Bhagavatam · Parashurama

The sun was going down over the bank of the Ganga. Parikshit stayed silent a while, then spoke. “Bhagavan, so far you have told me of compassion, of forgiveness, of the tenderness of the Lord who comes running at the cry of the king of elephants. But a question has settled inside me. When adharma passes all bounds, when strength itself is turned into a tool of injustice, in what form does Bhagavan come then? Is there ever an axe in his hand?”

A quiet gravity settled over Shukadeva’s face. “There is, Rajan. And when it rises, the earth trembles. Listen to the story of a brahmin whose very anger was the Lord’s lila. But first know the line into which that fire came down.”

“In the line of Pururava, Rajan, there came in time a king named Gadhi. He had a daughter, Satyavati. A rishi named Richika, born of the house of Bhrigu, asked Gadhi for her hand. Gadhi thought this quiet ascetic no fitting match for a daughter of the Kushika line, so he named a bride-price he was sure no hermit could ever meet: one thousand horses, each with a body white as the moon and a single ear of deep black. Richika went to Varuna, the lord of waters, brought back exactly such horses, and married Satyavati.”

“Some time later, both Satyavati and her mother came to Richika, each longing for a son. The rishi cooked a charu, a consecrated offering of rice and barley and milk, for each of them: one prepared with mantras to beget a brahmin son for his wife, the other with mantras to beget a warrior son for the queen, her mother. Then he went down to the river to bathe. The queen, certain that the sage would have made the finer charu for his own wife, asked Satyavati for it. Satyavati gave her mother that charu and ate her mother’s in its place. When Richika returned he knew it all by the power of his tapas, and his face went grave. ‘You have done a ruinous thing,’ he told her. ‘The charu you have eaten was meant to make a fierce chastiser of kings. Now your own son will be a punisher, terrible by nature, and your brother, who was to have been the warrior, will instead be a supreme knower of Brahman.’ That brother was Vishvamitra, born a prince and destined to become one of the greatest of all brahmin-sages. When Satyavati pleaded that her own son might be spared such a nature, the rishi granted this much: the fierceness would pass over one generation and settle upon her grandson instead. And so, in time, from Satyavati’s womb was born a calm and radiant brahmin, Jamadagni. Satyavati herself, at the end of her days, became the sacred river Kaushiki, the Kosi, whose waters cleanse the world.”

Jamadagni grew into a rishi steeped in tapasya. He married Renuka, the daughter of the rishi Renu, and her quiet dignity seemed to live in the very air of the ashram. Many sons were born to them, Vasuman and the rest, and the youngest of all was Rama, whom people in time began to call Parashurama, for the parashu, the axe, that never left his shoulder.

From childhood there was something more in him. A strength in his arms that would not stay hidden even at play, and inside him an ember that flared at the smallest wind. To an ordinary eye he seemed only a boy. Within that boy a portion of Shri Hari himself, the Lord Vasudeva, had come down, with one purpose: to break the arrogance of those kshatriyas who in that age had trampled every wall of maryada.

Jamadagni kept a cow, Kamadhenu, who gave whatever was asked of her. Her milk and ghee fed the rishi’s yajnas, and from her came the honoring of every guest who reached his door.

One day Kartavirya Arjuna came to that ashram. He was overlord of the Haihaya line, and by long worship of Dattatreya, a part manifestation of Bhagavan Narayana, he had won a thousand arms and much besides: soundness of body, undimmed senses, wealth, fame, mastery of yoga, and powers so strange that he could shrink to the size of an atom or move through the worlds as freely as the wind. Once, sporting in the waters of the Narmada, he had dammed the whole river with his thousand arms and flooded the very camp of Ravana, and when the ten-headed king took offense, Kartavirya had seized him in play and caged him in Mahishmati like a monkey before letting him go. His pride, by now, had grown larger than his arms.

Amid the plain hospitality of the ashram, his eye found the cow whose plenty put the wealth of royal palaces to shame. A king who owns a thousand hands has never learned to ask. He seized Kamadhenu by force, had his soldiers rope her, and led her away with her calf, both of them crying after the home they were torn from.

Parashurama was away. When he came back, the silence of the ashram told him everything: the empty tethering post, the broken pen, and in his father’s eyes a pain that even a rishi could not hide.

He lifted the parashu from his shoulder. He ran a finger along its edge, took up his bow and quiver as well, and without a single word set out for Mahishmati.

The battle was terrible. On one side stood a thousand arms and an army of seventeen akshauhinis, elephants, horses, chariots, and foot soldiers, bristling with maces and swords and iron-spiked clubs. On the other stood one lone brahmin with the axe that never left his shoulder. Kartavirya set arrows to five hundred bows at once, and Parashurama cut them all down together with the arrows of his single bow. The king tore up hills and trees and hurled them, and the parashu went on slicing them out of the air. Wherever Parashurama turned, quick as the mind and the wind, warriors dropped with their arms and thighs and necks severed, until the field ran to mud with blood. At last, every arm lopped away like the hoods of a serpent, the thousand-armed king toppled to the earth, and Parashurama struck the head from his shoulders as one strikes the peak from a mountain. His ten thousand sons scattered in terror.

Parashurama untied Kamadhenu and her calf, still trembling from the rough hands that had taken them, and led them home to the ashram. He set them again before his father and told him everything, the theft and the killing both.

