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Also calledParasuramaRama JamadagnyaBhargava RamaBhrigupatiJamadagni Rama

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The Boy and the Iluppa Tree

At a glance

TraditionVaishnava
FormA tall

strong brahmin ascetic, with matted hair, a sacred thread and a deerskin

In his handsThe axe

parashu, that Shiva gave him; often a bow and arrows too

Who Parashurama is

Parashurama is Rama with the axe, the sixth of the ten avatars of Vishnu, and the strangest of them: a brahmin, a priest's son, who lived as a warrior and killed kings.

He was the youngest son of the sage Jamadagni and his wife Renuka. His first famous deed was the hardest: at his father's command he struck off his mother's head with his axe, and then, offered any reward, asked for her to be brought back to life and to forget what he had done.

His great deed came after. The thousand-armed king Kartavirya Arjuna took his father's cow, and Parashurama killed him; the king's sons killed his father in revenge; and Parashurama took his axe against every warrior king on earth, twenty-one times over, the Bhagavata says. At the end of it he gave the whole earth away and went to live on Mount Mahendra.

Om Jamadagnyaya vidmahe, mahaviraya dhimahi, tanno Parashurama prachodayat: the Gayatri of Parashurama, son of Jamadagni, great hero.

Having given the earth away, he had nowhere of his own, and so, on the western coast of India, they say he threw his axe into the ocean and the sea drew back, leaving the land of Kerala.

Unlike the other avatars, he does not die. He is one of the chiranjivi, the long-lived ones, who will be on earth until the end of this age. He appears again and again in the epics, an old man now: he teaches Bhishma, Drona and Karna; he confronts Rama, his own next avatar, after the bow of Shiva is broken, and gives way to him; and in the Kalki Purana he will teach Kalki, the last avatar.

Before the Puranas

The Vedic roots of Parashurama

Parashurama is a brahmin hero of the family of Bhrigu, the Bhargavas, and his stories are full of their concerns. The Mahabharata tells them several times, in the Vana Parva, the Shanti Parva and elsewhere, and the scholar V. S. Sukthankar argued in the 1930s that Bhargava brahmins had a large hand in shaping the epic, which may be why their hero appears in it so often.

His name in the oldest stories is just Rama, son of Jamadagni. The name Parashurama, Rama with the axe, grew up later, to tell him apart from the Rama of the Ramayana. In the Ramayana itself he appears once, terrifying, when he meets Rama on the road back from the wedding at Mithila and challenges him with Vishnu's bow; Rama strings it, and Parashurama, defeated, goes back to his mountain.

By the time of the Puranas he was firmly the sixth avatar of Vishnu, and the Bhagavata gives his story in two chapters. His war against the kshatriyas, the warrior class, has been read in many ways, as memory of real conflict between priests and kings, as a story about the limits of royal power, and as a warning about vengeance.

Along the western coast, from Gokarna in Karnataka through the Konkan to Kerala, he became a founder. The Keralolpathi, the old chronicle of Kerala, begins with him raising the land from the sea. In the far northeast, in Arunachal Pradesh, Parashuram Kund on the Lohit river is said to be where the axe at last fell from his hand after the killing of his mother, and pilgrims bathe there every Makar Sankranti.

See how the Vedic gods became the Puranic ones →

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