Hiranyakashipu

On the lower slope of Mount Mandara there was, for a very long time, nothing worth looking at but an anthill. Grass grew over it. Bamboo came up through it. The ants went in and ate a man’s skin, then his fat, then his flesh, then his blood, and left the bones standing upright with the life still in them. Heat came off the mound regardless. It rose in a smoky column out of the crown of a buried head, scorched the worlds above and below, boiled the rivers, shook the continents and knocked stars loose from their courses, until the gods gave up on heaven altogether and went to Brahma to say they could not go on living in a house that was burning.

Inside the anthill was Hiranyakashipu, and he was not praying. He was negotiating.

His brother was dead. He and Hiranyaksha were the two sons of the sage Kashyapa and of Diti, whose children are born into a losing war with the gods and keep fighting it anyway, and Hiranyaksha had just been killed by Vishnu, who came up out of the flood as a boar to do it. Hiranyakashipu’s response to bereavement was not grief but procedure. Brahma rewards austerity, and austerity can be performed. So he stood on the tips of his big toes with his arms stretched above his head and his eyes fixed on the sky, and he went a hundred celestial years without a mouthful of water, which the commentators reckon at thirty-six thousand of ours. When Brahma finally came down on his swan he could not at first see anyone there, and then laughed out loud at the smoking mound, and sprinkled water from his pot over the wreckage. A young man rose out of the bamboo the way fire rises out of kindling: whole in every limb, hard as diamond, the colour of molten gold.

Then came the request, and it is the reason the story has outlasted almost everything around it. He did not ask to be immortal. He asked for something better than immortality, because immortality was not on offer and he had plainly worked on this. Let no being created by Brahma kill him. Not indoors and not outdoors. Not by day and not by night. Not by any weapon. Not on the earth and not in the sky. Not by a man, a beast, a god, a demon or a great serpent. Not by anything living and not by anything dead. And, since he was already there, no equal in battle, sole rulership over every embodied creature, and the standing enjoyed by the guardians of the world.

Brahma granted it.

What followed was exactly what anyone would expect. He took heaven, sat down on Indra’s throne, redirected the sacrifices to himself and ate the offerings meant for the ancestors, so that the dead went hungry along with everybody else. The Nagas said afterwards that he had prised the jewels out of their hoods and carried off their wives. The Gandharvas said he had made them sing. The Yakshas said he had put them under palanquins. The Prajapatis said that under his administration they had not been able to make anything new at all. Every god but the highest three stood up when he entered a room. He held the three worlds for something close to a quarter of an aeon, and no source has a good word to say about how he ran them.

The crack in the arrangement was domestic. His son Prahlada, sent to be taught statecraft by Shanda and Amarka, the sons of the demons’ own priest, kept coming home devoted to Vishnu, the god who had killed the boy’s uncle. Hiranyakashipu tried patience first. There is a moment in the Bhagavata Purana where he lifts the child onto his lap, smells the crown of his head in the old gesture of fatherly love, weeps on him, and asks him to recite something of what he has learned. Prahlada recites the nine forms of devotion to Vishnu. His father throws him on the floor.

After that it stopped being a family argument. Demons with red beards and sharp teeth drove tridents into the boy while he sat there quietly. Then the war elephants, then great serpents, then black magic, cliffs, illusions, dark pits, poison, starvation, snow, wind, fire, and finally mountains dropped on him from a height. None of it took, and the failure frightened the king in a way no army ever had. Later tellings give that fire an operator, an aunt called Holika who sits in the flames holding the boy and burns while he does not, and she is why bonfires go up across northern India every spring. The Bhagavata’s own catalogue of torments never names her.

The end came over a point of theology. Where is your god, Hiranyakashipu asked, if he is everywhere? Is he in this pillar? The boy said yes. His father drew his sword, struck the column with his fist, and the noise that came out of it was loud enough that Brahma, worlds away, mistook it for the end of everything.

