Jayā Ekadasi

The dancers turned to goblins

Retold from the Padma Purāṇa, Uttara Khaṇḍa, Chapter 43. The standard English translation, on which this retelling relies, is by N.A. Deshpande (Motilal Banarsidass).

This is a story about a missed beat in a song, and what it cost.

In heaven, where Indra rules fifty crores of inhabitants and the celestial nymphs serve nectar, there is a grove called Nandana. Pārijāta trees grow in it. Gods rejoice there, attended by nymphs. Among the gandharvas who sing for these rejoicings were a young man and a young woman who happened to love each other.

His name was Mālyavat. He was the son of the gandharva Puṣpadanta. She was Puṣpadantī, born of Mālinī, who was Citrasena's wife. They were musicians by birth, beautiful by inheritance, and infatuated with each other in a way the Purāṇa describes at length: her arms were like Cupid's nooses, her eyes long to the ears and reeling, her breasts like golden pitchers, her waist so lean it could be grasped in a fist. He was filled with the feeling of love just looking at her.

One day they were called to perform before Indra. They came together — singing and dancing, attended by bands of nymphs, both of them dressed and adorned for the occasion. But their attention was on each other. The text is gentle about what happened next, almost apologetic on their behalf. Their bodies were filled with cupid. Their minds were perplexed. They missed the rhythm. The clapping of their hands fell out of time. Their feet drifted from the measure. The execution of the song faltered.

Indra noticed.

The king of the gods felt insulted. His jealousy was the jealousy of a powerful man who senses, accurately, that something has been taken from him — the full attention of his entertainers. Fie upon you, he said. You stupid ones have disobeyed me. Be turned into goblins as husband and wife. Go to the mortal world, enjoying the fruit of your deed.

The curse worked instantly. They fell.

They landed on the Himalaya — not at its base, but somewhere in its impassable upper reaches, where the snow does not melt. Their bodies had changed. They were pishachas now, goblins. The cold tore at them. The summer, when it came, was worse. They moved through mountain caves with their teeth chattering and the hair of their bodies standing up in fear and pain. They could not sleep at night. They did not have coition. They got no pleasure. The Purāṇa permits itself one observation: Hell is looked upon as fierce, and goblin-hood as painful.

In one of the caves, the male goblin spoke to the female. What great, fierce, and thrilling sin have we committed, he asked, due to which we have obtained goblin-hood as the result of our bad deeds? With all efforts, one should not commit a sin. It is the kind of question people ask when they have learned the lesson but cannot yet undo what brought them to it.

Then the Ekādaśī of Māgha — the bright fortnight, the one called Jayā — arrived in the world, and it arrived also in the cave. The two goblins, in their misery, did the things the Ekādaśī asks for, without knowing they were doing them. They did not eat. They did not drink. They did not kill any creature for meat, as goblins are otherwise inclined to do. They did not eat leaves or fruits. They sat near an Aśvattha tree, full of grief, clinging to each other in their changed bodies. The night came — fierce, terrible, fatal — and they slept on the bare ground. They did not sleep, actually. There was no coition. There was no pleasure. Their bodies, which had failed to keep time at Indra's court, now kept the vow of Jayā by being unable to do anything else.

Kṛṣṇa, watching, held their salvation in his heart. When the morning of Dvādaśī came, the curse lifted. Their goblin-bodies fell away. Mālyavat and Puṣpadantī stood in their old forms with their old ornaments, their old love between them, unaltered.

A vimāna — an aerial vehicle — appeared, and they rose in it through the sky and came again to Indra's court. They saluted him. Indra looked at them, astonished. Tell me, he said, due to what moral merit, you who were reduced to goblin-hood, who had received a curse from me — by which god were you freed?

Mālyavat answered: Our goblin-hood has gone by Viṣṇu's favour, the observance of the Jayā-vow, and the strength of devotion to you.

Indra paused. Then he said something that the Purāṇa preserves as one of its rare moments of one god conceding the rank of another. You have become sinless, pure, and have become adorable even to me. There is no doubt that those mortals who adhere to the vow of the day of Viṣṇu, and are devoted to Kṛṣṇa, are adorable to us also.

The vow

Jayā Ekādaśī is observed on the eleventh tithi of the bright fortnight of Māgha. The fast is broken on Dvādaśī. The observance is standard: fasting from sunrise to sunrise, worship of Viṣṇu, keeping awake through the night, breaking the fast in the pāraṇa window the following morning.

This Ekādaśī is observed by those who fear they have lost their place. It is not a vow asked for; it is a vow that pulls those who have already fallen up out of their fall. The Purāṇa specifically describes it as the destroyer of the state of being a goblin — but the goblin is a stand-in for any condition into which a person has been cast by the heedlessness of a moment.

The phalaśruti

The chapter is unusually direct about the merit. Jayā removes the sin of a brāhmaṇa's murder. The observer has given all gifts, has performed all sacrifices. They rejoice in Vaikuṇṭha for a crore of kalpas — a kalpa being one day of Brahmā, which is itself roughly 4.32 billion years. The arithmetic is not the point. The point is permanence.

There is one more thing this story teaches that the phalaśruti does not name. Cupid pulled the dancers off-rhythm. Love made them careless. The vow restored them not by punishing the love but by burning out what their carelessness had cost. They returned to the same court, in the same forms, with the same love between them. The vow does not remove what one cherishes. It removes what one has done in despair of cherishing it.

Source: Padma Purāṇa, Uttara Khaṇḍa, Chapter 43, "Jayā Ekādaśī." Translated by N.A. Deshpande in Ancient Indian Tradition and Mythology series, vols. 39–48 (Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, ISBN 9788120838291). The full English translation is freely available at wisdomlib.org.