The Pilgrimage, Arjuna’s Penance, the Kirata, and the Halls of Indra

In the first months of the exile, in the Dvaita forest, Yudhishthira felt the weight of his enemies settle on his mind like a stone, and Bhima’s hot words pressed it deeper. Bhima wanted to take up arms that very hour and fall on the Kauravas. The eldest brother knew what stood on the other side: Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, Karna, and Drona’s son Ashvatthama, each a master of celestial weapons, each bound to Duryodhana by favors and honor, and to beat them unprepared would be like grinding Mount Meru to powder with bare hands. While the king sat inside that thought, Vyasa came to him, Satyavati’s son, the sage who had fathered both Pandu and Dhritarashtra and who could read what was passing in a heart without being told. The brothers worshiped him with the rites due to a sage, and Vyasa drew the king aside and gave him a secret science called the Pratismriti, a knowledge a man carries in his memory and that works on the world like success itself.

“Pass this science on to Arjuna,” Vyasa said, “and send him to Indra, Rudra, Varuna, Kubera, and Yama to receive their celestial weapons. He can stand before the gods, because his penance and his prowess have earned him the sight of them. He is the ancient seer Nara come down among men, the friend of Narayana, and no one has ever defeated him.”

Vyasa’s coming and the gift of the Pratismriti

The Pandavas were in the Dvaita forest then, on the shore of its great lake, and the future sat heavily on all of them. Draupadi had opened a long argument about anger and about forbearance, about whether a kshatriya who swallows an insult is patient or only beaten. Bhima had said the kingdom could be taken back by the strength of his arms, and should be, now. Yudhishthira had held the side of dharma and restraint against both of them and, for the moment, quieted them. Into the middle of those talks came an hour that turned them in a new direction.

Bhima’s words were sharp, and Yudhishthira answered them first with silence. He drew long breaths and turned the matter over. He had heard the duties of kings recited, and the duties of each of the four orders, and he knew that a man keeps those duties only by holding them in front of his eyes every day, so that what he does now and what he will do later are both ruled by them. He knew the true road of virtue, hard as that road is to know, and he could not see how to grind virtue down by force, as if it were Mount Meru and he had it in his hands. He settled what he would say, and he said it before Bhima could speak again.

“It is exactly as you say,” he told Bhima, “and now hear another word from me. Whatever a man sets out to do on the strength of his daring alone, whatever sin it is, turns into pain every time. What is begun with deliberation, with prowess aimed where it belongs, with every means gathered and every step thought through beforehand, is the thing that succeeds, and the gods themselves lean toward a plan of that kind. Now hear about what you, proud of your strength and pulled along by your restlessness, think should be begun this minute. Bhurishravas, Shala, the mighty Jarasandha, Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Drona’s mighty son, and Dhritarashtra’s sons with Duryodhana at their head are all accomplished in arms, hard to beat, and ready for war with us at any hour. The kings and chiefs we injured in our conquests have gone over to the Kauravas and are bound to them by affection; they want Duryodhana’s good and none of ours, and they have full treasuries and large armies to prove it. Every officer of the Kuru army, with his sons and his kin, has been honored by Duryodhana with wealth and comfort, and I am certain they will spend their lives for him. Bhishma, Drona, and the noble Kripa carry themselves the same toward us as toward them, and still I am certain that to repay the king’s favors they will throw down the one thing dearer than anything, their lives. Every one of them is a master of celestial weapons and devoted to virtue. I think the gods with Indra leading them could not beat those men. And among them stands Karna, headlong, always angry, master of every weapon, unbeaten, cased in armor nothing pierces. Without first defeating every one of those men, alone as you are, how will you kill Duryodhana? I cannot sleep for thinking of the speed of that charioteer’s son’s hands. I count him the first of all who draw the bow.”

Bhima heard him out and, for once, was alarmed into silence. And while the brothers sat like that, the great ascetic Vyasa came to the place, Satyavati’s son, who could see into a heart from any distance. The Pandavas worshiped him with the rites due to him, and the sage turned to Yudhishthira. “I have seen by my inner sight what is passing in your heart, and that is why I have come,” he said. “This fear of yours, born of Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, Karna, Drona’s son, Duryodhana, and Duhshasana, I am going to drive out with a means the ordinance itself allows. Hear it from me, carry it through with patience, and when it is done, put this fever of yours down.”

Then Vyasa, Parashara’s son, took Yudhishthira aside to a corner where the others could not hear, and what he said there was heavy with meaning. “Your good fortune has arrived,” he said. “The time has come when Arjuna, Pritha’s son, Dhananjaya, will kill every enemy of yours in battle. I am giving you a knowledge called the Pratismriti. It comes from my mouth, and it works like success itself given a body; I give it to you because you can hold it. When Arjuna receives it from you, he will be able to do what he means to do. Send him to Indra, to Rudra, to Varuna, to Kubera, and to Yama, to receive weapons from them. His penance and his prowess have made him fit to see the gods. He is a seer of great power, the friend of Narayana, ancient and eternal, a god in his own right, unbeaten, always successful, beyond decay. With weapons from Indra and Rudra and the guardians of the world in his hands, he will do great things.”

“And think of leaving this forest for another one fit to live in,” Vyasa went on. “To stay in one place for long is rarely pleasant, and in your case it may also be a worry to the ascetics here. You keep a great many Brahmins learned in the Vedas and every branch of them, and if you stay, this forest will run out of deer and its creepers and plants will be destroyed.” Having said that much, the sage of great wisdom, who knew the hidden workings of the world, gave the best of sciences to the willing king, who had purified himself for it in the meantime, and then he took his leave of Kunti’s son and disappeared where he stood. Yudhishthira held the knowledge carefully in his mind and recited it at the proper times.

Glad of the advice, Yudhishthira left the Dvaita woods and went to the forest of Kamyaka, on the banks of the Sarasvati. A great company of ascetic Brahmins, learned in the correct sounding and the correct spelling of the Vedic words, followed him the way rishis follow the king of the gods. At Kamyaka the brothers settled in with their friends and attendants, and for a time their days took a shape: practice with the bow, the chanting of the Vedas sounding all the while, a hunt through the woods each day with clean arrows, and every rite owed to the ancestors, the gods, and the Brahmins performed in its proper form.

A key to reading this (a concept): The Pratismriti is a science of yoga. Whoever holds it can win the sight of the gods and, through them, the road to celestial weapons. Vyasa calls it success itself given a body, and it passes only to someone fit to carry it, which is why he puts it first into Yudhishthira’s hands and lets the king pass it to Arjuna.

The gist: Bhima wants war now and Yudhishthira wants it done right, and the two of them are locked until Vyasa arrives and loosens the knot. The one strength fit to face those enemies lives in Arjuna, and the key that carries that strength up to the celestial weapons is the Pratismriti. From here the story leaves the argument about war and turns toward penance and the gods.

The command to Arjuna to go north, and the farewell

Some time passed. Then Yudhishthira remembered the sage’s command and called Arjuna to him. He took his brother’s hands in his own, and his face was smiling and his voice was gentle, and he seemed to think for a moment before he spoke, and what he said he said in private.

“The whole science of arms lives in five men,” he said, “Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, Karna, and Drona’s son. They know every weapon there is, the Brahma weapons and the celestial ones, the human ones and the ones of the wind, and they know how each is loosed and how each is turned aside. Duryodhana has won them over, honored them, satisfied them; he treats every one of them as a man should treat his teacher, and he treats all his fighters with affection, and men honored like that seek the good of the man who honored them. They will hold nothing back. And the whole earth is under Duryodhana now, its villages and towns, its seas and woods and mines. You are our only refuge. A great burden rests on you, and so I will tell you what you have to do.”

“I have received a science from Krishna Dvaipayana,” Yudhishthira went on. “Used by you, it will lay the whole universe open to you. Receive it from me with care, child, and in time, through it, win the grace of the gods. Give yourself to fierce austerity. Armed with the bow and the sword, cased in mail, take up hard vows and go north, and give way to no one on the road. All the celestial weapons are with Indra. Long ago, when the gods were afraid of Vritra, they handed all their might to him, and so the weapons that were once scattered among them are gathered in one place, and you can win them all there. Go to Indra; he will give you every weapon he has. Take up your bow and set out this very day for the sight of Purandara.”

With that, Yudhishthira gave Arjuna the science. The elder brother, with his speech, body, and mind under full restraint, handed the knowledge to the younger with the proper rites, and then he commanded him to go. At the king’s word Arjuna took up the Gandiva, the bow that had come to him out of the burning of the Khandava forest and had been his companion ever since, and the two quivers that never emptied. He put on his mail, his gauntlets, and the finger-guards cut from iguana skin that keep a bowstring from opening the hand. He poured offerings into the fire and made gifts to the Brahmins, and they spoke their blessings over him. Then he set out from Kamyaka for the sight of Indra. At the moment of leaving, bow in hand, he heaved one long breath and lifted his eyes to the sky, and what he asked for in that look was the death of Dhritarashtra’s sons.

The Brahmins and the siddhas saw him armed like that and about to go, and so did spirits no one could see, and they spoke to him. “Win soon what you are going for,” they said. The Brahmins added a blessing of their own: “Achieve what you have set your mind on. Let victory truly be yours.” Then Draupadi came to him, this man whose thighs were as thick as the trunks of sal trees and who took everyone’s heart with him wherever he went, and she spoke.

“May everything Kunti wished for at your birth come to pass, and everything you wish for yourself, Dhananjaya,” she said. “May none of us ever be born into the kshatriya order again. I have always bowed to the Brahmins, who live by asking. Here is my great grief: that wretch Duryodhana looked at me in the assembly of princes and mockingly called me a cow, and he said many harder things than that in front of them all. And the grief of parting from you is heavier than any of it. In your absence your brothers will sit up through their waking hours telling one another about your deeds, over and over. If you stay away for long, no pleasure and no wealth will give us any joy; life itself will lose its taste. Our weal and our woe, our life and our death, our kingdom and our fortune all hang on you. I bless you. Let success be yours. Against powerful enemies you will still carry through what you have set out to do. Go quickly and win it. Let no danger find you. I bow to Dhatri and Vidhatri, who order what befalls us, and I bless you; let prosperity be yours.”

She called on Hri and Sri, Kirti and Dhriti, Pushti, Uma, Lakshmi, and Sarasvati to protect him on the road, because he had always worshiped his elder brother and always obeyed his commands, and she bowed to the Vasus, the Rudras, and the Adityas, the Maruts, the Vishvedevas, and the Sadhyas to secure his welfare. “From every spirit of mischief that belongs to the sky, the earth, and the heavens, and from all such spirits everywhere, be safe,” she said. With those blessings spoken, Yajnasena’s daughter was silent. Arjuna walked once around his brothers, and around Dhaumya, the family’s priest, took up his handsome bow, and went.

Every living creature moved off the path Arjuna took, driven as he was by the wish to see Indra. He crossed mountain after mountain where ascetics lived and came to the holy Himavat, where the gods go. He reached the sacred mountain in a single day; his austerities had given him the speed of the mind and the speed of the winds. He crossed Himavat and then Gandhamadana, went over rough and dangerous ground, walked night and day without tiring, and when he came to Indrakila he stopped for a moment.

A key to reading this (a place): Himavat is the old name for the Himalaya, the snow mountain that closes the north of the human world. Gandhamadana is the mountain Arjuna crosses after it, and Indrakila the peak where he stops, where his penance will be done and the hunter will find him. The names carry the story northward step by step, out of the country of men, to the edge where the gods can be reached.

The gist: Yudhishthira gives Arjuna the science and sends him north alone, to please the gods by penance and bring back their weapons. Draupadi’s farewell carries both her tenderness and her rage at the assembly hall. With the speed his austerities have given him, Arjuna crosses the Himalaya in a day and stops at Indrakila.

Indra’s test in the guise of an ascetic

Arjuna had stopped at Indrakila for no more than a breath when a voice came down out of the empty sky above him, one word, and the word was an order. “Stop!”

He turned where he stood and searched the slope, the rocks, the trees. Arjuna, whose left hand could draw a bow as well as his right, had spent his life reading a field for the man who was about to move, and what he found now was a man who had no intention of moving: an ascetic sitting in the shade of a tree, tawny-skinned, thin, his hair matted into ropes, and burning all over with the brilliance that comes to a man who has lived long enough in Brahman.

The ascetic had watched him stop, and now he spoke, and his voice was kind. “Who are you, child, coming up here with a bow and arrows, cased in mail, a scabbard at your hip and gauntlets on your hands, every inch of you bred to the ways of a kshatriya? Weapons have no work to do here. This is the home of peaceful Brahmins given to austerity, men who have put anger and joy behind them alike. A bow is no use in a place where no one quarrels about anything. So throw this bow of yours down, child. By climbing this far you have already reached a pure state of life. And there is no man alive who equals you in energy and prowess.”

He said it more than once, and he smiled each time, the smile of a man offering another man a rest he plainly needs. Arjuna did not move. He had walked out of the forest where his brothers were living in exile, he had crossed the Himalaya in a day, and he had come for one thing; no invitation to lay his bow down could shift him from it.

That refusal was what the visitor had been waiting for. Glad at heart, still smiling, he let the disguise go with a sentence. “Blessed be you. I am Indra. Ask for the boon you want.”

Arjuna bowed his head and joined his palms before the thousand-eyed god, the father who had given him his birth, and he did not waste the moment on wonder. “This is the one thing I want. Grant me this boon: I want to learn every weapon from you.”

The king of the gods smiled, and his answer was cheerful, and it was a second test. “Dhananjaya, now that you have climbed to this region, what do you need weapons for? You have already won a pure state of life. Ask for the regions of bliss you would like, and they are yours.”

“I do not want regions of bliss,” Arjuna said, “or pleasures, or the condition of a god. What is this talk of happiness? I would not take the fortune of all the gods together. I have left my brothers behind me in a forest. If I go home without taking my revenge on the enemy, am I to carry the contempt of the whole world through every age that is still to come?”

Indra, whom every world worships, the god who killed Vritra, heard the anger in it and answered gently, the way a father answers a son who has said exactly what the father hoped to hear. “When you are able to look on Shiva, the three-eyed one who carries the trident, the lord of all creatures, then, child, I will give you all the celestial weapons. So strive for the sight of the highest of the gods. Only after you have seen him will you get everything you wish for.” With that Indra vanished where he stood, and the shade under the tree was empty, and Arjuna stayed on that spot and gave himself to austerity.

A key to reading this (names): Arjuna wears many names through this story, and they are all one man. Phalguna, for the star under which he was born; Dhananjaya, the winner of wealth, from the conquests he brought home to his brother; Jishnu, the victorious; Vibhatsu, who never did anything loathsome in a fight; Gudakesha, the one who has conquered sleep; Partha and Kaunteya, son of Pritha and son of Kunti, two names for the same mother; and Kauravya, of the line of Kuru. When a god or a sage calls him by one of these, the man being called is always the same, and the name chosen usually says what the speaker has in mind: the mother when tenderness is meant, the victories when a fight is coming.

The gist: Indra comes in the shape of an ascetic to test his son, and offers him first a life of peace and then the regions of bliss. Arjuna wants neither. He wants weapons and the defeat of his enemies, and he says so with his brothers’ forest in his voice. Pleased, Indra sets his condition: first the sight of Shiva, then the weapons. That condition is the door into the story of the Kirata.

Janamejaya’s question and Arjuna’s grim austerity

Here Janamejaya, who was hearing all of this at his own great sacrifice, stopped Vaishampayana and asked for more. “I want to hear in detail how Arjuna, whose deeds are spotless, came by his weapons,” he said. “Tell me how Dhananjaya, with those arms and that energy of his, walked into that lonely forest without fear, and what he did while he lived there. How did he win over Shiva, whom they call Sthanu, and how the chief of the gods? No one alive knows the Vedas better than you; tell me all of it, as a favor to me. You know everything. You know all there is to know about the gods and all there is to know about men. The battle fought long ago between Arjuna, the first of fighters, who was never defeated, and Bhava, Shiva himself, was beyond anything that had happened before or since, and to hear of it makes the hair stand up on the body. Even the hearts of his brothers, lions among men, trembled at it, with wonder and with joy and with a sense of how far below him they stood. Tell me everything else Arjuna did. I cannot find one thing in Jishnu, however small, that deserves blame. So tell me the whole history of that hero.”

“I will tell you that story,” Vaishampayana said. “It is excellent, and it is long, and nothing else is like it. Hear in full how Arjuna met the three-eyed god of gods, and how his body came to touch the body of that god.”

At Yudhishthira’s command, then, Arjuna set out from Kamyaka to win the sight of Indra, the chief of the gods, and of Shankara, the god of gods. He carried his celestial bow and a sword with a golden hilt, and he went north, toward the summit of Himavat, for the success of the thing he had in view. And that first of the fighters of the three worlds, Indra’s son, with his mind calm and his purpose fixed, lost no time on the mountain. He gave himself to austerity at once.

He went into that terrible forest alone. Thorny plants crowded it, and trees and flowers and fruits of every kind; birds of every species lived in it, animals of every description swarmed through it, and the siddhas and the charanas, the perfected ones and the wandering singers of heaven, came there. The moment Kunti’s son entered that forest, empty of any human being, conches and drums sounded in the sky, a thick rain of flowers came down on the earth, and clouds spread over the whole sky and laid a deep shade across the ground, as if heaven had noticed him and was making him welcome. He crossed the difficult wooded country at the foot of the great mountains and soon reached the breast of Himavat, and there he stayed a while, and began to shine with a brilliance that was his own.

The trees there spread wide with green, and singing birds filled them. The rivers ran the blue of lapis lazuli, broken here and there by fierce eddies, and swans and ducks and cranes called along them. On the banks the male cuckoos sang their sweetest, and the peacocks and the cranes answered them. The water in those rivers was sacred, and pure, and sweet to drink, and Arjuna, looking at it and at the lovely banks it ran between, was filled with delight.

Then Arjuna, fierce in energy and high in soul, took that lovely wooded place and made it the site of an austerity that would trouble the sages who lived on the mountain. He dressed in rags of grass, took up a black deerskin and a staff, and ate the withered leaves that had fallen to the ground. Through the first month he ate fruit once every three nights; through the second, once every six; through the third, once a fortnight. When the fourth month came, that strong-armed son of Pandu, the best of the Bharatas, lived on air alone. He stood with his arms raised, leaning on nothing, on the tips of his toes, and he held that posture and kept his austerities up like that. He bathed so often that his matted locks took on the color of lightning, or of the lotus.

The great rishis of the mountain felt the heat of it before they understood it, and they went together to Shiva, the god of the Pinaka bow, to tell him what Pritha’s son was doing. They bowed to the god of gods and described the austerities. “This son of Pritha, this man of great energy, is doing the hardest austerities there are, on the breast of Himavat,” they said. “The earth is smoking all around him with the heat of it. We do not know what he wants. But he is causing us pain. You should stop him.”

Shiva, the lord of all creatures, the husband of Uma, heard those sages whose souls were under perfect control, and answered them. “You need not grieve about Phalguna. Go back, all of you, cheerful and quick, to the places you came from. I know the desire that is in Arjuna’s heart. He wants neither heaven, nor prosperity, nor long life. And everything he does want, I will give him this very day.”

The truth-speaking rishis were glad to hear Mahadeva say it, and each of them went back down to his own hermitage, and left the man on the mountain to the god.

A sub-tale: The order of Arjuna’s eating is itself a discipline with a shape. Fruit every third night for the first month, every sixth night for the second, once a fortnight for the third, and in the fourth month air alone. Standing on the tips of the toes with the arms raised and no support anywhere is one of the hardest postures the old ascetics knew, and Arjuna held it. The heat that came off him was enough to make the earth smoke, and enough to hurt the rishis who lived on that mountain, which is what sent them to Shiva, and Shiva’s reply tells them what Arjuna has told no one: what he is burning for.

The gist: Janamejaya’s curiosity opens the Kirata story, and Vaishampayana begins it. Arjuna’s austerity tightens month by month until the heat of it troubles the rishis of Himavat. Shiva already knows what Arjuna wants, and he decides to give it to him that same day.

Shiva as the mountain hunter, and the slaying of Muka

When those ascetics had gone, Hara, the god of the Pinaka, the cleanser of every sin, put on the shape of a Kirata, one of the hunters of the high mountains, and he did it on a scale no hunter ever had. He shone like a tree made of gold. His body was huge and stalwart, a second Meru walking. He took up a handsome bow and a quantity of arrows like snakes whose poison kills at a touch, and looking like fire given a body, he came quickly down onto the breast of Himavat. Uma came with him, dressed as a Kirata woman, and a swarm of merry spirits of every shape and costume, and thousands of women in the form and dress of the hunter people. At the coming of the god of gods in such company, the whole region suddenly blazed with beauty. Then a solemn stillness fell over it. The sound of the springs and the watercourses stopped, and every bird on the mountain went silent at once.

As the god of gods came near Pritha’s son, whose deeds were blameless, he saw a wonderful thing: a danava named Muka, wearing the body of a boar, on his way to kill Arjuna. Arjuna saw the enemy coming for his life and became in one motion the man he had been before the forest. He took up the Gandiva and a handful of arrows like poisonous snakes, strung the bow, filled the air with its twang, and spoke to the boar. “I came here and did you no harm. Since you want to kill me, I am going to send you to Yama’s house.”

Shiva, in the hunter’s shape, saw that firm bowman about to shoot and called out to him to stop. “That boar, the color of the mountain Indrakila, was marked by me first.” Arjuna took no notice of the words and struck the boar. The Kirata, blazing with splendor, let fly at the same target an arrow like flaming fire, like the thunderbolt itself. The two arrows arrived in the same instant on Muka’s broad body, which was hard as adamant, and they struck with a noise like Indra’s thunderbolt and the thunder of the clouds landing together on the breast of a mountain. Struck by two shafts that threw off arrows by the dozen, each like a snake with a blazing mouth, Muka gave up his life, and as he died the boar’s shape fell away from him and he lay there as what he was, a rakshasa, terrible to look at.

