The King Born of a King

The sages told the Pandavas of Mandhata, who was born in the strangest manner of any king in the old tales - conceived not in a mother but in his own father, and suckled by the king of the gods - and who grew to be one of the mightiest and most righteous emperors the world has ever known.

There was a king of the ancient solar line named Yuvanashva, a good and powerful ruler, but he had one great sorrow: though he had many wives, he had no son to continue his line and inherit his throne. He longed for a child with all his heart, and grieved that his house might end with him. At last, leaving his kingdom in the care of his ministers, he went into the forest to the hermitages of the great sages, to beg them to help him obtain a son by their sacred power.

The sages took pity on the childless king, and they undertook to perform for him a great sacrifice - a powerful rite to obtain for him the son he longed for. Through the night they performed the sacred ceremony, and as part of it they consecrated a great vessel of water with mantras of immense potency, charging it with the power to bring about conception. This consecrated water was meant for the king's chief queen to drink; whoever drank it would conceive the longed-for child. The sages set the sacred vessel within the sacrificial enclosure and, the long rite finished, lay down to rest, intending to give the water to the queen in the morning.

But in the depths of that night a mischance occurred that would change everything. King Yuvanashva, who had fasted and labored through the long ceremony, woke in the night tormented by a terrible thirst.

Parched and desperate for water in the dark, the king rose and looked about for something to drink. He came into the sacrificial enclosure where the sages slept, and there he saw the great vessel of water standing ready. Not knowing that it was the consecrated water of the sacrifice, charged with the power of conception and meant for his queen, and seeing only water when he was dying of thirst, the king lifted the vessel and drank it down.

When the sages woke and found the sacred vessel empty, they were alarmed and asked who had drunk the consecrated water. The king, realizing his error, confessed that he himself had drunk it in the night, thinking it ordinary water, in his great thirst. The sages understood at once what this meant. The water's power could not be undone; it would bring about conception in whoever had drunk it - and the one who had drunk it was the king himself. "What is done is done," they said. "It was fate, and the will of heaven. The child will now be born from you, O King, for you have taken into yourself the power that should have gone to your queen."

And so a strange and wondrous thing came to pass. The king himself conceived the child, carrying within his own body the son that the sacred water was meant to give. In due time the child grew to term within him, and at last the child was born - drawn forth from the king's own side, brought into the world from his father's body, with no mother at all.

The child was healthy and whole and radiant, a splendid boy, born in this unheard-of way from a man, by the power of the consecrated water and the will of fate. The sages and the gods marveled at the wonder of it. But at once a difficulty appeared: the child had been born from a father, and had no mother to nurse him. Who would suckle the motherless infant? There was no mother's milk for a child born from a king. The newborn cried with hunger, and there seemed no way to feed him.

Then the gods themselves came down to attend to the wondrous child, for he was clearly destined for greatness. And when the question arose of who would nurse the motherless infant, it was Indra, the king of the gods himself, who answered it.

Indra came to the hungry child and put his own finger - or, some say, gave the child his own hand to suckle, from which flowed a divine, nourishing stream - into the baby's mouth, saying, "Mam dhata" - "He shall suck me; he shall draw his nourishment from me." And from these words of Indra, the child was given his name: Mandhata, 'he whom Indra suckled,' the child nursed by the king of the gods himself.

So the boy was fed by Indra, and grew, nourished from his infancy by a divine stream from the hand of the lord of heaven - a sign, all could see, that this child born so strangely was no ordinary mortal, but one marked from his very birth for a destiny among the greatest of the earth. He grew with the swiftness and strength that such divine nursing gives, into a youth of immense power and nobility.

Mandhata grew into one of the mightiest emperors who ever ruled the earth - a chakravartin, a universal monarch, whose dominion and whose fame spread to the very ends of the world. He was a warrior of tremendous power, mastering all weapons and all the arts of war, and by his might he conquered the whole earth, bringing kingdom after kingdom under his single, just rule, until the entire world acknowledged him as its emperor.

So great was his power and his sovereignty that his fame became a proverb: it was said that the whole earth, from the place where the sun rises to the place where it sets, was the kingdom of Mandhata - that all the land the sun looked upon was his. His dominion was not merely of the earth; his might was honored even in heaven, and the gods themselves respected him. He was counted among the very greatest of all the kings of the ancient world, named again and again in the chronicles as the measure of imperial greatness, a ruler whose reach and whose glory few in all of history could match.

But Mandhata was not merely a conqueror. He was as righteous as he was mighty, and he used his vast power for the good of the world. He ruled his immense empire with justice and care; he protected his subjects, upheld dharma, performed great sacrifices, gave generously, and kept the order of the world. Under his reign the earth prospered; the rains came in their season, the harvests were plentiful, and his people lived in safety and contentment, for their emperor was both powerful enough to protect them and righteous enough to be worthy of his power.

He was, in the memory of the world, the very pattern of the great king: one whose might was matched by his virtue, whose conquests served justice rather than mere ambition, and whose vast power was held in trust for the welfare of all under him. He had been born by a wonder and nursed by a god, and he lived up to the destiny those signs proclaimed, becoming not a tyrant but a guardian, not a mere conqueror but a true emperor in the highest sense.

The sages drew the lessons of the tale for the Pandavas.

"There is wonder in the story of Mandhata - a child conceived in his own father, born from a man, nursed by the king of the gods - and the wonder itself carries a meaning: that the coming of a truly great soul into the world is often marked by signs that overturn the ordinary order of things, and that destiny works by paths we cannot foresee. The childless king sought a son by every proper means, and received him at last by a strange mischance in the night - a reminder that the gifts we long for may come to us in ways we never expected, and that what seems an accident may be the working of a higher will.

"But the deeper teaching is in what Mandhata became. Born to greatness and nursed by a god, he might have grown into a proud and ruthless conqueror; instead he became the model of the righteous emperor, who held his vast power as a trust for the welfare of his people and the upholding of dharma. His greatness lay not merely in the extent of his conquests - though they reached from sunrise to sunset - but in the justice with which he ruled. The mark of a truly great king, the tale teaches, is not how much he conquers, but how well and how righteously he protects and nourishes those he rules."

And the Pandavas, who would one day rule again, took to heart the example of Mandhata: that power is given to be used for the good of others, and that the greatest emperors are remembered not for their might alone, but for the justice with which they wielded it.