Bhagavatam · Vritrasura, the Demon Devotee

The Ganga ran a little slower that morning, as if the river itself had paused to listen. Parikshit looked at the sage. “Bhagavan, until now you have told me the stories of devotees whose hearts were spotless, whose very birth was holy. But a thorn sits in my mind. I have stopped counting how many days I have left. Yet I want to know this: can even one whose body is molded out of sin, one whom the world calls an enemy, reach the Lord?”

Shukadeva stayed silent a few moments. Then a calm settled over his face, the kind that comes with a beloved memory.

“Rajan, there was a rakshasa named Vritra. All three worlds trembled at his name. And inside that same rakshasa lived a devotion that would put the gods themselves to shame. Listen.”

It began with a wrong that Indra could not take back. The gods had a priest in those days, a brahmin named Vishvarupa, son of Tvashta the divine craftsman. He had three heads and three mouths, and with them he drank the Soma, drank wine, and took his food. At the yajna he called out the gods’ portion of every oblation for all to hear, since the gods were his father’s people. But his mother came of asura stock, and love for her kin worked on him, so that under his breath, even as he poured the offerings into the fire, he slipped a share to the asuras as well. When Indra learned of the double dealing, and saw in it the slow ruin of the gods, his anger broke and he struck off all three heads. The head that had drunk Soma flew up as a francolin, the head that had drunk wine as a sparrow, the head that had eaten food as a partridge.

The killing of a brahmin is a stain that does not simply lift, and it clung to Indra though he had the power to shrug it off. For a year he carried it. Then he cut it into four portions and handed them away, to the earth, to the waters, to the trees, and to women, and each took its share along with a gift in return.

Tvashta, who had lost his son, answered grief with fire. He poured oblations into the southern altar, the Anvaharya-pachana, with one prayer on his lips: that an enemy of Indra be born, one who would swell beyond all measure and strike his son’s killer down. From that fire rose a shape like the end of the world, dark as a hill of ash, beard and hair red as heated copper, eyes like the noon sun. He grew by an arrow’s flight a day. He danced with the vault of heaven balanced on the tip of his trident, and when he opened his cavern of a mouth the very stars seemed ready to slide into it. Because his darkness wrapped the worlds, they named him Vritra, the one who covers. This was Vritrasura.

When Vritra fell upon heaven, the gods came at him in their thousands with every celestial weapon they owned, and he swallowed the weapons whole. Their splendor went out of them like lamps in cloud. Indra their king could do nothing. Beaten, the gods turned inward, to the Narayana seated in their own hearts, and begged him to save them.

The Lord came to them, bearing conch and discus and mace, and his words fell on the fever in their chests like the first cool of rain. “No weapon you carry can end this demon,” he told Indra. “You need the bones of an ascetic, bones that years of tapas have made harder than any metal. From them Vishvakarma will forge a vajra, and I will charge it with my own power. That, and nothing less, will sever Vritra’s head.”

“Which ascetic, Lord?”

“Dadhichi. Go to him, and ask him for the gift of his body.”

Indra found the ashram of Dadhichi, son of Atharva, where havan smoke and the scent of tulsi hung in the still air. This was the sage who had once handed the two Ashwins the secret of the deathless through the mouth of a horse’s head, a man who had walked past his own dying more than once. He heard the whole errand out, and then he laughed.

“You have come a long way for a frame of bone and flesh that is going to crumble into dust on its own. A body that never spends itself on someone else’s good is a thing even the trees might pity. If mine can serve, take it. I hold nothing back.”

He settled into yoga. He gathered in his senses, his breath, his mind, fixed his gaze on the one Reality, and slipped out of the body the way a man steps out of a worn coat, so quietly that he never felt it fall. They lifted out his bones, and Vishvakarma forged from them a vajra with a hundred joints. Indra took it up, felt its weight settle into his hand, and with it the certainty of what he had to do.

Then, the battlefield again.

They met on the banks of the Narmada, and the sky went dark with arrows. Maces rang against maces, the ground bucked, and a curtain of dust drew across the sun. The blows came so hard from both sides that gods and asuras alike forgot to breathe.

Vritrasura’s strength had no floor to it. But there was something in the demon that Indra could not read.

He fought, and somewhere under the fighting he was not fighting at all. His arm drove the weapon; the rest of him was somewhere else entirely.

