Gangadhara: Catching the River of Heaven
Containment without ego
Bhagiratha has spent years on a single rock doing tapas to bring the Ganga down from heaven for his sixty thousand ash-covered ancestors. The river is willing. The problem is the force of her fall. No earth can take it. Shiva agrees to catch her in his matted hair, and the Ganga descends.
The Rock at Gokarna
On the western coast of present-day Karnataka, where the Arabian Sea meets the laterite cliffs of the Uttara Kannada district, there is a small rocky outcrop above the high-tide line. The rock is dark, pitted, salt-streaked, warm under the soles even in winter. Coconut palms lean over it from the landward side. The sound of the surf is constant, the sound of the wind in the palms is louder, and the smell of brine carries on every breath. Sometime in the early ages of the world, a young man stands on this rock with both arms raised over his head. His name is Bhagiratha.
He is the great-great-grandson of King Sagara of the Ikshvaku dynasty, the lineage that will one day produce Rama. His own kingdom waits for him in the north. He has not been there in years. His feet have grown rough on the rock. His hair has matted. He eats one fruit a day, drinks rainwater from a small hollow in the stone, and stands with his arms up while the salt cakes on his shoulders. He is doing what the tradition calls tapas, the slow, deliberate burning of the small self until something larger can be asked of the cosmos.
What he is asking for is impossible. His sixty thousand great-uncles, the sons of Sagara, lie in a pit at Patala under the lower world, reduced to a heap of ash by a single glance from the sage Kapila. They had insulted Kapila while searching for a lost ritual horse. The curse on them is fixed. The only force in the cosmos that can lift their ash and send them home is Ganga, the river of the sky, who at present flows in heaven and has never come down. Brahma alone can release her. Bhagiratha, on a small rock above the Arabian Sea, is asking Brahma to do exactly that.