Bhagavatam · The Curse of Jaya and Vijaya

The Ganga ran slow that morning, as if the river too had paused to listen. Parikshit had not closed his eyes all night. Today he looked toward Shukadeva, held his silence a while, and then he asked.

“Bhagavan, you told me of the Varaha who lifted the earth from the deep, and of Hiranyaksha, who fell at his hands. One thing has lodged in me and will not move. Beings who carry enmity toward the Lord, who spend their lives bent on killing him, why do you call their death a liberation? My days are counted now, and I would understand this before they run out. Can hatred, too, be a door?”

Shukadeva let his gaze rest on the water. Then he smiled, as though the question had reached somewhere deep in him and pleased him there.

“Rajan, the one you name your enemy has more than once been Sri Hari’s own. Listen. This katha belongs to the very two with whom your Varaha and your Narasimha both begin.”

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“You will remember, Rajan, that Diti held the burning seed of her husband Kashyapa in her womb for a hundred years. The heat of that womb began to dim the light of every world. Indra and the guardians of the four quarters lost their luster, and darkness crept across the directions until the gods, frightened, went to Brahma and told him the sky itself was failing. To steady them, Brahma told a story, and the story he told was the story of the gate of Vaikuntha.”

In Vaikuntha stood two doorkeepers. Jaya and Vijaya.

They were among the closest of Lord Vishnu’s attendants, and their whole work was one thing: to stand at the threshold of Sri Hari’s dwelling and weigh each visitor before letting him pass within.

One day four sages came walking toward that realm. Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatana, and Sanatkumara, the mind-born sons of Brahma. They were older than Marici and the elder lords of creation, born before them all, and yet to the eye they seemed boys of five, and they walked wearing nothing but the open sky.

No film of wanting lay on those four. Nothing held them, no object drew them, no gate gave them pause. They had come for one thing only, the sight of Sri Hari, and they meant to go in.

Six gates they crossed, each with doors of gold and set jewels, and no one stopped them, for they moved through as freely as through open country. At the seventh gate two guards stood waiting. Both were of the same age and the same fierce beauty: four dark arms apiece, a mace held ready, armlets and earrings and jeweled crowns catching the light, and around their necks garlands of forest flowers loud with drunk bees. Their brows were arched, their nostrils wide, their eyes touched with red. To anyone who did not know them, they might have been small images of the Lord they served. When the naked boys came on toward the door as though it were not there, Jaya and Vijaya crossed their staffs and barred the way.

The guards looked at the untroubled walk of these children and laughed, a laugh that had no place in Sri Hari’s house. “Stop there. This is no way to come in.”

The four glanced at one another. Their eyes fell the same way on all things, and they had gone everywhere in the worlds without a hand raised against them. But to be turned back at the very threshold of the one they loved brought a slow red into their eyes.

“Doorkeepers,” they said, “those who live in this realm live here by long and loving service to the Lord, and they come to look on everything with his own even gaze. You two belong to that company. Where, then, did this crookedness enter you? The Lord is peace through and through, and he is at odds with no one. If you scent a danger here that must be shut out, the danger is your own; you suspect in others what you carry in yourselves.”

“You wear the Lord’s own likeness, and still your minds have gone dull, so for your own good we will give your fault the answer it has earned. Since you see division even here, where there is none, go down from Vaikuntha into the wombs where division rules, into the world where the three enemies keep house: desire, anger, and greed.”

At that one sentence the guards’ hands fell to their sides.

They knew a Brahmana’s curse when they heard one, and they knew no weapon forged could turn it. They let go of their staffs, went down to the ground, and took hold of the sages’ feet.

“Bhagavan,” they said, and their voices shook, “we are guilty, and the punishment fits the fault. Let it fall. Let it burn out of us the sin of having slighted the Lord by slighting you. We ask only one thing, if any pity for us stirs in you: that down in those low wombs no forgetting take us, no delusion thick enough to wipe the Lord from our memory.”

And then, at the sound of his own servants shaming his guests, Sri Hari came to the gate himself, with Lakshmi beside him.

His form undid them. On his dark chest Lakshmi lay as a thread of gold; the Kaustubha gem burned at his throat; a garland of forest flowers hung between his four arms, and a crown of set gems rested on his head. The sages’ eyes moved over him and could not take their fill. They bowed to the ground and began to praise him.

For a moment Sri Hari said nothing, and his look, resting on his two servants, was full of pity.

“Best of sages,” he said, “these two, Jaya and Vijaya, are mine, and in forgetting me they have wronged you badly. You follow me with all your hearts, and so the sentence you have passed on them, for a slight that was truly a slight to me, has my full assent. The Brahmana is the highest thing I honor. When my own people insult you, I count the insult mine. And so I come to you as a beggar, asking one gift of you: your goodwill.”

“They wronged you because they could not read my mind. For my sake, then, grant only this: let their exile run short. Let them take the low birth their fault has earned, and let them come home to me quickly.”

The sages relented. They set the term of the curse at three lives, three descents into the world as the Lord’s enemies, and said that when the third was spent the curse would loose its hold and carry the two home to his realm.

Then Sri Hari turned to the pair who had guarded his door.

“You must go down into the world of death and be born. Even this was set moving by me, so hear it without fear. Long ago, when you turned Lakshmi herself away at this door while I lay deep in yoga-sleep, her displeasure already marked you, and I have not lifted it. Now you will enter the womb of the daityas, and there, in the very heat of your hatred, your minds will hold fast to me and to nothing else. That one unbroken hold, tighter than any devotion, will bring you home to me, and soon.”

Jaya and Vijaya bowed their heads.

In their eyes was the pain of leaving their master, and under it the hope of the road back.

So the road was set.

The two attendants fell from Vaikuntha and sank into the same womb of Diti where Kashyapa’s fierce fire already lay stored. When they were born, they came as two brothers, Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu, and their coming shook the worlds.

In time the boar, Varaha, killed Hiranyaksha, and the man-lion, Narasimha, killed Hiranyakashipu. Each time the brothers came to stand before the very Lord whose door they had once kept. Each time they came as his enemies. And each time, dying under his hand, they went back to Vaikuntha.

Shukadeva paused. “Rajan, the Bhagavata carries them further. These same two came into the world again, as Ravana and Kumbhakarna, and Rama killed them both. They came a third time, as Shishupala and Dantavakra, and Krishna’s discus took them. Three births as his foes, and at the end of the third the curse was spent and they merged back into him for good. But those are stories set further on. Here it is enough to say that they left the gate of Vaikuntha and went down into the womb of Diti.”