Skandapurana 16.248

English (machine translation) 16.248

Language: English

16.248.1

Īśvara said: / Then, O great goddess, one should go to the aforementioned [liṅga] worshipped by Brahmā, / situated on the bank of the Sarasvatī to the west of Parṇāditya.

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I shall relate its origin; listen with single-minded attention, O dear one. / Formerly, as Brahmā was creating the fourfold collection of beings,

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there arose a woman endowed with wondrous beauty, lotus-eyed, / with a conch-like neck, beautiful hair, bimba-fruit lips, slender-waisted,

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deep-navelled, with lovely hips, full buttocks and breasts, / moon-faced, with hidden ankles and a radiant face.

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Neither a goddess, nor a gandharvī, nor an asurī, nor a pannagī / had such a form as that fair-hipped woman was born with.

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Seeing her endowed with beauty, Brahmā came under the sway of desire; / then he begged her for sexual pleasure, O lady of excellent complexion.

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As he thus solicited her, his fifth head, / having the form of a donkey, O great goddess, fell off in an instant due to that sin.

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Then, realising the great sin arising from his lust for his daughter, / filled with supreme self-reproach, he came to the sacred field of Prabhāsa.

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Because there is no purification of the body without bathing in a sacred ford, / he bathed in the holy waters of the Sarasvatī, O lovely-faced one,

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and installed a liṅga of the god of gods who wields the trident. / Then, freed from blemish, he returned to his own abode.

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Having bathed in the water of Sarasvatī, he who beholds that liṅga / is completely freed from all sins and glorified in the world of Brahmā.

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The man who beholds it on the fourteenth day of the bright fortnight of Caitra / goes to the supreme abode where the god Maheśvara resides.

Thus ends the two hundred and forty-eighth chapter, named 'Description of the Glory of Brahmeśvara,' in the first [part], 'Glory of the Prabhāsa Field,' of the seventh [book], Prabhāsakhaṇḍa, in the glorious Skanda Mahāpurāṇa consisting of eighty-one thousand verses.

Linked texts (1)

Skandapurāṇa — Vyāsa, Sanskrit