Then Jishnu looked up from the body and saw the other archer: a man blazing like a god in the dress of a hunter, with a crowd of women around him. Kunti’s son studied him with a glad heart and spoke to him, smiling. “Who are you, wandering these lonely woods with women all around you, shining like gold? Are you not afraid of this terrible forest? And why did you shoot the boar I had marked first? This rakshasa came here, whether idly or to kill me, and I had aimed at him before you did. You will not get away from me alive. What you have done to me is against the customs of the chase. So, mountaineer, I am going to take your life.”

The Kirata smiled at the man who could draw the bow with his left hand, and his answer came in soft words, and the softness was the strangest thing about him. “You need not be anxious on my account. This forest country is the right home for people like us, who have always lived in the woods. About you, though, I might ask why you have chosen to live here, among such hardships. We have our dwelling in these woods full of animals of every kind, ascetic. But you, so delicate, brought up in luxury, shining like fire, why do you live alone in a place as lonely as this?”

“I live in this great forest by the strength of the Gandiva and arrows that blaze like fire,” Arjuna said, “like a second son of Agni. You saw how this monster, this terrible rakshasa who came here in the shape of an animal, was killed by me.”

“This rakshasa was struck first by the arrow from my bow,” the Kirata answered. “I killed him, and I sent him to the regions of Yama. I aimed first, and it was my shot that took his life. You are proud of your strength, and it does not suit you to lay your own fault on someone else. The fault is yours, wretch, and so you will not leave here alive. Stand where you are. I am going to shoot arrows like thunderbolts at you. You shoot too, as hard as you can, at me.”

A key to reading this (a concept): The Kiratas are the hunting people of the high mountains, and a Kirata with a bow is nobody a prince would look at twice. That is the whole point of the disguise. Shiva has come down to test Arjuna, and a god who wants to weigh a man’s strength, endurance, and humility hides himself in a shape that man will underrate. Muka comes at the same moment in the shape of a boar, so that the murder and the test arrive together, and the quarrel over whose arrow killed him is the quarrel of every hunting people on earth: the first arrow owns the kill.

The gist: Shiva comes down as a mountain hunter, with Uma and his attendants dressed as hunters too. The demon Muka charges as a boar, and both bows loose on him in the same instant. Each man claims the kill. The hunter’s challenge turns the argument into a duel, and Arjuna does not know who he is about to fight.

The wondrous battle of Arjuna and the hunter

Arjuna heard the hunter out, and anger took him, and he attacked with arrows. The Kirata took every shaft on his body with a glad heart, and he kept talking while he took them. “Wretch, wretch,” he said, “shoot your best arrows, the ones that go into the vitals.” Arjuna showered him. Now they were both angry, and the fight turned fierce, each pouring arrows on the other, every arrow like a snake full of poison. Arjuna rained a perfect storm of shafts on the Kirata, and Shankara bore the whole downpour cheerfully. He stood under it for a moment, the wielder of the Pinaka, and when it was over he had not been wounded, and he had not moved. He stood there like a hill.

Dhananjaya watched his shower of arrows come to nothing and could not get over his amazement. “Excellent, excellent,” he said, over and over, half in praise and half in disbelief. “This mountaineer with the delicate limbs, who lives on the heights of Himavat, takes the shafts from the Gandiva and does not even waver. Who is he? Is he Rudra himself, or some other god, or a yaksha, or an asura? The gods do come down to the heights of Himavat sometimes. Apart from the god who holds the Pinaka, there is no one who can bear the force of thousands of arrows shot from the Gandiva. God or yaksha, whoever he is, so long as he is anyone other than Rudra, my arrows are going to send him to Yama’s regions very soon.”

With that thought, and with a cheerful heart, Arjuna began shooting arrows by the hundred, each as bright as a ray of the sun. And the Creator of the worlds, the wielder of the trident, took that downpour with a glad heart, the way a mountain takes a shower of rocks. Then Phalguna reached into his quiver and his hand found nothing. His arrows had run out. When he understood it, Arjuna was badly alarmed, and he thought of the god Agni, who had given him two inexhaustible quivers during the burning of the Khandava, quivers that had never once failed him until this hour.

“My arrows are all gone,” he thought. “What am I to shoot from my bow now? Who is this man who swallows my arrows? I will kill him with the end of my bow, the way elephants are killed with lances, and send him to the domain of Yama, who carries the mace.”

So Arjuna took up the bow by the wrong end, hooked the Kirata toward him with the bowstring, and struck him with the stave, blows that came down like thunderbolts. But as soon as Kunti’s son began fighting with the end of the bow, the mountaineer wrenched the celestial bow out of his hands. Arjuna saw the bow taken, drew his sword, and rushed at his enemy to end the thing. The Kuru prince brought that sharp blade, which no solid rock could resist, down on the Kirata’s head with the whole strength of his arms. That first of swords touched the Kirata’s crown and broke into pieces.

Then Phalguna fought with trees and stones. He tore them up and threw them, and the god in the huge-bodied hunter’s form bore that shower of trees and rocks with patience. Then Pritha’s son, his mouth smoking with rage, went at the unconquerable god with his clenched fists, blows that came down like thunderbolts, and the god in the Kirata’s form answered Phalguna’s blows with fierce blows of his own, like the thunderbolts of Indra. The fists of Pandu’s son and the fists of the Kirata raised loud and frightful sounds in that place. That terrible fight of blows, like the fight of old between Vritra and Indra, lasted only a moment. Jishnu, with all his might, clasped the Kirata and pressed him with his breast, and the Kirata, whose strength was the greater, pressed back until the son of Pandu lost his senses. From the pressure of their arms and their breasts, their bodies began to smoke like charcoal in a fire.

Then the great god struck the already beaten son of Pandu again, in anger, with his full might, and drove him out of his senses. Pressed by the god of gods, his limbs bruised and mangled, Phalguna could not move; he was almost a ball of flesh. Struck by that god, he lost his breath and fell to the earth without the power to stir, and he looked like a dead man. Soon, though, he came back to himself. He rose from where he had fallen with his body covered in blood, and grief filled him, because everything he had was gone: the arrows, the bow, the sword, and now the strength of his own arms.

In his mind he bowed down before the gracious god of gods, the only refuge he had left. Then he shaped an image of that god out of clay with his hands and worshiped it with offerings of garlands of flowers. And when he looked up, the garland he had laid on the clay image of Bhava was hanging on the crown of the Kirata. In that instant the best of Pandu’s sons understood, and joy filled him, and his ease came back to him. He threw himself down at Bhava’s feet, and the god was pleased with him.

Hara had seen the wonder Arjuna had worked, and he had seen the body worn thin by austerity, and he spoke to him in a voice as deep as the roar of the clouds. “Phalguna, I am pleased with you, because what you have done has no parallel. There is no kshatriya who is your equal in courage and in endurance. Your strength and your prowess are almost equal to mine. I am pleased with you. Look at me. I will give you eyes to see me in my true form. You were a rishi once. You will defeat all your enemies, even the dwellers of heaven. Because I am pleased with you, I will give you a weapon that cannot be resisted. Soon you will be able to wield that weapon of mine.”

Then Phalguna saw him: Mahadeva, the god of blazing splendor, the wielder of the Pinaka, whose home is on the mountain, with Uma beside him and the hunter’s disguise gone like a shadow at noon. He went down on one knee, bowed his head, and worshiped Hara, and asked for his grace.

“I know you, Kapardin of the matted hair, as the chief of all the gods, the destroyer of the eyes of Bhaga, the god of gods, Mahadeva of the blue throat, the cause of all causes,” Arjuna said. “You are the three-eyed one, the lord of all, the refuge of every god. This universe sprang from you. The three worlds of gods, asuras, and men cannot conquer you. You are Shiva in the form of Vishnu, and Vishnu in the form of Shiva. Long ago you destroyed the great sacrifice of Daksha. Hari, Rudra, I bow to you. You have an eye on your forehead. You are Sarva, the rainer of everything desired, the bearer of the trident, the wielder of the Pinaka, the sun, the one whose body is pure, the maker of all, and I bow to you. You are the lord of all created things, and I worship you to obtain your grace. You are the lord of the ganas, the source of every blessing, the cause of the causes of the universe. You are beyond the foremost of male beings, you are the highest, you are the subtlest, Hara. Shankara, forgive my fault. It was to see you that I came to this great mountain, which is dear to you and which is the best home of ascetics. All the worlds worship you, and I worship you for your grace. Do not count my rashness against me as a fault, this fight I fought with you out of ignorance. Shankara, I take refuge in you. Forgive me everything I have done.”

The mighty god whose sign is the bull took Arjuna’s handsome hands into his own, the same hands that had been beating at his chest a moment before, and smiled. “I have pardoned you,” he said. And Hara, glad, took Arjuna in his arms, and went on comforting him.

A key to reading this (a concept): Vasava is a name of Indra, and Vritra was the great asura Indra killed with the thunderbolt; the fight between them is the war the gods measure every other war against. When the teller sets the fists of Arjuna and the hunter beside it, the duel on Indrakila is lifted to the scale of gods and demons. The sword that shatters on a hunter’s crown, and the thousands of arrows that vanish into his body, are the signs Arjuna reads before he reads the truth: whoever this is, he is no hunter. The garland is the last sign and the only one he cannot argue with.

The gist: Arrows, the bow’s end, the sword, trees and stones, and at last bare fists: each fails in turn, and Arjuna falls senseless, a ball of flesh. When he comes to, he shapes a clay image of Shiva and garlands it, and the garland reappears on the hunter’s head. That is how he learns whom he fought. Shiva, pleased, shows his true form and pardons the rashness.

The gift of the Pashupata weapon

“In your former life you were Nara, the friend of Narayana,” Hara said, consoling him. “At Badari you did fierce austerities for several thousand years. Great might lives in you, and in Vishnu, the first of male beings, and the two of you hold the universe up by that might. When Indra was crowned, you took up that fierce bow whose twang is like the deep roar of the clouds, and you and Krishna chastised the danavas with it. That bow is this Gandiva, Partha, and it is fit for your hands. I took it from you with my powers of illusion, and here it is again. These two quivers, fit for you, will be inexhaustible once more. Your body will be free of pain and disease, and no one will be able to baffle your prowess. I am pleased with you. Ask me for the boon you want. Not even in heaven is there a male being who is your equal, nor any kshatriya who stands above you.”

Arjuna answered the god whose sign is the bull, and what he asked for shows where his mind had been living through all those months of leaves and air. “If you will grant me my desire, then I ask you for the fierce celestial weapon that you wield, the one called Brahmashira, which at the end of the age destroys the entire universe. With that weapon, by your grace, I might win the terrible fight that is coming between me on one side and Karna, Bhishma, Kripa, and Drona on the other. With it I might burn up danavas and rakshasas in battle, and evil spirits and pishachas and gandharvas and nagas. Hurled with mantras, it produces darts by the thousand, and fierce maces, and arrows like snakes of deadly poison. With it I might fight Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, and Karna of the ever-abusive tongue. That is my first desire: to be able to fight them, and to win.”

“I will give you my favorite weapon, the one called Pashupata,” Bhava answered. “You are able to hold it, to hurl it, and to withdraw it. Neither the chief of the gods himself, nor Yama, nor the king of the yakshas, nor Varuna, nor Vayu knows it. How could men know anything of it? But this weapon must never be hurled without a cause that deserves it. Hurled at any enemy of small might, it can destroy the whole universe. In the three worlds, with every creature in them that moves or stands still, there is no one it cannot kill. And it can be hurled by the mind, by the eye, by words, and by the bow.”

Hearing this, Pritha’s son purified himself, as a man does before he receives a thing that will change his life. He went up to the lord of the universe with his whole attention gathered and said, “Teach me.” Then Mahadeva gave that best of Pandu’s sons the knowledge of the weapon that looked like Yama himself given a body, with every secret of hurling it and of calling it back. From that moment the weapon waited on Arjuna as it waited on Shankara, the lord of Uma. Arjuna took it gladly.

In that moment the whole earth trembled, with its mountains and woods and trees, its seas and forests, its villages and towns and mines. Conches and drums and trumpets sounded by the thousand out of no hand anyone could see. Hurricanes and whirlwinds rose. And the gods and the danavas, wherever they were, saw that terrible weapon, in its embodied form, standing at the side of Arjuna of immeasurable energy. Whatever evil had been in Phalguna’s body was gone at the touch of the three-eyed god.

“Go into heaven,” the three-eyed god commanded him. Arjuna bowed his head in worship and gazed at him with joined hands. Then Bhava, the lord of all who dwell in heaven, the god of blazing splendor whose home is the mountain’s breast, the husband of Uma, the god whose passions are under complete control, the source of every blessing, put back into Arjuna’s hands the great bow Gandiva, the destroyer of danavas and pishachas, which he had taken from him in the fight. And the god of gods left that blessed mountain with its snowy plateaus and valleys and caves, the favorite resort of the great rishis who range the sky, and went up into the sky with Uma, while Arjuna watched him go.

A key to reading this (a concept): In a former life Arjuna was the seer Nara and Krishna was Narayana, the pair of ancient seers who did austerities for thousands of years at Badari, near the source of the Ganga. The Pashupata is Shiva’s own weapon, and it can be loosed four ways, by the mind, by the eye, by the spoken word, and by the bow. Loosed at a small enemy it destroys all creation, and that one rule binds the weapon to the judgment of the man who holds it. Arjuna asks for the Brahmashira; what Shiva puts in his hands is the Pashupata.

The gist: Shiva names Arjuna’s former birth as Nara and returns the Gandiva he took by illusion. Arjuna asks for the Brahmashira, and Shiva gives him the Pashupata with all its secrets and one stern condition: never loose it for a small cause. The weapon stands beside Arjuna in bodily form, creation trembles, and Shiva, sending him on to heaven, rises into the sky with Uma.

The coming of the Lokapalas and the gift of celestial weapons

The wielder of the Pinaka, whose sign is the bull, went out of Arjuna’s sight the way the sun goes out of the sight of the world at evening, and Arjuna stood on the mountain in wonder. “I have seen the great god of gods,” he said. “I am fortunate, I have been greatly favored, because I have seen Hara, the three-eyed wielder of the Pinaka, in his boon-giving form, and I have touched him with my hand. I will win. I am already great. My enemies are already beaten. What I set out to do is already done.”

While Pritha’s son was thinking that, the sky over the mountain began to fill. Varuna came to the place, the god of the waters, handsome, with the splendor of lapis lazuli, surrounded by every kind of creature that lives in water, and every point of the horizon blazed with his light. The rivers came with him, the male rivers and the female, and nagas and daityas and sadhyas and the lesser gods; so the controller and lord of all water-creatures arrived. Kubera came too, the lord of treasures, his body like pure gold, seated in his chariot of great splendor, with crowds of yakshas around him, and he was very beautiful, and he lit the sky as he came to see Arjuna.

Yama himself came, in his great beauty, the mighty destroyer of all the worlds, with the pitris around him, the lords of creation, the ancestors, some of them with bodies and some without. The god of justice, whose soul no one can conceive, the son of the Sun, the destroyer of every creature, came in his chariot with the mace in his hand, and his light fell over the three worlds and over the regions of the guhyakas, the gandharvas, and the nagas, like a second Sun rising at the end of the age. From the shining, many-colored summits of the great mountain they looked down and saw Arjuna at his austerities. And in a moment Indra himself was there too, with his queen, seated on the back of the celestial elephant Airavata, with all the gods around him. Under the white umbrella held over his head he looked like the moon among fleecy clouds. Praised by gandharvas and by rishis rich in austerity, the chief of the gods came down on a summit of his own, like a second sun, and the four guardians of the world stood on the peaks around the one man on the slope.

Yama, who was wise and who understood virtue through and through, had taken a summit on the south, the quarter that is his. In a voice as deep as the clouds he spoke these words of good omen. “Arjuna, look at us, the protectors of the worlds, arrived here. We will grant you the sight to see us, because you deserve it. In your former life you were a rishi of immeasurable soul, known as Nara, of great might, and at Brahma’s command, child, you were born among men. By you the grandsire of the Kurus will be defeated in battle, Bhishma of great energy, born of the Vasus, who has so much virtue in him. You will defeat all the kshatriyas of fiery energy whom the son of Bharadvaja commands, Drona’s whole array. You will defeat the danavas of fierce prowess who have been born among men, and the danavas called Nivatakavachas.”

“And you will kill Karna of fierce prowess, Dhananjaya,” Yama went on, “Karna, who is a portion of my own father, the Sun, whose energy is celebrated through the worlds. You will kill every portion of the gods and the danavas and the rakshasas that has taken flesh on the earth, and killed by you, they will go to the regions their deeds have earned them. Phalguna, the fame of what you do will last in the world forever. You have satisfied Mahadeva himself in combat. With Vishnu you will lighten the burden of the earth. Take this weapon of mine, the mace I wield, which no one in any of the worlds can baffle. With it you will do great things.”

Pritha’s son received that weapon from Yama in due form, Vaishampayana told Janamejaya, with the mantras and the rite that went with it and the secrets of hurling it and calling it back.

Then Varuna, the lord of every creature of the waters, blue as the clouds, spoke from the summit he had taken on the west, which is his own quarter. “Partha, you are the first of kshatriyas, and you live by kshatriya practice. Look at me with those large coppery eyes. I am Varuna, the lord of the waters. When I hurl my nooses, no one can resist them. Take these weapons of Varuna from me, with the secrets of hurling them and calling them back. With these, in the battle that was fought long ago over Taraka, thousands of mighty daityas were seized and bound. Take them. If Yama himself were your enemy, with these in your hands he could not escape you. When you range a battlefield armed with these, there is no doubt of it: the land will be emptied of kshatriyas.”

When both Varuna and Yama had given away their celestial weapons, the lord of treasures, whose home is on the heights of Kailasa, spoke. “You have great might and great wisdom, and I too am pleased with you. Meeting you gives me as much pleasure as meeting Krishna. You who draw the bow with the left hand, you were a god before, eternal as the other gods are. In ancient kalpas you went through austerities every day beside us. I grant you celestial sight. You will defeat even the invincible daityas and danavas. Take from me too, without delay, an excellent weapon; with it you will be able to consume the ranks of Dhritarashtra. This is my favorite weapon, called Antardhana. It is full of energy and prowess and splendor, and it can put an enemy to sleep. When Shankara killed Tripura, this was the weapon he shot, and by it many mighty asuras were consumed. I take it up to give it to you, whose prowess no one can beat. You have the dignity of Meru, and you can hold this weapon.”

When that had been said, the Kuru prince duly received that celestial weapon from Kubera. Then the chief of the gods spoke to Pritha’s son, whose deeds never ceased, in sweet words and in a voice as deep as the clouds or the kettle-drum. “You are an ancient god. You have already achieved the highest success and taken on the stature of a god. But the purposes of the gods are still ahead of you, and you must go up to heaven. So prepare yourself. My own chariot, with Matali driving it, will soon come down to the earth. I will take you to heaven, and there I will give you all my celestial weapons.”

Dhananjaya, Kunti’s son, looked at those protectors of the worlds gathered together on the heights of Himavat and wondered greatly. Then, in the proper form, with words and water and fruits, he worshiped the assembled Lokapalas, the guardians of the four quarters, as a host receives guests, though his hermitage was a slope of rock and the fruit was the mountain’s own. The gods returned that worship and went away; able to go anywhere they wished, with the speed of the mind, they went back to the places they had come from. And Arjuna, with weapons like these in his hands, was filled with pleasure. He looked on himself as a man whose desires had been fulfilled and whose work had been crowned with success.

A key to reading this (a concept): The Lokapalas are the guardian gods of the four directions: Indra in the east, Yama in the south, Varuna in the west, Kubera in the north. Here all four arrive at once, and the text places two of them on the summits their directions demand, Yama on a southern peak and Varuna on a western one. Yama gives his mace, Varuna his nooses, Kubera the Antardhana, the weapon that destroyed Tripura, and Indra promises his own weapons in heaven. The Nivatakavachas whom Yama names are demons of the nether regions, and Arjuna will meet them later. The war over Taraka and the burning of Tripura are old wars that these weapons have already been through.

The gist: Shiva has barely gone when the four guardians of the world stand on the peaks around Arjuna. Yama tells him the future: Bhishma, Drona’s array, Karna, the Nivatakavachas, all of them will fall to him, and Yama says out loud that Karna carries a portion of the Sun, so the cost of that victory is named before it is won. The four give their weapons and leave, and Indra calls his son up to heaven, sending Matali down with the chariot.

Matali’s chariot and the journey to Indra’s world

When the Lokapalas had gone, Arjuna began to think of Indra’s chariot, and as Gudakesha, who was gifted with great intelligence, was thinking of it, the chariot came. It split the clouds and lit up the sky, Matali was driving it, and its rattle, as deep as the roar of vast masses of cloud, filled the whole of heaven before it was in sight. On that chariot were swords, and missiles of terrible shapes, and maces frightful to look at, and winged darts of celestial splendor, and lightnings of the brightest brilliance, and thunderbolts, and engines on wheels, driven by the expansion of the air, that gave out sounds as loud as great masses of cloud roaring.

