The Epiphany of Panini

In a story that I have been unable to locate in the Net, Panini, the Sanksrit grammarian, starts as a worthless student. Lazy, laid back and lounging around, the frustrated criticisms of his Guru have no effect. One day he resolves to leave the Ashrama, and declares his intention to his Guru. His master is aggrieved, but Panini has decided on idiocy. He sets out, packing his nominal belongings into a saffron bundle.
As he walks further away from the home of his abortive learning, memories of the place resonate in his mind. Soon he is loathing himself, and regrets the finality of his mental sloth. He pauses at a well, to rest and refresh his dried throat and cringing mind. Suddenly, he experiences an epiphany, and if the legend is to be believed, a fateful one. The scene at the well assails him. He sees the iron axle of the well-rope scored by the hemp, he sees the damp disks that wooden buckets have left on the stone. This is all he needs to turn back. If iron and stone are scarred by hemp and wood, then why not.....
Panini is now Appolline in his devotion to texts. Without relent or ruth, he eventually hews Sankrit to order and logic in his epochal Ashtadhyayi. Let us also observe, partisans that we are.... that he graced the Achaemenid Empire, which would help 300 Spartans achieve immortality by repulsing their 'barbarian' advance into Greece. And wrote his treatise almost contemporaneously with the Gates of Fire.
I insert an anecdote that cannot belong here. I have been playing the violin with a certain manic passion for a year or so, now. My style allowing few of the fingers but the left index, I had secreted thick, dead skin at its sensitive tip. I also play, with ritual fervence, Endharo Mahanubhavulu, St. Thyagaraja's richest and most complex Pancharatna Kriti. The Kriti repeats and reinforces a signature Sree Ragam phrase (involving Kaishiki Nishadam, or minor ti in the Western Solfa). I have unravelled the steel twine of the third string thanks to my repeated rendition of the phrase. I can no longer use the violin without replacing it.
The irony is that I am an amateur and a very ordinary player even among amateurs. Which only serves, perhaps, to reinforce that metaphors and idioms are as Platonic as the ideal they set us off to try and achieve.