A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, Geography, History, and Literature c5.2010

c5.2010

According to the Vishnu Purāna, Vasishtha had for wife Ūrjā, one of the daughters of Daksha, and by her he had seven sons. The Bhāgavata Purāna gives him Arundhatī for wife. The Vishnu Purāna also makes him the family priest “of the house of Ikshwāku;” and he was not only contemporary with Ikshwāku himself, but with his descendants down to the sixty-first generation. “Vasishtha, according to all accounts (says Dr. Muir), must have been possessed of a vitality altogether superhuman,” for it appears that the name Vasishtha is “used not to denote merely a person belonging to a family so called, but to represent the founder of the family himself as taking part in the transactions of many successive ages.”