The God Who Finds What Is Lost

Most gods of the Rigveda are asked for victory. Pushan is asked for directions.

"Pushan, bring us to the man who knows," one hymn begins, "the one who will point straight and say, It is here."

The singers are herdsmen and travellers, and their troubles are small and real. A cow has strayed. A road runs through wolf country. Somebody must go to a strange village and does not know which house is which. For all of this there is one god to call.

"Shorten our road, Pushan," says a traveller setting out. "Move the obstacles out of the path. Go close in front of us."

He lists what he is afraid of. "Drive the wolf off our road, the wicked wolf that lies in wait. Chase the robber far from the path, the one who lurks with a crooked heart." Then he says what he hopes for. "Lead us to meadows thick with grass. Send no heat on us too early in the day. Find the strength for this, Pushan."

The hymns say what Pushan looks like. His hair is braided, and he has a beard that he shakes lightly. He carries a goad with a horn tip for guiding cows, and an awl, the pointed tool of a leather worker. One poet asks him to use the awl on a miser and prick the man's hard heart until it turns generous.

He does not drive horses. "Bright god, your team is goats," the poets say, and they call him goat-borne. The goats are sure-footed. The wheel of his cart is never damaged, and its box never falls to the ground.

His work is the herd. "Let Pushan follow our cows. Let Pushan keep our horses safe." When the cattle go out to graze, the herdsman sends a prayer after them.

"Let none be lost. Let none be hurt. Let none fall into a pit and break a leg. Come back with all of them safe and sound."

And when one is missing after all, the prayer changes.

"From far away let Pushan stretch out his right hand, and drive our lost ones back to us."

He looks after the small animals too. One hymn says that he weaves the clothing of the sheep and makes it fine, which is a herdsman's way of speaking about wool.

Then there is his food. The great gods drink Soma. Pushan eats karambha, a plain gruel of meal stirred into curds.

A hymn to Indra and Pushan together puts the two side by side without embarrassment. "One sits down to drink the pressed Soma. The other wants his gruel. Goats pull the one, and two bay horses the other." It adds that when Indra brought down the great waters, Pushan was standing at his side.

Another poet seems to have heard somebody laugh at the gruel-eater, and he answers shortly. Whoever thinks of Pushan only as the god who eats gruel, he says, has not understood the god at all.

The Rigveda gives no reason for the gruel. It says nothing about his teeth. Pushan eats what a herdsman eats, and the poets love him for it. "We have no fault to find with Pushan," one of them says. "We praise him in our songs."

Later ages wanted to know why a god should live on gruel, and the answer they gave was that he had lost his teeth. The old ritual books say a dangerous morsel of a sacrifice broke them. We tell that in The God Who Was Left Behind. The Mahabharata and the Puranas tell it differently.

In the Mahabharata it is Krishna who tells the story, to explain the terrible power of Rudra.

The gods once planned a sacrifice and shared it out among themselves. They did not truly know Rudra, Krishna says, and they set aside no share for him. Rudra made a bow and came to the place dressed in deerskin. The earth shook. The wind stopped, and the fire would not blaze. He shot the Sacrifice through the heart, and it fled into the sky in the shape of a deer.

Then, in his rage, he turned his bow on the gods. He broke the arms of Savitr. He put out the eyes of Bhaga. He knocked out the teeth of Pushan.

The gods cried out, and at their cry the bowstring snapped. They came to him and asked for his protection, and his anger passed.

"He gave Savitr back his arms," says Krishna, "and Bhaga his eyes, and Pushan his teeth." And the gods gave Rudra all the offerings of butter as his share.

The Bhagavata Purana sets the scene at the sacrifice of Daksha and makes the blow a punishment. When Daksha stood up in the assembly and cursed Shiva, Pushan smiled and showed his teeth. So when Shiva's warrior Virabhadra wrecked the sacrifice, those teeth were knocked out.

This time they are not returned. When Shiva is calm again he gives his ruling.

"Pushan will chew with the teeth of others. When he eats alone, he will eat food made of flour."