The Descent of the River

When the Pandavas came in their pilgrimage to the banks of the holy Ganga, where she rushes down out of the mountains, the sage Lomasha told them why that river is the most sacred of all the waters of the world - how she once flowed only in heaven, and was brought down to the earth and on into the underworld by the penance of a single determined king, to wash the ashes of sixty thousand dead and set their souls free.

"It is a tale of pride and disaster and of a devotion that would not give up across four generations," said Lomasha. "It begins with a great king named Sagara, an ancestor of Rama's own line, and a horse sacrifice that went terribly wrong." And the brothers sat by the rushing, sacred water while the sage told the story of the descent of Ganga.

King Sagara was a mighty and righteous emperor, and by his two queens he had, through a boon, an extraordinary progeny: from one queen a single son who would carry on the line, and from the other a full sixty thousand sons, a host of princes as numerous as an army. The sixty thousand grew up proud, powerful, and headstrong, accustomed to overcoming everything by force of numbers.

In time King Sagara resolved to perform the Ashvamedha, the great horse sacrifice, the rite by which an emperor proclaims his sovereignty over the earth. A consecrated horse was set loose to wander the world, guarded by the king's sons, and wherever it roamed unchallenged, that land acknowledged Sagara's overlordship. The sixty thousand princes followed the sacred horse as its guard, and the rite proceeded toward its triumphant close - until the horse vanished.

It was Indra, king of the gods, who had stolen the horse, fearing the merit and power Sagara would gain by completing the sacrifice. Unseen, Indra carried the horse far down into the depths of the earth and tethered it in the underworld, close beside the place where a great and terrible sage named Kapila sat absorbed in deep meditation - and then slipped away, leaving no trace.

When the sixty thousand princes found the horse gone, their pride turned to fury. Determined to recover it at any cost, they began to dig. With their enormous strength and their countless hands they tore open the earth itself, digging down and down, ripping through the ground, gouging out vast caverns, descending deeper and deeper in their search, troubling the creatures of the deep and rending the world as they went. Nothing would turn them aside. They dug their way down at last into the underworld - and there, in a great cavern, they found the missing sacrificial horse, grazing quietly. And seated near it, serene in meditation, was the sage Kapila.

The sixty thousand princes, seeing the horse beside the meditating sage, leaped to the wrong conclusion in their arrogance. Certain that this hermit was the thief who had stolen their father's sacrificial horse, they rushed upon Kapila with shouts and threats and abuse, brandishing their weapons, heedless of his holiness, ready to seize and punish him.

Kapila was no ordinary sage; he was a being of immense spiritual power, an incarnation of the divine. Disturbed from his deep meditation by the uproar and the insults of the princes, he opened his eyes and looked upon them - and that was all it took. From the accumulated fire of his penance, a single wrathful glance blazed out, and in an instant all sixty thousand sons of Sagara were burned to ashes where they stood, the whole vast host of them reduced in a moment to grey heaps of cinders upon the floor of the underworld. So perished the pride of Sagara's sons, undone by their own arrogance, for they had laid violent hands upon a holy man in their certainty that strength and numbers made them right.

When the princes did not return, King Sagara sent his grandson Anshuman, a wise and humble youth, to search for them. Anshuman followed the great trench his uncles had dug down into the underworld, and there he found the sacrificial horse, and beside it the heaps of ashes that had been the sixty thousand. Grieved, he approached the sage Kapila with reverence and humility - the very opposite of his uncles' arrogance - and bowed to him and praised him.

Kapila, pleased by the youth's humility, granted him the horse to complete the sacrifice, and told him also the fate of the burned princes. Their souls, he said, could not ascend to heaven, for they had died unhallowed, their ashes lying unwashed in the underworld with none of the proper rites. There was only one thing in all the worlds that could purify them and release their souls to the higher realms: the waters of the heavenly river Ganga, who flowed then only in the sky. If Ganga could be brought down to wash over the ashes of the sixty thousand, they would be cleansed and liberated. But to bring the celestial river down to earth was a labor beyond any ordinary man, and it would not be Anshuman, nor his son after him, who accomplished it.

Anshuman recovered the horse and the sacrifice was completed, but the souls of the sixty thousand remained unredeemed, and the longing to free them passed down the generations like an inheritance. Anshuman tried and failed to bring the river down; his son tried and failed. At last the task came to Anshuman's great-grandson, a king named Bhagiratha.

