Prahlada

On Mandarachala a daitya stands on one foot, grinding his body away in the hunger to wring deathlessness out of Brahma, and the moment his back is turned the army of the gods falls on his capital. The asuras have fled, the palace is being stripped room by room, and in the middle of the plunder Indra’s gaze stops on a pregnant queen. The Shrimad Bhagavata opens the story of Prahlada in chapter 7 of its seventh skandha from this scene, before his birth. Indra has Kayadhu by the wrist and is dragging her out onto the road, having reckoned that the child can be killed at the hour it is born, and the queen weeps like a kurari bird, her free hand pressed again and again over her belly. Then a veena comes up the road, its strings ringing softly under a practiced hand, and Devarshi Narada stands in the way. “Devaraj, stop. This lady is innocent.” Indra’s grip stays where it is, so Narada tells him what he is holding: the one he calls an enemy’s seed is a great devotee of the Lord, sinless, a mighty servant of Vishnu, and “Death will not come to that child from your hands.” The king of the gods lets go of the wrist, walks in a slow circle of worship around the mother whose womb he had come to empty, and goes back to his heaven.

Narada takes the queen to his hermitage, and until her husband comes down from his austerity he teaches her the secret of the religion of devotion and the stainless nature of the self. The mother listens, and inside her a second listener hears every word with his eyes still shut. Hiranyakashipu wins his boon, follows her trail, and carries her home. Season by season the words she heard in the hermitage soften and blur and sink out of her reach; by Narada’s grace they stay whole in the child in the womb, every word in its place. The mother forgot. The one within did not. In time the boy is born and is given a name built out of gladness, Prahlada, and every so often, taught by no one, he drifts away behind his own eyes and murmurs “Narayana,” softly, like a boy repeating a lesson from a classroom so far away that nobody else remembers it exists.

The question on his father’s lap

Chapter 5 first shows the thorn inside Hiranyakashipu. His brother Hiranyaksha died under the tusks of the Boar, and from that day the name of Vishnu has been a wound in him that never closes; rising and lying down, eating and sleeping, he remembers that one enemy, with a concentration that love has rarely matched in any devotee. His austerity has bought from Brahma a death fenced out of every opening, by day or by night, indoors or outdoors, by man or by beast, by weapon or by missile; he has taken the three worlds and thrown Indra off the throne of heaven; and he has handed his son’s schooling to Shanda and Amarka, the sons of Shukracharya. One day he takes the boy onto his lap, on the same chest that shouldered Indra out of heaven, and asks: of everything you have learned, what seems best to you? “Father, every creature in this world lives in torment, twisting on two small words, I and mine.” The one good thing he can see for them is to walk out of this house, this covered well with its mouth hidden in the grass, and go to the forest, and take shelter in Shri Hari. The father throws back his head and laughs, and then the laughter stops. The teachers ask where this crook in his thinking came from, and the boy tells them: “The one this house calls its enemy is the self standing inside every creature. Inside me. Inside you.”

The priests teach him the four instruments of a ruler, soothing words, gifts, division, and the rod, hang him with ornaments, and return him to the palace, and the father sets him on his lap, breathes in the scent of his head, and asks for one fine thing he has mastered. Prahlada counts the nine limbs of devotion, from hearing of him to handing over one’s whole self into his keeping: “If a person practices these nine as an offering laid directly in the Lord’s hands, I hold that to be the finest thing anyone has ever learned.” The king’s lips tremble. The teacher’s son swears that this understanding was born with the boy and rises in him by itself, and Prahlada himself says that men sunk in the life of the house never turn toward Hari, and go on like the blind walking in a file behind the blind, every one stepping into the same pit. Hiranyakashipu lifts the boy off his lap and hurls him to the floor. “Daityas, take him out and kill him now.” Tridents come down on the vital places of a child who sits without moving, his mind gone into the Parabrahman that no weapon touches. Then the great elephants that hold up the quarters, serpents whose bite kills at a touch, a kritya raised by sorcery, poison in his food, fire, the sea, and the weight of mountains piled on him. Every time he is found where he was, saying the name of Hari. The king’s face falls, and Shanda and Amarka advise him to keep the boy in Varuna’s cords until Shukracharya returns.

