Vaivasvata Manu

The title Manu comes from the Sanskrit root man — to think, to reflect — and means the thinking one, the reflective one. It is both a personal name and a cosmic office: in each of the fourteen Manvantaras of the present Kalpa a different being serves as Manu, the lawgiver-progenitor of humanity for that age. The Sanskrit word for human being, manushya, and the English word man both descend from this root — a linguistic record that all humans are, by definition, the descendants of Manu.

His personal name Satyavrata — from satya, truth, and vrata, vow — means the one whose vow is truth. Shraddhadeva — from shraddha, faith or sincerity, and deva, divine being — means the divine one of faith. His patronymic Vaivasvata simply means son of Vivasvat, the sun. The Mahabharata sums him up directly: a man endowed with great wisdom and devoted to virtue, who became the progenitor of a race — and in Manu's race have been born all beings, who have therefore been called Manavas.

His father is Kashyapa's grandson Vivasvat — Surya, the sun god, seventh of the twelve Adityas — and his mother is Sanjna, daughter of the divine architect Vishvakarma. Unable to bear her husband's full radiance, Sanjna created a shadow-double, Chhaya, to take her place in the solar household while she withdrew to the forests of Uttara Kuru and lived there as a mare, until Vishvakarma reduced Vivasvat's radiance and the two were reunited. From that reunion, in horse and mare form, came the twin physicians the Ashvini Kumaras — Nasatya and Dasra — alongside Vaivasvata Manu's full siblings Yama, the god of death and cosmic justice, and Yama's twin sister Yami, the river goddess Yamuna. From Chhaya came his half-siblings: Shani, the planet Saturn; Savarni Manu, who will govern the Manvantara after this one; the river goddess Tapati; and Vishti.

His wife is Shraddha, whose name — faith, sincerity — gives him his epithet Shraddhadeva. Together they had ten children: nine sons and a tenth child, Ila, whose nature crossed the boundary between the two. Ikshvaku, the eldest, founded the Solar Dynasty. Sharyati fathered Sukanya, who married the sage Chyavana. Nabhaga, Dhrishnu, Narishyanta, Nabhagarishtha, Korusha, and Pramshu each founded lines of lesser but still recorded importance. Prishadhra killed his preceptor's cow by mistake, was cursed to become a Shudra, and later attained liberation by entering a forest fire in meditation. And Ila — born a girl, transformed to a man named Sudyumna by Shiva's curse, then back again, alternating between male and female states by the month — married the sage Budha in her female state and became, through their son Pururavas, the founder of the entire Chandravamsha.

Before the flood, Vaivasvata Manu was Satyavrata, king of the Dravida kingdom in present-day South India — the Matsya Purana places his realm near the Malaya Mountains, with the Kritamala river running through it. He was pious and disciplined, performing the ritual of Tarpana — offering water oblations to the gods — at the riverbank each morning. He was not yet Manu of this age, only a virtuous king carrying out his royal and spiritual duties with unusual dedication. His father Vivasvat had already passed to him the teaching later immortalized in the Bhagavad Gita — Krishna tells Arjuna that Vishnu taught this imperishable yoga to Vivasvat, Vivasvat taught it to Manu, and Manu taught it to Ikshvaku — making Satyavrata the second link in the tradition's most celebrated chain of teaching.

One morning, while Satyavrata performed his water oblations at the Kritamala river, a tiny fish slipped into his cupped hands. He was about to release it back into the river when it spoke — pleading to be saved from the larger fish that would devour it. Moved, he kept it in a jar. By morning it had outgrown the jar. He moved it to a larger vessel; it outgrew that too. Vessel to well, well to tank, tank to river, river finally to the ocean — and as it entered the sea, it revealed itself as Vishnu.

