Shantanu and Gangā

King Shantanu was a mighty and righteous king of the Lunar Line, ruling Hastināpura in devotion to dharma; and it was to him that there came, one day on the banks of the river Gangā, a love that was also a mystery, and that would give the dynasty its greatest son.

Walking by the river, Shantanu saw a maiden of such loveliness that his senses were overwhelmed, a beauty beyond anything of this world; and drawn irresistibly, he asked her to be his wife. And she accepted, but she bound her acceptance with a strict and binding condition.

I will be your wife, she told him, but only on these terms: that you never ask me who I am or where I come from; that you never stand in the way of anything I do, whether it seems to you good or evil; that you never grow angry with me for any cause, and never say to me a single word that displeases me. Break any of these, and I will leave you on the instant. Do you agree? And Shantanu, mastered by his passion, agreed to all of it, and they were married.

And then came the horror. Within a few months Gangā bore a beautiful son, and the moment he was born she carried him to the river and drowned him. Shantanu, devastated, could not say a word, for his promise bound him. And this happened again, and again: one after another she bore seven sons, and one after another, with the same cold, unyielding silence, she drowned all seven in the river.

And through it all Shantanu held his tongue, tormented, grieving, but bound by the vow he had made in his passion, watching his children die and unable even to ask why.

But when the eighth child was born, and Gangā moved once more toward the river to drown him, Shantanu could bear it no longer. He broke. He confronted her, crying that he had endured the drowning of seven sons in silence but would endure it no more, and he pleaded for the life of the eighth. And Gangā, at his broken silence, smiled sadly, and revealed at last who she was and what she had been doing.

She was the goddess Gangā herself. And these eight children were the eight Vasus, celestial beings, who had been cursed by the sage Vasishṭha to be born as mortal men, a punishment for the theft of the sage's sacred cow by one of their number, Prabhāsa, the eighth. And her drownings, which had looked like monstrous cruelty, had in truth been mercy: for by drowning each of the first seven the instant he was born, she had freed him at once from the curse of a mortal life, releasing him back to his celestial nature.

Only the eighth, Prabhāsa, who had been the instigator of the theft, was fated to live out a long life in the mortal world. And since Shantanu had broken his vow and questioned her, she would keep her word and leave him; but she would take the eighth child with her, to raise him and train him for the great destiny that awaited him.

We should pause on this strange and terrible tale, for it teaches something hard about the difference between how a thing looks and what it is. To Shantanu, watching, Gangā's acts were pure horror, a mother murdering her own children one by one. And they were, in truth, acts of deliverance, each drowning a release from a curse, each death a mercy. He could not see it, because he did not know what she knew; he saw only the surface, the drowning, and it broke his heart.

And so it often is with the workings of a providence we cannot fully see: what looks to us like cruelty, like meaningless loss, may be, in a design we cannot grasp, a mercy and a release. This is not to say our griefs are not real; Shantanu's grief was real, and his breaking was human and forgivable. But the story sets beside his limited sight the larger truth he could not see, and asks us to consider that the losses that break our hearts may have a meaning hidden from us, as the drownings had a meaning hidden from Shantanu.

Gangā raised the eighth child to youth, and gave him the finest of all educations: the Vedas and Vedānta from Vasishṭha himself, the arts and sciences from Shukrāchārya, and the supreme mastery of arms from the great Parashurāma. This child was Devavrata; and when his training was complete, Gangā brought the resplendent prince back to his father Shantanu, and placed him in his care, and vanished once more. The son of the river had come home, and he would become the greatest and the most tragic figure of his age.