ORIENTAL SERIES.

AGASTYA.
Agastya, is derived by a forced etymology from a fable
represents him as having commanded the Yindliya mountains to
prostrate themselves before him, through which they lost their
primeval altitude; or rather, perhaps, the fable has been invented
to account for his name. This miracle has obtained for him the
epithet Yindhya-kuYa ;
and he acquired another name, Pitabdhi,
or Samudra-chuluka.,
l
Ocean drinker/ from another fable,
according to which he drank up the ocean because it had
offended him, and because he wished to help the gods in their
wars with the Daityas when the latter had hidden themselves in
the waters. He was afterwards made regent of the star Canopus,
which bears his name. The Puriwias represent him as being the
son of Pulastya, the sage from whom the Kakshasas sprang.
was one of the narrators of the Brahma Purana and also a writer
on medicine.
The Maha-bharata relates a legend respecting the creation of
his wife. It says that Agastya saw his ancestors suspended by
their heels in a pit, and was told by them that they could be
rescued only by bis begetting a son. Thereupon he formed a
girl out of the most graceful parts of different animals and
passed her secretly into the palace of the king of Yidarbha.
There the child grew up as a daughter of the king, and was
demanded in marriage by Agastya. Much against his will the
king was constrained to consent, and she became the wife of the
sage. She was named Lopa-mudra, because the animals had
been subjected to loss (lopa) by her engrossing their distinctive
beaxities, as the eyes of the deer,
He
&c. She was also called
Kausitaki and Yara-prada. The same poem also tells a story
exhibiting his superhuman power, by which he tinned King
Nahusha into a serpent and afterwards restored him to his
proper form. See Nahusha.
It is in the Kamayana that Agastya makes the most distin-
guished figure. He dwelt in a hermitage on Mount Kunjara,
situated in a most beautiful country to the south of the Yindhya
mountains, and was chief of the hermits of the south. He kept
the Eakshasas who infested the south under control, so that the
country was "only gazed upon and not possessed by them."
His power over them is illustrated by a legend which represents
him as eating up a Kakshasa named Yatapi who assumed the
form' of a ram, and as destroying by a flash of his eye the