Skandapurana 14.49

English (machine translation) 14.49

Language: English

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Pulastya said: / Then one should go to Rāmatīrtha, sacred and resorted to by seers; / for a mortal who has bathed there, destruction of sin occurs,

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and supreme satisfaction of the ancestors until the dissolution of all beings. / Formerly, there was Rāma the Bhārgava, the best of all weapon-bearers.

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Earlier, desiring the destruction of his enemies, he performed austerity; / then He gave him the supreme weapon named Pāśupata.

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Pleased with his austerity after three hundred years had passed, / Mahādeva said, “I am a giver of boons,” and he chose the destruction of his enemies.

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Then He gave him the supreme weapon named Pāśupata, / by the mere remembrance of which the destruction of enemies occurs.

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And smiling, the bull-bannered [god] spoke these words: / “O son of Jamadagni, mighty-armed one, hear my supreme words!

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Endowed with this weapon, you will be unconquerable by all embodied beings / without a doubt, through my grace, O scion of Bhṛgu.

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This holy pool, renowned in the three worlds of moving and unmoving beings / as Rāmatīrtha, will come to be through my grace.

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Those who, being concentrated in mind, perform an ancestral rite here on the full moon day / when the month of Kārttika arrives in conjunction with the Kṛttikā constellation,

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will receive the complete fruit of an ancestral sacrifice, / as well as the destruction of enemies, O king, and imperishable residence in the heavens.”

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Pulastya said: / Having spoken thus, Mahādeva then vanished from sight. / Rāma, too, pained by grief for his father, slaughtered the kṣatriyas.

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Extremely delighted, he offered libations to his ancestors twenty-one times there. / When Jamadagni died, that great-souled one made a vow,

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having seen, O ruler of men, twenty-one wounds on his mother's body, / inflicted by weapons, when an assembly of brahmins had gathered:

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“Since my father, an ascetic twice-born, was slain by kṣatriyas / even as he was not fighting, therefore, having made

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the earth devoid of kṣatriyas twenty-one times, I will offer water to my father.” / All that came to pass for him, O king, by the power of the sacred ford.

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Therefore, one should perform an ancestral rite there with every effort, / especially a kṣatriya who desires the destruction of enemies.

Thus ends the forty-ninth chapter, titled ‘Description of the Māhātmya of the Rāmatīrtha,’ in the Arbudakhaṇḍa, the third [part] of the Prabhāsakhaṇḍa, the seventh [book] of the glorious Skanda Mahāpurāṇa, a collection of eighty-one thousand [verses].

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Skandapurāṇa — Vyāsa, Sanskrit