Vishvamitra

The Forest of Tataka, and Siddhashrama

A league and a half along the Sarayu the sage gives the first of his gifts, two chains of mantras named Bala and Atibala, which keep hunger, thirst, and weariness from whoever recites them; “Bala and Atibala are the mothers of all knowledge.” That night the princes sleep on straw, and the night is sweet, because Vishvamitra’s affection runs through every word he says to them. Beyond the meeting of the Ganga and the Sarayu lies a forest with no trace of human life in it, and in sargas 24 to 26 the sage tells its history: Tataka, a yakshini who carries the strength of a thousand elephants by a boon of Brahma and wears a rakshasi’s shape by a curse of Agastya. Rama asks how a woman comes to hold such strength, and the answer is one of the plainest orders in the poem. “And feel no revulsion at the killing of a woman. For the good of the four orders of society a kshatriya prince has to do deeds that are cruel and deeds that are gentle, both.” Rama’s mind still wants only to maim her and let her go, and when she wraps the brothers in a storm of dust and stones the sage cuts the tenderness short: “This sinful yakshini of wicked conduct, this wrecker of sacrifices: kill her before she gathers more strength out of her maya.” One arrow through her chest, and by evening the forest she had ravaged stands as fresh as Kubera’s pleasure garden. The gods come down to tell the sage to give those missiles, the sons of Krishashva, to Rama.

In sargas 27 to 28, at dawn, Vishvamitra faces east and hands every missile to Rama with its mantra, and when Rama asks he teaches the brothers the lore for calling a missile back as well. In sarga 29 he explains the name of his hermitage: Vishnu did his austerities here before he descended as Vamana, and so the place is Siddhashrama, the hermitage of accomplishment. “This hermitage is as much yours as it is mine, my child. It belonged to Vishnu first, and you are that Vishnu.” Then he enters the consecration of his rite and sits six days in rigid silence while the princes keep guard without closing their eyes. On the sixth day blood falls out of the sky onto the altar, and Rama hurls Maricha a hundred yojanas into the sea with the weapon of Manu and kills Subahu with the weapon of fire. The rite is finished. The first words Vishvamitra speaks in six days are these: “My purpose is accomplished, mighty-armed hero of high renown. You have carried out your guru’s bidding. And the name of this Siddhashrama has been made true.”

His Own Line, on the Bank of the Shona

The road to Mithila is paved with stories, and in sargas 31 to 49 every one of them is his, from the descent of the Ganga to Ahalya. On the bank of the Shona, in sargas 32 to 34, Rama asks whose country this is, and the sage tells him his own home. Kusha, a son of Brahma; Kusha’s son Kushanabha, who had a hundred daughters and no son until he made a sacrifice for one; and Gadhi, born of that rite. “That Gadhi, that most righteous man, was my father. I was born in the line of Kusha, and that is why I am called Kaushika.” He had an elder sister, Satyavati, married to the sage Richika, who went up to heaven in her own body and became a river, the Kaushiki, that runs beside the Himalaya; out of love for her he lived on that bank for years. The seers listening say that Vishvamitra stands apart even in this line, because he won brahminhood by austerity. What that austerity was, Rama has not yet heard. At the edge of Mithila there is a deserted hermitage, and in sargas 48 to 49 the sage tells the story of Gautama’s wife and then gives the order: step into the hermitage of Gautama, and set Ahalya free.

