The Weapon That Could Not Be Faced

This is the tale of the Narayanastra, the irresistible weapon, and of how it was met not by force but by submission - one of the great lessons of the war. On the fifteenth day, after Drona the teacher had been slain, his son Ashwatthama was consumed with grief and rage. For Drona had been brought down by a stratagem: a false report that Ashwatthama was dead, which made the old warrior lay down his arms in despair, whereupon he was beheaded as he sat unresisting in meditation upon the field. When Ashwatthama learned the truth - that his father had been undone by a lie about his own death and slain while defenseless - his sorrow turned to a terrible fury, and he resolved to take a fearful vengeance upon the whole Pandava host.

For his vengeance, Ashwatthama reached for the most dreadful of all the weapons he possessed: the Narayanastra, the weapon of Narayana, the Lord Vishnu himself, which his father had given him. This was a celestial weapon of overwhelming and irresistible power, against which no force could prevail; and it had a terrible nature, that it grew fiercer and more deadly the more it was resisted, raining destruction in proportion to the opposition offered it, so that to fight against it was only to feed its fury and to be destroyed. Ashwatthama, blind with grief and wrath, invoked this weapon to annihilate the entire Pandava army in revenge for his father's death.