Bhagavatam · Prahlada’s Rebellion

Parikshit looked at the sage Shukadeva, and his voice was low.

“Bhagavan, I have been a king. I have learned how hard it is to speak truth to power, and hardest of all before one’s own father, where speaking it scorches love, and withholding it scorches one’s own soul. There must once have been a boy whose own father was having him thrown into fire, and that boy went on loving that same father. How do that fear and that tenderness live together, Bhagavan? Tell me his story.”

A tenderness came into Shukadeva’s eyes. “Rajan, where Shri Hari comes to dwell, fear finds no room to sit. But room for love remains, so much of it that it rains even on the father bent on killing him. Listen. This is the story of that same Prahlada, born in a demon’s house, who taught the demons themselves what devotion is.”

⁂

Hiranyakashipu was emperor of the entire universe, and a thorn sat lodged in him that he could never pull out.

He had a brother, Hiranyaksha, mighty, the companion of his boyhood games. That same Hiranyaksha, Shri Vishnu had slain deep in the ocean, wearing the form of the boar Varaha. From that day the name of Vishnu settled into Hiranyakashipu’s mind like a wound that never closed, only seeped. Rising and sitting, eating and sleeping, he remembered that one enemy. Hatred too is a kind of remembrance, and Hiranyakashipu hated Vishnu with a concentration no devotee has ever matched in love.

By long austerity he won Brahma over and asked for a death that could never reach him: not by day, not by night, not indoors, not outdoors, not by man, not by beast, not by any weapon held in the hand or flung from it, not on the earth, not in the sky, not from any creature Brahma had made, not from god, demon, or great serpent. He asked, besides, for no rival in battle, for lordship over every embodied thing, for glory to stand beside the glory of the gods, and for mystic powers that would never fail him. Brahma granted it all. Hiranyakashipu now counted himself immortal. He took the three worlds, threw Indra down from heaven, and set the gods trembling before him. Yet the one death he wanted more than any dominion stayed beyond the grasp of every boon he held.

And he had a son, Prahlada.

Four sons in all were born to the demon king, and this one was the finest of them. From birth his heart leaned toward Shri Hari. The name that kept his father burning day and night was the very name the boy grew up carrying inside him.

He was gentle, and his word could be trusted. He honored the learned, kept his own senses in hand, and moved among living things as though each of them were a friend he had known a long time. To his elders he bent like a servant; the poor he looked after the way a father does; the boys his own age he treated as brothers; those set above him he regarded almost as he regarded God. He had learning, and wealth, and a fine face, and the highest birth in all three worlds, and not one of these had left the smallest mark of pride on him. Trouble did not shake him. The pleasures the other boys ran after he let go past him, for he took them for the unreal things they were. He had come into a demon’s body, and he had let the demon in it fall away.

There was something in him stranger than any of that. He had put his toys aside while he was still very small. His mind stayed so far inside the Lord that he often passed for a slow child, absent, half-asleep to the world, as though something had entered him and taken hold. Sitting, walking, eating, lying down at night, he seemed not to know he was doing it, as if he were being held somewhere else the whole time. One moment he would weep as though he had lost everything; the next he would laugh, or sing at the top of his voice, or go still with the hair lifting on his arms and his half-shut eyes filling. And the other demon boys at their lessons, restless and unhappy without knowing the reason, would grow calm when he was near, and not know the reason for that either.

Hiranyakashipu had made the venerable Shukracharya his priest. Kavya, as Shukracharya is called, had two sons, Shanda and Amarka. The two lived close by the royal palace, and there they taught statecraft, the science of wealth, and the rest to the quick-witted boy Prahlada, sent to them by Hiranyakashipu, and to the other demon boys. Prahlada would hear the lesson and recite it back exactly as given. But in his heart he did not care for it, because at the root of all that schooling lay one idea alone: this is mine, that is another’s.

One day Hiranyakashipu seated his son on his lap with great affection. On that chest, the same chest that had pulled Indra from his throne, the small boy sat weighing almost nothing.

“Tell me truly, son. Of everything you have learned, what do you hold to be best?”

Prahlada said, “Father, the creatures of this world live in constant torment, caught in the false insistence of ‘I’ and ‘mine.’ For such beings I think this alone is right: that they leave this house, which is like a well whose mouth lies hidden under grass and is the root of their fall, go to the forest, and take shelter in Bhagavan Shri Hari.”

Hearing praise of the enemy on his own son’s lips, Hiranyakashipu laughed. “A child’s wits are easily turned when others put ideas in his head.” Then the laughter died. He gave an order: the boy was to be watched closely at his teachers’ house, so that no Brahmana who worshiped Vishnu in secret could work on him there again.