On that chariot too were fierce, huge-bodied nagas with fiery mouths, and heaps of stones as white as fleecy clouds. Ten thousand horses the color of gold drew it, with the speed of the wind. Its power of illusion carried it so fast that the eye could hardly follow where it went. Arjuna saw on it the flagstaff called Vaijayanta, blazing bright, the color of emerald or of the dark blue lotus, decked with gold ornaments and straight as bamboo. And when he saw a charioteer dressed in gold sitting on it, the strong-armed son of Pritha knew it for a chariot of the gods and stood where he was, and waited to be spoken to.

While Arjuna was still taking the chariot in, the charioteer Matali climbed down from it, bowed to him, and spoke. “Fortune is with you today, son of Indra, for Indra himself wants to see you,” he said. “Climb without delay into this chariot he has sent. The chief of the immortals, your father, the god of a hundred sacrifices, has commanded me: bring Kunti’s son here, and let the gods see him. And Shankara himself, with the gods and the rishis and the gandharvas and the apsaras around him, is waiting to see you. So, at Indra’s command, come up with me from here to the region of the gods. You will return once you have the weapons.”

“Matali,” Arjuna answered, “climb up first, without delay, into this excellent chariot. A chariot like this cannot be won by hundreds of Rajasuya sacrifices and horse sacrifices together. Kings of great prosperity who have performed great sacrifices with great gifts to the Brahmins cannot ride in it; even gods and danavas cannot. A man without the merit of austerity cannot so much as see or touch this chariot, let alone ride in it. After you have climbed in and the horses have grown still, I will climb in, the way a virtuous man steps onto the high road of honesty.”

Matali, Indra’s charioteer, heard him, climbed into the chariot at once, and took the horses in hand. Then Kunti’s son, with a cheerful heart, purified himself with a bath in the Ganga. He said his customary prayers in the proper way, under his breath, and then, exactly as the ordinance lays it down, he satisfied his ancestors with offerings of water, the water the living owe the dead. Last of all, he turned to Mandara, the king of mountains, and spoke to it as a man speaks to a house he is leaving.

“Mountain, you are always the refuge of holy sages of virtuous conduct who seek heaven,” he said. “It is through your grace that Brahmins and kshatriyas and vaishyas reach heaven and, their anxieties gone, sport with the gods. King of mountains, you are the asylum of sages, and you hold on your breast a great many sacred shrines. I have lived happily on your heights. I am leaving you now, and I bid you farewell.”

“Many times I have seen your tablelands and your bowers, your springs and your brooks, and the sacred shrines on your breast,” Arjuna went on. “I have eaten the savory fruits that grow on you. I have slaked my thirst with the perfumed water that seeps from your body, and I have drunk the water of your springs, as sweet as amrita itself. As a child sleeps happily in his father’s lap, so I have sported on your breast, king of mountains, while your slopes echoed with the singing of apsaras and the chanting of the Vedas. Every day I have lived happily on your tablelands.”

With that farewell to the mountain, Arjuna, blazing like the sun himself, climbed into the celestial chariot, and the ten thousand horses took the sky.

The Kuru prince coursed through the sky with a glad heart on that chariot, as bright as the sun, made for feats no chariot of the earth could attempt. When he had passed out of sight of the mortals of the earth, he saw thousands of chariots of a beauty beyond anything below. In that region there was no sun, no moon, and no fire to give light; it blazed with a light of its own, born of the merit of austerity. And those brilliant regions that are seen from the earth in the form of stars, like lamps in the sky, so small because of their distance though they are in fact very large, the son of Pandu now saw close, each fixed in its own place, full of beauty and brightness, blazing with a splendor all its own.

There he saw royal sages who had been crowned with ascetic success, and heroes who had given up their lives in battle, and those who had won heaven by austerities, by the hundred upon hundred. There were gandharvas with bodies blazing like the sun, thousands upon thousands of them, and guhyakas and rishis and numerous tribes of apsaras. Phalguna looked at those self-luminous regions and was filled with wonder, and he asked Matali what they were. Matali answered him gladly, with the pleasure of a man showing a guest his master’s house. “These are virtuous persons, each in his own station. These are the ones you saw from the earth as stars.”

Then Arjuna saw the handsome elephant Airavata standing at the gates of Indra’s region, the elephant that has never been defeated, with his four tusks, like the mountain Kailasa with its summits. Coursing along the road of the siddhas, the son of Pandu sat in beauty like Mandhata, the best of kings. With his eyes like lotus leaves he passed through the region set apart for virtuous kings. And so, having passed through the regions of heaven one after another, the celebrated Arjuna at last saw Amaravati, the city of Indra.

A key to reading this (numbers, a modern equivalent): The chariot is drawn by ten thousand horses, and it moves with the speed of the mind, so fast that the eye cannot mark its progress. In the old story those are figures for a speed and a power without limit, the way we might speak today of a craft that outruns light. The stars, the text says, are very large and look small only because of their distance; that is the astronomy of the story, and Matali’s answer to Arjuna turns it into something else again: each of those lights is a person who earned the place by virtue.

The gist: Indra’s chariot comes down out of the clouds with Matali driving, and Arjuna insists that the charioteer mount first, bathes in the Ganga, and takes a grateful leave of the mountain. On the way up he learns that the stars seen from earth are the self-lit worlds of ascetics and heroes. The journey ends at the gate of Amaravati, with Airavata standing guard.

Arjuna in Amaravati, and Indra’s lap

The city of Indra that Arjuna saw was delightful, a resort of the siddhas and the charanas, adorned with the flowers of every season all at once and with sacred trees of every kind. He saw the celestial gardens called Nandana, the favorite haunt of the apsaras, where the trees with their loads of celestial blossom, fanned by fragrant breezes heavy with the pollen of sweet flowers, seemed to lean toward him and welcome him among them. No one could see that region who had not gone through austerities or poured libations on the fire. It was a region for the virtuous alone, and for no one who had ever turned his back on a battlefield. No one could see it who had not performed sacrifices or kept rigid vows, who was without knowledge of the Vedas, who had not bathed in sacred waters, or who was not known for sacrifices and gifts. And no one could see it who disturbed sacrifices, or who was low, or who drank strong liquor, or who had violated his teacher’s bed, or who ate unsanctified meat, or who was wicked.

Having looked at those celestial gardens ringing with celestial music, the strong-armed son of Pandu entered the favorite city of Indra. He saw there celestial chariots by the thousand, each able to go wherever it was willed, standing in their proper places, and tens of thousands more moving in every direction. Pleasant breezes charged with the perfumes of flowers fanned him, and apsaras and gandharvas praised him. The gods, with the gandharvas and the siddhas and the great rishis, cheerfully honored Pritha’s son, whose deeds were spotless; benedictions were poured on him to the sound of celestial music, and all around him the son of Pritha heard conches and drums, the same sounds that had greeted him at the edge of the forest, sounded now by the whole of heaven.

Praised on every side, Pritha’s son went, at Indra’s command, along that large and extensive starry road called Suravithi. There he met the Sadhyas, the Vishvedevas, the Maruts, the twin Ashvins, the Adityas, the Vasus, the Rudras, the brahmarshis of great splendor, and numerous royal sages with Dilipa at their head, and Tumburu and Narada, and the pair of gandharvas known as Haha and Huhu. The Kuru prince met them and saluted each of them properly, and last of all, at the end of that road, he saw the chief of the gods, the god of a hundred sacrifices. The strong-armed son of Pritha got down from the chariot and went up on foot to the lord of the gods, his father.

A beautiful white umbrella on a golden staff was held over the chief of the gods, and he was fanned with a chamara whisk perfumed with celestial scents. Many gandharvas, with Vishvavasu at their head, and bards and singers, and the foremost Brahmins chanting the hymns of the Rik and the Yajus, sang his praises. The mighty son of Kunti went up to Indra and saluted him, bending his head to the ground. Indra took him in his round, full arms. Then, taking his hand, he made him sit beside him on a part of his own seat, that sacred seat which gods and rishis worship.

The lord of the gods smelled the head of Arjuna, who was bowed in humility, the way a father smells the head of a child, and then he took him onto his lap. Seated on Indra’s seat at the command of the thousand-eyed god, Pritha’s son began to blaze with splendor like a second Indra. Moved by affection, the killer of Vritra consoled Arjuna and touched his beautiful face with his own perfumed hands. The wielder of the thunderbolt patted and rubbed, gently, again and again, with hands that bore the marks of the thunderbolt, Arjuna’s handsome, huge arms, which were like two golden columns and had grown hard from drawing the bowstring.

The thousand-eyed god looked at his curly-haired son with a smile and with eyes wide with delight, and he seemed unable to be satisfied; the more he gazed, the more he wanted to gaze. Seated on one seat, the father and the son gave the assembly its beauty, the way the sun and the moon together beautify the sky on the fourteenth day of the dark fortnight. A band of gandharvas led by Tumburu, skilled in music sacred and profane, sang many verses in melodious notes. And Ghritachi and Menaka and Rambha and Purvachitti, Svayamprabha, Urvashi, Mishrakeshi, Dandagauri, Varuthini, Gopali, Sahajanya, Kumbhayoni, Prajagara, Chitrasena, Chitralekha, Saha, and Madhurasvana, these and others by the thousand, the apsaras with eyes like lotus leaves whose work it is to lure the hearts of men practicing rigid austerity, danced there. Slim-waisted and full-hipped, they went through their evolutions, shaking their deep bosoms, casting their glances around, and taking every attitude that can steal the heart and the resolve and the mind of anyone who watches.

A key to reading this (a place): Amaravati is Indra’s capital, Nandana its celestial garden, and Suravithi the starry road along which the gods and the royal sages are met. Who may enter is decided by sacrifice, vows, knowledge of the Vedas, and gift, and the one fighter barred from it is the one who fled the field, which ties a kshatriya’s dharma to the winning of heaven as tightly as anything in the story does.

The gist: Arjuna enters Amaravati, is honored by gods, rishis, and royal sages along the starry road, and ends on Indra’s lap, a father who cannot look at his son enough. The apsaras dance, and Urvashi is named among them. Out of that splendor a new episode is about to come, one that will test Arjuna’s restraint.

The thunderbolt, the celestial weapons, and lessons in the arts from Chitrasena

The gods and the gandharvas understood what Indra wanted, and they procured an excellent arghya, the offering with which an honored guest is received, and reverenced Pritha’s son in a hurry. They gave him water to wash his feet and his face, and they led the prince into Indra’s palace. Honored like that, Jishnu went on living in his father’s home. All the while the son of Pandu kept acquiring celestial weapons, together with the means of withdrawing them, and from Indra’s own hands he received the weapon Indra loves above the rest, the thunderbolt whose force nothing resists, and those other weapons of tremendous roar, the lightnings of heaven, whose coming can be read in the look of the clouds and the dancing of the peacocks.

Once he had those weapons, the son of Pandu remembered his brothers, and the forest, and the promise of his return. But at Indra’s command he lived for five full years in heaven, surrounded by every comfort and luxury. After some time, when Arjuna had obtained all the weapons, Indra chose his moment and spoke to him. “Learn music and dancing from Chitrasena. Learn the instrumental music that is current among the gods and does not exist in the world of men. It will be to your benefit.” And Indra gave Chitrasena to Arjuna as a friend. Pritha’s son lived happily and in peace with Chitrasena, and Chitrasena taught him all the while: the music of instruments and of the voice, and dancing.

But the active Arjuna found no peace of mind. He remembered the unfair play of Shakuni, Subala’s son, at the dice, and he thought with rage of Duhshasana and of Duhshasana’s death. Still, when his friendship with Chitrasena had fully ripened, he learned, at times, the dance and the music that are practiced among the gandharvas and have no rival anywhere. And at last, having learned various kinds of dance and different species of music, vocal and instrumental, he still found no peace of mind, because he remembered his brothers and his mother, Kunti, and no music in heaven could tell him how they were.

A key to reading this (numbers, a modern equivalent): Arjuna stays five full years in heaven, and the same five years pass for his brothers below; the text says the Pandavas lived five years in the Kamyaka woods, anxious at his absence, while he was gone. The music and dancing he learns here have a use waiting for them: in the thirteenth year of the exile, when Arjuna lives hidden as Brihannala in Virata’s court, this is the skill that covers him.

The gist: Arjuna wins the thunderbolt and the lightning weapons from Indra and lives five years in heaven. At Indra’s word he learns instrumental music, singing, and dance from the gandharva Chitrasena. Under all the art and all the comfort his mind will not rest; the crooked dice and his brothers keep him awake.

Urvashi’s curse and how it became a blessing

One day Indra learned that Arjuna’s eyes had been resting on Urvashi, and he called Chitrasena aside and spoke to him where no one else could hear. “I am pleased. Go as my messenger to Urvashi, the first of the apsaras, and have her wait on Phalguna. Give her these words of mine: as Arjuna has learned all the weapons and the other arts through me, and is honored by all, so you should make him skilled in the arts of acquitting oneself in the company of women.”

At that command from Indra, the chief of the gandharvas went straight to Urvashi, the first of the apsaras. She recognized him the moment she saw him, and delighted him with her welcome and her greeting, as one old friend delights another.

When he was seated at his ease, and she at hers, he smiled at her and began the way a messenger begins who knows the message will be welcome. “Understand, Urvashi, that I come sent by the one sole lord of heaven, and he asks a favor of you.”

“There is a man known among gods and men for his many inborn virtues,” he went on, “for his grace, his behavior, the beauty of his person, his vows and his self-control; a man noted for might and prowess, respected by the virtuous, quick of wit; a man of genius and splendid energy, forgiving in temper, without malice of any kind; who has studied the four Vedas with their branches, and the Upanishads, and the Puranas too; who is devoted to his teachers and whose intellect has the eight attributes; who by his abstinence, his ability, his birth, and his age is alone capable of protecting the celestial regions, as Indra himself is; who never boasts; who shows proper respect to everyone; who sees the minutest things as clearly as if they were gross and large; who is sweet of speech; who showers every kind of food and drink on his friends and dependents; who is truthful, worshiped by all, eloquent, handsome, and without pride; who is kind to those devoted to him, pleasing and dear to everyone; who is firm in his promises; who equals even Mahendra and Varuna in every desirable quality. That man is Arjuna, and you know him. Understand, Urvashi, that this hero is to be made to taste the joys of heaven. Indra commands it: let him obtain your feet today. Do this, for Dhananjaya is inclined toward you.”

Urvashi, whose features had no flaw, put on a smiling face, received the gandharva’s words with high respect, and answered him with a glad heart. “Hearing the virtues that should adorn a man, as you have unfolded them, I would give my favors to anyone who happened to have them. Why then should I not choose Arjuna for a lover? At Indra’s command, out of my friendship for you, and moved by Phalguna’s many virtues, I am already in the power of the god of love. Go where you want to go. I will go gladly to Arjuna.”

Having sent the gandharva away with his errand done, Urvashi of the luminous smile, moved by the desire to have Phalguna, took a bath. After her ablutions she decked herself in charming ornaments and splendid garlands of celestial fragrance. Inflamed by the god of love, her heart pierced through and through by the shafts Manmatha shoots, with Arjuna’s beauty in front of her eyes and her imagination wholly taken up with him, she sported with him already in her mind, on a wide and excellent bed spread with celestial sheets. And when the twilight had deepened and the moon was up, that high-hipped apsara set out for the mansions of Arjuna.

She went with her crisp, soft, long braids decked in bunches of flowers, and she was extremely beautiful. With her beauty and her grace, with the charm of her moving brows and her soft accents and her moon-like face, she seemed to walk in challenge to the moon himself. A chain of gold lay on her breast, over celestial unguents and fragrant sandal paste, and the weight of her breasts bent her a little forward at every step, so that her waist showed its three folds. Her hips were decked with chains of gold under a thin garment, hips that could shake the sainthood of an anchorite, and her feet, the color of burnished copper, with their flat soles and straight toes and high arched insteps, carried rows of little bells that sounded as she went. A little liquor she had taken had exhilarated her, desire excited her, and she moved through one attitude after another, expressing her delight, and she was more beautiful than she usually was. Heaven abounds in wonderful things, and yet the siddhas and charanas and gandharvas who watched Urvashi go held her the most beautiful thing they had ever set eyes on. The upper half of her body was clad in cloth of fine texture and cloudy hues, and she shone like a sliver of the moon in a sky veiled with fleecy clouds. With the speed of the winds or of the mind, she of the luminous smile soon reached the mansion of Phalguna, Pandu’s son. Urvashi of the beautiful eyes came to the gate of Arjuna’s home and sent word through the keeper in attendance, and when leave was given she entered that brilliant and charming palace.

But when Arjuna saw her in his mansion, at night, dressed like that, his heart was struck with fear. He stepped up to receive her with respect, and the moment he saw her, Pritha’s son closed his eyes out of modesty. He saluted her and offered the apsara the worship that is offered to a superior, and his greeting was the greeting a man gives an elder, and every word of it was wrong for what she had come for. “I bow my head to you, Urvashi,” he said. “Tell me your commands. I wait on you as your servant.”

When she heard Phalguna say that, Urvashi lost command of herself. And she told Arjuna, at once, everything that had passed between her and the gandharva Chitrasena, as if the whole errand explained itself.

“I will tell you all that passed between Chitrasena and me, and why I have come here,” she said. “Because you had come, Arjuna, Mahendra convened a large and charming assembly, and celestial festivities were held in it. The Rudras came to that assembly, and the Adityas, the Ashvins, and the Vasus. Great rishis came in numbers, and royal sages, and siddhas and charanas and yakshas and great nagas. And when the members of that assembly, resplendent as fire or the sun or the moon, had taken their seats according to rank and honor and prowess, the gandharvas struck their vinas and sang charming songs of celestial melody, and the principal apsaras began to dance.”

“Then you looked at me alone, with a steady gaze,” Urvashi went on. “When that assembly of the gods broke up, the gods went away at your father’s command to their own places, and the principal apsaras went to their homes, and the others too, at your father’s command and with his leave. It was then that Chitrasena, sent by Indra, came to my house. ‘I have been sent to you by the chief of the gods,’ he said to me. ‘Do something that would please Mahendra, and me, and yourself. Seek to please Arjuna, who is as brave in battle as Indra himself and who is always generous.’ Those were his words.”

“Commanded like that by him and by your father, I have come here to wait on you,” she said. “My heart has been drawn to your virtues, and I am already in the power of the god of love. And this is my own wish, and I have cherished it for a long time.”

Hearing her say that, in heaven, with the gods’ own sanction behind her, Arjuna was overcome with bashfulness. He shut his ears with his hands and answered her. “Shame on my sense of hearing, when you speak to me like that. In my estimation you are surely the equal of the wife of a superior. As Kunti is to me, or Shachi, Indra’s queen, so are you to me, and of this there is no doubt. That I gazed particularly at you is true, and there was a reason for it, and I will tell it to you truly. In the assembly I looked at you with my eyes wide with delight, and what I was thinking was this: this blooming lady is the mother of the Kaurava line. You should not have other feelings toward me, because you stand above my superiors; you are the parent of my line.”

Urvashi heard him and answered, and there was no shame in her voice, because she saw none in the thing itself. “We apsaras are free and unconfined in our choice. You should not count me as your superior. The sons and grandsons of Puru’s line who come here by their ascetic merit all sport with us, and no sin attaches to it. Relent. You should not send me away. I am burning with desire. I am devoted to you. Accept me.”

“Listen, and I will tell you the truth,” Arjuna answered. “Let the four directions hear it, and the directions between them, and let the gods hear it too. As Kunti is to me, or Madri, or Shachi, so are you: the parent of my line, and an object of reverence. Go back. I bow my head to you, and I lay myself at your feet. You deserve my worship as my own mother does, and it is for you to protect me as a son.”

Anger took Urvashi’s senses from her at those words. Trembling with rage, her brows drawn together, she cursed him, and the curse was shaped to the insult. “Since you disregard a woman who came to your mansion at your father’s command and of her own accord, a woman pierced by the shafts of Kama besides, therefore, Partha, you will have to pass your time among women, unregarded, as a dancer, without manhood, and scorned as a eunuch.”

Her lips were still quivering with anger after she had cursed him, and she was breathing hard, and she went quickly back to her own house. Arjuna lost no time either; he went to find Chitrasena, and when he found him he told him everything that had passed between him and Urvashi in the night, all of it as it had happened, and he came back again and again to the curse she had laid on him. And Chitrasena laid the whole thing before Indra.

Indra, whose horses are the tawny ones, called his son to him in private, and consoled him with sweet words, and smiled as he spoke, because he could see further down the road than his son could. “In having you for a son, child, Pritha has today become a truly blessed mother. You have now conquered even rishis by your patience and your self-control. But the curse that Urvashi has pronounced on you will be to your benefit, and it will stand you in good stead. You will have to pass the thirteenth year of your exile on earth unknown to everyone. That is when you will suffer Urvashi’s curse. You will spend one year as a dancer without manhood, and at the end of that term you will get your power back.”

Indra’s words gave Phalguna great delight, and he put the curse out of his mind, since his father had already found a use for it. And Dhananjaya, Pandu’s son, went back to sporting through the regions of heaven with the celebrated gandharva Chitrasena.

A sub-tale: Urvashi is the mother of the Puru line: the Kauravas and the Pandavas alike descend from the union of King Pururavas and this apsara, generations back. That is why Arjuna calls her the parent of his line, sets her beside Kunti, Madri, and Shachi, and closes his eyes. And her curse turns out to be exactly what the thirteenth year needs. As Brihannala, a dance-teacher without manhood in the women’s quarters of Virata’s palace, Arjuna passes a whole year in plain sight and no one knows him; the curse becomes the disguise.

It is said that the desires of a man who listens to this history of the son of Pandu never run after lustful ends. The best of men, hearing this account of the awesomely pure conduct of Phalguna, the son of the lord of the gods, become free of pride and arrogance and anger and the other faults, and they go up to heaven and sport there in bliss.

