The Demons Born of Sleep

The sages told the Pandavas 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 the very substance of the sleeping Lord, from the wax of his ears or the dirt of his body, springing up out of the primordial deep. 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 prayed to the Lord to wake; and above all he prayed to the power of the Lord's own sleep - to Yoganidra, the Goddess of the divine slumber, the great power that held Vishnu in his deep rest - beseeching her to release her hold upon the Lord, so that he might wake and save creation. The creator poured out his praise and his plea to the Goddess of sleep, begging her to withdraw from the Lord's eyes and let him rise. And the Goddess, hearing the prayer, was pleased, and she withdrew herself from the Lord, releasing him from his slumber. 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 for a vast span of time - the tellings say five thousand years and more. For so long did the battle rage, neither side prevailing, that it seemed it might never end. And the demons had this further protection: that they were drunk on their own power and all but invincible, deluded by the very strength that the Goddess of cosmic delusion had placed in them, so that they could not be brought down by force alone. The Lord would need not only strength but stratagem to end them.

After the long ages of battle, 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. Pleased with their own valor in the endless fight, and supposing themselves beyond all danger, they said to the Lord, in their pride: 'We are delighted by your prowess in this long battle. 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.

But the demons, even caught by their own boast, tried to slip free by a cleverness of their own. They had a condition to their death, or sought to make one: they said they could be slain only in a place that was not covered by water - 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 simply expanded his own form, and drew the two demons up onto his own vast thighs - and there, upon his thighs, which alone of all that watery world were not covered by water, the one dry place in the endless ocean, he fulfilled the condition. And there, bound by their own boon and trapped by their own condition, the Lord slew the two great demons Madhu and Kaitabha, 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.

With the two demons slain, the Lord 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.