The Demons Born of Sleep

The sage Markandeya told Yudhishthira in the forest of the very dawn of a cycle of creation, and of the two primordial demons whom the Lord slew at the beginning of the world to make creation possible - the deed from which he won one of his great names, Madhusudana, the slayer of Madhu.

At the start of a great cycle, when the previous creation had been dissolved and there was nothing in all the universe but the boundless cosmic ocean, the Lord Vishnu lay upon the coils of the cosmic serpent Shesha, floating upon those endless waters in his yogic sleep, the deep slumber from which all creation would spring. And from his navel there grew a lotus, and upon that lotus was born Brahma, the creator, whose task it would be to bring forth the new creation. So all was set for the world to begin: the Lord asleep upon the waters, and the creator seated upon the lotus, ready to make the worlds.

But as the Lord slept, two fierce demons came into being - born, it is said, from two drops of water that the Lord himself had placed upon the petals of the lotus, one sweet and bright as honey, the other hard. They were named Madhu and Kaitabha, and they were beings of enormous strength and overweening arrogance, the first great demons of the new cycle, grown mighty in the formless waters before the world had even begun.

Madhu and Kaitabha, in their pride and their hunger for power, grew terrible. And they conceived a design that threatened to strangle the new creation in its very cradle: they seized the Vedas - the sacred knowledge, the eternal wisdom by which the worlds are made and ordered and sustained - and carried them off, hiding them away in the depths of the cosmic ocean. Without the Vedas, the creator Brahma could not perform his work; creation could not proceed; the new world could not be born. And worse, the two demons turned their fury upon Brahma himself, menacing the creator where he sat upon his lotus, threatening to destroy him before he could begin his task.

Brahma, seated upon the lotus and menaced by the two mighty demons, with the Vedas stolen and creation at a standstill, was terrified. He had no power to fight Madhu and Kaitabha himself, and the only one who could save him - the Lord Vishnu - lay deep in his yogic sleep upon the waters, and did not wake.

So Brahma prayed. He joined his hands and poured out his praise to the Lord, calling him the origin of the worlds, whose son he had been from one cycle of creation to the next. 'The Vedas are my eyes,' he cried, 'and they have been stolen. Though I have been born, I am blind. Awake, and give my eyes back to me.' And the creator trembled so on his seat that the stalk of the lotus shook. And Vishnu awoke upon the cosmic waters.

The Lord awoke, and beheld the two demons menacing the creator and the creation, and he rose to do battle with them. And there was fought, upon the boundless cosmic ocean at the dawn of the world, a tremendous battle between the Lord Vishnu and the two primordial demons Madhu and Kaitabha.

It was no swift thing. The two demons were mighty beyond measure, the first and fiercest beings of the new cycle, and they fought the Lord with all their strength across the endless waters with all the fury of rajas and tamas that was their nature. And the demons were drunk on their own power, boasting that no one was their equal in strength, valour or truthfulness, and they thought themselves beyond all harm. The Lord would need not only strength but stratagem to end them.

The two demons, drunk on their own strength and certain of their invincibility, grew so arrogant that they made a boast that would prove their undoing. When the Lord, on seeing them, bade them welcome and offered them a boon, they laughed at him, and supposing themselves beyond all danger, they said to the Lord, in their pride: 'We are the ones who grant boons. Ask of us a boon - anything you wish - and we will grant it, for we are mighty enough to give whatever is asked.'

It was the recklessness of pride, to offer a boon to one's own enemy in the midst of battle, certain that nothing could harm oneself. And the Lord, seeing the opening their arrogance had given him, seized it at once. 'If you will truly grant me what I ask,' he said, 'then grant me this: that I may slay you both - that you will let me kill you.' The two demons were caught in their own boast. Having offered a boon out of pride, they were bound by their word to honor it, even though it was their own deaths they had been asked to grant. Their arrogance had handed the Lord the very thing he needed to end them.

The demons, who had never spoken a falsehood, accepted that no one can overcome destiny, but they asked one thing in return: that he slay them only in a spot that was wholly uncovered, and that they might afterwards become his sons - and they looked about the boundless cosmic ocean, where there was nothing but water in every direction, as far as could be seen, and thought themselves safe after all, for surely there was no dry spot anywhere in all that endless sea.

But the Lord was not to be outdone by such a trick. He looked about earth and sky and found no uncovered place, and then he looked upon his own thighs, which alone of all that watery world were uncovered. And there, upon his thighs, bound by their own boon and their own condition, the Lord cut off the heads of the two great demons Madhu and Kaitabha with his sharp discus, ending the primordial foes who had imperiled the new creation. From the slaying of Madhu, the Lord is called ever after Madhusudana, the slayer of Madhu.

Before the two demons fell, the Lord had already recovered the Vedas they had stolen and hidden in the depths of the cosmic ocean. It is told that for this recovery the Lord took a special form, with the head of a horse - Hayagriva - diving into the deep to bring back the sacred knowledge from where the demons had concealed it, and restoring the Vedas to the creator Brahma.

With the Vedas restored and the demons destroyed, the great obstacle to creation was removed at last. Brahma, freed from his terror and given back the sacred knowledge by which the worlds are made, could now begin his work. And so creation went forward, the new cycle of the world unfolding from the lotus and the sleeping Lord, all of it made possible because the Lord had wakened from his cosmic sleep to slay the two primordial demons and recover the wisdom they had stolen at the very dawn of the world.

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

"See, first, how the Lord guards creation and the sacred knowledge from the very dawn of the world. Before the worlds were even made, two primordial demons rose up to strangle creation in its cradle - to destroy the creator and steal away the wisdom by which the worlds are ordered. And the Lord woke from his cosmic sleep to defend them both, slaying the demons and recovering the Vedas, so that creation could go forward. The order of the world, and the sacred knowledge that sustains it, are guarded by the Lord against the forces that would unmake them, from the very beginning; the world is upheld, always, against the demons of chaos.

"And see, once more, the oldest pattern of all: that arrogance carries its own destruction within it. The two demons, drunk on their own strength and certain of their invincibility, in their pride offered their enemy a boon - and so handed the Lord the very means to slay them. The proud, who think themselves beyond all danger, again and again give away their own undoing through the recklessness of their pride. Be wary, then, of the overconfidence that thinks itself safe; it is precisely in that overconfidence that ruin finds its opening."

And the Pandavas, who knew the Lord as Krishna their friend, marveled to hear of his deeds at the very dawn of the world, and took to heart both the guarding of creation and the self-undoing of arrogance.