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.