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A dry well on the Sarasvati: Gautama’s three sons, a herd taken in fee, and the brother who ran from a wolf
The next tirtha on the road was called Udapana, which is to say the well, and the man with the plow on his shoulder came to it quickly. There is no river to see at Udapana. The Sarasvati looks as though she has given up there and gone out of the world altogether, and a traveler who did not know better would take the place for an ordinary stretch of dry country with a hole in it. The ascetics who have succeeded know otherwise. They point to the coolness of the herbs, and to the coolness of the ground itself under a sun that should have baked it, and they say that the river is running underneath, through the bowels of the earth, the whole way. Balarama gave away a great deal of wealth at that place and honored the Brahmins who lived near it and went down into the water, and when he came up he was glad, in the uncomplicated way of a man who has done a thing properly. Vaishampayana told Janamejaya what the place was. A great ascetic named Trita had lived here, a man wholly given over to righteousness. He had once been inside a hole in the ground, and while he was inside it he had drunk the Soma juice. His two brothers had thrown him down into that pit and had gone home. And from inside the pit that foremost of Brahmins had cursed them both.
Janamejaya would not let a sentence like that pass. Where does Udapana come from, he said. How did the great ascetic come to fall into a pit at all? Why should his own brothers throw a Brahmin into a hole? Having thrown him in, how did they simply walk home? And how, in that condition, did he perform a sacrifice, and how did he drink Soma? Tell me the whole of it, Brahmin, if you think it is a thing I may properly hear.
In an age now gone, Vaishampayana said, there were three brothers, and all three were ascetics. Their names were Ekata, Dvita and Trita, first and second and third, and each of them burned with a light like the sun’s. They were like the Lords of creation, and they had children, and they were utterers of Brahma, and by their penances they had already earned the right to go to the regions of Brahman when their bodies fell away. Their father was Gautama, who never in his life stepped aside from virtue, and their austerities and their vows and the hold they kept on themselves pleased him so steadily that pleasure in his sons became the settled weather of his old age. He lived a long time. When it ended he went to the region that suited him, and the three were left with his reputation.
They were also left with his clients. The kings who had been Gautama’s yajamanas, the men for whom he had performed the sacrifices and at whose cost the fires were fed, went on employing his sons after the father had gone to heaven, which meant the household lost nothing. Among the three, though, Trita drew ahead. His conduct did it and his study of the Vedas did it, and before very long he stood where his father had stood, with the same authority. The holy men of that country began to honor Trita exactly as they had honored Gautama before him. Nobody recorded what the two elder brothers thought about being the other two.
What is recorded is that Ekata and Dvita conceived a wish to perform a sacrifice of their own, and a sacrifice requires wealth, and wanting the wealth made them restless. The scheme they settled on was sound and entirely respectable. They would take Trita along, summon every yajamana the family had, gather as many animals as the rite called for, and at the end of it drink the Soma with glad hearts and carry away the great merit of the thing. So the three of them went out and did it. They called on their clients for animals, they officiated at the sacrifices those clients wanted performed, and in return for that priestly service they received animals, properly given and properly accepted, in very large numbers. Then they turned east for home.
Trita walked in front. He was cheerful, which is the detail the story keeps, a man striding ahead in good spirits with his work done well behind him. Ekata and Dvita came along at the back, driving the animals, and from the back they had a clear view of what they were driving. It was a great deal of livestock. Somewhere along that road the two of them began to turn over the question of how the herd might become theirs without a share of it going to the man walking ahead. Hear what those two said to each other, Vaishampayana told the king, and he did not soften the description of them. Trita is skilled at conducting sacrifices, they said. Trita is devoted to the Vedas. Trita is perfectly capable of earning any number of cattle over again. So let the two of us go on with these, and let him go wherever he likes, so long as he is not with us.
Night caught them still on the road. And on the road ahead of them, in the dark, stood a wolf. Not far from that spot the bank of the Sarasvati was broken by a deep hole. Trita was in front, as he had been all along, so Trita was the one who saw the wolf first, and he turned and ran in terror and went straight down into the pit. It had no bottom that anyone could find. It was the kind of opening in the ground that frightens every living creature that looks into it, and the best of ascetics was now at the bottom of it, calling up out of the dark.
His brothers heard him. That is the part the text is careful about. They heard the cries, they worked out what had happened, and then two things arrived in their minds at the same moment and pulled in the same direction: the wolf standing in the road, and the herd standing behind them. Ekata and Dvita went on and left their brother where he was.
A key to reading this (the arrangement behind the herd): A yajamana is the patron of a sacrifice, the man for whose benefit and at whose expense the fire is fed. Priests conduct the rite and are paid in cattle, animals or gold, and this is how three ascetics come to be walking home behind a herd large enough to be worth stealing: it is their fee, honestly earned and formally accepted. The Soma is the pressed juice drunk at the climax of the rite, and in this age a sacrifice was not reckoned complete without it, which is why the merit of having drunk it, and the lack of that merit, will matter so much to a man at the bottom of a well. The three names mean simply First, Second and Third.
