Part 19: Story of Sodāsa

Asleep in a temple there, Vasudeva was aroused by a Rākṣasa, who had come quickly, and was beaten severely by his fists. After lighting the Rākṣasa hand-to-hand for a long time, Śauri tied him with a doth like a goat that had been bought. Beating him on the ground, like a washerman clothes on a stone, he killed the Rākṣasa.

At daybreak the people saw him. Delighted, the people put Śauri in a chariot and conducted him inside a home with a drum being played, as if he were an eminent bridegroom. Promptly the people offered him five hundred maidens. Preventing that, Śauri said, “Who is this Rākṣasa?” One of them explained:

“In the city Śrī Kāṭcanapura in the Kaliṅgas, there was a powerful king, Jitaśatru. This was his son, Sodāsa, greedy for flesh by nature,^[1] but the king had given freedom from fear to living creatures in his country. But the king, asked by his son for the meat of one peacock every day, agreed, though against his wishes. Daily the cooks brought a peacock from Mt. Vaṃśa. One day when it had been killed for cooking, it was stolen by a cal.

So at that time they cooked and gave him the flesh of a dead boy. After eating it, he asked them, ‘What is this unusually sweet meat?’ They told him the truth and Sodāsa ordered: ‘In future a man must be cooked in the place of the peacock every day.’ With these orders, he himself constantly seized boys from the people. When the king found it out, he expelled him from his country from anger. Terrified of his father, he lived here in an inaccessible place and killed five or six men every day. The villain was killed by you. Well done! Well done!”

When they had told him this, Śauri gladly married the maidens. He stayed for the night and went to excellent Acalagrama. There Yādava married Mitraśrī, the daughter or a caravan-leader, because he had been described earlier by an astrologer as her husband.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Cf. IV, pp. 187 ff., for a slightly different version of a cannibal Sodāsa.