The Boy Who Would Not Bow

Among the tales the sages told the Pandavas was the story of Prahlada, the demon's son who loved God, and of how the Lord took a form that was neither man nor beast to keep an impossible promise.

There was once a mighty demon king named Hiranyakashipu, whose brother had been slain by the Lord Vishnu in an earlier age. Burning with hatred and grief, Hiranyakashipu swore vengeance upon Vishnu and upon all who worshipped him, and he resolved to make himself so powerful that no one - not god, not man, not the Lord himself - could ever stand against him. To this end he went into the wilderness and undertook a penance of fearful severity, standing in austerities for ages until the heat of his discipline shook the heavens and compelled the creator Brahma to come before him and grant him a boon.

Hiranyakashipu asked for immortality, but Brahma told him that no creature can be wholly deathless. So the cunning demon, thinking to make himself unkillable in effect, framed his wish with great care, blocking off every avenue of death he could imagine.

"Then grant me this," he said. "Let me not be slain by any creature you have made, neither god nor demon nor man nor beast. Let me not be killed indoors nor outdoors, neither by day nor by night, neither on the ground nor in the sky. Let no weapon be able to harm me, neither anything dry nor anything wet. Let me be master of all the worlds, and let none be able to bring about my death."

Brahma granted the boon exactly as it was asked, hedged about with all its conditions, and departed. And Hiranyakashipu, believing he had sealed off every possible road to his own death, laughed in his pride. He fell upon the worlds and conquered them, drove the gods from heaven, seized dominion over all things, and in his arrogance declared that he himself was now the only god, and commanded that all creatures worship him alone and speak the name of Vishnu no more.

But in the very house of this enemy of Vishnu, a strange and beautiful thing happened. Hiranyakashipu had a young son named Prahlada, and from his earliest childhood Prahlada was a pure and ardent devotee of the very Lord his father hated. While still a small boy he loved Vishnu with his whole heart, spoke his name constantly, saw him in all things, and could not be turned from his devotion by anything in the world.

When Hiranyakashipu discovered that his own son and heir worshipped his hated enemy, he was first astonished, then furious. He summoned the boy and commanded him to give up this folly, to forget Vishnu and worship his father as the only god. But Prahlada answered, with the fearless simplicity of a child who loves truly, that Vishnu was the Lord of all, present everywhere and in everything, and that he could no more stop loving him than he could stop breathing. No threat and no command could shake the boy's quiet, unwavering devotion. The demon king had conquered the three worlds, but he could not conquer the heart of his own little son.

Hiranyakashipu first tried to have the boy taught out of his devotion, handing him to teachers to fill his mind with the ways of demons and the worship of his father. But Prahlada only turned the lessons back, teaching his own schoolmates to love Vishnu, so that the teachers despaired. Reasoning, scolding, bribing, threatening - nothing could move the child from his love of the Lord.

Then the father's patience turned to murderous rage. If the boy would not abandon his enemy, the boy would die. And so Hiranyakashipu set about killing his own son.

But every attempt failed. He had Prahlada thrown from a high cliff, and the boy landed unharmed. He had him cast among venomous serpents, and they did not bite him. He had him trampled by maddened war-elephants, and they could not crush him. He had him given deadly poison, and it did not sicken him. He had him thrown into a great fire, and the flames did not burn him. Through every torment, Prahlada simply went on calmly loving and remembering Vishnu, and by the grace of the Lord no harm could touch him. The more his father tried to destroy him, the more plainly it was shown that a power greater than the demon's protected the devoted boy.

At last Hiranyakashipu, beside himself with fury and unable to kill the boy by any means, confronted his son in the great hall of his palace, and demanded an answer.

"You say this Vishnu of yours is everywhere," the demon roared, "present in all things, the Lord of all. Very well. Where is he, then? Is he here in this hall? Is he in this pillar before us? Show me your all-present God!"

And Prahlada answered without fear, in perfect faith: "Yes, father. He is here. He is in this pillar, and in everything, and in every place. There is nowhere that he is not."

