The Remedy for the Shakti and Vishalya's Past Lives

Ravana, taking his brother and both sons for dead, mourns them in secret: ‘Alas Kumbhakarna! Alas Indrajit and Meghanada, strong as my own arms! I have killed the enemy's brother; who knows what the frantic foe will do to you?’ Sita weeps on hearing that Lakshmana has been struck, praising his devotion to his elder brother, until her Vidyadhara companions assure her that her brother-in-law's death is not certain and that many remedies exist.

Bhamandala stops a stranger at the camp gate, who says he has long yearned to see Rama and knows how to save Lakshmana. Before Rama he introduces himself as Chandrapratima, son of King Shashimandala and Queen Suprabha of the city of Devagati, and tells how Sahasravijaya, son of King Veladhyaksha, a rival because Chandrapratima had married the princess he desired, fought him in the sky and struck him with the shakti called Chandarava.

He fell from the sky into the Mahendra garden of Ayodhya, where King Bharata sprinkled his wounded chest with fragrant water mixed with sandal; the shakti fled and he became more handsome than before. Bharata had told him that a plague of chest pains, burning fevers, aches and boils once struck his land, and that King Dronamegha, free of disease with all his people, cured Bharata, his palace, city and country with the same fragrant water.

Dronamegha had explained that it was the bath water of his daughter Vishalya, skilled in all sciences and devoted to Jina worship, at whose conception every disease left his land and whose fragrant body perfumes the water. Marvelling, Bharata went to his city, praised the princess, and asked the sage Sarvahita, holder of four kinds of knowledge, to tell her story.

The sage told of the Pundarika country in Videha, where the Chakravarti Chakradhara ruled at Tribhuvanananda; his lovely daughter Anangashara was carried off in a vimana (aerial car) by Punarvasu, the Vidyadhara king of Pratishthitapura and a vassal of the emperor. When the Chakravarti's army smashed the vimana, Punarvasu let her fall, and by his Parnalaghu (leaf-light) vidya she drifted down into Shvapadaraurava, a terrible forest full of beasts where not even Vidyadharas go.

Alone in the forest, the princess wept for her parents, lived on fallen fruits, endured fierce summers, rains and winters, kept many two- and three-day fasts and broke them once a day with fruit and water, practising such penance for three thousand years. At last she took the sallekhana vow (a holy fast unto death), renouncing all four kinds of food and vowing never to step beyond a hundred cubits of ground.

With six days of life left, she was found by the Vidyadhara Arhaddasa, returning from worship at Mount Sumeru; bound by her vow she refused to go with him, so he brought the Chakravarti himself, who arrived to find a huge python swallowing her. Seeing her father, she had him grant the python abhayadana (the gift of safety) and would not let it be killed, then died in samadhi (meditative peace) and was reborn in the third heaven, while her father renounced the world with his twenty-two thousand sons and became a muni.

Punarvasu searched forest after forest in vain, then in grief became a muni under the sage Drumasena, did great penance, became a god in heaven and from there was born as Lakshmana; Anangashara, descending from heaven, was born as Vishalya, daughter of King Dronamegha. Because Punarvasu had made a nidana (a binding wish) for Anangashara, Lakshmana will now marry Vishalya, whose past penance and mercy to the python give her bath water the power to quell every shakti and disease.

Asked why the plague struck Ayodhya, the sage said that Vindhya, a rich merchant of Hastinapura, stayed eleven months in Ayodhya with laden donkeys, camels and buffaloes; an overloaded buffalo, wounded and sick, died there and through akama nirjara (involuntary shedding of karma) became a Vayukumara god named Ashvaketu. Recalling by avadhi jnana (clairvoyance) how people had trodden on his head as he lay in the mud, he spread diseases through Ayodhya in revenge, all cured by Vishalya's water, and Chandrapratima urges Rama to send for it at once as the only remedy.