Bhagavatam · The Battle of Hiranyaksha

Parikshit had eaten nothing that night, and what filled his eyes now was a wakefulness of another order entirely. He looked at Shukadeva.

“Bhagavan, yesterday you spoke of the boar who lifted the earth on his tusks. But one thing has stayed lodged in my mind. Who was the asura that drowned the earth in the waters, and how did he meet his end? My days are numbered, Munivar. I want to know what kind of dying it is, to die at the hands of the Lord.”

Shukadeva was silent a while. Then he said, “Rajan, that asura’s name was Hiranyaksha. And he was never going to simply fall.”

“His story begins a little further back. At the gates of Vaikuntha stood two of the Lord’s own attendants, Jaya and Vijaya. The four boy-sages, Sanaka and his brothers, cursed them to take birth three times in the wombs of asuras. In the first of those births they came as two brothers, Hiranyakashipu and Hiranyaksha. But the way they were made carried its own ruin inside it. Their mother, Diti, a daughter of Daksha, once went to her husband, the sage Kashyapa, at the hour of dusk, when the sun was going down and the whole failing sky belongs to Rudra and his roaming host of spirits. Kashyapa begged her to wait a little, for the hour was an evil one, a time that favors fierce and dreadful creatures. She would not wait. So the seed was sown at that forbidden twilight, in a mind clouded with desire and heedless of the gods, and everything that came of it was shaped by that one impatient hour.”

“When it was over, Kashyapa told her plainly what she had made. ‘Because your mind was unclean, because the hour was wrong, because you overrode my word and slighted the gods, two cruel and worthless sons will come of you. They will make the three worlds and their guardians weep again and again. And when they turn to killing the helpless and tormenting the good, the Lord himself will come down and strike them, the way Indra strikes the mountains.’ Diti wept at that, and then she asked him one thing. ‘If they must die, let them die at the hands of the Lord himself, and not under the curse of some angry Brahmana.’ She had chosen her sons’ death before they were even born. By Kashyapa’s seed, Hiranyakashipu was the one who entered her womb first, yet it was Hiranyaksha who came out of her belly first, and he was the fiercer of the two. It was he who gathered up the earth and hid it away in the waters of Rasatala.”

“Even with the earth hidden away, his thirst for war stayed unslaked. Mace in hand, he went up first into heaven itself, looking for someone to fight. The gods, who feared death from no one else, feared him; they hid the way snakes hide from Garuda, and when he found neither Indra nor any of the others, he roared his contempt at the empty halls. Then he plunged into the deep and thundering ocean, purely for the sport of it. The moment he entered, Varuna’s water-creatures scattered in terror, undone by his splendor alone before he had struck a single blow. For years he ranged the sea, beating its wind-tossed waves with his iron mace, until he came at last to Vibhavari, the capital of Varuna.”

“There he found Varuna, lord of the waters and warden of the demon-world below, and he mocked him, falling at his feet like some low man playing a joke, and said with a grin, ‘Give me the alms of battle, my lord. You are the guardian of a whole sphere, famous the world over. You have crushed the proud, beaten down every Daitya and Danava, and once performed the Rajasuya sacrifice. Surely you can spare me a fight.’ Varuna’s anger rose, and he mastered it with his reason. ‘Dear one,’ he said, ‘we have laid warfare down; we have grown too old for it. There is only one left who can still give a fighter like you the satisfaction you are after, the most ancient Person, whom even heroes like you name with awe. Go to him. You will lose your pride the moment you reach him, and you will lie down on that field surrounded by dogs. It is to root out wicked creatures like you, and to shelter the good, that he takes on his many forms.’ So, along the road Narada showed him, Hiranyaksha set out for the depths, where Shri Hari was carrying the earth upward.”

“When Varaha stood before him, Hiranyaksha thought this would be the work of a single blow.”

“A boar! Before me!”

He steadied his mace, a weight so vast that no other hand could even have raised it from the ground.

“You wild beast! Let go of that earth. The Maker of all things gave her into our keeping, to us who live in Rasatala, and you will not slip off with her under my eyes, you sham god hiding in a boar’s hide. When my mace has cracked your skull open, the gods and sages who live off your offerings will stand like trees with their roots torn out.”

The taunts landed on him like arrows, and he bore them, because the earth trembling on the ends of his tusks needed him more than his pride did. He rose out of the water carrying her the way a great elephant carries his mate clear of a lurking crocodile, and the demon came chasing up behind him like the crocodile itself. Only when he had lifted her into the open did the Boar set the earth down upon the surface of the water, in full sight of them all, and pour into her the power to hold herself afloat. Brahma broke into praise, and the devas let fall a rain of flowers.

Then Shri Hari turned, his red eyes seeming to draw the very fire out of the asura, and laughed with a slow and terrible anger. “Wild brutes we are indeed, since we go hunting for dogs like you. But a hero pays no mind to the boasting of a creature already roped by death. You scared us off with your mace, true, and we who carried the earth away from you men of Rasatala stand here now with all our shame thrown to the wind, because a fighter with a strong enemy in front of him has nowhere left to run. So come, leader of foot soldiers. Put us down, and wipe your family’s tears. A man who cannot make good on his word has no seat in the company of the good.”

Then the war broke open.

First it was mace against mace. Hissing with fury like a snake being teased with a stick, the demon sprang and brought his weapon down at the Lord’s chest. Shri Hari slid aside by a hair, the way a practiced yogi slips past death itself, and the blow found nothing. Then he swung, and his mace caught the demon on the right brow; but Hiranyaksha was a master of the weapon, and he turned it away on his own. Iron struck iron, and the sound of it was such that all the water of Rasatala shuddered, and the tremor ran up to the very floor of the ocean above. They circled and hammered at each other, both of them cut, both bleeding, both driven wilder by the smell of their own blood, wheeling and feinting like two bulls that gore each other over a single cow.

