Shantanu listened. Of course he remembered nothing of his previous life, as humans forget everything at the moment of birth; however, something made him believe that story.
“But what does all that have to do with killing our children?” he asked.
Ganga resumed:
“In their previous life, those children were the eight Vasus. They found themselves born as our children under a similar sentence to ours.
Listen, I’ll tell you briefly what happened:
One day they were walking with their wives in a forest on their celestial planet, when they saw a beautiful cow that belonged to the sage Vasishtha. One of the women was so enchanted that she begged her husband to pick it up and take her to their gardens. Unable to refuse, he took the peaceful animal with him.
When the sage returned to the hermitage, he did not find his cow, which was necessary for the performance of the sacrifices. He looked for it for a while, then, in meditation, he went back in time to the moment in which the theft took place, and, realizing what had happened, he launched a powerful curse on the Vasus:
“Those who stole my cow will fall into the planet of the mortals, where life is short and full of anguish.”
Later, thanks to Brahma’s intercession, Vasishtha modified the curse so that only the one who had taken the cow would remain in this world for a long time while the others would be born here and soon after would return to their home planet.
This is a section of the book “Maha-Bharata As It Is vol. 1 of 2”.
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