The Nāga King's Austerity

Aśvatara said: A man should not give up the effort because a thing looks impossible. Success rests on fate and effort together. I will make the effort; I will undertake austerity.

He went to Plakṣāvataraṇa, the holy ford of the Himālaya, and practised fierce austerity there. He bathed three times a day, held back his food, and praised Sarasvatī, the goddess of speech. You are the imperishable, he sang to her, the syllable Oṃ, in which all things rest. Its three measures hold all that is threefold, the three worlds, the three Vedas and the three fires, and its half measure beyond them, which no tongue can speak, is your highest form.

Sarasvatī, the tongue of Viṣṇu, was pleased and offered Aśvatara, Kambala's brother, a boon. First give me my brother Kambala as my companion, he said, and give the two of us all the notes and every way they join. She granted it, the whole art of music, and named all that she gave: the seven notes; the seven melodies of the scales; the seven songs and as many modulations; the forty-nine measures and the three scales; the four kinds of verse, the three kinds of measure, the three tempos and the three pauses; the four kinds of instrument; and all that lies within these and belongs to them, down to every vowel and consonant. No one else on earth or in Pātāla will have this as you will, she said; you two will be its masters in Pātāla, in the world of the gods and on earth. Then she vanished, and it all came to the two brothers as she had said, the highest understanding of verse and measure and note.

They went to the peak of Kailāsa and worshipped Śiva, the god who once burned away the body of Love, singing to him with the lute, morning, noon, evening and night, for a long time. At last Śiva was pleased and offered them a boon.