The Sage of Eight Bends

On their long pilgrimage through the holy places of the land, the Pandavas came with the sage Lomasha to the banks of a clear and gentle river called the Samanga, whose waters were said to wash away not only sin but deformity itself. Yudhishthira asked why so small a stream was held so sacred, and Lomasha smiled and sat down upon the bank to tell them.

"There was once a boy," he said, "born so crooked in his body that men laughed aloud to see him - bent in eight places, so that he was named Ashtavakra, the Eight-Bends. He was mocked for his twisted frame by the proudest scholars in the proudest court in the land. And that crooked boy, with nothing but the straightness of his mind, overthrew the greatest debater of the age, brought his drowned father back from the dead, and then washed his crookedness away in this very river. Listen, and I will tell you how."

Draupadi and the brothers settled on the cool grass by the water, and Lomasha began the story of Ashtavakra.