The fish told Satyavrata that in seven days a flood would engulf the three worlds, ending the previous cosmic age and beginning a new one. It instructed him to build a great boat, load it with the seeds of every plant and living being, and bring the seven Saptarishis aboard. When the flood came, the fish said, it would return with a horn, and Satyavrata should tie the boat to that horn using the great serpent Shesha as a rope. Satyavrata obeyed without hesitation. The flood came as promised — the Bhagavata Purana describes torrential rain drowning the earth, the three worlds submerged in chaos — and the enormous fish reappeared, its horn blazing, and towed the boat through the raging waters toward the northern mountains.

Where exactly the boat came to rest varies by text: the Malaya Mountains in the Matsya Purana, the peak called Naubandhana — the harbour — in the Bhagavata Purana's telling, Mount Meru or the Himalayan summit in others. When the waters receded, the fish revealed its full identity and appointed Satyavrata as Manu of the new Manvantara, charging him with repopulating the earth. Afterward, Satyavrata performed a sacrifice invoking the power of creation, and from the sacrificial waters a woman emerged — Ida, or Ila — who declared herself his daughter. Through her, and later through Ikshvaku, both halves of this series' story would begin.

Vaivasvata Manu, the seventh Manu, is often conflated with Svayambhuva Manu, the very first — born directly from Brahma's own body, husband of Shatarupa, and father of Priyavrata, Uttanapada, Akuti, Devahuti, and Prasuti. The two belong to entirely different cosmic eras. Svayambhuva Manu's line runs through Devahuti to Kapila and through Prasuti to Sati and the divine household of Shiva. Vaivasvata Manu's line runs through Ikshvaku and Ila to the Solar and Lunar royal dynasties that produced Rama, the Pandavas, the Kauravas, and Krishna. The two Manus remain part of a single genealogical universe — Svayambhuva several Manvantaras upstream of Vaivasvata — but they are distinct figures of distinct ages, and this series concerns itself only with the latter.

The present cosmic age takes its name directly from him. As recorded in the Bhagavata Purana and the Vishnu Purana, the Vaivasvata Manvantara's Indra is Purandara; its Saptarishis are Kashyapa, Atri, Vasishtha, Vishvamitra, Gautama, Jamadagni, and Bharadvaja — the very seven sages this series' companion volume, The Saptarishi Chronicles, is devoted to; and Vishnu's avatar for this Manvantara is Vamana, the dwarf who strode across the universe in three steps at Mahabali's sacrifice. One Manvantara spans seventy-one Mahayugas of 4,320,000 years each — some 306,720,000 years in total — and it began with the flood recounted above. We are presently in the twenty-eighth Chaturyuga of Vaivasvata's Manvantara, within its Kali Yuga: the last and most degenerate of the four ages.

The most extraordinary genealogical fact of Vaivasvata Manu's story is that the Solar and Lunar dynasties — the two lineages whose stories become the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — both descend from his single household. Ikshvaku founded the Suryavamsha, from which Rama would descend some sixty-six generations later. Ila founded, through her union with the moon-sage Budha and their son Pururavas, the Chandravamsha — and through the Pururavas-Nahusha-Yayati line, that dynasty split further still: through Yadu came Krishna, and through Puru came the Kuru line that produced the Pandavas and Kauravas. Vaivasvata Manu is thus the shared ancestor of both figures at the heart of the Bhagavad Gita — Krishna, who gave its teaching, and Arjuna, who received it — closing a circle that opened with his own father Vivasvat first receiving that same teaching from Vishnu.

The Manusmriti — the Laws of Manu, the most influential ancient code of Hindu law and social ethics — bears his title but not, strictly, his authorship. Scholarly consensus dates its composition across several centuries, roughly 200 BCE to 300 CE, and holds that its stated authority is Svayambhuva Manu, the first Manu, rather than Vaivasvata. The text uses "Manu" as a generalized voice for the human lawgiving tradition, since every Manu is simultaneously progenitor and lawgiver for his age. In popular usage, however, the Manusmriti is frequently associated with Vaivasvata Manu, as the current and most directly relevant of the fourteen to present-day humanity.