The gist: Balarama reaches a tirtha where the river has gone underground, and Vaishampayana names it in a single sentence that raises more questions than it answers: a sage once drank Soma at the bottom of a hole here, and cursed the brothers who put him in it. Janamejaya asks for the whole story. Gautama’s three ascetic sons inherited his clients, and the youngest of them, Trita, quietly outgrew the other two. Walking home behind a herd received as their priestly fee, the two elder brothers decide the youngest can earn more cattle whenever he likes and need not share these. Then a wolf on a dark road, a bottomless pit beside the Sarasvati, and a man calling up out of it while his brothers keep walking.
The sacrifice performed in a dry hole: a creeper for the Soma plant, pebbles for sugar, and two brothers who became what they had fled from
So the great ascetic Trita was left at the bottom of the well, abandoned by two men who had been pulled away by the thought of owning a herd of animals. The place he was left in was choked with dust and matted over with herbs and creepers, and the impression it made on him was of hell, of being a sinner dropped through the floor of the world into the pit kept for sinners. What frightened him there was of a particular kind. He was afraid of dying, and the reason he was afraid of dying was that he had never yet earned the merit that comes of drinking the Soma. A lifetime of officiating at other men’s rites had left him with that one account unsettled, and now the ground had closed over him with the account still open. He was a man of great wisdom and he used it on the only question that mattered to him. Standing at the bottom of that hole, he began to work out how a man in a hole might drink Soma.
While he was turning it over he noticed a creeper. It had grown down over the lip of the well in the ordinary course of its growing and it hung there in front of him. The pit was bone dry. Out of that dryness the sage imagined water, and imagined the sacrificial fires burning, and set them where they should stand. He appointed himself the Hotri, since there was nobody else to be the Hotri. He looked at the hanging creeper and made it the Soma plant. Then he began to recite, in his mind, the Richs and the Yajushes and the Samans that the rite requires, every one of them in its place. The pebbles lying at the bottom of the well he turned into grains of sugar. He performed his ablutions, in his mind. The water he had imagined he now conceived to be clarified butter. He divided the offerings and allotted to each of the celestials the share that belonged to that god. And then, having drunk the Soma in his mind, he raised his voice and let out a great sound.
That sound, the first one out of the mouth of the sacrificing Rishi, went up out of the hole and into heaven. Trita finished the sacrifice exactly as the utterers of Brahma have laid down that it should be finished. And while it was going forward, the whole region of the celestials was shaken, without any of them being able to say what was shaking it. Then Brihaspati, the preceptor of the gods, heard the noise. The priests of the celestials came to him and told him what it meant. Trita is performing a sacrifice, they said. We have to go there, gods. His ascetic merit is enormous, and if he becomes angry he is entirely capable of creating other gods to replace us.
They went, all of them together, down to the place where the sacrifice was going on, and what they found there was a man installed in his rite and giving off light. He was resplendent, at the bottom of a hole in the ground, and the gods came and said what gods say. We have come here for our shares. Trita answered them without any ceremony at all. Look at me, denizens of heaven. I am fallen into this terrible well and I am very nearly out of my senses. Then he gave them their portions, every one with the mantra that belonged to it, and the gods took what he handed up to them and were delighted.
Having been given their allotted shares and being thoroughly satisfied, they told him to ask for whatever boons he wanted. He asked for one thing, which was to be taken out of the well. Then he added a second, which cost him nothing and has outlasted him: let any man who bathes in this well obtain the same end that is obtained by men who have drunk the Soma. The moment the words were out, the Sarasvati came up inside the well with her waves, the invisible river arriving in the one place a man needed her. She lifted him on the water until he came out at the top, and he stood and worshiped the gods. Be it as you wish, they said, and went back where they had come from, and Trita, filled with joy, set off for his own house.
On the way he met his brothers. Whatever had been in him while he was in the hole came up at the sight of the two of them, and the ascetic said a number of hard things and then cursed them outright. You two ran away out of covetousness and left me where I was, he said, and for that act my curse is on you: you will become wolves with sharp teeth, fierce ones, and you will range the forest, and the offspring you get will be leopards and bears and apes. He was a truthful man and his words did what truthful men’s words do in that age. Very shortly the brothers were seen changing into those shapes. Balarama, whose strength no one has measured, touched the water of Udapana, gave away wealth of many kinds there and honored a great many Brahmins, and looked at the place, and praised it, and praised it again. Then he went on along the Sarasvati toward Vinashana.
A key to reading this (the rite, and one thing the text leaves alone): The Hotri is the priest who recites the verses that call the gods to a sacrifice, one of several officiants a full rite requires. Trita has no fire, no water, no Soma plant, no enclosure and no colleagues, so he supplies all of it out of his own mind and takes the Hotri’s office himself, and the force of the episode is that the gods come down and accept their shares from an imagined offering as though it were laid out on real grass. The Richs, Yajushes and Samans are the verse forms of the three Vedas used in the rite. One symmetry sits in plain view and the original declines to remark on it: the two brothers who abandoned him because a wolf was standing in the road are turned into wolves.
