Bhagavatam · The Syamantaka Jewel

Parikshit looked toward the great muni and said, “Bhagavan, so far you have told me those lilas of the Lord in which he steals butter, lifts a mountain, dances with the gopis. But there is a restlessness in me. When a false charge is laid on someone, he burns with anger and screams in his own defense. Did any stain ever fall on the Lord himself? And if it did, with what grace did he wash it away?”

Shukadeva smiled. In his eyes was that stillness which settles before the telling of something dear. “Rajan, it did. Over a single jewel, the lanes of Dwarka filled with the word that Shri Hari had stolen and killed. And the charge came to him twice over that same stone, and both times he cleared it the same way, with a quiet search, his sword never leaving its sheath. Listen.”

In Dwarka lived a Yadava named Satrajit, rich and honored, and above all a devotee of the Sun-god Surya. Pleased with his worship, Surya befriended him the way one man befriends another, and gave him a jewel called the Syamantaka.

The gem was no ordinary stone. When Satrajit wore it at his throat and walked back into Dwarka, he blazed so brightly that no one could look straight at him. People took him for the Sun-god himself, come down into the city, and ran to tell Krishna, who was in the middle of a game of dice. Krishna laughed. “That is no god,” he said. “That is Satrajit, lit up by his jewel.”

Satrajit had the Syamantaka installed with proper rites in a shrine in his house. Every single day it gave up eight bhara of gold. Wherever it was kept and honored, there was no famine, no plague, no calamity of any kind; sickness and fear and ill fortune all kept their distance.

Krishna thought a treasure like that belonged with the king, held in trust for everyone, and he asked Satrajit to give the Syamantaka to Ugrasena, lord of the Yadus. Satrajit was too greedy to part with it. He refused, and never stopped to think what such a refusal, aimed at Krishna, might one day cost him.

One day Satrajit’s brother Prasena hung that same mighty jewel at his own throat and rode into the forest to hunt. In the noon light it burned on his chest, as though a second sun were riding through the trees.

Deep in the woods a lion sprang on the lone rider and brought down horse and man together. It tore Prasena open, took the jewel, a chip of fire in all that blood, and turned back toward its den in the hills.

In those same hills lived Jambavan, king of the bears, old as the yugas. He wanted the shining thing the lion carried, so he struck the lion down, lifted the jewel, and took it home into his dark cave, where he handed it to his infant cub as a toy. The cub turned the glowing stone over and over in its small palms and gurgled with delight.

In Dwarka, Satrajit counted the days. His brother did not come home, and no word of him came either.

His suspicion fixed on Krishna, and he said it out loud, to anyone who would listen. “It would be just like Krishna to have my brother killed. Prasena rode out with the jewel around his neck, and Krishna had wanted that jewel.”

The words traveled lane to lane. The people of Dwarka whispered to one another, and every whisper left another smear on the name of Shri Hari.

It lodged in Krishna’s mind like a thorn. Even a little dust settling on a good name will sting. Yet he challenged no one and spoke not a single word in his own defense.

“A stain laid by words will not lift by more words,” he thought. “Let the truth speak for itself.” He gathered a few respected men of the city and set out for the same forest Prasena had ridden into.

Footprints in the grass, a snapped branch, blood going dry. Reading each sign in turn, they pressed deeper. First they came on Prasena’s body, torn apart along with his horse. Beside it the heavy pad-marks of a lion led off in the direction the jewel had gone. They followed, and higher up the slope they found the lion itself dead, killed by some far greater paw. Those broader, deeper prints ran straight to the mouth of a hill cave, the den of the bear-king.

Krishna left his companions at the entrance and went down alone into the thick dark.

Inside hung the smell of damp earth, and in a far corner the great jewel lay like a child’s plaything. A small cub sat with it, dancing it in its palms and babbling to itself, and beside the cub a nurse kept watch. Seeing a stranger step out of the dark, she screamed in fright.

Krishna moved slowly toward the stone to take it up.

At the nurse’s scream the shadows of the cave shifted, and Jambavan came and stood before him, huge with anger. His body filled the doorway and shut out the last of the light.

“Who are you, standing so close to this child?” His voice hit the stone walls and came back deeper than before.

Krishna answered calmly and gave his name. But Jambavan could not see past the man to the God inside him. He took Krishna for an ordinary intruder, believed nothing he said, and saw only a thief who had come to snatch his cub’s bright toy.

