The Chaste Wife and the Three Gods

The sages told the Pandavas of Anasuya, the wife of the sage Atri, whose chastity and devotion were so perfect that they gave her power over the very gods - and of how, when the three great gods themselves came to test her, she humbled them with her purity and her wit.

Atri was one of the great sages, a seer of the highest order, and his wife Anasuya was famed throughout all the worlds as the most faithful and devoted of wives, a pativrata of perfect purity. Her name itself means "free of envy," and she was without jealousy, without ill-will, wholly devoted to her husband and to righteousness. So complete was her chastity and her devotion that, by the law that gives such purity great power, Anasuya had become mighty in spirit - so mighty that her virtue could command the elements and even the gods, and her fame as the most faithful of wives spread to the very heaven of the gods.

The fame of Anasuya's perfect chastity reached the wives of the three great gods - Saraswati, the consort of Brahma; Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu; and Parvati, the consort of Shiva. Whether out of a touch of jealousy at hearing a mortal woman so praised, or out of a wish to see whether her fabled purity was truly as great as the worlds declared, the three goddesses desired that Anasuya's chastity be put to the test.

They went to their husbands - Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer, the three supreme gods of the cosmos - and asked them to go and test the famous chastity of Anasuya, to see whether her devotion could truly withstand any trial. And the three great gods, persuaded, agreed to go down to the hermitage of Atri and put the faithful wife to a test - a test designed to place her in an impossible position, where she must either break the sacred law of hospitality or break her chastity, with no apparent way to keep both.

So the three great gods disguised themselves as ordinary wandering brahmins, three holy mendicants seeking alms, and came to the hermitage of Atri at a time when the sage himself was away. They presented themselves to Anasuya and asked her, as guests, for food, for they were hungry travelers and she the mistress of the house.

Anasuya received them with the warmth and reverence due to guests, for to her, as to all the righteous, a guest was sacred - a guest come to the door is to be honored like a god, and to feed a hungry guest is among the highest of duties. She at once made ready to serve them a meal, glad of the chance to honor three holy brahmins. But as she prepared to set the food before them, the three guests named a strange and shocking condition upon which alone they would accept her hospitality.

"We will accept your hospitality and eat the food you offer," the three disguised gods said, "but only on one condition: that you serve us the meal unclothed - that you wait upon us naked, with no garment upon you. Only so will we eat. If you will not, we must go hungry from your door."

It was a condition designed to trap her utterly. For Anasuya was caught now between two sacred duties that seemed wholly to contradict each other. On the one hand, the law of hospitality was absolute: to send away hungry guests, to refuse to feed brahmins who had come to her door, would be a grave sin and a failure of her duty as a host. On the other hand, her chastity - the very heart of her devotion, the source of all her purity and power - forbade her absolutely to appear naked before any man but her own husband. To serve them clothed was to refuse them and fail her duty as a host; to serve them naked was to violate her chastity before strange men. Either way she seemed bound to commit a sin, and her famous virtue seemed certain to be broken, one way or the other. This was exactly the impossible trap the test had been designed to spring.

But Anasuya was not trapped, for the very purity they had come to test gave her a power and a wisdom equal to the trial. She thought, and then she found the one path that satisfied both her duties at once, and she found it precisely because her heart was pure.

She reflected: a mother may be naked before her own infant children without any breach of chastity at all, for between a mother and a babe there is only innocence; the duty of modesty has no place there. And so, if her three guests were not grown men but little infants, she could serve them unclothed, as a mother serves her babies, and honor the law of hospitality without the slightest stain upon her chastity. The solution lay in transforming the guests.

So Anasuya took water, and consecrated it by the power of her own chastity and devotion - the accumulated spiritual force of her perfect faithfulness - and she sprinkled that water upon the three disguised gods. And at the touch of the water charged with her purity, the three great gods of the cosmos were transformed: they shrank and changed into three tiny, helpless infant babies, lying before her, cooing and crying as newborns do, their godhood and their disguises alike dissolved by the power of a faithful wife.

Now Anasuya could keep both her duties perfectly. With a mother's tenderness, she took up the three infant gods, and she nursed them and fed them and cared for them as her own babies - serving them, as it were, unclothed, exactly as their condition had demanded, yet with no breach of her chastity at all, for they were now only helpless infants and she only a loving mother. The maternal love rose up in her for the three little ones, and she cradled them and tended them with joy, and the three supreme gods of the universe lay in the lap of the faithful wife as her babies, fed and soothed and rocked to sleep.

So the test that had been designed to break Anasuya's virtue had instead displayed it more gloriously than ever. The three great gods who had come to trap her had themselves been caught - reduced to infants by the very purity they had presumed to test, and now lying helpless in her care. Her chastity had not merely withstood the trial; it had overpowered the testers.

In heaven, the three goddesses waited for their husbands to return, and when the gods did not come back, the wives grew anxious. By their own sight they learned what had befallen - that the three great gods had been turned into infants by the power of Anasuya's chastity and were now in her care. Humbled and alarmed, the three goddesses came down to the hermitage of Atri to beg for the restoration of their husbands.

They came to Anasuya and praised her, acknowledging that her chastity and devotion were as great as the worlds had said and greater, and they begged her to restore the three gods to their own forms and give them back. Anasuya, who bore no malice and had only wished to keep her own virtue intact, received the goddesses graciously and agreed at once. By her power she restored the three infants to their true and mighty forms, and Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva stood before her once more as the great gods they were - but humbled now, and full of wonder and respect for the faithful wife who had bested their test.

The three great gods, far from being angered at being humbled, were delighted and deeply impressed by Anasuya's perfect chastity and her wisdom, and they wished to reward her. They offered her a boon, and Anasuya, with the longing of a devoted wife, asked that the three of them - Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva - be born as her own sons, so that she might have the joy of mothering the very gods she had cradled as infants.

The gods granted her wish. In time, portions of the three great gods were born as the sons of Atri and Anasuya: from Brahma came a son associated with the moon; from Shiva came the fierce sage Durvasa; and from Vishnu came Dattatreya, the great sage and teacher who embodied the essence of all three, and who became one of the most revered of all spiritual masters. So the faithful wife who had turned the three gods into babies by her purity was granted, by those same gods, the joy of bearing them as her own children.

The sages drew the lessons for the Pandavas. "See the power of perfect purity and devotion, son of Pandu. Anasuya's chastity was so complete that it gave her power over the very gods - so that when they came to test and trap her, her virtue not only withstood the trial but overpowered the testers, turning the three supreme gods into helpless infants. There is no power in all the worlds greater than the power of perfect virtue and devotion sincerely held.

"And see her wisdom, which flowed from her purity: caught in an impossible trap between two sacred duties, she found, by the clarity of a pure heart, the one path that honored both - keeping her hospitality and her chastity together, where a less pure mind would have seen only an impossible choice. The pure heart finds a way through where the impure sees only a wall. Honor virtue, and honor those who keep it; and know that purity and devotion, truly held, are mightier than the mighty."

And the Pandavas, with their own devoted and faithful Draupadi beside them, took to heart the power and the wisdom of perfect virtue.