The debt was Vishwamitra’s, and it had eaten everything. To pay the dakshina he had promised the sage, King Harishchandra of Ayodhya had given up his kingdom, then sold his queen, Shaivya, and his small son, Rohita, into a Brahmin’s house in Kashi, and at the last, with the sum still short, he had sold himself. The buyer was a chandala, a keeper of the burning grounds who gave his name as Pravira: black, pot-bellied, big-toothed, garlanded with the flowers taken off corpses. Vishwamitra had sold him his royal slave for land of ten yojanas around Prayaga and thousands of jewels, and the king stood sold. Then a bodiless voice spoke out of the sky. “You are free of debt. You have paid that dakshina.” Flowers rained on the king’s head, and the gods, Indra among them, cried “Sadhu, sadhu!” Flooded with joy, the king turned to Vishwamitra. “You are my mother and my father, you are my kinsman, for in one moment you have freed me and made me a man without debt. Your word is my good. What shall I do?” The sage answered, “From today you obey the chandala’s word.” He wished the king well, took the wealth, and left. The chandala watched him go. Then, glad at heart, he bound the lord of men, told him, “You will run off and make a liar of yourself,” beat him with his staff until he reeled, dragged him to his hamlet, put him in iron fetters, and lay down himself and slept without a care. For four days the king took neither food nor water. He saw his thin, sad-faced wife with the sad-faced boy before her, telling herself that the king would earn the money, pay the Brahmin, and free them both; he heard the boy crying “Tata, tata,” and heard her soothing him. “That fawn-eyed woman does not know,” he said, “that I have become a chandala’s slave. Kingdom lost, friends gone, wife and son sold, and now this: what a chain of sorrows.” On the fifth day the chandala struck off the fetters, cursed him again and again, and taught him the trade of taking the clothes of the dead. “In the southern part of Kashi there is a great shmashana. Guard it properly, and never leave it. Take this worn staff and go at once, and proclaim everywhere: this staff is Virabahu’s.”
The Watchman of the Cremation Ground
So King Harishchandra, under a chandala’s orders, became the taker of shrouds in the cremation ground of Kashi, and went to live in the house of the dead. The ground lay on the southern edge of the city, and it was a place of dread. Garlands stripped from corpses lay in heaps, the air was thick with smoke and stench, and hundreds of she-jackals ran there with vultures and jackals and dogs, among rings of corpses and hills of bones, while the half-burnt faces of the dead showed their teeth in the fire as though they were laughing. Over everything rose the wailing of the mourners. “Alas, my son! Brother, child, you leave me now! Nephew, uncle, grandfather, father, grandson, where have you gone? Come back!” Under the cries ran the hiss of burning flesh and fat and marrow and the fierce crackle of the flames, so that the place was like the end of a kalpa. The king stood in it and grieved. “Where are my servants, my ministers? Where is the kingdom of my line? Where have my beloved and my child gone, far from me, through a Brahmin’s anger, leaving me here with my ill luck?” And out of the same grief came the one thought that kept him standing there: without dharma no good ever comes to men, so a man must hold to dharma with all his effort. His body was caked in filth, his frame thin as a dry stick, and he ran from corpse to corpse reckoning fees. “From this body, this much. From the next one I shall get a hundred. This is mine, this is the king’s, this is the chandala’s.” One old cloth was left to him, knotted in many places. Pyre-ash and dust lay on his face, his arms, his belly, his feet; fat and marrow from the burning dried on his fingers; the air he breathed was foul. He stilled his hunger with the rice of the pinda offerings set out for the dead, and crowned his head with their garlands. He did not sleep by night and he did not sleep by day, and “Alas, alas” was always in his mouth. In this way twelve months passed over him like a hundred years.
