Sanatani
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Skandha 8, adhyayas 5-12 · Saptah day 4
Gods and demons churn the milk ocean together, and the first thing that rises is a poison only Shiva will drink.
In the age of the sixth Manu the gods were losing. The demons had beaten them in battle, many lay where they fell, and the three worlds had lost their prosperity. Indra and the gods went to Brahma, and Brahma led them to the shore of the ocean of milk, where they praised the Lord. He appeared to them, and his advice was practical rather than heroic.
Time, he said, was on the demons' side for now. Make peace with them until it turns. Even enemies may be joined with when a task requires it, the way a snake and a mouse shut in one basket leave each other alone. Together you will churn the ocean for the nectar of immortality, with Mandara mountain as the churning rod and the serpent Vasuki as the rope, and I will help you. He warned them against two things: greed for whatever came out of the ocean, and anger if they did not get it.
That answers the first question people ask about this story. The gods did not need the demons for want of better partners. They needed them because they were weak, the work was enormous, and the time was not theirs.
Indra went unarmed to Bali, king of the demons, and a truce was made. Both sides together tried to carry Mandara to the shore and failed; the mountain slipped and crushed many of them. The Lord came on Garuda, lifted it with one hand, set it on Garuda's back and carried it to the sea. Vasuki, promised a share of the nectar, coiled himself around it.
Even the rope became a quarrel. The Lord took hold of the serpent's head with the gods, and the demons protested that the tail was beneath beings of their learning and birth. The Lord smiled, let go of the head and took the tail, and the demons took the head, where, once the churning began, the serpent's fiery breath scorched them.
Then the mountain, with nothing beneath it, began to sink. The Lord took the form of a vast tortoise, went under the water, and bore Mandara on his back like a second island. The text adds that he entered the demons, the gods and the serpent as the power each of them needed, and steadied the mountain from above as well. Every part of the labour, in other words, was his.
What rose first was not nectar. It was halahala, a poison so fierce that it spread in every direction, and every creature fled from it. They ran to Shiva and praised him. Shiva turned to Bhavani and said: look at the plight of these beings. The good protect living things even at the cost of their own fleeting lives, and when one is kind to creatures, Hari, the self of all, is pleased. Bhavani, knowing his power, consented. He gathered the poison in his palm and drank it. It stayed in his throat and turned it blue, and the blue mark became an ornament to him. A few drops fell from his hand, and snakes, scorpions and poisonous plants took them up.
After that came the treasures. The wish-cow went to the sages for their sacrifices, Bali took the horse Uchchaihshravas, Indra the elephant Airavata, and the Lord the jewel Kaustubha. Lakshmi herself rose, looked over every god and sage for a husband without a flaw, found a fault in each, and placed her garland on the Lord. Last came Dhanvantari, a portion of the Lord, holding a pot of nectar, and the demons snatched it and ran.
The gods despaired, and the Lord told them not to. The demons were already quarrelling over who should drink first when a woman of astonishing beauty walked among them. This was Mohini, the Lord himself. Charmed, they handed her the pot and asked her to divide it. She warned them, half in jest, not to trust a woman like her; they laughed and trusted her anyway. She seated gods and demons in separate rows and served the gods, and the demons, having given their word and unwilling to quarrel in front of her, kept silent. Only Rahu slipped into the gods' row in disguise. The sun and moon pointed him out, and the discus took his head; but the head had touched the nectar and could not die, and it became a graha that pursues the sun and moon at the eclipses.
A war follows, and a coda in which Shiva asks to see the Mohini form and is himself bewildered by it for a time before he recovers. But the shape is already clear. The eighth book, which counts the ages of the Manus, pauses on one labour in which everything depends on the Lord, the mountain, its foundation and the strength in every arm, and in which the first thing all that effort produced could be faced only by Shiva.
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