The Warrior With the Axe

The sages told the Pandavas of Parashurama, the brahmin who took up the axe of a warrior - the sixth descent of the Lord upon the earth, the master of arms who would one day teach Bhishma and Drona and Karna themselves, and whose terrible story holds within it both the highest obedience and the long, exhausting fury of vengeance.

Parashurama was the youngest son of the great sage Jamadagni, of the line of Bhrigu, and of his wife Renuka, a woman famed for her chastity and devotion. He was born a brahmin, a sage's son, destined by his birth for the quiet life of penance and learning. But there was in him from the first a fierceness and a martial gift unusual in a brahmin, and by his devotion he won from the great god Shiva a mighty axe, the parashu, from which he took his name - Parashurama, Rama of the Axe. With that axe, and the brahmin's spirit joined to a warrior's wrath, he would carve a terrible path through the history of the world.

His mother Renuka was so pure and so perfect in her chastity that her virtue gave her a wonderful power: when she went each day to the river to fetch water for her husband's rites, she could gather the water into a ball of unbaked clay by the force of her purity alone, and carry it home unspilled - a thing impossible to any but the most chaste of women.

But one day, as Renuka went to the river, she saw upon the water a handsome gandharva king sporting with his wives, beautiful and joyful, and for a single moment her mind was caught - a stray flicker of admiration and longing passed through her heart. It was the briefest lapse, a momentary clouding of her perfect purity by a single wandering desire. But it was enough. In that instant her power failed her; the water would no longer hold its shape in the clay, and she could not gather it as before. Shaken and ashamed, she returned to the hermitage late and empty-handed.

Jamadagni was a sage of immense penance but of a fearsome and unforgiving temper. By his yogic insight he perceived at once what had happened - that his wife's perfect chastity had been clouded, for a single moment, by a stray desire - and he was seized with a terrible wrath, far out of proportion to so slight a lapse. In his fury he resolved that Renuka must die for it, and he commanded his sons, one after another, to take up a weapon and kill their own mother.

The elder sons recoiled in horror. To slay their own mother, who had done no real wrong, at their father's angry command, was a thing they could not do, and they refused. And Jamadagni, enraged at their disobedience, cursed them, robbing them of their reason, so that they stood witless and helpless.

Then he turned to his youngest son, Parashurama, and gave the same dreadful command: take your axe and behead your mother. And Parashurama, faced with the most terrible choice a son can face - to obey a father's monstrous command, or to refuse it - did a thing that has troubled hearers ever since.

Parashurama obeyed. Holding his father's word above all else, in the absolute and unquestioning obedience to a parent that the old order prized above almost everything, he took up his axe and struck off his mother's head at his father's command, and struck down his witless brothers as well.

The deed done, Jamadagni, pleased beyond measure by his son's perfect, unflinching obedience - that he had not hesitated even at so dreadful a command - offered Parashurama any boon he wished. And here the love beneath the terrible obedience showed itself. Parashurama asked, first, that his mother be restored to life, whole and well, with no memory at all of having been slain; that his brothers too be brought back and their reason returned; and that he himself be freed of any guilt or sin for what he had done in obedience.

Jamadagni, bound by his promise, granted it all. Renuka rose alive again, unharmed and remembering nothing of her death; the brothers were restored, whole and sane; and Parashurama was absolved. So the dreadful deed was, in a sense, undone - yet it remains one of the most troubling of all the old tales, holding up for our unease the terrible question of obedience: how far a son must go in obeying a father, and whether even the highest obedience can justify so monstrous a command. The sages who told it did not pretend it was simple, but left it standing as a hard knot for the conscience to wrestle with.

Now there ruled in those days a mighty king named Kartavirya Arjuna, lord of the Haihayas, who by a boon had a thousand arms and was a conqueror of immense power - but proud, grasping, and oppressive, the very image of the arrogant warrior-king who lords his might over the weak.

One day Kartavirya came with his army to the hermitage of Jamadagni. The sage received the king and his whole host with perfect hospitality, and fed them all a magnificent feast - for Jamadagni possessed a divine wish-granting cow, a daughter of the celestial Kamadhenu, who could produce at his wish any abundance, and from her he fed the entire army with ease.

Kartavirya was amazed at the wonder of the wish-cow, and at once his greed was kindled. Such a treasure, he thought, belonged in the hands of a king, not a forest hermit. He demanded that Jamadagni give him the cow. The sage refused, for she was needed for his rites and his hospitality. And so the arrogant king, in his pride and greed, seized the wish-cow by force and carried her off from the hermitage - and, in the violence of the seizure, his men did the sage Jamadagni grievous harm, even unto death.