“I am Shri Hari, no robber,” Krishna told him. “That jewel is the witness to a lie told about me. Give it to me.” To the bear-king the words sounded like the smooth talk of a brazen thief.

And then the fight began, the one that still seems to echo in the stone of that cave.

Jambavan was no common strength of arm. Ages before, in the days of the Rama avatar, he had been a pillar of the army that leapt the ocean. He had watched the bridge take shape across the water and seen Lanka burn. The power of the Satya and Treta yugas was packed into his arms.

He did not give a single step.

They came at each other like two starving hawks over one scrap of meat. First it was weapons, then flung boulders, then whole trees torn up by the roots and hurled, and at last bare arms and fists. Stone cracked, dust boiled up, and in the corner the cub cowered with the jewel hugged to its chest.

One day went by. Then two. Then a whole fortnight.

For twenty-eight days, with no rest, no sleep, no food or water, they grappled day and night, trading blows that landed like strokes of lightning.

At the end of those twenty-eight days, for the first time in his long life, Jambavan’s arms began to shake. Every joint in his body had been battered loose, his spirit was draining out of him, and the strength that had never once failed him across the yugas was leaking away at the mere touch of this single man. Still he would not bow.

And then, somewhere in the depths of his exhausted mind, an old memory lifted its head. This heat, this touch, this unbreakable calm, he had felt them before, ages ago, in the one master whose service had filled his whole life.

His hands went slack. Amazed, gasping for breath, he said, “Stop. Who are you? This strength is not of this world.”

“I am Krishna.”

“The same one who in that age was Rama? For whom I carried stones across the sea, and watched the ocean part and Lanka burn?”

“Yes.”

The bear-king’s great head sank slowly, and in that bow the whole force of twenty-eight days melted and turned into bhakti, into devotion.

“Prabhu, I know you now. You are the lord and protector of every living being, the most ancient Purusha, Bhagavan Vishnu himself, the maker of Brahma, the very self within all that breathes. Forgive me. I was blind. I could not tell who you were, and for all these days I lifted my hand against you.”

“There is no fault in you,” Krishna said gently, passing his cool, blessing hand over the old devotee’s battered body. “This time I have come in another form.”

Jambavan went in, took the jewel from his cub’s palm, and set it in Krishna’s hands.

“One more thing I would ask, Prabhu,” he said. “My daughter, the maiden Jambavati. Give her a place at your feet. What greater fortune could I hope for than that?”

Krishna took her hand in marriage with the proper rites.

Back in Dwarka, twelve days went by with no sign of Krishna coming out of the cave, and Devaki, Rukmini, Vasudeva, and all their kin fell into grief. The people of the city cursed Satrajit’s name and turned to the great Goddess Durga, worshipped there as Candrabhaga, praying for Krishna’s safe return. Just then Krishna came back among them, the jewel recovered and a new bride, Jambavati, at his side. Those who had given him up for dead were flooded with a joy that felt like watching someone return from the grave.

The royal assembly was called. Before Maharaja Ugrasena, Krishna laid the jewel down in front of Satrajit and told the whole story from beginning to end. Satrajit’s head bent so low with shame that he could not lift his eyes.

He went home heavy with remorse. He had set himself against Krishna, and now a fear of that mighty man sat in him and would not leave; his offense played before his eyes day and night. At last he made up his mind. “Greed for gold has made a fool of me. Let me give Krishna both my daughter Satyabhama and this jewel. That is the only atonement worth the name.”

He carried both to Krishna himself and clasped his feet. “Forgive me, Prabhu. I flung filth at a man as clean as you. My greed drew a veil across my eyes. Take the jewel and take my daughter, both.”

Satyabhama had been sought by many suitors, for she was gracious and lovely and large of heart, and Krishna married her with the proper rites. But the jewel he would not take. “I will not keep the Syamantaka,” he said. “You are a devotee of the Sun-god; let it stay with you. I ask only for its fruit, the gold it yields. That you may send to me.” And so the jewel remained with Satrajit.

At the end of a single search, the man who had set out only to wipe away a lie came home with two queens: Jambavati, the bear-king’s daughter, out of the dark of a cave, and Satyabhama, daughter of the very man who had framed him.

But the Syamantaka was not finished with the world, and it would cost more lives before it came to rest.

Some time later, word reached Dwarka that the sons of Pandu and their mother Kunti had burned to death in a house of lac. Krishna knew better, that they had slipped away unharmed before the fire was ever set, yet he went to Hastinapura with Balarama to sit with the grieving Kuru elders, Bhishma, Kripa, Vidura, Gandhari, and Drona, and to carry a share of their sorrow.