Back at the school, the demon priests coaxed Prahlada in the sweetest voices and began to question him. “Child Prahlada, blessings on you. Tell us the truth, and tell no lie. How has this mind of yours turned so contrary? No other boy’s mind has turned this way. We are your teachers, and we wish to know: did this understanding rise in you on its own, or has someone truly led you astray?”

Prahlada said, “Only in men whose minds are seized by delusion does the Lord’s maya breed this stubborn conviction, this is mine and that is another. To that master of maya I bow. When he turns gracious, the beast-like understanding that men share with animals falls away, and with it this false division. His path is not easy to trace. Even Brahma and the great masters of the Veda lose their way trying to follow it, and it is he alone who has turned my seeing. As a piece of iron with no will of its own stirs toward a magnet, so my mind, without any contriving of mine, is drawn to Lord Vishnu. The one you name your enemy is the self of every being, mine as much as yours.”

One of the teachers heard this, and his eyes went red. He was a Brahmana in the king’s pay, and a pupil who would not bend shamed him before his master. “Bring me a cane,” he said. “Of the four measures a ruler is taught, conciliation, gift, division, and the rod, only the rod is left for this one. In the sandalwood forest of the daityas, the sons of Diti, where has this thorn tree sprung from? Vishnu is the axe laid to the root of that forest, and this witless boy has made himself the axe’s handle.”

Threatening him in every key, the teacher drilled him again in dharma, in the getting of wealth, and in pleasure. After a time, judging that the boy now knew the four expedients cold, conciliation, gift, division, and force, he had Prahlada bathed and dressed in ornaments by his mother, and brought him before Hiranyakashipu. The boy threw himself at his father’s feet. Hiranyakashipu blessed him, lifted him with both arms, and held him a long while against his chest, then set him on his lap and breathed in the scent of his head, his eyes wet. In that moment the demon king’s heart brimmed with joy.

“Son Prahlada,” he asked, well pleased, “out of everything your teachers have given you all this time, tell us some fine thing.”

Prahlada said, “Father, devotion to Bhagavan Vishnu has nine forms. Hearing of the Lord’s qualities, his lila, and his name; singing them; remembering his form and name; serving his feet; worship and offering; bowing in reverence; living as his servant; loving him as a friend; and surrendering one’s whole self into his hands. If these nine kinds of bhakti are practiced in a spirit of full offering to the Lord, that I hold to be the finest of all learning.”

At these words Hiranyakashipu’s lips began to shake with fury. He turned on the teacher’s son. “You vile Brahmana, what work of yours is this? Caring nothing for me, taking my enemy’s side, what hollow teaching have you poured into this child? There are men who move about in a friend’s clothing, and their rot, like a sinner’s hidden disease, shows itself only when the time is ripe. Beyond doubt you have taken shelter with my enemies.”

The teacher’s son joined his palms. “O enemy of Indra, what your son says, he says from no prompting of mine or of anyone else. Rajan, this is his inborn, natural understanding. Calm your anger. Do not blame us for nothing.”

Hiranyakashipu turned back to Prahlada. “Well then. If this ruinous understanding did not come to you from your teacher’s mouth, tell me, where did you get it?”

Prahlada said, “Father, the understanding of men attached to home and household turns toward Bhagavan Shri Hari neither on its own, nor by another’s teaching, nor in the company of others like themselves. Those who take the outer objects the senses can see for the highest goal keep tumbling into the pit, blind men following the blind, and they do not know that our worldly good and our highest good are Vishnu himself, that in gaining him every aim of life is gained. When a person’s intelligence once touches the Lord’s lotus feet, the whole calamity of birth and death is destroyed for good. But those who do not bathe in the dust of the feet of Bhagavan’s selfless lovers, those great souls who own nothing, their intelligence can never touch his feet.”

Having said this, Prahlada fell silent. Wrath took Hiranyakashipu’s sight. He lifted the boy from his lap and hurled him to the ground.

“Daityas,” he said, his eyes gone bloodshot, “take him out of here and kill him at once. He deserves nothing short of death. Abandoning his own well-wishers and kin, he worships, like some bought slave, the feet of the very Vishnu who killed his uncle. For all I know, Vishnu himself, my brother’s killer, has come inside this boy. At five years of age he has already thrown away his parents’ love, a love that should be impossible to throw away. What good will such an ingrate ever do even for Vishnu? An enemy who helps you the way medicine does is worth more than a son who works against you. A son like that is a sickness sprung from your own body, and a wise man cuts away the limb that has gone bad so the rest of him may live in health. Get rid of him by any means you have, poison in his food, a blade while he sits unguarded. He wears a son’s face, and he is the enemy inside our own house.”