What stepped out was neither a man nor an animal, and there went the first clause. Eyes like molten gold, a mane, tusks, a tongue moving like a razor, ears rigid and motionless, mouth and nostrils open like caves in a hillside, and a body tall enough to foul the clouds. Hiranyakashipu went at it with a mace, then with a sword and shield, fast as a hawk and leaving nothing open. Narasimha caught him the way a snake catches a mouse. Then, without hurrying, on the threshold of the assembly hall at the turn of the day, the man-lion sat down, laid the king across his thighs and opened him with his fingernails. Not indoors and not outdoors. Not day and not night. Not on the earth and not in the sky. No weapon. Skin that had turned a thunderbolt gave way to a claw. When it was finished he sat licking the corners of his mouth, his face and mane dark and wet, and the gods came out from behind the clouds to thank him.

His powers were never his own, which is the joke the whole thing is built on. The strength, the invulnerability, the sovereignty, the eight perfections of yoga: all of it was signed over by Brahma, and none of it was his in the way a lion’s teeth are a lion’s. The weakness was in the drafting. He had listed every death he could imagine, and he could imagine a great many, but a list is a shape and a shape has edges, and Vishnu simply walked around the outside of it.

There is one more layer beneath all of this. When the fighting stopped and the gods filed in to praise the man-lion, Vishnu’s own attendants said the quiet part out loud: the thing on the floor had been one of them. A doorkeeper of Vaikuntha, cursed by four child-sages he had turned away at the gate, offered seven births as a devotee or three as an enemy, and choosing the shorter road home. Hiranyakashipu was the first of the three. Ravana was the second.

And there is a version where he softens. The Vishnu Purana, which gives Prahlada four full chapters, has the father relent near the end. He smells his son’s forehead, embraces him, sheds tears, asks “Dost thou live, my son?”, repents of his cruelty and treats the boy kindly from then on. Then, in half a sentence and with no scene attached, he is put to death by Vishnu in the form of the man-lion. Horace Hayman Wilson, translating in 1840, stopped to add a footnote: the man-lion is referred to all over the Puranas, but he had found the story told out in full in one place only. The most famous death in Hindu myth is, in the older telling, an aside.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Hiranyakashipu?

Hiranyakashipu was a Daitya king in Hindu mythology, the son of the sage Kashyapa and Diti and the father of the devotee Prahlada. After his younger brother Hiranyaksha was killed by Vishnu’s boar avatar, he performed an enormous penance on Mount Mandara and won a boon from Brahma that made him effectively unkillable, then seized the three worlds and ruled them for close to a quarter of an aeon.

What was Hiranyakashipu’s boon, and why did it fail?

Brahma refused him outright immortality, so Hiranyakashipu asked instead that no being created by Brahma could kill him, not indoors or outdoors, not by day or by night, not by any weapon, not on the earth or in the sky, and not by man, beast, god, demon, serpent, or anything living or dead. It failed because it was a list rather than a principle. Vishnu took the form of Narasimha, who is neither man nor beast, and killed him at twilight on a threshold, on his own lap, with his fingernails.

How did Narasimha kill Hiranyakashipu?

Hiranyakashipu struck a pillar in his assembly hall while taunting Prahlada about where Vishnu was hiding, and Narasimha, the man-lion, came out of it. After a fight in which Hiranyakashipu used a mace and then a sword and shield, Narasimha seized him, sat on the threshold of the hall at dusk, laid him across his thighs and tore him open with his claws, satisfying every clause of the boon at once.

Why did Hiranyakashipu hate Vishnu?

Vishnu had killed his younger brother Hiranyaksha while in the form of the boar, Varaha. Hiranyakashipu undertook his penance specifically to make himself proof against that god, and when his own son Prahlada turned out to be Vishnu’s devotee, he treated the boy as an accomplice in his brother’s death and tried repeatedly to have him killed.

Was Hiranyakashipu connected to Ravana?

Yes, in one strand of the tradition they are the same soul. The Bhagavata Purana has Vishnu’s attendants reveal that Hiranyakashipu was one of the Lord’s own doorkeepers, cursed by four child-sages and given the choice of seven births as a devotee or three as an enemy; he chose the three. Hiranyakashipu was the first of those births and Ravana the second.

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Narasimha, Vishnu, Varaha, Brahma, Daitya, Asura, Rakshasa, Ravana, Indra, Shiva, Rudra, Garuda, Naga, Sharabha, Gandabherunda