Sagara’s Sixty Thousand Sons
King Sagara had two wives: Sumati, daughter of Kashyapa, and Keshini, daughter of the king of Vidarbha. Wanting children, the two queens gave themselves to the worship of Bhagavan Aurva in the deepest samadhi, and the boon he gave them had a fork in it. “One of you will bear a single son, and the line will go on through him. The other will bear sixty thousand sons. Choose between you which of you wants which.” Keshini asked for the one son. Sumati asked for the sixty thousand. The maharshi said tathastu, and within a few days Keshini bore a son named Asamanjas, who would carry the line, and Sumati, Kashyapa’s daughter, bore sixty thousand.
Prince Asamanjas in time had a son of his own, Amshuman. Asamanjas himself had been ill-behaved from his earliest childhood. His father told himself that sense would come once childhood was over, and when youth came and went and the conduct was what it had always been, Sagara cast him out. The sixty thousand brothers took up the conduct of Asamanjas and copied it exactly, and across the whole world the good path of yajna and the rest was cut off by them. So the devas went to Shri Kapiladeva, the store of all knowledge, free of every fault, an amsha of Bhagavan Purushottama walking the earth in a body, and bowed to him and laid the matter out. “All these sons of King Sagara follow the conduct of Asamanjas. With every one of them on the wrong road, what will become of the world? You took this body to protect the distressed. Protect the world from this.” Kapila heard them and said, “Within a few days, all of these will perish.”
The Sacrificial Horse and Kapila’s Gaze
At this very time Sagara began an ashvamedha, and the horse went out under the guard of his sons. Someone stole it from under them and went down into the earth. The princes followed the marks of its hooves, and each of the sixty thousand dug his own yojana of ground, so that the digging carried them all the way into Patala. There they saw their horse, wandering loose. Close by sat the paramarshi Kapila, his head bowed, lighting every direction with his tejas like the autumn sun in a sky with no cloud in it, and to them he was the thief of their horse.
“Here is the one who has wronged us, the obstructer of the yajna. Kill this horse-stealer. Kill him!” Shouting it, those wicked men raised their weapons and ran at him. Bhagavan Kapiladeva looked at them, and the look was no more than a slight change in his eyes. Fire broke out of their own bodies, and all sixty thousand of them were burned to destruction where they stood.
Amshuman and the Promise of the Ganga
Word came to King Sagara that his sons, following the horse, had been burned by the tejas of the maharshi Kapila, and he sent Amshuman, the son of Asamanjas, to bring the horse back. Amshuman went down by the path his uncles had dug, came to Bhagavan Kapila, bowed with devotion and praised him. “Child, go,” Kapila said. “Take this horse to your grandfather, and ask whatever boon you wish. Your grandson will bring the Ganga down from svarga to the earth.” Amshuman asked for one thing only. “Give me the boon that brings svarga to my forefathers, who were struck down by the brahmadanda and are not fit for it now.” “I have told you already,” Bhagavan Kapila said. “Your grandson will bring her down, and the moment the Ganga’s water touches the ashes of their bones, they will all go to svarga. Such is the greatness of the water that flows from the toe-nail of Bhagavan Vishnu’s foot. A man who bathes in it with a wish in his heart has his wish. And a dead man who wished for nothing, whose bone or skin or sinew or hair, or any part of his body, falls into that water or is touched by it, is carried by it to svarga at once.” Amshuman bowed to him and took the horse.
He came up with it to his grandfather’s yajnashala, and Sagara, with the horse in his hands again, completed the yajna. The pit his sons had dug, a yojana for each of them, open all the way down to Patala, the king took to be a son of his own, out of a father’s love for the sons who had dug it, and that is how the ocean came to be called sagara.
Amshuman’s son was Dilipa, and Dilipa’s son was Bhagiratha. It was Bhagiratha who brought the Ganga down from svarga to the earth, and she took the name Bhagirathi from him. Kapila’s word to Amshuman was kept in Amshuman’s grandson.
