Putrada Ekadasi (Pausha)

The sonless king and the sages on the lake

Retold from the Padma Purāṇa, Uttara Khaṇḍa, Chapter 41. The standard English translation, on which this retelling relies, is by N.A. Deshpande (Motilal Banarsidass).

In a city called Bhadrāvatī there once lived a king named Suketumat. His queen was Campakā. They had everything: wealth, a kingdom, allies, ministers, horses, elephants, and they had no child.

The Purāṇa is unsparing about what this absence felt like. The king did not derive pleasure from his kingdom or his city. He grew unhappy every day. The couple was always full of anxiety and grief. There is a small, terrible detail in the text: his dead ancestors drank only lukewarm water from the offerings he made them. We do not see anybody who will gratify us after the king, his manes were saying, somewhere beyond the rim of the world he could see. A man who is without a son does not get the fruit of his existence. The house of a sonless person is always desolate.

Suketumat thought about all the things sonlessness meant. The debt to ancestors, unpaid. The debt to gods, unpaid. The debt to humanity, unpaid. He could find no joy in his kinsmen, ministers, allies, friends, elephants, horses, foot-soldiers. Sons, he concluded, are certainly the wealth of a person.

One day, the despair tipped him toward suicide. He stood, the text says, looking down at his own body, seeing it fallen in his imagination, and saw that this would solve nothing. So instead, he did something quieter and more radical. He left.

He mounted a horse and rode out of the city. His family-priest did not know. His ministers did not know. He went alone into a dense forest, a forest the Purāṇa lingers over, naming the trees in long lists: vaṭa, aśvattha, bilva, the date palm and the breadfruit, bakula, the seven-leaved saptaparṇa, tinduka and the sesame tree, śāla and tamāla and sarala, iṅgudī and kakubha, aśoka and palāśa. Then the animals: wolves, hares, wild cats, buffaloes, porcupines, camara deer. Serpents emerged half-way from their anthills. Wild elephants moved in herds with their young. Owls cried; jackals called.

The king rode through all of it, and in the middle of the day he was overtaken by his other thirst, the simpler one. His throat dried. He stopped and asked the unhelpful air a question.

What deed have I done by which I have met with such grief? With sacrifices and worships I have pleased the deities. I have pleased brāhmaṇas with gifts and meals. I have always looked after my subjects like my own son. Due to what have I met with this great, terrible distress?

The question was the kind that does not get answered. But what the king found instead, by the efficacy of his good deeds, was a lake.

The lake was beautiful. Fish moved beneath its surface. Lotuses bloomed across it. Ducks and ruddy geese floated on it, and royal swans. There were alligators and other aquatic creatures. And on its bank stood several hermitages.

The king’s right eye throbbed. So did his right hand. In the old reckoning, these are auspicious signs, the body knows things the mind does not. He saw sages by the lake muttering Vedic prayers under their breath, and he came to a halt in front of them and prostrated like a staff before each one.

The sages, kind as the Purāṇa knows kind men to be, said: O king, we are pleased with you.

Who are you? the king asked. Why have you assembled here?

We are the Viśvedevāḥ, they answered, the ten gods, sons of Viśvā, including Vasu and Satya and Dakṣa and Kāma. We have come here for a bath. The month of Māgha is five days away. Today, O king, is the Ekādaśī called Putradā. Viṣṇu gives a son to those who observe it.

The king did not waste the moment. I have a great uncertainty about producing a son. If you are pleased, give me a son.

Today only it is the Ekādaśī called Putradā, the sages said. Observe this well-known vow, which is the best of vows. After ablution and by the favour of us and of Viṣṇu, you will certainly have a son.

Suketumat observed it on the spot. He broke his fast on Dvādaśī as prescribed, and returned home. The queen conceived. When the time of delivery came, a bright son was born. He pleased his father with righteous deeds, and in time became a king himself.

The vow

Putradā Ekādaśī falls twice each year, once in the bright fortnight of Pauṣa (this one) and once in the bright fortnight of Śrāvaṇa (Chapter 55). The vow is observed by fasting on the eleventh tithi and breaking the fast on Dvādaśī after worship of Viṣṇu and feeding of a brāhmaṇa.

Couples seeking children observe this Ekādaśī specifically. The vow is also observed by parents on behalf of children, or by those wishing for the line to continue. The chapter does not prescribe elaborate ritual, the king does not perform a thousand ceremonies. He simply fasts the day he chances upon the sages, returns to his queen, and the result follows.

The phalaśruti

The chapter is brief about the merit because it does not need to belabour it. Those who, with a concentrated mind, observe this Putradā vow obtain sons in this world and after death go to heaven.

Reciting or listening to the account gives the fruit of an Agniṣṭoma sacrifice, the five-day Vedic ritual that is the foundational soma sacrifice in the system.

The hidden teaching of this Ekādaśī is one Suketumat learned by mistake. Despair turned him outward. He rode away from his palace not toward an answer but away from the kingdom of his unhappiness. What he found was that the answer was not within his power to manufacture, it was waiting on a lake he had never seen, on a day that happened to be sacred, in the company of sages he had not known were there. The vow finds the one who is open to finding it.

Source: Padma Purāṇa, Uttara Khaṇḍa, Chapter 41, “Putradā 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.