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Skandha 8, adhyayas 2-4 · Saptah day 4
A king of elephants fights a crocodile for a thousand years, and is saved only when he stops fighting and calls.
Shuka places this story in the age of the fourth Manu, and he tells it in full because Parikshit asks to hear it. It begins far from any city, on a mountain called Trikuta that rises out of the ocean of milk.
The mountain had three peaks, of iron, silver and gold, and its slopes held forests, streams and a garden that belonged to Varuna. Through those woods moved a great elephant, lord of a herd, with his mates and young ones behind him. Lesser animals stepped out of his way. On a hot day, smelling lotus pollen on the wind, he led them all down to a lake, drank his fill, and then did what a strong animal does in water when it feels safe: he played. He drew water up in his trunk and showered his mates and calves with it, looking after them the way a householder looks after his family.
Then a crocodile seized his leg.
The fight that follows is the strangest detail in the story, and the text means it to be strange. The elephant pulled toward the shore and the crocodile pulled toward the deep, and this went on, Shuka says, for a thousand years, while the gods looked on and marvelled that both were still alive. The herd tried to haul their leader out and could not. Slowly the balance turned. The elephant was out of his element and weakened year by year; the crocodile was at home in the water and grew stronger.
At the end of his strength Gajendra reasoned it through. His kin could not save him. His mates could not save him. What held him was not finally a crocodile but something larger, the great serpent of death that pursues every living thing, and against that only the one who is the refuge even of death could help. So he turned his mind inward and began to pray, and the words that came to him were words he had learned in an earlier life.
That prayer, the Gajendra Stuti of the third chapter, is the heart of the episode. It opens "oṁ namo bhagavate tasmai", salutation to that Lord from whom this conscious world comes, and what is remarkable is what it does not do. It names no god. It addresses the first cause, the witness within every being, the one beyond all qualities and forms. At its most moving point the elephant says he has no wish to go on living as an elephant, covered in darkness inside and out. He asks to be freed from the covering over the self, not merely from the crocodile.
Shuka explains what happened next with some care. Brahma and the other gods heard the prayer, but each of them identified with his own particular form, and the prayer was addressed to none of them in particular. So none came. Hari, who holds all the gods within himself, came in person, riding Garuda, discus in hand. Gajendra saw him, raised a lotus in his trunk with great effort, and called out "nārāyaṇākhila-guro bhagavan namas te": Narayana, teacher of all, Lord, I bow to you. Hari sprang down from Garuda, drew elephant and crocodile together out of the lake, and split the crocodile's jaws with his discus.
Both creatures were released, and the fourth chapter tells who they had been. The crocodile was a gandharva named Huhu, cursed by the sage Devala for pulling at his leg in the water as a prank; he rose now in his own bright form and went home. The elephant had been Indradyumna, a Pandya king devoted to Vishnu, who had been sitting in silent worship when the sage Agastya came by, and had not risen to greet him. Agastya, seeing that stiffness, cursed him to a birth where dullness is the nature of the body: an elephant's. Yet the worship he had done as a king outlived the curse, and at the last moment it came back to him as the prayer. Touched by the Lord's hand, Gajendra took a form like Hari's own, four-armed and dressed in yellow, and went with him as his companion.
The Lord then promised that those who rise at the end of night and praise him with this prayer would be given a clear mind at the hour of death. That promise is why the prayer is still recited at dawn and in danger. It is also why the episode stands at the opening of the eighth book. The Manus and their ages are a long account of cosmic time, and the book begins that account with a single creature caught in time's jaws, who finds the way out only when he stops relying on his own strength.
ॐ नमो भगवते तस्मै यत एतच्चिदात्मकम् । पुरुषायादिबीजाय परेशायाभिधीमहि ॥Om, salutations to the Lord, from whom this conscious world comes — to the Person, the first seed, the supreme ruler, on whom we meditate.
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