Vasishtha

Vasishtha (वसिष्ठ) is the kulaguru, the family preceptor, of the solar dynasty of Ayodhya and one of the Saptarishi, the seven great sages. In the Ramayana he is the calm centre of the royal house: the priest who conducts its sacrifices, the teacher of its princes, and the steady counsellor of its kings. If Vishwamitra is fire, Vasishtha is the deep, still pool.

The royal guru

Vasishtha is counted among the mind-born sons of Brahma and is married to the chaste Arundhati, the two of them held up as the ideal of a wedded pair and shown together in the night sky. As kulaguru he served generations of the Ikshvaku line. It was he who guided King Dasharatha to perform the sacrifices that at last brought him sons, and he who taught the young princes their first lessons, as the Ramayana notes when it says that Rama and his brothers studied with the royal priest Vasishtha.

The wish-cow and the long rivalry

The most famous episode of Vasishtha’s life is his contest with Vishwamitra. When the king Kaushika tried to seize his wish-fulfilling cow, Nandini (the calf of Kamadhenu), Vasishtha’s spiritual power proved greater than a whole army, and the humiliated king left to win brahminhood by austerity. Their rivalry ran for ages and cost Vasishtha dearly, yet in the end it was Vasishtha himself who graciously acknowledged Vishwamitra as a Brahmarshi, a reconciliation remembered as a lesson in humility for both.

Counsel in grief and crisis

Vasishtha steadies the kingdom at its darkest hours. When Dasharatha dies of grief after Rama’s exile, it is Vasishtha who manages the rites and the succession and who accompanies Bharata to Chitrakoot to plead with Rama to return. He presides again at Rama’s long-delayed coronation. The philosophical dialogue in which he answers the young Rama’s despair about life and the world is preserved as the Yoga Vasishtha, a classic of Hindu thought.