Bhagavatam · The Liberation of Gajendra

In the middle of the Ocean of Milk, the white sea the Lord himself names among his favorite dwelling places, there stood a mountain called Trikuta. It rose ten thousand yojanas out of the water and spread just as far across, and its three great peaks were three different treasures, one silver, one iron, one gold, so that the sea below and the sky above and every direction between them took their light. Lesser summits crowded its shoulders, glittering with shrubs of gemstone and mineral color, and its caves belonged to beings a traveler hears of only in songs: siddhas and charanas, gandharvas and vidyadharas, great jeweled serpents, kinnaras and apsaras. When the kinnaras sang in those caves, the lions of the mountain answered the echoes with challenge-roars, certain that some rival lion had entered their country. In one of its valleys lay a pleasure garden of Varuna, lord of the waters, called Rituman, where the women of heaven came down to play and where some tree stood in flower or in fruit through every season of the year: mandara and parijata, champak and ashoka, mango and sandalwood, date palm and sugarcane and rose-apple. And in that garden spread a great lake. Its water ran so clear and so cool that golden lotuses stood open on it the whole year round, blue lilies crowding between them, swans and ruddy geese calling across pollen-dusted water, the banks beneath them sanded with gems.

On that mountain lived a herd of wild elephants, and at its head walked Gajendra. He was immense, and nothing on the mountain disputed his rule. He fed by tearing whole thickets of bamboo out of the earth; when he moved, his weight shook the slopes, and the dark fluid of musth ran down his temples while a retinue of black bees rode the air behind him to drink it. Lions caught his scent and abandoned their kills. Tigers, rhinoceroses, even the great serpents gave up their ground and moved away. And in the shadow of that one animal’s rule the meek of the forest, the boars and bears and porcupines, the monkeys, the antelope, the hares, grazed wherever they pleased and feared nothing, because everything that might have hunted them was itself afraid of him. Around him moved his wives and his calves, and the whole herd turned on a single gesture of his trunk.

Then came a summer noon, the sun straight overhead, the herd heavy with thirst. The wind shifted and carried them, from a long way off, the cool breath of that lake, sweet with lotus pollen, and Gajendra turned toward it. They came down through the trees half wild with wanting it, his own eyes rolling with musth and heat, and when the water finally showed itself the whole herd broke and ran. They crashed in trumpeting. They drank, they doused one another, trunks filling and emptying over every back in reach, and then they simply stood in the water a while, for no reason except that it felt good.

Gajendra came down into the water after them. He drank first, long and unhurried, the clear water tasting faintly of the gold and blue lotus pollen it carried, and he bathed the weariness of the march out of his hide. Then, sunk in fondness like any householder home among his own, he began to tend his family. Fountain after fountain arched from his trunk over his wives and calves; he slid his trunk into the small mouths one by one and gave them water to drink. He was drunk with tenderness and pride, wrapped in the Lord’s own maya, the veiling power that lets a creature believe the good hour will last forever, and he had no inkling of how vast a disaster was gathering beneath his feet.

Under the surface, something moved.

It had him before he understood what had him. A graha, a crocodile, old and enormously strong, seized his hind leg in a cold fury. Hunger had a part in those jaws, and something older than hunger had the greater part: destiny itself had chosen the day, the lake, and the leg. The jaws closed on bone and locked.

Gajendra pulled. It was the first answer his body knew, the answer that had never once failed him: mass, muscle, and rage. He planted his three free feet and heaved. He heaved again. The water churned white around him, and torn lotuses spun away across the lake.

He threw everything into it. The crocodile bit deeper.

The herd crowded the bank in a panic. His wives screamed and reached for him, trunk winding around trunk, hauling until their feet cut furrows in the wet sand. The bulls waded in behind him and pushed and pulled and gained nothing. The crocodile hardly seemed to notice any of it. The water was its country. An elephant is a creature of land, and every gift that had made Gajendra a king on land, the weight, the footing, the leverage, was worth nothing once the fight moved into the water.

The other elephants tried to pull him free from behind. They could not overcome the crocodile. Gajendra dragged his attacker toward the bank; the crocodile dragged him back into the lake. The contest continued, each animal exerting its full strength.

The Bhagavata gives the struggle a measure almost beyond human scale: one thousand years. Both animals remained alive, and the gods watched in astonishment. During those long years, Gajendra was repeatedly pulled into the water. His body weakened, his courage ebbed, and his senses lost their force. The crocodile lived in its own element, so its strength and aggression increased while the elephant’s declined.

Then came a moment.

The moment when everything within reach has been tried. Every heave, every angle, every device, every ally, all of it spent, and the jaws still locked. A moment with nothing left inside it at all, except one thing.

In that moment, something surfaced in Gajendra that was older than the elephant.

He had not always been this body. Long before, in another birth, he had been a man: a king named Indradyumna, of the Pandya line that ruled the Dravida country in the far south, and his devotion to Vishnu outweighed everything else he owned. In time it outweighed the throne itself. He laid the kingdom down, let his hair mat into jata, and withdrew to a hermitage on Mount Malaya, where he took a vow of silence and gave his days to a single occupation: the worship, at the appointed hours, of the almighty, immortal Hari.

