Bhagavatam · The Narasimha Avatar

The Ganga slid past, slow in the evening wind. Parikshit turned to the sage Shukadeva. “Bhagavan, yesterday you told me of the boy Prahlada, who felt no fear even in the fire. Now here is what I want to know. When his father asked him at the end whether his God was inside that pillar too, and when the pillar broke open, what came out of it? I have only a few days left, great sage, and I want to see the form that comes to the door of death.”

Shukadeva was quiet for a moment. Then he began. “Rajan, listen. The boy had turned the sons of the Daityas toward the love of Hari, and word of it had climbed to the throne. Hiranyakashipu settled it in his mind that Prahlada would die, and die by his father’s own hand. His limbs shook as he stood. He looked at the child with a crooked and poisoned eye, and rebuked him in a voice like a snake that has been stepped on. Reckless fool, breeder of discord in my house, today I send you to the house of Yama. On whose strength do you defy the one command before which the three worlds and all their guardians shake?”

Prahlada folded his palms and answered without a tremor. “The strength you name, father, runs through you no less than through me. Everything that moves and everything that stands still, from Brahma at the summit down to a single blade of grass, is held in his hand. He is the strength inside all strength. He is Kala, Time itself, the ruler that no one rules. Set down this anger. There is no enemy anywhere except a mind a man has left unconquered. Master the six thieves that live in the senses and the mind, and the world runs clean out of enemies, because the one who has conquered himself looks on all beings with a single, level gaze.”

This burned Hiranyakashipu hotter than before. He rose from the throne. “Wretch, you have set some other master of the universe above me. Show him to me. Where is this Lord of yours who is supposed to be everywhere? If he is everywhere, why is he not in this pillar? Watch. I am going to take your head off your shoulders where you stand. Let us see how this Hari of yours, your all-in-all, comes to save you.”

He drew his sword, sprang down from the throne, and drove his fist into the pillar with the whole of his strength. In that instant a sound broke out of the pillar so vast that the shell of the cosmic egg seemed to split from end to end. It climbed to the highest spheres, and Brahma and the gods in their far worlds went still, certain their own houses were dissolving. Hiranyakashipu searched for the source of that unearthly roar and could not find it, and the chiefs of the Asuras around him stood rooted in fear.

To make the boy’s every word come true, that the Lord is present in all things, present even inside that pillar, he came out of it. The shape that rose was neither a beast’s nor a man’s.

Hiranyakashipu stopped for one moment.

What he saw, no god had ever seen, and no danava either. The form was neither wholly a lion’s, nor wholly a man’s.

A living being. Half lion, half man. Eyes yellow as gold heated in the fire, terrible, as if the sun of the last dissolution were burning inside them. A yawn set the hair of the mane tossing about the neck. Monstrous fangs. A tongue that flickered like the edge of a sword and cut like a razor. Crooked brows that made the face more dreadful still. Ears erect and motionless. Flared nostrils, and a mouth open like the mouth of a mountain cave, the parting of its jaws alone enough to spread terror.

The vast body touched the sky. The neck was short and thick, the chest broad, the waist very slender. Hair white as moonlight shimmered over the whole frame. Hundreds of arms reached out on every side, and the great claws on them were weapons in themselves. That form had already driven the Daityas and the Danavas back with every weapon there is, down to the thunderbolt, and no one had the courage to come near it.

Hiranyakashipu told himself this was a conjuring trick of Vishnu, that old master of illusion, staged to kill him. And what could the tricks of Vishnu do to him, ready as he was?

Roaring his own lion-roar, the Daitya king took up his mace and hurled himself at the Lord. As a moth drops into a flame and is gone, the demon fell into that blaze of light and vanished from sight. It was no wonder. Darkness had walked into the one radiance that had swallowed all darkness at the first dawn of the worlds.

He came on again in a fury, spun the mace with all his weight, and brought it down. As the blow fell, the Lord caught him, mace and all, the way Garuda catches a serpent. Then the Lord began to toy with him, and the demon slid out of that grip the way a snake slips free of a Garuda at play.

The guardians of the plundered worlds watched from behind a bank of cloud and read that escape as an ill omen. Hiranyakashipu read it as fear, sure now that Narasimha had let him go out of dread of his strength and valor. His weariness fell away. He took up his shield and his sword and sprang at him again.

He leapt like a hawk, high and low, changing his guard of shield and sword so fast that no opening showed. Then the Lord laughed, one huge and savage peal at the top of his voice, and the roar inside it slammed Hiranyakashipu’s eyes shut. He pounced, and seized the demon the way a snake seizes a mouse.

The same Hiranyakashipu whose skin the thunderbolt had never so much as scratched now thrashed with everything in him to break free of those claws.

Carrying him, the Lord came to the doorway of the hall. To the threshold itself.

There he laid him across his thigh.