From Bhagiratha to Rama
From Bhagiratha the line ran on: Suhotra, Shruti, Nabhaga, Ambarisha, Sindhudvipa, Ayutayu, and Ayutayu’s son Rituparna, the king who stood by Nala and was a master of the dice; then Sarvakama, Sudasa, and Sudasa’s son Saudasa, called Mitrasaha. One day Saudasa was hunting in the forest and saw two tigers. The forest had been emptied of deer, he judged that these two had done it, and he killed one of them with an arrow. As it died it became a rakshasa, huge and cruel-faced, and the other tiger went off saying, “I will take revenge for this.” In time Saudasa performed a yajna. When it was over and the acharya Vasishtha had gone out, the rakshasa came in wearing Vasishtha’s form and said, “At the close of the yajna I must be fed meat, and the meat must be human flesh. Have it prepared; I will come at once,” and went out again. Then he put on the dress of a cook, and on the king’s order cooked human flesh and set it before the king, and the king held it in a golden vessel and waited for Vasishtha, and when Vasishtha came, offered it to him. Vasishtha looked at the dish and thought, see the crookedness of this king, who knowingly gives me this to eat; and to learn what meat it was he went into meditation, and in meditation he saw. Anger took him, and he cursed the king: “Since you have knowingly given me human flesh to eat, which is wholly unfit for ascetics like us, your craving from now on will be for this alone.” “You yourself gave the order,” the king said. “What? Did I say this?” Vasishtha went into samadhi again, learned the truth of it, and softened. “You will not eat human flesh forever. Only for twelve years.” Saudasa had already taken water into his joined palms to curse the munishvara back. His queen Madayanti caught at him: “This is our kula-guru, the deity of our house. It is wrong to curse the acharya.” He calmed, and now he held a palmful of water charged with a curse and had nowhere to put it. He would not throw it on the earth, for the sake of the grain, nor into the sky, for the sake of the clouds, so he wet his own feet with it, and the anger in the water scorched his feet a mottled color, kalmasha, and from that day he was Kalmashapada. By the force of Vasishtha’s curse, in every sixth kala, at the end of every third day, the rakshasa nature came over him, and he roamed the forest and ate men. One day he came on a munishvara lying with his wife in her ritukala. The couple saw that terrible form and fled, and he seized the Brahmin. The Brahmani pleaded with him every way she knew: “Be pleased with us. You are no rakshasa. You are Mitrasaha, the ornament of Ikshvaku’s line. You know what the joy of union with a woman is; I am unsatisfied; it is wrong to kill my husband.” He ate the Brahmin in front of her, the way a tiger in the forest takes the beast it wants. Then she cursed him in her fury: “You have eaten my husband while I was unsatisfied, so when you go to a woman, your end will come.” And she walked into the fire. Twelve years passed and the curse lifted, and one day his desire turned toward his queen, and Madayanti reminded him of the Brahmani’s words. From then the king gave up the company of women. Later, since he was sonless and asked it of him, Vasishtha placed an embryo in Madayanti. Seven years went by and the embryo was not born, and it was the queen who struck it with a stone, an ashma, and the son born of that blow was named Ashmaka. Ashmaka’s son was Mulaka, and when Parashurama was emptying the earth of kshatriyas, women without clothing surrounded Mulaka and shielded him with their bodies, so he is also called Narikavacha.
From Mulaka came Dasharatha, from him Ilivila, from him Vishvasaha, and Vishvasaha’s son was Khatvanga, who went up at the devas’ asking to fight in the war of the devas and the asuras and killed the daityas for them. When he had done them that service in svarga they pressed a boon on him, and he said, “If I must take a boon, tell me how long I have to live.” One muhurta, they said. He sat down in a vimana the devas gave him, which nothing in the worlds could obstruct, came down to the mortal world at great speed, and said: “If my own self was never dearer to me than the Brahmins, if I never once stepped outside my own dharma, and if in devas and men, in animals, birds and trees and all the rest, I never saw anything other than Shri Achyuta, then let me reach without obstruction that Lord whom the munis worship.” He fixed his mind on Bhagavan Vasudeva, guru of all the devas, beyond words, pure being, the Paramatman, and in that muhurta was absorbed in him. The saptarshis sang a shloka about it that is heard to this day: “On earth there will be no other king like Khatvanga, who, with one muhurta of life left to him, came down from svarga to the earth and by his own intelligence saw the three worlds as Bhagavan Vasudeva, the form of truth.” From Khatvanga came Dirghabahu, from Dirghabahu Raghu, from Raghu Aja, and from Aja, Dasharatha.
A Brief Life of the Lord Rama
In this Dasharatha, Bhagavan Kamalanabha, for the maintenance of the world, became a son through his own amshas in four forms: Rama, Lakshmana, Bharata and Shatrughna. Rama was a boy when he went with Vishvamitra to guard his yajna. On the road he killed the rakshasi Tataka; at the yajnashala he struck Maricha with an arrow that went like wind and flung him into the sea, and destroyed Subahu and the other rakshasas. Ahalya he made sinless with nothing more than his sight. In Janaka’s palace he broke Mahadeva’s bow without effort and won as his wife Shri Sita, Janaka’s daughter, born of no womb, whose bride-price was valor alone. Then he broke the strength and the pride of Parashurama, who had destroyed all the kshatriyas and had been a fire to the whole Haihaya line.
