The Wife Turned to Stone

The sages told the Pandavas of Ahalya, the wife of the sage Gautama, who fell through a god's deception and lay for ages under a curse, and was redeemed at last by the touch of the Lord - a tale of the cost of a lapse, and of the grace that redeems even the fallen.

Ahalya was a woman of surpassing beauty, fashioned, it was said, as the most perfect and lovely of all women. She was given in marriage to the great sage Gautama, an ascetic of immense penance and power, and she lived with him in his forest hermitage as his devoted wife. Her beauty was famous through all the worlds - so famous that it troubled even the heaven of the gods, for Indra, the king of the gods, conceived a desire for her that he could not master.

Indra's desire for Ahalya grew until he resolved to possess her by deception. He waited until the sage Gautama had left the hermitage for his morning rites at the river, and then he worked his cunning: he took upon himself the exact form of Gautama himself, assuming the sage's appearance perfectly, so that none could tell the false from the true.

In the guise of her own husband, Indra came to Ahalya. And here the old tellings differ, and leave the matter troublingly unclear: some say Ahalya was wholly deceived, and yielded believing the disguised god to be truly her husband returned; others say that she saw through the disguise, and yet, flattered that the king of the gods himself should desire her, did not refuse him as she should have. Whether deceived or half-knowing, the lapse occurred: Ahalya, in the form-disguised presence of Indra, was unfaithful to her husband, and the king of the gods accomplished the wrong he had desired.

It was a deception and a lapse together - Indra's calculated trickery, and Ahalya's failure, whether through innocence deceived or vanity yielding, to hold fast to the perfect faithfulness her station demanded.

But the deception could not be hidden from a sage of Gautama's power. As Indra, his wrong accomplished, made to slip away from the hermitage - some say in the form of a cat, trying to creep out unseen - Gautama himself returned from the river, and by his yogic insight he perceived at once everything that had happened in his absence: the god's disguise, the trespass, his wife's lapse.

The great sage's wrath was terrible. He had been wronged in the deepest way a man can be wronged, in his own home, by the king of the gods wearing his own stolen face, and his own wife had failed in her faithfulness. And Gautama, in his fury, pronounced his curses - one upon the god who had deceived him, and one upon the wife who had fallen - and the curses fell heavy upon them both.

Upon Indra, the king of the gods, who had abused his power and his shape-shifting to violate the sanctity of another man's home, Gautama laid a humiliating curse - that his body should be marked all over with a thousand signs of his shame, a disgrace he would carry as the visible mark of his deed. (In time, by the mercy of the gods, those marks of shame were transformed into a thousand eyes, so that Indra became the thousand-eyed one - but the curse and its shame came first.) So even the king of the gods was punished, and learned that no power places one above the law of right and wrong, and that to abuse strength and cunning to wrong the innocent brings disgrace even upon a god.

And upon Ahalya his wife, Gautama laid a heavy curse as well: that she should lose her beauty and her living form, and lie in the hermitage invisible and unregarded - in some tellings turned to a lifeless stone, in others reduced to a bare, ascetic existence, subsisting on air alone, unseen by all - for a long age of penance, suffering and atoning for her lapse. Yet even in his wrath Gautama set a term and a mercy to the curse: that it would not last forever, but would end, and Ahalya be restored and purified, on the day that the Lord himself, born as Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, should come to that hermitage in a later age, and the dust of his blessed feet should fall upon her. So her redemption was promised from the very beginning, set into the curse itself - a long penance, but with grace waiting at the end of it.

So Ahalya passed out of the living world into her long expiation. She lay in the deserted hermitage, unseen and unregarded, year upon year, age upon age - a still and lifeless form, like a stone among the leaves, or a bare ascetic shape subsisting on the air alone, doing penance for her lapse through the slow turning of the centuries.

It was a hard and lonely atonement, but it was not without hope, for she knew that an end had been promised - that one day, however far off, the Lord would come, and the dust of his feet would lift the curse and restore her. And so through all the long ages of her penance, Ahalya waited - patient, repentant, enduring her punishment and purifying herself through it, holding to the promise of redemption that had been set at the very heart of her curse. The hermitage fell into ruin and was forgotten; the world went on and knew nothing of the woman lying there in her long expiation; and still she waited for the coming of the Lord.

At last, in a later age, the appointed day arrived. The prince Rama of Ayodhya - the Lord himself come down to the earth in human form - journeyed with his brother Lakshmana and the sage Vishvamitra, and their road led them past the deserted, ruined hermitage where Ahalya lay in her long penance. Vishvamitra told Rama the whole story - of Ahalya's lapse, of Gautama's curse, and of the promise that the dust of Rama's own feet would redeem her - and bid him go to the place and lift the curse.

Rama entered the overgrown, forgotten hermitage and came to where Ahalya lay, a still form awaiting him through the long ages. And as the dust of the Lord's blessed feet touched her, the curse was lifted in an instant. Ahalya rose, restored to her living, lovely form, purified and freed - her long penance complete, her lapse atoned for and washed away, redeemed by the grace and the touch of the Lord she had waited for through so many ages. She had endured her punishment fully, and now grace lifted what penance had prepared.

Ahalya, restored and purified, worshipped Rama with overflowing gratitude, honoring the Lord whose grace had redeemed her at the end of her long penance. And then her husband Gautama, whose curse had run its course and whose anger had long since cooled into something gentler over the ages, came to her - and the long-estranged husband and wife were reconciled at last.

Gautama received Ahalya back, purified by her penance and redeemed by the Lord, forgiving the lapse that had been atoned for through so many ages of suffering. The wrong had been grievous, and the punishment long and hard; but the punishment had been fully borne, the atonement was complete, and grace had lifted the curse - and so forgiveness and reunion became possible. The sage and his wife, parted for an age by deception and a curse, were made whole again, their long ordeal ended in reconciliation rather than in lasting ruin.

The sages drew the lessons of the difficult tale for the Pandavas, and there were several, held in a careful balance.

"There is in it, first, the cost of deception and the failure of virtue. Indra abused his power and his cunning to violate the sanctity of another's home, and even the king of the gods was disgraced for it, learning that no power sets one above the law of right and wrong. And Ahalya, whether deceived or yielding, failed in the faithfulness her station demanded, and bore a long and heavy penance for it. The tale does not pretend the lapse was nothing, nor that it went unpunished.

"But the deeper teaching is one of hope - that a fall, however grievous, need not be the end. Ahalya's curse carried its own redemption within it from the first; her long penance was not a hopeless damnation but an atonement, with grace waiting at its end. She endured her punishment fully, purified herself through her long suffering, and was redeemed at last by the touch of the Lord and reconciled with her husband through forgiveness. So the tale teaches that even the deepest fall can be atoned for and redeemed; that penance sincerely borne prepares the soul for grace; and that the grace of the Lord can lift even one who has fallen and been long under a curse, and restore her, purified, to wholeness and to love. No one is so fallen as to be beyond redemption, if penance and grace are given their time."

And the Pandavas, who knew their own failures and their own long ordeal of expiation, took to heart this hard and hopeful tale of the fall and the redemption of Ahalya.