Bhagavatam · The Varaha Avatar

The Ganga flowed a little slower that morning, as if it too had paused to listen. Parikshit looked at the sage Shukadeva and joined his palms.

“Bhagavan, the days of my life are down to a count now. Yesterday you said that Bhagavan descends again and again, each time in a new form. Tell me this. When a calamity sinks so deep that no edge of it can be seen, in what form does he come?”

A quiet smile moved in Shukadeva’s eyes. “Rajan, for the deepest darkness Bhagavan chose the humblest of forms. Listen. This is a matter from the first hours of creation, one that the sage Maitreya once narrated to Vidura, who loved nothing in the world so much as the stories of Shri Hari.”

Brahma had only just set the work of creation moving. Out of himself he brought forth the first sovereign of the earth, Svayambhuva Manu, and Manu’s wife Shatarupa. The two bowed and joined their hands. “You alone are the one father of every living being, the one who begets them and the one who feeds them. Tell us, then, how your children may serve you, so that we earn honor in this world and a good passage to the next.”

Brahma was pleased. “May it go well with you both. Beget children as rich in virtue as yourselves. Rule the earth by dharma, and worship the Supreme Person through yajna, the fire-rite. Watch over your people well, for the care of the people is the greatest service you can render me. Shri Hari, who shows himself to men in the very form of their sacrifices, is pleased with a king when he sees that king guarding his subjects.”

Manu joined his hands again. “Your command I will keep, father, destroyer of sins. But show me the place where I and the people who are to come from me are to live. At this hour the earth lies drowned in the waters, the home of every creature sunk clean out of sight. You yourself must find the way to raise her.”

Brahma looked, and it was so. The earth lay sunk in fathomless water, exactly as she lies at the close of an age when all things dissolve. The sun’s ray reached the surface of the water and stopped there; below it was nothing for the light to travel down to.

With that, the rest of creation came to a halt. Without ground, no tree could root, no creature could draw breath, no foot had anywhere to stand.

For a long while Brahma turned the one thought over. “The waters washed the earth even as I pressed on with the work of making, and she has slipped to the lowest depth. How am I to lift her out?” At last he remembered his own source, the almighty Shri Hari, from whose very thought he himself had sprung. Let the Lord who had made him contrive the way.

And then, while he was still turning it over, something happened that left Brahma staring.

From one of Brahma’s nostrils there slipped out, all at once, a tiny boar. It was no bigger than a thumb, small enough to sit on an open palm.

Brahma watched without blinking. What game was this?

Then the little thing began to grow. While he looked on, it swelled in the open air to the size of an elephant, and then to the size of a great rock. Brahma, with Marichi and the other sages, with Sanaka and his three brothers, and with Svayambhuva Manu beside him, wondered aloud what it could be. “What strange creature is this, wearing the shape of a boar? And it came out of my own nostril. A moment ago it was no wider than the tip of a thumb, and now it stands like a hill. Could this be Lord Vishnu himself, working on my mind?”

While they spoke, the boar grew on, until it loomed like a whole mountain against the sky. Dense black bristles ran the length of that body. Two white tusks curved and gleamed. Such a light poured from its eyes that whoever met them had to look away. It was the Lord of sacrifices, Shri Hari, and none other, wearing the tusks and the hide.

He roared. The sound rolled out and set the four quarters ringing, and it swept every doubt from the watchers. The sages of Janaloka, Tapoloka, and Satyaloka, hearing it, praised him with the holy mantras of the three Vedas. He received their tribute as the Veda itself, roared a second time, and, sporting like a lordly elephant, turned toward the water for the sake of the gods.

His frame was hard as forged steel, his hide a thick coat of stiff bristles. He sprang into the air, lifted his tail, shook out his mane, and tore through the clouds with his hoofs. His white tusks flashed, and light went wherever he looked. Fearsome as those tusks were, he cast a gentle glance at Marichi and the sages who stood praising him.

Then he leapt into the sea.

The water split and stood away on either side. The ocean, its depths ripped open by that plunging mountain of a body, roared and heaved its waves up like so many arms and cried out as if in fear, “Protect me, Lord of sacrifices.” And Varaha, cleaving the deep with hooves keen as arrows, went down straight as a shaft.

Deeper, and deeper. He hunted by scent, his nostrils reaching for the smell of earth, until at the far bottom of that measureless water he found her: the earth, the resting place of all that lives, the very earth he had drawn into his own body when he lay down to rest at the close of the last kalpa. In the lowest deep, at Rasatala, she lay buried.