The body lay pinned in that lap, and in those hands there was nothing but claws. No sword was drawn, none held, none thrown.

Narasimha’s fingers found Hiranyakashipu’s chest. And the sharp claws began to open his breast.

Hiranyakashipu screamed. For the first time in his whole life the sound that left his throat was fear. Brahma’s boons were failing one after another, along the very crack he had left in the asking of them. Every clause had its seam, and every seam had been found.

“I am deathless,” he was thinking. “What is this that is happening to me?”

He had built himself boons full of seams, and his deathlessness was running out today through those same seams. The only deathlessness that held was in the form bent over his thigh.

Narasimha tore open the lotus of Hiranyakashipu’s heart with those sharp claws and flung him to the ground. He fell.

In the same moment thousands of Daitya soldiers rushed the Lord with weapons raised. With his army of arms, with his heels, with his claws for weapons, he scattered them on every side and killed them all.

No one could meet those wrath-filled eyes. With his flickering tongue he licked the two corners of his gaping mouth. Blood had spattered his face and reddened his mane. A garland of the demon’s own entrails hung at his throat, and he blazed like the lord of beasts standing over a felled elephant.

The lash of his mane scattered the clouds. The fire of his eyes drained the light from the sun and the planets. The wind of his breath threw the oceans into turmoil. The elephants that guard the quarters trumpeted in terror at his roar. The flying chariots of the gods, striking against his mane, were flung out of their courses. The stamp of his feet set off earthquakes, whole mountains took to the air, and the glare of his splendor blotted the sky and the directions from sight.

By now no one anywhere could stand in front of Narasimha, and still his anger kept climbing. He walked into Hiranyakashipu’s royal court and sat down on the high throne. That face, blazing and full of wrath, was so terrible that no one found the courage to come near and offer him any service.

The gods stood at a distance with folded hands. Not one could go close.

In heaven, when the goddesses learned that Hiranyakashipu, the headache of the three worlds made flesh, had been killed in battle at the Lord’s hands, their faces opened with joy, and they rained flowers down on him again and again.

The sky filled with the flying chariots of the gods. Their drums and kettledrums began to sound, the lords of the gandharvas sang, and the apsaras danced.

Then Brahma, Indra, Shankara, and the other gods came, and with them the rishis, the pitris, the siddhas, the vidyadharas, the great nagas, the Manus, the Prajapatis, the gandharvas, the apsaras, the charanas, the yakshas, the kimpurushas, the vetalas, the kinnaras, and all the Lord’s own attendants, Sunanda and Kumuda among them. They stood a little apart, hands joined above their heads, and each in turn praised that blazing Narasimha in words of his own.

Brahma spoke first. Lord, you have no end, and no one can sound the floor of your power. Your prowess is a marvel and your every act is clean. You carry the making, the keeping, and the unmaking of the worlds on the play of the three gunas, and none of it touches you. Then Shankara: the hour for your anger is the close of a kalpa, a thousand turns of the four yugas, and if you put on this wrath only to end one small demon, he is ended already. Now guard the boy, this devotee of yours who has come to your shelter. Then Indra: the shares of the offerings you have handed back to us were always your own, for you are the one who eats in every fire. The lotus of our heart, where you sit as its inner ruler, this demon had held for so long, and you have opened it again. What is the throne of the three worlds, that Time will swallow soon enough, to anyone who longs to serve you? They set no great store even by liberation, and lesser prizes mean nothing to them at all.

Then the others, each in his own voice. The pitris said the demon had seized the rice-balls and the sesame-water their sons had offered at the sacred fords, and that the Lord had torn all of it back out of his opened belly. The nagas bowed for their wives, whom the demon had carried off, and for their jewels, which he had wrenched away, and which the splitting of that breast had won back. The yakshas, who count themselves the first among the Lord’s servants, said he had put them to hauling his palanquin like beasts of burden, and that the Lord had known their whole humiliation and had ended it. The rishis, the siddhas, the vidyadharas, the Manus, the Prajapatis, the gandharvas, the charanas, the kimpurushas, the vaitalikas, and the kinnaras took their turns after them, each restored to the office the demon had stripped from him. And the Lord’s own attendants said a strange and tender thing. This demon was once your own servant, they said, the one the sages of the line of Sanaka had cursed. We think you killed him in mercy, to carry him home.

That fearsome form was still not calm, Rajan, and that belongs to what comes next. The gods went on praising from a distance. Not one of them stepped closer. Who it was that finally quieted the half-lion, and how, is the story ahead.

This much is enough for now, Rajan. That evening a king who had called himself deathless fell, and the form that no god dared come near gave its enemy release with its own claws, across its own thigh, at the hour that was neither day nor night, on the threshold that belonged neither to the hall nor to the world outside it, over a lap that was neither the earth nor the sky.