The Son Who Taught His Mother

The sages told the Pandavas of Kapila, the sage who was born as a son to teach his own mother the highest wisdom, and of Devahuti, the mother who learned liberation at the feet of her child - a tale of the love between mother and son made into the door of the deepest knowledge.

Devahuti was a woman of great virtue, the wife of the sage Kardama. For long years she had served her husband faithfully through his austerities, and at last, his penance complete, he had granted her wish for a son and then departed to the forest to seek liberation, as was the way of sages, leaving her alone. But the son born to Devahuti was no ordinary child: he was Kapila, an incarnation of the Lord himself, come into the world in the form of her son, born to be the teacher of the sacred knowledge and, above all, to lead his own mother to the freedom she longed for. So the child she cradled was, in truth, the Lord, come to be her son and her guru both.