The gist: At the bottom of the well Trita is afraid of the wrong thing, or the right one: dying with the merit of the Soma still unearned. So he builds the entire sacrifice out of nothing. A creeper hanging into the hole becomes the Soma plant, the pebbles become sugar, imagined water becomes clarified butter, and he makes himself the priest and recites the whole liturgy in his mind. His first shout reaches heaven. The gods arrive, shaken and uneasy, warned by their own priests that an angry Trita could simply make replacements for them, and they accept their shares from a man standing in a pit. He asks to be let out, and asks that anyone who bathes there receive what Soma-drinkers receive, and the hidden Sarasvati rises inside the well and carries him up. Then he meets his brothers on the road and makes them wolves. Balarama bathes, gives, praises the place twice, and moves on to Vinashana.
Vinashana, where the river goes under: a playground of Apsaras, the old man who learned the course of Time, and a tree that feeds a thousand Siddhas
From there, Vaishampayana said, Baladeva came to Vinashana. That is the place where the Sarasvati becomes invisible. In consequence of her contempt for Shudras and Abhiras she is lost at that spot, and for that reason, best of the Bharatas, the Rishis have always called the place by that name. A man standing on the sand there can see where a great river ought to be and cannot see the river. Balarama bathed in that tirtha of the Sarasvati and went on along the same excellent bank to Subhumika. Apsaras of fair complexion and beautiful faces are always at their sports there, and the sports are of a pure character, and they never break off. Every month the gods and the Gandharvas go to that sacred tirtha, which is the resort of Brahman himself. The Gandharvas and the diverse tribes of Apsaras can be seen there assembled together, passing the time as happily as they like. The gods and the Pitris take their pleasure there, and flowers, sacred and auspicious, rain down over them again and again, and every creeper in the place carries its own load of blossom. Because that spot is the beautiful sporting ground of those Apsaras, the tirtha on that excellent bank of the Sarasvati is called Subhumika. Balarama of Madhu’s race bathed there and gave away much wealth to the Brahmins, and while he stood in the water he heard the sound of celestial songs and celestial instruments, and he saw the shadows of gods and Gandharvas and Rakshasas moving where no bodies were.
The son of Rohini went next to the tirtha of the Gandharvas. Many Gandharvas live there with Vishvavasu at their head, and they have ascetic merit of their own, and they spend their time in dancing and in singing of the most charming kind. Balarama gave wealth of every sort to the Brahmins at that place, goats and sheep and cattle, mules and camels, gold and silver. He fed many Brahmins and satisfied them with costly gifts of the kinds they wanted, and when he moved on from there a crowd of Brahmins walked with him, praising him as he went. Leaving the tirtha the Gandharvas frequent, that mighty-armed chastiser of foes, the one who wears a single earring, came to the famous tirtha called Gargasrota. There, Janamejaya, on that sacred water of the Sarasvati, the illustrious Garga, a man of great age whose soul had been washed clean by penance, had acquired his knowledge of Time and of the course of Time, and of the deviations of the luminous bodies overhead, and of every portent that runs to good or to ill. The tirtha took its name from his. Rishis of excellent vows, highly blessed, used to wait on Garga there for exactly that knowledge, and they waited a long while for it. Smeared as always with white sandal paste, Balarama came to that water and gave wealth in due form to many ascetics of cleansed soul.
He gave costly food of many kinds to the Brahmins as well, and then that illustrious one, dressed in his blue robes, went on to the tirtha called Shankha. There on the bank of the Sarasvati the hero with the palmyra on his banner saw a gigantic tree. It is called Mohashankha. It stands as tall as Meru and looks like the White Mountain, and Rishis live in its shade. Yakshas live there, and Vidyadharas, and Rakshasas of immeasurable energy, and Pishachas of immeasurable might, and Siddhas in their thousands. All of them have given up every other kind of food. They keep vows and observances, they take the fruit of that lord of the forest in its proper season and live on that alone, and they wander in separate bands where no man sees them. That monarch of the forest is known through the whole world for this, and the tree itself is the reason the tirtha on the Sarasvati is celebrated and holy. At that place Balarama gave away many milch cows, and vessels of copper and of iron, and vessels of other kinds besides. That tiger of Yadu’s race, the one whose weapon is the plow, worshiped the Brahmins there and was worshiped by them in return.
Then he came to the Dvaita lake, and saw ascetics of many sorts in clothing of many sorts. He bathed in its water and worshiped the Brahmins and gave them articles of enjoyment in great quantity, and from there he went on along the southern bank of the Sarasvati. That mighty-armed and illustrious man of virtuous soul and unfading glory came in time to the tirtha called Nagadhanvana. It swarms with snakes. It is the home of Vasuki of great splendor, the king of the snakes, and fourteen thousand Rishis have their permanent dwelling there as well. The celestials came to that place in days of old and installed the excellent snake Vasuki as king over all snakes, with every rite performed in order. Since then there has been no fear of snakes in that place at all, which is a thing worth knowing about a wood full of them. Balarama gave many valuables to the Brahmins there in due form, and then he set his face toward the east.
