Argument.—Bhusunda traces his origin from the Mátres, whose manners and revelries he describes in length.
BHUSUNDA related:—There is in this world, the god of gods Hara (Horus?) by name; who is the chief among the celestials, and honoured by all the divinities of heaven.
2. He had his consort Gaurí constituting the better half of his body, and by whom he is embraced in the manner of an ivy clasping the young Amra tree. Her bosom likened a cluster of blooming blossom, and her eyes resembled the lines of black bees fluttering in the summer sky.
3. The hoary locks of hair on the braided head of Hara, were entwined as with a white lace, by the snow white stream of Ganges, whose billows and waves as clusters of flowers on the hair-band.
4. The crown of his head was decorated with the gemming milk-white disk of the moon, which sprung from the bosom of the milky ocean; and spread her bright radiance and ambrosial dews about his person. (The streams of ganguari are represented as consorts of Hara, and the moon as forming the discus on the braces of the hairs on his head).
5. The incessant effusion of ambrosial draughts, from the disk of the moon on his crest, has made him immortal by assuaging the heat of the deadly poison which he swallowed, and has marked his throat with the bluish hue of the sapphire or lapis lazuli, whence he named the blue gulletted Níla Kantha. (Hara is said to have swallowed the kála-kuta poison, as Hercules drank his full bowl of henbane).
6. The god is besmeared with powdered ashes on his body, as emblematical of the particles of dust, to which the world was reduced by the flame of his all destructive conflagration; while the stream of water flowing from the Ganges on his head, is typical of the current of his clear knowledge of all things. (Others make the burning fire of his frontal eye bhála netra to represent the flash of his cognoscence—jnánágni).
7. His body is decorated with strings of blanched bones, which are brighter far than the silvery beams of fair moon, and these serve as necklaces of argent and pearly gems about his person. (Hence he is named as Jala-padda-málika).
8. His vest is the open sky with its plates of folded clouds, which are washed by the milk white beam of the moon, and studded with the variegated spots of the stars. (This means the nudity of the god, hence called Digamvara or sky attired).
9. He is beset by the prowling shakals, devouring the burnt carcasses on funeral grounds, and holds his abode beyond the habitations of men, in cemeteries and mortuaries in the outer skirts of cities. (Whence his name of Smashána sáyí).