Yavakrīda's End and Raibhya's Wrath

When Raibhya discovered the outrage done to his daughter-in-law, he was seized with a terrible and righteous anger, and in his wrath he plucked a hair from his matted locks and offered it into the sacrificial fire with mantras of power; and from the flames there rose a beautiful maiden in the likeness of the violated woman, and behind her a fearful, weapon-wielding demon; and Raibhya commanded them to hunt down and destroy Yavakrīda.

And Yavakrīda, pursued by the terrible demon, fled toward his father's hermitage for protection; but his father Bharadvāja was blind and helpless and could not turn aside the working of the law of retribution his son had brought upon himself. Yavakrīda tried then to take shelter in a nearby temple, but the gatekeeper barred him, for his recent crime had made him ritually impure, unfit to enter the holy place; and so, shut out from the sanctuary he had defiled himself out of the right to enter, he was overtaken by the demon and slain.

There is a stern justice in the manner of his death, and the story means us to see it: that the refuge of dharma is closed to the one who has himself violated dharma's foundations, that a man cannot flee for shelter to the very sanctity he has just trampled. Yavakrīda sought the temple's protection with the stain of his crime still on him, and the temple could not receive him; his own act had shut its door against him.

And the chain of sorrow did not end there, for such chains of anger and vengeance rarely do. When Bharadvāja learned of his son's death, he was plunged into grief, and in his grief he cursed Raibhya, that Raibhya should be killed by his own eldest son; and then, unable to bear his loss, Bharadvāja gave up his own life upon his son's funeral pyre. So the anger of one sage and the crime of another had now set a curse upon a third and killed a fourth, the sorrow spreading outward from soul to soul.

And the tellers draw from this dark chain a vital truth: that even the most advanced ascetics, men of great penance and great power, are undone in an instant the moment they let their minds be swept away by anger and the thirst for vengeance; that all the spiritual attainment in the world is no protection against the ruin that unmastered anger brings, but rather makes that ruin the greater, for the more power a soul holds, the more destruction its anger can loose upon the world.