The gist: At Indra’s prompting Urvashi comes to Arjuna’s door at night, dressed for love. Arjuna sees the mother of his line and refuses her, with his eyes shut and his head bowed, and she curses him to a year among women as a dancer without manhood. Indra tells him the curse is a gift: it will hide him through the thirteenth year. The test of restraint has become his armor.

Lomasha’s coming and Indra’s message

One day the great rishi Lomasha, in the course of his wanderings, came to Indra’s home, wishing to see the lord of the gods. The great sage approached the chief of the gods and bowed to him with respect, and then he saw something that did not fit: the son of Pandu, a man, occupying half of Indra’s seat. Worshiped by the great rishis, Lomasha sat down on an excellent seat at Indra’s wish, and he could not stop looking. How had Arjuna, who was a kshatriya, reached the seat of Indra himself? What acts of merit had he done, what regions had he conquered by austerity, that he should have won a seat the gods themselves worship?

As the rishi was turning those thoughts over, Indra, the killer of Vritra, came to know of them. Shachi’s lord smiled at Lomasha and spoke. “Listen to what is passing in your mind now. This one is no mortal, though he has taken his birth among men. This strong-armed hero is my own son, born of Kunti. He has come here to acquire weapons for a certain purpose. Do you not recognize him as an ancient rishi of the highest merit? Listen, and I will tell you who he is and why he has come to me. Those ancient and excellent rishis who were known by the names of Nara and Narayana are none other than Hrishikesha, who is Krishna, and Dhananjaya, who is Arjuna. Those rishis, celebrated through the three worlds, have been born on earth to accomplish a certain purpose, and that purpose is virtue.”

“That sacred hermitage which even gods and great rishis cannot look at, known through the world by the name of Badari, near the source of the Ganga, worshiped by the siddhas and the charanas, was the home of Vishnu and Jishnu,” Indra said. “Those rishis of blazing splendor have been born on earth at my wish, and with their mighty energy they will lighten its burden. Besides this, there are asuras known as the Nivatakavachas who, proud of a boon they have won, are busy doing us injury. Boastful of their strength, they are even now planning the destruction of the gods; since they got their boon they have no regard for the gods at all. Those fierce and mighty danavas live in the nether regions, and all the gods together cannot fight them. The blessed Vishnu, the killer of Madhu, the one who is known on earth as Kapila, whose glance alone destroyed the sons of Sagara when they came upon him shouting in the bowels of the earth, that invincible Hari could do us this great service. Either he or Partha, or both together, could certainly do it. Just as Hari killed the nagas in the great lake, so he could kill those asuras called Nivatakavachas and all their followers by a single look. But the killer of Madhu should not be urged when the task is small. He is a mighty mass of energy, and it swells; it could consume the whole universe. This Arjuna is able to meet them all, and when he has killed them in battle he will go back to the world of men.”

“Go to the earth at my request,” Indra told Lomasha. “You will find the brave Yudhishthira living in the woods of Kamyaka. Tell that virtuous king, whose prowess in battle no one has ever baffled, this from me: he should not be anxious on Phalguna’s account, because that hero will return to earth a thorough master of weapons, and without prowess of arms sanctified by the gods, without skill in weapons, he could not meet Bhishma and Drona and the others in battle. Tell Yudhishthira too that the strong-armed Gudakesha, having obtained the weapons, has also mastered the science of celestial dancing and of music, instrumental and vocal. And tell him this: that he himself, with all his brothers, should go and see the various tirthas, the sacred bathing places, because when he has bathed in one sacred water after another he will be cleansed of his sins and the fever in his heart will abate, and then he will be able to enjoy his kingdom, happy in the thought that his sins have been washed away. And you, the foremost of Brahmins, with the power of your austerities, should protect Yudhishthira while he wanders over the earth. Fierce rakshasas live in the mountain fastnesses and on the rugged steppes. Protect the king from those eaters of men.”

When Mahendra had said this to Lomasha, Vibhatsu, which is Arjuna, also spoke to the rishi, with reverence. “Protect the son of Pandu always,” he said. “Let the king, protected by you, visit the various tirthas and give away wealth to the Brahmins.”

The mighty ascetic Lomasha answered them both with “So be it,” and set out for the earth, meaning to reach Kamyaka. When he came to those woods, he saw Kunti’s son, King Yudhishthira the just, surrounded by ascetics and by his younger brothers, and the message from heaven came down into the forest at last.

A key to reading this (lineage and concept): Nara and Narayana are two ancient seers whose hermitage was at Badari, near the source of the Ganga; in this birth Nara is Arjuna and Narayana is Krishna, and Indra tells Lomasha that they have taken flesh at his own wish to lighten the earth’s burden. That is his answer to the sage’s silent question about a kshatriya on Indra’s seat. The Nivatakavachas, demons whose very name is a claim that no blade gets through their armor, live in the nether regions, and the fight with them is the test still waiting for everything Arjuna has learned.

The gist: Indra reads the doubt in Lomasha’s mind and tells him who Arjuna is: Nara, born beside Narayana for a purpose. Then he sends the sage down to the earth with a message for Yudhishthira, patience about Arjuna and a pilgrimage to the tirthas in the meantime, and an order to guard the king against rakshasas on the road. Lomasha reaches Kamyaka, and the story of the weapons meets the story of the pilgrimage.

The emptiness of Kamyaka, and the grief of the brothers in Arjuna’s absence

“After my great-grandfather Partha had gone away from the woods of Kamyaka, what did the sons of Pandu do without him?” Janamejaya asked, and the question turned the story back down from heaven to the forest. “Without that hero who could draw the bow with his left hand? It seems to me that that mighty bowman, that vanquisher of armies, was their refuge, as Vishnu is the refuge of the gods. How did my heroic grandsires pass their time in the forest, deprived of the company of that man, who had Indra’s own prowess and never turned his back in battle?”

After Arjuna had gone away from Kamyaka, Vaishampayana said, the sons of Pandu were filled with sorrow and grief. With their hearts so cheerless they looked like pearls unstrung from a wreath, or birds shorn of their wings, and without that hero of the white horses the forest itself looked like the Chaitraratha woods with Kubera gone from them. Deprived of Arjuna’s company, they went on living in Kamyaka in perfect cheerlessness. The work of the days went on because it had to. Those mighty warriors still killed sacrificial animals of various kinds with pure arrows for the Brahmins; every day they killed those wild animals, sanctified them properly, and offered them to the Brahmins who lived under their protection. And that is how, after Dhananjaya’s departure, those men, afflicted with sorrow, lived there with cheerless hearts.

It was the princess of Panchala, above all, remembering her third lord, who spoke to the anxious Yudhishthira. “That Arjuna who with two arms rivals the thousand-armed Arjuna of the old stories, alas, without him, the foremost of Pandu’s sons, this forest does not look beautiful to me at all,” she said. “Without him, wherever I turn my eyes, the earth looks forlorn. This forest with its blossoming trees, so full of wonders, is not what it was without Arjuna. Without him, whose color is a mass of blue clouds, who has the prowess of an elephant in rut, whose eyes are the leaves of the lotus, this Kamyaka forest does not look beautiful to me. I remember that hero who draws the bow with his left hand, whose bowstring sounds like the roar of thunder, and I cannot feel any happiness.”

Bhimasena heard her lament and answered her, and the words that came out of him were tender. “The agreeable words you speak delight my heart the way a draught of nectar does. Without him whose arms are long and symmetrical, stout as a pair of iron maces, round, marked with the scars of the bowstring, graced with bow and sword and the other weapons, circled with golden bracelets, like two five-headed snakes, without that man the sky itself seems to be without its sun. Relying on that strong-armed man, the Panchalas and the Kauravas do not fear even the gods in full array; relying on his arms, we count our enemies already beaten and the earth already conquered. Without that Phalguna I can get no peace in the woods of Kamyaka. In whatever direction I look, it seems empty.”

When Bhima had finished, Nakula, the son of Pandu, spoke, and his voice was choked with tears. “Without him whose extraordinary deeds on the field of battle are the talk of the gods themselves, without that foremost of warriors, what pleasure can we have in the woods? He went north and defeated mighty gandharva chiefs by the hundred, and he took numberless handsome horses of the Tittiri and Kalmasha breeds, every one of them with the speed of the wind, and presented them out of love to his brother the king at the great Rajasuya sacrifice. Without that dear and famous man, without that terrible warrior born after Bhima, without that hero who is the equal of a god, I do not want to live in the Kamyaka woods any longer.”

After Nakula’s lament, Sahadeva spoke. “He defeated mighty warriors in battle and won wealth and maidens and brought them to the king at the great Rajasuya. He defeated the assembled Yadavas single-handed and carried off Subhadra, with Vasudeva’s consent. He invaded the dominion of the great Drupada and with that paid Drona, our teacher, the fee he had asked for his teaching. When I look at Jishnu’s bed of grass lying empty in our hermitage, my heart refuses to be consoled. What I would choose is to leave this forest, because without that hero it cannot be delightful.”

A key to reading this (a concept): The Tirthayatra Parva is the part of the Vana Parva in which the Pandavas, with Arjuna away, set out on a pilgrimage of the tirthas. A tirtha is a crossing place, a river bank or a lake or a confluence where bathing and giving earn merit, and Pulastya will explain to Bhishma that it is also the sacrifice a poor man can afford, since the great rites need wealth and materials and helpers, and a tirtha asks only that a man come to it and bathe.

The gist: With Arjuna in heaven collecting weapons, the four brothers and Draupadi sink into grief in Kamyaka. Each of them remembers him in a different shape: Draupadi his beauty, Bhima his arms, Nakula his horses, Sahadeva his empty bed of grass. All of them want to leave the forest, and that restlessness is the ground the pilgrimage will grow from.

Narada’s arrival and the question of the glory of the tirthas

Yudhishthira heard his brothers, and Draupadi with them, all anxious on Dhananjaya’s account, and he grew melancholy; he was the one who had sent Arjuna away, and he had no news to give them. And at that moment he saw before him the celestial rishi Narada, blazing with the beauty of Brahman, like a fire that flames up when the libation is poured. Seeing him come, Yudhishthira stood up with his brothers and worshiped him in the proper way. Blazing with energy, the handsome chief of the Kuru line, with his brothers around him, shone like the god of a hundred sacrifices encircled by the gods. And Yajnasena’s daughter, obedient to the dictates of virtue, kept close to her lords, the sons of Pritha, the way Savitri keeps close to the Vedas, or the rays of the sun to the peak of Meru.

The rishi Narada accepted that worship and comforted the son of Dharma in fitting terms, the words a guest of his standing owes a host in grief. Then, addressing the king, Yudhishthira the just, he said, “Tell me what you seek, and what I can do for you.”

The royal son of Dharma bowed with his brothers to Narada, whom the gods themselves revere, and answered him with joined hands. “All the worlds worship you, and when you are pleased with me I count all my wishes as already fulfilled by your grace. If I and my brothers deserve your favor, then dispel the doubt in my mind. Tell me in detail what merit belongs to the man who goes around the world wishing to see the sacred waters and the tirthas that are on it.”

“Listen carefully,” Narada said, “to what the wise Bhishma heard long ago from Pulastya, the seer who is one of Brahma’s own sons.”

Once, Bhishma, while he was keeping the vow owed to the ancestors, lived among sages in a delightful and sacred region near the source of the Ganga, a place the celestial rishis and the gandharvas and the gods themselves resort to. Living there, he satisfied the pitris and the gods and the rishis with his oblations, according to the rites the scriptures lay down. And once, while Bhishma was at his silent recitations, he saw Pulastya, the best of rishis, and the sight was a wonder. Seeing that austere ascetic blazing with beauty, he was filled with great delight and exceeding wonder. Bhishma worshiped him according to the rites of the ordinance. He purified himself, gathered his attention, and approached the sage with the arghya on his head, the water and the honey and the rest with which a guest of that rank is received, carried high the way an offering is carried. And saying his own name aloud, he said, “Blessed be you. I am Bhishma, your slave. At the sight of you I am freed from all my sins.”

Having said that, Bhishma held his speech and stood in silence with his hands joined. And Pulastya looked at that foremost of the Kurus, reduced and emaciated by his vows and by the study of the Vedas, and saw what the thin body meant, and the sage was filled with joy.

“I have been greatly gratified by your humility, your self-control, and your truth,” Pulastya said. “It is for this virtue of yours, which you have acquired out of regard for your ancestors, that I am pleased with you and that you have obtained a sight of my person. Bhishma, my eyes penetrate everything. Tell me what I may do for you. Whatever you ask me, I will grant.”

“You are worshiped by the three worlds, and now that you are pleased with me and I have had the sight of your exalted self, I count myself already crowned with success,” Bhishma said. “But if I have deserved your favor, I will tell you my doubts, and you should dispel them. I have some religious doubts about the tirthas. Speak of them to me in detail; I want to hear you. What merit is his who goes around the whole earth visiting the tirthas? Tell me this with certainty.”

A key to reading this (lineage and narrative frame): This story runs in layers. Vaishampayana is telling all of it to Janamejaya. Inside that telling, the celestial seer Narada tells Yudhishthira what Pulastya, one of the seers born from Brahma’s own mind, once told Bhishma by the source of the Ganga. So the whole account of the tirthas that follows comes out of Pulastya’s mouth, to Bhishma, in Narada’s voice, for Yudhishthira, and the same question is asked twice, by Yudhishthira and by Bhishma, long years apart.

Pulastya’s teaching and the glory of Pushkara

“Listen closely, my son,” Pulastya said, “and I will tell you what the tirthas hold for the one who reaches them, the bathing places on the sacred rivers where the seers have always gone for refuge, and what such a journey earns.”

The seer began with the pilgrim, because the merit of a holy place belongs only to the person fit to receive it. The one who reaps the fruit of the tirthas, Pulastya said, is the one whose hands and feet, whose mind and knowledge, whose austerity and every act are held in wholesome restraint. The one who has stopped accepting gifts, who is content, who carries no pride, reaps that fruit. So does the one who is free of sin, who acts without an eye on the reward, who eats lightly, who has mastered the senses. And the one who has put away anger, who stands in truth, who holds firm in a vow, and who looks on every creature as if it were his own self, that person walks into a tirtha and comes away with everything it has to give.

In the Vedas, Pulastya went on, the seers set out the sacrifices in their proper order, and the fruit each one bears in this life and the next. Those rites lie beyond the reach of a poor man. They call for materials of many kinds in great quantities, for priests and fees and cattle and gold, so kings perform them, and now and then some other man of wealth and standing. Then the seer named what he had come to say. There is a rite that a man with no wealth can perform, a man with no allies, alone, with no wife and no child and no means of any kind, and its merit stands equal to the holy fruit of the sacrifices. To dwell at the tirthas, to go to them and stay there and keep their vows, is one of the high secrets of the seers, and it stands higher than the sacrifices themselves.

The poor man, in Pulastya’s reckoning, is the one who reaches a tirtha and fails to fast three nights there, gives away no gold, and distributes no cattle. The Agnishtoma and the other great rites, with all their lavish gifts, cannot earn what a stay at a tirtha earns. And of all the tirthas in the world of men, the first he named was Pushkara, the place of the God of gods, known through all three worlds, where Brahma himself once sat in delight on his lotus seat. Whoever dwells there becomes the equal of that deity. At the two twilights and at midday a hundred thousand million tirthas gather into Pushkara’s waters. The Adityas and the Vasus, the Rudras and the Sadhyas, the Maruts, the gandharvas, and the apsaras are always present there. It was at Pushkara that gods and daityas and the great Brahmin seers performed their austerities, won their merit, and at the end rose into godhood.

Men of self-command who so much as think of Pushkara are cleansed of their sins and honored in heaven. The one who bathes there devoted to the gods and the ancestors earns, the wise have said, ten times the merit of the horse sacrifice, the Ashvamedha, which is the costliest rite a king can undertake. The one who goes into the Pushkara woods and feeds a single Brahmin is made happy in this world and the next by that one act, and if he lives on greens and roots and fruit, he may offer even that fare, with reverence and without disrespect, and win the merit of the horse sacrifice for it. Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, or Shudra, whoever bathes at Pushkara is loosed from the obligation of rebirth, and whoever sees it on the full moon of the month of Kartika wins everlasting worlds in the abode of Brahma. As Vishnu, the slayer of Madhu, stands first among the gods, so Pushkara stands first among tirthas. The one who remembers it with folded hands morning and evening has in truth bathed in every tirtha there is. Man or woman, every sin committed since birth falls away at the first bath in its waters. Twelve years of residence there, with purity and steady vows, earn the merit of all the sacrifices together and the abode of Brahma; a single month of Kartika spent at Pushkara equals a hundred years of the Agnihotra fire kept faithfully alight. Three white hillocks and three springs have carried the name Pushkara since a time no one remembers. Pulastya closed the account with a warning that was also a measure of its worth: it is hard to reach Pushkara, hard to practice austerity there, hard to give there, and hard to live there.

The gist: Pulastya starts with the pilgrim before the place, since the tirthas give their fruit only to the restrained, the truthful, the unangered, and the one who sees every creature as himself. He then sets the pilgrimage beside the great sacrifices: the rites need wealth and helpers, while the road to a tirtha is open to a man with nothing. Naming Pushkara first, Brahma’s own place, he opens the long circuit of holy sites that will become the Pandavas’ map.

The tirthas of the west and south: from Jambumarga to Prabhasa and the meeting of Sarasvati and the sea

The circuit begins at Pushkara and moves west and south. After twelve nights there, with the diet regulated and the vows kept, the pilgrim walks around the place and goes on to Jambumarga, where gods, seers, and ancestors gather; reaching it earns the merit of the horse sacrifice and the fulfillment of every wish, and five nights there cleanse the soul of all sin, so that such a man never sinks into hell. From Jambumarga the road leads to the hermitage of Tandulika, whose visitor also escapes hell and rises to the abode of Brahma. At the lake of Agastya, a fast of three nights with worship of the ancestors and the gods yields the fruit of the Agnishtoma, and whoever lives there on greens and fruit attains the state called Kaumara. Then comes the beautiful hermitage of Kanva, revered by the whole world, a holy wood standing from remote times; the moment a man enters it his sins leave him, and worship of the ancestors and gods there, with restrained diet, brings the fruit of a sacrifice that grants every desire.

Having walked around Kanva’s hermitage, the pilgrim goes to the spot where Yayati fell from heaven, and earns the horse sacrifice’s merit; then to Mahakala, with senses subdued, where a bath in the tirtha called Koti earns it again. Next is the tirtha of Sthanu, the husband of Uma, famed in the three worlds as Bhadravata: whoever reaches it sees Ishana, earns the fruit of a thousand cows given away, and by Mahadeva’s grace rises to the rank of Ganapatya among the lord’s own hosts, blessed with prosperity, peace, and high favor. At the Narmada, celebrated through the three worlds, the water offering to the ancestors and the gods yields the horse sacrifice’s fruit; at the southern sea, a man who keeps chastity and holds his senses in check wins the Agnishtoma’s fruit and heaven; and at the Charmanvati, with the same discipline, he wins the Agnishtoma’s merit by the leave of Rantideva, the king whose generosity once made that river’s banks famous.

Then Arbuda, Himavat’s son, the mountain where in ancient days there was a hole through the earth, and where the hermitage of Vasishtha, famed in the three worlds, still stands; one night there earns the fruit of a thousand cows. A bath at the Pinga tirtha, in chastity, earns the gift of a hundred tawny cows. Then the excellent tirtha of Prabhasa, where Agni, the friend of the wind and the mouth through which every god receives his offering, is present in his own person. The pilgrim who bathes there with subdued and hallowed soul wins more than the Agnishtoma and the Atiratra together. Where the Sarasvati flows into the sea, a bath earns a thousand cows and heaven, and the man burns bright for all time like Agni himself. At the tirtha of Varuna, the king of the waters, one who bathes with subdued soul, pours the water offering to ancestors and gods, and stays three nights, shines like the moon and wins the fruit of the horse sacrifice.

Then Varadana, where the seer Durvasa granted a boon to Vishnu; a bath there earns a thousand cows. Then Dvaravati, with senses subdued and diet restrained, where a bath at Pindaraka earns the fruit of gold given in abundance. Pulastya paused over a wonder of that place: to this day, he said, coins stamped with the lotus are found there, and lotuses stamped with the trident, and Mahadeva is present. At the tirtha of Varuna where the Sindhu meets the sea, the pilgrim bathes with subdued soul, offers water to the ancestors, the seers, and the gods, and wins the world of Varuna, shining with a light of his own. By worshiping the god called Shankukarneshvara there, the wise say, one earns ten times the merit of the horse sacrifice. Walking around that tirtha, the pilgrim goes on to Drimi, famed through the three worlds, which cleanses every sin, where the gods with Brahma among them worship Maheshvara; whoever bathes there and worships Rudra in the company of the gods is freed of every sin since birth, and it was there that Vishnu, maker of the universe, came to purify himself after killing the daityas and the danavas.

Then Vasudhara, revered by all: the mere arrival earns the horse sacrifice’s fruit, and a bath with subdued soul and rapt attention, with the water offering to gods and ancestors, carries a man to the world of Vishnu, where he is honored. There lies the sacred lake of the Vasus, and whoever bathes in it and drinks its water is regarded by the Vasus as their own. The famous tirtha of Sindhuttama destroys every sin; bathing there earns gold given in abundance. Reaching Bhadratunga with a hallowed soul and pure conduct, one attains the world of Brahma and a high state of blessedness. Then the tirtha of the maidens of Indra, much visited by the siddhas, where a bath earns the world of Indra, and Renuka in the same Kumarika region, where a Brahmin who bathes becomes bright as the moon. At Panchananda, with senses subdued and diet restrained, a bath earns the fruit of the five sacrifices the scriptures name one after another. Then the excellent region of Bhima, where a bath at the tirtha called Yoni makes a man, in his next birth, the son of a goddess, wearing earrings set with pearls, and earns the merit of a hundred thousand cows given away.