With Krishna away, three men found their opening. Akrura and Kritavarma had never forgiven Satrajit for smearing Krishna’s name, and they went to a Yadava named Satadhanva and worked on him. “Why let that house keep the jewel? Satrajit swore his daughter to us, and then handed her to Krishna as if we counted for nothing. Let him follow his brother Prasena.”

The poison did its work. One night Satadhanva walked into Satrajit’s house while the man slept and killed him where he lay, as a butcher fells a beast. He took the Syamantaka from among the shrieking women of the household and slipped out into the dark.

Satyabhama found her father murdered. Half out of her mind, crying “Father, oh my father, I am undone,” fainting and waking and fainting again, she had his body laid in a vat of oil so it would not spoil, and drove through to Hastinapura to bring Krishna the news. He already knew it. Even so, he and Balarama wept the way men weep, and said, “A great grief has come on us.” Then they turned for home, to take Satadhanva’s life and bring the jewel back.

Satadhanva heard they were coming and went cold. He ran first to Kritavarma, who shut the door on him. “I will not stand against those two brothers. Look what enmity with them did to Kamsa, who lost his throne and his life at a single stroke, and to Jarasandha, who came at them seventeen times and each time crept away without so much as his chariot.” He ran next to Akrura, the very man who had lit this fire, and Akrura refused him too, and spoke of Krishna as a frightened man speaks of God, of the boy who once lifted the whole of Govardhana on one hand as lightly as a child lifts a mushroom. Turned away on both sides, Satadhanva left the jewel with Akrura for safekeeping, climbed onto a mare that could run a hundred yojanas without tiring, and fled.

Krishna and Balarama came after him on their chariot under the Garuda banner, four horses at a dead run. Near Mithila the mare dropped dead beneath him and Satadhanva ran on his own feet. Krishna went after him on foot as well, unwilling to ride down a man who had no horse, and took off his head with the discus. He searched the dead man’s garments for the jewel and found nothing. He came back to the chariot. “I have killed him for nothing,” he told Balarama. “The Syamantaka is not on him.”

“Then he left it with someone in Dwarka before he ran,” Balarama said. “Go back and trace it. I have long wanted to see my friend the king of Videha.” And he walked into Mithila, where Janaka rose from his seat to welcome him and kept him as an honored guest for years. In that time Duryodhana came and learned the mace at Balarama’s feet.

Krishna returned to Dwarka, told Satyabhama that the killer was dead though the jewel was still lost, and with his kinsmen saw to every last rite owed to her murdered father.

When Akrura and Kritavarma heard that Satadhanva had been cut down, fear drove them both out of Dwarka. And with Akrura gone, and the jewel gone with him, the city began to suffer. The omens turned foul; sickness and misfortune came again and again. The elders, forgetting something they knew perfectly well, blamed it all on Akrura’s absence. They recalled how his father Swaphalka had once come to Kashi in a long drought, and how the king there gave him his daughter Gandini, and how the rains broke soon after. Wherever a man of that line lives, they said, the clouds open and no plague comes near.

Krishna knew the omens ran deeper than one man’s absence, but he also knew exactly where the jewel was. He had Akrura brought back, received him warmly, and then, smiling, said aloud the thing everyone had been stepping around. “We have always known that Satadhanva left the Syamantaka with you, friend. Satrajit died without a son, so the gold of it belongs by right to the sons Satyabhama will bear, once his debts are cleared. Keep the gem itself; a man strict in his vows can hold such a thing, and other men cannot. But my brother Balarama half believes that I took it and hid it away, and the whole house is uneasy over it. Bring it into the open, and let them breathe. I know it is with you. No one else could be raising the altars of gold your rites have raised all this while.”

Akrura brought out the jewel, wrapped in a piece of cloth and blazing like a small sun, and laid it in Krishna’s hands. Krishna held it up before Balarama and all his people, so the last of the blame slid off him, and then he gave it back to Akrura, to keep in plain sight, with his blessing.

So the Syamantaka came to rest at last. It had passed from a greedy hand to a murdered one, from a murderer to a schemer, and only in the keeping of a devotee who lived by his vows did it stop taking lives and simply shine. Twice that one stone had gotten Krishna named a thief. Both times he answered the same way. He said nothing for himself, walked the truth out into open daylight, and let the sight of it clear him.