Skandapurana 6.3.129

Chapter 129

The venerable Mārkaṇḍeya said: / Then one should go, O ruler of the earth, to the unsurpassed Brahmatīrtha, / which is greater than the greatest among the other sacred fords.

At that sacred ford, the best of the gods, Brahmā, the grandfather of the worlds, / has resorted to the bank of the Narmadā for [the benefit of] all four classes.

Whatever sin has been committed formerly, born of speech, mind, or bodily action, / the lord of the gods washes away that sin merely by being seen.

Having bathed there, the best of the twice-born perform expiations / declared in the Śruti and Smṛti; their abode is in heaven.

Those, on the other hand, who abandon the scriptures and, tormented by desire and greed, / declare an expiation, will indeed go to hell.

Having bathed first, a sinner, O brahmin, having bowed, should declare his sin; / that [sin] of his is quickly destroyed, like darkness at sunrise.

Whoever bathes at that sacred ford and worships the ancestors and the deities, / obtains the excellent fruit of an Agniṣṭoma sacrifice.

Whatever gift one gives at that sacred ford dedicated to Brahmā, / all of that has inexhaustible fruit; thus spoke Śaṅkara.

Even if only the essence of the Gāyatrī is recited there in muttered prayer, / it becomes endowed with the Ṛg, Yajur, and Sāma Vedas; of this there is no doubt.

Whoever abandons with devotion the body so hard to abandon at that sacred ford, / his attainment is one that does not return from the world of Brahmā; of this there is no doubt.

As long as the bones of embodied beings remain in Brahmatīrtha, / for that many thousands of years one is honored in the world of the gods.

Having descended from there into the world, he is born in a family of knowers of the Veda, / superior among all the classes, like a deity among the gods.

He knows all branches of knowledge and has mastered the auxiliary disciplines of the Veda; / he is born respected in the world by kings, without a doubt.

Endowed with sons and grandsons, free from all diseases, / he lives for a full hundred years through the power of Brahmatīrtha.

This holy sacred ford, which removes sin, is the best for the wise; / the great-souled ones who see it attain immortality.

Thus ends the one hundred twenty-ninth chapter, named 'Description of the Glory of the Sacred Ford Brahmatīrtha', in the Revā Section of the fifth section, the Āvantyakhaṇḍa, in the Skanda Mahāpurāṇa consisting of eighty-one thousand verses.