The Father Who Fell Apart

Prajapati made everything, and he made it out of himself.

He made the earth, the air and the sky. He made the fire, the wind, the sun and the moon. He made the gods and set them in their places, and from his breath he made every creature that lives and dies. He toiled, the Brahmana says, and he burned with effort, and he went on.

Then the work was finished, and so was he.

The Brahmana says he was like a runner who has run the whole race. His joints came loose. The breath went out of the middle of him, and after the breath his strength went too. He fell down. As he lay there on his side, the food ran out of him, flowing from the eye he was lying on.

The gods looked at their father on the ground. Everything in the world had come out of him, and now there was nothing firm under their feet.

"There is no other foundation than this one," they said to each other. "We must put our father back together. He shall be what we stand on."

They went to Agni, the fire.

"We will restore our father Prajapati in you," they said. "There is nothing else to stand on."

Agni was willing, and he was also careful. "And what will be my reward?" he asked.

"This Prajapati is food," said the gods. "With you as our mouth we will eat that food. Whatever anyone offers to any of us shall be offered into you."

"So be it," said Agni.

The same book tells the bargain another way a few pages earlier. There it is Prajapati himself who speaks, lying where he fell.

"Put me together again," he said to Agni.

"What will come to me if I do?"

"They will call me by your name," said Prajapati. "When a son does well, people name the father after the son. They shall call me Agni."

"So be it," said Agni.

However the bargain was made, the mending was done with fire. The gods laid their father in the fire and heated him. They made offerings over him, and each offering became a baked brick and went into his body.

"As much as you offer," Prajapati said from the fire, "so much is my happiness."

As the fire rose over him, the breath that had left him came back, and they put it into him. They put his strength back, and the food that had flowed away. When he was whole they lifted him and stood him upright.

Five parts of him had come loose: hair, skin, flesh, bone and marrow. The Brahmana counts five seasons in the year, and Prajapati is the year. So the great fire altar is built in five layers of brick, and the priests who build it are putting the father together again.

That is why, the teachers say, the altar is called Agni although it is Prajapati's body, and why the gods eat through the fire to this day.

They add a warning from an old teacher named Vamakakshayana. The building takes a full year, and nobody should even stand and watch an altar that is hurried through in less. "You would see our father Prajapati being torn to pieces," he said.

The tenth book of the Shatapatha tells it differently. Prajapati does not collapse there. He hides.

He had made the gods from his upward breaths and the mortal creatures from his downward ones. And over the creatures he had made Death, to consume them.

Half of Prajapati was immortal, the Brahmana says, and half of him was mortal. With the mortal half he was afraid of what he had made. So he turned himself into two things, clay and water, and slipped into the earth.

It was Death who missed him.

"What has become of the one who created us?" Death asked the gods.

"He was afraid of you," they said. "He has gone into the earth."

"Then let us look for him and gather him up," said Death. "I will not hurt him."

The gods searched the ground. What there was of him in the water they collected as water, and what there was of him in the earth they collected as clay. They pressed the two together and made a brick. That is why a brick is clay and water.

"Let us make him immortal," they said. They built him up in layers, each soft layer of earth closed in between layers of baked brick, the mortal part wrapped in the part that does not die.

Having done this for their father, the gods wanted it for themselves. They made every offering they knew, and they did not become immortal. They built an altar with bricks past counting, and still they did not.

"You are not laying down all my forms," Prajapati told them. "You make me too large, or you leave me incomplete."

"Then tell us how," they said.

He gave them the numbers: one stone for each night of the year, a brick for each day, and ten thousand eight hundred small bricks, one for every hour. They built it so, and they became immortal.

Then Death came to them again.

"If it is done this way, every man will become immortal," he said. "What share will be left for me?"

"From now on," the gods answered, "no one shall be immortal with his body. The body is your share. Whoever is to become immortal, by knowledge or by holy work, shall become so only after you have taken it."