The King Who Milked the Earth

There was once a king named Vena who forbade all worship.

"No sacrifices," he ordered. "No offerings and no gifts. I am the king. Every god there is lives in the person of a king, so who should be honoured except me?"

The sages came to him and spoke gently. They asked only to be allowed their rites, and promised him a share of the merit. He refused them, and refused them again. At last their patience ended. They struck him down with blades of sacred grass, and the king died.

Then the land had no ruler, and the sages saw dust rising on every road. Robbers were out, people told them, taking whatever they liked.

A kingdom needs a king. The sages rubbed the right arm of the dead Vena, and from it came a son who shone like fire. His name was Prithu. A bow and arrows fell from the sky for him, the rivers and seas brought water and jewels for his crowning, and all creatures were glad.

His people loved him. But they were starving.

They came to him thin and desperate. "In the time when there was no king, every plant we could eat disappeared," they said. "The Earth has kept them back. You are our protector. Give us food, or we die."

Prithu did not make a speech. He picked up his bow and went out to find the Earth.

She saw him coming and ran.

She took the shape of a cow and fled. She ran through the heavens and the world of Brahma, and wherever she turned she found the king behind her with his arrow raised. At last she stopped, trembling, and faced him.

"King of men," she said, "do you not know it is a sin to kill a female? Why do you hunt me like this?"

"When one who does harm is destroyed and many are made happy by it," said Prithu, "the killing is a good deed."

"And if you kill me to feed your people," said the Earth, "what will your people stand on? Where will they live?"

"You have disobeyed my rule," he said. "If I must destroy you, I will hold my people up by my own power."

She shook in every limb. Then she bowed to him and tried again, and this time she had something to offer.

"Everything succeeds when it is done by the right means," she said. "Let me give you a means. The plants are old, and I have taken them into myself. At your command I will give them back, as milk. But a cow gives milk for a calf. Find me a calf. And make my surface level, so that the milk can flow everywhere and not run off."

The king lowered his bow.

He did what she asked. He pulled up the hills, hundreds and thousands of them, and piled them one on another until there was flat ground between. Before that, the Purana says, there were no fields or pastures, no villages with boundaries and no roads for merchants. Now there were places where people could settle.

Then he made Manu, the father of mankind, the calf. The Earth let down her milk for it, and Prithu milked her into his own hand. What he drew out was every kind of grain and vegetable that people have lived on since.

After him the others came. Gods, sages, demons, spirits, the ancestors, the snakes, the mountains and the trees each brought a calf of their own kind and a pail that suited them, and each drew from her the milk they lived by.

By sparing her life, the Purana says, Prithu became a father to the Earth. That is why she is called Prithivi, the daughter of Prithu.

The oldest form of this story is in the Atharvaveda, and it does not look much like the later one. Nobody is chased. The cow in it is not the Earth. She is a power called Viraj, and in this telling the Earth is the bucket.

In the beginning, the hymn says, Viraj was all there was, and everyone who saw her was afraid.

She rose and went from place to place, and wherever she arrived, those who lived there called to her by the name of the thing they most wanted.

She came to the demons. "Come, Maya!" they cried. Their calf was Virochana and their pail was made of iron, and what they milked from her was the power of illusion, which demons live by.

She came to the ancestors. "Come, Food!" they called. Their calf was King Yama and their pail was silver.

She came to men. "Come, Giver of plenty!" they called.

The calf of men was Manu. The milking pail was the Earth. And the one who did the milking was Prithi, the son of Vena. What he milked out was farming, and grain to sow. People live by farming and grain, the hymn says, and the man who knows this will do well with his fields.

Then she went on. The seven sages called her, with Soma as their calf, and the priest Brihaspati milked holy speech and discipline from her. The gods milked strength. The heavenly musicians milked sweet scent into a lotus leaf. The snakes called, "Come, Poisonous one!" and milked venom into a gourd.

Every kind of being got from her what it lives on. The hymn does not say that she minded.

The Mahabharata tells of Prithu in a list of great kings of the past, and in its telling there is no famine and no hunt.

In Prithu's time, it says, the earth gave crops without being ploughed. Every cow gave milk at a touch, and there was honey in every lotus. Nobody went hungry. When the king went down to the sea the waves grew solid under him, and the mountains opened to let him through.

One day the trees, the mountains, the gods, the demons, men, the snakes, the seven sages and the ancestors all came to him together as he sat at his ease.

"You are our emperor and our father," they said. "Give each of us the thing that will keep us content for ever."

"So be it," said Prithu. He took up his bow, thought for a moment, and spoke to the Earth.

"Come quickly, Earth. Give these the milk they want."

The Earth did not run. She made one request.

"Then you must think of me as your daughter."

"So be it," said Prithu.

She stood there, full of affection, the epic says, and waited for a calf, a milker and a pail. The trees went first. The sala tree was the calf, the banyan did the milking, and the milk they drew was buds. The mountains milked jewels and herbs. Men milked crops and tillage, with Manu as the calf and Prithu himself as the milker.

In another book of the epic, the Shanti Parva, the Earth comes to Prithu's crowning in person and brings him a gift of jewels.