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Skandha 7, adhyayas 3-7 · Saptah day 3
A boy asked what the best thing he learned at school is answers 'devotion to Vishnu' — to the father who wants Vishnu dead.
Hiranyakashipu's brother had been killed by Vishnu in the form of the boar, and the king of the daityas turned his grief into a plan. He went to a valley of Mount Mandara and began an austerity of frightening force, standing on his toes with his arms raised and his eyes on the sky. Smoke and fire rose from his head and scorched the worlds, and the gods fled to Brahma.
When Brahma came, he found the ascetic buried in an anthill overgrown with grass and bamboo, his flesh eaten away by ants. Brahma sprinkled water from his pot, and Hiranyakashipu rose with a body made new.
The boon he asked for was drafted with a lawyer's care. Let me not die by any being you have made, he said; not inside or outside, not by day or by night, not on the ground or in the sky; not by any weapon; not by man or beast, by god or demon or great serpent. Let me have no rival in battle, sole rule over all beings, and the powers of the yogis. Brahma granted it all.
Hiranyakashipu conquered the three worlds and moved into Indra's palace. The gods, in hiding, prayed to the Lord, and a voice answered: when this king turns on his own son, a gentle boy who bears no one ill will, I will kill him.
That son was Prahlada. The text describes him at length: self-controlled, truthful, humble, untouched by his father's riches, and so absorbed in the Lord that at times he wept, laughed, sang or danced.
He was sent to school under Shanda and Amarka, sons of Shukra, the daityas' preceptor. One day his father took him on his lap and asked what was the best thing he had learned. Prahlada answered that for embodied beings, always anxious over "I" and "mine", the best course is to leave the house, which is a dark well, go to the forest, and take refuge in Hari.
Hiranyakashipu laughed and told the teachers to watch the boy more closely; someone must be spoiling his mind. They questioned Prahlada, and he told them that the very idea of "mine" and "another's" is the Lord's illusion, and that his mind was drawn to Vishnu as iron is drawn to a magnet. The teachers threatened him with the stick and drilled him in the arts of statecraft.
Some time later his father asked again, and this time Prahlada gave the answer the episode is remembered for. Hearing about Vishnu, singing of him, remembering him, serving his feet, worshipping him, bowing to him, serving him as a servant, loving him as a friend, and offering him one's whole self: these nine, when offered directly to the Lord, are the highest learning.
The father threw his son off his lap and turned on the teachers, who said they had not taught him this; it was the boy's own nature. Prahlada agreed. A mind turned toward the Lord, he said, does not come from a teacher, or from one's own effort, or from those at home. It comes only to one who has been bathed in the dust of the feet of the great devotees.
Hiranyakashipu ordered him killed. His demons stabbed at him with tridents. He was thrown before elephants, given to great serpents, attacked with sorcery, hurled from mountain heights, shut in a dungeon, poisoned, starved, exposed to snow and wind and fire and water, and pelted with rocks. Nothing harmed him. The text's explanation is simple: his mind rested in the Lord, the Self of all beings, and against that every effort came to nothing.
When the teachers were away, Prahlada gathered his classmates and taught them. Begin devotion in childhood, he said, because human birth is rare and short. Half of it is lost to sleep, and the rest goes to play, then to family cares, then to the weakness of age. The Lord is not far off. He is in every being, and he is not hard to please.
The boys asked the obvious question: he had had the same teachers as they had, so where had he learned this?
His answer reached back before his birth. When his father had gone to the mountain, Indra seized his mother Kayadhu, pregnant with him, meaning to destroy the daitya's child. Narada stopped Indra, saying that the child in her womb was a great devotee, and took her into his own hermitage. There, for her sake and for the child's, he taught her about dharma and the Lord. She had forgotten it since, Prahlada said, but by Narada's grace he never had.
So the boy who frightens his father is no accident in the family of the daityas. He is the fruit of a teaching given years before, heard from inside a mother's womb. The seventh book builds its drama on that: the most powerful king of the age, armoured by every condition he could think of, and a child at school who already knows the one thing the armour does not cover.
श्रवणं कीर्तनं विष्णोः स्मरणं पादसेवनम् । अर्चनं वन्दनं दास्यं सख्यमात्मनिवेदनम् ॥Hearing about Vishnu, singing of him, remembering him, serving his feet, worshipping, bowing, serving as a servant, loving as a friend, and offering one's whole self.
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