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Skandha 3, adhyayas 15-16 · Saptah day 2
Four child-sages are stopped at Vaikuntha's seventh gate, and the two guards who stopped them must be born three times as demons.
The story is told to frightened gods. Diti, wife of the sage Kashyapa, was carrying twins, and she had kept them in her womb for a hundred years, afraid of what they would do once born. The power of the unborn children was already spreading darkness through every direction. The gods went to Brahma and asked what was happening. Brahma answered with a story.
The four Kumaras, he said, sons born of his own mind, roam the worlds through the sky, wanting nothing. Once they came to Vaikuntha, the Lord's own world. They passed through six gates without stopping, drawn to nothing they saw, and at the seventh they found two attendants of the same age, splendidly dressed, holding maces, wearing garlands loud with bees.
The Kumaras were the oldest of beings, but they looked like children of about five, and they went naked. The two gatekeepers saw four naked boys and missed what was in them. They mocked the sages' radiance, the text says, and barred their way with their staffs.
The Kumaras had come to see the Lord, the one they loved most, and their eyes reddened with anger. They spoke plainly. Those who live in Vaikuntha, they said, share the Lord's own nature. There is no conflict here, and the Lord has no enemy. Who are you, then, to suspect danger in this place and see division in it? You do not belong here. Go down to the worlds where the three enemies of the soul hold sway. Commentators name these three as desire, anger and greed.
The two gatekeepers knew at once what they had done. They fell at the sages' feet and accepted the punishment as just. They asked only one thing: that however far down they went, the delusion that destroys the memory of the Lord should not come over them.
Then the Lord came, on foot, with Lakshmi. He had learned that his servants had insulted the sages. The Kumaras had long meditated on the formless, but the breeze from his feet, carrying the scent of tulasi, reached them and stirred them in body and mind. They gazed at him without being able to gaze enough, and praised him.
The Lord's answer is the surprising part. These two, Jaya and Vijaya, are my attendants, he told the Kumaras. In mistreating you they disregarded me. When a servant does wrong, the world blames the master, so their offence is mine, and I accept your punishment. Then he spoke at length about the honour due to brahmanas. He would cut off his own arm, he said, if it acted against them.
The Kumaras did not know what to make of this. We cannot tell what you intend, they said. Whatever you decide for these two, or for us, we accept. If we have cursed the innocent, punish us.
The Lord then said the thing that turns the story round. The two would soon be born as demons, he told the sages, and the intensity of their anger would bind their minds to him in concentration, and they would return to him quickly. Know, he said, that the curse you gave was ordained by me.
When the Kumaras had gone, he turned to his attendants. Go, he said, and do not be afraid. I could cancel this curse, but I do not wish to. Lakshmi foretold it, he added, on the day she came to the gate while I was resting and you stopped her. Through anger fixed on me you will be purified and come back to me in a short time.
The two fell from Vaikuntha, their radiance gone, and a cry of dismay rose from the gods watching in their aerial cars. They entered Diti's womb. That, Brahma told the gods, is what is darkening the sky.
Later, in the seventh book, the Bhagavatam names their three births as enemies of the Lord: Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu, then Ravana and Kumbhakarna, then Shishupala and Dantavakra. Each pair dies at the hands of an avatar, and after the last, killed by Krishna, the two return to Vishnu's side.
This is why the episode is placed just before the boar avatar, and long before Narasimha. It gives the Bhagavatam's great demons an origin inside heaven. They are not rival powers but servants on a hard errand, sent down for a slight at a gate and brought back by the one they will spend three lives opposing. The book will show again and again that intense attention to the Lord, even in the form of hostility, does not leave a soul where it found it.
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