The Curses of the Rishis

Vaisampayana was telling Janamejaya what Krishna had once told Arjuna, and the two of them, the king and the reciter, had come by then to the far end of the Narayaniya, where the names of Hari are explained one by one and each name turns out to have an old story folded inside it.

The last thing Krishna had said was that Agni and Soma, fire and the moon-plant, appetite and food, are complementary to one another, and that between them they pervade the whole universe of mobile and immobile things, and that the deities have Agni for their mouth.

Arjuna would not let that pass.

"How did Agni and Soma, in days of yore, attain to uniformity in respect of their original nature?" he said. "This doubt has arisen in my mind. Do thou dispel it, O slayer of Madhu."

It is a question about the beginning of things, and Krishna answered it by going back to the point where there were no things at all.

"I shall recite to thee, O son of Pandu, an ancient story of incidents originating from my own energy. Do thou listen to it with rapt attention."

When four thousand Yugas have elapsed, measured as the celestials measure them, the dissolution of the universe comes. The Manifest disappears into the Unmanifest. All creatures, mobile and immobile, meet with destruction. Light goes. Earth goes. Wind goes. Darkness spreads over everything and everything becomes one infinite expanse of water, and while that waste of water alone exists, like Brahman without a second, it is neither day nor night. Neither aught nor naught exists. Neither the manifest nor the unmanifest.

The Sruti says it flatly. Day was not. Night was not. Aught was not. Naught was not. In the beginning there was only Tamas, and Tamas is the night of Narayana.

Out of that darkness the foremost of Beings sprang, the eternal and immutable Hari, unborn, formless, without senses, having Brahman for his parent. And from that Purusha came into existence the Being called Brahman, the Grandsire, who wished to create creatures.

He created Agni and Soma first, and he caused them to spring from his own two eyes.

After the two came out of Brahma's eyes, the creatures came, in their due order, as Brahmanas and Kshatriyas.

That is the part of the answer Arjuna had not expected. Agni and Soma are not only a fire and a plant. They came out of the Creator's face before anything else did, and when men were made they were made out of the same two things. He who started into life as Soma was none else than Brahma, and they that were born as Brahmanas were all Soma in reality. They who started into being as Kshatriyas were none else than Agni.

The Brahmanas became endued with greater energy than the Kshatras, and Krishna did not pretend the claim was modest. If you ask the reason why, he said, the answer is that this superiority is an attribute manifest to the whole world. The Brahmanas represent the eldest creation as regards men.

Then the rule that follows from it, which is a rule about hospitality and not about rank. He who offers food into the mouth of a Brahmana is regarded as pouring libations into a blazing fire for gratifying the deities. The sacrifices the Brahmanas perform strengthen the deities, and the deities so strengthened fructify the Earth and thereby support every living creature. But what the foremost of sacrifices achieves can as well be achieved through the mouth of a Brahmana. A man with no altar and no fee to pay has a fire in front of him whenever a learned guest is hungry.

Sanatkumara sang a verse to the same effect. Brahman, in creating the universe, first created the Brahmanas. They become immortal by studying the Vedas and repair to heaven through the aid of such study. Their intelligence, speech, acts, observances, faith and penances uphold the Earth and the heaven together, like slings of string upholding a vessel.

And Krishna described what a country looks like when it does not keep them. There the oxen do not carry the people or draw the plough. No vehicle of any kind bears them. Milk kept in jars is never churned for butter. The residents lose prosperity of every kind and betake themselves to the ways of robbers.

There is no duty higher than Truth, he said. There is no superior more worthy of reverence than the mother. There is none more efficient than the Brahmana for conferring felicity here and hereafter.

Then he said the thing the rest of the discourse would be spent proving. As I created the deities and the Asuras and the great Rishis, so I have placed the Brahmanas in their situations.

And he began to count what the Brahmanas had done to the gods.

The list is short and it is not arranged as praise. It is arranged as evidence, and every item on it is a disfigurement.

In consequence of his licentious assault on Ahalya, Indra was cursed by Gautama, her husband, and by that curse a green beard came upon the face of the king of the gods. Through the curse of Kausika he lost his testicles as well, and the other deities, unwilling to leave him so, made up the loss afterwards by the substitution of the testicles of a ram. The lord of heaven walks about the three worlds carrying both repairs.

At the sacrifice of king Saryati, the great Rishi Chyavana became desirous of making the twin Ashwins sharers of the sacrificial offerings, and Indra objected, because the physicians of the gods were not, in his judgment, fit to be given a portion. Chyavana insisted. Indra sought to hurl his thunderbolt at him. And the Rishi paralysed his arms where they were, lifted, with the bolt in them.

Incensed at the destruction of his sacrifice by Rudra, Daksha set himself once more to the practice of severe austerities, and by the puissance he attained he caused something like a third eye to appear on the forehead of Rudra, for the destruction of Tripura, the triple city of the Asuras. Read that carefully. The eye that the world thinks of as the god's own was put there by a Rishi whose sacrifice the god had wrecked, and it was put there to be used.