At Hiranyakashipu’s command, daityas with sharp fangs, dreadful faces, and flaming red beards and mustaches took up tridents and began to bellow, “Strike! Cut him down!” Prahlada sat unmoving while they drove their points into every vital place on his body. But in that hour the child’s mind rested in the Supreme Self that lies past the reach of thought and speech, the soul of all, the ground of every power, Parabrahman. So all their blows fell useless, the way the grand undertakings of the luckless come to nothing.

When the trident blows left no mark on Prahlada’s body, dread took hold of Hiranyakashipu, and he began, with grim persistence, to contrive one death after another for the boy.

He had the boy trampled by the great elephants that guard the quarters of the sky, and bitten by venomous serpents. He had the priests raise the kritya sorcery of Shambara against him, had him flung from a mountaintop, worked on with maya of many kinds, shut in dark cells, fed poison, and cut off from food and water. He had him cast, turn by turn, into freezing wastes, into blazing fire, and into the sea, left out in the storm wind, and buried under mountains.

And by none of these means could he harm one hair of his sinless son Prahlada. Each time the boy would be sitting right where he had been, breathing, taking Hari’s name, because his mind rested in that Supreme Self whom no weapon can reach.

Seeing his own helplessness, Hiranyakashipu sank into deep worry. No further way of killing Prahlada would come to him. He began to think: “I have heaped abuse on him, tried device after device to kill him, and he has come through my malice and my cruelties by his own power, with help from no one. Child though he is, he understands everything, and he lives beside me without a trace of fear. Beyond doubt there is some strength in him. As Sunahsepa turned against his own father for his father’s deeds, so this one too will not forget the wrongs I have done him. He fears no one, and he does not die. Surely my death will come from crossing him. Or possibly it will not.”

Turning all this over, his face fell. When Shukracharya’s sons Shanda and Amarka saw Hiranyakashipu sitting with his head hung low, they drew him aside and said, “Master, you alone have conquered the three worlds. One bend of your brow and every guardian of the worlds trembles. As we see it, you have nothing at all to worry about. Is a child’s game any matter for weighing good and ill? Until our father Shukracharya returns, keep the boy bound in Varuna’s cords, so that fear does not send him running off somewhere. Usually, with growing age, and with the service of elders, the understanding mends.”

Hiranyakashipu accepted their counsel, and the priests took Prahlada back to the school and resumed, step by step, the teaching of dharma, wealth, and pleasure. Prahlada lived there like the humblest of servants, but the teaching never sat well in his heart, for it serves only those who relish attachment, aversion, and the pleasures of the senses.

One day the teachers went out on some household errand. With the holiday, the demon boys of his own age called Prahlada out to play. Prahlada rose, though he had no wish to play. Prahlada was supremely wise; he called those boys close in the sweetest voice, the way an elder brother gathers in his younger ones to share a secret.

“Brothers, listen,” he said, and his voice was so gentle that the children forgot their games and edged closer. “In this world a human birth is rare beyond price. Through it the imperishable Supreme can be attained. And no one knows when it will end. So the wise should trust neither old age nor youth, and should take up, from this very childhood, the practices that bring one to Bhagavan. In this human birth, taking shelter at the feet of Shri Bhagavan is the one success a life can have, for the Lord is the master, the well-wisher, the beloved, and the very self of all beings.”

One child spoke up: we are still small, why start now? Prahlada turned to him.

“See, whatever pleasure comes through the senses arrives everywhere on its own, by the working of one’s past deeds, the same way sorrow arrives without anyone striving for it. So there is no need to labor for worldly pleasure; it only squanders your years and your strength. And think how few those years are. They give a man a hundred, if he is fortunate, and the night takes back half of them in sleep. Twenty go while he is a child who understands nothing and a boy who wants only to play. Twenty more are waiting at the far end, when his own body has stopped obeying him. What little is left after that drains away in worry over a house and the things kept inside it. So tell me where the years are that you imagine you are saving. This body is enough for reaching Bhagavan, and so, while it has not yet been seized by disease and grief and dragged to the mouth of death, the wise begin.”

The children were listening intently; their fists had fallen open.

