The Sage Who Drank the Ocean

As the Pandavas journeyed among the holy places, the sage Lomasha told them of the great rishi Agastya, the small but mighty sage whose deeds had shaped the very world, and whose story began with a strange and troubling vision.

In his youth (said Lomasha) Agastya was a sage of fierce austerity who had given himself wholly to penance and had no thought of marriage or children. One day, deep in the forest, he came upon a pit, and hanging head-downward over its mouth he saw a company of sorrowful figures, clinging by a single fraying thread that a rat was steadily gnawing through. He asked who they were, and they answered, "We are your ancestors, the Pitris. We hang here over the abyss because our line is about to end. You, Agastya, are our only descendant, and you have chosen penance over progeny. If you beget no son to continue the line and offer the rites for us, this thread will break and we will fall into ruin. Only a child of yours can save us."

Agastya understood then that a man owes a debt not only to the gods and the sages but to his own ancestors, and that even the highest penance does not free him from it. So he resolved, against his own inclination, to marry and father a son, and so to lift his fathers out of the pit.

But Agastya could find no woman who suited him, for he wished for a wife of perfect qualities, and such a one did not exist. So the sage, by his spiritual power, gathered the most beautiful and excellent features from every creature of the world - the grace of the deer, the eyes of the doe, the loveliness of all lovely things - and from them he shaped, particle by particle, a flawless girl-child.

Now at that time the king of Vidarbha was childless and longing for offspring, praying and performing penance for a child. Agastya, in his compassion and his wisdom, caused the perfect girl-child he had fashioned to be born as the daughter of that king. The child was named Lopamudra, because in making her Agastya had taken away (lopa) the finest qualities of all creatures to form her. She grew in the king's palace into a maiden of unequalled beauty and virtue, surrounded by a hundred handmaids and every royal comfort, and many kings desired her - but Agastya had made her for himself.

When Lopamudra had grown, Agastya came to the king of Vidarbha and asked for her hand. The king was dismayed, for though he honored the sage above all men, he could not bear to give his cherished, delicately raised daughter to a stern ascetic who lived in the forest on roots and wore bark and owned nothing. He did not dare refuse outright, fearing the sage's curse, but he could not bring himself to consent, and so he stood silent and miserable.

It was Lopamudra herself who settled the matter. Wise beyond her years, she came to her grieving father and said, "Do not be troubled on my account, father. Give me to the sage Agastya. He is far greater in his poverty than any of these kings in their wealth. I will be honored to be his wife." And so, with her own glad consent, the princess was given to the sage.

Then Lopamudra did a thing that amazed the court. She took off her costly silks and her gold and her jewels with her own hands and laid them all aside, and she put on instead the rough bark garments and deer-skins of a forest ascetic. Leaving behind the palace and all its luxury without a backward glance, the pampered princess walked into the wilderness beside her husband to share his life of penance.

Lopamudra served her husband faithfully in the forest, growing radiant with her penance and devotion, until Agastya was filled with love for her and wished for the son the ancestors required. But when he approached her, Lopamudra set a gentle and wise condition.

"My lord," she said, "in my father's house I slept on soft beds and was adorned with garlands and jewels. I do not ask for those things for vanity's sake. But I ask that when we come together to bring a child into the world, you approach me as a king approaches his queen - with the fitting riches and honor that such a sacred act deserves. Let our child be conceived not in want but in worthiness. Go, therefore, and acquire wealth honestly, and then return to me."

Agastya saw the rightness of her wish. "You have spoken well," he said. "I will go and gather wealth without harming any righteous man, and then I will return." And so the sage set out to seek riches, not for greed, but to honor his wife and the child they hoped to bring into the world.

Agastya went first to a rich and righteous king and asked him for his surplus wealth. But when the sage examined the king's accounts, he found that the king's income and expenditure were exactly balanced, with no true surplus - and to take from him would be to harm his subjects. So Agastya would take nothing. He went to a second king, and a third, and found the same: each was a just ruler whose wealth was already given over to the needs of his people, with nothing to spare that could be taken without injustice.

Unwilling to impoverish good kings, Agastya joined those very kings in their difficulty, and together they considered where great wealth might be found that could be taken from no righteous man. And they thought of one being who possessed vast treasure and deserved no mercy at all: the asura Ilvala, a demon of great wealth and greater cruelty, who dwelt with his brother and was the enemy of all holy men.

So Agastya, with the kings, set out for the hall of the asura Ilvala - though the sage knew well the deadly trap that waited there, into which many a brahmin before him had walked and never walked out.

Now Ilvala the asura had a brother named Vatapi, and between them they had devised a horrible game by which they murdered brahmins. Ilvala had gained a magic power: whatever he commanded to come forth would come, even from the dead. He hated brahmins, and so he and Vatapi turned this power into a slaughter.

When a brahmin guest came to his hall, Ilvala would transform his brother Vatapi into a ram, and cook the ram's flesh, and serve it to the unsuspecting guest as a feast of hospitality. Then, after the brahmin had eaten and the meal was inside him, Ilvala would call aloud, "Vatapi, come forth!" And Vatapi, obeying the magic, would burst alive out of the brahmin's belly, tearing him apart and killing him, and then return to his brother's side, whole again. By this monstrous trick the two brothers had murdered a great many holy men and laughed over their deaths, and grown rich on the spoils.

