Bhagavatam · The Matsya Avatar

Parikshit looked toward the Ganga, where the evening water flowed on and on, and asked Shukadeva, “Bhagavan, yesterday you told me of the boy who did not waver even in fire. Only a handful of days is left to me now, and when I watch this current move a question keeps rising. In the pralaya, when the worlds are washed away and even the sun goes out, what is the one cord that survives? Has anyone looked on that great water and come back to speak of it?”

Shukadeva smiled. His voice stayed low, as though he had stepped back into some very old morning. “Rajan, there was once a king named Satyavrata, who ruled the Dravida country in the south. He saw that water, and he crossed to its far shore. And the one who carried him over could rest, in the beginning, in a single palmful of water.”

Satyavrata was a royal sage, a man of the throne who lived like an ascetic. He took no food, only water, and held his mind on Narayana through every hour. Each morning he waded into the Kritamala river, the cold climbing to his calves, joined his palms, and offered the water to his ancestors, the tarpana the living owe the dead. That handful trembled in his hands, drops slid from between his fingers, and he went on reciting the mantra.

One morning he filled his cupped palms, and something stirred against his skin.

A tiny fish. So small it was no larger than a fingertip, a shaphari that had tumbled into his hands with the water, flailing this way and that.

He moved to pour it back into the river. Then a voice came, so thin that at first he took it for a trick of his own hearing.

“Rajan, do not put me back into that current. I am small and helpless, and the larger fish there kill and swallow their own kind. You are known to be kind to the frightened. Take me with you.”

Satyavrata’s palm went still. Fish do not speak; that much he knew. But his heart ran straight, and turning away the cry of a frightened creature was the one skill he had never troubled to learn. He could not know that Narayana himself had slipped into a fish’s body out of love, to draw this very king toward his own rescue.

He filled his kamandalu, the ascetic’s water pot, set the fish inside, and carried it home to his hermitage.

In a single night the fish grew until the pot could no longer hold it. Its body lay bent in a tight curve, and the water spilled over the rim.

“Rajan, I can barely live in this pot now. Give me somewhere I can live at ease.”

Satyavrata lifted the fish, with great care, into a large earthen water jar.

Within two ghadis it had grown three cubits, and the jar too proved small.

“This jar is no longer enough for me either. I have come to you for refuge; give me a wider place.”

He carried it to a broad pond. In a little while it swelled into a mahamatsya, a monstrous fish, and its body filled the whole water of the pond.

“Rajan, I am a creature of the water, and this pond cannot hold me at ease. Protect me. Set me where the water has no floor.”

Satyavrata carried it from lake to lake, each one larger than the last, and each time the fish grew until it matched the water exactly. At last, with no lake left that could contain it, he released this fish of divine play into the ocean.

As he let it slide into the sea, the fish said, “Brave one, the ocean is full of mighty crocodiles and creatures of great strength; they will devour me. Do not leave me here.”

And Satyavrata stood still. In the ocean too the body kept growing. As far as sight could reach there was only salt water, and in the midst of it a single form that had begun to touch the horizon.

Then Satyavrata knelt on both knees at the water’s edge and joined his palms. “Who are you, that bewitch me in the shape of a great fish? In a single day you have grown to cover a lake four hundred kos across. I have never seen, never heard, of any creature of the water increasing so. You can be no one but Narayana himself, the deathless Lord who wipes out sin, come in this form out of grace toward every living thing. Tell me why you have taken it.”

Then the great fish answered him in a voice like honey. “Rajan, I am Shri Hari. Hear how this began. A single day of Brahma is a thousand turns of the four ages, and when that long day closes the creator grows heavy with sleep and lies down to rest. As his eyes shut, the Vedas slipped from his mouths, and a demon named Hayagriva, horse-headed and strong, seized them and fled with them into the rising water. The three worlds had already begun to sink. I took this shape to hunt him down and carry the Vedas back. And I have come to you carrying a warning.”

