"अगस्त्य ऋषी - भाग ९"

"अगस्त्य ऋषी - भाग ९"

1.Agastya,according to the Ramayana, is a unique sage,who is short and heavy in build,but by living in the south he balances the powers of Shiva and the weight of Kailasha and Mount Meru.

2.Agastya and his wife meet Rama, Sita and Lakshmana.He gives them a divine bow and arrow,describes the evil nature of Ravana and, according to William Buck, B. A. van Nooten and Shirley Triest, bids them goodbye with the advice, "Rama, demons do not love men, therefore men must love each other".

3.The story of Agastya is mirrored in the second major Hindu epic  Mahabharata.However, instead of Rama, the story is told as a conversation between Yudhishthira and Lomasa starting with section 96 of Book 3, the Vana Parva (the Book of Forest).[39]

4.He is described in the epic as a sage with enormous powers of ingestion and digestion.Agastya, once again, stops the Vindhya mountains from growing and lowers them and he kills the demons Vatapi and Ilvala much the same mythical way as in the Ramayana.The Vana Parva also describes the story of Lopamudra and Agastya getting engaged and married. It also contains the mythical story of a war between Indra and Vritra, where all the demons hide in the sea, gods requesting Agastya for help, who then goes and drinks up the ocean thereby revealing all the demons to the gods.

5.The Puranic literature of Hinduism has numerous stories about Agastya, more elaborate, more fantastical and inconsistent than the mythologies found in Vedic and Epics literature of India.

6.For example, chapter 61 of the Matsya Purana, chapter 22 of Padma Purana, and seven other Maha Puranas tell the entire biography of Agastya.Some list him as one of the Saptarishi (seven great rishi), while in others he is one of the eight or twelve extraordinary sages of the Hindu traditions.The names and details are not consistent across the different Puranas,nor in different manuscript versions of the same Purana.He is variously listed along with Angiras,Atri,Bhrigu,Bhargava, Bharadvaja,Visvamitra,Vasistha, Kashyapa,Gautama,Jamadagni and others.

7.Agastya is reverentially mentioned in the Puranas of all major Hindu traditions: Shaivism, Shaktism and Vaishnavism. Many of the Puranas include lengthy and detailed accounts of the descendants of Agastya and other Saptarishis.