Jamadagni did not praise him. A shadow crossed the old sage’s face. “Rama,” he said, “you have taken on a great sin. You killed a king for no true cause, and a crowned king carries all the gods within him. We brahmins are honored in this world for one thing above all, our patience to forgive. It was by forgiveness that Brahma rose to his seat above the worlds; the forbearance of a brahmin shines like the sun, and Shri Hari is pleased most swiftly with the one who pardons. To kill a consecrated king is a heavier stain than to kill a brahmin. Go, my son. Walk the holy places for a year with your mind fixed on Vishnu, and wash this from yourself.”

And Parashurama, the boy in whom a part of the Lord had come down, bowed his head and answered only, “So be it.” The axe that had felled a thousand arms lay quiet on his shoulder. For one full year he went as a penitent from tirtha to tirtha, and only when the year was spent did he turn again toward home.

Not long after his return, Renuka went down to the bank of the Ganga to fetch water. There she saw Chitraratha, king of the gandharvas, garlanded with lotuses, sporting in the water among the apsaras, and for a single instant her mind wavered toward him, and the hour of the fire offering slipped past. When she came back to the ashram, frightened, and set the pitcher down, and stood before her husband with folded hands, Jamadagni already knew everything by the power of his tapas. His anger rose. One by one he commanded his sons to put their mother to death. The elder sons froze; no hand would lift. But Parashurama, who understood what his father’s austerities could do to those who defied them, took the command upon his head and stilled his mother and his hesitating brothers alike. Pleased, Jamadagni told him to ask a boon. Parashurama asked only this: that his mother and his brothers rise again, and that no memory of that hour remain in their minds. And they rose, whole, as though waking from sleep.

But the old grudge had not died. Kartavirya’s sons could find no peace anywhere, turning over and over in their minds the death of their father. One day, when Parashurama and his brothers had gone far from the ashram toward the forest, the sons of the slain king watched their chance and slipped quietly inside.

Jamadagni sat in the fire-shed, unarmed, his eyes closed, lost in the contemplation of Bhagavan. Renuka begged them to spare him. They did not listen. In that very state they cut the rishi’s head from his body, and fled, carrying it away with them.

Renuka came running. She fell upon her husband’s severed body and beat her breast and her head, and went on beating them, crying out, “Rama! O Rama! Come, my child, come!” Again and again her hand fell upon her breast. The old tellers say it fell twenty-one times, and that for each of those blows her son would one day empty the earth once, so that her grief might at last be answered.

From far off Parashurama heard that anguished wail. He raced back, and at the very gate his feet stopped. Before him lay his father’s headless body, and bent over it, still beating her breast, his mother. “Father,” he cried, “most gentle and most righteous of men, you have left us and gone up to heaven.”

In that moment there were no tears in his eyes, only fire. He gathered his father’s body to his chest, gave it into his brothers’ keeping, and took a vow so quiet that it was far more fearsome than any scream.

“The arrogance that has murdered an ascetic seated in meditation will not stand upon this earth. Again and again I will empty this ground of every kshatriya who has bent his strength to the service of injustice.”

And he did exactly that. He went first to Mahishmati, and in the heart of the city he raised a mountain of the heads of Kartavirya’s sons and set a river of their blood running through the streets, to strike terror into every hater of brahmins. Then he set out, kingdom after kingdom. The kings who crushed their subjects, the kings whose pride had erased all maryada, he sought them out one by one and finished them. His parashu would not rest.

But seeds stay in the soil. Some kshatriya children were still in their mothers’ wombs; some the brahmins hid away in their own ashrams. They survived, they grew, and the same old pride climbed back onto the thrones.

So Parashurama would return, and the parashu would rise again. Twenty-one times over it happened, until his vow stood fulfilled and the number matched, blow for blow, the grief his mother had beaten into her breast. At Samantapanchaka, in the field that men would later call Kurukshetra, he left the lakes brimming with blood in place of water.

When his resolve was at last complete, Parashurama brought his father’s head, joined it to the body, and laid it upon blades of sacred kusha grass, and there he worshipped, through a long chain of sacrifices, the supreme Self who holds all the gods within him. At the close of the sacrifices he gave the whole earth he had conquered away as the priests’ fee, its four quarters to the officiating priests and its central heartland to the sage Kashyapa. The earth for which kings had cut one another’s throats, a brahmin set on his open palm and let go, as lightly as if it were a piece of fruit. Then he bathed in the Saraswati, the river of the Vedas, and the blood of a hundred battlefields washed from him, and he shone like the sun in a cloudless sky. His father Jamadagni rose again in a body made of pure spirit and took his place as the seventh among the seven seers who watch over the world.

Then Parashurama went away to Mount Mahendra. The air there stayed heavy with the scent of deodar, and the voice of the waterfalls ran on day and night.

Here Shukadeva paused a moment. “Think of it, Rajan. The man who had emptied the earth twenty-one times now had to sit alone with his own anger. In any feud the hardest enemy is never the one outside.”

Slowly, through years of that solitary sadhana, he laid his weapons down and his mind grew still. The parashu was near him still, but it rose no more; the old feud had loosened its grip on him.

The shastras say that Parashurama lives even now, a chiranjivi, deathless, dwelling with a calm heart on that same Mount Mahendra, where siddhas and gandharvas and charanas sing his deeds in sweet voices, all violence set aside. In the manvantara to come he will sit in the circle of the seven rishis and carry the Vedas far and wide.