The Story of Yayati

King Raji and the Throne of Indra

Pururava’s eldest son Ayu had married a daughter of Rahu, and she bore him five sons, Nahusha, Kshatravriddha, Rambha, Raji and Anena. Raji grew into a king with five hundred sons of his own, every one of them of a strength and a daring that nothing could match. In his day the devas and the daityas moved toward war once more. Each side meant to kill the other to the last fighter, and before a weapon was lifted both went together to Brahma, who had made them both, and asked him, “In this quarrel between the two of us, which side will win?” Brahma named neither of them. He named a king of the earth, a mortal standing below both armies. “The side for which King Raji takes up his weapons and fights,” he said, “that side will win.” From that moment the war in heaven would be decided by whichever side could get to one man first.

The daityas reached Raji first and asked for his help. He heard them out and set his price. “If, once the devas are beaten, I may become your Indra, then I can fight on your side.” The daityas would not pay it. “We do not say one thing and act another way,” they told him. “Our Indra is Prahlada, and this whole effort of ours is for him.” Prahlada, the daitya prince whom Vishnu had carried unharmed through every death his own father devised for him, was the one king his people would keep at any cost, and they went home without Raji. Then the devas came and asked the same help, and heard the same condition, and they accepted it on the spot. “You yourself will be our Indra,” they said. So Raji went to war at the head of the deva army, and with one great weapon after another he destroyed the whole host of the daityas.

When the enemy was finished, Indra came to Raji and bent until his crowned head was under the king’s feet. He lifted both of those feet and set them on his own head, the head that wore the crown of svarga, with the dust of a mortal’s road on it, and said, “You guard us from fear and you give us food, and so you are our father; you stand highest in all the worlds, because I, the Indra of the three worlds, am your son.” The king laughed at that. “Very well,” he said, “so be it.” A flattering word and an entreaty were wrong to brush aside even when they came from the enemy’s side, he said, and these had come from his own. With that Raji went back to his capital, and Indra, who had just called himself a son, stayed on in the seat of Indra, exactly where he had been before the war.

In time Raji went to svarga, and his five hundred sons were left behind with a claim they had not yet thought to press. Narada, the devarshi who carries news and questions between the worlds, put it to them: by every settled custom a son inherits his father’s kingdom, and Indra had made himself their father’s son with his own mouth. So the sons went to Indra and asked for their father’s kingdom by that custom. He refused. They took it. Those strong men beat Indra in the field and sat in his seat themselves, and they enjoyed the post of Indra for a long age, and with the post came everything that had fed it. All that while Indra lived without his share of the yajnas of the three worlds, the portion poured into the fire in his name at every rite, on which a deva’s splendor is fed. One day he found Brihaspati, the purohita of the devas, sitting alone, and asked him for the one thing he could still bring himself to name. “Can you give me, for my satisfaction, even a piece of purodasha the size of a badari fruit?” One piece of the offering cake, no bigger than a jujube: that was what the Indra of the three worlds had come to. Brihaspati said, “If it is so, why did you not tell me before? What is there that I cannot do for you? Within a few days I will set you in your post again.” He began two homas. One was abhichara, the rite that reaches out through the fire to do harm, and its target was the minds of Raji’s sons; the other fed oblations to the teja of Indra. Under that spell the sons of Raji turned hostile to the Brahmins, let go of dharma and turned their backs on the Veda, and once they stood without dharma and without conduct, Indra killed them. Made radiant again by his purohita, he took back his place in svarga. Whoever hears this account of Indra falling from his post and climbing back to it never falls from his own, and no wickedness ever enters him.

The Curse of Yayati

Raji’s brother Nahusha, another of Ayu’s sons, had six sons of his own, each of them strong and bold: Yati, Yayati, Samyati, Ayati, Viyati and Kriti. Yati wanted no kingdom at all, and the throne went past him to Yayati, who took it. Yayati married twice, and both his wives came out of the daitya camp. Devayani was the daughter of Shukracharya, the Ushanas of the old hymns and the guru of the daityas; Sharmishtha was the daughter of Vrishaparva, the daitya king. The daughter of the daityas’ guru and the daughter of their king lived under one roof as the wives of a king of the lunar line. About their line one shloka is still recited: Devayani bore Yadu and Turvasu, and Vrishaparva’s daughter Sharmishtha bore Druhyu, Anu and Puru.

Then Shukracharya cursed Yayati, and old age seized him long before its time. The curse put a finished body on a king who had not finished with the world; everything in him that wanted was as young as it had been the day before, and the body could no longer carry it anywhere. For a while there was nothing to be done about it. Later, when Shukra was pleased with him again, his grace came with one concession: the old age need not stay where it had fallen. Yayati could give it to another, if another would take it, and take that person’s youth in exchange. A father with five sons heard that and began to count.

He went to his eldest son, Yadu, Devayani’s child and so Shukra’s own grandson, and spoke plainly. “Child, by your mother’s father’s curse old age has seized me before its time, and now by his grace I wish to give it to you. I am not yet satisfied with the pleasures of the senses, and I want to enjoy them with your youth for a thousand years. You must not refuse me in this, in any way.” Yadu heard his father out and would not take the old age. Yayati cursed him where he stood. “Your offspring will never be fit for the royal throne.”

He asked Turvasu next, and then Druhyu, and then Anu, each time the same thing: give me your youth and take my old age from me. Each of them refused, and each was cursed in his turn. Last of all he came to the youngest, Sharmishtha’s son Puru, and said to him what he had said to the four before. Puru bowed low before his father, with humility and with respect, and gave his answer without holding anything back: “This is a great favor to us.” He took his father’s old age onto himself and gave him his own youth.

The Futility of Indulgence

With Puru’s youth on him Yayati was young again, and he used the years the way a king is permitted to use them. He enjoyed the objects of the senses as they came in their season, as far as his zeal carried him and never past the line of dharma, and he protected his subjects well. With the apsara Vishvachi and with Devayani he tasted pleasure in every form it takes, and each time he told himself, “With this I will put an end to desire,” and each morning he woke eager for more. Constant enjoyment did its slow work on him. The desires he had meant to finish became very dear to him, dearer with every year he spent on them. Then one day the king heard his own condition clearly, and he gave voice to it.

“Craving for enjoyments is never calmed by enjoying them. It grows, the way a fire grows when ghee is poured into it. All the grain and the barley, the gold, the cattle and the women of the whole earth do not satisfy even one man, so craving is to be given up whole. When a man holds no sinful feeling toward any being, then for that equal-seeing man every direction fills with happiness. This craving is very hard for the dull-minded to give up; it does not slacken even in old age; the wise man who sets it down is filled with happiness. In old age the hair and the teeth wear out. The hope of life and the hope of wealth do not wear out, even when the man is worn out. A thousand years have passed with me fastened to the objects of sense, and still my desire for them rises in me every day. So now I will give this up. I will fix my mind on Bhagavan alone, free of every pair of opposites, free of mamata, of anything I still call mine, and I will go to the forest and wander with the deer.”

So Yayati took his old age back from Puru and gave the young man his youth again, and then he set the earth in order before he left it. Turvasu he placed in the southeast as mandalika, holding that quarter under the throne; Druhyu in the west, Yadu in the south, and Anu in the north. Puru, the son who had given, he consecrated king of the whole earth. Then the man who had asked for a thousand years and had been given them walked out of his own gates in the old body he had taken back, and went into the forest, and gave himself to tapas.