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STORIES · THE MAHĀBHĀRATA · Ādi
Aṇimāṇḍavya
Classical
Janamejaya asks a pointed question about Vidura: what did Dharma, the god of justice, do to be cursed, and which Brahmin's curse made him a servant's son? Vaisampayana answers with the story of the ascetic Mandavya.
Mandavya sat under a tree near his hermitage with his arms raised, in a vow of silence. Robbers, running from the king's guards, hid their stolen goods there and slipped away. The guards, close behind, asked the sage which way the thieves had gone. He said nothing. They found the thieves and the loot nearby, grew suspicious of the silent man, and took him to the king. The king sentenced him with the robbers to impalement, and the officers carried it out.
He did not die. Through his ascetic power he stayed alive on the stake for a long time. At night other sages came to him in the shape of birds, grieved to see him, and asked what sin had brought this punishment on him. Mandavya answered that no one but himself was to blame. When the officers found him still alive and told the king, the king consulted his advisers, went to the sage, and begged pardon for wronging him without knowing. Mandavya was pacified. The king tried to pull the stake out of his body, could not, and cut it off just outside. So the sage went on living and doing severe penances with the stake still inside him, and that is why he was called Ani-Mandavya, Mandavya with the stake within.
He went to the house of Dharma and demanded to know what sin he had unknowingly committed to deserve this. Dharma told him that when he was a small child he had pierced a tiny insect on a blade of grass, and that the results of acts, good and bad, grow over time.
Mandavya was outraged. A child's act, he said, should not count as sin, and the punishment was far too heavy for so small a fault, because killing a Brahmin is a graver sin than killing other creatures. Then he laid down a rule: from that day, acts done before the age of fourteen would not be counted as sin. The page I read also mentions twelve at one point, so the text is not entirely steady on the number. He cursed Dharma to be born among men in the lowest of the four social orders.
That is how Dharma came to be born as Vidura. In the epic Vidura is learned in morality, politics and the ways of the world, free of greed and anger, and devoted to the good of the Kurus. He is the quiet, honest voice in a family that keeps ignoring him. His birth is a punishment for a god who judged too harshly, and a reminder that even justice can be wrong in its proportions.
Told by Vaiśampāyana → Janamejaya
Who: Vidura
Bound to
Vidura is Dharma/Yama, cursed by Mandavya same-story-other-version
Where this comes from
- CE · Mahabharata, Critical Edition 1.101 1.101
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Adi Parva, Section CVII (Mandavya is impaled)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Adi Parva, Section CVIII (the stake cut; Dharma's reply; the curse; Vidura)