The Death of the Prince
Across the city, in the Brahmin’s house, the prince Rohita was a servant too. One day he went out with the other boys to play, not far from Varanasi. When the game was over he set about gathering darbha for his master: the tender kusha with its small roots and fine tips, as much as he could hold, pulled carefully with both hands, telling himself that this would please his arya. He added well-shaped samidh sticks for the fire offering, firewood, sacrificial grass, and palasha wood, lifted the whole load onto his head, and set off, tiring at every step. Thirst drove him to a pool. He set the load down, drank as much as he wanted, rested for a muhurta, and then reached for the bundle, which he had set down on an anthill. Out of the anthill, at Vishwamitra’s command, came a black serpent, thick with poison. It bit the boy, and he fell to the ground and died where he lay. The other boys ran in terror to the Brahmin’s house and said before his mother that her son had gone out to play with them, and that a snake had bitten him, and that he was dead.
The words struck Shaivya like a thunderbolt, and she fell senseless, like a plantain tree cut through at the root. The Brahmin, angry, threw water on her. After a muhurta she came to herself, and he was already speaking. “You know that weeping at nightfall is blameworthy and draws ill fortune into a house, and still you weep. Have you no shame?” She said nothing. Her face was wet, gray with dust, her hair loose, and she wept for her son, and his anger rose. “Fie on you. You took your price, and now you neglect my work. If you could not do it, why did you take my money?” He flung cruel words at her until she told him the cause in a choking voice. “My little son has been bitten by a snake outside, and he is dead. Give me leave. I will go and see the boy. The sight of him has become a rare thing for me now.” The Brahmin answered her with the law of servants: one who takes a master’s wage and neglects his work cooks in the hells, Maharaurava first, and after a kalpa there is born a cock; and what use was dharma-talk to a sinful, foolish, cruel, lying cheat, seed sown in salt ground? “Come. If you have any fear of the next world, do your work.” She trembled before him. “Have pity. Be gracious. Let me go for one muhurta, so that I may see my child.” She laid her head at his feet and wept, and his eyes went red. “What business have I with your son? Do my housework. Do you not know my anger, and that it bears the fruit of the whip?” So she steadied herself and did his housework, and half the night went in pressing and anointing his feet. Then he told her, “Go to your son now. Do his cremation and the rest, and come back quickly, or my morning work will be spoiled.” Alone in the dark the queen went out, lamenting, like a doe strayed from the herd, like a cow whose calf has been taken.
Outside Varanasi she found him soon enough, lying on the ground like a pauper, on wood and darbha and grass. “Come to me,” she cried out in a harsh, broken voice. “Why are you angry with me? You always came running to me, saying Amba, Amba.” She stumbled toward him and fell senseless across his body. When she woke she gathered the boy in both arms, laid her face against his, and wept, beating her head and her breast. “Alas, Harishchandra, where have you gone? See your own boy, dearer to you than life, lying dead on the ground!” Hope took her, and she searched his face again and again for some sign of life, and when she knew there was none she fainted a second time. She came back and took his face in her hand. “Child, leave this dreadful sleep and wake up quickly. Midnight is past. Hundreds of she-jackals are howling, and the bhutas and pretas and pishachas and dakinis are crying out. Your friends all went home at sunset. Why have you alone stayed?” There was no one to stop her, so she went on. She told him she had left her land for him, lost the kingdom, become a slave when her husband sold her, and lived only by the sight of him. She went through what the Brahmins had read in his stars at his birth, long life and rule over the earth, sons and grandsons, valor and giving, truth, mastery of the senses, and said that all of it had turned false tonight; she turned his palm over and named the marks on it, the discus and the fish, the parasol, the shrivatsa, the svastika, the banner, the water-pot and the chamara, and said that every one of them had come to nothing. Then her grief turned toward the husband she could not see. “Alas, Harishchandra, where is your kingdom, where are your ministers, your throne, your parasol, your sword? Where is Ayodhya? Alas, husband, come and see your dear son, who crawled across your chest when it was smeared with kumkum and dirtied it with his muddy little body, who sat in your lap and rubbed the musk tilaka off your brow. The face I kissed, all smeared with earth, I see spoiled by worms now, and the flies are settling on it. What deed did I do in a former birth, that I cannot see the end of its fruit?” The city guards heard it and woke, and came to her in amazement. “Who are you? Whose boy is this? Where is your husband? Why do you weep here alone at night, afraid of nothing?” She said nothing. They asked again, and she stood as if stunned, her eyes flooding, and their hair stood on end, and they raised their weapons. “This is no woman, since she will not speak. She is a child-killer, and she must be put to death with care. If she were a decent woman, why would she be outside at midnight? She has brought someone’s child out here to eat it.” Some seized her by the hair, some by the arms, some by the throat. “This sky-roamer will get away,” they shouted, and they dragged her to the chandala’s hamlet and handed her over. “We found this child-killer outside the city. Take her off somewhere quickly and kill her. Kill her.” The chandala looked at her. “I know this one. She is famous in the world, though no one has ever seen her before. She has eaten many of the people’s children. You have earned great merit. Go home in peace.” He recited the law for them as they went: to kill a killer of children, like a killer of Brahmins or cows, a thief of gold, a setter of fires, brings merit, even when the one killed is a woman. He bound her tightly, dragged her by the hair, and beat her with ropes. Then he turned to Harishchandra and said harshly, “Kill this wicked woman. Do not hesitate.”