Hiranyakashipu, in a frenzy of rage and scorn, drew his sword. "Then let your God save you now," he cried, "for I shall strike this pillar, and we shall see whether your Vishnu is in it!" And with all his demonic strength he smote the great pillar of the hall a tremendous blow.

The pillar split open with a roar like thunder that shook the whole palace - and out of it burst a form more terrible than anything the worlds had ever seen. It was Vishnu himself, come in a shape devised exactly to answer the demon's boon: Narasimha, the man-lion. From the waist down he had the body of a man, but his head and his fore-parts were those of a great lion, with a flaming golden mane, blazing eyes, and gaping fanged jaws and terrible claws. He was neither wholly man nor wholly beast, but both and neither - and so outside the protection of a boon that guarded only against man and beast.

The man-lion sprang upon Hiranyakashipu with a roar that filled the worlds. The demon, who had conquered gods and trampled creation, who had thought himself proof against every death, found himself face to face with a form his careful boon had never accounted for, and for the first time he knew fear. He fought and struggled, but he was as a child in the grip of the man-lion, and the moment of his reckoning had come.

And then, blow by blow, the man-lion fulfilled every single clause of the boon while slaying the demon who had thought that boon made him safe.

Hiranyakashipu could not be killed by god, demon, man, or beast - so he was slain by Narasimha, who was none of these, but a man-lion, a form belonging to no category of creature. He could not be killed indoors or outdoors - so the Lord seized him and dragged him to the very threshold of the hall, the doorway that is neither inside nor outside. He could not be killed by day or by night - and it was now the twilight, the gray in-between hour that is neither day nor night. He could not be killed on the ground or in the sky - so Narasimha sat upon the threshold and laid the demon across his own lap, which is neither the earth nor the air. And he could not be killed by any weapon, wet or dry - so the man-lion used no weapon at all, but tore the demon apart with his bare claws.

In that single moment every protection of the great boon was honored to the letter and turned inside out. Hiranyakashipu, who had blocked every road to his death with such cunning, died in the one impossible space that lay between all his conditions - and so the Lord kept the boon and slew the tyrant both at once.

The man-lion's wrath was so terrible that even the gods, watching, were afraid, and none could calm him - none but the boy. Little Prahlada came forward without fear and bowed before the fearsome form of Narasimha, the Lord he had loved through every torment, and at the sight of his pure devotee's serene and loving face, the terrible anger of the man-lion grew still.

Vishnu blessed the boy, and offered him any boon he wished. And Prahlada, true to his nature, asked nothing for himself - not the kingdom, not power, not even reward - but only that his heart might remain forever fixed in love of the Lord, and, in his goodness, he even asked mercy and a good destiny for his cruel father, forgiving the one who had tried so many times to kill him.

Then Prahlada, the demon's son who had loved God, was made king in his father's place, and he ruled the asuras with righteousness and devotion, a just and gentle king where his father had been a tyrant. And his name became, ever after, the very byword for pure, fearless, unwavering devotion - the boy who could not be turned from his love of the Lord by torment or by death, and for whose sake the Lord himself burst out of a pillar.

The sages drew out for the Pandavas the meaning of the tale.

"See first the power of devotion, son of Pandu. A small boy, alone in the house of the Lord's greatest enemy, threatened and tortured and flung from cliffs and cast into fire, could not be turned from his love of God, nor harmed while that love protected him. His faith was stronger than all his father's might. There is no armor like a pure and fearless heart.

"And see, once more, the old truth about pride. Hiranyakashipu blocked every road to his death with the most careful cunning - not by man or beast, not day or night, not indoors or out, not on ground or in air, not by any weapon. And the Lord slew him precisely in the seams between all his conditions, in the one space his pride had not imagined. The arrogant always believe they have closed every door; but there is always a door they have not seen, and through it their reckoning comes. No boon, no cleverness, no power can armor a wicked heart against the consequence of its own evil."

And the Pandavas remembered the man-lion and the boy, and took to heart both lessons: the unconquerable strength of devotion, and the certain, patient loophole that waits in every tyrant's pride.