Brahma had come down to watch, ringed by Marici and the other sages, and when he saw the demon standing fearless and giving back the Lord’s blows one for one, he spoke. “Prabhu, this creature has grown past all bearing on the strength of a boon he wrung from me. He torments the gods, the Brahmanas, the cows, every helpless thing, and roams the worlds hunting for someone to fight. Do not play with him the way a child plays with an angry snake. The most dreadful hour of dusk, the one that swallows the worlds, is nearly here, and it will only make him stronger. The lucky span called Abhijit, which opened at midday, has all but run out. He has walked to you on his own feet, carrying a death you yourself decreed. Show your power. End him in this duel, and give the worlds back their peace.”

The Lord heard him out, and laughed, and took the prayer in with a look full of love. Then the Boar sprang and aimed his mace straight at the demon’s chin. But Hiranyaksha met it with his own mace, and the great weapon spun out of the Lord’s hand and fell, turning over and over, splendid even as it dropped, a thing that looked very like a miracle. The opening was there; the demon had only to strike the now unarmed Lord and the fight was his. He would not do it. He would not hit a foe without a weapon, and he held to the law of single combat, and that fair play of his lit a fresh fury in the Lord. As the mace hit the ground a cry of alarm went up from the watching gods and sages, and Shri Hari, honoring the honor in his enemy, called his discus, the Sudarshana, into his hand.

As the disc began to spin, and the Lord closed with him again, voices came down from the aerial cars of those who did not know who he truly was: “Victory to you. Finish him, play no more.” The moment the demon saw that whirling wheel, something in him gave way. He hissed and bit his lips, and with his fearful tusks he glared as though he could burn the Lord where he stood. He leaped into the air and hurled his mace, screaming, “You are dead.” The Lord let it come on like a storm-wind and knocked it down with his left foot, unhurried, while the demon looked on. “Pick up your weapon,” he said, “and try again, since you are so hungry to beat me.” The demon flung the mace once more with a roar, and this time the Lord stood his ground and caught it clean out of the air, the way Garuda snatches up a snake. That broke something in the great daitya. His pride went cold, and when the Lord held the mace out to him, he would not take it back.

Instead he seized a trident that fed on the air like a living fire, and threw it at Shri Hari with everything he had.

The trident flashed across the sky at terrible speed.

But Varaha, with his Sudarshana chakra, cut it into two pieces midway, the way Indra once severed one of Garuda’s wings with his thunderbolt.

His trident in halves on the ground, Hiranyaksha lost the last of his reason. He rushed in close, and on the broad chest where the mark of Shrivatsa shone he drove his fist with all his weight. Then, with a great roar, he vanished from sight.

Varaha did not so much as sway. It was as if an elephant had been struck with a garland of flowers.

Now the great conjurer began to spin illusion out of illusion.

A savage wind rose, and the dust of it drowned the world in darkness.

Then stones came in volleys from every side, as if flung from some engine of siege.

Lightning cracked and flared, clouds smothered the sun and the moon and the stars, and out of them rained blood and pus, hair and bone.

Naked rakshasis appeared, their hair unbound, tridents in their fists. Yakshas and rakshasas, marauding on foot and on horseback, in chariots and on the backs of elephants, raised a butcher’s clamor: kill them, cut them down.

Varaha stood through all of it unmoved, a mountain in a storm.

Then, to tear this asuric web apart, Shri Hari loosed his beloved Sudarshana chakra, and in a single instant the whole net of illusion fell away in shreds.

In that same instant, far away, the heart of his mother Diti lurched, and blood began to run from her breasts. The words her husband Kashyapa had spoken over her long ago were coming true, to the letter, on this day. And the death she had once begged for her sons, over any Brahmana’s curse, had found the first of them.

His illusions gone, the daitya came at the Lord once more. Meaning to crush the life out of him, he threw both arms around him and locked them tight, and found that he had caught nothing at all. The Lord stood outside the ring of his arms.

Then Hiranyaksha set to pounding him with fists harder than thunderbolts. And the Lord, as Indra once struck Vritrasura, brought his open palm down in a single slap at the root of the demon’s ear.

That was all. Hiranyaksha’s vast body reeled, his eyes burst from their sockets, his arms and legs and hair were flung apart, and he crashed lifeless onto the water, like an old tree ripped up by its roots in a gale.

Even in death the glow on him had not faded. He lay there, that terrible-tusked daitya, teeth still set in his lip, and Brahma and the gods who had come to watch the battle stood marveling over him. “Ah, who is given a death like this one? Struck down by the Lord’s own limb, his eyes fixed on that face to the very end, this jewel among Diti’s sons has laid down his body. That is why the light on him will not die.” And they understood the rest of it too. “These two, Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu, are the Lord’s own gatekeepers. A curse has dragged them down to this low birth. In a few more lives they will return to their own place.”

The devas folded their hands and said, “Prabhu, again and again we bow to you. Source of every sacrifice, you have taken on this form of pure goodness to keep the world standing. It is a great joy to us that this wicked daitya, tormentor of the world, has been slain, and that we too, by the power of devotion to your feet, have come back into peace.”

Having slain the mighty Hiranyaksha in this way, Adi Varaha returned to his own realm of unbroken bliss, while Brahma and the rest sang after him.

Shukadeva paused here a while.

“Rajan, here is the thing worth turning over: he had to reach his Master as an enemy. And that was no small reaching.”