Recognition at the Cremation Ground
The order fell on the king like a thunderbolt. He trembled, for the thing he was asked to do was the killing of a woman, and he said, “I cannot do this. Give me other work. Whatever task you name, even an impossible one, I will do.” The chandala answered, “Do not be afraid. Take the sword. Killing her is held to be meritorious. She is the terror of children, and she must never be protected.” “Women are to be protected with every effort and never killed,” the king said. “The man who kills one, knowing or unknowing, cooks in the hells, Maharaurava first.” “Stop talking. Take this sharp sword, bright as lightning. Where the death of one makes many happy, that violence earns great merit.” “I have carried a fierce vow from my birth, never to kill a woman. I will do some other work of yours.” “What other work is there for you than your master’s? For the servant who takes his wage and neglects his master’s work there is no release from hell in ten thousand kalpas.” “Then give me some other task, however hard. Name your enemy. I will kill him at once and give you his land. I will conquer the king of the gods himself, with the gods and the nagas and the siddhas and the gandharvas, and bring them down with sharp arrows.” That was too much for the chandala, and his anger broke over the trembling king. “A chandala’s slave, and you talk like the gods. If there was any fear of sin in your heart, why did you take slavery in a chandala’s house? Take this sword, and cut off her lotus of a head.” He put the sword into the king’s hand. With his face lowered, Harishchandra spoke to the woman. “Sit here before me, a sinner. I will cut off your head, if my hand can kill.” He raised the blade and went toward her. The king did not know his wife, and the wife did not know the king. She wanted nothing now except her own death, and she said, “Hear me, if you think it proper at all. My son lies dead not far outside the city. Wait until I have brought him to you and burned him. Then kill me with the sword.” “Very well,” he said, and sent her for the boy, and she went, grieving, with a dreadful lament.
She came back saying over and over, “Alas, son, alas, my darling, my baby,” laid the snake-bitten boy on the ground, and sat down beside him, thin, discolored, filthy, her hair full of dust. The watchman heard her lament and came to the corpse for his fee, and pulled the cloth off it. He did not recognize the weeping woman, whom long exile had changed as though she had been born again; and she did not recognize the king, whose fair hair was matted now, whose skin was like dry bark. He looked at the boy lying stricken by the poison, and he saw the royal marks: a face like the full moon, a fine high nose, cheeks shining like mirrors, dark hair curling at the tips, eyes like lotuses, lips like bimba fruit, a broad chest, long arms, a deep navel, a body made to rule the earth. “What pain is this,” the king said. “This child born in some king’s line has been taken by wicked Kritanta in the noose of time.” And something in him remembered. “Has my own child come to this, and been taken by dreadful Kritanta?” He stood very still. The queen, lost in her grief, cried out beside him. “By what sin, by whose ill wish, has this dreadful sorrow fallen on me? Alas, Harishchandra, you left me in this great sorrow; where do you stay now at your ease? The loss of the kingdom, the loss of friends, a wife and son sold: for the royal sage Harishchandra! Creator, what have you done?” The king heard the name, and left his place, and knew the queen and knew the dead boy. “This is my own wife,” he said, “and this boy is my own son.” He fell as if scorched and lay senseless. She knew him in that fall and fell senseless too, and they came back to themselves together, king and queen, and lamented under the one grief. “Child,” he said, “I see your tender face with its curling locks so sad, and my heart does not burst. When shall I hold you again, as you come to me saying Tata, tata? Whose knees, yellow with the dust of the earth, will soil my upper cloth and my lap now? You had a father who sold you like a thing. I look at the lotus