Then Shrikunda, famed through the three worlds, where worship of the Grandsire earns a thousand cows. Then the excellent tirtha of Vimala, where to this day fish of gold and silver hue can be seen; a bath there soon wins the world of Vasava, and the soul, cleansed of every sin, comes to a high blessedness. At the Vitasta, the water offering to ancestors and gods earns the fruit of the Vajapeya; that sin-destroying river runs through the country of Kashmir and is the home of the naga Takshaka, and a bath there brings the same fruit and the same blessed state. Then Vadava, famed through the three worlds, where the pilgrim bathes at evening with the proper rites and offers rice boiled in butter and milk, as much as he can afford, to the god of seven flames. A gift made there in honor of the ancestors, the wise say, never runs out.

A sub-tale: Pulastya explained how Vadava came by its other name. Seers and ancestors, gods and gandharvas, several tribes of apsaras, guhyakas, kinnaras, yakshas, siddhas, vidyadharas, rakshasas, daityas, Rudras, and Brahma himself once undertook austerities there for a thousand years, senses subdued, to move Vishnu to grace. They cooked rice in milk and butter and offered it to Keshava, each oblation sent up with seven verses of the Rig Veda. Keshava, satisfied, granted them the eightfold powers called aishvarya and whatever else they desired, and then vanished from their sight the way lightning vanishes into a cloud. From those seven verses the place is called Saptacharu, and whoever offers charu to the seven-flamed god there earns more than a hundred thousand cows given away, more than a hundred Rajasuyas, more than a hundred horse sacrifices.

Leaving Vadava, the pilgrim goes to Raudrapada, where seeing Mahadeva earns the horse sacrifice’s merit, then to Manimat, with subdued soul and in chastity, where one night earns the Agnishtoma’s. Then Devika, famed across the whole world, where the Brahmins, as we have heard it, first came into being; the region of the trident-bearer is there too, and whoever bathes in Devika and worships Maheshvara with an offering of rice boiled in milk and butter earns the fruit of a sacrifice that fills every desire. At Devika stands another tirtha of Rudra called Kamakhya, much visited by the gods, where a bath brings swift success, and by touching the waters of Yajana, Brahmavaluka, and Pushpamva a man is freed of sorrow in the life to come. The learned measure the holy ground of Devika at five yojanas in length and half a yojana across. Then, in due order, Dirghasatra, where the gods with Brahma among them, the siddhas, and the greatest seers perform the long sacrifice with regulated vows, having taken the preliminary pledge; simply going there earns more than the Rajasuya or the horse sacrifice. Then Vinashana, with senses subdued and diet restrained, where the Sarasvati sinks out of sight on the breast of Meru and rises again at Chamasa, Shivodbheda, and Nagodbheda: a bath at Chamasodbheda earns the Agnishtoma’s merit, at Shivodbheda a thousand cows, and at Nagodbheda the world of the nagas.

A key to reading this (numbers, a modern equivalent): The account keeps returning to the same measures: “a thousand cows given away,” “a hundred horse sacrifices,” “ten times the merit.” These are a way of weighing worth, and no literal ledger is intended. In that age the Ashvamedha, the horse sacrifice, was the costliest and rarest rite a king could perform, a year-long undertaking that only a sovereign of the whole land could attempt, so to say “the fruit of the horse sacrifice” is to say, in today’s idiom, “the equal of a lifetime’s highest achievement.” To set a simple bath at a river beside these vast rites is to say two things at once: how easy the tirtha is, and how great.

Rudrakoti and the Sarasvati-sea confluence: the stream of holy places

The road turns next to the hard-to-reach tirtha of Shashayana, where every year in the month of Kartika the cranes, which spend the rest of the year hidden in the form of hares, reappear and bathe in the Sarasvati. Whoever bathes there shines like the moon and earns a thousand cows. Then Kumarakoti, with senses subdued, where a bath and the worship of the gods and ancestors earn ten thousand cows and lift all of a man’s forefathers to higher worlds. Then, with subdued soul, Rudrakoti, and Pulastya told why it bears that name: in ancient days ten million sages gathered there.

They had come to see Mahadeva, and each of them, full of joy at the prospect, kept saying, “I will see the god first, I will see the god first.” Ten million seers with their souls subdued were about to quarrel over precedence, and the lord of yoga would not have it. By the power of his yoga he multiplied himself into ten million forms and stood before every one of them at once. Every seer said, “I have seen him first.” Mahadeva, pleased by the depth of their devotion, gave them a boon: “From this day your righteousness shall grow.” Whoever bathes at Rudrakoti with a pure mind earns the fruit of the horse sacrifice and delivers his ancestors.

Then the pilgrim goes to that most holy and famous region where the Sarasvati meets the sea. The gods with Brahma among them, and seers rich in austerity, come there on the fourteenth day of the bright fortnight of Chaitra to worship Keshava. A bath there earns the merit of gold given in abundance, and the soul, cleansed of every sin, rises to the world of Brahma. The seers have completed many a sacrifice on that shore, and a journey to it earns a thousand cows.

The gist: The story of Rudrakoti is a small episode inside the roll of tirthas, and a telling one. Ten million sages, each wanting to be first before Mahadeva, are given exactly that, because the god multiplies himself until every one of them has him to himself. In devotion there is no queue, and the god is as near to the last of them as to the first.

The glory of Kurukshetra and Parashurama’s lakes of blood

“Then to Kurukshetra,” Pulastya said, “the revered field at the mere sight of which every creature is freed of its sins.”

Whoever keeps saying “I will live in Kurukshetra” is freed of all his sins. The very dust of Kurukshetra, carried on the wind, leads a sinful man to a blessed course in the life to come. Those who dwell there, in the land that lies south of the Sarasvati and north of the Drishadvati, are said to dwell in heaven, and a pilgrim should stay there a month. The gods with Brahma among them, the seers, the siddhas, the charanas, the gandharvas, the apsaras, the yakshas, and the nagas come again and again to that most holy field of Brahma. Even the man who only wishes in his mind to go there has his sins destroyed and goes in the end to the world of Brahma, and the one who reaches it in a pious frame of mind earns the fruit of the Rajasuya and the horse sacrifice together.

Within Kurukshetra the tirthas come thick. Saluting the yaksha Mankanaka, the mighty gatekeeper of Kubera, earns a thousand cows. In the region of Vishnu, where Hari is always present, a bath and a bow to the creator of the three worlds earn the horse sacrifice’s fruit and the abode of Vishnu. At Pariplava, famed in the three worlds, one earns more than the Agnishtoma and the Atiratra; at the tirtha called Prithivi, a thousand cows; at Shalukini, a bath in the Dashashvamedha earns the merit of ten horse sacrifices. Then Sarpadevi, the excellent tirtha of the nagas, which brings the Agnishtoma’s merit and the world of the serpents; then Tarantuka the gatekeeper, where one night earns a thousand cows; then Panchananda, where a bath at Koti earns the horse sacrifice’s fruit, and the tirtha of the twin Ashvins, which gives beauty of person. At the excellent tirtha of Varaha, where Vishnu once stood in the form of a boar, a bath earns the horse sacrifice’s merit; at Sama in Jayanti, the Rajasuya’s; at Ekahamsa, a thousand cows; at Kritashaucha, the lotus-eyed Vishnu and perfect purity of soul. At Munjavata, sacred to Sthanu, one night without food earns the rank of Ganapatya, and there too is the famous tirtha called Yakshini, which grants every desire. That tirtha is counted the gate of Kurukshetra, and the pilgrim walks around it with a concentrated soul. Equal to the Pushkaras, it was made by Rama, the son of Jamadagni; a bath there with worship of the ancestors and gods earns the horse sacrifice’s merit and success in everything.

Then, with a fixed mind, the pilgrim goes to Ramahrada, and here Pulastya told what the lakes there hold. Rama of the line of Bhrigu, the Brahmin who took up the axe, had exterminated the Kshatriyas by his own might, and when it was done he dug five lakes and filled them, as we have heard it, with the blood of the men he killed. With that blood he made the oblation a son makes with water to his fathers and grandfathers. The ancestors, satisfied, spoke to him from the sky. “Rama, we are pleased with you, for this regard you have shown your forefathers, and for your prowess. Be blessed, and ask what boon you choose. What is it you desire?”

Rama, the foremost of smiters, answered them with folded hands, looking up at his fathers standing in the firmament. “If you are pleased with me, if I have earned your favor, this is the favor I ask of my ancestors: that I may take pleasure in austerity again. Let me, through your power, be freed of the sin I committed when I wiped out the Kshatriya race in my anger. And let these lakes of mine become tirthas known across the world.”

The words delighted the ancestors, and they answered him with joy. “Let your austerity increase, for the regard you have shown us. You destroyed the Kshatriyas in anger, and of that sin you are already free, because they perished by the fruit of their own misdeeds. These lakes of yours will become tirthas, there is no doubt of it, and whoever bathes in them and offers their water to the ancestors will receive from them the desire hardest to win in this world, and eternal heaven besides.” Having granted this, the ancestors saluted Rama of Bhrigu’s line with gladness and vanished on the spot. That is how his lakes became holy. A pilgrim who bathes in them in chastity and under sacred vows, and worships Rama there, earns the merit of gold given in abundance.

A key to reading this (moral complexity): The story names Parashurama’s slaughter of the Kshatriyas for what it was: “the sin I committed in my anger,” in his own words to his ancestors. The ancestors release him, and the ground of the release is that the slain had brought their deaths on themselves by their own misdeeds. The lakes of blood become places of pilgrimage, and the blood remains in the telling. The Mahabharata keeps violence and dharma in the same frame.

The dance of the sage Mankanaka and the story of the Manusha tirtha

From the lakes of Rama the roll runs on, and Pulastya gave each place its gift. Vamshamulaka, where a bath raises a man’s whole line. Kayashodhana, where the body itself is purified and goes on, purified, to a realm without rival. Lokoddhara, famed in the three worlds, where Vishnu of great might once created the worlds, and where a bath earns many worlds for the bather. Then Shri, where a bath with worship of the ancestors and gods brings high prosperity; Kapila, in chastity and with concentrated soul, which earns a thousand tawny cows; Surya, where a fasting bath earns the Agnishtoma’s fruit and, at the end, the region of the sun; Gobhavana, worth a thousand cows; Shankhini, where a bath in the Devi tirtha gives great prowess; Tarandaka on the Sarasvati, belonging to the chief of the yakshas who keeps Kubera’s gate, worth the Agnishtoma; and Brahmavarta, from which one rises to Brahma’s abode. Then Sutirtha in Ambumati, where the ancestors are ever present with the gods, so that a bath and worship there earn the horse sacrifice’s merit and the world of the fathers; Kashishvara, where a bath frees a man of every disease and wins him honor in Brahma’s abode, and the tirtha of Matri beside it, which gives a large family and great prosperity; and Shitavana, with senses subdued and diet restrained, a place with a merit rarely found elsewhere, since merely going there brings holiness, and casting off one’s hair there brings great sanctity. Within Shitavana lies Shvavillomapaha, where learned Brahmins on pilgrimage find deep satisfaction in a single dip, and where good Brahmins who cast off their hair attain holiness through the breath discipline of pranayama and come at last to a high state; and Dashashvamedhika, which also lifts a man high. Then the famous tirtha of Manusha, and Pulastya told how it got its name: a herd of black antelope, pierced by a hunter’s arrows, plunged into its waters and came out as human beings. A bath there in chastity, with a concentrated soul, frees a man of all his sins and wins him honor in heaven. A krosha east of Manusha runs the river Apaga, visited by the siddhas; offering the shyamaka grain there to the gods and ancestors brings great merit, feeding one Brahmin there equals feeding ten million, and a bath with worship and one night’s stay earn the Agnishtoma’s fruit.

Then the excellent region of Brahma known on earth as Brahmodumbara, where a bath in the tank of the seven seers and in the Kedara of the great Kapila, with pure mind and subdued soul, and the sight of Brahma who is there, purify the soul of every sin and carry it to Brahma’s abode; the hard-to-reach Kedara of Kapila, where austerity burns away sin and grants the power to vanish at will; and the famous tirtha of Saraka, where seeing Mahadeva on the fourteenth day of the dark fortnight fulfills every wish and opens heaven. In Saraka and Rudrakoti, and in the well and the lakes there, thirty million tirthas are present. There too is Ilaspada, where a bath with worship of gods and ancestors keeps a man from hell and earns the Vajapeya’s fruit; then Kindana and Kinjapya, which earn the merit of giving without measure and of endless prayer; then Kalashi, worth the Agnishtoma; and east of Saraka the auspicious tirtha of Anajanma, belonging to the great Narada, whose bather receives after death, at Narada’s own command, worlds without rival. On the tenth day of the bright fortnight the pilgrim goes to Pundarika, and earns the Pundarika sacrifice’s merit; then to Tripishtapa, famed over the three worlds, where the sacred, sin-destroying Vaitarani flows, and where a bath and the worship of the god marked with the bull, the trident in his hand, purify the soul and lift it to the highest state. Then Phalakivana, where the gods once practiced austerities for many thousands of years; then the Drishadvati, where a bath and worship earn more than the Agnishtoma and the Atiratra; then Sarvadeva, worth a thousand cows; then Panikhata, where a bath and the worship of all the gods earn more than those two rites, add the Rajasuya’s merit, and lead at last to the world of the seers. Then the excellent tirtha of Mishraka, and Pulastya explained its name: Vyasa, for the sake of the Brahmins, mingled all the tirthas there, so that whoever bathes in Mishraka has in truth bathed in them all. Then Vyasavana, with senses subdued and diet restrained, where a bath at Manojava earns a thousand cows; the Devi tirtha in Madhuvati, where a bath and worship earn a thousand cows at the goddess’s own command; the confluence of the Kaushiki and the Drishadvati, which frees a man of all his sins; and Vyasasthali, where Vyasa, burning with grief for his son, had resolved to cast off his body, and where the gods cheered him back to life. Going to that spot of Vyasa’s earns a thousand cows.

Then the well called Kindatta, into which a man throws a measure of sesame and is freed of all his debts; the tirtha of Vedi, worth a thousand cows; the two famous tirthas of Ahas and Sudina, from which a man goes to the world of the sun; Mrigadhuma, famed through the three worlds, where a bath in the Ganga and the worship of Mahadeva earn the horse sacrifice’s merit, and a bath in the Devi tirtha a thousand cows; Vamanaka, where a bath in Vishnupada and the worship of Vamana purify the soul and carry it to Vishnu’s abode; Kulampuna, which hallows a man’s whole line; Pavanahrada, the excellent tirtha of the Maruts, whose bather is honored in the world of the wind god; Amarahrada, where one who bathes and worships the chief of the gods with devotion is honored in heaven and rides among the immortals in a splendid chariot; Shalisurya, the tirtha of Shalihotra, worth a thousand cows; Shrikunja on the Sarasvati, worth the Agnishtoma; and Naimishakunja, made when the seers of the Naimisha wood, having taken the vow of pilgrimage, came to Kurukshetra in the old days and planted a grove on the Sarasvati’s bank to rest in, a place that delighted them, where a bath in the river earns the Agnishtoma’s merit. Then Kanya, worth a thousand cows; the excellent tirtha of Brahma, where a man of the three lower orders gains the standing of a Brahmin, and a Brahmin, purified of every sin, the highest state; and Soma, from which one goes to the world of Soma. Then the tirtha called Saptasarasvata, where the famous seer Mankanaka won his ascetic success, and here Pulastya stopped for a story. In ancient days, as we have heard it, Mankanaka cut his hand on the sharp blade of a kusha grass, and what flowed from the wound was vegetable sap in place of blood. The seer looked at the sap running from his own hand, his eyes wide with wonder, and began to dance. And as he danced, every creature that moves and every one that stands still, overwhelmed by his power, began to dance with him.

The gods with Brahma among them, and the seers rich in austerity, were troubled by what Mankanaka had set in motion, and they brought the matter to Mahadeva. “Lord, do something,” they said, “so that this seer stops dancing.”

Mahadeva, glad at heart, went to the dancing seer and, for the good of the gods, put a question to him. “Great seer, why are you dancing? What is the cause of this joy of yours?”

“I am an ascetic who walks the path of virtue,” the seer answered. “Do you not see, Brahmin, that vegetable sap is flowing from the wound in my hand? The sight of it has filled me with such joy that I dance.”

The seer was blind with feeling, and the god laughed at him. “Brahmin, I see nothing to wonder at in this. Look at me.” And Mahadeva pressed his own thumb with the tip of his finger, and from that wound came ash, white as snow. Mankanaka saw it, and shame took the place of the joy in him, and he fell at the god’s feet.

Convinced that there was nothing better and nothing greater than the god Rudra, he began to praise him. “Wielder of the trident, you are the refuge of the gods and the asuras, the refuge of the whole universe. You created the three worlds with every creature that moves and every one that stands still, and at the end of the age it is you who swallow everything again. The gods themselves cannot know you; how much less can I. The gods with Brahma among them are all displayed in you. You are all of it, the creator and the ordainer of the worlds, and it is by your grace that the gods go about their play without anxiety or fear.” Then the seer made his request. “God of gods, grant me your grace, so that my austerity does not diminish.”

The god’s heart was light, and he answered the seer with a boon. “Brahmin, by my grace let your austerity increase a thousandfold. And I will live with you here in this hermitage of yours. Those who bathe at Saptasarasvata and worship me will be able to attain everything in this world and the next, and all of them, without doubt, will reach the Sarasvata region in the end.” Having said this, Mahadeva vanished on the spot.

The gist: Mankanaka’s story is the story of a pride undone gently. The seer is so elated by the mark of his own austerity, sap where blood should be, that he sets the whole creation dancing. Mahadeva draws ash from his own thumb and the seer sees where power actually comes from. Elation turns to shame, and shame turns to worship, and the god, pleased, makes the place his home.

The supremacy of Prithudaka and the sequence of tirthas as far as the Ganga and the sea

After Saraswata the pilgrim goes to Aushanasa, famed in the three worlds, where the gods with Brahma among them, seers rich in austerity, and the great Kartikeya are present at the two twilights and at noon, drawn there by their wish to do good to the descendant of Bhrigu. Within it lies Kapalamochana, which washes away every sin. Then the tirtha of Agni, where a bath earns the worlds of Agni and lifts a man’s line from the lower regions; then the tirtha of Vishvamitra there, where a bath confers the standing of a Brahmin; then Brahmayoni, in purity of body and with subdued soul, where a bath earns the abode of Brahma and hallows one’s line to the seventh generation upward and downward. Then Prithudaka, famed through the three worlds, belonging to Kartikeya. The pilgrim bathes there and gives himself to the worship of the ancestors and the gods, and whatever evil has been done, knowingly or unknowingly, by man or woman, driven by human motives, is destroyed by that bath, which also earns the horse sacrifice’s merit and heaven.

The learned have said that Kurukshetra is holy; that holier than Kurukshetra is the Sarasvati; that holier than the Sarasvati are all the tirthas together; and that holier than all the tirthas together is Prithudaka. Whoever gives up his body at Prithudaka, the best of all tirthas, while engaged in the recitation of prayers, becomes an immortal. Sanatkumara has sung it, and the great Vyasa, and the Vedas say it too: go to Prithudaka with a subdued soul. There is no tirtha above it. It purifies, it is holy, it destroys sin, and learned men have said that people, however sinful, go to heaven by bathing there.

Within Prithudaka lies Madhusrava, where a bath earns a thousand cows. Then the famous and sacred place where the Sarasvati joins the Aruna: a bath there after a fast of three nights cleanses even the sin of killing a Brahmin, earns more than the Agnishtoma or the Atiratra, and rescues a man’s line to the seventh generation up and down. There too is Ardhakila, and Pulastya told how it came to be: the seer Darbhi made it in the old days out of compassion for the Brahmins. A man becomes a Brahmin, without doubt, by vows, by investiture with the sacred thread, by fasts, by rites, and by mantras; yet learned men of old saw that even one with no rites and no mantras, by only bathing there, became learned and gained the merit of vows. Darbhi also brought the four oceans to that place, so that whoever bathes there never meets distress in the life to come and earns four thousand cows besides. Then Shatasahasraka, and near it Sahasraka, both famous, where a bath earns a thousand cows and fasts and gifts are multiplied a thousandfold. Then the excellent tirtha of Renuka, where a bath and the worship of the ancestors and gods cleanse every sin and earn the Agnishtoma’s fruit; Vimochana, where a bath with passions and senses under control washes away every sin born of accepting gifts; the woods of Panchavati, in chastity and with senses subdued, which earn much virtue and honor in the worlds of the virtuous; and Taijasa, the tirtha of Varuna, blazing with a light of its own, where the lord of yoga, Sthanu himself, sits with the bull for his mount, and where the gods with Brahma among them and the seers rich in austerity installed Guha, Kartikeya, as commander of the armies of heaven. Whoever sojourns there and worships the god of gods attains success. East of it lies the Kuru tirtha, where a bath in chastity and with senses restrained cleanses every sin and earns the world of Brahma.