A day off from school

Chapter 6 belongs to the day the teachers go out and the daitya boys call Prahlada to play. He rises, and play has long since gone out of him. “Brothers, listen,” he says, and the voice is so gentle that the games die where they stand. “A human birth is the rare thing in this universe, rarer than anything our fathers have piled up in their treasuries, and it does not keep.” No one is told the hour it ends, so the wise borrow no time from old age; “Begin in childhood itself, in this childhood, the practices that carry a person to Bhagavan.” One child speaks for all of them: we are still small, why must it start now? And Prahlada tells him that whatever pleasure the senses can give comes to every creature on its own, by the ripening of old deeds, exactly the way sorrow comes without anyone laboring for it. The sons of demons, so what; the Lord draws no line between his own and another’s. The boys set their toys down, sit in a ring around him, and one by one small voices in a palace built on hatred of the name begin to say it. Hari. Hari. The teachers go cold, word runs to the palace, and this time the father summons the boy to the full court.

A pillar, a threshold, and a barefoot boy

He stands between the high pillars of the hall, palms joined, and there is a crack of weariness in his father’s voice now. Prahlada’s answer comes without a tremor anywhere in it: “The strength I stand on, father, is the strength you stand on. He is the strength of the strong.” Everything that moves and everything that holds still, from Brahma down to a blade of grass, is held under his sway; “there is no enemy anywhere except a mind left unconquered.” Chapter 8 puts the axis of the whole story in the father’s mouth. “Where is he, this lord of the universe you set above me? Everywhere, is he? Then why does he fail to show himself in this pillar?” He springs from the throne and drives his fist into the pillar, and a crash comes out of it so vast that the shell of the cosmic egg seems to crack along its whole curve, and out of the pillar steps the form that belongs to neither the lion’s kind nor the man’s. The father does not run; he takes up his weapons. The Bhagavata gives his end on the threshold of the hall, thrown across the thighs of that form and opened with the claws alone, and every clause of Brahma’s grant fails along the seam he himself left in the asking. One being in that court does not tremble at the roar: the boy, who stands exactly between his father and the form.

In chapter 9 the enemy is dead and the wrath is still alive. Brahma steps forward and his words stick in his throat; Rudra stays silent; Lakshmi herself cannot cross the remaining distance to her own lord by a single step. Then Brahma notices who is standing beside him, the dead king’s son, and stoops to him. “Go, child. It is on your father’s account that Bhagavan’s anger rose. Go near him, and make him calm.” The boy does not blink. “So be it.” He walks barefoot into the roar and goes down full length before the feet, and the same claws that have just opened an asura’s chest settle on his hair light as leaf-shadow. The hymn rises. He names the flickering tongue, the mane clotted with blood, the garland made of what his father was, and the claws still wet, and says, “I have looked at every piece of it, and nowhere in me can I find any fear.” One thing frightens him: the wheel, the grinding round of birth and death in which a soul is tied in the rope of its own deeds. And the boy who could have stepped out of it that instant says, “These lost, stumbling, defenseless beings: any crossing that leaves them behind on the bank is a crossing I refuse.” “Ferry them over with me. Sending me across alone would be no kindness I could bear.” The mane settles, the brows come apart. “Prahlada. All blessings on you, best of the Daityas. I am pleased with you, deeply and completely pleased. Ask for any boon you can name.”

Chapter 10 is the chapter of the asking, and Prahlada declines to ask. He will not be tempted with the very pleasures he fled to the Lord’s feet to escape; a servant who bargains for gifts has turned himself into a trader. The Lord tells him to enjoy the fortune of the daityas all the same, for the length of this manvantara, to offer every act to him, and when his time comes to leave the body and reach him. Then the boy asks for one thing, and it is for someone else: that his father, who reviled the Lord and persecuted his son, be freed of that sin. The answer is that Hiranyakashipu was purified the moment the corner of that compassionate eye fell on him, and that a son like Prahlada sanctifies twenty-one generations of his line; let him perform the rites for his father and sit on his father’s throne. Brahma and Shukracharya anoint him king of the daityas, and Narasimha, before he vanishes, tells Brahma to grant the asuras no more boons of that kind, which are like feeding milk to a snake.

