Pushan's standing falls sharply between the Vedic hymns and the later Puranic stories, and one episode explains why. When Daksha holds his great sacrifice and pointedly leaves Shiva off the guest list, the insult reaches Shiva's wife Sati, who dies of the shame, and Shiva's fury tears Virabhadra into being from his matted hair to destroy the rite. Among the gods who suffer for merely attending is Pushan: accounts differ on the exact cause, some naming Rudra himself as the striker in the older Taittiriya Samhita telling, others naming Virabhadra in the fuller Puranic version, but the result is the same. Pushan's teeth are knocked from his mouth, sometimes because he smiled or laughed at the chaos, sometimes simply because he was caught eating the sacrificial oblation when the attack came.
The consequence becomes a fixed part of his later iconography: Pushan is shown toothless, reduced to eating gruel or mashed offerings because he can no longer chew solid food, an odd and almost comic diminishment for a god once addressed in the Rigveda as the one who finds what is lost and never loses the way himself. Scholars of Vedic religion read the story as a record of an older pastoral god being pushed to the margins as the Puranic pantheon reorganizes itself around Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma, with the physical mutilation standing in for the god's loss of standing in the wider tradition.
The episode is one of the few points where Pushan's myth intersects directly with Daksha's own story, since both figures suffer at the same sacrifice for the same reason, caught in a family quarrel between Shiva and his father in law that neither of them started.