The sacrifice is over. Viṣṇu has come in person, with Indra beside him, and the boons are on the table.
Pṛthu turns them down before naming what he wants:
O lord! The lords who grant boons result from your boon. Confused by the transformation of gunas within his own self, which learned person will seek a boon from you? O lord! O bestower of kaivalya! Embodied beings who go to hell also enjoy them. I will not ask for these.1
Two arguments in three sentences, and they are different arguments.
The first is about the source. The boon-granting gods exist because of him, so asking him for what they hand out is asking the wrong party for a lesser thing.
The second is about the goods themselves. Embodied beings who go to hell also enjoy them. Whatever the standard boons deliver — wealth, sons, victory, heaven — is available in hell too. Which is a flat statement that the boons do not discriminate between destinations, and therefore cannot be evidence of anything.
O protector! If I can taste the asava of your lotus feet, which flows from the hearts of great ones and emerges through their mouths, I do not desire any of that. Give me the boon of ten thousand ears so that I can hear about your glory.1
Not a state. Not knowledge, not liberation, not devotion, not a place at his feet.
Receiving equipment.
He asks for more of the organ, in a quantity, so that the same available material can arrive at higher volume. It is the one request in Volume 1 that is a hardware specification.
The petition's mechanism is worth following, because he is precise about the supply chain:
the asava of your lotus feet, which flows from the hearts of great ones and emerges through their mouths1
O Uttamashloka! Emerging from the mouths of great ones, drops of the nectar from your lotus feet are borne by the wind. It again brings back memory to those who have forgotten about the true path, the bad yogis.1
The route is: the deity's feet → the hearts of great ones → their mouths → the air → whoever is downwind.
Nothing in that chain is direct. The thing he wants more ears for is not available from the deity standing in front of him; it is only available secondhand, from other people talking, and it travels by wind.
Which is why ears rather than eyes. He is standing in front of Viṣṇu and asking for better equipment to receive reports of him — because the reports are the medium the substance actually moves in.
And there is a claim inside that: the drops bring back memory to those who have forgotten, including bad yogis. Overheard praise is described as a recovery mechanism for people whose practice has failed.
The next sentence names where this happens:
O one who knows about qualities! If one can manage to hear about the excellent account of your auspicious fame in an assembly of noble ones even once, unless he is an animal, which person will desire a cessation of that?1
In an assembly of noble ones. Not in solitude, not in meditation, not from a text.
The unit of transmission is a room with good company in it, and this is the volume's settled position rather than a one-off. It has already said that unwavering devotion arises only through association, and that what is required of the listener is an ear like a snake's hole.2
So the ten thousand ears are not a request for private capacity. They are a request to get more out of the one setting the volume says works, and the setting requires other people.
Which makes the boon social rather than personal. Ten thousand ears are useless alone.
The closing move of the petition compares himself to Lakṣmī, and it is the most confident sentence in it:
Even Shri wishes to receive the accumulation of your qualities. I hanker to worship the complete Purushottama, who is a reservoir of qualities, just as the one with the lotus in her hand does.1
He is not claiming to be greater than the goddess. He is claiming the same appetite, and using her as the precedent that the appetite is respectable at any scale.
Which is a careful piece of argument from a man who two chapters earlier refused to be praised for qualities he had not demonstrated.3 He does not say he deserves the boon. He says the thing he wants is what Śrī herself wants, which makes the request modest by making its object exalted.
The omissions are the page's other half.
Not liberation. He explicitly puts it aside — O bestower of kaivalya! is a vocative, addressed to the being who could grant it, in a sentence declining to ask.
Not the completion of the hundredth sacrifice. It has just been permanently stopped and he does not raise it.4
Not the fame Brahmā promised him. That was conferred in the settlement and he does not mention it.
And not less capacity. This is the striking one. Everything else in the volume's devotional apparatus is subtractive — reduce desire, withdraw the senses, dissolve the liṅga śarīra, obstruct the gates in the body.5 Dhruva's austerity was a systematic closing-down.
Pṛthu asks to be opened further, at scale, permanently, in one specific channel.
The volume does not remark on the reversal. It is the only additive request in Volume 1 and it is granted without comment.
The boon is offered at the end of a discourse, and the discourse has already told him what the right answer is.
