Chyavanaच्यवन

Chyavana (च्यवन) is the sage of restored youth. A son of Bhrigu, he practised austerities so long and so motionless that termites raised their mound over his body, leaving only his eyes glittering within. The princess Sukanya, passing with her father King Sharyati's retinue, saw the two points of light and pierced them — in some tellings with a thorn, unknowing. The sage's anger fell upon the king's people, and amends were made in the old manner: Sukanya was given to the aged, withered Chyavana in marriage, and served him with unresenting fidelity.

The Ashvins' gift

The heavenly twins, the Ashvins, physicians of the gods, encountered Sukanya and urged her to leave her decrepit husband for one of them. She refused, and her constancy moved them to an offer: they would make Chyavana young and beautiful, indistinguishable from themselves, and she must then choose among the three. All three rose from the waters identical; Sukanya knew her husband, tradition says, by subtle signs, and chose rightly. The story is ancient — the Rigveda already praises the Ashvins for stripping age from Chyavana like a garment — and the fuller narrative is told in the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Mahabharata.

The sage against Indra

Chyavana repaid his physicians in kind. At Sharyati's sacrifice he poured soma for the Ashvins, whom Indra held ineligible for the offering. When the king of the gods raised his thunderbolt in objection, the sage paralysed his arm and created from his ascetic power the monstrous demon Mada, intoxication personified, before whose gaping jaws Indra capitulated. The Ashvins won their share of the soma, and Mada was dismembered into dice, drink, hunting and women — the tradition's sardonic account of where intoxication went. Chyavana's name survives most familiarly in chyavanprash, the herbal preparation of Ayurveda said to be the formula by which his youth was renewed, still sold in vast quantities across India.