A King Who Builds a City He Cannot Explain
The story of Puranjana, narrated by the sage Narada in the Bhagavata Purana, follows a king who, wandering the earth in search of a place to settle, comes upon a magnificent city with nine gates, built and offered to him without explanation by a serpent who becomes his constant, silent companion and protector. Inside the city, Puranjana meets and marries a beautiful queen, and, utterly absorbed by her and the pleasures of ruling this city, forgets everything about who he was before arriving there or why the serpent had brought him.
Puranjana lives out an entire reign inside this city, indulging every pleasure it offers, fathering children, accumulating wealth and status, entirely consumed by the sensory and emotional life the city provides, never once questioning the strange fact of the nine gates or the serpent's unexplained loyalty.
The City Is the Body, and the King Is the Soul
Narada, after narrating the full story of Puranjana's eventual old age, decline and death still trapped in attachment to this life, provides the interpretation directly: the nine-gated city is the human body itself, its nine gates the body's nine natural openings, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, mouth, and the two lower openings. The queen represents the mind and its desires, which the soul, Puranjana, marries and becomes consumed by. The serpent who built the city and remains loyal throughout represents the life-force or prana, the silent, constant companion the embodied soul rarely thinks to thank or even notice.
The entire allegory is offered as an explanation for why the atma, the soul, forgets its own true nature once embodied, becoming so thoroughly absorbed in the sensory pleasures and relationships available through a particular body that it loses awareness of anything beyond that single incarnation, mistaking the temporary city for the entirety of its own identity.
Why a Story Rather Than a Direct Teaching
The Puranjana episode is narrated within the Bhagavata Purana specifically to King Pracinabarhi, who had grown deeply attached to elaborate ritual sacrifice as an end in itself, and Narada tells the story precisely because a direct philosophical lecture had failed to shift the king's attachment, while a narrative he could recognize himself inside proved more effective. This use of allegory rather than direct doctrine is itself notable within the wider Bhagavata Purana, which otherwise favours devotional narrative over abstract philosophical argument, making Puranjana's story a rare and deliberately constructed exception.
The story remains a frequently cited teaching device in Vedantic and Bhagavata commentary specifically because its imagery, a soul who builds an elaborate home, falls in love with what lives inside it, and forgets it was ever anything else, translates directly and memorably into a lesson about ordinary embodied life without requiring technical philosophical vocabulary to land.
Reader Questions Answered
What do the nine gates of Puranjana's city represent?+
They represent the nine natural openings of the human body: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, the mouth, and the two lower bodily openings, framing the entire city as an allegory for the physical body itself.
Who tells this story and to whom, within the Bhagavata Purana?+
The sage Narada narrates it to King Pracinabarhi, who had become deeply attached to ritual sacrifice for its own sake, using the story to illustrate a point that direct philosophical instruction had failed to convey.
Is the serpent in the story meant to be a villain?+
No, the serpent, representing the life-force or prana, is portrayed as a loyal, silent protector throughout, present constantly but rarely acknowledged by Puranjana, which is part of the story's point about how little attention embodied beings pay to what actually sustains them.
About the author
Anjali Mehta · Editor, M.A. Religious Studies
Anjali is the managing editor for Vandnaa and oversees the festival and vrat coverage. She holds an M.A. in Religious Studies and reviews every published article for accuracy, accessibility, and tradition-fidelity.
Meet the Vandnaa editorial team →