What followed stopped being a route and became a sheer accumulation. Hundreds and thousands of famous tirthas came one after another, and they came at every step. He bathed in all of them. He kept the fasts and the other vows the Rishis directed him to keep, he gave away wealth in profusion, and he saluted every ascetic who had taken up residence along that water. Then he set out again, on the road those ascetics pointed out to him, toward the place where the Sarasvati turns and runs east, the way falling rain is bent sideways by a hard wind. She took that course in order to look at the high-souled Rishis living in the forest of Naimisha. Balarama came to the bend smeared with his white sandal paste, carrying the plow, and he stood and watched the foremost of rivers running the wrong way, and he was filled with wonder.
A key to reading this (who is walking, and why): Baladeva, Balarama, Vala, the son of Rohini and the one of Madhu’s race are all one man, Krishna’s older brother, who carries a plow for a weapon and a palmyra tree on his banner, and who wears a single earring. He refused to fight on either side at Kurukshetra and went on pilgrimage instead, which is why he is walking a river while the war runs to its end without him. The name Vinashana means the place of the loss; the reason the text gives for that loss is given here as the text gives it, and the text says nothing further about it. The Dvaita lake is the same one the Pandavas lived beside during their exile.
The gist: Balarama walks the Sarasvati tirtha by tirtha while the war he walked out of is being decided somewhere behind him. He passes Vinashana, where the river hides herself underground; Subhumika, where Apsaras play under a rain of flowers and the gods come every month; the tirtha of the Gandharvas, where Vishvavasu sings; Gargasrota, where an old man once worked out the course of Time and the wandering of the stars; Shankha, where a tree as tall as Meru feeds thousands of Siddhas who are never seen; and Nagadhanvana, where Vasuki was crowned king of snakes and no snake frightens anyone. He bathes at each one and gives away what he has. At the last he reaches a bend where the river runs east instead of west, and stops, and stares.
The day a river had to make room: a twelve-year sacrifice, ground measured out with sacred threads, and the Sarasvati turning back
Why, Brahmin, Janamejaya said, did the Sarasvati bend her course there toward the east? Best of Adhvaryus, it is right that you should tell me everything that belongs to this. For what reason was the delighter of the Yadus filled with wonder? Why, in fact, did the foremost of rivers alter her course at all?
Formerly, in the Krita age, Vaishampayana said, the ascetics living in Naimisha were engaged in a grand sacrifice, and it was to run for twelve years. Many Rishis came to it. They passed their days there in the performance of that sacrifice according to the rites. Twelve years is long enough for a man to arrive young and leave with gray in his beard, and by the end of it Naimisha held a population rather than a gathering. When the twelve years were finished those highly blessed ones set out in large numbers to visit the tirthas, and they set out all at once, together, in the direction of the same river. There were so many of them that the tirthas along the southern bank of the Sarasvati came to look like towns and cities. Those foremost of Brahmins, in their eagerness for the merit that tirthas confer, took up their dwellings on the bank of the river all the way to the site of Samantapanchaka. The whole region rang with the loud Vedic recitation of those Rishis of cleansed soul, every one of them employed in pouring libations on a sacrificial fire. The foremost of rivers looked exceedingly beautiful with all those homa fires blazing along her, and the high-souled ascetics pouring clarified butter into them.
The Valkhilyas came, and the Ashmakuttas, and the Dantolakhalinas, and the Samprakshanas, and other ascetics besides. Those who subsist on air came, and those who live on water, and those who live on the dry leaves of trees, and men observing vows of every other kind, and those who have given up beds altogether for the bare hard ground. All of them came to that spot near the Sarasvati, and they made the foremost of rivers as beautiful as the celestials make the heavenly stream Mandakini beautiful by standing in it. Hundreds upon hundreds of Rishis arrived, all of them given to the observance of sacrifices. And these practicers of high vows could not find enough room on the banks of the Sarasvati to do what they had come to do. They took their sacred threads and measured out small plots of ground with them, and on those plots they performed their Agnihotras and their other rites, which is the picture worth holding on to: a crowd of the holiest men alive, reduced to surveying the dirt with the string off their own shoulders.
The Sarasvati saw them. She saw that great body of Rishis sunk in despair and plunged into anxiety for want of a broad tirtha to work in. For their sake, out of kindness toward those men of sacred penance, the foremost of streams came to that place and made many dwellings for herself there. Having turned her course for their sake, she then flowed once more toward the west, as though she were saying, I must go from here now, having kept the coming of these Rishis from being wasted. That was the wonderful thing the great river did in that place, Janamejaya, and that is how those receptacles of water came to be formed at Naimisha. There, at Kurukshetra, foremost of Kuru’s race, perform your own grand sacrifices and rites.
So when Balarama looked at all those pools of standing water, and at the foremost of rivers running against her own direction, wonder filled the heart of that high-souled man, and now he knew the reason for it. He had spent the whole of this journey among men who had given up one thing or another, food or sleep or the ground itself, and here was a river that had given up her own course for a season because a crowd of them needed somewhere to light a fire. A man who had refused to take a side in a war between his own students was in a good position to notice what that kind of yielding costs. He bathed in those tirthas in due form. He gave wealth to the Brahmins and articles of enjoyment in quantity, and food of many kinds, and whatever else they wanted. Worshiped by those regenerate ones, he set out from there toward the greatest of all the tirthas on the Sarasvati, the one called Sapta-Sarasvata. Birds beyond counting have their home there. The place is thick with Vadari and Inguda and Kshamarya, with Plaksha and Ashvattha and Vibhitaka, with Kakkola and Palasha and Karira and Pilu, and with every other kind of tree that grows along the banks of that river. Forests of Karushaka and Vilva and Amrataka stand there, and Atimukta and Kashanda and Parijata, and groves of plantain, and the whole of it is agreeable to look at and charming past description.
