Loading…
For Everyone
Gita verses, universal mantras, festivals.
1028 items · showing 1–24
Ten goddesses counted as one set — a girl of sixteen, an old widow, and a goddess holding her own severed head. What the grouping means, where it comes from, and which popular version of the story is misplaced.
A ragged brahmin stood at the gates of Dwarka with a little beaten rice in a bundle — and the king came running out barefoot.
Offered a kingdom he had never asked for, he spent fourteen years in a hut — and ruled with his brother's sandals on the throne.
Devas and asuras work together to churn the ocean for the nectar of immortality — and the first thing that surfaces is poison.
An old woman waits a lifetime in a forest hermitage for a guest who has not yet been born into her story.
The five-day festival marking the victory of light over darkness — its stories, customs, and meaning.
Hindu deity and combined avatar of the Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva)
A weaver in love above his station has a friend build him a flying wooden Garuda, and arrives at a princess's window as a god. Then a war begins in that god's name.
A robbed mendicant begs a night's shelter and watches his hosts deceive one another — a wife, a stand-in at the pillar, and a village court that examines nothing.
A scholar turned thief spends months earning four traders' trust so he can rob them. In a forest, surrounded by robbers, he steps forward first.
Thrown out for paying a hundred rupees for a book with one verse in it, a young man answers every question anyone asks him with that verse — and it answers for him.
A young wife who cannot bear to look at her elderly husband throws her arms around him one night. A thief is standing in the corner of the room.
A husband hides under his own bed to catch his wife out. Her foot brushes him, and she improvises a speech that has him carrying her on his shoulders in gratitude.
A wife asks the goddess how her husband might go blind. A voice answers from behind the image — and it is not the goddess.
A man abandons his family for his wife, then gives her half his own lifespan to bring her back from the dead. She repays him at a well, and then in a king's court.
Two men are each set an absurd condition by an angry wife, and each agrees. In open court the next morning, one of them explains the other's shaved head.
A woman takes her old husband's money and runs off with a stranger, who offers to carry it over the river first. On the bank, a jackal has just lost two things too.
A ruined merchant is told in a dream how to turn a visitor into gold. A barber watches him do it, understands nothing, and tries it on everyone he can invite home.
Nobody will marry the king's three-breasted daughter, so a blind man and a hunchback take the dowry and sail away with her. Far from home, poison is stirred.
At the end he was calling his son, not God — the most argued-over and most reassuring story in the Bhagavata.
A dwarf brahmin asked for three paces of land, and the most generous of kings would not refuse him — even when his own guru told him to.
A cobbler in Kashi skipped the pilgrimage because he had promised a customer a pair of shoes — and a proverb was born that day.
Hindu goddess, daughter of Daksha and consort of Chandra
Traditional religious and cultural fairs of the Konkan region