Agastya and the Humbling of Vindhya

While Arjuna was away in the celestial regions winning his weapons, the sage Lomasha came to the other Pāṇḍavas and led them on a pilgrimage to the sacred places, and along the way he told them the old stories that clung to those places, and among them the story of the sage Agastya and his wife Lopāmudrā.

Agastya, the story went, once saw his own ancestors hanging head-downward in a void, suffering because he had begotten no children to continue their line and secure their peace; and so, to fulfil his duty to them, he resolved to marry, and wedded the beautiful princess Lopāmudrā of Vidarbha. But Lopāmudrā, raised in a palace, found the bare poverty of his forest hermitage hard, and asked that before they had children they might live for a time in royal comfort, in the manner she was used to.

And Agastya, unwilling to spend his hard-won spiritual merit on mere temporary wealth, set out instead as a humble beggar to ask riches of the wealthy kings of the earth.

And here the story folds in a quiet lesson in governance. For as Agastya examined the treasuries of king after king, he found in each that the state's expenditure exactly equalled its revenue, that there was no true surplus anywhere, and that to take a gift from any of these kings would only mean laying a heavier tax on their common people to make up the loss.

And so he would not take from them, for he would not enrich himself at the cost of the poor; a lesson, the tellers note, in what righteous rule requires, that a king's wealth is his people's wealth, and not to be given away to enrich one man at the expense of the many.

Agastya then came to a demon named Ilvala, who had a cruel custom of murdering brāhmaṇas: he would turn his brother Vātāpi into a goat, cook and serve the meat to his guest, and then call Vātāpi to come forth, and the demon would tear his way out of the guest's belly and kill him. And Agastya knew the trick, and ate the meal calmly, and then, before Ilvala could call his brother, rubbed his own stomach and said: Vātāpi, be digested.

And so Vātāpi was digested and could not return, and Ilvala's murderous magic failed, and the demon, overcome, surrendered his great riches to the sage. This story, the tellers say, shows the power of a true sage to digest and neutralize even the most poisonous things the material world can offer him, to take in what would destroy a lesser soul and render it harmless, so complete is the mastery that genuine spiritual power confers.