Brahmastra

On the bank of the Ganga a man sat in a robe of woven kusha grass, smeared with clarified butter, the ash of the camp he had burned in the night still on his skin. He heard the chariot coming. He picked up a single blade of grass in his left hand, said a few words over it, and the grass caught. What came out of it was a fire that could have taken the three worlds. That is the whole mechanism. A stalk, a mouth, and a man frightened enough to use it.

The Brahmastra is not forged and it is not carried. It is a formula, Brahma’s own, laid into whatever is to hand. An arrow will do. So will a stalk of grass. The knowledge travels down a line of teachers and is given rather than taken, and the giving always arrives with conditions attached, because everyone who has ever held it understands exactly what it is for.

When the Ramayana finally lets one be seen, at the end of the war outside Lanka, it slows right down over the object. Brahma had made it for Indra, back when Indra wanted the three worlds. Wind sat in its feathers. Fire and the sun were set into its point. Its weight was the weight of Meru and Mandara, its shaft was made of ether, it was worked with gold and its body shone. Feathers of Garuda in several colours had been bound to it for speed. It blazed like the fire that ends a cosmic age, wrapped in its own smoke, and it hissed. The poem also records, without apology, that it was smeared with the blood of everything it had already killed and coated with their marrow. It was not a clean thing.

Rama had drawn it once before, on the shore, out of temper. The sea would not answer him, so he told the sea he would boil it dry and walk his monkeys across the sand. Then he strung the arrow. The sky went dark in the middle of the day and meteors came down through the darkness in their hundreds, the mountains shook, the rivers turned in their beds, and the ocean itself recoiled a full yojana from the shore. Sagara came up out of the water in person, wearing pearls and a garland, and asked him, very politely, to point it somewhere else.

Rama’s reply is the most revealing line anybody speaks about this weapon. The arrow must not go in vain, he said, so where should it land? Once it is out it has to be fed. The ocean nominated a stretch of country to the north where robbers came down to drink, and Rama sent it there, and the ground split and gave off a sound, and the water under the world came up through the crack and dried away. That, the poem says, is where the desert of Maru came from. Rama gave the desert a boon afterwards, which is an odd thing to do to a place you have just destroyed, and is as close as the story comes to an apology.

The Mahabharata follows the other line of descent. Agastya taught Agnivesa, Agnivesa taught Drona, and Drona handed it to Arjuna on a riverbank after the boy put five arrows into the crocodile that had hold of his teacher’s thigh while the rest of the class stood watching. The conditions came with it. Never against a human enemy, Drona said, because loosed at a foe of lesser energy it would burn the universe; keep it for something that is not a man. Arjuna accepted it with joined hands and then kept it in its case through eighteen days of the worst war the epic knows.

Drona’s son wanted it as well. His father gave it to him unwillingly and said so aloud, telling the boy to his face that he did not think he would walk the righteous road. Ashvatthama went off and wandered the earth in grief over that, turned up in Dvaraka, and tried to trade the weapon to Krishna for the discus. He could not shift the discus with his left hand. He could not shift it with his right either. He left with horses and gems and nothing he had come for.

Which brings it back to the grass. Bhima was coming for him and Ashvatthama, out of every other option, let it go for the destruction of the Pandavas. Arjuna stepped down off the chariot, wished his teacher’s son well, bowed to the gods and his elders, and fired his own to cancel it. The two weapons met inside a single sphere of fire. Thunder came in peals, meteors fell in their thousands, and the earth shook with all her mountains and waters on her. Narada and Vyasa walked in between the two burning things, stood there like two fires themselves, and asked the men what they thought they were doing.

Arjuna pulled his back. This is the detail the epic cares about most and spends the most words on, far more than it spends on the destruction. The weapon can be recalled, but only by a man who has kept brahmacharya. Anyone else who tries to take it back after loosing it has his own head struck off by it, and his equipment destroyed with him. Arjuna had kept the vow. Ashvatthama had not, and stood in front of two sages holding a fire he could not put out.

