Dattatreya

Somewhere in the forest there is a lake, and at the edge of it a ring of young ascetics sits waiting. Their teacher walked into the water and did not come out. The Markandeya Purana counts his stay on the bottom in years of the gods, which are long years. The reeds grow and die back. The young men stay. Then the surface breaks, and the teacher rises with a woman on his arm, dressed like a queen of heaven, and the two of them sit down on the bank and begin to drink.

This is Dattatreya, and that is his method. He had gone under hoping his followers would get bored and leave him alone. When that failed he tried scandal. He passed the cup, he sang, he played music with his wife in full view of men who had given up all three. They looked at him, decided that a master of yoga cannot be stained by what he touches, and stayed put. He was stuck with them.

His birth is a reward for another act of stubbornness. In the city of Pratishthana, the same Purana says, a brahman sick with leprosy had a wife who carried him on her back wherever he wished to go. One black night she stumbled against a sage who had been wrongly impaled on a stake, and the sage cursed her husband to die at sunrise. The wife answered that in that case the sun would not rise. It did not. The world sat in the dark, the sacrifices stopped, and the gods grew hungry and frightened. They went to Anasuya, wife of the sage Atri and the most admired woman alive, and begged her to talk the other woman round. She did, and when the sun came up and the husband fell dead she brought him back by the strength of her own faithfulness. The gods offered her anything. She asked that Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva be born as her sons. So the moon god Soma came from Brahma, the hot-tempered sage Durvasa came from Shiva, and from Vishnu came the child whose name simply says what he is: the one given, Atri’s son.

A later and much loved telling makes the story sharper. The three great gods, or in some versions their jealous wives, decide to test Anasuya. The gods arrive at her door as begging holy men and ask to be served food by a hostess wearing nothing at all. She cannot refuse a guest and she will not shame herself, so she sprinkles water on them and turns all three into babies, then feeds them as a mother would. When they are restored they stay with her as a single son. That version does not appear in the oldest texts. It is the one painted on calendars.

The old accounts never give him three heads. He is a hermit, one man with one face, smelling of the forest and of liquor. The famous image came centuries afterwards and belongs above all to Maharashtra and the Deccan: three faces side by side, six arms, and in the hands the tokens of all three gods, a water pot and prayer beads, a conch and a discus, a trident and a small hand drum. A cow stands behind him. Four dogs lie around his feet, animals that an orthodox priest would cross the road to avoid. His devotees read the dogs as the four Vedas and the cow as the earth. A plainer reading is that he keeps the company other holy men will not.

His best known favour went to a king. Arjuna, son of Kritavirya, of the Haihaya line, had just come to the throne and did not think he deserved it. His adviser Garga told him to go and serve the hermit on the mountain, and told him why. Long before, the gods had lost a war against the demon clans and had come to this same hermit for help. Dattatreya protested that he was a drinker who lived with a woman and was fit for nothing. The gods kept bowing. So he told them to lead the demons to his door. The demons came, saw his wife, who was the goddess Lakshmi herself, lost their heads, and carried her off in a litter raised above them. Dattatreya laughed. Fortune, he explained, brings different things depending on where she sits on a man, and when she climbs onto his head she is about to step off. The demons had also laid hands on another man’s wife, which burned up whatever merit they had left. The gods cut them down that afternoon.

Arjuna went up the mountain. He washed the hermit’s feet and brought him garlands and food, and was told for his trouble that he was wasting his time on a ruined man. He kept serving. In the end Dattatreya gave him what he asked: just rule, victory in every battle, the power to go anywhere, and a thousand arms. The king walked down with the dust of the hermitage still on his knees and reigned for a very long time. The gift did not make him wise. In old age he wronged the family of a sage and was killed for it by the sage’s son, Parasurama, who later sought out the same teacher on his own account.

Dattatreya’s other pupils wanted the opposite of a throne. King Alarka, beaten in war and sick of pleasure, opened a ring his mother Madalasa had left him, found her advice inside, and went to the hermit to learn how to stop wanting things. The long lesson in yoga that follows fills several chapters of the Markandeya Purana. The Bhagavata Purana tells of King Yadu meeting a young wanderer, naked and plainly happy, and asking how he managed it. The wanderer, whom tradition names as Dattatreya, says he had twenty-four teachers. The earth taught him patience. The python taught him to take what comes. A pigeon that flew into a net after its trapped family taught him what too much love costs, and a courtesan named Pingala, who gave up waiting for a rich client one night and slept soundly for the first time, taught him the peace of expecting nothing. He never had a guru. He paid attention.

That is why later ages made him the teacher of teachers. A short, fierce poem on the freedom of the soul, the Avadhuta Gita, is credited to him, as is the goddess teaching called the Tripura Rahasya, given to Parasurama. The Nath yogis claim him as their first master. In the Deccan the Marathi Guru Charitra, composed around 1550, tells of two holy men, Shripad Shrivallabha and Narasimha Saraswati, in whom he is said to have been born again, and their town of Ganagapur still draws crowds. Pilgrims climb thousands of stone steps on Mount Girnar in Gujarat to a pair of footprints said to be his. His birthday falls on the full moon of the winter month of Margashirsha.

His powers are those of a perfected yogi. He can sit under water for an age, hand out a thousand arms, and stay clean in the middle of what looks like filth. He cannot be shamed, which is a rarer gift than it sounds. His limits are of his own choosing. He fights no battles himself and has to wait for his enemies to ruin themselves in front of him. He gives only to those who ask more than once. And for all his effort he has never managed to be left alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dattatreya in Hindu mythology?

Dattatreya is a Hindu deity and sage, the son of the sage Atri and his wife Anasuya. The Puranas count him as a descent of Vishnu, and later devotion treats him as Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva in one body. He is honoured above all as a guru and a master of yoga.

Why does Dattatreya have three heads?

Dattatreya’s three heads stand for Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, who are said to have been born together as the son of Anasuya. The oldest accounts describe him with one head, as a forest hermit. The three-headed, six-armed image came centuries later and is tied most closely to Maharashtra and the Deccan.

Who were Dattatreya’s parents and brothers?

Dattatreya’s parents were the sage Atri and Anasuya. In the Markandeya Purana, Anasuya asked that Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva be born as her sons. Brahma became the moon god Soma, Shiva became the sage Durvasa, and Vishnu became Dattatreya.

What boon did Dattatreya give Kartavirya Arjuna?

Dattatreya gave the Haihaya king Arjuna, son of Kritavirya, a thousand arms, just rule, victory in battle and the power to go anywhere. Arjuna earned the gifts by serving the hermit faithfully even after Dattatreya called himself a ruined drunkard. The king was later killed by Parasurama.

What are the twenty-four gurus of Dattatreya?

The twenty-four gurus are the things in nature and daily life from which a young wanderer in the Bhagavata Purana says he learned wisdom. They include the earth, a python, a pigeon and a courtesan named Pingala. Tradition names the wanderer as Dattatreya, and the story is the reason he is seen as a teacher who had no human teacher.

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