“One thing alone goes with you. Remembrance of Bhagavan. Hearing of his qualities, his lila, his name; then singing them; then holding them always in the mind. Serving his feet, worshiping him, bowing to him, living as his servant, loving him like a friend, and at the last placing yourself whole and entire into his hands. For this no high caste is needed, no wealth, no strength. So what if we are the sons of demons? Bhagavan draws no line between his own and the stranger. He dwells within all of us, within every creature, in one same form.”

A boy asked the thing all of them had been wondering. “But who taught you this, Prahlada? You sat in the same room we sat in, in front of the same two masters. We never heard a word of it from them.”

“You are right that they never taught it.” He almost smiled. “I heard it before I was born. My father had gone away to the mountain to sit in his austerities, and while he was gone the gods came down on our house, and a wandering sage, Narada, took my mother in and kept her safe, and spoke to her day after day of the Lord. She has forgotten most of it by now. The child she was carrying did not.” He said it plainly, the way a person states a thing that is simply so.

“So take my word. Begin now. Do not wait to grow old.”

They were all still children, so attachment, aversion, and the taste for sense-pleasure had not yet stained their understanding. Because of this, and because of the reverence they felt for Prahlada, they set their playthings aside, went to him, and sat down all around him. They gave their minds over to his teaching, gazing at him steadily with great love, and somewhere inside them, something melted.

They were demon children, but children still. A child’s heart still stands open.

The heart of Prahlada, Bhagavan’s supreme lover, filled with compassion and friendship toward them, and one by one they began to say, “Hari, Hari.”

The teachers took fright. Word reached the palace.

Hiranyakashipu’s fury broke loose. His own son, a child of his own line, had set the enemy’s name ringing inside his own kingdom. He summoned Prahlada once more.

One day he sat in his court. A file of high pillars, and between them stood that same boy, facing him.

“Tell me, where is this Vishnu of yours?” There was a crack of weariness now in Hiranyakashipu’s voice.

Prahlada said softly, “Everywhere, Father.”

“Everywhere?” He rose to his feet. “Then in this pillar too?” He flung a hand toward a pillar close by.

“Yes, Father. In this one too.”

There was no grain of hesitation in the boy’s voice, and this was what Hiranyakashipu found most unbearable of all. All he wanted was for the child to tremble once, and the child kept looking at him as though he could see that same presence inside this father too.

He came up out of the throne and drove his fist against the pillar with all his strength.

And a roar went up such as no one had ever heard, no god and no daitya, a sound that climbed all the way to the world of Brahma and made even the gods there wonder if their own worlds were ending. Then the pillar burst open.

What emerged from it was neither man nor beast. A vast body, lion above, man below, a dreadful mouth of sharp fangs, eyes blazing like molten gold. Weapons dropped from the hands of the demon army; screams froze in throats.

Hiranyakashipu stood fixed for one moment. It had been in the pillar, in this very hall, exactly as near as the boy had kept saying. And now it stood before him.

And even then, looking at that half-lion, what rose in Hiranyakashipu was the same old enmity, the same concentrated flame of hatred he had burned with all his life. He felt no fear. He took up his mace.

Narasimha.

That hour belonged neither to day nor to night. That body belonged neither to man nor to beast. And what was about to happen would come neither from weapon held nor from weapon hurled. But that story is the next one.

Know this much, Rajan: in that whole assembly there was one being who did not tremble at that roar. The same boy, standing exactly between his father and that terrible form, palms joined, loving them both, fearless alike before both.

⁂

Shukadeva stayed silent a while.

Parikshit said quietly, “Bhagavan, one thing escapes me. Hiranyakashipu spent his whole life cursing that one name, and at the end that very name appeared before him. Does enmity, then, also carry a man to him?”

“Rajan, whoever you cannot forget for even a moment, whether through love or through hatred, comes to dwell inside you. Hiranyakashipu remembered Shri Hari with such concentration that no room was left in him for remembering anything else. The remembrance was soiled, steeped in enmity, yet remembrance it was. But look: in that same assembly there was one other who was remembering him too, and with love. One name, called from two far ends, and both callers reached him.”

Parikshit let the words settle into him.

“And Prahlada?” he asked. “He watched all of this standing before his own father.”

Shukadeva’s gaze held steady. “His was the hardest heart’s work in that assembly, Rajan. Staying fearless is easy when only an enemy stands before you. But there, on one side, stood the terrible form he had sheltered in all his life, and on the other stood the father who had had him thrown into fire, and Prahlada stood between them, loving both, trembling before neither. When someone gives himself away so completely, no hatred is left in him for an enemy, and no fear of death. For such a heart, Rajan, even Takshaka is only a doorway.”