Menakā

When those thousand years were over, the gods came, and Brahmā said to him, You are now a seer, by your own good works. And he went back to heaven. But Viśvāmitra set himself to still greater austerity.

After a long time Menakā, the foremost of the apsaras, the women of heaven, came to bathe in the lotus waters at Puṣkara. Viśvāmitra saw her, beyond compare in her beauty, like lightning in a dark cloud, and he was overcome with desire. Welcome, apsaras, he said. Stay in my hermitage. Be gracious to me; I am bewildered by love. And she stayed. For ten years she lived happily with him in his hermitage, and that was a great obstacle to his austerity.

When the ten years had gone by, Viśvāmitra was suddenly filled with shame, and sorrow, and indignation. This is all the gods' doing, he thought, to rob me of my austerity. Ten years have slipped away as if they were a day and a night. Blinded by desire and delusion I let this happen. He sighed, full of remorse. Menakā stood before him trembling, with folded hands, and he sent her away with gentle words.

Menakā bore him a daughter. She left the newborn child beside the river Mālinī, in a lonely forest full of lions and tigers, and went back to Indra's court, her work done. Birds, śakuntas, gathered round the child and guarded her so that no flesh-eating creature would harm her, and there the sage Kaṇva found her when he went to the river to bathe. He took her home and raised her as his own daughter, and because the birds had guarded her he named her Śakuntalā. She grew up to be the mother of King Bharata, from whom the royal line of the Bhāratas took its name.

Viśvāmitra went to the northern mountain, to the bank of the Kauśikī, his sister's river, resolved to master his senses, and practised austerities so fierce for thousands of years that the gods grew afraid. They asked Brahmā to make him a great seer, and Brahmā came and said, Welcome, great seer. I am pleased with your fierce austerity. Viśvāmitra bowed with folded hands, neither downcast nor elated, and said, If you, lord, will call me brahmarṣi, a title without equal, won by my own good works, then I am master of my senses. Brahmā said, You have not yet conquered your senses. Strive further. Then Viśvāmitra stood with his arms raised, without support, living on air; in summer he sat among the five fires, four fires around him and the sun overhead, in the rains under the open sky, in winter in the water day and night, and so a thousand years went by.