Viṣṇu's instruction, delivered with Indra standing there being forgiven, runs through the whole position:
A learned person knows that this body is the creation of ignorance, kama and karma. That being the case, a person in whom knowledge has been generated, has no attachment towards it. If a learned person is not attached to the body, why will he have a sense of ownership towards things that result from it — a house, children and riches?6
The atman is one and pure. It is self-resplendent and nirguna, though it is a store for the gunas. It is not covered by anything and goes everywhere. It is a witness and there is nothing that is superior to the atman.6
O king! If a person follows his own dharma and always worships me devotedly, without any motive, his mind gradually obtains gratification. Such a person discards the gunas and is impartial in his outlook. He obtains unadulterated tranquility in me. Like the brahman, he is indifferent and obtains kaivalya.6
House, children and riches are named and dismissed. Kaivalya is named as the outcome of motiveless worship.
So Pṛthu's refusal is not spontaneous discernment. He has just been given the list of what not to want and the name of what the right practice produces, by the party about to offer him anything.
Which makes the interesting part of the petition not the refusal but the substitution. He was handed a syllabus that ends in kaivalya and asked instead for more ears, which is not on it.
Someone with real power to help asks what you want, and the obvious answers are all results.
Consider asking for the receiving apparatus. Results are consumed; capacity keeps producing. Ten thousand ears is a claim on every future assembly rather than on one delivery, and the difference compounds. This is the same choice as asking for a better instrument rather than a better measurement.
Check where the substance actually flows. He asks for ears, not eyes, while standing in front of the source — because the material he wants moves through other people's speech, not through direct contact. Requests aimed at the apparent source frequently miss the channel, and the channel is usually social and indirect.
And name the setting the capacity needs. In an assembly of noble ones. Capacity requests fail when the environment that feeds them is not also secured; ten thousand ears in an empty room is a worse position than two ears in a good one. If you are asking for capability, ask what supplies it.
The strongest evidence that the request is additive rather than ascetic is its form — a quantity of an organ, requested permanently, in a volume whose devotional programme is otherwise entirely subtractive.5
Tension — he declines boons on the grounds that embodied beings who go to hell also enjoy them, and then asks for a boon.1 The distinction he is drawing is never stated. Preserved.
Tension — the substance he wants is only available secondhand, from the mouths of great ones, while its source is standing in front of him.1 The volume does not explain why the direct route is unavailable. Preserved unresolved.
Open question. Ten thousand ears is a physical specification. Is it granted, and does the volume ever refer to him as having them?
The vault's Gauḍīya layer holds śravaṇam as the first and foundational of the nine practices, and reads this petition as its scriptural warrant — the devotee who, offered anything, asks only for more hearing.
The primary text agrees and specifies something the developed doctrine tends to generalise away. Pṛthu is not asking for better hearing. He is asking for more ears, and the substance he wants to catch is borne by the wind from other people's mouths, in an assembly.
The tradition's śravaṇam is a practice the individual performs. This request is for an increase in surface area exposed to a shared atmosphere, which is a different picture: less a discipline than a way of standing in a room where something is in the air.
With Spiritual Thirst and Misdirected Seeking. That page holds the pattern of a genuine appetite that keeps attaching to objects unable to satisfy it — the seeking being real and well-founded, the targets being substitutes, and the substitutions repeating because the appetite is never wrong about needing something.
Pṛthu's petition is what that pattern looks like when the misdirection is corrected explicitly and out loud. Embodied beings who go to hell also enjoy them. I will not ask for these. The boons are named as substitutes, on the specific ground that they are indifferent to destination — they show up in hell as well as heaven, which is exactly the property that makes an object incapable of satisfying the thirst it is being used for.
What the pairing produces: the clinical version usually diagnoses misdirection by the outcome — the person acquires the thing and remains thirsty. Pṛthu supplies a test that can be run in advance: does this good discriminate between where you end up? If it is equally available in the worst available destination, it is not evidence of progress toward the best one, whatever it is evidence of.
That is a sharper filter than the standard advice to examine one's motives, and it does not require introspection at all. It is a property of the object rather than of the wanting. And it explains why the substitutions repeat so reliably — the goods that misdirect are attractive precisely because they are available everywhere, which is the same fact that makes them useless as a signal.
Sharpest implication. He refuses boons on the ground that they are available in hell too — a test of the object rather than of the wanting — and then asks not for a state but for equipment: ten thousand ears, permanently, so that more of the same available material can arrive. And the material only travels secondhand, from the mouths of great ones on the wind, in an assembly, which makes the volume's only additive request a request to be better positioned in a room.
Generative questions.