Parasurama

The cow would not stop lowing. It went on across the clearing while the king’s men dragged her away from her calf, and behind them the young trees of the hermitage grove lay snapped where the hunting party had ridden through for the pleasure of it. Smoke still hung over the morning fire. The air smelled of the clarified butter that this cow’s milk supplied for the offerings, which was the whole reason she had been worth taking. The old sage watched and did nothing. He had given up weapons a long time ago.

His youngest son had not.

That son was also called Rama, and to keep the two apart the tradition gave him his tool. Parashurama, Rama with the axe. He is Rama Jamadagnya, son of Jamadagni, and Bhargava Rama, of the ancient priestly line of Bhrigu. He was the last of five brothers born to Jamadagni and to Renuka, a king’s daughter given in marriage to a man whose entire business was recitation and penance. The tradition counts him sixth of Vishnu’s ten descents into the world, and he is the only one of the ten who is a brahmin. The Bhagavata calls his a partial descent rather than a whole one, an incarnation of the god’s wrath and nothing else, and the stories that follow do very little to argue with that reading.

Long before the cow there was the river. Renuka went down to bathe, and on the walk back she happened to look at Chitraratha, who was in the water with his wives, a wreath of lotuses across his chest. The Mahabharata makes him a neighbouring king; the Bhagavata makes him king of the gandharvas and says only that Renuka was captivated and forgot that the hour of the fire offering was passing. She came home frightened. Her husband knew at once, said “Fie,” and told his sons one after another to kill their mother. Rumanvan, then Sushena, then Vasu, then Vishvavasu stood there and could not speak, and he cursed them where they stood into a senseless condition, like beasts and birds. Then the youngest came in from gathering fruit. He picked up an axe and took off his mother’s head.

His father’s rage went out of him instantly, the way a fire goes out when the fuel is gone, and he offered his son anything he wanted. So Rama asked for his mother’s life back, and for his brothers to be restored, and that he never be haunted by the memory of what he had just done, and that no sin attach to it, and that he be unbeaten in battle, and that he live a long time. All of it was granted. He asked for her back, and to be allowed to forget.

The Bhagavata tells it harder. There the brothers refuse and he kills them too, all four, at his father’s word, and the boon he asks is that they come back and not remember having been killed by him. They wake as if from a sound sleep. The versions agree that he obeyed. They disagree about how much he had to destroy in order to.

Then Kartavirya Arjuna came, lord of the sea coast, with a thousand arms and a hunting party’s manners, and took the cow. When Parashurama came home and heard what had happened, he went after the king and cut down all thousand arms, which the epic describes as massive, like the wooden bolts that bar a door. It should have finished there. Instead Kartavirya’s sons waited until Parashurama was away and came to the hermitage and shot the old man full of arrows while he sat at his fire, and he would not lift a hand against them, and they left him calling his son’s name in a helpless and piteous way. Renuka beat her own body with her hands and cried out, O Rama, my son Rama, and the sound carried a very long distance.

He came back carrying firewood for the ritual and found his father dead.

What followed is one of the few atrocities in Indian myth that the text is willing to count out loud. He cremated his father and vowed the destruction of the entire warrior caste. Three times he struck down the followers of Kartavirya’s sons; seven times he emptied the earth of kshatriyas altogether, and three sevens is the twenty-one that the tradition remembers. The widows survived each time and the caste regrew, which is precisely why it took twenty-one. In the tract of land called Samantapanchaka he left five lakes of blood, though the Bhagavata, counting the same ground, says nine. Valmiki gives no number at all and has him say only that he killed them as and when they were born, again and again.

At the end of it he performed a great sacrifice, raised a gold altar ten vyamas broad and nine high, and gave away the earth to the sage Kashyapa. Kashyapa took the gift and told him the obvious consequence of it: the land was no longer his to sleep on. So he went up Mount Mahendra and stayed there.

He came down once. Word reached him that a boy in Janaka’s hall had broken the bow of Shiva, and he arrived carrying the other one, the bow of Vishnu, which the god had entrusted to Ricika of the Bhrigus, who gave it to his son Jamadagni, who gave it to him. Dasharatha begged him to spare his sons and reminded him of everything he had already renounced, including a promise to Indra to lay down weapons. Parashurama did not answer the father. He handed the bow to the son and said, string it, and if you can, I will give you a duel. The younger Rama took it out of his hands with the arrow already fitted, drew it, and then stood there with nowhere to aim, because an arrow from that bow could not be wasted and he would not kill a brahmin. He offered a choice instead: your power to travel at the speed of thought, or the heavens you earned by your austerities. Parashurama chose the heavens, said he had no right to remain on the earth in any case, and stood looking up with his strength gone out of him. The arrow went. He walked once around the boy in respect and returned to the mountain.

