Читать книгу Ashtanga Yoga - The Intermediate Series - Gregor Maehle - Страница 63

Krouncha means “heron.” A pair of herons figure prominently in the incident that not only gave rise to Indian poetry but also triggered the composition of the oldest epic, the Ramayana.

At the outset of the Ramayana we find sage Valmiki accompanied by his disciple Bharadvaja in the forest.⁷ When Valmiki wants to take a bath, he suddenly becomes aware of two krounchas engaged in love play. Just then a hunter appears and strikes down the male krouncha with an arrow. As the male bird lies on the ground in his blood, the female cries out in agony at the loss of her mate. Valmiki is intensely touched by this tragedy and in the midst of his passion curses the hunter for killing the bird. He then realizes that his outcry was spontaneously forged into metrical quarters, each containing the same number of syllables. Because it was produced by the sentiment grief (shoka), he calls his creation shloka. Later on, Valmiki is visited by Lord Brahma, who explains that what the seer discovered was in fact poetry, and he assigns him to cast into verse the entire tragedy of the life of Rama (the king of Ayodhya and sixth avatara of Lord Vishnu), which today we know as the Ramayana, the first and foremost of all poems.

Krouncha also refers to a famed asura who is the antagonist in a tale about the Rishi Agastya, who brought the eternal teaching (sanatana dharma) to South India and Indonesia. The story commences with Agastya visiting Mount Kailasha in order to obtain a boon from Lord Shiva. Agastya asks for the boon to install a tirtha (sacred bathing site) in South India. For this purpose, the Lord turns the goddess Kaveri, who is attending him at the time, into a river and places her in Agastya’s water pot (kumbha) for easy transport.

On his way to South India, Agastya finds a huge mountain obstructing his way. After several attempts to walk around the mountain, which are thwarted by the mountain repositioning itself, Agastya eventually realizes that the mountain is the asura Krouncha. Krouncha wants to prevent Agastya from installing the sacred site, because it would block Krouncha from further defiling the country.

Agastya curses the asura to forever remain a mountain, called Krouncha Mountain, until a divine force frees him. This divine force would eventually arise in the form of Lord Shiva’s second son, Skanda, the Lord of War, who splits open Mount Krouncha with an arrow.

Agastya, upon finding the correct location for his sacred site, releases the waters of his vessel, and the River Kaveri is born. This river is still well known today, as it flows through the entire Indian state of Karnataka. The ashrama of the rishi is said to have been located at the source of the Kaveri, in the Western Ghats. The Kaveri is considered so sacred that even the goddess Ganga, whose material manifestation is the River Ganges, bathes there once a year to cleanse herself from the degradation she has to absorb as a bathing site.