry him through.

Dhruva sipped water and set to his bow the weapon of the sage Narayana. The moment it touched the string, every illusion the Yakshas had raised simply vanished, the way the dark and everything hiding inside it goes the instant a lamp is lit. Golden arrows flew from the bow into the enemy ranks.

Then Dhruva’s grandfather, Svayambhuva Manu, came onto the field with a company of sages, grieved to see so many Yakshas cut down, and began to counsel the boy. “Enough, my child. This much rage is a doorway into hell. You believed these Yakshas had killed your brother, and you have slaughtered them by the thousand, and most of them were guiltless. This is not worthy of our house. No Yaksha killed Uttama. The birth and the death of every creature has one cause only, and that cause is Time. You who won the very realm of Vishnu as a child, you who should be teaching others the way of the righteous, do not do this. Take refuge in the Lord and let this anger go cold. And know that you have wronged Kubera, the friend of Shiva, by killing his Yakshas. Go and appease him before the anger of a great one falls on our line.” Then Manu blessed him and returned to his own city with the sages.

Dhruva laid down that enmity, which is among the hardest things a man is ever asked to lay down. And Kubera, lord of the Yakshas, came before him then, well pleased, praised by the celestial bards. “Prince of the Kshatriyas, you gave up a hatred that few can give up, at your grandfather’s word, and it pleases me. Understand the truth of it. You did not kill the Yakshas, and the Yakshas did not kill your brother. Time alone moves all of that. Now ask me for whatever you wish.” Dhruva asked for one thing only, that the memory of Shri Hari never break in him, since a man who holds that memory crosses the shoreless ocean of the world with ease. Kubera granted it gladly and vanished where he stood.

Dhruva returned to Barhismati, worshipped the Lord through many yajnas, and came to see the one Lord seated alike in himself and in every creature. His people loved him as a father. For thirty-six thousand years he held the earth in dharma.

When age came at last, he placed the throne in the hands of his son Utkala and left for Badarikashrama.

There he bathed in the holy water, quieted his breath, and fixed his mind on the form of the Lord until the line between the one who sees and the thing seen dissolved. As the pride of the body fell away from him, even the thought “I am Dhruva” left him.

And at that very moment Dhruva saw a vimana of great beauty coming down out of the sky, lighting all ten directions as it came. Two of Shri Hari’s chief attendants stood in it, four-armed, dark of body, eyes like a pair of red lotuses, leaning easily on their maces, in the first freshness of youth.

They said to him, “Rajan, blessings on you. At five years old you did your tapas and won the favor of the Lord of all. Shri Hari has sent this finest of vimanas for you himself. Come and take up your home in the abode of Vishnu, a place no ancestor of yours ever reached, a place the seven seers themselves can only gaze up at from below.” Their names were Sunanda and Nanda.

At these words, sweet as nectar, Dhruva bathed, put on auspicious ornaments, bowed to the munis of Badarikashrama for their blessings, and walked around the divine car in reverence. Then he made ready to climb aboard.

As he did, Death itself arrived to meet him. Dhruva set his foot on the head of Death and stepped up into the car. Drums and tabors sounded on their own, the chief among the Gandharvas sang aloud, and flowers came raining down.

Seated and ready to leave for the Lord’s abode, Dhruva remembered his mother Suniti. He thought, “Am I to go alone to Vaikuntha, so hard to reach, and leave my poor mother behind?”

Nanda and Sunanda read the thought in his heart and showed him the lady Suniti already going on ahead in another vimana. The mother from whose lap this whole journey had started now led the way.

All along the route the gods sat in their own cars and praised him and rained flowers as he rose. He passed the planets one by one, crossed the three worlds, climbed higher than the circle of the seven rishis, and came at last to the eternal abode of Vishnu, the place where the pole star holds to this day, and has never once slipped from where it stands.

Shukadeva stopped there.

Parikshit said softly, “Bhagavan, the boy went out to ask for a kingdom and came home with something far larger than a kingdom. But the thing that has stayed with me is none of that. It is the wound. It looked so small at the beginning.”

Shukadeva smiled. “Rajan, a wound makes one person smaller and shows another a door. The whole of the difference is which way the mind turns while it carries the pain. Dhruva’s mind turned toward the Lord, and the child who had been pushed off a lap rose to sit higher than any of them.”

Parikshit said nothing.