The Lion Who Would Not Cool

The demon king lay dead in the doorway, torn open on the man-lion's lap. Prahlada was safe. It should have been over.

It was not. Narasimha's anger had been made for one purpose, and the purpose was done, but the anger went on. The lion roared and the mountains cracked. His mane blazed and the sky turned red. The worlds began to shake, and nothing in them could calm him.

The gods went to Shiva.

"He will burn everything," they said. "Save us from the one who saved us."

Shiva called Virabhadra, the fierce being born of his own anger, and sent him.

Virabhadra came before the man-lion and bowed, and spoke to him gently.

"Lord, you have done what you came to do," he said. "The world needs your kindness now, not your fury. Put away this terrible form."

Narasimha only laughed.

"Go back where you came from," he roared. "I am the lord of all things. Everything that is, comes from me and goes back into me. Who is your Shiva, to send me orders? I will finish what I started, and the whole world with it."

Virabhadra tried again. He reminded the man-lion of what he was, and of Shiva, from whom all the gods' power comes. Narasimha would not listen. He reached out with his claws to seize Virabhadra too.

Then Shiva himself came.

He came in a form no one had ever seen, the Sharabha, a creature part bird and part beast, with great wings and a hooked beak, with three eyes and a thousand arms, blazing like the fire at the end of the world. The lion and the bird stood face to face. The gods who had come to watch hid their eyes, and the man-lion's strength, the Purana says, began to drain out of him at the sight.

The Sharabha wound his tail round the man-lion and bound him. Then he spread his wings and rose into the air, carrying Narasimha the way a vulture carries off a snake.

High above the worlds, the anger went out of the lion at last.

"I know you now," said Narasimha. "You are Shiva."

And he praised Shiva there, in the air, with a hundred and eight names. When the Sharabha set him down, he was calm.

From then on, says the Purana, Shiva wore the man-lion's skin, in memory of the day.

The Bhagavata Purana tells the same moment, and sends no monster.

The gods gathered round the man-lion, all of them, Brahma and Shiva and Indra, and sang his praises from a safe distance. None of them dared go nearer. He sat on the throne in the hall with the demon's blood on him and the fire still in his eyes.

They sent for Lakshmi. She had never seen him like this, and she was afraid, and would not approach.

Then Brahma turned to the one person who was not afraid.

"Prahlada," he said. "It was for you that he came. Go to him."

The boy walked across the hall to the throne, quite alone. He folded his hands, and lay down flat on the floor at the lion's feet.

Narasimha looked down at him. Then he reached out and lifted the boy up, and laid his great clawed hand on his head, very gently.

And the anger was gone. Prahlada stood up and sang him a hymn, and the lion listened like a father to his son.

"Ask me for anything," said Narasimha when it was over.

"I want nothing," said the boy. "A servant who serves for a reward is only a merchant." Then he thought, and asked for one thing after all. "Forgive my father."

"Your father is already free," said the lion, "and twenty-one generations of your family with him, because you were born into it."

Vaishnava tellings in the south answered the Sharabha with a bird of their own. When Shiva became the Sharabha, they say, Vishnu became the Gandabherunda, a huge bird with two heads, fiercer still, and the Sharabha was the one who was subdued.