Ascetics of many tribes live in it. Some live on air, some on water, some on fruit, some on leaves, and some on raw grain that they husk with nothing but stones. Some of them are called Vaneyas. The place resounds with the chanting of the Vedas and teems with animals of every kind, and it is the favorite dwelling of men who carry no malice in them and are devoted to righteousness. Balarama, with the plow for his weapon, came at last to that tirtha called Sapta-Sarasvata, where the great ascetic Mankanaka had performed his penances, and where he had been crowned with success.
A key to reading this (a printer’s slip, and some names): In Janamejaya’s question Ganguli’s text prints “that daughter of the Yadus,” which can only be a slip for the delighter of the Yadus, since the question is about Balarama’s wonder; the sense is given here. Samantapanchaka is another name for Kurukshetra. The Valkhilyas, Ashmakuttas, Dantolakhalinas and Samprakshanas are orders of ascetics known by the single hard rule each one keeps, so that the Ashmakuttas, for instance, are those who husk their grain with stones and nothing else. The sacred thread is the cord a Brahmin wears over one shoulder, which is why measuring plots of ground with it is the detail that tells you how little the men had with them.
The gist: Janamejaya asks why the river turned, and the answer turns out to have nothing to do with anger or a curse. In the Krita age a twelve-year sacrifice at Naimisha ended and the Rishis went out to the tirthas in such numbers that the southern bank of the Sarasvati looked like a line of cities, and in the end they were measuring out scraps of ground with their own sacred threads because there was no room left to make fire on. The river watched them, came to them, opened many channels for herself so that all of them could work, and then went back to running west. Those pools are still there. Balarama, having seen it and now knowing why, moves on to Sapta-Sarasvata, where the story of Mankanaka is waiting for him.
Seven rivers that turned out to be one, and the ascetic whose wound ran green
Janamejaya would not let the name pass. Why is that crossing called Sapta-Sarasvat, he said, and who was this Mankanaka? How did he come to his success, what vows did he keep, in whose line was he born, and what books did he study? Tell me all of it. Vaishampayana answered him with a fact that rearranges the map. There are seven Sarasvatis, he said, and between them the seven cover the whole of this world. Wherever a person of great energy called her to mind, there she came out of the ground and ran. Her seven forms are these: Suprava, Kanchanakshi, Vishala, Manorama, Oghavati, Surenu and Vimalodaka. A pilgrim standing on one bank is never standing beside a local stream. He is standing beside one of seven appearances of the same river, and the river keeps her appointments.
The Grandsire once held a great sacrifice at Pushkara. Brahmins who had already come to ascetic success gathered on the chosen ground until the place rang with recited hymns and the chanting of the Vedas, and the preparations were so grand that the gods lost their composure watching. Whatever any guest so much as thought of needing appeared in front of him. Gandharvas sang, companies of Apsaras danced, celestial instruments played without pause, and the stores laid in for that sacrifice satisfied the gods themselves, which says enough about what it did for human beings. In the middle of all that abundance the Rishis found the one thing missing. This sacrifice cannot be called a high one, they said, since the first of rivers, the Sarasvati, is nowhere to be seen here. Brahma heard it, and cheerfully turned his mind to her, and she appeared at Pushkara, and there she was called Suprava. Later a body of Munis settled at Naimisha and fell to discussing the Vedas, and thinking of her they brought her, and there she was Kanchanakshi. King Gaya was performing a great sacrifice at Gaya and summoned her, and the Rishis of rigid vows who were present named that form of hers Vishala, the swift stream that runs down off the flanks of Himavat. Auddalaka sacrificed in the northern part of Kosala and thought of her before he began, and she came for the sake of those Rishis in bark and deerskin, who called her in their minds by a name that stayed with her, Manorama. Kuru was sacrificing at Kurukshetra with Vasishtha assisting him, and at Vasishtha’s summons she arrived full of celestial water as Oghavati. Daksha sacrificed at the source of the Ganga and she came there as fast-running Surenu. And when Brahma held a sacrifice in the sacred forest of the Himavat mountains she was summoned once more and once more she came. All seven of those forms then ran together and joined at the very crossing Balarama had now reached, and because the seven mingled at that spot the earth calls it Sapta-Sarasvat.
The man whose name is attached to the place had kept the vow of a student since boyhood. Mankanaka was bathing in that river one day when he saw a woman in the water, faultless in her limbs and fine in the brow, bathing as she pleased with nothing on. At the sight of her his seed fell into the Sarasvati. He was enough of an ascetic to treat even that as material to be handled carefully. He gathered it up and put it into his earthen water pot, and inside the vessel it separated into seven parts, and out of those seven parts came seven Rishis, and from those seven sprang the forty-nine Maruts, the storm gods who ride the wind in troops. The seven were named Vayuvega, Vayuhan, Vayumandala, Vayujata, Vayuretas and Vayuchakra of great energy. So the ancestors of the various Maruts were born in a clay pot on a riverbank, out of one unguarded moment in an otherwise unbroken celibacy.
