Vessel- and Medium-Born

The sage Bharadvaja, engaged in austerities at the riverbank, sees the apsara Ghritachi and, in some tellings, simply the sight of her disturbs him enough that his seed falls — not to the ground, but into a drona, an earthen vessel or pot standing nearby. From that vessel a son is born, given the name Drona directly from the object of his birth. Bharadvaja raises him in the hermitage tradition, and Drona later becomes the preceptor of both the Kaurava and Pandava princes in arms — his own unusual birth never treated by the epic as diminishing his standing, only as the reason for his name.

The Shalya Parva records a second, separate encounter between Bharadvaja and Ghritachi, some time after Drona's own birth, producing a daughter: Shrutavati. The mechanism is described in the same terms — Bharadvaja's involuntary arousal at the sight of Ghritachi — but the text does not specify whether a vessel was involved this time, the detail that gives Drona his name is simply absent from her account. Bharadvaja performs her naming rites himself before departing for the Himalayas, leaving her at his ashrama. She goes on to live as a brahmacharini devoted to Vedic study, and later undertakes penance at the tirtha of Badarapachana with the singular aim of marrying Indra — a later life this piece does not narrate further, since it falls outside the birth-mechanism this series follows, beyond noting that she is Drona's full sibling by the same two originating figures.

The sage Sharadvan (son of Gautama), so absorbed in his own ascetic practice that he is born already gripping a bow, is startled at his practice by the apsara Urvashi. His bow and arrows fall from his hands, and his seed falls onto a nearby clump of reeds (shara-stamba), splitting there into two — a boy and a girl born together from the same clump. King Shantanu, out hunting, finds the twins and, moved to pity (kripa), takes them in and raises them at his own court — from which both children take their names: Kripa and Kripi.

Kripa grows to become another of the Kuru princes' arms-instructors, serving alongside Drona; Kripi in turn marries Drona and becomes the mother of Ashwatthama — meaning two of the five figures in this cluster are joined again, one generation later, by marriage.

In the account most closely tied to the Rigveda's own hymns, the gods Mitra and Varuna, at the sight of Urvashi during a sacrificial rite, both discharge seed into a single pitcher (kumbha) set before them. From that one vessel, shared between two divine fathers, two sons are born: Agastya, whose name is derived from this very jar-origin, and, in this account, Vasishtha as his brother from the same birth.

The sage Parashara, travelling by ferry across the Yamuna, is struck by desire for the ferrywoman Satyavati (then known as Matsyagandha). With her consent secured through a series of boons — a fog to conceal them, and the restoration of her fish-smell to fragrance — their union produces a son conceived and brought to full maturity in a single day, on an island in the river. He is named Krishna Dwaipayana — "the dark one, island-born" — and is better known simply as Vyasa, who goes on to compile the Vedas and author the Mahabharata itself.

Vyasa, wishing for a son who would match his own ascetic power, undertakes tapas of his own. He too is startled by the sight of an apsara — Ghritachi, the same figure associated with Drona's birth generations earlier, who in this telling transforms into a parrot to escape his gaze. His seed falls not into a vessel but onto the araṇi, the pair of fire-sticks used to kindle sacrificial fire by friction. From that wood, Shuka is born — already a grown, self-realized youth, requiring no infancy at all. Some Puranic accounts add that Agni and Vayu subsequently give him a more conventional physical body so that he can move among ordinary people, since a being born directly from fire-wood would otherwise be too rarefied to function in the world.