Bhagavatam · Prahlada’s Prayer

Parikshit looked at Shukadeva and stayed silent a while, as if weighing something within.

“Bhagavan, yesterday you told me of the boy who felt no fear even in the fire. But one thing has stayed lodged in my mind. Narasimha had already killed Hiranyakashipu. Why did his anger not subside even then? And when the greatest of the gods could not calm it, how did that boy manage it? I have only a few days left, Muniwar. I want to understand this one thing: what accomplishes what no one’s power can accomplish?”

A faint smile crossed Shukadeva’s eyes. “Rajan, Devarshi Narada once told this katha to Dharmaraja Yudhishthira, and I give it to you as he gave it. On that day the greatest beings in creation failed, one after another, and the smallest one in that hall prevailed. Listen.”

Hiranyakashipu was dead. His enormous body lay at the very threshold of the assembly hall, opened there with nothing but claws, and from the entrails Narasimha had slung around his neck like a garland a thin line of blood was still tracing its way to the floor.

The demon had asked Brahma, long ago, to make him safe from every creature Brahma had ever made, and Brahma had granted it. So the one who came for him was the one no maker had made. Every other seam the demon had stitched into his deathlessness held to the last thread, and every one of them was walked straight through. No death from man or beast, so the Lord came as neither, a lion’s face set on a man’s frame. No death indoors or out, so it was done on the threshold, in the doorway that is neither. No death on the earth or in the sky, so it was done on a lap that touched neither. No death by day or by night, so it was done at twilight, the hour that is the seam between them. No weapon could reach him, so he was opened by claws, which are no weapon at all. The boon had been honored down to its last letter, and its last letter was his death.

But the enemy for whose sake the killing had been done was already dead, and the anger had not died with him.

Narasimha was still roaring. His tongue flickered like lightning, his brows were knotted as if two mountains had collided, and the hair of his mane, drenched in blood, stood up stiff as spears. With every breath a lion-roar rose that made even the elephants of the quarters tremble, struck the walls of the assembly hall, and came rolling back.

The whole of heaven had gathered by now, ranged along the edges of the hall and the sky above it. Brahma and Shiva and Indra, the rishis and the fathers and the perfected ones, the gandharvas and the serpent-kings and the lords of created beings, all of them had come, and from a safe distance they were singing his praises, hymn after hymn rising toward that terrible seat. But praise was one thing and nearness was another. Not one of them could make his feet carry him forward. They had never seen this form. They had never so much as heard that such a form could be.

Brahma led them, and Brahma could not. He was the maker of creation; he must have thought that if anyone could speak to this fire in the language of its own ordinances and settle it, it was the one who had written those ordinances. Before those burning eyes, his own language died in his throat.

Rudra stood beside him, lord of the dissolution, destruction itself his nature. Before this destruction, even he had nothing to say.

Then the gods turned to Lakshmi and sent her forward. This was an avatar of her own lord; who besides his wife could touch this fire? Lakshmi went. But the moment she came in sight of that vast, unearthly form, fear stopped her too, well short of him. The face she had known and loved for ages she had never once seen worn like this, never even heard could be worn like this. Toward her own beloved, for sheer dread, she could not advance a single step.

And when Shri herself turned back, who else was going to pretend to try.

Then Brahma’s eye fell on the boy standing quietly beside him amid all that thunder. Hiranyakashipu’s son. Prahlada.

Brahma bent down to him. “Child, it was against your father that Bhagavan’s anger rose. Go to him yourself now, and make him calm.”

It was a strange thing to ask. The boy whose father had just been killed at those very feet was being told to go and win those feet over. And the boy did not so much as blink. He said only, “As you command,” as if that were the one sentence his whole life had been waiting to say.

There was no trace of fear on his face. Fear had never once made a home in that boy’s mind; where would it come from now?

Carrying his small body, barefoot, he walked toward that roaring blaze. Behind him the gods stood with folded hands, and their breath seemed to stop all at once.

Narasimha did not turn to look. The boy did not slow. He went straight to those feet and stretched himself full length on the ground there, both palms joined, his head laid at the base of Bhagavan’s feet.

One tiny body, pressed to the earth, directly beneath that rising fire.

Narasimha looked down.

Those blazing eyes found the small form lying at his own feet, and Bhagavan’s heart flooded with tenderness.

He lowered his vast arms, lifted the little body from the ground, and laid his lotus hand, the same paw that moments before had torn open an asura’s chest, upon the boy’s head. It is the hand that has always given fearlessness to beings terrified of the serpent of time.

At the touch of that hand, whatever last traces of inauspicious samskaras still clung to Prahlada fell away. In that instant the supreme reality stood open before him, seen face to face.

