Puranic Encyclopaedia: A Comprehensive Dictionary with Special Reference to the Epic and Puranic Literature c9.513

c9.513

The young women went to the forest and made a floating āśrama in a boat in which they sailed in the river by the side of Vibhāṇḍaka's āśrama. They stopped the boat close to the āśrama and one of the girls entered the āśrama when Vibhāṇḍaka was not there. She had a talk with Ṛṣyaśṛṅga in the course of which she used all the amorous enchantments of her sex to captivate the young Muni. She told him that she was the daughter of a Muni, living in an āśrama, three yojanas away. Ṛṣyaśṛṅga felt a peculiar fascination for her and tried to please her by offering fruits etc. When she left him, he felt deeply distressed and unhappy. He was in that depressed and gloomy state of mind when Vibhāṇḍaka returned to the āśrama. Finding him unusually restless and dejected, the father asked him whether anyone had come there. Ṛṣyaśṛṅga who was an entire stranger to the feminine world told his father that a handsome youth of irresistible charm had visited him during Vibhāṇḍaka's absence. But from Ṛṣyaśṛṅga's description of the "youth" Vibhāṇḍaka understood that the visitor must have been a woman. But he could not guess who it was.