Vyasa told him to throw it into the wombs of the Pandava women and then stop there. He did it. Krishna answered him evenly: the child would die, and being dead would live again, and live long. As for Ashvatthama, he would walk the earth for three thousand years without a companion and without being able to speak to anyone, stinking of pus and blood, carrying the weight of every disease, sleeping in trackless forest and dead moorland. The child was born anyway, was named Parikshit, and ruled for sixty years. Ashvatthama gave up the gem out of his head and went into the forest while they watched.

So the powers are plain enough. It consumes armies, dries seas, and opens the earth down to the water underneath. Nothing in the three worlds is said to match it except another of its own kind, and when two are matched and cancelled the country where it happened gets no rain for twelve years, which is the reason Arjuna would sooner have taken the strike than let his own go off.

The limits are all of a piece with that. An unclean mouth cannot un-say it. It cannot be sent nowhere, because something has to receive it. And it cannot be pointed at a man without the man pointing it becoming, in the text’s own judgement, a killer of children. Drona was right about his son, and knew he was right while he was handing the thing over. The most powerful object in either epic is one that almost nobody in either epic is willing to fire, and both poems are built so that the moment it finally goes off is the moment somebody is damned.

The name is not stable, and the texts make no secret of it. In one speech in the Sauptika Parva, Vyasa calls the weapon Arjuna knows the brahmashira, then a breath later says he had the brahmastra from his teacher’s instruction, and manuscripts, commentators and translators have never fully agreed where one ends and the other starts. Readers since the twentieth century have liked to hear a bomb in all of it, in the darkness at noon and the twelve dry years and the strike at the unborn. The poems are after something narrower and harder than that: the difference between a man who can take back what he has thrown, and a man who cannot.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Brahmastra?

The Brahmastra is a divine missile of Hindu myth associated with the creator god Brahma, invoked by mantra rather than manufactured as a physical object. It can be laid into anything the wielder is holding, from a gold-worked arrow to a single blade of grass. Once released it destroys armies, dries up seas and splits open the ground.

Who was allowed to use the Brahmastra?

Knowledge of the Brahmastra passed down a chain of teachers rather than being taken by force. In the Mahabharata the sage Agastya taught Agnivesa, who taught Drona, who gave it to Arjuna and later, reluctantly, to his own son Ashvatthama. Drona attached an explicit condition: it was never to be used against a human enemy, because loosed at a foe of lesser energy it would burn the universe.

Why could Ashvatthama not recall the Brahmastra?

Recalling the weapon required the wielder to have kept the vow of brahmacharya, and Ashvatthama had not. Anyone who has not kept that discipline and attempts to withdraw the weapon after firing it has his own head struck off by it. Arjuna, who had kept the vow, was able to pull his own weapon back; Ashvatthama could only redirect his, and threw it into the wombs of the Pandava women.

What happened when Rama used the Brahmastra?

Rama used it twice in the Ramayana. On the seashore he aimed it at the ocean, which recoiled a yojana and sent its god up to negotiate, and the arrow was redirected north into the country that became the desert of Maru. At the end of the war outside Lanka, reminded by the charioteer Matali, Rama fired the arrow Brahma had made for Indra straight through Ravana’s heart, and it returned to his quiver afterwards.

Is the Brahmastra the same as the Brahmashira?

The epics use the two names so closely that they cannot be cleanly separated. In a single speech in the Sauptika Parva, Vyasa calls the weapon Arjuna knows the brahmashira and then says he obtained the brahmastra through Drona’s instruction. Popular retellings often rank the brahmashira as the stronger form, but the manuscripts, commentators and translators do not consistently support a fixed distinction.

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Arjuna, Krishna, Rama, Ravana, Brahma, Indra, Visvamitra, Garuda, Vishnu, Shiva, Rakshasa