Now hear something stranger, Vaishampayana said, a thing famous through all three worlds. Long after he had come to his success, Mankanaka tore his hand on the point of a blade of kusha grass. What ran out of the cut was the juice of a plant, clear and green, with no red in it anywhere. The sight of it filled the Rishi with such joy that he began to dance where he stood. And because his energy was what it was, every creature that watched him began to dance too, the moving and the unmoving alike, stupefied, the trees going with the men. The gods put Brahma at their head and went with the wealthy ascetics to Mahadeva and told him what the Rishi was doing. You must do something, they said, to stop this man dancing. So Mahadeva came, and looked at the joy the man was in, and out of concern for the gods he spoke to him. Brahmin, he said, you know your duties. Why are you dancing like this? What great cause has come to you, sage, that you who walk the path of virtue should behave in this way? And the Rishi answered without the least suspicion of who was asking. Do you not see, Brahmin, he said, that the juice of a plant is flowing from this wound of mine? That is what I am dancing about.
Mahadeva laughed at him, at a man so carried away by feeling, and said, this does not astonish me at all. Look at me. Then he pressed the tip of one finger against his own thumb, and out of that wound came ash, white as snow. The Rishi understood in an instant both what he had been doing and whom he had been telling about it, and he fell at the god’s feet with his face burning. You are Rudra, he said, that great and supreme being, and nobody else. Trident-bearer, this universe of gods and Asuras takes shelter in you. The wise say you made it, and at the destruction of all things it enters you again. The gods themselves cannot know you, so how am I to know you? Every form that exists is seen in you. The gods with Brahma in front worship you who grant boons. You are everything, you created the gods and caused them to be created, and it is by your grace that they pass their time in joy and without fear. Then he bowed and asked for the only thing he wanted, which was not to be punished for the last few minutes. Let this lightness of mine, god, ridiculous as it was, not destroy what my penances have earned. Mahadeva answered him cheerfully. Let your asceticism increase a thousand times over by my grace, Brahmin. I will live here in this hermitage with you always. And for any man who worships me at the crossing called Sapta-Sarasvat there will be nothing out of reach, here or afterward; he goes after death to the region called Sarasvat. That is the history of Mankanaka of abundant energy, who was a son begotten by the god of the wind upon the lady Sukanya.
A key to reading this (seven sons, six names): The text says the seed divided into seven parts and seven Rishis were born, then lists six names: Vayuvega, Vayuhan, Vayumandala, Vayujata, Vayuretas and Vayuchakra. The seventh is not given, and none has been supplied here. The same thing happens with the river: Vimalodaka is named in the opening list of seven forms, and when the account reaches Brahma’s sacrifice in the Himavat forest the text simply says she was summoned and came, without repeating which name she took there.
The gist: The Sarasvati is seven rivers, and every one of them is an appearance she made when somebody powerful enough called her: Suprava at Pushkara, Kanchanakshi at Naimisha, Vishala at Gaya, Manorama in Kosala, Oghavati at Kurukshetra, Surenu at the source of the Ganga. Where all seven ran together is the crossing Balarama has reached. The ascetic who lives there once cut his hand, found green sap coming out instead of blood, and danced so hard that the whole world danced with him, until Mahadeva opened his own thumb, poured out ash, and shamed him back into gravity.
The head that fastened itself to a thigh and would not come off for all the pilgrimages on earth
Balarama spent one more night at Sapta-Sarasvat. He honored the people who lived at the crossing, paid his respects to Mankanaka, gave wealth to the Brahmins, and was himself worshiped in turn by the ascetics there. In the morning he rose, took leave of them all, touched the sacred water, and set out quickly for the other crossings. The next place he came to is called Usanas, and it has a second name, Kapalamochana, the loosening of the skull. Long before, Rama the son of Dasharatha killed a Rakshasa and threw its head a great distance, and that head fell upon the thigh of a great Muni named Mahodara and stuck there. Mahodara was freed of it by bathing at this one crossing. Shukra also did his penances here, the sage the world calls Kavya, and it was here that the whole science of policy and duty came to him by an inward light, the science that still goes by his name. Here too he sat thinking about the war between the gods and the Daityas and Danavas, weighing what the one side had and what the other side wanted. So a single bank of the river gave the world two separate things, a whole science of statecraft that arrived inside one man’s head without a teacher, and a release that another man found only after he had looked for it everywhere else. Baladeva reached that excellent crossing and made his gifts to the Brahmins according to the proper form.
Janamejaya stopped him there. Why is it called Kapalamochana, he asked, where that great Muni was freed of the Rakshasa’s head? And how did the head come to stick to him in the first place, and for what cause? Vaishampayana said, tiger among kings, in the old days Rama the high souled son of Dasharatha lived for a while in the Dandaka forest, intending to kill the Rakshasas. At Janasthana he cut off the head of an evil-souled Rakshasa with an arrow of the sharpest razor edge. The head flew far and dropped into the deep woods. After that it wandered through the air as it pleased, and it came down on the thigh of Mahodara while he was walking in that same forest. It pierced his thigh, king, and there it lodged and stayed. Nothing in his life had prepared him for it. He had done no injury to the Rakshasa, he had taken no part in the killing, and he was walking in the woods on his own business when a war he had nothing to do with came down out of the sky and attached itself to him.
