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Skandha 4, adhyayas 8-12 · Saptah day 2
A five-year-old turned away from his father's lap goes into the forest to find a seat no one can take from him.
King Uttanapada had two queens. Suruchi he loved; Suniti he hardly noticed. Each had given him a son: Uttama to Suruchi, Dhruva to Suniti.
One day Uttama was sitting on his father's lap, and Dhruva, who was five, wanted to climb up too. The king did not lift him. Suruchi, sure of the king's attention, spoke to the child in front of everyone. He might be a king's son, she said, but he had not come from her womb, so that seat was not his. If he wanted it, let him go and do austerities to the Supreme Person, and by his grace be born again from her.
The text compares the boy to a snake struck with a stick. He ran to his mother breathing hard and crying. Suniti wept as well, and then gave him the only counsel she had. Wish harm on no one, she said. And do what your stepmother told you: take refuge at the feet of the Lord, because no one else can take this sorrow away.
So the child walked out of the city. On the road he met Narada.
Narada laid his hand on the boy's head and then tried to send him home. You are a child, he said; what are honour and insult to you at this age? Sages who give up everything struggle for many lives to reach the Lord. Go back, and try when you are old. A teacher turning a student away at the door is a test of whether the resolve is real, and Dhruva's answer showed that it was. He had a kshatriya's temper, he said, and Suruchi's words had gone through him. He would not go home. He wanted a place higher than any his forefathers had reached, higher than anything in the three worlds.
Narada, pleased, taught him. Go to Madhuvana on the Yamuna, he said; bathe there three times a day; steady the breath; and meditate on the Lord's form, which he described to the boy in detail. And he gave him a mantra of twelve syllables: oṁ namo bhagavate vāsudevāya.
Dhruva's austerity is counted in months. In the first he ate fruit and berries every third day. In the second, grass and leaves every sixth day. In the third, water every ninth day. In the fourth he lived on air, breathing once in twelve days. In the fifth he stood on one foot, motionless, breath held, mind fixed on the Lord, and the earth tipped under that single foot like a boat. The breath of every creature stopped with his, and the gods, choking, went to the Lord for help.
The Lord came on Garuda. Dhruva, absorbed within, suddenly lost the form he had been seeing in his heart; he opened his eyes and found it standing before him. He wanted to praise and had no words, for he was a child. The Lord touched his cheek with the conch, and the words came.
The boon was what he had gone for: he would rule for thirty-six thousand years and afterwards reach the fixed point around which the stars and planets turn.
And Dhruva went home unhappy. This is the turn the episode hangs on. He had come to the feet of the one who ends rebirth, he thought, and asked him for something that ends. He compares himself to a poor man who stands before an emperor and asks for broken husks of grain.
His father, sick with regret since Narada's visit, came out in procession to meet him. Dhruva bowed to his mother and to Suruchi, and Suruchi embraced him. In time he was crowned. Later, when a Yaksha killed his half-brother Uttama in the Himalayas, he made war on the Yakshas until his grandfather Svayambhuva Manu came and told him to stop. And when Kubera offered him a boon, the boy who had once wanted a throne asked only to remember Hari without a break.
At the end of his reign he went to Badarikashrama. A celestial car came for him, and he set his foot on the head of Death to climb into it. Before he would go, he asked after his mother, and was shown her going ahead of him in a car of her own. The pole star bears his name.
The Bhagavatam gives this story an early and prominent place in the fourth book, and the reason is its shape. The first devotee it follows at length is a child who began with the wrong wish and was answered anyway, because what he did with the wish was turn toward the Lord. By the end, the wish has changed, and the seat no one can take from him is the smallest part of what he found.
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