A brilliant minister grows tired of the court

Pushpadanta, reborn as a man, grew up in Kausambi under the name Vararuchi — though he was also known by a second name, Katyayana. He mastered every branch of learning available to him and rose to serve King Nanda as a minister, a position of real power and comfort. And yet something in him remained unsatisfied, and eventually, worn down by the endless business of court life, he set off to visit a shrine of the goddess Durga simply to clear his mind.

A dream sends him into the wild forest

Durga, pleased by his devotion, appeared to him that night in a dream and gave him a strange instruction: he was to travel into the wilds of the Vindhya forest and seek out a spirit named Kanabhuti. Vararuchi did as he was told, making his way through a stretch of country full of tigers and wild apes, until at last, beneath a great spreading tree, he came upon Kanabhuti himself — a Pisacha of enormous size, standing among hundreds of lesser spirits like their unquestioned chief.

The chief of the Pisachas tells his own strange story

Kanabhuti received the stranger with respect, and Vararuchi, sitting down beside him, asked plainly how a being like him had come to this condition. Kanabhuti admitted he did not fully understand it himself, but he had once, by chance, overheard Shiva explaining it to Parvati at a cremation-ground in Ujjain, and he offered to repeat what he had heard.

Why the god of destruction loves skulls and burning-grounds

Long ago, Shiva had said, when a great cycle of creation had ended and the universe was nothing but water, he had let fall a drop of his own blood, which became an egg, and from that egg the Supreme Spirit — the first Creator — had emerged. That spirit, in time, grew arrogant with the power of creation, and Shiva, in anger, cut off his head. It was in penance for that killing that Shiva had ever after carried skulls in his hand and taken pleasure in the places where the dead are burned; the world itself, he said, rested in his palm like the two halves of that same primordial egg.

A curse explained, and a stranger's arrival foretold

While Shiva was telling this to Parvati, Kanabhuti — listening in secret exactly as Pushpadanta once had — heard something else that concerned him directly. Parvati asked when Pushpadanta might return to them, and Shiva, gesturing toward the very spirit hiding nearby, explained that this Pisacha had once been a Yaksha in Kubera's service, banished to the Vindhya wilds for keeping bad company with a wicked Rakshasa. His own release, Kubera had ruled, would come only once he heard the great tale from a reborn Pushpadanta, and told it in turn to a reborn Malyavan. Hearing all this from Shiva's own mouth, Kanabhuti had come to the forest and waited ever since, certain his freedom would eventually arrive on two legs.

A stranger remembers who he really is

The moment Kanabhuti finished his account, something shifted behind Vararuchi's eyes, and he came alive with recognition, as though waking from a long sleep. I am Pushpadanta, he said. Hear the story from me. And there, in the forest, Vararuchi recited to the astonished Kanabhuti the entire cycle of tales Shiva had once told Parvati — seven great stories, seven hundred thousand verses in all, delivered whole and complete, exactly as a god might deliver them.

Kanabhuti asks for one more story in return

Kanabhuti, prostrate with gratitude and awe at what he had just witnessed, asked one favor before letting his benefactor go: tell me your own history too, he said, from your very birth as a mortal man — sanctify me further by letting me hear it. Vararuchi, moved by the request, agreed, and began the story of his own life.

A child who forgets nothing he has heard once

He had been born in Kausambi to a poor Brahmin named Somadatta, who died while Vararuchi was still small, leaving his mother to raise him alone through years of hard, humble work. He showed his gift early: when two traveling scholars once stopped at their house and a drum sounded outside for a play being performed nearby, the boy declared he would go, watch it once, and come home able to perform the entire thing himself, word for word — and did exactly that, astonishing everyone who saw it, including the two scholars who happened to be watching.

Two orphaned scholars recognize a prodigy

One of those scholars, a man named Vyadi, realized at once what kind of mind he was looking at, and told Vararuchi's mother his own story in return: he and his companion Indradatta were themselves orphans, sons of two brothers who had died within days of each other, and they had spent years wandering in search of a legendary teacher named Varsha, guided by a dream that promised them all knowledge once they found him — on one condition. They had found Varsha at last in Pataliputra, living in grinding poverty, mocked by the whole city as a fool, and had learned from his own wife the truth behind that reputation.

A humiliated teacher's secret blessing from the gods

Varsha, it turned out, had once been publicly humiliated over a ridiculous local custom involving a disrespectful ceremonial cake, and the shame of it had driven him, in despair at his own perceived stupidity, to undertake severe austerities in worship of the god Kartikeya. The god had rewarded him with the promise of all knowledge in the world — but only once he found a single student capable of remembering anything after hearing it just one time. Varsha's wife had been searching for such a student for years, with no success at all, until Vyadi and Indradatta, hearing this story, realized they had just found him standing in front of them: Vararuchi himself.

Three pupils, one teacher, and all knowledge in a single sitting

The two scholars took the boy back with them to Varsha's house, over his weeping mother's blessing, and the very next day the teacher sat the three young men before him and began to recite the sacred syllable Om. In that single sitting, the whole of the Vedas and their supplementary sciences rushed into his mind exactly as the god had promised — and he in turn poured all of it into his three students at once. Vararuchi retained everything after hearing it a single time; Vyadi needed to hear it twice; Indradatta needed three. Word of the miracle spread through the city within hours, and even King Nanda himself came to shower the once-mocked teacher with wealth and honor.