Hayagriva

Somewhere beneath the floor of the world, in the lightless country the epics call Rasatala, a voice started to sing. It held one syllable, long and unhurried, pitched by the strict rules that govern how a Vedic chant is allowed to rise and fall, and the sound travelled out through rock and black water until it reached the two thieves who had come down there to hide.

They had stolen the four Vedas. Madhu and Kaitabha had been born only moments earlier, from two drops of water that Narayana let fall onto the petal of the cosmic lotus while it burned in the light of the sun. One drop was sweet and bright as honey and produced Madhu, who carried the quality of darkness. The other was hard, and produced Kaitabha, who carried the quality of restless passion. The first thing they saw when they opened their eyes was Brahma sitting on the lotus in a delighted mood, shaping the four Vedas into being. They took the books out of his hands while he watched, and carried them down to the nether region.

What Brahma said afterward is one of the more affecting speeches in the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata. The Vedas are my eyes, he said. The Vedas are my strength, my shelter, my highest ground. Without them the worlds have gone dark to me, and what sort of creation am I supposed to make now. Then he prayed, and Narayana woke out of his yogic sleep.

What Narayana built to answer him was not a disguise. It was a second body, and the Mahabharata inventories that body piece by piece as though reading out a map of the universe. He made himself moon-bright, gave the form a fine nose, and set on it a shining horse’s head that was the dwelling place of the Vedas. The sky with all its stars and constellations was the crown of that head. The hair was long and had the brilliance of the rays of the sun. Open space and the underworld were its two ears, and the earth was its forehead. The Ganga and the Sarasvati were its eyebrows, the sun and moon its eyes, the twilight its nose. Lightning was its tongue. The ancestors who drink soma were its teeth. The cattle-heaven and Brahma’s own world were the upper and lower lips. Its neck was Kalaratri, the night that ends a universe.

Then he went down into the dark and sang.

Madhu and Kaitabha set the books aside and went looking for the singer, which is exactly what he wanted. While they were away, the horse-headed god lifted the Vedas out of their hiding place, carried them up and handed them back to Brahma. The killing of the two demons is credited to him as well, but the passage that recovers the books is far more interested in the singing than in the fighting.

Then comes the strange verse. Having restored the Vedas, the text says, he set the horse-head form down in the north-eastern sea and resumed his own nature. P. C. Roy, translating the passage in the nineteenth century, stopped and admitted that he could not settle the reading, because the line seems to contradict the one before it. If Narayana went back to being Narayana, whose is the horse head sitting out there in the water? Nobody has answered that.

A different set of texts explains the head itself, and their version is not heroic at all. In the Skanda Purana, and again in the Devi Bhagavata Purana, Vishnu is found standing asleep with his chin resting on the end of his strung bow. The gods need him awake and cannot rouse him, so somebody decides that plucking the bowstring will do it. In the Devi Bhagavata a colony of termites is talked into gnawing through the string instead, on the promise of a share in future sacrifices. The string parts. The freed end whips back and takes off Vishnu’s head, which flies away and is never recovered. Vishvakarman, the craftsman of the gods, is asked to supply another, and negotiates his own share of the offerings first. In the Skanda Purana he takes one of the horses of the sun, cuts off its head and joins it neatly to the neck of Vishnu, and that is where the god of knowledge got his face.

The Devi Bhagavata supplies the reason. A demon also called Hayagriva had obtained a boon from the Goddess that nothing could kill him except a horse-headed being, which is a very safe boon to hold right up until the moment it is not. The business with the bowstring was not an accident.

The whole sequence is older than the Puranas that tell it. In the Shatapatha Brahmana the gods hold a sacrificial session from which the Ashvins are shut out, and Makha, who is the head of the sacrifice, is identified with Vishnu. His head comes off, and the twin physicians put it back on condition that they receive a portion of the offering. Standing in the same passage is Dadhyanc Atharvana, who taught those twins the sweet honey-doctrine with a horse’s head on his shoulders, because his own head was forfeit if he used it. The Pravargya rite still turns on a clay pot heated until it glows, standing in for a severed head, with milk poured hissing into it. Hayagriva’s horse head grew out of that ritual soil rather than out of a storyteller’s whim.

The doubled name is not a slip either. The Bhagavata Purana runs the theft again with the roles reversed. Brahma, drowsy at the close of an age, lets the Vedas slip out of his mouth, and a danava named Hayagriva carries them off. The god who recovers them in that version is Matsya, the fish, and the chapter closes with Hari killing the asura Hayagriva and giving the books back. The same demon turns up elsewhere in the ranks of Naraka’s army at Pragjyotisha, and the Kalika Purana stations him at the northern gate of that city. One name, two beings, on opposite sides of the same theft, and the texts never entirely settle it.

