Bhagavatam · King Vena and Prithu

Parikshit folded his hands and raised his eyes toward Shukadeva.

“Munivar, I too have worn a crown. Whatever lay in my power to do for my people, I did. But one doubt stays lodged in me. If the man on the throne goes bad, what becomes of the land that sits trusting in his care? Has there ever been a king who devoured the very people he was set over?”

Shukadeva was silent a while. Then he said, “Rajan, there was such a king. His name was Vena. And from his own dead body came the king by whose name this earth is still called. Listen.”

In the line of Dhruva there was a king named Anga. A rajarshi, gentle by nature, devoted to the brahmins, with dharma settled in every pore of him and the fire-rite, the yajna, in his breath. He ruled well and wanted for nothing, except that the years passed and his lap stayed empty.

For a son, Anga set in motion a great horse-sacrifice. The rites were faultless, the offerings pure, the Vedic verses sound, yet the gods did not come to take their share, though the sages called on them again and again. The officiating priests, amazed, told the king the truth. The fault lay in no error of his in this life. A sin carried over from a former birth had left him without a son, and only a child born of the Lord’s grace would open the gods’ hands again. So they turned the whole sacrifice toward Shri Vishnu, the Lord of every offering, and asked him for a son.

When the ritvij priests poured the oblation into the fire, a being rose from the flames, adorned with a golden necklace and clothed in spotless white, bearing in a golden vessel the kheer already made ready. Anga received it in his cupped hands and, breathing in its sweetness, gave it with great gladness to his wife Sunitha. From it, in time, a son was born. But the hour he came into the world, in place of joy an unspoken dread settled over the house.

The infant’s eyes held no cry for milk. In them sat a cold burning. He was named Vena.

Sunitha was herself the daughter of Death, and Death had sprung from a portion of Adharma. That blood came down through her into every vein of the child, and so Vena leaned toward wrongdoing from his first breath.

Anga held him to his chest and tried by every means to raise him well, with softness, with sternness, by teaching him manners. Nothing turned him. He grew as he was born, harder with each passing year. He would seize children of his own age at their play and throttle them the way a butcher handles beasts, and he would take up a bow and cut down harmless deer in the woods, until people learned to cry out at the sight of him, “Here comes Vena.”

This grief turned Anga’s mind away from the household. One night, while the palace slept, he rose, crossed the threshold of all that vast wealth, and walked out. He said nothing to anyone. He never came back. The people, the priests, and the ministers searched the whole earth for him, the way men who have not learned the secret of yoga look outside themselves for what sits within, and they found no trace.

The throne stood empty, and without a king the people began to run wild. Bhrigu and the other sages, seeing men sink to the level of animals, sent for the queen mother Sunitha and, over the ministers’ objections and with heavy hearts, crowned Vena, in the hope that the weight of the crown might steady him. For a moment it seemed to work. Word that a hard hand now held the scepter sent the thieves and bandits into hiding, like rats when a snake is near.

The hope was short. Power went to Vena’s head like a fever. He set himself above every great man of the realm, mounted his chariot, and rolled through his dominion like a bull elephant with no goad on it, making earth and sky shudder. Then he had the war drum beaten and a decree carried through the whole kingdom. “From this day no twice-born man shall perform any sacrifice, give any gift, or pour any oblation into the fire. The offering that was the gods’ shall come to me. Worship shall be of me, for there is no one but me who holds the right to first worship.”

The sages and seers swallowed their anger and came to the court. With great courtesy, with great patience, in gentle words, they set out to reason with him.

“Give heed to us, chief of kings, for what we urge will lengthen your life and swell your fortune, your strength, and your fame. Duty done in thought and word and deed carries a man to worlds without sorrow. Your duty is the safety and the flourishing of your people, and a king who lets that duty fall is cast down from his own splendor. You are the guardian of this land; you are not its owner. Shri Hari, the Yajnapurusha by whom the whole world turns, is worshipped in your kingdom whenever your people follow the work of their station in life, and it is his favor that keeps your throne standing under you. Do not shut the gates on the gods.”

The old burning flared up in Vena’s eyes.

“You are fools, and worse, you take wrong for right. This Yajnapurusha you fawn over, who is he? Vishnu, Brahma, Mahadeva, Indra, Surya, Agni, Varuna, every last one of the gods lives inside the body of the king. The king alone, then, is made of all the gods. Set me aside, and worship no one else. Bring your offerings to me, for what other person deserves them?”

The sages rose without a word and went outside. They met one another’s eyes.

“To leave him standing would itself be adharma. This king will trample the whole order of creation. He reviles Shri Hari to his face, and the people will be ground to nothing under his hunger.”

Their patience burned through. Roused by the reviling of that shameless man, the sages woke the mantra that lived in their hearts and finished him with the force of sound alone. A single utterance: “Hum.”

In that sound was the gathered power of their tapas. Vena shook once and dropped where he stood. His breath stopped in that instant.

With the king dead, the land fell into anarchy. Thieves and bandits swelled in number, and the people were plundered on every side. Some days later, bathing in the Saraswati and offering their oblations, the sages saw dark omens rise over the world and clouds of dust thrown up by robbers running in every direction. They knew the earth could not be left without a ruler. They knew too that when men who have taken a vow of stillness let the suffering of others pass them by, the spiritual power they have stored drains away like water from a cracked jar. And the line of Anga, they said, from which kings devoted to the Lord had come, must not be allowed to die out. Vena’s grieving mother had by her spells kept her son’s corpse from decay. The sages gathered around that body.

