Skandapurana 3.2.24

English (machine translation) 3.2.24

Language: English

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“This māhātmya of the sacred ford has been told by me in front of you,

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which destroys sins arising from many previous births, O king of the earth! / 1

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It is the best place of all places, supreme and bringing great welfare,

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which was related formerly before Skanda by the wise Mahārudra. / 2

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You, O son of Pṛthā, by bathing there indeed will be freed from all sins.”

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Having heard those words of Vyāsa indeed, Yudhiṣṭhira, the king of dharma, / 3

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the son of Dharma, entered Dharmāraṇya then, O dear one,

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intent on protecting the virtuous and destroying great sins. / 4

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Plunging there into the sacred fords and visiting the temples of the deities,

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he performed all the sacrificial and charitable rites according to his desire. / 5

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Then, completely freed from sin, having gone back to his own city,

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Indraprastha, he ruled the surface of the earth, O Mahāsena. / 6

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Those best of men who, having approached this place, hear it,

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theirs will be worldly enjoyment and liberation; there is no doubt. / 7

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Having enjoyed earthly pleasures, they will attain the supreme nirvāṇa.

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And when the time for an ancestral rite arrives, those twice-born who recite it— / 8

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the ancestors have been delivered by them for as long as the moon, sun, and earth endure.

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Having been born in the Dvāpara age, this was spoken by the great-souled Vyāsa: / 9

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‘By merely the water in the well of dharma, one obtains the fruit of the Gayā ancestral rite.

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The sin belonging to a mortal who has arrived here, which was stationed in the realm of Yama, / 10

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—this was declared by the son of Dharma with the desire for the welfare of the worlds—

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even without grains, without darbha grass, or without a seat, / 11

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by water alone, reaches destruction, even sin committed across ten million births.

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The merit of giving a thousand long-horned milk-cows in Kurujāṅgala

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at a solar eclipse is equal to the libation offered in the well of dharma.’ / 12

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All this activity of Dharmāraṇya has been recounted to you,

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hearing which the killer of a brahmin or the killer of a cow is freed from all sins. / 13

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What fruit is attained by offering rice-balls at Gayā twenty-one times,

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one completely obtains that fruit if this is heard even once. / 14

Thus ends the twenty-fourth chapter, named 'The Recital of the Glory and Māhātmya of the Sacred Ford of Dharmāraṇya', in the First Part of the Brahma Section, in the Great Purāṇa of Skanda containing eighty-one thousand verses.

Linked texts (1)

Skandapurāṇa — Vyāsa, Sanskrit