And when Rudra addressed himself to the destruction of that triple city, the preceptor of the Asuras, Usanas, provoked beyond endurance, tore a matted lock from his own head and hurled it at him. From that lock sprang many serpents, and the serpents began to bite Rudra, and his throat turned blue. There is another account of that throat, belonging to the period of the Self-born Manu, in which it was Narayana who seized Rudra by it, and the mark of the hand stayed. Krishna gave both accounts and did not choose between them. Both of them explain the same blue.

A green beard. A ram's testicles. A third eye. A blue throat.

Four of the most famous marks in heaven, and not one of them was worn by choice.

On the occasion of the churning of the Ocean for raising the amrita, when every deity and every Asura in the three worlds was at the rope and the mountain was turning in the water, one Brahmana had gone a little apart from the work to do his own.

Brihaspati of the race of Angiras, the priest of the celestials, sat down on the shore of the Ocean to perform the rite of Puruscharana. It is a long preparatory discipline of repetition, and like every rite it begins with achamana, the sipping of a little water from the palm.

He took up a little water for that purpose and the water seemed to him to be very muddy.

That is the whole of the offence. There was no insult offered and no refusal made. The sea was simply dirty on the day the chief priest of heaven bent down and put his hand into it, and he had come to it, as he saw the matter, for the express purpose of touching it.

"Since thou continuest to be so dirty," he said to the Ocean, "regardless of the fact of my having come to thee for touching thee, since thou hast not become clear and transparent, therefore from this day thou shalt be tainted with fishes and sharks and tortoises and other aquatic animals."

From that time the waters of the ocean have been infested with diverse kinds of sea-animals and monsters.

There is something worth sitting with in the shape of that curse. He did not dry the sea up and he did not poison it. He filled it. Every shark that has ever turned under a hull, every enormous slow thing that lives where the light stops, every creature the fishermen name in a lowered voice, is in the water because a man could not get a clean mouthful out of it one morning at the beginning of the world.

The gods went on churning. They got their nectar. And the sea they had been stirring was never afterwards a place a man could stand in without company.

In days of yore, while the great Rishi Bharadwaja was saying his prayers by the side of the celestial Ganga, the sky above him was interrupted.

Vishnu had assumed his three-footed form and was measuring the worlds with three strides, and the middle of those three came down through the upper air and reached the spot where the Rishi was standing in the water with his prayers half finished.

Beholding that strange sight, Bharadwaja assailed Vishnu with a handful of water.

He did not fall on his face. He did not sing. A foot the size of the sky came through his morning devotions and he did what a man does when something enormous shoulders into the place where he is working, which is that he threw water at it, and the water struck the god's breast, and it left a mark.

Upon that mark Vishnu's bosom received the whirl that is called Sreevatsa.

That is the sign the poets never tire of. It is on the chest of Narayana in every description of him, and Narada looked for it when he wanted to be sure whom he was talking to at Badari, and the whole of the White Island knows him by it. It got there because a startled Brahmana splashed him.

Krishna added one more of the same kind, more briefly, because the outcome of that one is on every hearth in the world. Cursed by that foremost of Rishis, Bhrigu, Agni was obliged to become a devourer of all things.

Before the curse, fire ate what was given to it with mantras. After the curse, fire eats anything. The god who carries the offerings to the gods will also take a house, a forest, a body, a book, whatever is put against him, without asking whether it was offered.

Two Rishis, two gods, two permanent changes. One of them made the most beautiful mark in the scriptures and the other made the most dangerous thing men keep in their homes.

Once on a time Aditi, the mother of the deities, cooked food for her sons.

She had a reason for the cooking that went beyond a mother feeding her children. She thought that eating that food, and strengthened by it, the deities would succeed in slaying the Asuras. The pot on her fire was a weapon of the war in heaven, and everything that went into it was going into the arms of her sons.

After the food had been cooked, and before the gods had come, Budha presented himself at her door.

He is the presiding deity of the luminary that bears his name, and he had just then completed the observance of an austere vow, which is the state in which a man is most nearly a fire himself and least able to be refused. He said what a guest of that kind says.

"Give me alms."

Aditi, though solicited for food, gave him none. She was not being miserly and she was not being proud. She thought that no one should eat of the food she had cooked before her sons, the deities, had first taken it. She had cooked for a purpose and the purpose had not yet been served, and she looked at the ascetic standing in her doorway and weighed him against the war, and told him to wait or told him nothing.

Incensed at the conduct of Aditi who thus refused him alms, Budha, who was Brahma's own self through the austere vow he had completed, cursed her.

He did not curse her sons and he did not curse the food. He went for the one part of her that had made the decision. Since she had refused him alms, she should have a pain in her womb, when Vivaswat, in his second birth in the womb of Aditi, would be born in the form of an egg.

The curse waited a long time, as such curses do. When the time came, and the Sun was to be born of her a second time, Aditi remembered what had been said at her door and reminded Vivaswat of the curse of Budha. And he came out of her womb in that shape.

It is for that reason that Vivaswat, the deity who is adored in the Sraddhas for the dead, is called by the name of Martanda, which is to say, the one born of a lifeless egg.