Between blows his lips kept moving. Striking, taking wounds, striking again, he returned always to the same few words.

“Narayana.” “Vasudeva.” “Hari.”

The god who had come to kill him kept losing the rhythm of his own attack. Whose name is a demon speaking, here, in the middle of a war?

Vritra hurled his trident, its prongs burning like the fire that breaks out at the end of an age. Indra split it in the air with the vajra, and the same stroke sheared away one of the demon’s arms. Vritra did not slow. With the arm still left to him he brought his mace down on Airavata, Indra’s elephant, and the great beast reeled back the length of twenty-eight cubits, its mouth broken, blood on its tusks. The vajra dropped from Indra’s fist. For a moment the king of the gods stood there with empty hands, waiting to die.

Vritra could have finished him. He held back. He looked at the disarmed god and laughed, softly, the way you laugh at a child. “Pick it up,” he said. “Take up your thunderbolt and strike. Victory and defeat belong to the Lord of time. He hands them out as he pleases, and grieving over a fallen weapon changes nothing. Fight.”

Indra bent and lifted the vajra, and he was staring now, because no demon he had ever fought had spoken like a sage, and none had ever gone into battle with Hari’s name in his mouth.

“You feel no fear?”

“Fear of what? This body belongs to a rakshasa, that much is true. But the one seated inside it is a servant of Shri Hari. For me the fall of this body is a chain coming loose.”

“You are a devotee.”

“The form changed. The birth changed. The heart stayed the same. Not one breath has passed in which he slipped from my remembrance.”

His breathing was ragged, and there was no bitterness anywhere in it.

Indra shook his head, half in disbelief. Here was a creature born of the darker energies, and yet he was drunk on a love for Vasudeva that most gods never taste. What could a soul who swims in an ocean of nectar want with the ditch-water of heaven and its small pleasures?

Then Vritra closed his eyes, and spoke the prayer that has gone on echoing through the heart of the Bhagavata ever since. He was speaking past Indra, to the Shri Hari seated within him.

“I ask you for no heaven. Not for the seat of Brahma, not for a kingdom in the regions under the earth, not for the powers that yoga yields, not even for liberation from birth and death. Let those beg for such things who imagine there is something worth more than you.”

“I want one thing. In my next birth, in whatever shape you give me, into whatever womb I open my eyes, let my mind not wander from your feet. Let my tongue keep singing what you are. Let me never lose the company of the people who love you. Only that.”

“As a fledgling with its wings still bare cries for the mother bird, as a starving calf strains toward the cow, as a wife alone in the house aches for the husband gone far from home, so my heart reaches for you and nothing else.”

“For the rest, whatever you wish, let it be.”

Having said it, Vritra went looking for the death the scriptures call the finest of all, the death of one who falls with his face to the enemy. He whirled his iron club up in his left hand and flung it, and Indra shore off club and arm together with the hundred-jointed vajra. Now the demon had no arms at all, and the blood ran down his shoulders like water off a cliff, and still he would not fall. He dropped his lower jaw to the ground and stretched the upper one to the sky, until the opening was as deep as the sky itself, and he swallowed Indra whole, elephant and all. A cry went up from every watching god and sage. Vritra had eaten the king of heaven.

But inside that darkness Indra did not die. The armor of Narayana’s name was still wrapped around him, and it held. He set the vajra to the wall of the demon’s belly, tore it open, and climbed out into the light.

Then he raised the vajra over Vritra’s neck and brought it down. The weapon turned and turned against that neck for a full year, the length of the sun’s long journey north and south, before the head at last came away. Somewhere above, drums sounded. Gandharvas and Siddhas let fall a rain of flowers.

Vritra’s body dropped. But the light that came up out of it did not scatter and did not turn. It went straight toward the abode of Shri Hari, steady as someone walking home after a journey of many years, and it entered him and was gone. Every soul on that field watched it happen.

And there was a price. Vritra had been a brahmin, and the sin of killing him would not let Indra be. It came after him in the shape of a hag, gray-haired and reeking, crying “Stop, stop,” until he fled to the far northeast and hid himself in the fiber of a lotus stalk in a lake for a long age, while another ruled heaven in his place. Only a horse-sacrifice, and the name of Narayana spoken over its fire, finally burned the stain away, the way the morning sun burns off frost.

And Bhagavan kept the demon’s prayer. Those who will not ask even for liberation are the ones he draws closest, and keeps at his own side.