He is still there, by the reckoning of the texts, and in the next age of the world he will be one of the seven sages and a teacher of the Vedas. Deathlessness has a consequence in his case that nobody seems to have planned for: the man who emptied the earth of warriors twenty-one times spent the rest of the epic tradition training them. Bhishma learned from him and later fought him for twenty-three days on Amba’s behalf, neither able to finish the other. Karna got the great weapons out of him by claiming to be a brahmin, and gave himself away by lying perfectly still while an insect bored through his thigh rather than wake his teacher, who was sleeping on his lap. No brahmin could bear that much pain. The weapon would fail him at the moment he needed it most, and it did.

Along the western coast the memory is different and much warmer. The Sahyadrikhanda and the seventeenth-century Malayalam Keralolpathi tell how the land from Gokarna south was raised out of the sea at his command, which is why Konkan and Kerala are called Parashurama Kshetra, the field of Parashurama; the texts cannot quite agree whether he did it by throwing his axe or by shooting an arrow. He is also said to have brought brahmins down from the north and settled them there, an act of expiation for all the killing, which is the tradition’s own quiet verdict on it.

There is a further layer worth naming. V. S. Sukthankar argued in 1936, and Robert Goldman worked out at length in 1977, that the Bhargava material in the Mahabharata looks like the work of Bhargava brahmins who had editorial control of the epic while it was growing. On that reading, the story of the brahmin who beat every king on earth is partly a story a priestly family told about itself. That does not make him a late invention; he is old, and he is everywhere. It does mean the loudest voice in his legend belongs to his own relatives.

His powers are almost entirely inherited or granted. The axe, the Vaishnava bow passed down three generations, invincibility in battle and a long life, all of it handed to him by a father whose one request of him was a beheading. What he cannot do is keep anything. He conquered the earth and gave it away and was then barred from sleeping on it. He could not finish the extermination, because the thing he was exterminating grew back twenty-one times. His vows do not hold; he laid down his weapons for Indra and picked them up again over a rumour about a broken bow. And in the one encounter where somebody stands in front of him properly, he is not defeated so much as emptied out, left with nothing to do but hand over the bow and look up. He was granted an extraordinarily long life, and what he does with it is teach.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Parasurama?

Parasurama is the sixth avatar of Vishnu in Hindu mythology, a brahmin sage and warrior whose name means “Rama with the axe.” He was born to the sage Jamadagni and Renuka, and he is the only one of Vishnu’s ten descents who belongs to the priestly class rather than the warrior class. He is best known for destroying the kshatriya warrior caste twenty-one times in revenge for his father’s murder.

Why did Parasurama kill his mother?

Parasurama beheaded his mother Renuka on the direct order of his father Jamadagni, who believed she had been unfaithful in thought after she looked at the king Chitraratha bathing in the river. His four older brothers refused the order and were cursed for it. When Jamadagni offered him any boon in return, Parasurama asked for his mother to be restored to life, for his brothers to recover, and for the memory of the killing not to haunt him.

How many times did Parasurama destroy the kshatriyas?

Twenty-one times, according to the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana. The epic reaches that figure by describing three campaigns against the followers of Kartavirya’s sons and seven separate clearances of the warrior caste from the earth. Each time the surviving widows bore new children and the caste regrew, which is why the destruction had to be repeated.

What happened when Parasurama met Rama?

Parasurama confronted Rama in the Ramayana after hearing that Rama had broken the bow of Shiva at King Janaka’s court. He produced the bow of Vishnu and challenged Rama to string it, but Rama took the weapon from him, drew it, and then demanded a target. Parasurama surrendered the heavenly worlds he had earned through his austerities, and after the arrow destroyed them he withdrew permanently to Mount Mahendra.

Is Parasurama still alive?

In the tradition, yes. The Bhagavata Purana states that Parasurama still lives as a brahmin on Mount Mahendra, having given up the weapons of a warrior, and that in the next cosmic age he will become one of the seven great sages and a teacher of Vedic knowledge. This deathlessness is why later stories can place him as the teacher of figures such as Bhishma and Karna.

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