The Sage Who Drank the Sea

Bhishma told Yudhishthira how the wind god once schooled the proud king Kartavirya Arjuna in the power of brahmanas, and among the wind god's tales was this one, of what a sage's anger, once truly provoked, could accomplish without a single weapon raised - the story of Utathya and the sea.

Utathya was a great sage of the line of Angiras, and his wife Bhadra, daughter of Soma, was famed for her beauty, and it was that beauty that had long drawn the desire of Varuna, lord of the waters and keeper of all rivers that run to the ocean. One day, while she was bathing in the Yamuna, Varuna came upon Bhadra and, overcome by a desire he did not trouble to master, carried her down beneath the waves to his own house under the sea, where the rivers of the world gather before they are given back to the sky as rain.

Utathya returned to an empty hermitage. He learned from Narada where his wife had been taken and by whom. A lesser man might have gone to war with an ocean and lost, or gone to the gods and begged. Utathya did neither, not yet. He was a sage who had spent a long life in tapas, austerity kept so faithfully that it had become, in him, something closer to a stored force than a virtue, the kind of power that a person of true restraint accumulates precisely by spending almost nothing of it, year upon year, until the day it is needed all at once. He did not yet raise that force. First, he sent word demanding that his wife be returned, and bade the messenger speak harshly: Varuna was a protector of the worlds, not a destroyer, so why had he carried off the wife Soma had given?

Utathya sent Narada, the sage who moved easily between the courts of gods and the hermitages of men, down to Varuna's house beneath the water to ask for Bhadra's return. Narada delivered the errand plainly: Utathya demanded his wife back, and demanded it as a matter that concerned dharma more than desire, since a wife taken from her husband by force, even by a god, was a wrong the world could not simply absorb.

Varuna refused the request outright. He loved this timid girl too much, he said, to let her go. And when Narada pressed him, the lord of the waters seized the celestial sage by the throat and threw him out of his house. It was the refusal of a powerful being who did not expect to be made to answer for it.

Narada returned to the sage's hermitage, cheerless, and reported the answer exactly as he had received it, the hand at his throat and the door shut behind him. 'Do what you must,' he said. Utathya listened, and his wrath blazed up. He had asked once, as one asks a peer, and the ocean's lord had answered as a lord answers a petitioner he does not fear, certain that no sage, however great, could trouble a god who ruled every river running to the sea. There would be no third request. Utathya thanked Narada for the errand, and those who knew him best understood that what followed was not defeat but a decision already made.

What Utathya did next, he did without lifting a weapon or invoking a single god against Varuna. He turned the force he had kept folded inside himself through decades of vows toward the sea itself, and he began to drink it.

Accounts of that drinking do not agree on how such a thing was accomplished by one man's mouth, only on what followed: the ocean's waters receded before him, day by day, the way a lake recedes in a season of failed rain, except that no season failed here, only a sage's throat proved wide enough to hold what an ocean had thought inexhaustible. Where ships had sailed, mud showed, and then dry ground, and creatures that lived nowhere but in that water crowded into an ever smaller remainder, and Varuna's own house under the waves stood suddenly exposed to open air.

Even with his waters gone and his kin in distress, Varuna still would not give Bhadra up. So Utathya was not finished distributing the lesson. He commanded the Earth to show dry land where Varuna's six hundred thousand lakes had been, and the ocean drew back and left barren ground. The Saraswati, which flowed through that region, he commanded to become invisible there, to leave it for the desert, and to let that region lose its sanctity. The river obeyed him, and has been remembered as a river that is there and is not there, present beneath the earth but absent to the eye. Between the drying ocean and the vanishing river, Utathya had, without raising his hand, made the entire architecture of water on that stretch of the world answer to him instead of to Varuna.

An ocean turned to desert is not a private catastrophe. Every creature that had lived in those waters, every kingdom whose shores had depended on it, every god whose portion of the world's order included the sea running full and the rivers reaching it, felt Utathya's anger as soon as Varuna had felt it. It was this widening cost, more than his own discomfort, that brought Varuna at last to reconsider a refusal he had offered so lightly.

He came to Utathya not as a lord receiving a messenger in his own house beneath the waves, since that house now stood open to the sky and half buried in mud, but as a supplicant crossing dry, cracked seabed on his own two feet, the ground his waters had covered for as long as the world remembered now offering him nothing but the long, humbling walk of a god made to travel like a man. He brought Bhadra with him, and when he reached Utathya he did not offer courtesies dressed around a refusal. He returned the sage's wife outright, and Utathya told him plainly that it was by the power of his austerities that Varuna had been made to cry out in such distress.

Utathya, his anger spent in the act of proving it justified rather than in any further punishment, took Bhadra back gladly and released Varuna and the world from the distress he had brought on them. He did not hold the sea dry out of spite, nor drag the offense out past the point it had made. Slowly, in its own time, the ocean returned to what it had been. The Saraswati did not.

'That is why,' Bhishma said to Yudhishthira, 'you will hear pilgrims speak of the Saraswati as a river that is there and is not there, sinking into the sand rather than reaching the sea it once fed. Utathya's anger receded. The ocean was forgiven and filled again. The river he ordered underground has never, in all the years since, been given leave to come back up. What a life of true restraint stores away, it seems, can be spent all at once, but not always taken back in whole once it is spent, and the world keeps some part of the bill long after the quarrel that raised it is settled and both sides have forgiven each other.'

'Understand also,' Bhishma added, 'that Utathya's was not the only ocean a sage has drunk. You will hear of Agastya doing the same, for the gods' own purposes, to expose demons hiding beneath the waves from Indra's army, and that is a different story, told for a different reason, not to be confused with this one. Utathya drank the sea for a wife taken without leave and a refusal that would not stand corrected any other way. Agastya drank it as a weapon lent to heaven. The force is the same. What a sage spends it on is not.'

'Mark the difference between a man who wields his power constantly, wearing it thin through use, and one who keeps it folded for a lifetime and then unfolds it once. Utathya said almost nothing, asked almost nothing, and when the asking failed he did not argue further. He simply began to drink, and an ocean discovered, too late, exactly what stillness had been storing up against the day it was needed.'