The King and the Merchant

There was once a king called Suratha who ruled the whole earth and protected it like his own children. Then enemies came against him, and he lost the battle. When he came home, his own ministers, who were supposed to serve him, turned on him and took his treasury and his army. Suratha rode out of the city alone, on the pretext of hunting, and went into the forest.

Deep in the forest he found a hermitage, the home of the sage Medhas, where wild animals lived peacefully beside the sage's pupils. Suratha stayed there, and the sage welcomed him. But his mind would not settle.

"Are my old servants keeping the city safe?" he thought. "Is my elephant, the brave one, being fed? Are the men who took my treasure wasting it?"

One day he met another man wandering near the hermitage, pale and troubled. "Who are you?" Suratha asked.

"My name is Samadhi," the man said. "I am a merchant, born into a rich family. My wife and my sons wanted my money, and they threw me out of my own house. Now I am here, and I do not even know whether they are well."

"They drove you out," said the king, "and still you worry about them?"

"I know," said Samadhi. "I cannot help it. My heart will not stop loving them."

The two of them went to the sage together, and Suratha told him everything. "I know my kingdom is gone," he said. "This man knows his family has thrown him away. We understand it perfectly. Then why do we still grieve, like fools who understand nothing?"

Medhas smiled. "Every creature has knowledge," he said. "Birds feed their chicks even when they are starving themselves. And still all of them are caught in the whirlpool of attachment. That is the power of the Goddess, Mahamaya. She draws the minds even of wise men into delusion. And when she is pleased, she is the one who sets them free."

"Who is she?" asked the king. "How was she born, and what has she done?"

So the sage told them. He told how she woke Vishnu from his sleep on the waters when the demons Madhu and Kaitabha came to kill Brahma. He told how she rose from the anger of all the gods to kill the buffalo demon Mahisha. He told how she killed Shumbha and Nishumbha and all their generals. Those three stories are the Devi Mahatmya.

When he had finished, the king and the merchant went down to the bank of a river. They made an image of the Goddess out of the river's clay, and they worshipped her with flowers, incense, fire and water. They fasted, and they gave her offerings smeared with blood from their own bodies. They did this for three years.

At the end of the three years the Goddess appeared before them. "Ask for what you want," she said.

Suratha asked for his kingdom back, in this life, and for a kingdom that would never be lost in the next. Samadhi, whose heart had changed by then, asked for nothing of the world. He asked for the knowledge that frees a man from "mine" and "I".

She gave them both what they asked. Suratha won back his kingdom in a few days and, she said, would be born again as Savarni, the Manu of a future age. Samadhi went away with the knowledge he had wanted.

Bengal tells the same story with a place and a season. Suratha, the Bengali telling says, was a king of Bengal whose capital was at Bolpur. When he lost his throne he rode west across the Ajay river into the sal forest, and the hermitage he came to is pointed out today at Garh Jungle, near Durgapur, where a temple called Garh Chandi Dham stands among the trees.

There he met the merchant Samadhi, and there the sage Medhas told them both the stories of the Goddess. When the sage had finished, he gave them an order.

"Make her image out of clay," he said, "and worship her."

So the king and the merchant dug clay from the riverbank and shaped a goddess with ten arms, and they worshipped her in the spring, in the month of Chaitra, while the trees of the forest were coming into flower. "This was the first Durga Puja," Bengalis say, "long before Rama ever worshipped her."

When the Goddess had given them their wishes, Suratha went home to his kingdom, and every spring after that he worshipped her again. That spring worship is still kept in Bengal as Basanti Puja, the puja of the spring season.

Then, the story goes on, Rama needed her help against Ravana in the autumn, out of her proper season, and woke her early. People came to love the autumn puja more, and it became the great Durga Puja of Bengal. The spring one is quieter now, but it is the older of the two, and some families still keep only that one.