Vasistha’s Prahlada

The Yoga Vasistha takes the same name into a story of its own, which Vasistha tells Rama, and in it Prahlada reaches his attainment by his own inward inquiry. Narasimha has gone, the smoke has not yet settled on the burned city of Patala, and the asuras sit among their dead as figures sit in a painting, with no more hope of rising than a withered tree. It is the king’s eldest son who speaks what the rest cannot: there is one expedient, and only one, against the rage of Hari, and that is to go to him, as fast as they can, with contrite hearts, “because that god is the true refuge of the pious and the only resort of everyone.” In his house Vishnu appears in person and offers a boon, and Prahlada asks for whatever the Lord himself counts his best gift. “Sinless one, may your right discrimination of things lead you to your rest in God and to supreme felicity.” That is the whole of the boon. A long self-inquiry follows: he is not the body, not the tongue that sticks to the inside of the mouth, not any of the senses; he is the unchanging self that shines as awareness; and speech stops. He sits in samadhi for thousands of years, his body as immovable as a rock in a painting, and Patala, with no one on its throne, falls under the law of the fishes, where the big ones eat the small. Hari wakes on the Milky Ocean, comes down through the sea, and blows Panchajanya: “Great soul, rise from your trance.” The woken Prahlada has no taste left for a kingdom, and Hari, having taught him what life and death mean for a man already free, says: “Rise, lord of the Danavas, and sit on your throne.” And at the last: “Reign here as sole monarch for as long as Mount Meru stands on the earth and the sun and the moon shine in the sky.” The Vishnu Purana also tells this story in its own way, in chapters 17 to 20 of its first book, and that telling stays in its own text.

The Bhagavata brings Prahlada back once more, in chapter 23 of the eighth skandha, at the sacrifice of his grandson Bali, coming into that broken assembly like the moon rising over the rim of the world. Vamana has measured everything in three steps, and Bali stands bound in Varuna’s cords. Prahlada looks past his bound grandson to the Lord and speaks with joined hands: “Lord, it was you who gave him Indra’s seat, and today it is you who have taken it back; you have only reclaimed what was always your own. And I think the taking is the greater kindness of the two.” The Lord sends him with Bali to Sutala, and gives that house a thing no conqueror in any age has been given: “You will see me there always, stationed at your gate, mace in my hand, keeping the watch.”

His path

The Narasimha avatar · A fist on a pillar, a crash like the cosmic egg cracking, and a boon breaking clause by clause across a lap on the threshold.

The Prahlada of the Yoga Vasistha · A resolve to take refuge with Hari in a burned city, a samadhi of thousands of years, and Panchajanya blown in the netherworld.

Vamana and Bali · A universe measured in three steps, a grandson in the cords, and a grandfather’s palms joined before the one who took everything.

The one who never learned to tremble

What holds the eye longest in Prahlada’s story is that fear never finds a place in it. Tridents, elephants, poison, fire, and then a form that Lakshmi herself could not approach by a single step, and every time the boy is where he was, and the Bhagavata gives the reason. The lesson he received came before birth, when he could do nothing except listen. He has no austerity of his own and no boon, and before Narasimha he says as much: wealth, lineage, learning, and strength win nothing from you, and Gajendra was saved by devotion alone. By the common scholarly dating the Bhagavata was composed in the ninth or tenth century CE, and inside it Prahlada arrives in the thread where Narada tells Yudhishthira that the concentration of hatred can also reach the Lord, Hiranyakashipu by that road and his son by the concentration of love. The two live in one house and look at one pillar. The father sees emptiness in it; the son sees him in that too. And when the asking comes, the one who has nothing asks nothing for himself; he asks pardon for his father and a crossing for everyone still sinking. The Prahlada of the Yoga Vasistha turns the same fearlessness inward, and after thousands of years of samadhi he is set back on the throne anyway, because freedom there is the name for staying in the body without being held by it. The answer at the pillar and the answer at the throne are one answer: he is everywhere, so here too, in this work too.