The King Set Free

As Vasiṣṭha walked home with his daughter-in-law, they came upon Kalmāṣapāda sitting in a lonely forest. The king saw him and rose up in fury, possessed by the fierce rākṣasa, wanting to eat him. Adṛśyantī saw the king coming at them with a club like death itself and cried out in terror, Lord, a dreadful rākṣasa is coming at us with a club! No one on earth but you can stop him. Save me from this terrible creature. He means to eat us both.

Vasiṣṭha said, Do not be afraid, daughter. You need fear no rākṣasa. This is not a rākṣasa you see coming. It is King Kalmāṣapāda, a mighty king known throughout the world, who lives in this forest now. As the king rushed at them, the seer stopped him with the single sound hum. Then he sprinkled him with water purified by mantras and freed that best of kings from the terrible rākṣasa. For twelve years, under the curse of Vasiṣṭha's own son, the rākṣasa had held the king, as an eclipse holds the sun; and now, freed from the rākṣasa, he lit up the great forest as the sun lights the clouds at evening.

The king came to himself and bowed to Vasiṣṭha with folded hands. I am Saudāsa, he said, whom you serve as priest. Tell me what you wish of me. Vasiṣṭha said, What has happened has happened in its time. Go and rule your kingdom. And never again dishonour a brahmin. The king said, I will never dishonour the best of brahmins. I will stand by your command and always honour them. And I ask you for a boon, by which I may pay my debt to the line of Ikṣvāku: go to my queen and give her a child, for the growth of the Ikṣvāku line. I will, said Vasiṣṭha, who kept his word. He went with the king to Ayodhyā, where the people came out to welcome their king as the gods welcome their lord. There, at the king's bidding, the queen came to Vasiṣṭha, and the great seer lay with her in her season, by the law the gods laid down, to give the king the heir he had asked for. When she had conceived, the king bowed to him, and he went back to his hermitage. The queen carried the child a long time, and when still she did not give birth, she split open her own womb with a stone. Then, in the twelfth year, the child was born, a royal sage named Aśmaka, who founded the city of Potana.

At the hermitage Adṛśyantī bore Śakti's son, who was like a second Śakti, the one who would carry on his line, and Vasiṣṭha performed the birth rites for his grandson himself. Vasiṣṭha had been parāsu, a man letting his life go, and the child, while still in the womb, had held him back; so he was called Parāśara in the world. The boy grew up thinking Vasiṣṭha was his father and called him father, until one day his mother, in tears, told him that his father had been eaten by a rākṣasa in the forest, and that the one he called father was his father's father. Then Parāśara, in his grief, set his mind on destroying all the worlds, and Vasiṣṭha, the great ascetic, restrained him. When Parāśara instead began a sacrifice to burn all the rākṣasas, Vasiṣṭha did not stop him, for he resolved not to break the boy's second vow, and in the end Pulastya, the seer from whom the rākṣasas are descended, and Vasiṣṭha together persuaded him to bring it to a close.