Every hair on the boy’s body rose. Lost in love and wonder, he took Bhagavan’s lotus feet into his heart and set them there like an image in a shrine. A current of love began to run in his chest, and tears of it streamed from his eyes. For a while he could not speak at all. He only kept gazing at that face, unblinking, as if a single blink might cost him the sight of it. Then, gathering his whole mind to one point in that absorption of feeling, his voice thick with love, he began to praise.

“From Brahma down through the great gods, the rishis, and the perfected seers, whose minds rest always in goodness, even they, with all their flowing rivers of praise, with all their heaped-up virtues, have never yet been able to please you. Then how am I, born into this fierce race of asuras, ever to win you over?”

His voice broke and steadied and broke again. “I know this much, Prabhu. Wealth, high birth, beauty, austerity, learning, sharp senses, splendor, fame, strength of body, effort, intellect, the discipline of yoga: not one of these twelve can buy your favor. Yet on Gajendra, the king of elephants sinking in the lake, you poured your whole grace, and he had brought you nothing but his love. Virtues stay at the door. Only love soaks all the way through.”

“An outcaste who has laid his mind and his speech and his deeds, his wealth and his very breath at your feet is worth more than a Brahmana who owns all twelve of those virtues and has turned his face from you. The first one carries his whole line across the water with him. And you, Prabhu, who are already filled to the brim with your own bliss, you have no need of my worship for yourself at all. When a small devotee offers you honor, the honor comes back to him alone, the way a man who decorates his face finds the decoration waiting for him in the mirror. You let the serving be for our sake. The whole gain of it returns to us.”

Then he raised his small palm toward the fire before which the three worlds had trembled, and said, in the most ordinary of voices, “Paramatman, this face of yours is terrible to look at. This flickering tongue, these eyes like two suns, these lifted brows, these ears standing stiff as spears, this garland of entrails, this blood-soaked hair, and these claws that a moment ago tore my own father apart. I look at all of it, and I am not afraid, not even slightly.”

“If I am afraid of anything, it is only this fierce, unbearable wheel of the world, where a soul is tied in the noose of its own deeds and thrown down among frightful creatures to be born and to die and to be born again. Friend of the helpless, when will you call me to the shelter of those feet of yours, where all of this wandering finally ends?”

“I have learned by now who saves and who cannot. A father cannot finally save his child, nor a mother. Medicine cannot save the dying man; the boat cannot save the one the sea has decided to drown. Whatever the world holds up as a cure holds for a little while and then lets go, for anyone you have not taken into your own care. And the boons that men break their lives to reach, long life, wealth, dominion, the very glory of the guardians of the worlds: I have seen what those are worth. My father had gathered them all, and a single knit of his brow could once set the three worlds shaking. You undid him in a breath. Lay those same boons before me now and they are ash in my sight. There is nothing in them I want.”

In Narasimha’s eyes, where the fire had been, something began to settle.

And the boy did not stop there. He had just been given the highest darshan there is. He could have slipped free of the whole round of coming and going in that one instant. But his mind was caught somewhere else.

“Prabho,” he said, and his throat filled again, “the great sages mostly go off alone into some empty forest for their own release, take a vow of silence, and do nothing for anyone but themselves. I cannot do that. I do not want a freedom I have to reach by leaving these lost, blundering, helpless souls behind.”

“I grieve for the ones who turn their faces from your praises and go chasing the false sweetness of maya, carrying the whole weight of the world on their heads like men sliding down into a dark well. For myself I am not afraid of that terrible river at all; my mind is soaked through with the songs of your power, and they are sweeter than any nectar. It is only for those others that I grieve. Your grace was made to fall on exactly such people, the ignorant, the sinking. And what labor is it to you, who make and hold and dissolve every world there is, to lift a few of them across? Carry them too. Do not make me cross this river of becoming alone.”

The fire that all three worlds together could not check had gone out, now, in those eyes.

Bhagavan Narasimha’s anger was calmed. The fierce form began to gather itself in of its own accord. The mane settled, the brows unknotted, the growl in his breathing eased slowly into one deep, quiet breath, and before the boy stood once more that form of pure compassion, the mere sight of which gives the mind rest.

Bhagavan spoke with great love and delight. “Prahlada, may every blessing be yours. Best of the Daityas, I am deeply pleased with you. Ask whatever you desire. I am the one who grants living beings their every wish. And whoever has once looked upon me, no burning of any kind stays in his heart again.”

Everything the world thirsts after was laid open before the boy. But he was a lover with room for one alone. To a mind fixed forever on Bhagavan, what could such things offer? The boons that turn the heads of the greatest of men lay in front of him, and he let them lie. He reached for none of them.

Only now could the rest of the gods come slowly forward. Brahma, Rudra, Lakshmi, all of them stood with folded hands, and not one of them could work out how the fire they had brought all their gathered power against, and failed to put out, had been put out empty-handed by a barefoot boy.