Slightly tangential but this was a learning moment for me.
This reminds me of a story where Sage Mandavya established the first juvenile law in Hindu mythology.
<story starts>
Long ago, there lived a great sage named Mandavya who had taken a vow of silence and spent his days in deep meditation. One day, while he sat motionless beneath a tree with his arms raised in penance, a group of thieves being pursued by the king’s soldiers fled into his hermitage. They hid their stolen loot near the sage and escaped through the other side.
When the king’s soldiers arrived, they found the stolen goods but the sage—deep in meditation and bound by his vow of silence—neither confirmed nor denied their presence. The soldiers arrested him and brought him before the king, accusing him of harboring criminals.
Despite his spiritual stature, the king ordered a severe punishment: Mandavya was to be impaled on a stake (shula)—a horrific execution where a wooden spike was driven through the body. However, due to his immense yogic powers and detachment from the physical world, the sage did not die. He remained alive on the stake, enduring the agony with superhuman patience.
Eventually, other sages intervened, the king realized his grave error, and Mandavya was freed. But the damage was done. When the sage finally left his mortal body, he went directly to Yamaloka—the realm of Yama, the god of death and justice—to demand an explanation.
“Why did I have to suffer such a gruesome fate?” Sage Mandavya asked Lord Yama. “What terrible sin did I commit to deserve impalement?”
Yama consulted his records and replied, “When you were a child, you caught a dragonfly and pierced it with a needle through its body, watching it suffer for your amusement. That act of cruelty resulted in your punishment - you experienced the same suffering you inflicted on that innocent creature.”
Sage Mandavya was furious. “That was when I was a child!” he protested. “I was too young to understand the difference between right and wrong, between sin and virtue. How can you punish an ignorant child with the same severity as a knowing adult?”
Yama tried to explain that karma operates impartially, but Mandavya would not accept this. In his righteous anger, the sage cursed Yama himself: “For this unjust judgment, you shall be born as a human on Earth and experience mortality yourself!”
This curse led to Yama being born as Vidura, the wise and virtuous counselor in the Mahabharata - a human who, despite his wisdom and righteousness, had to endure the limitations and sufferings of mortal life.
But Mandavya didn’t stop there. Using his spiritual authority, he proclaimed a new divine law: “No sin committed by a child below the age of fourteen shall count toward their karmic debt equivalent to that of an adult. Children who do not yet understand dharma and adharma shall not be punished for their ignorant actions.”
This became the first “juvenile law” in Hindu mythology—a recognition that children, in their innocence and ignorance, deserve compassion and correction rather than severe punishment.
<story ends>
When I was a child, I too wanted to catch a dragonfly and tie a thread to it so it would fly around like a little pet. But my mother stopped me. She told me this very story of Sage Mandavya, and it scared me for life. I never forgot it, and I never tried to catch and bind a dragonfly again.
