Parāvasu, Teacher of Satrājit
Parāvasu · parā-vasu
Parāvasu was a brāhmaṇa muni, rich in tapas, a hero and of good understanding. The Brahma Parva of the Bhavishya Purāṇa tells, in the Satrājitopākhyāna, that when King Satrājit asked the brāhmaṇas the cause of his good fortune, they looked to Parāvasu to answer. He stayed a long time in dhyāna-yoga (meditation) and came to know the whole of Satrājit’s former birth. Brahmā tells this to Bhagavān Vishṇu.
Satrājit’s former birth
Parāvasu told the king that in his former birth he had been poor and abandoned by his kin, and that with his devoted wife he had held the post of sweeping and cleaning in a Sūrya temple in Kānyakubja. They swept, sprinkled water and smeared the temple, served Bhagavān Sūrya with bhakti and śraddhā, and gave the reciter of the Purāṇa the ring his father had given him, to have the Purāṇas and Itihāsas recited. When the lamp in the temple was going out he poured in the oil meant for his own food, and his wife made a wick from the edge of her sari. By this service all their pāpa was destroyed, and as its fruit he became a cakravartī.
His teaching
Parāvasu told the king to worship Bhagavān Sūrya in this birth too, with his wife, with flowers, dhūpa, lamps, cloth and anointing, and by sweeping and other work in the Sūrya mandira, and to keep jāgaraṇa (night vigil) with dance and song on puṇya nights.
He taught a vrata to keep at home: one worships Bhagavān Sūrya with a one-pointed mind; of two meals one takes one oneself and gives the second to a brāhmaṇa, eating what remains after him. Kept through Kārtika, Mārgaśīrsha and Pausha, it frees one in the first year from laghu pāpas, in the second from upapātakas, and in the third from mahā pāpas. Asked to whom dāna should be given, Parāvasu said: “To a learned man who has knowledge of the Purāṇas one should give a pair of cloths.” He then told Satrājit what Bhagavān Sūrya said to Aruṇa in former times.
At the close of the Satrājitopākhyāna Parāvasu said that a man should offer every second meal to the vācaka, the reciter of the Purāṇa. Hearing from the great muni the fruit of his karma, Satrājit was very pleased. Wherever Sūrya temples stood on the earth he had upalepana done in them with bhakti, and his wife paid a salary to the vācaka in the mandira of Bhagavān Sūrya and had the sacred accounts recited.
Source: Bhavishya Purāṇa, Brahma Parva, Chapters 116–117
Sources
- Bhavishya Purāṇa, Brahma Parva, Chapters 116–117