The craftsman who put the Sun on a wheel and shaved an eighth off him

The marriage nobody could live inside

Vishvakarman is the one who makes things. Every hall the gods sit in, every weapon they carry, every city that is described as impossible, came off his bench. He is called Tvashtri and he is called Prajapati, sometimes both inside a single chapter, and the practical meaning of all three names is the same. He is the workman.

He had a daughter, Sanjna, and he gave her to the Sun.

They had three children. The eldest was Manu Vaivasvata, the Manu of this present age of the world, which means that every human being reading this is descended from that marriage. Then came twins, a boy and a girl, Yama and Yami, whom people now know as the lord of the dead and the river Yamuna.

Then Sanjna stopped being able to bear it.

The Markandeya Purana is very plain about the reason, and it is not a quarrel. Her husband's body was a globe of light, and it scorched the three worlds and everything moving and unmoving in them, and she could not look at him. Nobody had done anything wrong. She had simply married someone whose ordinary condition was unlivable at close range.

The woman she left behind

So she made a substitute out of her own shadow.

She looked at the shadow on the ground beside her, and the shadow stood up, and Sanjna gave her instructions like a woman handing over a house. Stay here. Do not change. Be good to these two boys for me, and to this daughter. And do not tell him.

Chhaya, which is the word for shadow, answered her: even if someone drags me by the hair, even if I am cursed, I will not tell him. Go where you want to go.

Sanjna went to her father's house. Vishvakarman told her, again and again, to go back to her husband. So she left his house too, turned herself into a mare, and went north to practise austerities in the wilderness, fasting, alone.

Behind her the shadow kept house for years, and the Sun did not notice. Chhaya had three children of her own by him. The eldest was another Manu, called Savarni because he was the same colour as his elder brother. The second was the planet Saturn, whom people call Shani. The third was a daughter, Tapati, who is a river too.

The foot that was raised

The thing that gave her away was the ordinary thing.

She could not love the first three the way she loved her own. Manu bore it. Yama would not.

He was a boy and he was angry, and one day, with his stepmother scolding him yet again, he lifted his foot at her. He did not bring it down. He says so himself, afterwards, and the text lets him say it: I raised my foot, I did not let it fall on her body, and I do not know whether it was childishness or stupidity.

Chhaya cursed him anyway. Since you raise your foot at your father's wife, let that foot fall off.

Yama went to his father with the whole thing, and what he said is worth hearing, because it is not a complaint. He said: I revere her, she is my mother, and even to worthless sons a mother does not run out of goodwill. So how does a mother say a thing like this out loud?

The Sun could not undo it. He told his son that a curse from a mother is the one curse there is no remedy for, and then he did the only thing left, which was to make it smaller. Worms would take a little flesh from the foot and carry it away to the earth, and the mother's word would be true, and the boy would be saved.

Then he turned to his wife and asked the question that ends the deception. Why do you show more affection to one son among sons who are all equal? You are not Sanjna. A mother does not curse a child, not even a bad one.

She would not answer. He sat and concentrated and saw the whole of it.

The workshop

The Sun went to his father-in-law in a rage, meaning to burn him.

Vishvakarman did not run and did not argue. He received him properly, honoured him, calmed him down, and then said the one thing a craftsman would say.

Your form is permeated with more glory than anything can hold. That is why she could not stay. She is in the forest at this moment, doing austerities, because of it. If it pleases you, my lord, I will restrain your form.

The Sun said, be it so.

So in Shakadvipa, Vishvakarman mounted the Sun on his wheel and began to pare him down.

The account of what that was like is one of the strangest passages in the Purana. The centre of every world was spinning on a lathe, so the worlds went with it. The earth with its oceans and mountains and forests went up into the sky and the sky with the moon and the planets and the stars went down. The pole supports snapped. Clouds were flung apart by the wind of the spin and broke up with a noise. The earth and the air and the regions below all cried out.

And while this was happening the gods stood around the workbench and sang.

Brahma sang. Indra came up close to the god who was being cut and shouted, be victorious. The seven rishis sang, with Vasishtha and Atri leading. The Balakhilyas, who are the size of a thumb, sang the oldest hymns of the Rig Veda. The Vidyadharas and Yakshas and Rakshasas and Nagas put their palms together and asked one thing: may your glory become bearable to the creatures you made. Narada and Tumburu sang in three scales. Menaka and Rambha and Urvashi and Tilottama danced next to the lathe. There were drums and conches in the hundreds.

That is the picture. Every being in creation, standing around a workshop, singing while a man with a tool takes an eighth off the sun.

What was done with the filings

The Markandeya Purana stops there. Vishvakarman gradually diminished his glory, it says, and leaves it.

The Vishnu Purana carries it one step further, and this is the part people usually remember. It is also the text that gives the figure. Vishvakarman ground away an eighth of him and stopped, because more than an eighth could not be separated from him. Markandeya never puts a number on it at all.

The parts of the Sun's splendour that came off under the tool fell to the earth still burning, and the artist did not waste them. He picked them up and made things out of them. The discus of Vishnu. The trident of Shiva. The weapon of the lord of wealth. The lance of Kartikeya. The weapons of the other gods, all of them, came off the same sun.

The two texts also differ on the order of events, and it is worth saying so rather than smoothing it over. In the Markandeya, the Sun is pared down while Sanjna is still in the forest. In the Vishnu Purana he finds her first, in the far north, in the form of a mare, and takes the form of a horse to be with her, and the twin Ashvins and Revanta are born from that meeting, and only after he has brought her home does Vishvakarman put him on the lathe. Both are old. Neither is a mistake.

Why a factory floor stops on this day

On Vishwakarma Puja the machines are washed and the tools are put down and garlanded, and the day is often explained as thanks to the maker of the gods.

The story underneath it is a good deal less polite than that. A father-in-law looked at the Sun, decided he was too much, put him on a wheel, and shaved off an eighth of him. He asked permission first and he asked it respectfully. But the judgement was his, the tool was his, and the Sun sat still for it.

That is why the lathe is worshipped and not only the man. The world we can actually live in is a machined world. It came off a wheel.

Sources

• Markandeya Purana, canto 106, 'The paring down of the Sun's body': Sanjna leaves her shadow, Yama is cursed, and Vishvakarman mounts the Sun on his wheel in Shakadvipa. The canto ends with the line that Vishvakarman gradually diminished his glory, and says nothing about the filings. F. E. Pargiter's translation, Wisdomlib.
• Vishnu Purana, Book 3, chapter 2: the same household in a different order, and the only one of the two texts that gives the figure of an eighth and says what Vishvakarman made from the filings. H. H. Wilson's translation, Wisdomlib.
• The Markandeya Purana, translated by F. Eden Pargiter, 1904 (public domain scan).