Bhagiratha was a king of rare resolve. He gave up his throne and all the pleasures of his kingdom, and went away alone into the high places of the Himalaya, and there he undertook a penance of the most fearful severity, fixed upon a single purpose: to bring the heavenly Ganga down to the earth, to wash the ashes of his ancestors and set their souls free. Year after year he stood in his austerities, through heat and cold, fasting and unmoving, his whole will bent upon the one goal, refusing every comfort and every distraction, until the power of his penance grew so great that it compelled the very heavens to answer him.

At last the goddess Ganga herself, the heavenly river, appeared before Bhagiratha, pleased by his unyielding penance and willing to grant his wish. But she gave him a grave warning.

"King Bhagiratha," she said, "I am willing to descend to the earth to redeem your ancestors. But consider what I am. I fall from the very height of heaven, and the force of my fall is beyond all measure. If I come down from so great a height all at once upon the earth, my torrent will not gently water the ground - it will shatter the world. The earth cannot bear the shock of my descent; it will be split and swept away beneath the weight and speed of my falling. Who is there strong enough to receive me as I fall, and break the force of my descent, so that I may come down upon the earth without destroying it? Find me one who can bear my fall, or I cannot come."

Bhagiratha knew of only one being in all the worlds with the power to catch the heavenly river and break her fall: the great god Shiva, lord of the mountains. So the king turned his penance now toward Shiva, and prayed to him to receive the descending Ganga upon his own head.

Shiva, pleased by Bhagiratha's devotion, consented to bear the burden of the river's fall. He took his place upon the earth and stood ready, and then, at the appointed time, the heavenly Ganga gathered herself in the sky and plunged downward in a vast and thunderous torrent, falling from the height of heaven with a force that might indeed have broken the world.

But Shiva received her upon his head. The whole mighty river came crashing down onto his matted locks of hair - and there she was caught, tangled and held, her terrible force absorbed and broken in the endless coils of the god's hair. The river that could have shattered the earth wound and wandered, lost, through the labyrinth of Shiva's locks, unable to find her way out, her violence spent and tamed.

Then, at Bhagiratha's continued prayer, Shiva released her gently - letting her flow out from his hair in streams of bearable size, so that she came down upon the mountains of the earth not as a world-destroying flood but as a great and holy river, broad and life-giving, descending in gentle cascades from the heights. So the heavenly Ganga came at last to the earth, her force broken by the god, ready now to do the work for which she had been brought down.

Now Bhagiratha mounted his chariot and rode ahead, and the great river Ganga, come down to earth, followed behind him wherever he led, flowing in the track of his chariot across the land. He led her down from the mountains, across the plains, through the kingdoms of the world, the holy water following faithfully after him - and everywhere she passed she blessed the land, and sages and creatures came to her banks, and the places she touched became sacred.

Bhagiratha led her at last to the place where the sea had been, and down into the deep trench his ancestors had dug long ago, down into the underworld where the ashes of the sixty thousand still lay. And the waters of Ganga flowed over the grey heaps of cinders that had been the proud sons of Sagara, and washed them, and purified them - and in that instant the souls of the sixty thousand, redeemed at last by the touch of the holy river, were freed from their long limbo and rose up, cleansed, to the higher worlds. The labor of four generations was complete, and the ancestors were saved.

Because it was Bhagiratha who brought her down by his penance and led her with his chariot, the river is called Bhagirathi after him to this day, in honor of the king who would not give up.

Lomasha finished the tale beside the rushing river. "This, son of Pandu, is why Ganga is the most sacred of all waters. She flowed once only in heaven, and was brought down to wash away the sins of the dead and set bound souls free - and she has gone on doing it ever since. To bathe in her, to die by her banks, to offer the ashes of one's own dead to her current, is to be purified and lifted up, just as the sixty thousand were lifted up. And all of it was won by the penance of one king, Bhagiratha, who took up a hopeless task that three generations before him had failed at, and held to it until heaven itself bent to his will."

Yudhishthira gazed at the holy water, and took two lessons from the tale: the ruin that the arrogance of Sagara's sons had brought upon them, who laid hands on a sage in the pride of their strength; and the redeeming power of a single unyielding resolve, by which Bhagiratha lifted a whole host of the dead out of their long darkness. The brothers bathed in the sacred Ganga and went on along their pilgrim road, cleansed and instructed, beneath the mountains down which the heavenly river still pours.