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The Beginning of the Lunar Dynasty
Maitreya asked, “Bhagavan, you have told me the solar dynasty; now tell me the story of that lunar dynasty in which kings as mighty as Nahusha, Yayati, and Kartavirya Arjuna arose.” Parashara said, “Listen.”
From the navel-lotus of Bhagavan Narayana, the maker of all the worlds, Brahma appeared. Brahma’s son was Atri, and Atri’s son was Chandra, the moon. Brahma made him the lord of all the herbs, of the brahmanas, and of the stars. Chandra performed the Rajasuya sacrifice, but the pride of his own splendor overtook him, and he carried off Tara, the wife of Brihaspati, the guru of the gods. Though Brahma and the celestial sages pleaded with him at length, he would not give her up. Over this a fierce war broke out between the gods and the daityas, the war called Tarakamaya, in which Shukra took the side of Chandra and Rudra the side of Brihaspati. Then the whole world, shaken to its depths, took refuge with Brahma, and Brahma halted the war and returned Tara to Brihaspati.
But Tara was with child. At Brihaspati’s word she left that child in a thicket of reeds, and when the boy was born, radiant beyond measure, both Brihaspati and Chandra claimed him as their own. However much the gods pressed her, Tara stayed silent out of shame; at last, when Brahma himself asked, she said the child was Chandra’s son. Then Chandra, delighted, held him to his heart and gave him the name Budha.
The Meeting of Pururava and Urvashi
It was this Budha who fathered Pururava upon Ila. Pururava was a king of great generosity, devoted to sacrifice and full of radiance. Meanwhile the apsara Urvashi, under a curse from Mitra and Varuna, had been made to live in the world of mortals. When her gaze fell upon that truthful, handsome, and wise king, she gave up her longing for the joys of heaven and came to him with her whole heart absorbed in him; and the king too, entranced by her beauty, her delicacy, and the play of her movements, forgot everything else.
The king spoke boldly: “Fair one, I desire you; be gracious, and give me your love.” Urvashi answered with modesty: “It can be so, if you can keep three promises for me. Beside my bed are tied two rams, reared as dearly as my own sons; never let them be taken from me. Never let me see you unclothed. And clarified butter alone shall be my food.” The king said, “So it shall be.”
And so, wandering through lovely forests such as Chaitraratha and lakes such as the Manasa, the two of them lived together for sixty thousand years, and day by day their love deepened. Urvashi no longer had any wish to return to the world of the gods.
The Separation
In heaven, meanwhile, without Urvashi the apsaras and gandharvas felt the place gone empty. So one night a gandharva named Vishvavasu stole one of the rams from beside their bedchamber. Hearing the ram’s cry of distress, Urvashi said, “Who is carrying off the child of a helpless woman?” But for fear that the queen would see him unclothed, the king did not rise. Then the gandharvas carried off the second ram as well. Now Urvashi began to lament: “Alas, helpless and without a husband, I have fallen under the power of a coward.”
This taunt the king could not bear. It is dark, he thought, the queen will not see me unclothed now, and taking up his sword he ran after the gandharvas. In that very moment the gandharvas flung a blaze of lightning across the sky, and in its light, seeing the king without his garments, and her promise thereby broken, Urvashi left the place at once. The gandharvas dropped the rams where they stood and returned to heaven.
When the king came back with the rams and did not find Urvashi in the bedchamber, still unclothed he began to roam from forest to forest like a madman. In his wandering he came one day to Kurukshetra, where on the bank of a lake he saw Urvashi among other apsaras. “Stop, O cruel-hearted one,” and many such words he began to say. Urvashi said, “There is nothing to be gained by these frenzied gestures. I am with child at this time; come again after a year, and then you will have a son, and I will stay with you for one night as well.”
When the year had passed the king came there. Urvashi gave him a son named Ayu, and staying with him for one night conceived five more sons, and she said that out of love for him all the gandharvas wished to grant the king a boon. The king said, “There is nothing left for me to gain beyond Urvashi’s company.” Then the gandharvas gave him a vessel of fire and said, “Divide this fire by the Vedic rule into three parts, the Garhapatya, the Ahavaniya, and the Dakshina, and make your offering with the desire for Urvashi’s company; then you will surely gain what you seek.”
The king set out carrying that vessel, but along the way, deep in the forest, he thought: what a fool I am, I have brought this vessel and not Urvashi herself; and leaving it there he returned to the city. When half the night had passed and sleep left him, he repented and went back to fetch it, but the vessel was gone. In its place a pipal tree had grown up from within a shami. The king brought that ashvattha to the city, made the fire-sticks (arani) from it, measured it out according to the syllables of the Gayatri, churned out the fire, and by offering into the three kinds of fire won the reward of dwelling in the same world as Urvashi. In this way the two of them were never parted again. In earlier ages there had been only a single fire; from this one fire came the spread of the three kinds of fire in this manvantara.
This same love story appears in the Shrimad Bhagavata as well, though here the Vishnu Purana tells it in its own measured way.
Jahnu and the Line Beyond
Pururava had six sons: Ayu, Amavasu, Vishvavasu, Shrutayu, Shatayu, and Ayutayu. In the line of Amavasu came Jahnu, who, seeing his whole sacrificial hall flooded by the water of the Ganga, his eyes reddening with anger, established the Lord within himself through deep meditation and drank up the entire Ganga. Then the celestial sages appeased him, and the Ganga was given back to him as his daughter.
Further along this line came Kusha, and Kusha’s son Kushamba performed austerities out of a longing for a son the equal of Indra. Seeing that fierce tapas, and fearing that anyone might become his equal, Indra himself became the son; he was called Gadhi and was known as a Kaushika. Gadhi gave birth to a daughter named Satyavati, whom Richika, son of Bhrigu, took as his wife. Longing for offspring, Richika prepared two dishes of consecrated food (charu), one for Satyavati and one for her mother; into the first he put the calm and knowledge fitting for a brahmana, and into the second the strength and valor fitting for a kshatriya.
But the mother, by mistake, gave her own dish to her daughter and took her daughter’s. On his return Richika saw what had happened and said that, the dishes having been exchanged, Satyavati’s son would now be as fierce as a kshatriya and the mother’s son a peace-loving brahmana. When Satyavati pleaded with him, he granted this much: that fierce nature would descend into her grandson and would spare her own son. In time Satyavati gave birth to Jamadagni and her mother to Vishvamitra; Satyavati herself became the river called Kaushiki. From Jamadagni and Renuka was born the Lord Parashurama, destroyer of all the kshatriyas, who was a portion of Narayana; and to Vishvamitra the gods gave a son named Shunahshepa, from whom many lineages of the Kaushika gotra descended.
Source: Vishnu Purana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)