The Cry of the Elephant King

On a great mountain that rose from the milk-ocean, in a garden thick with sandalwood and blossom, there lived a lord of elephants named Gajendra. He was enormous, grey as a raincloud, and the herds of the forest followed him wherever he went. The she-elephants walked at his side, the calves ran between his feet, and the young bulls raised their trunks in salute when he passed. No tiger dared cross him. No hunter's arrow had ever reached him. He was, in every sense, a king.

Gajendra had not always worn this shape. Long ago he had been a man, a devout ruler named Indradyumna, a king of the Pandya country who loved Vishnu and spent his days in worship. One afternoon the sage Agastya arrived at his door, and the king, deep in silent meditation, did not rise to greet him. The sage felt the sting of being ignored. "You carry yourself with the pride of an elephant," Agastya said. "Then take the body of one, and learn." So the king was born again as Gajendra, huge and magnificent, and the memory of who he had been sank somewhere beneath the animal's mind.

One day the heat lay heavy on the forest. The herd was thirsty, the calves fretful, and Gajendra led them down a slope to a lake he knew. It was a beautiful place. Lotuses opened their petals across the water, bees hung in the warm air, and cranes stood in the shallows. Gajendra waded in with the joy of a strong creature meeting cool water. He drank deeply. He drew water into his trunk and sprayed it over his back and over the calves crowding beside him. He splashed and rumbled with pleasure, and for a while the whole herd forgot the heat.

Then something moved in the deep water.

Beneath the lotuses lived a crocodile, and this was no ordinary beast either. He had once been a gandharva named Huhu, a singer of the celestial courts, until he played a rough joke on a sage bathing in a river and was cursed to crawl the mud as a reptile. Now hunger and habit drove him, and when he saw the great foot of the elephant standing in his water, he struck. His jaws closed on Gajendra's leg like a trap of iron.

Gajendra bellowed and pulled back. The crocodile did not let go. The elephant heaved with all the vast power of his shoulders, water churning white around him, and dragged the crocodile half out of the mud, but the jaws held. The crocodile pulled in return, trying to draw his prize into the deep, and the two of them strained against each other at the water's edge while the herd shrieked in terror on the bank.

The struggle did not end that day, or that week. The Bhagavata tells us it went on for a thousand years. The two enormous creatures pulled and twisted and rested and pulled again, locked at the boundary of land and water. The other elephants tried to help. They pushed at Gajendra's flanks, they wrapped their trunks around his and heaved, but the crocodile was in his own element and grew stronger in the water, while Gajendra, out of his, grew weaker. In time the herd could not bear to watch. One by one the cows and calves and young bulls turned away and left him. The king who had led them all stood alone with the beast fastened to his leg.

Year by year the strength drained out of him. His great muscles thinned. His trunk, once able to uproot trees, could barely lift. The proud head sank toward the water. And in that long wearing-down, something began to wake in him that a thousand years of kingship had kept asleep. Gajendra understood, at last, that his own strength would not save him. It had been the greatest thing about him, and it was finished, and the crocodile still held on.

So he stopped fighting the crocodile and did the only thing left. With the last force in his body he reached his trunk up out of the water, and he plucked a single lotus, and he lifted it toward the sky as an offering. Then he prayed.

He did not pray to the gods of the forest or the gods of rain. He remembered, from somewhere far below the elephant's mind, the Lord he had loved when he was a man. "I bow to that One," he cried, "from whom this whole world has come, in whom it rests, into whom it will return. I do not know his form. I do not know his name in full. But he is the refuge of those who have no other refuge. I have no strength of my own left. I have no friend, no herd, no power. I give myself to the One who is the beginning and the end, who saves not because we deserve it but because that is his nature. Save me, Lord, for I cannot save myself."

The prayer rose from him with no thought of reward, no bargain, only the naked surrender of a creature at the end of its strength. And because it asked for nothing but God himself, it reached him.

The gods in their heavens heard the hymn but did not stir, for Gajendra had not called on any one of them. He had called on the One who stands behind them all. And that One did not wait.

Far above, Vishnu heard the cry. He did not send a messenger. He did not deliberate. Sri Hari rose at once and came, mounted on Garuda the great eagle, whose wings darkened the sky as he flew. The devas and sages, looking up, saw the Lord flashing across the heavens, blue as a storm cloud, his yellow silk streaming, the discus spinning at his finger, and they knew that something rare was happening, that God himself was rushing to a lake in the mountains for the sake of one dying animal.

Gajendra, sinking, lifted his eyes and saw the eagle and the rider descend. With the very last of himself he raised the lotus higher and managed the words, "Narayana, master of all, I bow to you." Vishnu leaped from Garuda's back. He reached into the water and drew both the elephant and the crocodile out together in his hands, and he loosed the Sudarshana chakra, the blazing disc, which spun once and severed the crocodile's jaws, and Gajendra was free.

But the disc did more than cut. In the instant Vishnu touched him, the crocodile's cursed skin fell away, and there stood Huhu the gandharva, radiant, released, bowing before the Lord who had ended his long punishment. And Gajendra, lifted by the Lord's own hand, felt the animal body slip from him like a heavy garment. The pride that Agastya's curse had come to burn away was gone, dissolved in that final helpless cry. Vishnu granted him a form like the Lord's own and a place at his side, freed forever from birth and death.

Both of them, the elephant and the crocodile, the sufferer and the one who caused the suffering, were carried home by the same grace. Vishnu lifted Gajendra onto Garuda beside him, and they rose into the sky, and the devas rained down flowers on the lake where a thousand years of struggle had ended in a single breath of surrender.