The Birth of the Wind-Gods

The sages told the Pandavas how the storm-gods, the swift and shining Maruts, came to be - born out of a mother's vengeance that was turned, by a single lapse, into a blessing.

There was Diti, a wife of the great sage Kashyapa, and she was the mother of the asuras, the demons - among them the mighty Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu. Her sister Aditi was the mother of the gods, the devas, chief among them Indra. And so the gods and the demons were cousins, born of two sisters, and forever at war. In that long war, Indra and the gods had slain Diti's demon sons, and Diti was consumed with grief for her children and with a burning desire for revenge. She longed above all for one thing: a son so powerful that he could kill Indra himself and avenge her slain children.

Diti went to her husband Kashyapa and begged him for such a son - a child mighty enough to slay Indra. Kashyapa was reluctant, for Indra was his own son too, by her sister; but he could not refuse his grieving wife outright. So he granted her wish, but bound it with a strict and difficult condition.

'You shall bear such a son,' Kashyapa told her, 'if you can keep a vow of perfect purity through the whole long term of the pregnancy - a hundred years. You must observe the most rigorous discipline and cleanliness without the smallest lapse: keeping yourself ever pure, never neglecting the rites of purity, never lying down in an unclean state, never faltering in your observance even for a moment, through all the long years that you carry the child. If you keep this vow flawlessly to the end, your son will be born with the power to do what you wish. But if you fail in it, even once, even in the smallest particular, the boon will be undone.'

Diti, fixed upon her revenge, accepted the condition and undertook the great vow, carrying within her the powerful embryo, and binding herself to a hundred years of flawless purity for the sake of the son who would kill the king of the gods.

Word of this reached Indra, and the king of the gods was deeply alarmed, for he learned that his aunt Diti was carrying a child destined and empowered to kill him. He knew he could not simply attack her, for she was protected and the child was sacred while the vow held. But he saw, too, that the boon depended entirely upon the flawless keeping of the vow - that a single lapse in Diti's purity, at any moment in the hundred years, would undo the whole thing.

So Indra resolved upon a patient strategy. He came to Diti and offered himself humbly as her devoted attendant, pretending to be a dutiful nephew eager to serve and protect her through her long vow. Diti, pleased, accepted his service, and Indra entered her household and waited upon her faithfully - all the while watching, with unsleeping vigilance, for any moment when she might falter in her observance, any single lapse in her purity that would give him his opening. He served her devotedly, and he watched, and he waited, for years and years.

For a very long time Diti kept her vow perfectly, and Indra could find no opening. The hundred years drew on toward their end, and the child within her grew ever more powerful, and it seemed the vow would be kept flawlessly to the last and Indra's doom would be born.

But near the very end, when she was almost safe, a single lapse undid it all. One day Diti, grown weary and heavy with the long-carried child, lay down to rest in the evening twilight without observing the full discipline of purity her vow required - she slept, it is said, with her hair unbound and her head where her feet should have been, at an inauspicious hour, in a state that broke, in that one small particular, the flawless purity she had vowed to keep. It was the smallest of lapses, born of weariness, at the very end of a hundred years of perfect observance - but it was a lapse, and it was enough.

Indra, who had watched and waited all those long years for exactly this, saw his moment at last.

The instant Diti's purity was broken, the protection of the vow failed, and Indra seized his chance. By his divine power he made himself tiny and entered into the sleeping Diti's womb, taking his thunderbolt, the vajra, with him - going in among the very child he was destined to be killed by, to destroy it before it could be born and grow.

There, within the womb, Indra raised his thunderbolt against the powerful embryo. But the child, even unborn, was no ordinary being, and what followed was not the simple destruction Indra had intended. He struck the embryo with his vajra, and it broke - but it did not die.

When Indra's thunderbolt struck the embryo, it shattered into seven pieces - and each of the seven pieces, instead of dying, began to cry out, alive and wailing. Alarmed, and seeing they would not simply perish, Indra struck again, cutting each of the seven pieces into seven more, so that there were now forty-nine pieces - and all forty-nine cried out together, living still.

As they wept and wailed, Indra, moved at last to pity, or wishing to quiet them, said to each of them, again and again, 'Ma rodih' - 'Do not weep.' And by these words, and by the strange power of the moment, the forty-nine broken pieces did not die at all. Instead, soothed by Indra's words and by his changed heart, they were transformed into living beings - forty-nine swift, shining young gods, born from the cut pieces of the embryo. Because Indra had bid them 'Ma rodih,' do not weep, they came to be called the Maruts, the storm-gods, the wind-gods.

And here was the great turning of the tale. The child that Diti had borne to be Indra's destroyer, broken into forty-nine and reborn as the Maruts, did not become Indra's enemies at all. On the contrary, the shining storm-gods, born from Indra's own act and soothed by his own words, became his devoted companions and allies - the swift host of the wind-gods who ride beside Indra in his battles and serve him as his faithful followers. The very beings that Diti had striven a hundred years to bring forth as a weapon against the king of the gods became, instead, the king of the gods' own loyal helpers.

Diti, waking to find her great vow broken at the last moment and her intended weapon transformed into Indra's allies, was grieved that her revenge had come to nothing. Yet she was consoled, in the end, by this: that her son had not died but had become forty-nine bright and immortal gods, the Maruts, honored among the host of heaven. Her vengeance had failed utterly - but out of its failure had come not destruction but a company of shining gods, and her children lived on, transformed, as powers of the sky.

The sages drew the lessons of the tale for the Pandavas.

"See, first, the futility of a vengeance born of grief. Diti, in her sorrow for her slain sons, bound herself to a hundred years of harsh discipline for the sole purpose of bringing forth a destroyer - and all that long, bitter striving for revenge came to nothing in the end, undone in a single moment, and her intended weapon became her enemy's friend. Vengeance is a poor master to serve; it consumes years and devotion in the service of destruction, and often, in the end, it fails and turns to the very opposite of what was intended. Better to let grief heal than to spend a hundred years feeding it toward revenge.

"See, too, how a single small lapse can undo a vast and long-kept undertaking. Diti kept her difficult vow flawlessly for nearly a hundred years - and lost everything through one moment's carelessness, born of weariness, at the very end. So it is with all great disciplines and long endeavors: that they can be guarded faithfully for an age and yet ruined by a single slip at the last, and that the vigilance which guards them must not relax even at the very end. The watchful enemy waits precisely for the one moment we let our guard down.

"And see, in the Maruts, the mercy that can turn even a doom into a blessing: that the child meant for destruction, struck and broken, became instead a host of shining gods, when wrath gave way at the last to the gentle words, 'do not weep.' Even what is broken in conflict may, by a turn of mercy, be made into something bright and good."

And the Pandavas took the threefold lesson to heart: the emptiness of vengeance, the vigilance that even long discipline requires, and the mercy that can transform a doom into a blessing.