One day the sage Agastya came up the mountain with a company of disciples and found the king seated in solitary worship, silent and motionless. Indradyumna did not rise or perform the customary welcome. Agastya took the omission for pride and pronounced a curse: a king who had neglected the duties owed to a brahmin guest would receive the darkened understanding of an elephant and be born in an elephant’s body. The sage departed with his disciples. Indradyumna accepted the sentence as the arrival of his own destiny.

One thing survived the curse. The Bhagavata attributes it to the power of his worship: even in an elephant’s body, remembrance of the Lord returned when he needed it.

Now the moment had come. Trapped, emptied, dying, the elephant did what the king had done every day of his last human life. He steadied what remained of his mind, drew it down into the heart, and began, syllable by remembered syllable, the prayer Indradyumna had learned by heart a lifetime ago.

It rose the way water rises in a well, from very far down. Om, it began. I bow to the Lord from whom consciousness itself descends into the world, the one who enters every body ever formed and makes it aware. I take refuge in him in whom this universe rests, from whom it came, by whom it was made, who is it, and who stands beyond it, the refuge of the refugeless, from fear of whom Death himself keeps running. May he protect me: the self-revealed witness who watches with unobstructed sight as all of this blazes up out of him at creation and folds back into him at the end. When the worlds dissolve, when the fourteen realms and their guardians have gone down into a darkness so total that time cannot cut it, his light still shines on the far side of that darkness. Gods cannot find his edges; seers cannot. He plays every part on every stage, and no spectator has ever caught the actor behind the roles. He stands beyond birth, deed, name, and form, and by his own free maya he puts on birth and deed and name and form whenever the worlds need making or unmaking. He is the flame of consciousness asleep inside nature’s kindling wood. He is the sea into which all the Vedas run like rivers. Serene in one mode, dreadful in another, deluding in a third, and behind all three exactly one, unchanging. Without ever wearying he unties the ropes that bind animals like me; his compassion has no floor and no far wall. Those who clutch at body, children, house, wealth, and kin never reach him; the freed hold him in their hearts and ask him for nothing, drowned past asking in the bliss of his stories. Worlds pour out of a fraction of him the way sparks pour from a fire, the way rays pour from the sun, and they pour back into him the same way. He stands outside every category: god, demon, human, animal, female, male, quality, act, effect, and cause. He is what remains when everything a mind can name has been set aside, and he is everything that was named. Let the Lord of unbounded mercy pull me from the jaws of this monster, and from the jaws of the world behind it. And yet I do not ask him for my life. What would I do with a few more years inside this ignorance, wearing a body dark on the inside and the outside alike? I ask for the ignorance itself to fall. I ask for the tearing of the one veil that time cannot tear.

Near his trunk a lotus trembled on the water. With the strength left in him he plucked it and raised it above the surface as an offering.

And he called.

Aloud, and with great difficulty, he said: Narayana, teacher of all the worlds, Lord, I bow to you.

The prayer was heard, and heaven held still for one strange moment. The hymn had named no one. Brahma the creator heard it and did not stir; it did not describe him. Shiva heard it, and Indra, and the gods of every station, each wearing his own distinct form, and none of them rose, because a cry aimed past every form can be answered by none of the forms. So the one who wears all of them as a single body answered it himself. Hari, the soul of everything that is, was already there.

And the Lord rose.

He took up the discus, mounted Garuda, the great eagle whom the text calls Veda embodied, and came swiftly to the lake. Behind him came the gods, singing his praise.

Then the lake was below him.

Gajendra had come down to his last breaths, the crocodile still holding the leg it had held for a thousand years. And lifting his eyes, the elephant saw above the water what his borrowed hymn had been describing all along: Hari on Garuda in the open sky, yellow silk against storm-dark skin, the discus raised and already turning.

Vishnu did not wait for Garuda to land. He leapt straight from the eagle’s back into the shallows, took hold of the elephant, and hauled him out of the lake whole, crocodile and all, one immense motion dragging both animals up onto the bank together. Then, with every god in heaven watching, he set the edge of Sudarshana to the crocodile’s jaws and tore them open, and the leg came free.

Out of the crocodile’s body appeared a radiant celestial figure. The crocodile had once been Huhu, a leading gandharva, and had received this form through the curse of the sage Devala. Released by the Lord, Huhu bowed, circled him in reverence, sang his glory, and returned to his own celestial realm.

The Lord’s touch freed Gajendra from the bondage of ignorance. He received the form of one of Vishnu’s attendants, four-armed and dressed in yellow, and boarded Garuda beside the Lord.

Before departing, Vishnu gave the episode its final instruction. Those who rise in the last watch of night and remember the Lord, Gajendra, the lake, the mountain, the divine emblems, the sages, and the sacred rivers named in his teaching are freed from sin. Whoever recites Gajendra’s hymn at that hour, he promised, will receive clear remembrance at death. Then Vishnu sounded Panchajanya, gladdened the assembled gods, mounted Garuda, and returned to his realm with Gajendra.