Then Svargadvara, with senses subdued and diet restrained, which earns the Agnishtoma’s merit and the abode of Brahma. Then Anaraka, whose bather never meets distress in the life to come; there Brahma himself is always present with the other gods, Narayana at their head, and the wife of Rudra too, whose sight has the same effect; there stands Vishveshvara, the lord of Uma, whose sight cleanses every sin, and Narayana, from whose navel the lotus sprang, whose sight makes a man blaze with light and carries him to Vishnu’s abode; and whoever bathes in the tirthas of all the gods there is freed of every sorrow and shines like the moon. Then Svastipura, where walking around the place earns a thousand cows; Pavana, where the offering to ancestors and gods earns the Agnishtoma’s merit; Gangahrada near it, and Kupa, in which thirty million tirthas are present, so that a bath there earns heaven, while a bath in Gangahrada with worship of Maheshvara earns the rank of Ganapatya and rescues one’s line. Then Sthanuvata, famed in the three worlds, worth heaven; then Badaripachana, the hermitage of Vasishtha, where after a three-night fast the pilgrim eats jujubes, and where twelve years on jujubes, or a three-night fast, earn a merit that never fades. Then Indramarga, where a day and night of fasting win honor in Indra’s abode; Ekaratra, where one night kept with regulated vows and no untruth wins honor in Brahma’s; the hermitage of Aditya, the god who is a mass of light, where a bath and the worship of the lord of light carry a man to Aditya’s region and rescue his line; and the tirtha of Soma, which gives Soma’s world. Then the most sacred tirtha of the great Dadhicha, hallowing and famous over the whole world, where Angiras, that ocean of austerity of the Sarasvata line, was born, and where a bath earns the horse sacrifice’s merit and a home in the Sarasvata region. Then Kanyashrama, with senses subdued and in chastity, where three nights with regulated diet earn a hundred celestial maidens and the abode of Brahma. Then Sannihati, where the gods with Brahma among them and the seers rich in austerity earn great virtue, and where a bath in the Sarasvati during an eclipse of the sun earns the merit of a hundred horse sacrifices, and any sacrifice performed there bears eternal fruit. Every tirtha on earth and in the sky, every river and lake and pond and spring and tank, large or small, every spot sacred to a god, all of them come month after month and mingle with Sannihati, and that gathering is what its name records. A bath there and a drink of its water win honor in heaven, and the one who bathes there and performs the shraddha for his ancestors on the new moon of a solar eclipse earns what a thousand horse sacrifices properly performed would earn; whatever sins a man or woman has committed are destroyed at the first bath, and the bather rises to Brahma’s abode in a chariot the color of the lotus. Then Koti tirtha, after worship of Machakruka, the yaksha who keeps the gate, worth gold in abundance; and Gangahrada near it, where a bath in chastity and with subdued soul earns more than the Rajasuya and the horse sacrifice together. Pulastya then set the three great places against one another: Naimisha bears fruit on earth, Pushkara in the regions of the sky, and Kurukshetra in all three worlds. The dust of Kurukshetra, carried on the wind, leads sinful men to the highest blessedness. Whoever says even once, “I will go to Kurukshetra, I will live in Kurukshetra,” is cleansed of all sins. That sacred ground, revered by the Brahmin seers, is counted the sacrificial altar of the gods, and those who live there have nothing to grieve for at any time. What lies between Tarantuka and Arantuka, and between the lakes of Rama and Machakruka, is Kurukshetra; it is also called Samantapanchaka, and it is said to be the northern altar of the Grandsire.

A key to reading this (a place): Pulastya sets Prithudaka (today’s Pehowa, in Haryana) above every other tirtha, above Kurukshetra itself and above the Sarasvati. The whole order of holy places in his telling turns on the ancient course of the Sarasvati and on the Kurukshetra country between the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati, the ground he calls Samantapanchaka and the northern altar of the Grandsire. This was the heartland of Vedic geography, and the field on which the war of the Mahabharata will be fought.

Narada’s account of Pulastya’s teaching ran on past the Sarasvati country, through the tirthas of the Ganga and the east, to the sea, and it closed with the seer’s blessing on Bhishma: that by his virtue he had gratified his father and grandfather and great-grandfathers, the gods with Brahma among them, and the seers, and that he would attain the region of the Vasus and eternal fame on earth. Having spoken so with joy, the splendid seer Pulastya bade Bhishma farewell and vanished on the spot. Bhishma, who now understood the true meaning of the scriptures, wandered over the world at Pulastya’s command, and so completed at Prayaga his most holy pilgrimage, the journey that destroys all sins. Whoever ranges the earth by these instructions, Narada said, wins the highest fruit of a hundred horse sacrifices and salvation in the life to come.

“You will win the eightfold merit that Bhishma, the foremost of the Kurus, won long ago,” Narada went on, “and since you will be leading these ascetics to those tirthas, your merit will be far greater than his. Those tirthas are infested by rakshasas, and no one except you can go there.” Whoever rises early and recites this account of the tirthas as the celestial seers gave it, he added, is freed of all sins. Then he named the seers waiting for Yudhishthira, and the list was long: Valmiki and Kashyapa, Atreya and Kundajathara, Vishvamitra and Gautama, Asita and Devala, Markandeya and Galava, Bharadvaja and Vasishtha, the sage Uddalaka, Shaunaka with his son, Vyasa, the best of ascetics, Durvasa, foremost of sages, and Jabali of great austerities. “All these seers rich in austerity are waiting for you, and you will meet them as you visit the tirthas. A great seer of immeasurable energy named Lomasha will come to you. Follow him, and follow me, and see the tirthas in turn. By this you will win great fame, like King Mahabhisha. You already blaze with your own virtue as the righteous Yayati and King Pururavas did; you shine among kings like the sun itself, as Bhagiratha and the illustrious Rama shone; you are celebrated in the world as Manu was, and Ikshvaku, and the famous Puru, and Vainya. As the slayer of Vritra ruled the three worlds with an untroubled mind after he had burned up his enemies, so you will rule your subjects after you have destroyed yours, and having conquered the earth by the custom of your order, you will win renown by your virtue as Kartavirya Arjuna did.”

So the seer comforted the king, and then, bidding him farewell, Narada vanished on the spot. Yudhishthira sat with what he had heard, and began to recite to the ascetics around him the merit that belongs to the tirthas.

Yudhishthira’s counsel with Dhaumya: waiting for Arjuna, and the fear of Karna

Yudhishthira had taken the measure of his brothers’ minds and of Narada’s, and he turned to Dhaumya, the family priest, who was to them like the Grandsire Brahma himself. “I have sent Jishnu away to win weapons,” he said, “that tiger among men whose prowess no one can baffle, with his long arms and his measureless intelligence. That hero is devoted to me, ascetic. He is able, he is skilled in arms, and he is like Vasudeva himself. I know the two of them, Krishna and Arjuna, those destroyers of enemies, as well as the mighty Vyasa knows them. I know that Vasudeva and Dhananjaya are Vishnu himself, possessed of the six attributes. Narada knows it too, because he has always said so to me. I know them for the seers Nara and Narayana.”

“It was because I know what he can do that I sent him,” Yudhishthira went on. “He is no less than Indra, and fully equal to the task, and I sent that son of a god to see the lord of the gods and take weapons from him. Consider what he has to face. Bhishma and Drona are atirathas, chariot fighters of the highest class. Kripa and the son of Drona cannot be beaten. Dhritarashtra’s son has set these men at the head of his army, and every one of them knows the Vedas, every one is a hero, every one is a master of every weapon, and every one of them, strong as they are, longs to meet Arjuna in battle.”

“And there is Karna,” he said. “Karna of the suta caste, a mighty warrior versed in celestial weapons. When his weapons strike they have the force of the wind god. Think of him as a flame of fire: the arrows that leave his bow are its tongues, the slap of his left hand in its leather guard is its crackle, and the dust of the battlefield is its smoke. The sons of Dhritarashtra fan him the way the wind fans a fire, and Karna, like the all-devouring fire at the end of an age sent by Death himself, will burn my troops to nothing like a heap of straw. There is no doubt of it.”

“Only one thing can put out that fire,” Yudhishthira said. “The great cloud mass that is Arjuna, driven by the strong wind that is Krishna, with celestial weapons for its lightning, white horses and rows of white cranes flying low beneath it, and the unbearable bow Gandiva arched in front of it like a rainbow. That cloud can quench the blaze called Karna with its rain of arrows, loosed and never slackening. Vibhatsu, that conqueror of enemy cities, will surely get from Indra himself every celestial weapon in its fullness and with its life. Alone, I think, he is the equal of all of them. Otherwise we cannot defeat in battle enemies who have succeeded in everything they set out to do. We will see Arjuna come back fully armed with the weapons of heaven, because once Vibhatsu has taken up a task he never buckles under it.”

“Without that hero, without that best of men, the rest of us cannot be at rest here in Kamyaka, not even with Krishna beside us,” he said. “So name for us some other wood, holy and delightful, rich in food and fruit, where men of pious conduct live, and where we can pass the time waiting for Arjuna of unbaffled prowess, the way the chataka bird waits for the gathering of the clouds. Tell us of hermitages open to Brahmins, of lakes and rivers and beautiful mountains. Brahmin, with Arjuna gone, I have no wish to stay in this Kamyaka forest. We want to go somewhere else.”

A key to reading this (the image of Karna): Yudhishthira calls Karna “the fire at the end of an age” and admits in plain words that without an Arjuna armed with celestial weapons the Kaurava side cannot be beaten. This is the moral realism of the Mahabharata: Yudhishthira neither underrates the enemy’s strength nor hides his own dependence on one brother. The pilgrimage has a practical reason as well as a pious one, and that reason is the waiting.

Dhaumya’s tirthas by direction: east, south, west, and north

The Pandavas were anxious and low in spirit, and Dhaumya, who resembled Brihaspati, the preceptor of the gods, set out to comfort them. “Listen, and I will name the sacred hermitages and regions, the tirthas and the mountains, that the Brahmins approve,” he said. “Hear me, king, with Drupada’s daughter and your brothers, and your grief will lift. Merely to hear of these places brings merit, and to see them brings merit a hundred times greater.”

He began with the east, the beautiful country much regarded by the royal seers, and gave it as far as he remembered it. There lies Naimisha, held in regard by the gods, with several sacred tirthas of the gods in it, and the holy and beautiful Gomati, revered by the celestial seers, and the sacrificial ground of the gods, and the sacrificial stake of Surya. In that quarter stands Gaya, best of hills, sacred and much regarded by royal ascetics, and on it the auspicious lake Brahmasara, revered by the celestial seers. Dhaumya recalled the saying of the ancients about it: a man should wish for many sons, so that even one of them may go to Gaya, or perform the horse sacrifice, or give away a dark bull, and so deliver ten generations of his line up and down. There is a great river there, and a spot called Gayashira, and on Gayashira a banyan the Brahmins call the eternal banyan, because food offered there to the ancestors never runs out. The great river that flows by is the Phalgu, and all its water is sacred. There too is the Kaushiki, whose basin is rich in fruit and roots, where Vishvamitra, rich in austerity, won the standing of a Brahmin. In the same direction lies the sacred Ganga, on whose banks Bhagiratha performed many sacrifices with lavish gifts to the Brahmins.

In the country of Panchala, Dhaumya went on, there is said to be a wood called Utpala, where Vishvamitra of Kushika’s line performed sacrifices with his son, and where Rama, the son of Jamadagni, seeing the traces of Vishvamitra’s superhuman power, recited the praises of his own ancestry. At Kamyaka, Kushika’s son had drunk the soma with Indra, and then, abandoning the Kshatriya order, he began to say, “I am a Brahmin.” In that quarter is the sacred confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna, famed across the world, holy and sin-destroying, much regarded by the seers; there in the old days the Grandsire, the soul of all things, performed his sacrifice, and that is why the place is called Prayaga. In that direction lies the excellent hermitage of Agastya, and the forest called Tapasa, adorned with ascetics; the great tirtha called Hiranyabindu on the Kalanjara hills; and that best of mountains called Agastya, beautiful and sacred. There is Mahendra, the mountain sacred to Rama of Bhrigu’s line, where the Grandsire performed sacrifices long ago, where the sacred Bhagirathi enters a lake, and where the merit-giving river Brahmasara flows, its banks inhabited by people whose sins have been washed away and whose very sight produces merit. There too is Kedara, the excellent hermitage of the great Matanga, sacred and famous over the world, and the mountain Kundoda, delightful and rich in fruit and roots and water, where Nala, the king of the Nishadhas, quenched his thirst and rested a while. There is the delightful Devavana, graced by ascetics, and the rivers Bahuda and Nanda on the mountain’s crest. With that, Dhaumya said, he had described the tirthas of the east, and he asked the king to hear now of the other three quarters.

Then he told of the south, in detail and as he knew it. There flows the sacred and auspicious Godavari, full of water, rich in groves, frequented by ascetics, and the rivers Venna and Bhimarathi, both of which destroy sin and fear, alive with birds and deer and graced with the dwellings of ascetics. There is the Payoshni, the tirtha of the royal ascetic Nriga, delightful and full of water and visited by Brahmins, where the great Markandeya sang in verse the praises of Nriga’s line. Dhaumya recalled what happened while Nriga was sacrificing at the excellent tirtha called Varaha on that river: Indra grew intoxicated on the soma he drank, and the Brahmins on the gifts they received. The water of the Payoshni, whether carried in a vessel, or flowing along the ground, or borne on the wind, can cleanse a man of whatever sins he commits until the day of his death. There stands an image of Mahadeva, pure, higher than heaven itself, made and bestowed by the trident-bearing god, and a mortal who sees it goes to the region of Shiva. Put the Ganga and the other rivers with all their water on one scale, Dhaumya said, and the Payoshni on the other, and in his opinion the Payoshni would outweigh all the tirthas together. Then, on the mountain Varunasrotasa, the sacred wood of Mathara, rich in fruit and roots, with a sacrificial stake in it; north of the Praveni, around the hermitage of Kanva, many wooded retreats of ascetics; at Surparaka the two sacrificial platforms of the great Jamadagni, called Pashana and Punashchandra; the tirtha of Ashoka, thick with the retreats of ascetics; in the country of the Pandyas the tirthas of Agastya and Varuna, and among the Pandyas the tirtha called Kumari. Then the Tamraparni, where the gods underwent austerities in their longing for liberation, and the lake of Gokarna, famed in the three worlds, cool and holy and rich in merit, very hard for men of impure soul to reach; near it the sacred hermitage of Agastya’s disciple, the mountain Devasabha, thick with trees and grass and fruit and roots; and the Vaidurya mountain, delightful and full of gems, where Agastya has a hermitage rich in fruit and roots and water. Then the Surashtra country, where the Brahmins say that Chamasodbheda lies on the coast, and Prabhasa, the tirtha much regarded by the gods, and Pindaraka, frequented by ascetics and rich in merit, and the mighty hill Ujjayanta, which brings speedy success, about which the celestial seer Narada recited an ancient verse: by austerity on that sacred hill of Surashtra, alive with birds and animals, a man wins honor in heaven. And there is Dvaravati, rich in merit, where the slayer of Madhu lives, the Ancient One in bodily form, eternal virtue itself. Brahmins versed in the Vedas and those who know the philosophy of the soul say that the glorious Krishna is eternal virtue, that Govinda is the purest of the pure, the most righteous of the righteous, the most auspicious of the auspicious; in all three worlds the lotus-eyed one is the God of gods and eternal, the pure soul and the active principle of life, the supreme Brahman and the lord of all; and Hari of inconceivable soul lives there.

Then the west. In the country of the Anartas flows the sacred Narmada, westward, graced by priyangu and mango trees and garlanded with thickets of cane. Every tirtha and sacred spot, every river and wood and great mountain in the three worlds, and all the gods with the Grandsire, with the siddhas, the seers, and the charanas, come to bathe in the Narmada’s holy water. There, as Dhaumya had heard, once stood the sacred hermitage of the sage Vishrava, and there Kubera, the lord of treasures, who has men for his vehicles, was born. There rises the sacred and auspicious peak of Vaidurya, its trees always green and always in fruit and flower, with a holy tank on its summit, full of open lotuses, where the gods and gandharvas come; many wonders can be seen on that mountain, which is like heaven itself and is visited by the celestial seers. There flows the sacred river Vishvamitra, named for the royal sage, rich in holy tirthas, on whose banks Yayati, the son of Nahusha, fell from heaven among the virtuous and won back the eternal worlds of the righteous. There are the famous lake called Punya, the mountain Mainaka, the mountain Asita, rich in fruit and roots, the sacred hermitage of Kakshasena, and the hermitage of Chyavana, famous in every country, where men attain ascetic success without severe austerities. There is the region of Jambumarga, full of birds and deer, the retreat of ascetics with their souls under control; then the most sacred Ketumala, and Medhya, always graced with ascetics, and Gangadvara, and the famous woods of Saindhava, sacred and inhabited by the twice-born. And there is the celebrated tank of the Grandsire called Pushkara, the favorite home of the Vaikhanasas, the siddhas, and the seers, of which the creator himself, wishing it protected, sang this verse: if a man of pure soul so much as imagines a pilgrimage to the Pushkaras, he is purged of all his sins and rejoices in heaven.

Then the north, and Dhaumya asked the king to listen with attention, because the hearing alone puts a mind in a reverent frame that leads to much good. In that region flows the most sacred Sarasvati, thick with tirthas and with banks easy to descend, and the Yamuna, impetuous and seagoing. There is the tirtha called Plakshavatarana, rich in merit and prosperity, where the twice-born bathed after they had completed the Sarasvata sacrifice. There is the famous celestial tirtha of Agnishiras, rich in merit, where King Sahadeva performed a sacrifice on ground he measured out with a throw of the shamya stick, for which Indra praised him in verses the Brahmins still recite: on the Yamuna, Sahadeva worshiped the sacrificial fire and gave gifts to the Brahmins by the hundred thousand. There the illustrious emperor Bharata performed thirty-five horse sacrifices. There is the famous hermitage of Sarabhanga, who in the old days fulfilled every wish of the twice-born, and the Sarasvati, always worshiped by the gods, where the Valakhilyas once sacrificed, and the famous river Drishadvati, rich in merit. Then Nyagrodhakhya and Panchalya, Punyaka and Dalbhyaghosha and Dalbhya, the hermitage of the illustrious Anandayasas, of excellent vows and great energy, famed in the three worlds, where the great Etavarna and Avavarana, learned in the Vedas and expert in their rites, performed meritorious sacrifices. There is Vishakhayupa, where in the old days the gods came with Varuna and Indra and practiced austerities, which is why it is so sacred, and Palashaka, where the great and blessed seer Jamadagni sacrificed, and all the principal rivers, in their bodily forms, brought their water and stood around that best of sages, while Vibhavasu, the fire itself, seeing his initiation, sang a verse: the rivers, coming to the illustrious Jamadagni as he sacrificed to the gods, gratified the Brahmins with offerings of honey. Then the place where the Ganga rushes past, cleaving the foremost of mountains, frequented by gandharvas and yakshas and rakshasas and apsaras, and inhabited by hunters and kinnaras, which is called Gangadvara, and which Sanatkumara counts sacred, together with the tirtha of Kanakhala beside it. There is the mountain named Puru, where the great seers go, where Pururavas was born and Bhrigu practiced austerities, so that the hermitage became known as the great peak of Bhrigutunga. And near that peak lies the sacred and spacious Badari, the hermitage famed in the three worlds of him who is the present, the past, and the future, who is called Narayana and the lord Vishnu, eternal and the best of male beings. Near Badari the cold current of the Ganga once ran warm, and its banks were spread with golden sand; there the gods and the seers of great fortune approach the divine lord Narayana and worship him always. The whole universe with all its tirthas and holy places is there, Dhaumya said, where the divine and eternal Narayana dwells, the supreme soul, because he is merit, he is the supreme Brahman, he is the tirtha and the hermitage, he is the first and the foremost of gods and the great lord of all creatures, the eternal, the great creator, the highest state of blessedness; the learned who know him attain great happiness, and the celestial seers, the siddhas, and all the seers are where the slayer of Madhu is, that primeval deity and mighty yogin. “Let no doubt enter your heart that that place is the foremost of all holy places,” Dhaumya said. “These are the tirthas and sacred places of the earth as I have recited them, all of them visited by the Vasus, the Sadhyas, the Adityas, the Maruts, the Ashvins, and the great seers who resemble the gods. By journeying to them with the Brahmins and ascetics who are with you, and with your blessed brothers, you will be freed of your anxiety.”

The gist: Dhaumya lays out the tirthas of all four quarters: in the east Naimisha, Gaya, and Prayaga; in the south the Godavari, the Payoshni, and Dwarka; in the west the Narmada and Pushkara; in the north the Sarasvati, Gangadvara, and Badari. His account is the brief, direction-by-direction companion to Pulastya’s long roll, and it turns into the itinerary of the journey the Pandavas actually make.

Lomasha’s arrival and news of Arjuna from heaven

Dhaumya was still speaking when the seer Lomasha arrived, a man of great energy whose name Narada had already spoken. Yudhishthira, the eldest of Pandu’s sons, sat around that most righteous man with his followers and the Brahmins, the way the gods in heaven sit around Shakra. He received him with the proper honors, and then he asked the reason for his coming and the purpose of his wanderings.

The seer was pleased with the question, and his answer, given in sweet words, delighted the Pandavas. “I travel at will through every region,” he said, “and I came to the abode of Shakra and saw the lord of the gods. There I saw your heroic brother, the one who draws the bow with his left hand, seated on the same seat as Shakra. Seeing Partha on that seat astonished me. Then the lord of the gods said to me, ‘Go to the sons of Pandu.’ So at the request of Indra, and of your great-souled brother as well, I came here quickly, wanting to see you and your younger brothers.”

“I have news that will please you beyond measure, king,” Lomasha said. “Hear it with Krishna and the seers who are with you. Partha has obtained from Rudra the incomparable weapon for which you sent him to heaven. That fierce weapon called Brahmashira, which came into being after the nectar and which Rudra himself won by austerity, Arjuna now holds, together with the mantras for loosing it and for calling it back, and the rites of expiation and revival that belong to it.”

