How it is told
Why did Gautama have to bring the Godavari down?
The one hermitage with grain
A famine ran long. Gautama's practice kept his fields producing when nothing else did, and he fed every ashram on the hill out of them for the duration. The other sages ate at his place every day for years, which is a thing people forgive less readily than hunger.
A cow in the paddy
When the rains came back and they no longer needed him, they wanted him gone. A cow was sent into his standing paddy. Gautama went out to shoo it away with a handful of darbha grass — the gentlest implement in the ashram — and the cow dropped dead at his feet. In one telling it was Jaya, a companion of Parvati, who had taken the shape of a cow precisely so that it would.
The one stain with no rite to wash it
Go-hatya, the killing of a cow, is the sin the texts treat as near-unatonable. The sages who had arranged it then declined to eat with him or accept his offerings, which is how he discovered what had been done. The katha is unsparing about them: they are not demons, they are neighbours.
The remedy they named
Asked for a way out, they set the hardest terms they could think of — bring the Ganga herself to this hill and bathe in her. It was meant to be impossible. He went up Brahmagiri and started.
A thousand years on the hill
Shiva came, and gave him the river. The Ganga was not pleased to be relocated and tried to slip away underground; Gautama caught her at the pool below and held her there with the same darbha grass he had used on the cow. The pool is Kushavarta, and it is still the formal source of the Godavari, which the south calls Gautami after him.
Three faces in one stone
Gautama asked Shiva to remain, and he remained as Trimbakeshwar. The lingam here is not one mark but three small faces in a single stone — Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva — worn low with age and kept under a silver mask for most of the year.