Parashurama returned to the hermitage to find it ravaged, the wish-cow stolen, and his father slain or grievously wronged by the arrogant king and his men. And the fierce wrath that had always slept in the brahmin's heart woke now in full, and it was terrible.

He took up his axe and went after Kartavirya. He fell upon the thousand-armed king and his army, and in a tremendous battle he hewed off the king's thousand arms and struck him down, slaying the mighty oppressor and recovering the stolen cow. The proud conqueror who had thought his thousand arms made him invincible lay dead beneath the axe of a brahmin's son.

But the killing of Kartavirya did not end the matter; it began something far larger and far darker. For the sons and kinsmen of the slain king came in their turn for vengeance against Parashurama's house, and the cycle of blood spun on. And in Parashurama, grief for his father and rage at the arrogance and cruelty of the whole warrior-caste that Kartavirya embodied hardened into a vast and terrible vow.

Parashurama's wrath now turned not against one king alone but against the whole order of arrogant, oppressive warrior-kings who, like Kartavirya, abused their power and trampled the weak and the holy. He vowed to rid the earth of the wicked kshatriyas, and he set about it with a fury that has no equal in the old tales.

Twenty-one times over, it is said, Parashurama swept across the earth with his axe, destroying the oppressive warrior-kings and their hosts, clearing the world of the proud and cruel rulers who had made it a place of tyranny. So great was the slaughter that it was said he filled lakes with the blood of the slain at the field of Kurukshetra. Again and again the warrior-caste rose, and again and again the axe of Parashurama cut it down, until the earth had been cleared, twenty-one times, of its oppressive kings.

It was a vengeance beyond all measure - a righteous wrath, in its origin, against genuine arrogance and cruelty, yet grown so vast and so unending that it became a horror in itself, a fury that fed upon itself and could not find its own end. The brahmin who had taken up the warrior's axe had become a force of almost cosmic destruction, the scourge of an entire caste.

At last Parashurama's terrible wrath spent itself. After twenty-one rounds of vengeance, the fury that had driven him began to ebb, and a weariness and a longing for peace took its place. He saw, perhaps, that vengeance has no natural end - that blood calls for blood without ceasing, and that even a righteous anger, indulged without limit, becomes a destroyer of the world and of the one who wields it.

So Parashurama brought his great vengeance to a close. He performed expiatory sacrifices to cleanse himself of the immense slaughter, and he gave away the earth he had conquered to the brahmins and the sages, keeping nothing of it for himself. Then he laid down his terrible work, withdrew from the world of war, and retired to a mountain to give himself to penance and peace - the axe at last set aside, the fury at last stilled.

Yet he did not die, for Parashurama is counted among the immortals who endure through the ages. And so it was that, ages later, the same axe-wielding brahmin-warrior appeared again in the story of the Pandavas' own forefathers - as the great master of arms who taught Bhishma, and Drona, and Karna; who fought a long and undecided duel with his own pupil Bhishma over the maiden Amba; and who, deceived by Karna, laid upon him the curse that would help bring about his death. The wrath of Parashurama, though laid down, echoed on through the generations into the very war the Pandavas would fight.

The sages drew the hard lessons of the tale for the Pandavas, for it is a story full of difficult truths.

"There is in it, first, the terrible question of obedience - how Parashurama obeyed even his father's monstrous command, and won a boon by which the wrong was undone, yet left us forever uneasy about how far obedience should go. The tale does not resolve it for us; it leaves us to wrestle with whether any command, however it comes, can justify a monstrous deed - a question you too may one day have to face.

"And there is the long meditation on wrath and vengeance. Parashurama's anger began righteously enough - against a king's real arrogance and the murder of his father - but it grew, fed upon itself, and became a vengeance so vast that it nearly unmade the world, twenty-one times over. See in it the danger of even a just anger indulged without limit: that vengeance has no natural end, that blood calls endlessly for blood, and that the avenger, however right his first cause, may become at last as terrible as what he set out to punish. The wrath was righteous in its root and a horror in its full flower.

"And see, finally, the only true end of vengeance: not in more blood, but in its laying down. Parashurama found peace only when he wearied of his fury, cleansed himself of it, gave away all he had won, and set aside his axe. The cycle of vengeance ends not when the last enemy falls - for there is always another - but when someone chooses, at last, to stop."

And the Pandavas, who stood upon the edge of a great and terrible war of their own, and who would themselves have to reckon with vengeance and its endless cost, took the tale of the axe-warrior deeply and soberly to heart.