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Legend · 2 tellings · Pan-India

Mandavya on the stake

A sage impaled for a crime he did not commit curses the god of justice to be born as Vidura.

Who is in it

  • Mandavya the impaled sage
  • Yama as Dharma, the god of justice who is cursed
  • Vidura the god born as a man

Texts: Mahabharata

The story, beat by beat

  1. Mandavya sits under a vow of silence when thieves hide their loot in his hermitage.
  2. He does not answer the king's guards and is impaled with the thieves.
  3. He stays alive on the stake; the king begs pardon, and the stake is cut off inside him.
  4. He asks the god of justice what sin earned this.
  5. The god says that as a child he pierced an insect with a blade of grass.
  6. Mandavya rules that no act of a child shall count as sin and curses the god to be born on earth.
  7. The god of justice is born as Vidura.

justice curse karma childhood

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Primary text (translation)

Mahabharata, Adi Parva 107-108

Pan-India All traditions

Silent Mandavya is taken for an accomplice and impaled. He survives, and sages visit him as birds. Freed with the stake's tip left in him, he goes to the seat of the god of justice and learns the cause: an insect he pierced in childhood. He calls the punishment out of measure, lays down that a child's act is no sin, and curses the god to be born a Shudra; so Vidura is born.

The Mahabharata, tr. K. M. Ganguli (1883-96), sections read for the Vedic layer § adi.107-108

Encyclopedia

Purana variant with Shilavati (secondary)

Pan-India All traditions

A man carried by his wife Shilavati brushes against the impaled sage, who curses him to die at sunrise; her devotion stops the sun from rising until Anasuya persuades her to relent.

What is different here:

The curse falls on a passer-by, not on Dharma; attached to the Anasuya cycle. Primary text not opened.

Mandavya (Wikipedia)

Sources: The Mahabharata, tr. K. M. Ganguli (1883-96), sections read for the Vedic layer; Mandavya (Wikipedia)

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