Viśvāmitra

The Beas and the Sutlej were running high with snowmelt, and the Bharata carts had stopped at the water’s edge with nowhere to go. Their priest walked down to the bank and began to speak to the rivers as though they could be reasoned with. He called them mothers, praised them as two bright cows licking a calf, and asked them to lower themselves for the length of a crossing. The hymn that records this, the thirty-third of the third book of the Rigveda, is one of the strangest documents in early Indian literature, because the rivers answer back. They explain that they run where Indra hollowed a channel for them. Then they subside, and the wheels go through, and the poet thanks them and asks them never to forget the exchange.

The man on that bank was Viśvāmitra, and in the oldest layer of the tradition that is essentially all he is. He was a clan priest of the Kuśikas, chief poet of the third mandala, the composer or receiver of the verse at 3.62.10 that Hindus have recited at dawn for three thousand years and known ever since as the Gayatri. He served the Bharata king Sudās as household priest until Vasiṣṭha replaced him, and the Rigveda leaves the reason unstated. Some readers of the hymns put him afterwards among the ten-king confederation that marched against Sudās and lost. The Vedic record gives no biography, no parentage worth the name, and no face.

Everything else came later, and it came in enormous quantity. By the time of the epics and the Puranas, Viśvāmitra had become a king of the Kuśika line who went hunting, stopped at the hermitage of Vasiṣṭha, and was fed along with his entire army out of a single cow. The cow was Śabalā, sometimes called Nandinī, a daughter of the wish-granting Surabhi, and the food came out of her in a stream of rice and honey and hot cakes and drink until every soldier lay down groaning. The king offered a hundred thousand ordinary cows for her. When that was refused he tried to take her by force, and she produced armies out of her own flanks to defend herself, and those armies destroyed his. Then Vasiṣṭha’s staff, a plain length of wood, swallowed every weapon Viśvāmitra could throw at it.

That humiliation is the engine of the whole later legend. A kshatriya could not defeat a brahmin with kshatriya means, so Viśvāmitra went south and sat down in the forest to acquire brahmin means, and stayed sitting for what the texts count in thousands of years. He ate nothing. Anthills built up around him. Rain fell on his shoulders and dried there. Brahma came periodically to award him a promotion in rank, first to royal sage, then to great sage, and each time Viśvāmitra pointed out that the word he wanted had not yet been used and went back to his seat.

Indra found this alarming, which is the ordinary reaction of Indra to any mortal doing well, and sent the apsara Menaka to interrupt it. She succeeded so thoroughly that ten years vanished. The child of that interval was Shakuntala, abandoned in the forest, raised by the sage Kanva, and eventually the mother of the emperor Bharata, whose name the subcontinent still carries in Sanskrit. Viśvāmitra walked away from both mother and daughter without much sign of regret and went back to his austerities. When the apsara Rambha was sent on the same errand some time afterwards, he saw her coming and turned her to stone for ten thousand years, and then had to start again, because the curse itself had cost him the anger he had sworn off.

He was not a patient man. The most spectacular proof is the case of Trishanku, an Ikshvaku king who wanted to enter heaven in his living body. Vasiṣṭha refused him. Vasiṣṭha’s sons refused him and cursed him into the body of an outcaste for asking twice. Viśvāmitra, hearing that his old rival had turned the man away, agreed at once, performed the rite, and sent Trishanku up bodily through the air. Indra threw him back down. What Viśvāmitra did next is the moment the tradition remembers: standing among the smoke and spilled ghee of the ruined sacrifice, he began to build a second heaven in the southern sky, with its own constellations, and set about producing a second Indra to go in it. The gods came to terms before he finished. Trishanku hangs there still, in the sky he was given, upside down.

The oldest of his non-Vedic stories is grimmer and much older than the epics. In the Aitareya Brahmana, the boy Shunahshepa is bought from his starving father to die on the stake in place of a king’s son, and saves himself at the last moment with hymns to Varuna and to Ushas that loosen his bonds. Viśvāmitra was one of the officiating priests. He adopted the boy on the spot, named him Devarata, and set him at the head of his own sons. Half of them refused to accept a bought child as their elder brother. He cursed those, thoroughly, and the tradition traces several outcast peoples to the sentence.

By the opening of the Ramayana the rage has cooled into something closer to authority. Viśvāmitra walks into Dasharatha’s court and asks for the loan of a sixteen-year-old prince to guard a sacrifice from demons. He gets Rama and Lakshmana, teaches them the mantras called bala and atibala so that hunger and thirst will not touch them on the road, and points Rama at the yaksha woman Tataka in her poisoned scrubland. When the arrow goes home he hands the boy the arsenal of divine weapons that will decide the rest of the epic. He tells them the descent of Ganga on the way, walks them to Mithila, and puts Rama in front of the bow of Shiva that no one has been able to string. The marriage to Sita follows from that afternoon.

His power is simply stored austerity, and it behaves like capital. Tapas can be spent on a counter-cosmos, on weapon-mantras handed to a boy, on a curse that turns a woman to rock, and every expenditure draws the balance down. That is the limitation the stories keep returning to. Anger is the leak. Desire is the other. He needed centuries to make Brahma say the word brahmarshi, and in the end it was Vasiṣṭha who had to say it too, which suggests the tradition understood exactly what the fight had always been about.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Vishvamitra in Hindu mythology?

Vishvamitra is a sage of Hindu tradition who began as a kshatriya king and became a brahmarshi, the highest rank of Vedic seer, through centuries of austerity. He is credited with composing most of Mandala 3 of the Rigveda, including the Gayatri verse at 3.62.10. In the Rigveda itself he appears as the clan priest of the Bharata king Sudas.

Why did Vishvamitra fight with Vasishtha?

The quarrel began when Vishvamitra, then a king, tried to seize Vasishtha’s wish-granting cow Shabala after she fed his entire army. Vasishtha’s cow produced armies of her own and destroyed his forces, and Vasishtha’s staff absorbed every weapon thrown at it. Unable to win as a warrior, Vishvamitra abandoned his kingdom to acquire brahmin power instead.

What happened between Vishvamitra and Menaka?

Indra sent the apsara Menaka to break Vishvamitra’s austerities, and she succeeded, costing him ten years of accumulated tapas. Their daughter was Shakuntala, who was abandoned in the forest and raised by the sage Kanva. Shakuntala later became the mother of the emperor Bharata.

What did Vishvamitra do for King Trishanku?

Trishanku wanted to ascend to heaven in his physical body, and after Vasishtha and his sons refused him, Vishvamitra performed the rite that sent him up. Indra threw him back down, and Vishvamitra retaliated by beginning to construct a rival heaven in the southern sky, complete with its own constellations and a replacement Indra. The gods conceded, and Trishanku remains suspended in that sky, hanging upside down.

What is Vishvamitra’s role in the Ramayana?

Vishvamitra takes the young Rama and Lakshmana from their father’s court to protect a sacrifice from demons, and becomes Rama’s first teacher. He gives Rama the mantras bala and atibala, directs him to kill the yaksha woman Tataka, and then bestows the divine weapons that Rama uses for the rest of the epic. He also leads Rama to Mithila, where the prince strings the bow of Shiva and wins Sita.

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Rama, Sita, Rishi, Indra, Brahma, Shiva, Ganga, Apsaras, Varuna, Ushas, Rakshasa, Yaksha