“And there is more, Yudhishthira,” he went on. “Arjuna of immeasurable prowess has also obtained thunderbolts, staffs, and other celestial weapons from Yama, from Kubera, from Varuna, and from Indra. He has learned music, voice and instrument alike, and dancing, and the correct chanting of the Sama Veda, from the son of Vishvavasu. Having won his weapons and mastered the science of the gandharvas, your third brother Vibhatsu lives happily in heaven.”

“Now listen, Yudhishthira, to the message of the foremost of the gods,” Lomasha said. “This is what he commanded me to say.”

“You will be going down to the world of men, best of Brahmins,” Indra had said, “so carry these words of mine to Yudhishthira. Your brother Arjuna will soon come back to you, having won his weapons and accomplished for the gods a great deed that the gods themselves cannot accomplish. Until then, devote yourself to austerity with your brothers. There is nothing higher than austerity, and it is by austerity that a man achieves great results.”

“I know very well that Karna has great ardor and energy and strength, and a prowess that nothing can baffle,” Indra had said too. “I know that in fierce combat he has no rival, that he is a mighty bowman, a hero deft with terrible weapons and cased in the best of mail. I know that that exalted son of Aditya resembles the son of Maheshvara himself. And I know the natural prowess of broad-shouldered Arjuna. In battle Karna is not the equal of a sixteenth part of Pritha’s son. As for the fear of Karna that sits in your heart, I will dispel it myself once Savyasachi has left heaven. And as for your intention to set out on a pilgrimage to the tirthas, the great seer Lomasha will speak to you of it, and whatever that seer tells you about the merit of austerity and of the tirthas, receive it with respect.”

A key to reading this (a concept): Brahmashira is the name Lomasha gives the supreme weapon that Rudra granted Arjuna, with the mantras to loose it, to withdraw it, and to revive what it strikes. It is the same gift told earlier in this chapter, when Shiva came down as the hunter and the Pashupata passed from his hands to Arjuna’s; here its fruit is reported back to the brothers by a seer who has seen Arjuna on Indra’s throne. Arjuna has also gathered thunderbolts, staffs, and other weapons from the four Lokapalas, the guardians of the quarters, Yama, Kubera, Varuna, and Indra, and in heaven he has learned the gandharvas’ arts of music and dance.

Arjuna’s message and Yudhishthira’s resolve

“Now hear what Dhananjaya himself said, Yudhishthira,” Lomasha went on.

“Set my brother Yudhishthira to that practice of virtue which leads to prosperity,” Arjuna had said. “You are rich in austerity. You know the highest morality, every kind of austerity, the eternal duties of kings blessed with fortune, and the high and hallowing merit that men win from the tirthas. Persuade the sons of Pandu to win that merit. Persuade the king with your whole soul to visit the tirthas and give away cattle. Let him see all of them under your protection. Guard him from the rakshasas, and watch over him in the impassable places and on the rugged breasts of the mountains. As Dadhicha protected Indra and Angiras protected the sun, so protect the sons of Kunti from the rakshasas, best of the twice-born.”

“Along the way there are many rakshasas as huge as mountain cliffs,” Arjuna had said, “but under your protection they will never come near the sons of Kunti.”

“Obedient to Indra’s words and at Arjuna’s request, I will wander with you and keep you from danger,” Lomasha said. “I have visited the tirthas twice before; with you I will go a third time. Manu and the other royal seers of meritorious deeds made this journey, and the journey itself can dispel every fear. The crooked-minded do not bathe in the tirthas, nor do those without command of their souls, nor the illiterate and perverse. You are ever of a virtuous disposition, versed in morality and firm in your promises, and you will surely be able to free yourself from the world. You are the equal of King Bhagiratha, son of Pandu, or of Gaya, or of Yayati, or of any king like them.”

“Brahmin, I am so overwhelmed with delight that I cannot find words to answer you,” Yudhishthira said. “Who could be more fortunate than a man the lord of the gods himself remembers? Who could be more fortunate than a man who has your company, whose brother is Dhananjaya, and whom Vasava himself keeps in mind? As for the journey to the tirthas, my mind was already made up when Dhaumya spoke. At whatever hour you are pleased to appoint, Brahmin, I will set out. That is my firm resolve.”

The king had made up his mind to go, and Lomasha gave him one piece of practical advice. “Travel light in your retinue, great king, and you will go more easily.”

Yudhishthira understood him, and he spoke to the whole company. “Let those mendicants and Brahmins and yogis who cannot bear hunger and thirst, the fatigue of the road and the labor of it, and the severity of winter, stay behind. Let those Brahmins stay who live on sweetmeats, and those who want cooked food and things to suck and drink, and meat, and those who depend on cooks. And let the citizens who have followed me out of loyalty, and whom I have kept on proper stipends until now, go to King Dhritarashtra. He will give them their allowances in due time. If that king refuses them a proper allowance, the king of the Panchalas will give it, for our satisfaction and welfare.”

So the citizens and the principal Brahmins and the wandering ascetics set out for Hastinapura, weighed down with grief at the parting. Out of affection for the righteous Yudhishthira, Dhritarashtra, the royal son of Ambika, received them properly and satisfied them with the allowances they were due. And the royal son of Kunti, with only a small number of Brahmins left, stayed three nights more at Kamyaka, cheered by Lomasha.

The brahmanas’ plea and the start of the pilgrimage

The Brahmins who had been living with him in the woods saw the son of Kunti about to set out, and they came to him. “King, you are leaving on your journey to the sacred tirthas with your brothers and the illustrious seer Lomasha,” they said. “Son of Pandu, take us with you. Without you we could never visit them at any time. They are surrounded by dangers and hard to reach, and they are infested with beasts of prey; those tirthas cannot be reached by people traveling in small parties. Your brothers are the foremost of all wielders of the bow, and they are always brave. Protected by your heroic selves we too could go there. Let us win the blessed fruit of the tirthas through your grace, king; let us be cleansed of all our sins by visiting them and purified by bathing in them under the protection of your strength. Bathing in those tirthas you yourself will win, without doubt, the regions hard to attain that only Kartavirya and Ashtaka, the royal sage Lomapada, and the heroic emperor Bharata ever earned. In your company we want to see Prabhasa and the other tirthas, Mahendra and the other hills, the Ganga and the other rivers, and the plaksha and the other giant trees.”

“If you have any regard for the Brahmins, king, do what we ask, and prosperity will surely come to you from it,” the Brahmins said. “The tirthas are infested with rakshasas who constantly obstruct austerity, and you should protect us from them. Guarded by Lomasha, and taking us with you, go to all the tirthas that Dhaumya and the wise Narada have spoken of, and all those the celestial seer Lomasha, rich in austerity, has named, and be cleansed by this of all your sins.”

They had asked with respect, and the king, that bull among the sons of Pandu, standing among his heroic brothers with Bhima at their head, answered all those ascetics with tears of joy in his eyes. “Let it be so.” Then, with the permission of Lomasha and of his priest Dhaumya, that foremost of Pandu’s sons, his soul under full control, resolved to set out with his brothers and with Drupada’s daughter of the faultless features.

At that very moment the blessed Vyasa came to Kamyaka to see the son of Pandu, and with him Parvata and Narada, all three of high intelligence. Yudhishthira saw them and worshiped them with the proper rites, and the blessed ones, so honored, spoke to him. “Yudhishthira, Bhima, and you two, Nakula and Sahadeva, banish every evil thought from your minds. Purify your hearts, and then set out for the tirthas. The Brahmins have said that the rules observed for the body are called earthly vows, while the effort to purify the heart, so that it is free of evil thoughts, is called a spiritual vow. King, a mind free of every evil thought is the highest purity. So purify yourselves, hold only friendly feeling toward all, and see the tirthas. Keep the earthly vows with your bodies and cleanse your minds with the spiritual vows, and you will obtain the fruit of pilgrimage exactly as it has been recited.”

Saying “So be it,” the Pandavas with Krishna had those celestial and human seers perform the customary propitiatory rites. Then the heroes worshiped the feet of Lomasha and Dvaipayana, of Narada and the celestial seer Parvata, and set out with Dhaumya and the ascetics who had lived with them in the woods, on the day after the full moon of the month of Agrahayana, when the constellation Pushya was in the ascendant. They were dressed in bark and hides, with matted locks on their heads, and under the ascetic’s dress they were cased in impenetrable mail and armed with swords. And, as Vaishampayana told Janamejaya, the heroic sons of Pandu carried quivers and arrows and scimitars and other weapons, and with Indrasena and their other attendants, fifteen chariots, a number of cooks, and servants of other kinds, they set out with their faces turned to the east.

The gist: Before the road begins, Vyasa, Narada, and Parvata come and give the Pandavas the inner rule of pilgrimage: above the outer vow, the discipline of the body, stands the spiritual vow, a mind cleansed of ill will and holding friendliness toward every creature. Dressed in bark and deerskin and armored beneath it, the Pandavas set out on the day after the full moon of Agrahayana, under the star Pushya, facing east. Ascetic’s dress over warrior’s mail is the exact picture of what they are in these years, forest dwellers who are still the fighters the coming war will need.

Yudhishthira’s doubt: why do the wicked prosper

The question Yudhishthira put to Lomasha on the road came from the sore place in him. “Best of celestial seers, I do not think I am without merit. Yet I am afflicted with such sorrow that there has never been a king like me. My enemies, as I see it, have no good qualities and no morality either. Why then, Lomasha, do they prosper in this world?”

“Never grieve, king, that sinful men often prosper by the very sins they commit,” Lomasha said. “A man may be seen to prosper by his sins, to gain by them, and to conquer his enemies with them. And then destruction overtakes him, down to the roots. I have seen many daityas and danavas prosper by sin, and I have seen destruction overtake them too. I saw all of it in the righteous age of old.”

The gods practiced virtue in that age, Lomasha said, and the asuras abandoned it. The gods went to the tirthas; the asuras did not go. In the beginning, the sinful asuras were seized by pride, and the fall came in a chain. Pride begot vanity, and vanity begot wrath. From wrath came every kind of evil inclination, and from those came shamelessness. Once they were shameless, good conduct disappeared from among them, and because they had lost their virtuous inclinations, their good conduct, and their holy vows, forgiveness and prosperity and morality forsook them in no time.

Then prosperity sought out the gods, and adversity sought out the asuras. When the daityas and danavas, robbed of sense by pride, were in the grip of adversity, Kali sought to possess them too. Overwhelmed with pride, without rites and without sacrifices, empty of reason and feeling, their hearts full of vanity, they were soon destroyed, and covered with infamy the daityas were wiped out. The gods, whose practices were virtuous, went to the seas, the rivers, the lakes, and the holy places, cleansed themselves of every sin by austerity and sacrifice and gifts and blessings, and won prosperity and all that follows from it. Because the gods always sacrificed and did holy deeds, gave up every evil practice, and visited the tirthas, great good fortune came to them.

“Take this as your guide, king, and bathe in the tirthas with your brothers, and you will win prosperity again,” Lomasha said. “This is the eternal road. King Nriga and Shibi, Aushinara and Bhagiratha, Vasumanas and Gaya, Puru and Pururavas, won fame and sanctity and merit and wealth by austerity, by visiting the tirthas, by touching the sacred waters, and by seeing the great ascetics, and so will you win a prosperity that is great. Ikshvaku with his sons and friends and followers, Muchukunda and Mandhatri and King Marutta, the gods through the power of austerity, and the celestial seers too, all won fame this way, and so will you. As for the sons of Dhritarashtra, enslaved by sinfulness and ignorance, they will soon be wiped out like the daityas. There is no doubt of it.”

A key to reading this (a concept): Lomasha’s answer opens one of the central moral principles of the Mahabharata: the prosperity of the sinful does not last. He traces a chain of the mind, from pride to vanity to wrath to shamelessness to ruin, that brought down the daityas. The assurance he gives Yudhishthira rests on an argument, and the argument is that moral corruption carries the seeds of its own destruction inside it.

The journey begins: from Naimisha to Prayaga and Gaya

The heroic sons of Pandu went from place to place with their followers until they reached Naimisha. At the Gomati the Pandavas bathed in the sacred tirtha of that river, performed their rites, and gave away cattle and wealth. Offering water again and again to the gods, the ancestors, and the Brahmins, they came to the tirthas called Kanya, Ashva, and Go, stayed as they had been directed at the Kalakoti and Vishaprastha hills, and then reached the Bahuda and bathed in that river.

From there the Kauravas went to the sacrificial region of the gods known as Prayaga, bathed at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna, and stayed to practice austerities of great merit. The Pandavas, true to their promises, were cleansed of every sin by that bath. Then, with the Brahmins, they went on to the tirtha called Vedi, sacred to the creator and revered by ascetics, and stayed there a while, satisfying the Brahmins with the fruit and roots of the wilderness and with clarified butter, while the heroes took up austerities of great merit again.

Then they came to Mahidhara, the country hallowed by the virtuous royal sage Gaya of unrivaled splendor. In that region stands the hill called Gayashira, and the delightful river called Mahanadi, its fine banks graced with clumps of cane. On the holy peaks of that celestial hill lies the sacred tirtha called Brahmasara, much revered by ascetics. On the shore of that lake the eternal god of justice himself once lived, and it was there that the great seer Agastya came to see him. Every river takes its rise from that lake, and Mahadeva, who bears the bow Pinaka, is present there for all time.

Arriving there, the heroic sons of Pandu took up the vow called the Chaturmasya, with all the rites and ordinances of the great sacrifice known as the Rishiyajna. There stands the mighty tree called the eternal banyan, and any sacrifice performed beneath it bears a merit that never fades. On that sacrificial ground of the gods, where the merit does not fade, the Pandavas began their fast with concentrated souls. Brahmins rich in austerity came to them by the hundred, and all of them performed the Chaturmasya sacrifice by the rites the seers laid down.

In that tirtha the Brahmins who made up the court of the illustrious sons of Pandu, old in knowledge and ascetic merit and fully versed in the Vedas, talked in their presence on many sacred subjects. And it was there that Shamatha, learned and vow-keeping and holy, who lived the life of a celibate, told them of Gaya, the son of Amurtaraya.

A key to reading this (a vow): The Chaturmasya is the vow of four months, a season of fasting and rite that the seers kept. The Pandavas halt their journey to keep it at Brahmasara in Gaya, beneath the eternal banyan, where food offered to the ancestors is held never to run out. The pilgrimage is an ordered discipline of austerity and rite, and the brothers submit to it fully, with hundreds of Brahmins keeping the same fast beside them.

The great sacrifice of the royal sage Gaya

“Gaya, the son of Amurtaraya, was one of the foremost of royal sages,” Shamatha said. “Listen, and I will tell his meritorious deeds. It was here that Gaya performed many sacrifices, known for the enormous quantities of food they distributed and the lavish gifts they gave to the Brahmins. Those sacrifices had mountains of cooked rice by the hundred and the thousand, lakes of clarified butter and rivers of curds by the hundred, and streams of richly dressed curries by the thousand. Day after day these were made ready and shared out among everyone who came, and over and above this the Brahmins and others received food that was clean and pure.”

“At the close of every sacrifice, when the gifts were dedicated to the Brahmins, the chanting of the Vedas reached the heavens,” Shamatha went on. “So loud was the sound of the Vedic mantras that nothing else could be heard there. Those sacred sounds filled the earth, the points of the horizon, the sky, and heaven itself. These were the wonders people noticed on those occasions. Gratified by the excellent food and drink the illustrious Gaya provided, people went about singing verses: ‘At Gaya’s great sacrifice, is there any creature today that still wants to eat? Twenty-five mountains of food remain there after everyone has been fed.’”

“‘What the royal sage Gaya of immense splendor has achieved in his sacrifice was never achieved by men before, and never will be,’ they sang. ‘The gods are so surfeited with Gaya’s clarified butter that they cannot take anything anyone else offers. As no one can count the grains of sand on the earth, or the stars in the sky, or the drops the rain clouds shower, so no one can count the gifts of Gaya’s sacrifice.’” King Gaya performed sacrifices of this kind many times, Shamatha told them, here beside this very Brahmasara.

The gist: The glory of the royal sage Gaya’s sacrifice is caught in figures of enormous excess: mountains of rice, lakes of butter, rivers of curds, twenty-five mountains of food left over after everyone has eaten, and gods so full they can accept no one else’s offering. Shamatha’s tale gives the Pandavas the history of the ground they are fasting on, the tirtha where the rite for the ancestors is held to bear fruit without end.

Agastya, Ilvala and Vatapi, and the beginning of Lopamudra’s story

After this the royal son of Kunti, who had always been known for his lavish gifts to the Brahmins, went on to the hermitage of Agastya and took up residence at Durjaya. And there Yudhishthira, that foremost of speakers, put a question to Lomasha. “Why did Agastya kill Vatapi here? How great was the prowess of that man-eating daitya, and what stirred the illustrious Agastya’s anger against that asura?”

“In the old days, in the city called Manimati, there lived a daitya named Ilvala, whose younger brother was Vatapi,” Lomasha said. One day that son of Diti went to a Brahmin rich in ascetic merit with a request. “Holy one, grant me a son equal to Indra.” The Brahmin would not grant the asura a son like Indra, and Ilvala’s anger flared against him, and from that day the asura Ilvala became a killer of Brahmins.

He had the power of illusion, and in his anger he turned it into a trap. He would transform his brother into a ram, and Vatapi, who could take any shape at will, would become a ram at once. The ram’s flesh was properly dressed and served to Brahmins as food, and after they had eaten it, they died, because whoever Ilvala summoned with his voice came back to him, even from the abode of Yama, alive again in a body, and showed himself. So Ilvala would turn Vatapi into a ram, cook his flesh, feed it to the Brahmins, and then call his brother’s name. And the mighty asura Vatapi, that enemy of the Brahmins, strong and rich in illusion, would hear Ilvala’s loud summons, rip open the flanks of the man who had eaten him, and come out laughing. In this way the wicked-hearted daitya fed Brahmins, again and again, and took their lives.

Meanwhile the illustrious Agastya came upon his dead ancestors hanging head downward in a pit. “What is the matter with you?” he asked the figures suspended there.

“It is for offspring,” those utterers of Brahman answered, and they told him who they were. “We are your ancestors. It is for want of offspring that we hang in this pit. Agastya, if you can beget us a good son, we will be saved from this hell, and you too will win the blessed state of those who have children.”

“Ancestors, I will fulfill your desire,” answered Agastya, who was rich in energy and observant of truth and morality. “Let this anxiety of yours be dispelled.” Then the illustrious seer began to think about carrying on his line, and he found no wife worthy of him, no woman on whom he himself could take birth again in the form of a son. So he took from every creature the part of it that was thought most beautiful, and from those parts he made an excellent woman. The sage, rich in ascetic merit, gave that girl he had made for himself to the king of Vidarbha, who was then practicing austerities to obtain a child.

That blessed girl of the sweet face took birth in the royal line of Vidarbha, and beautiful as a flash of lightning, her limbs grew day by day. As soon as the ruler of Vidarbha saw her born he told the Brahmins with joy, and the Brahmins blessed the girl and gave her the name Lopamudra. She grew quickly in her great beauty, like a lotus in the middle of a lake or the bright flame of a fire. When she came of age, a hundred virgins decked in ornaments and a hundred maids waited on her in obedience, and among them she shone the way Rohini shines in the sky among the lesser stars. She had good conduct and excellent manners, and though she had come of age, no one dared ask for her hand, out of fear of her father, the king of Vidarbha. Lopamudra, devoted to truth, surpassing the apsaras in beauty, gratified her father and her kin by her conduct, and her father, seeing his daughter grown, began to turn one question over in his mind: to whom should he give her?

A sub-tale: Ilvala’s use of illusion is cruel in a pointed way. He turns his brother into a ram, cooks him, feeds him to Brahmins as a host feeds a guest, and then calls him back to life so that Vatapi tears his way out of the guest’s body. The trick makes a mockery of the law of hospitality and of the sacredness of food itself, and it is this history that makes Agastya’s later digestion of Vatapi an act of justice.

Lopamudra’s marriage and a life shared in austerity

When Agastya judged that the girl was ready for the duties of a household, he went to the ruler of Vidarbha. “I ask you, king, to bestow your daughter Lopamudra on me.”

At the sage’s words the king of Vidarbha fainted. He had no wish to give the sage his daughter, and he did not dare refuse him. He went to his queen. “This seer has great energy,” he said. “If he is angered he may burn me up with the fire of his curse. Tell me, sweet-faced one, what you wish.” The queen heard the king’s words and said nothing at all.

Lopamudra saw her father and mother stricken with grief, and at the right moment she went to them. “King, you should not grieve on my account,” she said. “Give me to Agastya, and by giving me away, father, save yourself.” At his daughter’s words the king gave Lopamudra to the illustrious Agastya with the proper rites.

Having obtained her as his wife, Agastya spoke to Lopamudra. “Cast away these costly robes and ornaments.” At her lord’s words the large-eyed girl, whose thighs tapered like the stem of the plantain, cast away her handsome and costly robes of fine weave, dressed herself in rags and bark and deerskin, and became her husband’s equal in vows and in acts. Then that best of seers went to Gangadvara and began the severest austerities with his helpful wife beside him. Lopamudra served her lord gladly, out of the deep respect she bore him, and the exalted Agastya, for his part, began to show great love for his wife.

A long time passed. One day the illustrious seer saw Lopamudra, blazing with the splendor of her austerity, coming up from her bath in her season. Pleased with the girl for her service, her purity, and her self-control, and with her grace and her beauty, he called her to him for the purpose of children. The girl joined her hands and answered the seer bashfully, and lovingly. “A husband weds a wife for offspring, there is no doubt of that. But you should show me the love that I have for you, seer. You should come to me on a bed like the one I had in my father’s palace. I want you decked in garlands of flowers and other ornaments, and I want to come to you adorned in the celestial ornaments that I love. Otherwise I cannot come to you, dressed in these rags dyed red. And on such an occasion, twice-born seer, it is no sin to wear ornaments.”

