Anasuya tests the three gods

The Bhagavata does not tell the test at all. It records that Atri prayed to the three gods for offspring and that Anasuya bore three sons, each a partial presence of one god: Soma the moon from Brahma, Dattatreya from Vishnu, and Durvasa from Shiva. Dattatreya is therefore Vishnu's portion and the three gods stay distinct.

In the Nath telling retold by Pattanaik, the three gods arrive as mendicants and ask to be fed by a naked hostess; the moment she undresses they become babies at her breast. Saraswati, Lakshmi and Gauri ask forgiveness and offer a boon, and she asks for a son with the qualities of all three. That son, Datta, becomes the first guru of the Nath yogis, the one who had no human teacher but learned from twenty-four teachers in nature — earth, sky, bee, spider, even a courtesan — and who kept dogs beside him against orthodox distaste. Attribute the framing to Pattanaik.

The living Datta tradition of the Deccan knows the birth through the Guru Charitra, a sixteenth-century Marathi work that follows two later avatars of Datta, Sripada Sri Vallabha of Pithapuram and Narasimha Saraswati, whose monastery at Ganagapur and twelve years at Narsobawadi made those places the tradition's centres, with sandals rather than images as the objects of worship. Mahur in Nanded district is held to be Datta's birthplace, with temples to Renuka, Datta and Anasuya, and a daily circuit in which Datta bathes at Mahur, begs at Kolhapur, eats at Panchaleshwar and sleeps again at Mahur.