“Seven days from this day the three worlds, the earth, the middle air, and heaven above it, will go under the ocean of dissolution. When that water begins to rise, a great boat will come to you; I will send it. Gather into it the seeds of every herb and plant, and the living seed of every creature, seat the seven sages aboard with you, and set out onto that shoreless flood. No sun, no star will steer you; the light of those seven sages will be your only light on the water.”

“When the gale takes hold and the boat begins to reel, I will be there in this very form. Bind the boat to my horn with Vasuki, the great serpent, for your rope. I will draw you on for as long as the night of Brahma lasts, roaming the ocean of pralaya. Do not be afraid; I will find you myself. And on that voyage, out of the very questions you ask me, I will make known in your heart the glory whose name is Para Brahma, the supreme and changeless truth.”

Satyavrata bowed his head, and when he raised his eyes the ocean lay as before, empty and calm.

He went home and gathered it all, one thing at a time: grain and the seeds of every herb and plant, the living seed of every creature, and the seven sages in whose throats the Vedas were kept safe. Then he spread blades of kusha grass with their tips to the east, sat with his face to the northeast, and held his mind on the feet of the Lord who had worn the body of a fish, and waited.

On the seventh day the first thunder broke across the sky. Then the clouds of the dissolution opened and poured without pause. The earth went under by degrees. The ocean climbed past every shore it had ever kept, the mountain peaks slid one after another beneath the surface, and the whole world closed into a single sea without a floor.

Just then, exactly as the Lord had said, the great boat came riding in. Satyavrata boarded it with the seeds and the living seed of all creatures, the seven sages beside him. With great affection the sages said, “Rajan, hold your mind on the Lord. He alone will carry us through this danger and turn it to our good.”

On that endless water a single boat stayed afloat. Satyavrata’s.

Then the water split open, and a vast body rose out of it. Four lakh kos from end to end, blazing like gold, and on its head one great heavy horn.

Matsya.

The huge shape drew up gently beside the boat, and the waves began to wheel around it in slow rings.

“Rajan, bind your boat to my horn. Let Vasuki the serpent be your rope.”

Just as the Lord had told him beforehand, Satyavrata cinched Vasuki tight like a cord, bound one end of the boat to the horn, and gripped the other end in his fist. Then, glad to his core, the king who would be Manu lifted his voice and sang the Lord’s praise.

Then Matsya began to pull the boat. Across that heaving sea, through the very center of the dissolution, one small boat, and holding it, the Infinite. And as he roamed the ocean of pralaya, the Lord gave Satyavrata and the sages the teaching of the truth of the self, that divine purana full of knowledge, devotion, and the yoga of works which is called the Matsya Purana. He had promised beforehand that the glory whose name is Para Brahma would rise in the king’s own heart, and that Satyavrata would come to know it exactly as it is. The boat went on, and Satyavrata, emptied of every doubt, listened to the eternal truth of the self, which is the very form of Brahman.

At last the dissolution spent itself, and that long night of Brahma passed. The water began to fall, and a fresh earth rose streaming to the surface. Then Matsya turned to look at Satyavrata.

“Rajan, stay here now. This is your new earth. You are Shraddhadeva, son of the sun, and in the cycle now beginning you will be Vaivasvata Manu, the seventh Manu of this age. Begin the world again from here.”

The Fish had already slain the horse-headed Hayagriva and taken back the stolen Vedas; now, as Brahma woke at the end of the deluge, the Lord returned them to the creator’s keeping. This is the dawn of the age men call the Sweta-Varaha Kalpa. Then the vast body melted into the water and was gone, as though it had never been.

Satyavrata, who was Manu now, stepped down onto the wet earth. He pressed the seeds into the soil, set free the pairs of every species, and the seven sages began once more to sound the Vedas they had carried safe in their throats.

A whole new cycle, begun from that same palmful of water a king had chosen to hold instead of pouring away.