Then, by his father’s word, with no care at all for royal fortune, he went to the forest with his brother Lakshmana and his wife Sita. There he killed Viradha, Khara, Dushana and the other rakshasas, and Kabandha, and Vali; he built a bridge over the sea, destroyed the whole race of rakshasas, and brought home to Ayodhya his wife Sita, Janaka’s daughter, whom Ravana had carried off, whose stain from that carrying off Ravana’s death had already removed, and who, purified by walking into the fire, was praised by all the hosts of the devas. The auspiciousness of his coronation could not be told in a hundred years; here it is in brief. Lakshmana, Bharata, Shatrughna, Vibhishana, Sugriva, Angada, Jambavan, Hanuman and the others served him with the chhatra and the chamara, their faces bright with joy. Brahma, Indra, Agni, Yama, Nirriti, Varuna, Vayu, Kubera, Ishana and all the devas praised him, and Vasishtha, Vamadeva, Valmiki, Markandeya, Vishvamitra, Bharadvaja, Agastya and the other munis, and the Rik, the Yajus, the Saman and the Atharva, while there was dance and song and everything auspicious, and the vina, the venu, the mridanga, the bheri, the pataha, the shankha, the kahala and the gomukha sounded together. In the midst of all the kings, for the protection of all the worlds, Dasharatha’s son, lord of Kosala, ornament of Raghu’s line, beloved of Janaki, dear to his three brothers, Shri Ramachandra was duly consecrated, mounted the throne, and ruled for eleven thousand years. Bharata went out to conquer the gandharva-loka and killed thirty million gandharvas in battle, and Shatrughna killed the rakshasa Lavana, Madhu’s son, whose strength and valor had no equal, and founded the city of Mathura. So Bhagavan Rama, Lakshmana, Bharata and Shatrughna, having destroyed the great wicked ones by their strength and valor and set the whole world in its right order, went back to svarga, and the people of Ayodhya and of the Kosala country, who were devoted to those incarnations past everything else, were absorbed in them and attained salokya, the same world as theirs. Rama had two sons, Kusha and Lava; Lakshmana had Angada and Chandraketu, Bharata had Taksha and Pushkala, and Shatrughna had Subahu and Shurasena. The line of Kusha ran on through many kings. One of them, Maru, Shighraga’s son, lives even now in the village of Kalapa, deep in the practice of yoga, and in a yuga still to come he will found the Suryavamshi kshatriyas afresh; and the line came down at last to Brihadbala, who died in the Bharata war at the hands of Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu.
The Videha Story of Nimi
Ikshvaku had a son named Nimi, and Nimi began a satra, a yajna that would take a thousand years to complete, and for it he chose Vasishtha as his hota. “Indra has already chosen me for a yajna of five hundred years,” Vasishtha told him. “Wait that long. When I come back from there I will be your ritvij too.” The king gave him no answer at all. Vasishtha took the silence for consent and went off to begin Indra’s yajna, and at that very hour Nimi began his own, with Gautama and other hotas in Vasishtha’s place.
The moment Indra’s yajna ended, Vasishtha came back at once, holding to one thought: Nimi’s yajna is mine to perform. He found Gautama doing the hota’s work in it, and the king asleep, and he cursed the sleeping Nimi: “Since he has slighted me and handed the whole rite to Gautama, he will be videha, without a body.” Nimi woke, and answered the curse with one of his own. “Since this wicked guru cursed me while I slept, without a word to my face and in ignorance of the facts, his body too will perish.” Having said it, the king gave up his body. By Nimi’s curse Vasishtha’s linga-deha, the subtle body, entered the virya of Mitra and Varuna, and when the sight of Urvashi drew their seed from them, he took another body out of it. Nimi’s body, meanwhile, was preserved with fragrant oils and the rest, and it neither rotted nor decayed; it lay like the body of a man dead that moment.
When the yajna was complete and the devas came to take their share, the ritvijs said to them, “Give the yajamana a boon.” Urged by the devas, King Nimi spoke to them. “You remove all the sorrows of samsara. In my view there is no sorrow like the one at the parting of body and self. So I do not wish to take a body again. I wish to live only in the eyes of all people.” The devas placed him in the eyes of all beings, and from then on beings began the closing and the opening of the eyelids, the nimesha and the unmesha.
The king had left no son, and for fear of a kingless land the munis churned his body with an arani, a shami stick. A prince was born from it, and because of that birth he was called Janaka; because his father was videha he is called Vaideha, and because he came of the churning, Mithi. His son was Udavasu, and the line ran down through Nandivardhana, Suketu, Devarata and many more to Hrasvaroma’s son Siradhvaja. Siradhvaja was plowing the yajna-ground, wishing for a son, when a daughter was born from the tip of his plow, and her name was Sita. His brother Kushadhvaja was king of Sankashya. From Siradhvaja the line went on through Bhanuman and Shatadyumna and many kings after them to Bahulashva’s son Kriti, and with Kriti this line of the Janakas ends. These are the Maithila kings, and almost all of them took refuge in atma-vidya, the knowledge of the self.
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)