First they churned Vena’s thigh, the way fire is drawn from the two arani sticks.

Out of it came a man of low stature. Black as a crow, dwarfish, with short arms and short legs, heavy jaws, a flat nose, bloodshot eyes, and copper-colored hair. On his face sat the same burning that had once been in Vena’s eyes.

Bowed low and meek, he asked, “What shall I do?”

The sages said, “Nishida,” which is to say, sit down. From that word he took the name Nishada. In the very act of being born he had drawn onto himself the whole of Vena’s terrible sin, as though every wrong in the dead king had bound itself into one bundle and come down into a single body.

Nishada bowed his head and set off toward the forest. From him came the Nishada people, who to this day live in the woods and the hills and are given to violence and plunder. So the Purana tells it.

Vena’s body was lighter now, the sin gone out of it. This time the sages churned his arms, and from the right arm a man and a woman rose together.

The man who appeared made the lamps of the court go pale. A hero blazing with splendor, a bow and arrow in his hand, the sign of the discus on his right palm and the mark of the lotus on the soles of his feet.

With him came a woman full of radiance, graced with every virtue and every ornament, his companion Archi.

The brahmavadi sages folded their hands. “This one has come from a world-sustaining portion of Shri Vishnu himself. His name is Prithu, for the splendor of that name will spread wide across the earth. And this woman is a ray of Shri Lakshmi, his companion who is never parted from him, Archi. Among all kings he will be the first, and the most glorious emperor the world will know. Here is our king.”

The Veda-knowing brahmins performed Maharaja Prithu’s consecration by the book. The rivers, the ocean, the mountains, the serpents, the cows, the birds, the deer, heaven, and earth all came bearing gifts. Indra brought a shining crown, Varuna an umbrella that dripped cool light like the moon, Agni a bow made of horn, Surya a quiver of arrows bright as his own rays, and Shri Hari laid the discus named Sudarshana into his hand. The forehead that took the crown was already bowed, bent under the weight of the dharma set on it and empty of any appetite for the seat itself.

Yet the moment he was king, the first calamity was already waiting. Under Vena’s lawless years the earth had gone dry, and not a single grain would rise from her.

The earth had drawn all her yield back into herself. Seeing that no fit protector remained and that the lawless were squandering what grew, she had gathered the seed of every plant and hidden it within her body, to keep it safe for the day when sacrifice and right order returned.

When word of his people’s hunger reached Prithu, something in him shook.

He lifted his bow, set an arrow to the string, and moved toward the earth, his aim as steady as Shiva’s when he drew on the three cities of Tripura. His hand did not tremble. In his mind were the faces of his starving people and the vow of a guardian who cannot stand and watch his own die of want.

The earth took fright, put on the form of a cow, and fled, running through all ten directions like a doe with a hunter behind her. Everywhere she turned she saw the raised bow. She found no shelter from the son of Vena, as living things find no shelter from death, and at last, worn down and shaking, she stopped.

“Rajan, do not loose your arrow on me. Why would you carry the sin of killing a woman? And think what you would be striking. I am the boat on which this whole creation rides above the waters. Bring me down, and how will you hold up yourself and all these living things on the face of the deep?”

“Then give back what you owe. You take your share of every offering, yet you refuse the people their grain. A cow that grazes all day and yields no milk has earned the goad. You are hiding the seed the creator himself brought forth, and my people sleep hungry over ground that will not feed them. Yield it, or I will open your body with these arrows and sustain them by my own power.”

The cow that was the earth bowed her head. “There is a gentler way, Rajan. Set up a fit calf, keep a proper vessel, and milk me with love. What I have held back will come down only to tenderness; force will draw out nothing. And level my rough places, so that when the rains have passed the water will stand on me and not run to waste.”

Prithu made Svayambhuva Manu the calf, cupped his own hands for the vessel, and milked the earth. What flowed from her was grain of every kind, rice and wheat and barley and pulses, poured out where milk should have been.

Once she had been gentled into a cow for his sake, every order of being came and milked her in the same fashion, each with its own calf and its own vessel, each drawing the sustenance proper to it. The sages set the teacher of the gods for their calf and drew the Veda. The gods drew the drink of the immortals. The ancestors drew their offerings, the mountains their minerals, the trees their sap. The earth is the wish-yielding cow, and she gave to all who came to her with love.

The parched land went green again. The threshing floors filled, the hearth fires were lit, and into the homes of the people the smell of grain came back.

Prithu did not stop there. The earth had been rough and broken, thick with hills and stone. With the tips of his bow he shattered the crests of the mountains and leveled her, cut fields, laid roads, and raised villages, towns, and cities where before men had lived scattered and unsheltered. And the earth, who had come to him first in terror, he took at the last for a daughter, and loved her as one.

From this same Prithu the earth took the name she still carries, Prithvi.

Prithu ruled by dharma for many years, and under him the people knew neither hunger nor injustice. When his last hour drew near, he laid down the kingdom and walked toward the forest to lose himself in tapas, and in the end he passed into the abode of Shri Hari.

Archi did not fall a single step behind him. Taking her husband’s pyre for her own road, she gave up her body and joined him in that same abode.