Devalok
Local story · 2 tellings · East India

Dharmapada and the crowning stone of Konark

Who is in it

The story, beat by beat

  1. Twelve hundred craftsmen under Bisu Maharana build the Sun temple for years.
  2. His son, born after he left, finds him by a fruit from the home courtyard.
  3. The king decrees death for all if the crowning vase is not set in time.
  4. The boy climbs up at night and completes it.
  5. The craftsmen fear for their lives if a boy takes the credit; the father chooses his fellows.
  6. The boy leaps from the top and dies.

craft sacrifice father and son temple

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Scholarly

Odia legend as recorded by K. S. Behera

East India · Konark, Odisha Folk

Twelve hundred carpenters and masons worked sixteen years. Visu Maharana had left his wife expecting; the son set out to find him carrying a barakoli fruit from their courtyard that only his father could identify. Learning of the king's decree that all 1200 heads would be cut if the porch was not finished to the kalasa in time, the boy climbed up that night and completed it. The artisans said they would lose their lives if the boy had the credit; the father sorrowfully preferred his workmen; the boy climbed the spire and jumped. The name Dharmapada was coined by Gopabandhu Das. A similar legend is told at Simhachalam.

Konark: The Black Pagoda, K. S. Behera (Publications Division, Government of India, 2005) § ch2

Encyclopedia

Popular variant (Wikipedia)

East India · Konark, Odisha Folk

Here the work takes twelve years, the boy is twelve, the deadline is the next morning, and in some tellings he jumps into the sea rather than from the temple. No reference to him is known before the nineteenth century.

What is different here:

Twelve years for sixteen; the sea for the temple top.

Wikipedia: Dharmapada (person)

Sources: Konark: The Black Pagoda, K. S. Behera (Publications Division, Government of India, 2005); Wikipedia: Dharmapada (person)

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