With the head fixed in him that way, the Brahmin of great intelligence could not go easily to the crossings and the holy places. Worn down by severe pain, with foul matter running from the wound, he went to every tirtha on earth, one after another, so we have heard. He would reach a new water with his hope raised, go down the steps into it, say what had to be said, and come back up with the thing still fixed in him and the smell of it still on him. He went to all the rivers and he went as far as the ocean, and nothing released him. What he was carrying was not only the weight and the pain of it. A man in that condition cannot sit easily among other men, and the holy places he most wanted to enter were the places where his presence was hardest to bear. At last that great ascetic told his trouble to a number of Rishis of pure hearts, and told them also that bathing in every sacred water in the world had brought him none of the relief he was looking for. Those Munis spoke to him of the great merit of this crossing on the bank of the Sarasvati, the one called Usanas, which is said to cleanse a man of every sin and to be an excellent place for gaining success. So the Brahmin went to Usanas tirtha and stepped down into its water. The moment he entered, the Rakshasa’s head let go of his thigh and fell into the stream. Free of that dead thing, the Rishi felt a happiness he had almost forgotten, and the head was lost somewhere in the water. Relieved of his burden, cheerful, his soul clean and all his sins washed away, Mahodara came back to his own asylum having gained success. He told the whole story to the Rishis of pure hearts, and hearing it they gave the crossing the name Kapalamochana. The great Rishi returned to it afterward, drank its water, and reached a high perfection of asceticism.
Baladeva of Madhu’s line gave much wealth to the Brahmins there and worshiped them, and then moved on toward the asylum of Rushangu. That is where Arshtishena performed his very severe penances in the old days, and where the great Muni Vishvamitra, a Kshatriya by birth, became a Brahmin. The asylum is a great one, able to grant every wish, and Munis and Brahmins have always lived in it. Beautiful Baladeva went there surrounded by Brahmins, to the spot where Rushangu had cast off his body long ago. Rushangu was an aged Brahmin, king, always engaged in penances, and when he decided to lay down his body he thought about it for a long time. Then he called all his sons and told them to carry him somewhere with abundant water. Understanding how old their father had become, those ascetic sons brought him to a tirtha on the Sarasvati. On the bank of that sacred river of a hundred crossings, where Rishis who had cut every attachment made their homes, the wise old man of rigid penances bathed in the proper way, and knowing what tirthas are worth he spoke, pleased with the sons standing in attendance on him, and this is what he said. Any man who casts off his body on the northern bank of this Sarasvati full of water, reciting sacred mantras in his mind, will never again be afflicted by death.
The virtuous Baladeva touched the water of that tirtha, bathed in it, and out of his devotion to Brahmins gave them a great deal of wealth. Then the mighty one went on toward the tirtha where the Grandsire created the mountains called Lokaloka, where the Rishi Arshtishena of rigid vows gained Brahmanahood by hard penance, and where the royal sage Sindhudvipa, the great ascetic Devapi, and the venerable Muni Vishvamitra of fierce energy all reached that same rank.
A key to reading this (two men named Rama): The source calls the pilgrim simply Rama all through this stretch, meaning Balarama, Krishna’s elder brother, who is walking the crossings of the Sarasvati while the war is being fought without him. The Rama who beheaded the Rakshasa at Janasthana is a different man entirely, the son of Dasharatha. To keep them apart, the traveler is called Balarama or Baladeva here and the other is always named as Dasharatha’s son. In the same way Usanas and Kapalamochana are two names for one ghat, the first from Shukra’s penances there and the second from what happened to Mahodara.
The gist: Balarama leaves Sapta-Sarasvat and comes to Usanas, also called Kapalamochana, and Janamejaya asks where the second name comes from. A Rakshasa head cut off by Dasharatha’s son at Janasthana went wandering through the air and buried itself in the thigh of the Muni Mahodara. He carried it to every crossing on earth, to all the rivers, out to the ocean, and none of them would take it. It came loose the instant he stepped into this one ghat. Balarama moves on to the asylum of Rushangu, where an old ascetic lay down to die and left behind a promise about the northern bank of the Sarasvati.
The student who learned nothing in his teacher’s house, and the king who lost an army and won a caste
Janamejaya had four questions and he asked them together. Holy one, why did the venerable Arshtishena undergo such severe penances? How did Sindhudvipa acquire the status of a Brahmin? How did Devapi get it, and how did Vishvamitra, best of men? Tell me all of it, because my curiosity is very great. Vaishampayana said, in the Krita age, king, there was a Brahmin named Arshtishena. He lived in the house of his preceptor and he applied himself to his lessons every single day. He stayed there a long time, and in all that time he could not master any branch of knowledge, and he could not master the Vedas either. He was not idle and he was not careless. He took his place every morning, he did the work the day called for, and every evening the verses stood exactly as far away from him as they had stood the evening before. Other students came, learned what they had come for, and left. That is a particular kind of defeat, and it does not get easier for being quiet. Worn out with disappointment, the great ascetic went away and began penances of the most rigid kind, and by those penances he obtained a mastery of the Vedas that has nothing above it. Learned, perfected in the sacred books, he attained success at that very crossing. Then he gave the place three boons. From this day forward, he said, a man who bathes at this tirtha of the great river shall win the high merit of a horse sacrifice. From this day forward there shall be no fear here of snakes or of any wild beast. And here a man shall obtain great fruit from a small exertion. Having said that, the Muni of great energy went up to heaven, and that is how the venerable Arshtishena was crowned with success.
