The King and the Apsara

The sages told the Pandavas of Pururavas and Urvashi - the love of a mortal king and a nymph of heaven, lost in a single careless moment and won back only through long grief and longing. It is one of the oldest love stories in the world, and among the saddest and most beautiful.

Pururavas was a noble and handsome king of the ancient lunar dynasty, righteous and brave and famed through the worlds. And Urvashi was the loveliest of the apsaras, the celestial nymphs who dwell in the heaven of Indra and dance in the courts of the gods - a being of such beauty that she was the glory of heaven itself. By the turnings of fate, this nymph of heaven and this king of earth came to love each other, and Urvashi descended from the world of the gods to live with Pururavas as his wife upon the earth.

But a nymph of heaven could not simply live as a mortal wife without conditions, and Urvashi set certain terms upon which alone she would remain with Pururavas. She told him that she kept two pet rams, or lambs, tied near her bed, which were dear to her as her own children and must never be allowed to be stolen or harmed - the king must always keep them safe. And she set a second, stranger condition: that she must never see him unclothed, never behold him naked except in the proper privacy of their union; if ever she should see his bare form by accident or mischance, in that moment she would be compelled to leave him and return to heaven.

Pururavas accepted her conditions gladly, for he loved her beyond measure and would have agreed to anything to keep her. "I will guard your rams with my life," he promised, "and I will be careful that you never see me so. Only stay with me, and I am content." And so, upon these terms, the king and the nymph of heaven began their life together.

For a long time Pururavas and Urvashi lived together in great happiness. The king was devoted to her, careful to keep her conditions, guarding her beloved rams and taking care that she never saw him unclothed, and Urvashi for her part loved her mortal husband and was content to dwell on earth with him, though she was a being of heaven. In time she bore him a son, and their joy was complete.

But their happiness troubled the dwellers of heaven. For Urvashi had been the brightest jewel of Indra's court, the loveliest of all the apsaras, and the gandharvas - the celestial musicians, her companions in heaven - missed her sorely, and longed to have her back among them. The heaven of the gods seemed dimmer without her, and the gandharvas resolved that they would find a way to break the bond that held her to the earth and bring Urvashi home to the courts of the sky. They watched, and they waited, and at last they devised a scheme that struck at the very conditions Urvashi had set.

One night, while the king and the nymph slept, the gandharvas came down from heaven, invisible, and stole away the two pet rams that Urvashi kept tied near her bed - the rams she loved and had charged the king to guard.

Urvashi woke to the cries of her beloved rams being carried off into the darkness, and she cried out in distress, reproaching her husband: "My rams! They are being stolen, and you, who promised to protect them, lie here doing nothing! Is there no man here to guard them? Am I undefended?" Stung by her words and unwilling to fail her, Pururavas leaped up from the bed in the dark and rushed out after the thieves to recover the rams - and in his haste, roused suddenly from sleep in the night, he sprang up without pausing to clothe himself, naked as he was.

The gandharvas had counted on exactly this. They had stolen the rams precisely to make the king leap up in the night unclothed - and now they sprang their trap.

At the very instant Pururavas rushed out naked into the darkness after the thieves, the gandharvas made a great flash of lightning blaze across the night sky, lighting up the darkness as bright as day. And in that sudden brilliant flash, Urvashi, looking out after her husband, saw him - unclothed, his bare form lit up plainly by the lightning.

The condition was broken. She had seen him naked, exactly as she had warned must never happen, and by the terms upon which she had come to earth, she could remain no longer. The bond was severed in that single flash of light. The gandharvas had what they wanted: the rams returned, the king tricked into breaking the condition, and Urvashi now compelled to leave the earth and return to heaven.

And so, even as Pururavas recovered the rams and came back to her, Urvashi was already slipping away from him. By the broken condition she could not stay; she vanished from his side, drawn back up to the heaven of the gods, and the king was left alone in the night, holding the rams he had saved but having lost, by that very saving, the wife he loved more than the rams or the kingdom or his life.

The loss of Urvashi drove Pururavas nearly out of his mind with grief. He could not bear the emptiness of his life without her. He abandoned his throne and his kingdom and his every care, and wandered the earth like a madman, searching everywhere for his vanished celestial wife, calling her name, lamenting, half-crazed with longing.

He roamed across countries and forests and lakeshores, asking the trees and the waters and the wind if they had seen her, finding her nowhere, sinking deeper into his sorrow. The mighty king who had ruled a kingdom and won the love of a nymph of heaven was reduced to a grief-maddened wanderer, with no thought in his head but Urvashi, no purpose but to find her again. His longing for her was a wound that would not close, and he carried it across the whole earth in his fruitless search.

At last, in his long wandering, Pururavas came to a lake where a company of apsaras were sporting in the water in the forms of swans or water-birds - and among them was Urvashi. When he saw her, his joy and his grief broke out of him together, and he cried out to her, pleading with her not to abandon him, pouring out all his love and his anguish, begging her to return to him or to let him die.

Urvashi, though bound by the laws of heaven, was not without love for him still, and she was moved by his devotion and his suffering. She could not simply undo what the broken condition had done, but she did not turn him away coldly either. She bid him take comfort, and told him to come to her again after a year had passed, and she granted him a night with her, and let him know that their son would be his. And in the end - through the favor of the gandharvas, who, having gotten Urvashi back, were at last moved to grant the faithful king a boon - Pururavas was given a way to be united with her permanently: by performing certain sacred rites and obtaining the celestial fire and worship that would raise him to the status of a gandharva himself. By this he was at last able to ascend to her own world and dwell with Urvashi forever, no longer a mortal who could lose her, but a being of heaven at her side.

The sages drew the meaning of the old tale for the Pandavas.

"It is, on its surface, a love story - the love of a mortal king and a nymph of heaven, lost by a careless mischance and won back through long suffering and devotion. And as a love story it teaches how fragile happiness can be: how a single broken condition, a single careless moment in the night, can shatter a joy that seemed secure, and how the envy of others may work to undo it. The king kept his wife's conditions faithfully for years, and lost her at last not through any wish to fail her, but through a sudden mischance contrived by others - a reminder of how carefully the precious things of life must be guarded, and how easily they slip away.

"But the wise have seen in it something deeper still: a picture of the soul's longing. The nymph of heaven is the higher, divine reality, which descends for a while to dwell with us, and which we lose so easily through carelessness; and the king's grief-mad wandering over the whole earth in search of his vanished beloved is the image of the soul that, having once tasted the divine and lost it, can find no rest in the world, but wanders, longing, until it wins its way back to the heaven it has lost. And the ending teaches that the longing, if it is faithful enough, is not in vain: that the king who would not give up, who sought across the whole earth and would accept no comfort but her, was raised in the end to her own world, and united with what he loved, forever."

And the Pandavas, who had themselves known the loss of all they loved, and the long wandering of exile, took the tale of Pururavas and his longing into their hearts.