Parashurāma’s Discomfiture

The wedding done, the great company set out north for Ayodhyā, a long joyful procession of two royal houses newly joined, the four young couples at its heart, Dasharatha’s cup of happiness filled to the brim. He had come to Mithilā fearing for the son Vishvāmitra had taken from him, and he was returning with that son grown into a hero, married to a bride from heaven, the future of his line secured in a single stroke. The old king rode home the happiest man in the world.

But the earth was not done testing them, and the last test of the Bāla Kāṇḍa came without warning.

The sky darkened. A wind rose that was not a natural wind, and the ground began to tremble, and the horses screamed and shied, and a terror fell over the whole procession as some vast and furious presence approached. And then he was there, blocking the road: a figure out of an older and harder age, matted-haired, blazing-eyed, an axe upon his shoulder and a great bow in his hand, and the very air around him seemed to burn. It was Parashurāma.

Now Parashurāma was a name to freeze the blood of any warrior, and every man in that procession knew it. He was of an earlier turning of the age, a brahmin by birth who had taken up the weapons of a warrior for a terrible purpose. The warrior-caste of that age had grown arrogant and cruel, oppressing the earth, and Parashurāma had made a vow to humble them, and he had kept it with a fury that had become legend.

Twenty-one times, the tellers say, he had cleared the earth of the proud warrior-kings, axe in hand, an exterminating wrath that had washed the world in blood. And here he stood, this ancient and merciless force, planted in the road before the wedding party, and the joy of the procession curdled into dread.

He had heard, it seemed, of the breaking of Shiva’s bow, and it had brought him. He came straight toward Rāma, and his voice was like the grinding of mountains. So, he said in effect, a boy has broken the bow of Shiva and thinks himself a hero. Here is another bow, the bow of Vishṇu, greater still, the companion of that other. Let the boy string this one, if he can, and we shall see what he is truly made of; and let him understand that this is no wedding game but a reckoning.

Dasharatha’s new-won happiness shattered in an instant. The old king flung himself forward, pleading, offering himself, offering anything, begging this terror out of the deep past to spare his son. He had feared to lose Rāma to Vishvāmitra’s demons and had gotten him back; he had feared and hoped through the whole contest of the bow; and now, on the very road home, with all his happiness gathered around him, here was death itself standing in the path reaching for his boy.

The father in him could not bear it, and he wept and pleaded in the road, a king unkinged by fear for his child.

But Rāma was not afraid.

This is the thing to hold onto in the scene, the contrast at its heart: all around him grown men trembled and his own royal father wept in the dust, and Rāma stood calm. He did not answer the ancient warrior’s fury with fury of his own. He was courteous, even gentle, and utterly unshaken.

He heard Parashurāma out, and then he simply reached and took the great bow of Vishṇu from the raging sage’s hand, took it as easily as he had taken up Shiva’s bow in Mithilā, and strung it, and drew it, all without effort, all without heat, while the fearsome figure who had cleared the earth of kings watched his weapon pass into the young man’s hands and be mastered.

And as Rāma strung the bow of Vishṇu, something happened in Parashurāma. The fury went out of him. For this was the thing he had not understood, the thing the whole encounter existed to reveal: that the age of his wrath was ending, and a new age was beginning, and that the very power he had carried, the cosmic force of righteous destruction, was now passing out of his hands and into the hands of the one who stood before him.

Parashurāma had been an instrument, mighty and terrible, of the divine will in his turning of the age; and now the divine had come into the world itself, in this calm young prince, and the instrument’s work was done. He felt his own long violence recognize its successor and its master. The blazing eyes dimmed. The proud shoulders bowed.

For the arrow was already fitted to the drawn bow of Vishṇu, and such a shaft, once fitted and drawn, could not simply be set aside; it had to be loosed somewhere, spent upon some target. And Rāma, with the great weapon bent and ready in his hands and the humbled sage before him, did not turn it upon Parashurāma. He asked, courteously, where he should send it, since it could not be withheld.

And Parashurāma, wholly quieted now, yielded up to the arrow the accumulated merit of his own penances, or by other tellings the power of his further movement through the worlds, so that the shaft was spent upon that and not upon his life. His age was over. He gave what he had to give to the one who had superseded him, and withdrew from the world of action into the long quiet of penance, and troubled the earth no more. The terror passed. The sky cleared.

The wind fell, and the horses grew calm, and the ground was steady underfoot again, and the procession stood blinking in the returned daylight, hardly able to believe that the ancient death which had blocked their road had been faced down and dissolved by a young man who never once raised his voice.

Dasharatha gathered his son to him, weak with relief, and the tellers say he understood in that moment, more than he had understood even at the breaking of Shiva’s bow, that the child he had feared for was beyond his power to protect, because the child had never needed his protection; that something had come into his house that was larger than his house, larger than his kingdom, larger than his understanding. He had wanted a son to carry on his line. He had been given the Lord of the worlds to call his own.

It was joy and it was awe and it was, though he could not have named it then, the beginning of a letting-go that would break his heart before it was done.

But that was still to come. For now the last shadow of the Bāla Kāṇḍa had lifted, and the road ran clear and bright before them all the way home. They came to Ayodhyā in triumph and in gladness, the city poured out to meet them, and the four young couples came home to a capital wild with joy. Rāma and Sītā came into the palace that had waited so long first for Rāma’s birth and now for his bride, and the whole of Ayodhyā settled into what everyone believed would be a long, golden, unshadowed happiness.

And for twelve years, it was.