Arjun Mishra and the Gita

A retelling of a legend told in Puri, the town of Lord Jagannath.

The reader of the Gita

In Puri, in the shadow of the great temple of Jagannath, there lived a poor Brahmin named Arjun Mishra. He read the whole of the Bhagavad Gita every day, and read it with such steadiness that the townspeople called him Gita Panda, the Gita-reading priest of the temple town. He did not do much else. He had no regular work, and often he did not trouble to earn a living. Whatever came to the house came from alms, and when none came, he and his wife went without.

The rain

One year the rain came down for days and would not stop. The streets ran with water, and the Brahmin could not go out to ask for anything. What little grain there was in the house was soon used up, and one evening his wife told him there was not a grain of rice left.

He had no answer. He sat down, as he did every day, with the Gita. In the course of his reading he came to the verse, in the ninth chapter, in which Krishna gives his promise to those who think of him alone:

The last word of the verse is the one that says "I carry". The Lord does not say that he will send help, or that he will see to it. He says that he himself will bear the burden of his devotee's needs.

Arjun Mishra read it again. He looked around at the empty house, at his wife sitting hungry, at the rain falling outside. In a sudden fit of doubt and anger, he took up a stylus and scratched a line through the word "I carry", and then he left the house and went out into the rain to look for something, anything, to eat.

Two boys

While he was gone, there was a knock at the door. His wife opened it and found two boys standing in the wet, one dark and one fair as milk. They were carrying more food than she could have asked for, rice and lentils and vegetables and all that a household needs, and they had borne it through the rain themselves. They said it had been sent by a friend of her husband.

She took what they gave her and thanked them. As they turned to go, she saw that the dark boy had a mark across his back, as if a sharp point had scratched it, and still fresh. She asked him what had happened. "Your husband did it," the boy said, "in a temper."

She was too puzzled to ask more. By the time she thought to, the two boys were out of sight.

The scratch on the page

Arjun Mishra came back after a long, fruitless search through the flooded streets. Nobody had been able to give him anything. He found his house full of food, and his wife waiting. She told him who had been there, and what the dark boy had said about the mark on his back.

He stood still. He thought of the verse, and the line he had scratched across it, and the mark on the boy's back that matched. He understood, then, who the two boys had been: Jagannath and his elder brother Balabhadra. The Lord had said that he would carry what his devotee lacked, and he had come to the door in the rain and carried it himself. The line that Arjun Mishra had drawn through the verse in his doubt was now a scratch on the Lord's own back.

Arjun Mishra fell to the ground, weeping, and begged to be forgiven for having doubted.

The people of Puri have told the story ever since.