The god of knowledge is wearing a borrowed head.

The Hayagriva who ended up with the temples is the calm one. He is white, whiter than crystal, seated on a white lotus in white cloth. Vedanta Desika, the Sri Vaishnava teacher who composed the Hayagriva Stotra, gives him four hands: one raised in the gesture that bestows knowledge, one holding the books, the other two holding the conch and the discus. Students still recite that hymn before beginning a course of study, which makes him one of the few gods whose worship is essentially an application form.

At Hajo in Assam, on Manikuta hill, the Hayagriva Madhava temple stands on foundations dated to the tenth or eleventh century and was rebuilt in 1583 by the Koch king Raghudeva Narayan. The Kalika Purana, composed in that same region, has Hayagriva-Vishnu kill the fever demon Jvarasura on that hill. Buddhist pilgrims climb it for reasons of their own, holding that the Buddha died there.

The Brahmanda Purana complicates his portfolio in a way worth noticing. There Hayagriva does not own the highest knowledge. He receives it. The secret glory of the goddess Lalita is given to him by the Devi and he passes it along, so the lord of learning is, in that telling, a student.

The Buddhist Hayagriva went a different way entirely. He begins in India as a yaksha attached to Avalokitesvara and hardens into a wrathful protector: red-bodied, three-eyed, fanged, hung with snakes, with one or three small green horse heads rearing out of his flaming hair. His weapon is a neigh. The sound is said to drive demons out of hiding, which is the Mahabharata’s trick again with the volume turned up. Under the name Tamdrin he became one of the most widely invoked protectors in Tibet, and as Bato Kannon he reached Japan, where he looks after animals. R. H. van Gulik traced that migration across China and Japan in a 1935 dissertation that is still the standard account.

What he can do follows directly from what he is. He is the dwelling place of the Vedas, so he restores speech, text and memory when they have been carried off, and he gives them to people who ask before they start. His real instrument is his voice, and it works by attraction rather than force. He does not chase the thieves. He makes them come to him.

His limits are stranger than most gods’. His head is not his own, and it had to be fitted by a smith who bargained for payment before he would do it. The Vedas he recovers can be stolen again, and are, in text after text, because a book left with a sleeping keeper is a book on its way out the door. His grandest form is temporary, laid down in a north-eastern sea when the work is finished. And the one thing he was assembled to destroy carries his name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hayagriva in Hindu mythology?

Hayagriva is a horse-headed form of Vishnu, worshipped as the god of knowledge and learning. His central myth appears in the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata, where he recovers the four Vedas after the demons Madhu and Kaitabha steal them from Brahma and hide them in the underworld. His name is Sanskrit for “horse-necked”.

Why does Hayagriva have a horse’s head?

Two different explanations survive. In the Mahabharata he deliberately assembles the horse-headed body as a second form, with the sky for a crown and lightning for a tongue. In the Skanda Purana and the Devi Bhagavata Purana it is an injury: Vishnu falls asleep leaning on his strung bow, the string is gnawed through by termites and snaps, his head is carried away, and the craftsman Vishvakarman replaces it with the head of one of the horses of the sun.

Is Hayagriva a god or a demon?

Both, depending on the text. The Vaishnava tradition treats Hayagriva as a form of Vishnu who rescues the Vedas, but the Bhagavata Purana gives the same name to a danava who steals them and is killed by Matsya, the fish avatar. The Vishnu Purana and the Kalika Purana also list a demon Hayagriva among the forces of Naraka at Pragjyotisha.

How is Hayagriva worshipped?

He is invoked at the start of study. Vedanta Desika’s Hayagriva Stotra, composed in the Sri Vaishnava tradition, is recited by students and scholars before beginning sacred or secular learning, and it describes him as white as crystal with four hands holding a book, a conch, a discus and the gesture that bestows knowledge. His best-known temple is the Hayagriva Madhava temple on Manikuta hill at Hajo in Assam.

Where does the Buddhist Hayagriva fit in?

The Buddhist Hayagriva is a wrathful protector rather than a serene teacher, red-bodied and fanged, with small horse heads rising from his hair, and he is understood as an emanation of Avalokitesvara. His characteristic weapon is a horse’s neigh that drives obstacles and demons out of hiding. He is called Tamdrin in Tibet and Bato Kannon in Japan.

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