Sanatani
Opening your Sanatani workspace
Skandha 3, adhyayas 13; 17-19 · Saptah day 2
A boar no bigger than a thumb leaps from Brahma's nostril, grows to fill the sky, and dives into the ocean for the sunken earth.
When Brahma had brought forth Svayambhuva Manu and his wife Shatarupa, the first parents of this age of the world, Manu asked what he should do. Have children, Brahma said, rule the earth by dharma, and worship the Lord with sacrifice.
Manu raised a practical difficulty. Where would his children live? The earth, the home of every creature, had sunk into the great waters. Brahma should find a way to raise her.
Brahma was at a loss. He had been absorbed in creating while the earth sank, and he could not think how to raise her. At last he hoped that the Lord from whom he himself had come would see to it.
While he was still thinking, a tiny boar, no bigger than the tip of a thumb, came out of his nostril. As Brahma watched, it stood in the sky and in a moment grew to the size of an elephant, and went on growing. Brahma, with Marichi and the other sages, the Kumaras and Manu, stared at it. Something the size of a thumb-tip came out of my nose, Brahma said, and now it is as large as a great rock. Could this be the Lord of sacrifice himself, bewildering my mind?
The boar roared like a mountain, and the sound filled the directions and delighted Brahma and the sages. They knew him for the Lord and praised him with verses of the three Vedas. Then, with an elephant's playfulness, he plunged into the water.
The text keeps the details of a real boar. His bristles were stiff, his hooves struck the clouds, his tusks were white. He sniffed his way along, tracking the earth by her scent as a boar tracks food. As he dived, his body split the ocean open, and the waters, as if raising their waves like arms, cried out to the Lord of sacrifice to save them. Deep below he found the earth and lifted her on his tusks.
As he rose with her, the demon Hiranyaksha, whose strength no one could withstand, came at him with a mace and blocked his way. The Lord killed him in the water, the text says briefly, as easily as a lion kills an elephant. Chapters 17 to 19 tell that fight at length.
The sages' hymn closes the thirteenth chapter. Victory to you, they cry, who shake out your body made of the three Vedas. They call the boar's body the sacrifice itself: the Vedic metres in his skin, the sacred grass in his bristles, the ghee in his eyes, the four priestly offices in his four feet. The earth on the point of his tusk, with all her mountains, looks to them like a lotus with its leaves lifted on the tusk of a great elephant coming up out of a lake. Then the Lord set the earth firmly on the water, gave her his own power to stay there, and withdrew.
Diti's twins, the gatekeepers cursed at Vaikuntha, were born amid dreadful omens: the earth shook, meteors fell, jackals howled. Hiranyakashipu won his boons from Brahma. Hiranyaksha, mace in hand, roamed looking for a fight while the gods hid from him. He beat the ocean's waves with his mace for years and mockingly challenged Varuna, lord of the waters. Varuna kept his temper and sent him to the ancient Person, Vishnu, who would humble his pride.
From Narada the demon learned where to look. He found the Lord in the depths, the earth on his tusks, jeered at him as a forest beast, and told him to let go of the earth, which belonged to the dwellers below. The Lord let the taunts pass. He set the earth on the water, gave her his strength, and only then turned to fight.
Their battle with maces was long. Brahma, watching, urged the Lord to finish before dusk, when the demon's power would grow; this, he said, was the auspicious hour. Hiranyaksha knocked the mace from the Lord's hand, and then, honouring the rules of combat, would not strike an unarmed opponent. The Lord called his discus. The demon hurled a trident, and the discus cut it to pieces. His sorcery, darkness and foul rains the discus scattered too. At last he tried to crush the Lord in his arms, but the Lord was outside his grip. He struck the demon once with his open hand at the root of the ear, and Hiranyaksha fell like a great tree torn up by the wind.
Brahma and the gods said no one had died a better death: he gave up his body looking at the face yogis seek in meditation. He was one of the Lord's own attendants, they recalled, born a demon by a curse, and after a few births he would return to his place.
That is why the book binds the two stories together across a gap of chapters. The rescue of the earth is also the first step in working out the curse at Vaikuntha's gate. The same descent that saves the world begins to bring a servant home.
Opening your Sanatani workspace