“Blessed girl, slender-waisted one, I have no wealth like your father’s,” Agastya answered when he had heard his wife.

“You are rich in austerity,” she answered. “By your ascetic power you could bring here, in a moment, everything that exists in the world of men.”

“It is as you say,” Agastya said. “But that would waste my ascetic merit. Ask me for something that will not loosen it.”

“Rich in austerity as you are, my season will not last long,” Lopamudra said then. “And I do not want to come to you any other way, nor to diminish your merit in any way. But you should do as I desire, without injury to your virtue.”

“If that is the resolve you have settled in your heart, blessed girl, then I will go out in search of wealth,” Agastya said. “Stay here meanwhile, as it pleases you.”

A key to reading this (moral balance): The exchange between Lopamudra and Agastya runs on good sense from both sides. The wife accepts that a marriage is for children, and she holds to her own dignity and her own wish as well: the royal bed and the ornaments she was raised with. The husband guards the merit his austerity has earned. Neither forces the other, and the way through is found when Agastya agrees to go and look for the wealth himself. It is a dialogue of restraint and mutual respect between two people of equal will.

Agastya’s search for wealth and the digesting of Vatapi at Ilvala’s house

Agastya went first to King Shrutarvan, who was counted richer than other kings, to beg for wealth. The king heard that the seer born of a pot had arrived on the frontier of his kingdom, went out with his ministers, and received the holy man with respect. He offered him the arghya, the guest’s welcome of water, and then, humbly and with folded hands, asked the reason for the seer’s visit.

“Lord of the earth, know that I have come to you in want of wealth,” Agastya said. “Give me a portion according to your means, and without doing injury to others.”

The king laid out before the seer the state of his treasury, in which what he spent and what he took in were exactly equal, and he said, “Learned one, take from my possessions whatever wealth you please.” But the seer, who always saw both sides of a thing with an equal eye, looked at that balance of expenditure and income and understood that anything he took would be taken from someone, and that his act would end in injury to living creatures.

So Agastya took Shrutarvan with him and went to Vadhryashva. That king heard of their arrival on his frontier and received them with due form, offering the arghya and water to wash their feet, and with their permission asked the reason for their coming. “Lord of the earth, know that we have come to you in want of wealth,” Agastya said. “Give us what you can, without doing injury to others.” This king too laid out the exact balance of his expenditure and his income, and said, “Knowing this, take what you desire.” And the seer who saw both sides with an equal eye reached the same conclusion, and took nothing. Then Agastya and Shrutarvan, with King Vadhryashva, went to Trasadasyu, the son of Purukutsa, whose wealth was enormous. The great-souled Trasadasyu heard that they had reached the borders of his kingdom, went out, and received them well; that best of kings in Ikshvaku’s line worshiped all of them with due form and asked why they had come, and Agastya made the same request in the same words. Trasadasyu too showed them the equality of his income and his spending and told them to take what they desired, and the seer, seeing it, thought as he had thought twice before, and took nothing.

Then all those kings looked at one another and spoke to the seer together. “Brahmin, there is a danava named Ilvala who has more wealth than any person on earth. Let us all go to him today and beg wealth of him.” The suggestion seemed proper to the whole company, and they all went together to Ilvala.

When Ilvala learned that those kings had reached the confines of his domain with the great seer, he went out with his ministers and worshiped them in due form. That prince of asuras received them hospitably, and the meat he set before them, well dressed, was his brother Vatapi turned into a ram. The royal sages looked at the mighty asura Vatapi cooked for them in the shape of a ram and grew sad and cheerless, and nearly lost hold of themselves. But Agastya, the best of seers, spoke to those royal sages. “Do not give way to grief. I will eat up the great asura.”

The mighty seer sat down on an excellent seat, and Ilvala, the prince of asuras, began to serve the food, smiling as he did it. Agastya ate the whole of the meat that had been Vatapi. When the meal was over, Ilvala began to summon his brother. What answered him was a quantity of air alone, which came out of the illustrious seer’s stomach with a sound as loud as the roar of the clouds. Ilvala kept on calling. “Come out, Vatapi! Come out!”

Agastya, that best of sages, burst out laughing. “How can he come out? I have already digested that great asura.”

Ilvala saw that his brother had been digested, and he grew sad and cheerless. Then he joined his hands, and with his ministers beside him he addressed the seer and his companions. “What have you come here for, and what can I do for you?”

Agastya answered him with a smile. “We know you, asura, to have great power and enormous wealth. These kings are not very wealthy, and my own need of wealth is great. Give us what you can, without injuring others.”

Ilvala saluted the seer and set him a condition. “If you can say what it is that I mean to give, then I will give you wealth.”

“Great asura, you have resolved to give each of these kings ten thousand cows and as many gold coins,” Agastya said, “and to give me twice as much, together with a chariot of gold and a pair of horses as fleet as thought. If you inquire now, you will soon learn that your chariot is made of gold.” Ilvala made his inquiries, and learned that the chariot he had intended to give away was indeed a golden one. Then, with a heavy heart, the daitya gave away much wealth and that chariot, to which two horses called Virava and Surava were yoked.

Those horses carried the kings and Agastya and all that wealth to Agastya’s hermitage faster than an eyelid falls. The royal sages took Agastya’s leave and went home to their own cities. And Agastya, with that wealth, did everything his wife Lopamudra had desired.

The gist: Agastya’s even-eyed sight stops him from taking wealth from three kings in turn, since each spends exactly what he takes in and any gift would fall on their people. In the end he goes to Ilvala, the killer of Brahmins, walks into the Vatapi trap with open eyes, swallows and digests it, and then reads Ilvala’s secret intention out loud and takes the wealth and the golden chariot. Justice, the equal eye, and the power of austerity work here together.

The birth of Dridhasyu and the glory of Agastya’s hermitage

“You have accomplished all my wishes, illustrious one,” Lopamudra said. “Now beget on me a child of great energy.”

“Blessed and beautiful one, I am much gratified with your conduct,” Agastya answered. “Now listen to the choice I offer you about your offspring. Would you have a thousand sons, or a hundred sons each equal to ten, or ten sons each equal to a hundred, or a single son who could defeat a thousand?”

“Let me have one son equal to a thousand, rich in austerity as you are,” Lopamudra answered. “One good and learned son is better than many bad ones.”

Saying “So be it,” the pious sage knew his devout wife, who was his equal in conduct. When she had conceived he withdrew into the forest, and after he had gone the child grew in the womb for seven years. When the seventh year had run out, there came out of the womb the deeply learned Dridhasyu, blazing with his own splendor. That great Brahmin and illustrious ascetic, rich in energy, was born as the seer’s son as if he were already reciting the Vedas with the Upanishads and the Angas. Even as a child, full of energy, he carried loads of sacrificial fuel into his father’s hermitage, and so he came to be called Idhmavaha, the carrier of sacrificial wood. The sage saw his son possessed of such virtues and was greatly glad.

That is how Agastya begot an excellent son, Lomasha said, and by that son his ancestors won the regions they had desired. From that time this place has been known on earth as the hermitage of Agastya. This is the hermitage, graced with many beauties, of the Agastya who killed Vatapi of Prahlada’s line. And Lomasha pointed the Pandavas to the river. The sacred Bhagirathi, adored by gods and gandharvas, runs gently past like a pennon shaken by the breeze in the sky; over there she flows down over craggy crests, descending lower and lower, and lies along the hill slopes like a frightened she-snake. She issues from the matted locks of Mahadeva, she floods the southern country and does it good like a mother, and in the end she mingles with the ocean as if she were his favorite bride.

“Bathe as you please in this sacred river, sons of Pandu,” Lomasha said. “And see there, Yudhishthira, the tirtha of Bhrigu, famed through the three worlds and revered by the great seers. Bathing here, Rama of Bhrigu’s line regained the might that Dasharatha’s son had taken from him. Bathe here with your brothers and Krishna, and you will surely regain the energy that Duryodhana has taken from you, just as Rama regained his after Dasharatha’s son had taken it from him in their encounter.”

At Lomasha’s words Yudhishthira bathed there with his brothers and Krishna, and offered water to the gods and the ancestors. When he came out of that tirtha his body blazed with a brighter light, and no enemy could see a way to him any longer. Then the son of Pandu asked Lomasha for the story behind the place. “Illustrious one, why was Rama’s energy and might taken from him, and how did he regain it? I am asking you; tell me everything.”

Two Ramas: Parashurama of the line of Bhrigu and Rama the son of Dasharatha

“Listen, king, to the story of Rama the son of Dasharatha and of Rama of Bhrigu’s line, that man of intelligence,” Lomasha said.

For the destruction of Ravana, Vishnu took birth in his own body as the son of the illustrious Dasharatha. We saw that son of Dasharatha in Ayodhya after he was born. Then Rama of Bhrigu’s line, born to Renuka in the line of Richika, heard of Rama the son of Dasharatha and his spotless deeds, and curiosity drove him to Ayodhya. He took with him the celestial bow that had been so fatal to the Kshatriyas, meaning to test for himself the prowess of Dasharatha’s son.

Dasharatha heard that Rama of Bhrigu’s line had reached the borders of his domain, and he sent his own son Rama to receive the hero with respect. Rama of Bhrigu’s line watched Dasharatha’s son approach and stand before him with his weapons ready, and he addressed him with a smile. “King, if you can, string this bow with all your might. In my hands it was the instrument that destroyed the Kshatriya race.”

“Illustrious one, you should not insult me like this,” Dasharatha’s son answered. “Among the twice-born orders I am not lacking in the virtues of the Kshatriya, and the descendants of Ikshvaku in particular never boast of the prowess of their arms.”

“Enough of crafty speech, king,” Rama of Bhrigu’s line replied. “Take this bow.” At that, Rama the son of Dasharatha took from the hands of Rama of Bhrigu’s line, in anger, the celestial bow that had dealt death to the foremost of Kshatriyas. And the mighty hero strung it with a smile and without the least exertion, and its twang, loud as a crack of thunder, frightened every creature that heard it.

“There, I have strung this bow,” Rama the son of Dasharatha said to Rama of Bhrigu’s line. “What else shall I do for you, Brahmin?”

Then Rama, the son of Jamadagni, handed Dasharatha’s illustrious son a celestial arrow. “Set this on the bowstring, hero, and draw it to your ear.”

Dasharatha’s son blazed up in anger at that. “I have heard what you said, and I have even pardoned you,” he said. “You are full of vanity, son of Bhrigu’s line. Through the Grandsire’s grace you have obtained an energy greater than the Kshatriyas’, and that is why you insult me. See me now in my own form. I give you the sight.”

Then Rama of Bhrigu’s line saw, inside the body of Dasharatha’s son, the Adityas with the Vasus, the Rudras, the Sadhyas with the Maruts, the ancestors, Agni, the stars and the planets, the gandharvas, the rakshasas, the yakshas, the rivers and the tirthas, those eternal seers one with Brahman who are called the Valakhilyas, the celestial seers, the seas and the mountains, the Vedas with the Upanishads and the vashat calls, the sacrifices, the Sama chants in their living form, the science of weapons, and the clouds with their rain and lightning.

Then the illustrious Vishnu loosed that arrow. The earth filled with the sound of thunder, and burning meteors began to flash across the sky. Showers of dust and rain fell on the face of the earth, whirlwinds and frightful sounds convulsed everything, and the earth herself began to shake. The arrow shot from Rama’s hand stunned the other Rama with its energy and came back blazing into the hand that had loosed it. Bhargava, who had been robbed of his senses, regained consciousness and life, and bowed to Rama, that manifestation of Vishnu’s power. At Vishnu’s command he went to the mountains of Mahendra.

From then on the great ascetic lived there in terror and in shame. When a year had passed, the ancestors saw Rama living there drained of his energy, his pride quelled, sunk in affliction, and they spoke to him. “Son, when you approached Vishnu, your behavior toward him was not proper. He deserves worship and respect in the three worlds for all time. Go, son, to the sacred river called Vadhusara. Bathe in all the tirthas of that stream and you will regain your energy. In that river is the tirtha called Diptoda, where your grandsire Bhrigu practiced austerities of great merit in the age of the gods.”

Rama did what the ancestors told him, and at this tirtha he got back the energy he had lost. “That, my child, is what befell Rama of spotless deeds long ago,” Lomasha said, “after he had met Vishnu in the form of Dasharatha’s son.”

A key to reading this (two Ramas): The story holds two different Ramas. Parashurama of the line of Bhrigu is the Brahmin of Richika’s house, born to Renuka, the son of Jamadagni, who carries the axe and the bow and has already wiped out the Kshatriyas; Rama the son of Dasharatha is Vishnu born in Ayodhya to destroy Ravana. Parashurama’s pride breaks when he is shown the whole cosmos inside the other Rama’s body, and he can win back his energy only by bathing in the Vadhusara at his grandfather Bhrigu’s tirtha. Lomasha tells it so that Yudhishthira, bathing at this same tirtha of Bhrigu, may take back the splendor Duryodhana has stripped from him.

The Kalakeyas, Vritra, and the forging of the thunderbolt from Dadhichi’s bones

“Best of the twice-born, I want to hear more, and in detail, of the achievements of Agastya, that illustrious seer of great intelligence,” Yudhishthira said.

“Listen then, king, to the excellent, wonderful, and extraordinary history of Agastya, and to the prowess of that seer of immeasurable energy,” Lomasha said. “In the Krita age there were certain tribes of fierce danavas who could not be beaten in battle. They were known as the Kalakeyas, and their prowess was terrible. They put themselves under Vritra, armed themselves with weapons of every kind, and hunted the gods, with Indra at their head, in every direction.”

Then all the gods, resolved on the destruction of Vritra, went with Indra at their head to Brahma. Parameshthi saw them standing before him with folded hands and addressed them all. “Everything you seek is known to me, gods. I will tell you now the means by which you may kill Vritra. There is a great-souled seer of high renown named Dadhicha. Go to him all together and ask him for a boon. That seer of virtuous soul will grant it with a glad heart. Since you want victory, go to him together and say, ‘For the good of the three worlds, give us your bones.’ He will give up his body and give you his bones. From those bones make a fierce and powerful weapon, to be called the Vajra, the thunderbolt, six-sided and terrible in its roar, able to destroy even the mightiest of enemies. With that weapon the god of a hundred sacrifices will kill Vritra. I have told you everything. See that it is done quickly.”

With the Grandsire’s leave the gods came away, and with Narayana at their head they went to the hermitage of Dadhicha. It stood on the far bank of the river Sarasvati, under trees and creepers of every kind, and it hummed with bees as if they were reciting the Sama chants; the male cuckoo and the chakora sang in it. Buffaloes and boars and deer and yaks wandered there at their pleasure, with no fear of tigers, and elephants with the rut streaming down their split temples plunged into the river and sported with their mates, until the whole region rang with their trumpeting. Lions and tigers roared there too, and here and there one of those grim monarchs of the forest could be seen stretched out in a cave or a glen, gracing it with his presence. Such was the hermitage of Dadhicha that the gods entered, a place like heaven itself.

There they saw Dadhicha, like the sun himself in splendor, blazing in grace of person like the Grandsire. The gods saluted the seer’s feet, bowed to him, and asked for the boon as the Grandsire had told them to. Dadhicha, well pleased, answered those foremost of the gods. “I will do what is for your benefit, gods. I will give up this body of mine myself.” And that best of men, his soul under his own control, having said it, gave up his life on the spot.

The gods took the bones of the dead seer as they had been directed, and glad at heart they went to Tvashtri, the artificer of heaven, and told him the means of their victory. Tvashtri heard them with joy, and with great attention and care he built from those bones the fierce weapon called the Vajra. When it was made he spoke to Indra with delight. “With this foremost of weapons, exalted one, reduce that fierce enemy of the gods to ashes. And when the enemy is dead, rule the whole domain of heaven in happiness, chief of the gods, with those who follow you.” Purandara took the thunderbolt from his hand with joy and with the respect it deserved.

A sub-tale: Dadhichi’s gift of himself stands among the highest ideals of giving in the Mahabharata. Brahma names him as the one who will grant the boon, the gods ask for his bones, and the seer does not hesitate for a moment: he says he will give up his body himself, and he does it at once. From that gift Tvashtri forges the thunderbolt, and the whole war against Vritra turns on one ascetic’s willingness to die for the three worlds.

The slaying of Vritra and the Kalakeyas’ flight into the sea

Armed now with the Vajra, and backed by gods of great might, Indra advanced on Vritra, who at that time occupied the whole of the earth and the heavens. Around him on every side stood the huge-bodied Kalakeyas with their weapons raised, like gigantic mountains with towering peaks. The battle between the gods and the danavas lasted only a short while, and it was terrible in the extreme; it appalled the three worlds. Swords and scimitars rang as heroic hands raised them and warded them off in those fierce encounters, and severed heads rolled down out of the sky onto the earth like fruit of the palmyra palm dropping from their stalks.

The Kalakeyas, armed with iron-mounted bludgeons and cased in golden mail, ran at the gods like moving mountains on fire. The gods could not withstand the shock of that impetuous and proudly advancing host, and they broke and fled in fear. Purandara of the thousand eyes watched the gods run and Vritra grow bolder, and he sank into a deep dejection. Then the foremost of the gods himself, shaken by fear of the Kalakeyas, wasted no time and went for refuge to the exalted Narayana.

The eternal Vishnu saw Indra so depressed and raised his might by pouring a portion of his own energy into him. When the gods saw that Shakra was under Vishnu’s protection, each of them poured his own energy into him, and the spotless Brahmin seers poured theirs into the chief of the gods as well. Favored in this way by Vishnu and all the gods and the blessed seers, Shakra became mightier than he had ever been.

When Vritra learned that the chief of the gods had been filled with the might of others, he let out terrific roars, and at those roars the earth, the directions, the firmament, heaven, and the mountains all began to tremble. The chief of the gods heard that fierce, loud roar and was deeply shaken and full of fear, and wanting to kill the asura quickly, he hurled the mighty Vajra.

Struck by Indra’s thunderbolt, the great asura, decked in gold and garlands, fell headlong like the great mountain Mandara when Vishnu’s hands hurled it down long ago. And although the prince of daityas was dead, Shakra ran from the field in panic, looking for a lake to shelter in, convinced that the Vajra had never left his hand and that Vritra was still alive.

The gods and the great seers, meanwhile, were filled with joy, and all of them began cheerfully to chant Indra’s praise. Mustering together, the gods began to kill the danavas, who were dejected at the death of their leader, and the stricken danavas, panicked at the sight of the assembled celestial host, fled into the depths of the sea. Down in that fathomless deep, teeming with fish and crocodiles, the danavas gathered and began, in their pride, to conspire for the destruction of the three worlds.

Those among them who were wise in inference proposed courses of action, each according to his own judgment. In time the dreadful resolution those conspiring sons of Diti arrived at was this: they would begin by destroying everyone who possessed knowledge and ascetic virtue. All the worlds rest on austerity, they reasoned. “So lose no time in destroying austerity,” they said. “Destroy without delay everyone on earth who has ascetic virtue, who knows the duties and the ways of morality, who has the knowledge of Brahman, because when these are destroyed, the universe itself is destroyed.” Having settled on this plan for the ruin of the universe, all the danavas were highly pleased, and from then on they made the ocean, the abode of Varuna, with its billows as high as hills, the fort from which they made their sallies.

Using that receptacle of waters, Varuna’s home, as their base, the Kalakeyas began their work of destroying the universe. In the darkness of the night those furious daityas devoured the sages they found in the wooded retreats and the holy places. In the hermitage of Vasishtha the wicked wretches devoured a hundred and eighty Brahmins, and nine other ascetics besides. Going on to the hermitage of Chyavana, which was full of celibate students, they devoured a hundred Brahmins who lived on fruit and roots alone. In the retreat of Bharadvaja they killed a full score of Brahmins of subdued soul who kept the vow of chastity and lived on air and water. All of this they did in the darkness of the night, and by day they went back down into the depths of the sea. Morning after morning people found the bodies of sages emaciated by their frugal diet lying on the ground, many of them without flesh or blood, without marrow or entrails, the limbs torn from one another, and here and there heaps of bones like masses of conch shells.

A key to reading this (numbers, a modern equivalent): The story is exact in its counting: a thunderbolt of six sides; a hundred and eighty Brahmins and nine other ascetics devoured at Vasishtha’s hermitage; a hundred at Chyavana’s; a score at Bharadvaja’s. The precision is the point. The Kalakeyas’ violence is ordered and countable, a campaign against austerity itself, and the tally is what the gods will carry to Vishnu when they ask for help.

The gist: The thunderbolt in Indra’s hand brings Vritra down, and then Indra runs, sure that the weapon is still in his fist and the enemy still alive, a hero’s own moment of fear that the story leaves in plain sight. Leaderless, the Kalakeyas hide in the sea and plot to strike at the root of austerity and knowledge, coming out by night to devour Brahmins and ascetics in their hermitages. The ground is laid for Agastya’s next feat, the drinking of the sea, which the Pandavas will hear from Lomasha next.

Source: the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Vana Parva, Arjunabhigamana, Kairata, Indralokabhigamana, and Tirtha-yatra sub-parvas, Sections 36 to 51 and 80 to 102. The Sanskrit e-text, the Gita Press Hindi edition, and Kisari Mohan Ganguli’s complete English translation were used to verify names, sequence, and principal events. Where the recensions differ, this English retelling follows Ganguli, and the Hindi edition follows Gita Press.