01The Vindhya bows
Hymns 1.165 to 1.191 of the Rigveda are seen by Agastya, among them the dialogue with Indra and the Maruts, and 1.179, a hymn with his wife Lopamudra. The Puranas tell how the Vindhya mountain grew so high that it blocked the sun. Agastya, the Vindhya’s guru, came walking south. The mountain bowed to let him pass, and he asked it to stay low until he returned. He never went back north. The Mahabharata, in the Vana Parva, also tells how he drank up the ocean so the devas could find the asuras hiding in it.
02In the Ramayana and beyond the sea
In the Aranya Kanda, Rama visits Agastya’s ashram and receives from him a bow of Vishnu, an inexhaustible quiver and a sword. In the Yuddha Kanda, before the last battle with Ravana, Agastya comes to the field and teaches Rama the Aditya Hridayam, the hymn to Surya still recited each morning. The Tamil country remembers him on the Pothigai hills. In Java and Cambodia, statues of a bearded, pot-bellied sage with a water pot, Bhatara Guru Agastya, were placed in temples from the 8th century on; several stand in museums in Jakarta and Bangkok.