The story

One day Parikshit went hunting and followed a deer deep into the forest. By the time he gave up the chase he was tired, hungry and very thirsty, and he went looking for water. He came to a hermitage and went in.

A sage named Shamika sat there with his eyes closed. His senses, breath and mind were drawn in and still; he had gone beyond waking, dreaming and sleep. Wrapped in a deerskin, his hair matted, he did not move.

The king asked for water. Nobody answered him. Nobody offered him a seat or a word of welcome. Parikshit was the protector of the land; he was also, just then, an exhausted man with a dry throat, and he felt slighted. Anger and resentment rose in him against a brahmana, the text says, for the first time in his life. He wondered whether the sage was truly absorbed or only pretending, so as not to have to receive a mere kshatriya.

On his way out, he lifted a dead snake on the tip of his bow, laid it across the sage's shoulders, and went home.

The sage had a son, a boy who was playing nearby with other children, but who had the power of a brahmana's word. When he heard what the king had done to his father, he was furious. Look at the wrongdoing of these rulers, he said; they are like crows fattened on offerings, like dogs set to guard the door, and now the servant turns on the master. With Krishna gone there is no one left to restrain them, so I will. He touched the water of the Kaushiki river and let his words fall like a thunderbolt: on the seventh day from today, the serpent Takshaka will bite the man who has offended my father.

Then he went back to the hermitage, saw the snake on his father's shoulders, and burst into loud weeping.

Shamika opened his eyes, saw the dead snake, threw it aside, and asked his son why he was crying. When he heard, he did not approve. He grieved. You have done a great wrong, he told the boy, giving a heavy punishment for a small offence. Your mind is not yet ripe. A king is not an ordinary man. He protects everyone, and without him the land falls to thieves who prey on one another, and that ruin would be laid at our door. This king, he added, is a great devotee of the Lord and a performer of horse sacrifices; he did not deserve a curse. Then he prayed to the Lord to forgive his foolish son. The saintly, the text remarks, are not shaken by insult any more than by praise.

The curse could not be taken back, and word of it reached Parikshit.

What he did next is the hinge of the whole Bhagavatam. He did not try to undo the curse or hunt for Takshaka. He was already sorry for what he had done to an innocent sage, and he welcomed the news as a fitting result: let the fire of an angered brahmana burn me now, he thought, so that I never do such a thing again. He saw the death that was coming as a release from attachment. He handed the kingdom to his son Janamejaya, went to the bank of the Ganga, and sat down on kusha grass to fast until death, his mind fixed on Krishna's feet.

Sages came from everywhere to be with him: Atri, Vasishtha, Chyavana, Bhrigu, Angiras, Parashara, Vishvamitra, Parashurama, Agastya, Vyasa, Narada and many others. Parikshit bowed to them all and put a single question. What should a man do who is about to die? What, for such a man, is pure in every way?

While the sages were still discussing it, Shuka arrived, Vyasa's son. He had been wandering wherever his feet took him, wanting nothing. He looked like a boy of sixteen, with tender feet and long arms, wearing nothing, his hair loose, and a crowd of children trailed after him as if after a madman. Nothing about him announced who he was. But the sages, who knew the marks of what they were looking at, rose from their seats. Parikshit bowed his head and offered him worship.

Then the king asked his question again, this time of Shuka. What should one about to die hear, repeat, remember and worship, and what should he give up? He adds, with a dying man's frankness, that one like Shuka is hardly ever seen to stay in a householder's home longer than it takes to milk a cow.

Shuka sits down to answer, and his answer is the rest of the Bhagavatam. The whole book is spoken by a riverbank to a man with seven days left, which is why the tradition reads it in seven days at a Saptah. The petty act in the forest, the boy's curse and the father's grief are not a prologue to the story. They are the reason it has a listener.

Who appears, and what it shows

• Parikshit — Saved by Krishna in his mother's womb, cursed to die in seven days, he spends the week asking the questions the book answers.
• Shuka — A sixteen-year-old sage so free of the world that women bathing did not cover themselves — and the one voice that tells the whole book.
• Theme: Time and dissolution
• Theme: Detachment

Keep reading

• Parikshit meets Kali — Skandha 1, adhyayas 16-17 — A bull on one leg, a weeping cow, and a man dressed as a king beating them both: the Kali age arrives in Parikshit's realm.
• The four verses given to Brahma — Skandha 2, adhyaya 9 — Brahma, seated on a lotus with no idea how to create, hears 'tapa' twice, does penance, and is given the whole book in four verses.

Questions to explore

• Why did Parikshit place a dead snake on a meditating sage?
• Why did the sage Shamika grieve over his own son's curse?
• What does a man who has seven days to live need to hear?