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CHAPTER FIVE
The rim of a wheel made of arista 178 was seen in a dream by his mother, while he was still in the womb, and for that reason his father gave him the name Ariṣṭanemi. When they heard of Ariṣṭanemi's birth, Vasudeva and others held a great festival in Mathura from extreme joy.
One day Kansa went to Vasudeva's house to see Devaki and saw the girl who had one nostril cut off. Terrified, Kansa went home and questioned an expert astrologer, "Is not the muni's speech about Devaki's seventh child false?"
The astrologer said: "The muni's speech is not false. Devaki's seventh child, the cause of your death, is somewhere. The bull, Arista, which you have, the great horse, named Keśin, an untamed donkey and goat-turn them loose in Vṛndāvana. The one who, playing there at will, kills them, though they are like iron, is Devaki's seventh son, your slayer. Furthermore, he alone will be able to string the hereditary bow Śarnga, which is in your house, worshipped by your mother. What was foretold by the omniscient, that, difficult to be touched by other people, will happen to the future powerful Vasudeva. Destroyer of the serpent Kaliya, slayer of Caņūra, he will kill your elephants, Padmottara and Campaka.
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In order to ascertain his enemy, Kansa turned Arista and the others loose in the forest and instructed the wrestlers, Caņūra and Mustika, to train. Then in autumn the bull, Arista, like misfortune personified, bellowing, attacked the cowherds' establishment in Vṛndāvana. He lifted the cows on the ends of his horns, like mud from a river-bank, and he turned over many jars of butter with the end of his nose. "Save us! Krsna! Krsna! Rāma! Rāma! the loud miserable outcry of herdsmen arose then.
Saying, "What's this?" Govinda ran in haste with Rāma and saw before him a powerful bull. Though restrained by the
178 198. Or rista, a kind of black jewel. Cf. I, p. 368. In the Uttar., p. 197 of SBE. vol. XLV, Jacobi takes rişṭaka, in a list of symbols for blackness, as Sapindus Detergens, the soap-nut. It is certainly the jewel there, also.
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