face of my son bitten by a great snake, and I am myself seized by a dreadful poison.” Choking on his tears he took the boy up and embraced him and fainted again. Shaivya looked at the fallen man and a thought came to her. “This tiger among men is known by his voice alone. It is Harishchandra, no doubt of it, the moon to the minds of the learned. That high fine nose like a sesame flower, those teeth like buds, belong to that great soul. If this is that king, how has he come to the cremation ground?” She gazed at her husband, glad and amazed and wretched, and fell senseless on the ground, and when she could speak her voice was choked. “Fie on this pitiless, boundless, loathsome fate, which has made a shvapaka of this king who was like a god! I see no parasol over you today, no throne, no chamara, no fan. Kings used to turn servant when you traveled past, and clean the dusty ground before you with their upper cloths, and now this king of kings wanders in pain among skulls and ash and half-burnt bones.” She clung to the king’s neck. “Is this a dream, or is it true, as you seem to think? If it is true, then there is no help in dharma, in the worship of Brahmins and gods, in keeping to the truth. There is no dharma at all. Where would truth or honesty or kindness come from, when you, who were given to dharma, have been cast down from your kingdom?” The king sighed hot breath and told her, in a choked voice, how he had become a shvapaka. She wept a long time, and then, timidly, she told him exactly how their son had died. He fell to the ground when he heard it; then he took up his dead son and kept licking the boy’s face with his tongue. And then Shaivya, in a choked voice, asked for the one thing left to ask. “Do your master’s bidding. Cut off my head, so that you incur no treachery to your master today and do not become a liar. Untruth must never be yours. Treachery to another is a great sin.” He fell senseless at the words. When he came back he could hardly speak. “How could you say so cruel a thing? What cannot even be spoken, how can it be done?” “I have worshiped Gauri, and the gods and the Brahmins too,” she said. “By their blessing you will be my husband in another birth.” He dropped to the ground again and kissed the dead face, and then he told her what he would do. He was not his own master; if he entered the fire without the chandala’s leave he would be a chandala’s slave again in another birth, and fall into the Raurava and the Maharaurava, and even so, for a man sunk in an ocean of sorrow, parting from life was better. The one boy who would have carried on his line had died by the force of mighty fate, and there was no pain like it in the three worlds, none in the Asipatra forest, none in the Vaitarani. So he would go into the blazing fire with his son’s body, and she should forgive him and say nothing more; with his leave she should go back to the Brahmin’s house, and if he had given gifts and offered oblations and satisfied his gurus, he would meet her and their son in the next world. Whatever improper thing he had ever said to her in jest when they were alone, she should forgive it all, as he went. “And do not scorn my Brahmin out of pride, thinking, I am a king’s wife. The master must be pleased with every effort, as a deity is.” The queen answered him. “I too will fall into this fire. I cannot carry the weight of this sorrow, and I will go with you. My good lies only in going with you. With you I will enjoy heaven, and with you I will enjoy hell.” And the king said, “So be it.”
The Meditation on the Goddess and the Coming of the Gods
Then the king built the pyre and laid his son on it, and he and his wife stood with their palms joined and turned their minds to the Parameshani, Shatakshi, she of the hundred eyes, the Jagadishvari who dwells within the five koshas of every body and whose own form is the puccha-brahman, the tail and the foundation beneath those sheaths; she who wears garments of red, who is an ocean of the rasa of compassion, who carries many weapons and is bent always on guarding the world; Amba herself. On her the two of them fixed their meditation, and made ready to burn with the boy.