It was into this hall that Agastya now came as a guest, and Ilvala, delighted to see another brahmin walk into his snare, welcomed him warmly and at once made his brother Vatapi into a ram and prepared the deadly feast.

But Agastya was no ordinary brahmin, and he knew exactly what was being done. He sat down to the feast and calmly ate the flesh of the ram that was the asura Vatapi, finishing the whole of it. Ilvala waited, gloating, for the moment to call his brother back to life inside the sage's belly.

Then Ilvala cried out his deadly summons: "Vatapi, come forth!"

But Agastya only smiled, patted his stomach, and said quietly, "Vatapi is digested. He has gone the way of all that I have eaten. He will not be coming forth." For such was the digestive fire of the great sage's penance that he had wholly consumed and dissolved the asura in the instant of eating him, before Ilvala could call him back. There was nothing left of Vatapi to summon. The demon who had burst alive out of so many murdered brahmins was himself digested to nothing in the belly of Agastya, and he died.

Ilvala stared in horror and grief, for his brother and partner in cruelty was gone, undone by the very trick that had served them so long, turned at last against them by a sage wiser than their wickedness.

His brother dead and his power broken, Ilvala had no choice but to yield. He gave Agastya the great wealth the sage and the kings had come for - much gold and many jewels and fine teams of horses - and the sage took it without injustice, for it came from a cruel demon who had earned no mercy. The righteous kings received their share, and Agastya carried his portion home.

Returning to Lopamudra with the honest wealth she had asked for, Agastya approached her now as a husband worthy of the sacred purpose, and in time a son was born to them. The child was a sage even in the womb, and grew to be a great rishi in his own right. By that son the line of Agastya was continued, the prescribed rites for the ancestors could be performed, and the Pitris who had hung sorrowing over the pit were lifted out of danger and saved from their fall. Agastya had paid his debt to his fathers, exactly as the figures in the pit had asked of him long before.

Agastya's deeds did not end there, for he was a shaper of the very world. In those days the great mountain Vindhya grew jealous of the golden peak of Meru, around which the sun was said to circle in honor. In his envy the Vindhya began to grow, rising higher and higher into the sky, until he threatened to rise so high that he would block the path of the sun and the moon and throw the whole world into ruin. The gods, alarmed, could find no one able to check the swelling mountain - except Agastya, whom the Vindhya revered as his teacher.

So Agastya came to the Vindhya, and the mountain, out of respect, bowed low before his master. And Agastya said gently, "I must travel to the southern lands, and the way is hard. Stay just as you are, bowed down low, until I return, so that I may pass over you easily. When I come back, you may rise again." The mountain, in obedience, lowered himself and waited.

But Agastya crossed to the south and settled there, and he never returned to the north. And so the Vindhya, bound by his promise to his teacher, remains bowed low to this day, never daring to rise, and the sun and the moon keep their courses, and the world was saved - by the cleverness and authority of one small sage.

Greatest of all Agastya's deeds was this. There was a host of fierce asuras called the Kalakeyas who, defeated by the gods, had taken refuge by day in the depths of the great ocean, and by night came forth to attack and devour the sages in their hermitages and to destroy the rites that sustained the gods. So long as they could hide in the unsearchable deep, no one could reach them or destroy them, and the gods despaired, for the holy men were being slaughtered and the world's order undone.

The gods went to Agastya and begged his help. And Agastya did a thing beyond all reckoning. He went down to the shore of the boundless sea, and he took the entire ocean up in his cupped hands, and he drank it. Sip by sip he swallowed the whole vast deep until the sea-bed lay bare and dry under the sky, its waters all gone down into the sage's body.

With the ocean drained and their hiding-place laid open, the Kalakeya asuras were exposed, naked upon the dry sea-floor with nowhere to flee. The gods fell upon them and destroyed them utterly, and the slaughter of the sages was ended. When it was done and the gods asked Agastya to give back the sea, he answered that he had already digested it and could not - and so the ocean had to be refilled long afterward, by other means, in another age. But the world had been saved again by the sage who could swallow the sea.

Lomasha finished the tale, and the Pandavas marveled, for they had not known that so many of the world's wonders were the work of a single sage.

"Such was Agastya, son of Pandu," said Lomasha. "Small of body, but greater in spirit than the mightiest. He lifted his ancestors out of the pit by doing his duty though it went against his own desire. He won a perfect wife and honored her wisdom. He digested the demon Vatapi who had murdered a hundred brahmins, and he humbled the proud Vindhya, and he drank the very ocean dry to save the holy men of the world. He teaches us that true greatness is not measured in size or show, but in penance, in wisdom, and in the willingness to do what the world's need requires."

Yudhishthira took the lesson to heart, for he too was a man often asked to do hard duties against his own wish. The brothers honored the places sacred to Agastya and went on along their pilgrim road, carrying with them the memory of the small sage who had shaped mountains and seas.