Dadhichi

The bees in the hermitage hum so steadily that the old poem compares them to priests chanting. It stands on the far bank of the Sarasvati, under trees roped with creepers. Cuckoos call. Buffalo, boar and deer wander between the trunks and take no notice of the tigers, and elephants stand in the river shallows, trumpeting and spraying each other. In the middle of all this noise sits a man so bright that the gods, who have come a long way to see him, think for a moment they are looking at Brahma.

They have come to ask him to die.

This is the best-known hour in the life of Dadhichi, as the Mahabharata tells it in its third book. The gods are losing a war. The demon Vritra, backed by a host called the Kalakeyas, has beaten them out of their own heaven, and no weapon they own will bite. Brahma gives them the answer and it is not a comfortable one. There is a seer on the Sarasvati. Ask him for his bones. A weapon made from those will do it.

So Indra and the rest walk into the humming grove, bow at the feet of the shining man, and ask. The poem gives him almost no time to think. He is glad to see them. He says he will do what is good for them, and that he gives up his body of his own free will. Then, in the same breath, he stops living. The gods take the bones to Tvashtri, the craftsman of heaven, who works them with great care into a six-sided thing of terrible weight: the vajra, the thunderbolt. He hands it to Indra and tells him to burn the enemy to ash with it. Indra does.

That is the whole of it. A man is asked for his skeleton and says yes.

The story is much older than the epic, and its oldest form is stranger. In the hymns of the Rigveda the sage is called Dadhyanch, son of the fire-priest Atharvan, and he is famous for something else entirely. He knows a secret called the honey, and he tells it to the Ashvins, the twin horsemen who serve as doctors to the gods. He tells it through the head of a horse. The hymns mention this the way people mention something everybody already knows, in a line or two, and move on.

A later priestly text, the Shatapatha Brahmana, fills in what happened, and it reads like a heist. Dadhyanch knew how the severed head of the sacrifice is put back on, the innermost secret of the whole ritual. Indra knew that he knew, and made a promise: teach it to anyone and I will cut off your head. The Ashvins badly wanted to learn it. So the twins came to him with a plan that only two surgeons could have thought of. They would take off his head themselves and put it somewhere safe. They would fit him with a horse’s head. He would teach them through that. Indra would keep his word and strike off the horse’s head, and then they would put the real one back.

It worked exactly as planned. The long-jawed head spoke the secret, the god’s blade fell, the twins stitched their teacher together again, and Indra had technically done what he said he would. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad later names this honey teaching as its own and credits Dadhyanch with passing it on. One of its deepest lessons about how every thing in the world feeds every other thing arrives with a footnote about a horse.

The Rigveda even knows what became of the spare head. Indra went looking for it afterwards, the hymn says, found it lying hidden in the hills at a lake called Sharyanavat, and with the bones of Dadhyanch struck down ninety-nine Vritras. That one verse is the seed of everything later. In the oldest telling the bones that kill the demon may be the horse’s. By the time of the epic they are the man’s own, and the tale has turned from a clever trick into a gift.

His birth gets less attention than his death. The Bhagavata Purana makes him the son of Atharvan and a mother named Chitti, and keeps his horse-headed nickname. The ninth book of the Mahabharata adds a family. Indra, uneasy about the power the sage was storing up through his austerities, sent the nymph Alambusha to distract him. She did, at a distance, and his seed fell into the Sarasvati. The river herself carried the child and brought the boy to his father, who blessed her waters for it. That son, Sarasvata, grew up to be the one man who still remembered the Vedas after a twelve-year drought had scattered every other priest in search of food.

Other books explain why his bones in particular were the right ones. The Shiva Purana and Linga Purana tell of a quarrel with his friend King Kshupa over whether priests or kings rank higher. It ended in blows, and Dadhichi came off worse until he turned to Shiva, who granted him bones as hard as the thunderbolt and a body no one could kill against his will. A different late telling has the gods leave all their weapons with him for safe keeping while they were away. They were gone so long that he tired of guarding the pile, dissolved the weapons in water and drank it, and their force settled in his bones. The same Shiva texts make him the one guest with nerve at the sacrifice of Daksha, where he stands up, says that a rite which shuts out Shiva will end in ruin, and walks out before it does.

The Bhagavata Purana tells the death scene again with a small change. Here it is Vishnu who sends the gods, and the sage does not agree at once. He teases them first. Does anyone, he asks, give away his own body, when every living thing clings to it so hard and dying hurts so much? Then he answers himself. The body will be gone soon whatever he does, and it may as well be useful. He sits, stills his breath, and leaves it behind. Vishvakarma makes the bolt, and Indra rides out on his elephant Airavata to finish the war.

What Dadhichi can do follows from what he is. He holds knowledge that even the king of the gods fears to see shared. He can survive the loss of his head, twice, with the right doctors. His bones outlast and outmatch iron, and he can step out of his body at a moment of his own choosing. His limits are just as plain. He never lifts a weapon in his own cause, and when he does throw a punch he loses the fight. The famous hardness of his bones is of no use to anyone while he is alive. And for all that he knows, he is a man who cannot refuse a request.

At Misrikh, near the forest of Naimisha in Uttar Pradesh, people still show the pond where the waters of every holy river are said to have been gathered so that he could bathe in all of them before he sat down for the last time. And in 1950, when the new Republic of India designed its highest award for courage in battle, the bronze disc of the Param Vir Chakra was struck with four thunderbolts on its face.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dadhichi in Hindu mythology?

Dadhichi is a sage, called Dadhyanch in the Vedas, who is the son of the fire-priest Atharvan. He is best known for giving up his life so the gods could make the vajra, Indra’s thunderbolt, from his bones.

Why did Dadhichi give his bones to Indra?

The gods had been defeated by the demon Vritra and no existing weapon could kill him. In the Mahabharata, Brahma tells the gods that only a weapon made from Dadhichi’s bones will work, so they ask him, and he agrees and dies at once. In the Bhagavata Purana it is Vishnu who sends them.

Why does Dadhichi have a horse’s head?

Dadhichi knew a secret teaching called the honey doctrine, and Indra had sworn to behead him if he shared it. The Ashvins swapped Dadhichi’s head for a horse’s head so he could teach them, let Indra cut the horse’s head off, and then put his own head back. The story is told in the Shatapatha Brahmana.

Who made the vajra from the bones of Dadhichi?

In the Mahabharata the vajra is made by Tvashtri, the craftsman of the gods. The Bhagavata Purana gives the work to Vishvakarma instead. In both, Indra uses the weapon to kill Vritra.

Who is the son of Dadhichi?

The Mahabharata names Sarasvata as the son of Dadhichi, born from the river Sarasvati after the sage saw the nymph Alambusha. Sarasvata later preserved the Vedas through a twelve-year drought when the other priests had forgotten them.

Related Entries

Indra, Vritra, Vajra, Kalakeyas, Sarasvati, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Daksha, Sati, Airavata, Apsaras, Rishi, Hayagriva, Mímir