Bhagavatam · The Liberation of Gajendra

Parikshit looked at the sage Shukadeva and asked, “Bhagavan, you said that whoever calls out even once with a true heart at the final hour is carried across. But I have only six days left, and something inside me still trembles now and then. Tell me this: the one who has no method of japa, no knowledge of shastra, who cannot even find the right words, is his cry heard too?”

Shukadeva stayed silent a while. Then he said, “Rajan, there was once just such a caller. Neither a man nor a rishi. An elephant. Listen.”

In the middle of the Ocean of Milk stood a mountain. Its name was Trikuta. A mountain of three peaks, a full ten thousand yojanas high and as many across. Of its three summits one was silver, one iron, one gold, and on every side the milk-white sea rolled against it. At its foot lay a garden of Lord Varuna called Rituman, where flowers and fruit hung heavy in every season. And in that garden spread a great lake, its water so clear and cool that golden lotuses stood open on it the whole year round.

On that mountain lived a herd of elephants, and their leader was a colossal Gajendra. Immense, immensely strong. Tusks that could tear a tree out of the earth in one wrench. Forests shook when he walked, and at his mere scent lions, tigers, even rhinoceroses turned and fled. Around him moved the she-elephants and the calves, and the whole herd turned on a single gesture of his trunk.

A summer day. The sun straight overhead. The elephants grew thirsty. From far off the scent of that lake’s lotuses drifted in on the wind, and Gajendra led his herd toward it. At the sight of water they all leapt with joy. They bathed in high spirits, filled their trunks and doused one another, and then simply stood in the water a while, for no reason except that it felt good.

Gajendra came down into the water too. First he drank his fill, then bathed himself through and washed his weariness away. Sunk in fondness like any householder, he sent fountain after fountain arcing from his trunk over his wives and children, slid his trunk into their mouths to give them water. Bewitched by the Lord’s maya, he was drunk with delight, and the poor creature had no inkling of how vast a disaster was gathering over him.

Then something moved beneath the water.

From under the water something seized his leg. A powerful graha, a crocodile. Old, and strong. Driven by the push of destiny, it filled with rage and clamped Gajendra’s foot fast in its jaws.

Gajendra gave the first heave. He tried to wrench his foot free. An elephant trusts his own strength; throwing his weight at a problem is his first resort. A second heave. And a third.

He strained. The crocodile bit down harder.

The other elephants stood close by, watching. The she-elephants screamed, pulled at his trunk with their own, his calves pressed forward. But the crocodile was in the water, and the water was its home ground. An elephant is a creature of land. The strength that had won him everything, all his life, was worth nothing to him in the water that day.

Hours passed. Then a day. Then a week.

Gajendra would not accept defeat. He pulled; the crocodile pulled. The strength of land on one side, the strength of water on the other. Land does not know how to step back; water does not know how to let go.

Months passed.

One by one the other elephants left. First the females, who had calves to look after. Then the calves, who were hungry. At the last, even the remaining purusha elephants. They too had tried to free him from the mighty crocodile’s grip, and had failed. In the end they needed water from somewhere else; they had lives of their own.

Gajendra was left alone. Just him and the crocodile.

Years passed. The Bhagavata says a thousand years. Perhaps those are the thousand years hidden somewhere in every life, when a habit, a fear, an old story takes hold of us and we cannot pull free. We try every day, lose every day, and try again.

Dragged into the water again and again for so long, Gajendra’s body went slack. No strength left in the body, no spirit left in the mind; even his power drained thin. But the crocodile was a water creature, its strength only grew in the water, and it began to pull harder still. Even then Gajendra kept spending whatever scraps of strength remained to him. That was his way. That was his very name for himself: king of elephants.

But a moment came.

The moment when everything within reach has been tried. Every heave, every trick, every last move. And none of it has worked.

In that moment, Gajendra remembered something.

He had not always been an elephant. Long ago, in some other birth, he had been a king. His name was Indradyumna. He was a devotee, a king of the Pandya line in the Dravida country. He had given up everything and taken an ascetic’s garb, let his hair grow into matted jata, and on Mount Malaya, under a vow of silence, he worshipped the Lord.

One day the rishi Agastya arrived there with his band of disciples. The king was so deep in silence, so deep in meditation, that he neither rose nor offered them honor. Agastya flared into anger and cursed him: “This king has taken no instruction from his elders. Out of arrogance he has cast aside all service and hospitality and does exactly as he pleases. This insulter of Brahmins is dull-witted as an elephant; let him fall into that very womb, the dark ignorance of an elephant’s birth.” So saying, the rishi turned back with his disciples. He had been an elephant ever since.

But one thing of the king survived, even inside the elephant. A memory. A devotee’s memory. Such was the power of his worship that even in an elephant’s body, the remembrance of the Lord had stayed with him.

Today, in this final moment, that old word rose to his dried lips.

This time the cry carried no single name. Neither “O Rama” nor “O Vishnu.” This time he called the one he had once named “he who is the root cause of all.” Without name, without form. Just a voice rising from some deep floor within him, reaching past every single deity toward the first cause of everything.

Near his trunk a lotus trembled on the water. With his last remaining breath he took hold of it, and on his shaking trunk he raised it above the water. Like an offering.

And he called.

This was the moment when everything of Gajendra’s own had run out. His strength, his herd, his standing, his identity. All of it. And in this very running out, a door swung open.

Vishnu, the Parabrahman, the one refuge, heard that cry. He saw that Gajendra was in terrible agony.

Suddenly he started up.

Without a moment’s delay, chakra in hand, he mounted the Veda-formed Garuda and sped toward the lake. The devas came with him, singing his praise as they flew.

The Lord came racing. No preparation, no procession. And he did not pause.

Why? Because a devotee had called with a true heart for the first time. And “with a true heart” meant exactly this here: no other support left, no second stratagem, and no last trace of trust in his own strength.

He reached the lake.

Gajendra was on his final breath. The crocodile still held his leg.

Vishnu leapt down from Garuda and hauled Gajendra out of the lake, crocodile and all, both of them together. Then, before every watching eye, he tore the crocodile’s mouth open with the Sudarshana chakra.

And then one thing more happened.

The crocodile that had been cut open appeared, that very instant, in a divine form. He too was freed. He too had been someone in an earlier birth: a noble gandharva named Huhu. The sage Devala had cursed him: go, become a crocodile in the water. Today, by Vishnu’s chakra, his curse was wiped away as well.

So one stroke, two liberations. The one who gripped and the one who was gripped, both.

Gajendra looked at Vishnu. For the first time. After that thousand-year battle his exhausted eyes lifted, and the Lord stood before them. Water began to run from the old, sunken eyes, and he simply kept looking.

Vishnu laid a hand on his head. The elephant’s form fell away. In its place stood a four-armed attendant robed in yellow silk. A servant of Vaikuntha. His kingly self of the old birth returned, and raised higher still.

Vishnu took him along.

All this passed behind the clouds. Below lay the mountain, the lake, and that empty water where a crocodile and an elephant had once wrestled for a thousand years, now settling clear. The forest nearby was as green as ever, but over that lake had descended a stillness it had never known before.