The Three-Headed Priest

The sages told the Pandavas of Trishira, the three-headed son of the divine craftsman Tvashta, and of the terrible chain of events his death set in motion - the sin of Indra, the birth of Vritra, and the great drought - a tale of how suspicion and a hasty killing breed an enemy far worse than the one destroyed.

The divine craftsman Tvashta, the maker of forms among the gods, had a son named Trishira, also called Vishvarupa, the All-Formed: a being born with three heads. With one head he recited the sacred Vedas; with the second he drank wine; and with the third he gazed upon all the quarters of the world, as if devouring them with his eyes. Trishira was a brahmana of fierce austerity and great holiness, who practiced penance with terrible severity, and his power grew until the gods, and Indra their king, began to watch him with unease, fearing what so mighty an ascetic might become.

Trishira, though he served as a priest and lived in holiness, was the son of Tvashta, and his mother was of the line of the demons, the foes of the gods. As his penance grew ever more severe and his power ever greater, Indra, the king of the gods, was seized with suspicion and fear. He saw the three-headed ascetic growing mightier by the day, and he imagined that Trishira meant in time to supplant him, to seize the throne of heaven, to use his accumulated power against the gods on behalf of his mother's demon kin.

The more Indra watched, the more his fear and suspicion grew, until he could no longer bear it. He tried first to tempt the ascetic from his penance: he sent the loveliest of the heavenly nymphs, the apsaras, to seduce Trishira and break his concentration with their beauty and their dancing. But the three-headed sage was unmoved; he sat rapt in his austerity, his senses wholly mastered, and the nymphs returned having failed to stir him at all. And this only deepened Indra's dread; for an ascetic so perfectly in command of himself seemed to him only the more dangerous.

His fear overcoming his judgment, Indra resolved to destroy the three-headed ascetic before he could grow more powerful. Hurling his thunderbolt, the dread weapon Vajra, Indra struck Trishira down where he sat absorbed in penance, and the holy ascetic, who had done him no wrong, was slain - killed not for any crime, but for the fear and suspicion of what he might one day become.

But even fallen, the three-headed body of Trishira blazed with such radiance and seemed so charged with power that Indra was still afraid, dreading that the ascetic might somehow revive or that his power lingered in the corpse. So Indra called to a woodcutter who was passing and bade him cut off the three heads of the slain sage. The woodcutter, fearing to refuse the king of the gods, took his axe and struck off the three heads; and from the severed heads there flew up flocks of birds - partridges and sparrows and other fowl, born of the holy power stored in those heads that had recited the Vedas, drunk the wine, and gazed upon the world. So Trishira was slain and beheaded, an innocent ascetic destroyed by a king's fear; and the deed lay heavy as sin upon Indra.

When Tvashta the craftsman learned that his innocent son Trishira had been slain by Indra out of mere suspicion, struck down at his penance and beheaded though he had done no wrong, his grief turned to a terrible wrath. He resolved to avenge his son and to punish the king of the gods for the murder of a holy and harmless ascetic.

So Tvashta, by his divine craft and the power of his penance, set himself to create an avenger - a being mighty enough to destroy Indra and humble the gods. From the sacrificial fire, with potent rites and offerings, he brought forth a monstrous and gigantic demon, fashioned for one purpose: the destruction of Indra. This was Vritra - a vast and terrible being, swelling huge as a mountain, growing greater day by day, charged with all the avenging fury his maker had poured into him. Out of the murder of the three-headed sage was born a far more dreadful foe than Trishira had ever been; the hasty killing born of fear had created the very enemy Indra most dreaded, and worse.

The demon Vritra grew until he was vast beyond measure, a being that filled the sky and covered the worlds, and he came against the gods in terrible power. The gods, with Indra at their head, gave battle; but Vritra was mightier than them all. He overwhelmed the host of heaven, scattering the gods before him, and he seized the very order of the world in his grip - in some tellings swallowing Indra himself, in others driving the king of the gods to flee in terror from the field.

For Vritra was no ordinary foe: he was the obstructor, the encloser, who held back the waters and the rains, coiling about the world and shutting up the life-giving floods within him, so that the rivers ceased to flow and a great drought fell upon the earth, and all things began to wither and die for want of water. The gods, defeated and dismayed, with Indra humbled and afraid, saw that they could not overcome this demon by force of arms; and the world languished under the drought that Vritra's coils imposed. The avenger born of Tvashta's grief had brought the gods themselves to the edge of ruin.

Unable to defeat Vritra in battle, the gods and sages sought another way. They went between the two sides and arranged a truce, a pact of peace between Indra and Vritra, sworn with solemn conditions: that Indra would not slay Vritra with anything dry or anything wet, nor with stone nor wood, nor with any weapon, nor by day nor by night. With these terms, binding Indra by oath, a peace was made, and for a time the war was stilled.

But Indra did not keep faith. He watched and waited for a moment that would fall outside the letter of his oath, that he might destroy Vritra without seeming to break the terms. And at last, at the twilight hour - neither day nor night - he came upon Vritra by the seashore, where a great mass of foam rose upon the waves. The foam was neither dry nor wet, neither stone nor wood, nor any weapon; and so Indra hurled it at Vritra, and into that foam he cast his thunderbolt hidden, and with it struck the demon down. So Vritra was slain at last - but by a treachery, an oath kept only in its letter and broken in its spirit; and the manner of the killing, like the killing of Trishira before it, was a stain upon Indra.

With Vritra slain, the waters were released, the rains returned, and the drought was ended; the world revived, and the rivers ran again. But Indra found no peace, for upon him now lay a double guilt: the murder of Trishira, the innocent three-headed brahmana, and the slaying of Vritra by treachery against his sworn oath. The sin of these deeds - and above all the dreadful sin of brahmanicide, the killing of a brahmana - pursued the king of the gods and would not let him rest.

So heavy was the guilt that Indra, the very king of heaven, was overcome by it. His power and his splendor drained away; unable to bear the weight of his sin, he fled and hid himself, shrinking into the stalk of a lotus in a lake at the end of the world, dwindling almost to nothing, and there he lay concealed, a fallen and diminished king, while heaven languished without its lord. The mighty Indra, who had slain his foes by suspicion and by treachery, was brought low by the consequences of his own deeds, and had to wander long and perform long penance and expiation before he could be cleansed of his guilt and restored to his throne. The killing that began in fear had ended in the ruin of the killer.

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

'See, first, how suspicion and the hasty deeds it breeds create the very evils they fear. Indra slew the three-headed Trishira out of mere suspicion of what he might become, though the sage had done no wrong; and from that murder was born Vritra, a foe a thousandfold more terrible, who nearly destroyed the gods and parched the world with drought. The tale teaches that to strike down another out of fear and suspicion, without just cause, is not safety but folly; that such a deed sows a far worse harvest than the danger it sought to forestall; and that the enemy we create by our own injustice is more dreadful than any we imagined.

'And see how the consequences of wrongdoing pursue even the mightiest, and how the end does not justify foul means. Indra slew Vritra by breaking the spirit of his sworn oath, by treachery; and the double sin of the innocent priest's murder and the broken faith pursued the king of the gods until his splendor failed and he hid himself, diminished, in a lotus stalk, and had to expiate his guilt with long penance. No power and no throne, the tale teaches, sets one above the reckoning for injustice and broken faith. Act, then, not from fear and suspicion but from justice; keep faith even with your enemies; for the wrong done in fear or by treachery returns upon the doer, however high he sits.'

And the Pandavas, who would face their own kin in war and be sorely tempted to win by any means, took soberly to heart the tale of the king of the gods undone by suspicion and broken faith.