At the same tirtha, in the same Krita age, Sindhudvipa of great energy obtained the high status of a Brahmin, and so did Devapi. And so did the descendant of Kushika, who was devoted to penances and had his senses under control, by directing his austerities the right way. There was a great Kshatriya named Gadhi, known over the whole world. He had a son, Vishvamitra of great prowess. King Kaushika had become a mighty ascetic, and having done a great deal of penance he wanted to install his son Vishvamitra on the throne and give up his body. His subjects bowed to him and said, do not go, great and wise one, and protect us from a terrible fear. They had lived under him long enough to know what a change of hands costs, and they were asking him to put off his own release for their sake. Gadhi answered them, my son shall be the protector of this wide world. He installed Vishvamitra on the throne, king, and went to heaven, and Vishvamitra became king.
He could not protect the earth, though he tried with everything he had. Then the king heard that a great fear from Rakshasas had spread through his kingdom, and he marched out of his capital with his army in its four divisions. He traveled a long way and came to the asylum of Vasishtha, and there, king, his troops did a great deal of damage. When the venerable Brahmin returned to his own asylum he found his wide groves being destroyed, and the best of Rishis grew angry with Vishvamitra. He gave an order to his homa cow. Create a fearful army of Shabaras, he said. At that word the cow brought forth a crowd of men of frightful features, and they closed with Vishvamitra’s army and made a great slaughter of it on every side, and his soldiers saw what was happening and ran.
Vishvamitra the son of Gadhi decided then that penance was the highest of all instruments, and he put his whole mind on it. At this excellent tirtha of the Sarasvati, king, he began to dry up his body with vows and fasts, holding to his resolution. Water, air and the leaves that fell from the trees were all he took. He slept on the bare ground and kept the other observances laid down for ascetics. He had commanded an army in four divisions and he had watched it break and run, and what he had left was his own body and the willingness to spend it. The gods tried again and again to interrupt his vow, and each time they found the same thing waiting for them, and his mind never moved off its purpose by so much as a hair. Then, having practiced austerities of many kinds with great devotion, the son of Gadhi became effulgent like the sun. The Grandsire of great energy, the giver of boons, determined to grant Vishvamitra, who had become rich in penances, whatever boon he desired. He could have asked for the earth back, or for an army that no cow could scatter, or for the death of the man who had humiliated him. The boon Vishvamitra asked for was permission to become a Brahmin. He had seen what a Brahmin’s word could do to a king’s four divisions, and he wanted the thing itself and not revenge on the man who had it. Brahma, the Grandsire of all the worlds, said to him, let it be so. Having won Brahmanahood by his own hard penance, the illustrious Vishvamitra walked over the whole earth like a god, with his wish accomplished. At that excellent crossing Balarama also distributed wealth of many kinds, and worshiping many of the best of Brahmins in the proper way he gave them milch cows, vehicles, beds, ornaments, and excellent food and drink with a cheerful heart. After that, king, he went on to a place not far from there, the asylum of Vaka, where, as we have heard, Vaka of Dalbhya’s line performed his very severe austerities.
A key to reading this (Kushika, Gadhi and Kaushika): The source sets three names side by side in this passage and never reconciles them. It first calls the man who gained Brahmanahood the descendant of Kushika, then introduces Gadhi as a great Kshatriya and the father of Vishvamitra, then refers to that same Gadhi as King Kaushika. The text has been left exactly as it stands, with no repair made. This is also the first collision between Vishvamitra and Vasishtha; the next round of that quarrel comes later at the crossing where the Sarasvati herself carries Vasishtha away.
The gist: Janamejaya asks how four different men won Brahmanahood at this one crossing, and the first answer is Arshtishena, who sat in his teacher’s house for years without learning a single branch of knowledge and then got the whole of the Vedas by penance. On his way to heaven he left the ghat three boons. Sindhudvipa and Devapi are named, and then Vishvamitra, a king whose entire army was routed by the Shabaras that Vasishtha’s homa cow produced out of nothing, and who lived on fallen leaves and air and slept on bare ground until Brahma gave him the one rank that birth is supposed to decide. Balarama gives his gifts and moves on toward the asylum of Vaka.
Source: the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Shalya Parva, Hradapravesha and Gada-yuddha sub-parvas, Sections 23-64. The Gita Press Hindi edition is the controlling witness. The Sanskrit e-text and an independent complete translation were used to verify names, sequence, and principal events. Where recensions differ, this retelling follows Gita Press.
Based on: The Mahabharata, Vyasa (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)