Shatananda’s Story: From King to Brahmarshi

Janaka‘s priest Shatananda is Ahalya’s son. When he hears that his mother has been restored to his father he turns to Rama: this guardian of yours “won the rank of brahmarshi by austerity alone, by nothing else,” and in sargas 51 to 65 he tells Rama the story the sage never told about himself. King Vishvamitra ruled the earth for thousands of years. One day, marching with a full akshauhini, he comes to Vasishtha‘s hermitage, and the sage’s cow of plenty, Shabala, feeds the entire army from her own body. The king eats his fill and asks for the cow. “Give me Shabala in exchange for a hundred thousand cows. She is a jewel, and a king is the proper keeper of jewels. Hand her over to me. By right she is mine.” The answer is no, and the king has her dragged off by force. Shabala throws off his men and runs back to the sage’s feet, and at Vasishtha’s word she bellows out armies of her own; within the hour the king’s whole force is gone, and his hundred sons, rushing at Vasishtha with their weapons, are burned to ash by the sage’s roar alone. He sets his one surviving son on the throne, goes alone to a slope of the Himalaya, and when Mahadeva appears to grant him a boon, what he asks for is the science of arms: “Let every magic missile known to the gods, to the demons and the great seers, to the Gandharvas, the Yakshas, and the Rakshasas rise clear before my mind’s eye.” With those missiles he comes back and sets the hermitage on fire, and Vasishtha walks out to meet him holding a plain Brahmin’s staff. From the fire missile to the weapon of Brahma itself, every one of them goes into that staff and is swallowed. The beaten king draws a long breath, and the rest of his life is in it. “A curse on the might of a Kshatriya. The strength that comes from a Brahmin’s fire is the true strength. All my missiles have been undone by a single staff. Now that I see plainly which is the greater, I will purify my senses and my mind and take up such austerities as will win me brahminhood in this very life.”

From that day the story is the pursuit of a single word. A thousand years of penance in the south, and Brahma comes to say that he has earned the worlds that belong to royal sages. “After austerities as hard as these, the gods and all the companies of seers know me only as a royal sage, and not as the Brahmin I meant to become.” In sargas 57 to 60 Trishanku, a king of Ikshvaku’s line, wants a sacrifice that will carry him to heaven in his living body; Vasishtha refuses him, Vasishtha’s hundred sons curse him into a chandala, and the outcaste king walks to the one man whose only wealth is now austerity. “I will give you shelter. Do not be afraid.” On Mahodaya and the hundred sons of Vasishtha, who will not come to a chandala’s rite, he lays a curse of seven hundred births; and when every god he calls stays away from the altar he lifts the ladle that pours the ghee and turns to the king: “See the power of the spiritual energy I have won by my own effort. Rise to heaven, where no one goes in the flesh.” Trishanku rises bodily toward heaven while the seers watch. Indra sends him back headlong. “Stop. Stop where you are.” And the king hangs in the empty air. Then the sage, seated among the seers and dazed with anger, begins to create: a second group of seven stars in the southern sky, a new ring of twenty-seven lunar mansions, and the beginnings of a second order of gods. “I will create another Indra. Or else let my heaven do without an Indra altogether.” The gods come to plead, and his answer is the sentence that binds this man harder than any other: “I have given King Trishanku my pledge to help him rise to heaven in his own body. May prosperity attend you; I dare not go back on it.” The gods agree that Trishanku will shine among those stars, head downward, happy as a god, and Vishvamitra says only, “All right.”

In sargas 61 to 62, at the lakes of Pushkara, a boy falls into his lap, his sister’s son Shunahshepa, bought by King Ambarisha to stand in for a stolen sacrificial victim. The sage turns to his own sons: “Do him a kindness, my dear sons, by simply giving up your own life.” Madhucchanda and his brothers laugh and refuse, and their father curses them to a thousand years among the lowest of the low. Then he teaches the boy two hymns, and the boy, bound to the post, sings them and wins long life from Indra himself. Another thousand years, and Brahma comes again: “now you have become a rishi, plain and simple.” Then Menaka, bathing in the lake, and a thousand years of penance go out of the sage’s mind in a single look. “Ten long years have gone by me as if they were a single day and night, so overwhelmed was I by the madness of desire. This has been an obstacle and nothing else.” He sends her away with gentle words, goes north to the bank of the Kaushiki, and binds himself to lifelong celibacy. Brahma next comes to call him maharshi; he answers with the one word he wants, brahmarshi, and Brahma tells him, “You have not yet conquered your senses. Strive further.” Rambha, sent by Indra, he sees through in an instant and turns to stone for ten thousand years, and in the same instant he knows that his temper has emptied his store of merit again. So in sargas 64 to 65 the vow changes. “I will not speak, on any account. I will not even breathe, for hundreds of years.” At the end of a thousand silent years, as he lifts the first mouthful of food, Indra comes in a Brahmin’s dress and asks for the meal, and the sage gives him all of it without a word; then he holds his breath for a thousand years more, until smoke rises from his head and scorches the three worlds. Brahma comes with every god behind him: “You have won brahminhood by the force of your hard austerities, and with these hosts of gods I give you long life besides.” One demand remains: let Vasishtha, the mind-born son of Brahma, call him a Brahmin. It had to be Vasishtha; no other voice would settle it. Won over by the gods, Vasishtha comes, makes friends with him, and says, “So be it. You are a Brahmin seer; there is no doubt of it.” And Shatananda closes: “That, Rama, is how Vishvamitra truly won brahminhood, in this very birth and without changing his body.”

