CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Mother Parvati Curses Citraketu

The Seventeenth Chapter is summarized as follows. This chapter de-
scribes Citraketu’s receiving the body of an asura, or demon, because of
joking with Lord Siva.

After personally talking with the Supreme Personality of Godhead,
King Citraketu enjoyed life in his airplane with the women of the
Vidyadhara planet. Engaging in the congregational chanting of the glo-
ries of the Lord, he began flying his plane and traveling in outer space.
One day while traveling like this, he wandered into the bowers of
Sumeru Mountain, where he came upon Lord Siva embracing Parvati,
surrounded by an assembly of Siddhas, Caranas and great sages. Seeing
Lord Siva in that situation, Citraketu laughed very loudly, but Parvati
became very angry at him and cursed him. Because of this curse,
Citraketu later appeared as the demon Vrtrasura.

Citraketu, however, was not at all afraid of Parvati’s curse, and thus
he spoke as follows: “Everyone in human society enjoys happiness and
distress according to his past deeds and in this way travels in the material
world. Therefore no one is responsible for his happiness and distress.
One is controlled by the influence of material nature in the material
world, yet one thinks himself the doer of everything. In this material
world, which is made of the external energy of the Supreme Lord, one is
sometimes cursed and sometimes favored, and thus he sometimes enjoys
in the upper planetary systems and sometimes suffers in the lower
planets, but all these situations are the same because they are within this
material world. None of these positions has any factual existence, for all
of them are temporary. The Supreme Personality of Godhead is the ulti-
mate controller because the material world is created, maintained and
annihilated under His control while He nonetheless remains neutral to
these different transformations of the material world in time and space.
The material, external energy of the Supreme Personality of Godhead is
in charge of this material world. The Lord helps the world by creating
situations for the living entities within it.”

165