Varaha set the earth between his two tusks and began to rise.

And there in the water a demon stepped across his path. Hiranyaksha, son of Diti, brother of Hiranyakashipu, a fighter of terrible strength. Seeing the earth carried up and out, he swelled with rage and brought his club down on the rising body of the boar.

“A pig will stand against me?” he thundered, and swung again, and again.

Varaha’s anger flared, bright and sharp as the Sudarshana discus. But the earth was still in his mouth, and there was no hurry in him. He killed the demon the way a lion kills an elephant, without effort, as if in play. The blood of the slain demon smeared his snout and his temples, and he looked like a great bull-elephant come up from goring a mound of red clay.

And so Varaha rose, the earth steadied on his tusks, carrying her the way a hand carries up its most fragile treasure.

He broke through the surface and set the earth gently down in her own place, up above the waters, where his hoofs held her firm. The sun’s ray reached her soil again, and for the first time the smell of wet ground opened on the air.

Gods and sages raised a shout of victory together. Brahma, and Marichi and the other sages, and Sanaka with his brothers, and Svayambhuva Manu, all knew him now, and with joined palms they waited on him with words that came out sounding like the verses of the Veda.

“Victory, victory to you, Lord of sacrifices whom none can conquer,” said the sages. “We bow to you even as you shake the water from that body of yours, the body that is made of the three Vedas. We bow again to you, who took the shape of a boar for one purpose only, to raise the earth, and in the very pores of whose bristles the sacrifices lie hidden.

“This form of yours, being sacrifice itself, is not a thing the sinful can so much as see. The meters of the Veda, the Gayatri and the rest, are your skin. The kusha grass of the altar is your bristles. The ghee of the offering is in your eyes. The work of the four priests, the hota, the adhvaryu, the udgata, and the brahma, moves in your four legs. In your snout rests the sruk, the great ladle that pours ghee on the flame; in your nostrils the smaller sruva; in your belly the ida, the dish of the offering; in the hollows of your ears the soma cups; in your mouth the vessel that holds the brahma-priest’s share, and in your throat the ladles that lift the soma. When you work your jaws, that is the agnihotra, the pouring of the oblation into the fire.

“Every descent you make into this world is the consecration with which a sacrifice opens. Your neck is the Upasad rites; the offerings that begin and end the rite are your two tusks; your tongue is the Pravargya; the fires of the hall and of the home are your head, and the bricks laid course on course to raise the altar are the breath in your body. Your seed is the soma. Your seven bodily elements are the seven great soma-sacrifices, the Agnishtoma foremost among them; the joints of your body are the long sacrificial sessions, and its sinews the many rites. Every mantra a priest recites, every deity he calls, every offering he pours, every act he performs, all of it is your one body. And you are more than the rite. You are the wisdom that comes of dispassion, of devotion, of a mastered self, and the teacher of every knowledge there is. To you, and to you again, we bow.

“When you shook that Veda-body of yours, the drops that flew from your mane sprinkled us who dwell in Janaloka and Tapoloka and Satyaloka, and washed us clean. He has surely lost his reason who thinks he can count your deeds to the end. Bring peace, then, to this whole world that wanders lost among the things of the senses, deluded by your own Yogamaya.”

Brahma stepped forward and joined his hands.

“Who but you, Lord, could have done this. To take a boar’s plain shape, to go down into the dark of Rasatala, to break that mighty demon, and to carry the earth up with such care. And for you it is no marvel at all, for you who spun this whole astonishing universe out of your maya. Look how she rides on the tips of your tusks. The earth with all her mountains shines there like a lotus plant, leaves and all, lifted on the tusk of a great elephant risen from the water. With her set on your tusks, this boar-body of yours, itself the three Vedas, stands like a huge mountain with the clouds gathered on its crown. Set her firm and steady now, this mother of all that moves and all that stays still, your own spouse, in whom you have laid the seed of her sustaining the way the priest draws fire out of the arani. Make her a home fit for every creature, for you are their father. Then we will bow to you, and to her.

“You did more than lift the earth. You showed that the greatest rescue can come in the plainest of forms.”

Varaha looked once toward the earth. Then that vast form went quiet and dissolved like water settling to stillness, and Shri Hari passed out of sight, back into his own being.