The mother of the gods had held back one meal, and the name of the Sun was changed by it.

On the northern breasts of the mountains of Meru, a Rishi named Sthulasiras was practising very severe austerities.

He was living upon air alone, to the exclusion of every kind of food, and his body was scorched by what he was doing to it. Into that clearing a pure breeze came, charged with all kinds of delicious perfumes, and it began to blow across him and fan him, and the man who had given up everything else was highly gratified by it. It was the only pleasant thing left in his life and it cost nobody anything.

The trees around him saw him being pleased.

Krishna is precise about what moved them, and the word he uses is jealousy. The trees were jealous, so they put forth their flowers, all of them, out of season and all at once, for making a display and extorting his praise. They wanted the credit for the sweetness in the air. They wanted the ascetic to look up and notice them instead of the wind.

Displeased at this conduct of the trees, because it was dictated by jealousy, the Rishi cursed them.

"Henceforth, ye shall not be able to put forth your flowers at all times."

That is why the world has seasons of flowering rather than a permanent one. Every orchard that stands bare in the cold months, every tree a man walks past for eight months of the year without looking at it, is under the sentence of an ascetic who was annoyed at being flattered.

It is the smallest quarrel in the whole catalogue and it has the largest visible consequence. The green beard is on one god and the blue throat is on another. This one is on every hillside on earth, and it renews itself every spring, when the trees are let out for a while and then shut again.

They had done nothing at all except try to be admired at the wrong moment, by a man who was not looking at them and had not asked.

In days of yore, for doing good to the world, Narayana took birth as the great Rishi Vadavamukha.

That is the detail to hold on to before the rest of it happens, because it changes the shape of what follows. The god who is telling Arjuna this story was, in that birth, the man in the story, and the thing he was about to curse was his own creation, and he was doing it, the text says, for doing good to the world.

While engaged in practising severe austerities on the breast of Meru, he summoned the Ocean to his presence.

The Ocean did not come. Whether it was pride, or the ordinary slowness of very large things, is not said. A Rishi on a mountain sent for the sea and the sea stayed where it was.

Incensed at this, the Rishi did not go down to it. With the heat of his body alone, from where he sat, he caused the waters of the Ocean to become as saltish in taste as human sweat.

Consider the exactness of that. Not bitter and not foul. The salt of a man's own body, which is what comes out of him when he works or is afraid, put into every sea on the planet, so that the taste of the ocean would be the taste of the labour of the one who called it and was not obeyed.

Then he sealed it. "Thy waters shall henceforth cease to be drinkable. Only when the Equine-head, roving within thee, will drink thy waters, they will be as sweet as honey."

It is for that curse that the waters of the Ocean are to this day saltish to the taste, and are drunk by no one else than the Equine-head that moves in them.

Every man who has ever been thirsty within sight of an unlimited quantity of water has been standing inside that sentence. There is more of it than of anything else in the world, and there is a mouth somewhere in it for which it is honey, and that mouth is not ours.

The last of them concerns a marriage that was already arranged.

The daughter of the Himavat mountains, named Uma, was desired by Rudra, and Himavat had promised her hand to Mahadeva, and the matter was settled in the way such matters are settled between a father and the bridegroom he has chosen.

Then the great Rishi Bhrigu came to Himavat and said, "Give this daughter of thine unto me in marriage."

Himavat answered him plainly and without insult. "Rudra is the bridegroom already selected by me for my daughter."

It was the only answer he could have given, and it was true, and Bhrigu heard in it a refusal and a slight.

"Since thou refusest my suit for the hand of thy daughter and insultest me thus, thou shalt no longer abound with jewels and gems."

To this day, in consequence of the Rishi's words, the mountains of Himavat have no jewels and gems in them. Men go up into the greatest range in the world and come back with herbs and ice and stories. The stones are elsewhere.

"Even such," said Krishna, "is the glory of the Brahmanas."

Then he closed the ring he had opened, and gave Arjuna the answer to the question he had actually asked. It is through the favour of the Brahmanas that the Kshatriyas are able to possess the eternal and undeteriorating Earth as their wife and enjoy her. And the power of the Brahmanas is itself made up of Agni and Soma. The universe is upheld by that power, and is therefore upheld by Agni and Soma united together.

Surya and Chandramas, he said, are the eyes of Narayana. The rays of Surya are my eyes. The one warms the universe and the other invigorates it, and because of that warming and that invigorating the two of them have come to be called the Harsha, the joy, of the world.

"It is in consequence of these acts of Agni and Soma that uphold the universe that I have come to be called by the name of Hrishikesa, O son of Pandu."

Arjuna had asked how fire and moon came to be one thing. He had been given a green beard, a paralysed arm, a third eye, a blue throat, a sea full of monsters, a whirl on the breast of God, a fire that eats everything, a sun called the child of a dead egg, an orchard that flowers only in its season, an undrinkable ocean and a range of mountains with nothing in it.

They are one thing, and every one of them is a mark left on the world by a man who owned nothing.