He had not finished the meditation when they came: all the gods with Indra, and Dharma walking at their head. They spoke together, “Hear us,” and then Brahma spoke. “I am the Pitamaha himself, and this is Lord Dharma himself, and here are the Sadhyas and the Vishvedevas, the Maruts, the guardians of the quarters with the charanas, the nagas, the siddhas with the gandharvas, the Rudras and the two Ashvins, and many more, and Vishwamitra too. Vishwamitra, who wants friendship with the three worlds by the way of dharma, wants your desire brought fully to its end.” Dharma said, “Do not do this rash thing. I am Dharma, and I have come to you satisfied by your virtues, by your forbearance, your self-mastery, your sattva and the rest.” Indra said, “Harishchandra, I am Shakra, and I have come to you. Today, with your wife and your son, you have won the eternal worlds. Ascend to heaven with them, to the place other men can hardly reach, which your own deeds have won.” Then Indra sent down out of the sky a rain of amrita, the destroyer of untimely death, on the child lying in the middle of the pyre, and after it a great rain of flowers, and the sound of drums. The king’s dead son stood up, his body tender and whole, well, glad, happy at heart, and Harishchandra took him in his arms. In the same instant he was restored to his glory, he and his wife both, and clad in divine garlands and divine garments, at ease, their hearts full, lifted into the highest joy. And Indra said to him again, “With your wife and your son, ascend to the world of heaven, the highest good goal, the fruit of your own deeds.”
The king did not move. “Without leave from my master the shvapacha, and without repaying him, I will not go up to the abode of the gods.” Then Dharma told him. “I knew the suffering that was coming to you, and I myself, by my own maya, became the shvapacha; and the hamlet you were shown was that maya too.” “Harishchandra,” Indra said, “ascend to that place of the virtuous which every man on earth longs for.” The king bowed to him. “Homage to you, and hear this word of mine. The men of the city of Kosala are sunk in grief for me. If I leave them, how shall I go to heaven? To abandon one who is devoted to you is declared a sin equal to killing a Brahmin, drinking liquor, killing a cow, killing a woman. I will not go without them. Go to heaven yourself, Shakra. If they go to heaven with me, then I will go too; and if it is hell, I will go to hell with them.” Indra objected. “Their merits are many and different, and so are their sins. How can you want heaven to be a thing a crowd eats from?” “Shakra, a king surely enjoys his kingdom by the power of his subjects. By them he offers the gods great sacrifices; by them he digs the wells and the tanks that are his purta works. Everything I did, I did by their power. I will not abandon my helpers out of desire for heaven. So let whatever good I have done, whatever I have given, sacrificed or recited, be shared with them, even for a single day, by your grace.” Shakra, lord of the three worlds, said, “So it will be,” and Dharma and Vishwamitra, the son of Gadhi, were pleased at heart. They all went to the city where the four varnas lived, and there, standing beside Harishchandra, the lord of the gods called the people to come quickly to a heaven rarely gained, which all of them had gained by the grace of dharma, and the king told his citizens, “Ascend to heaven.” They heard Indra and they heard their king, and they were glad. Those among them who were weary of the world laid their burdens on their sons and went up joyfully, all of them in fine vimanas, their bodies shining like the sun. In lovely Ayodhya, full of well-fed people, King Harishchandra consecrated his son Rohita to the kingdom, honored and greeted his son and his friends, and, having won a fame that even the gods find hard to reach, took his seat in a vimana that went wherever he willed, hung with little bells. Shukra, the preceptor of the daityas, who knew the meaning of every shastra, watched it and sang a shloka. “Ah, the greatness of forbearance! Ah, the great fruit of giving! Harishchandra has reached the world of Mahendra.”
So Suta ended it. “I have told you all of Harishchandra’s doings. Whoever hears this in sorrow finds happiness growing day by day. Whoever wants heaven gains heaven; whoever wants a son gains a son, a wife a wife, a kingdom a kingdom.” And when Janamejaya asked Vyasa his next question, he called the king by one name: the devotee of the feet of Shatakshi.
Source: Shrimad Devi Bhagavata Mahapurana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)