Devalok
From the epics · 2 tellings · Pan-India

The Yaksha's questions

Dharma, disguised as a Yaksha guarding a lake, strikes down four Pandavas and restores them when Yudhishthira answers his questions and chooses fairly.

Who is in it

Texts: Mahabharata

The story, beat by beat

  1. The Pandavas, chasing a deer that carried off a Brahmin's fire-sticks, are overcome by thirst.
  2. Nakula finds a lake; a voice forbids him to drink before answering; he drinks and falls dead.
  3. Sahadeva, Arjuna and Bhima do the same.
  4. Yudhishthira finds them and agrees to answer.
  5. He answers the Yaksha's many questions.
  6. Offered one brother's life, he chooses Nakula so that each of his two mothers has a living son.
  7. The Yaksha restores all four and reveals himself as Dharma, his father.
  8. Dharma grants boons: the fire-sticks, concealment in the thirteenth year, and a steadfast mind.

test riddles justice brothers boons

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Primary text (translation)

Mahabharata, Vana Parva 310-312

Pan-India All traditions

Four brothers ignore a voice at a forest lake, drink and die. Yudhishthira answers the Yaksha: the mother is weightier than the earth, the father higher than the sky, the mind swifter than wind; a fish sleeps with open eyes; the greatest wonder is that the living think themselves immortal while creatures go daily to Yama. He asks for Nakula, Madri's son, to live; all four are revived. The Yaksha is Dharma, who was also the deer, and he grants three boons.

The Mahabharata, tr. K. M. Ganguli (1883-96), sections read for the Vedic layer § vana.310-312

Primary text (translation)

Devadhamma Jataka (Jataka 6)

Pan-India Buddhist

Three princes of Benares go into exile. A water spirit, licensed by Vessavana to eat all who enter its pool except those who know what is truly godlike, takes the two younger, who answer "sun and moon" and "the four quarters". The eldest, the Bodhisatta, stays out of the water, answers that the godlike are those who shrink from wrong, and, offered one brother, chooses the youngest, his stepmother's son. The spirit returns both and is converted.

What is different here:

A real water demon, one question, three brothers, no hidden god; the spirit is the one taught.

The Jataka, Volume I, tr. Robert Chalmers (1895), No. 6 Devadhamma Jataka § 6

Sources: The Mahabharata, tr. K. M. Ganguli (1883-96), sections read for the Vedic layer; The Jataka, Volume I, tr. Robert Chalmers (1895), No. 6 Devadhamma Jataka

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