The Bow, Four Weddings, and the Road North

The next morning, in sargas 66 to 67, Janaka tells the story of the bow of Shiva and his pledge to give his daughter, born of no mother’s womb, to whoever strings it, and Vishvamitra says only, “Show the bow to Rama,” and then, “Rama, my child, look at the bow.” The bow breaks, and of all the people in that hall only Vishvamitra, Janaka, and the two princes keep their feet. In sargas 70 to 73 the same sage asks for the two daughters of Janaka’s brother Kushadhvaja for Bharata and Shatrughna, so that the two houses are bound four times over in a single day, and at the altar Vasishtha sets him and Shatananda before him as the rite begins. In sarga 74, when the night after the weddings has passed, the great sage goes to the two kings, asks their leave, and turns north on his own path. That is his last scene in the poem. On the road home, when Parashurama challenges Rama, Dasharatha pleads with him by that name: he is worthy of reverence “for your kinship with Vishvamitra, the sage who led me out of Ayodhya and who is your father’s maternal uncle.”

The Vishvamitra of Other Texts

The Mahabharata keeps this same Kaushika in two further stories, each on its own track. In the Adi Parva, Kalmashapada’s curse, a rakshasa named Kinkara enters the body of a king at Vishvamitra’s command, and the hundred sons of Vasishtha are eaten one by one. In the Udyoga Parva, the story of Galava has Dharma himself come to Vishvamitra’s door in Vasishtha’s shape; the sage stands a hundred years with the cooked offering held on his head, living on air, and in that moment his Kshatriya nature leaves him and he receives the standing of a Brahmin; then, worn down by his disciple Galava’s insistence on a parting fee, he names eight hundred moon-white horses, each with one black ear. The Yoga Vasistha opens with the same sage walking into Dasharatha’s court once more to ask for Rama, and this time finding a prince sick of the world; he reminds Vasishtha of the knowledge Brahma gave the two of them on Mount Nishadha, the knowledge that ended their old enmity, and asks that it now be given to Rama. Tulsidas’s Bala Kanda, in Hindi, brings him to Ayodhya as well; that telling is its own and is not blended in here.

His Path

The Sacrifice for Sons, and the Birth of Rama · A sage who has the gate-keepers carry in his own name, and a welcome like rain on dry ground.

Ahalya, and the Stories of the Road · A family line told past midnight on the bank of the Shona, and an order given at the door of an empty hermitage.

Parashurama and the Return to Ayodhya · A sage who turns north the morning after the weddings, and his name spoken to an angry Brahmin with an axe.

What He Earned Was a Word

The poem shows Valmiki’s Vishvamitra twice, and the order is reversed. Rama meets him first as a teacher, the man who gives the two lores and the missiles, tells stories the whole length of the road, and gives orders, and only afterward hears from Shatananda who this man had been: a king who lost an army and a hundred sons over a cow, who asked for weapons after his first defeat and for austerity after his second, whose anger builds Trishanku a heaven and spends on Rambha the merit of a thousand years. Brahma comes four times, and each time the sage sits down again, because the word he wants is in no god’s keeping; it belongs to the one man whose staff had beaten him. After that word he asks nothing for himself at the gate of Ayodhya; he asks for a boy for ten days, and when the rite is finished he tells the boy that he has carried out his guru’s bidding. At Mithila he says only, “Rama, my child, look at the bow,” and the morning after the weddings he turns north. The poem never tells his end. What it tells is that the word was earned in this very birth, in this very body.