The Three Strides

The Rigveda has more than a thousand hymns, and only a handful of them belong to Vishnu. He has no long story there. He has one deed, and the poets never tire of it. He took three steps.

The steps are easiest to picture on the day of Indra's great fight. The dragon Vritra was holding back the rivers. Indra's mother looked at her son and told him the hard truth.

"My son, the other gods are leaving you."

Indra did not argue. He turned to the one friend who had stayed.

"Vishnu, my comrade," he said, "stride out. Stride as wide as you can. Sky, make room for my thunderbolt. Let us kill Vritra and set the rivers free."

And Vishnu strode.

The poets describe him as a young man, vast in body, no longer a child. They say he was like a wild beast that prowls the mountains, a thing to be afraid of, and in the next breath they call him kind, a guardian whom nobody can deceive.

He set his foot down once, and the earth was measured. He set it down again, and the wide air was measured. He set it down a third time, and that step went so high that no one saw where it landed.

"A man can see two of his steps," one poet says, "and they leave him restless with wonder. The third no one dares to approach. Not even the birds fly that high."

Everything that lives, lives inside those three steps. One hymn says the whole world was gathered up in the dust of his footprint. He propped up the sky. He held earth and heaven apart, and he pegged the earth down firmly all around.

Why did he do it? The poets give a plain answer. He did it for people. He measured out the earth three times for man in his distress. He walked across it so that he could give it to Manu, the first man, for a home. Where there had been no room, there was now room to live.

"He paced it out," says another hymn, "for freedom and for life."

With room to move, Indra threw his bolt. The dragon died and the rivers ran.

After that the two friends were praised together. One hymn calls them both the lords of the mighty stride. It says that together they broke the ninety-nine forts of the demon Shambara, and that neither of the two was ever beaten.

But the poets' thoughts kept going back to the third step, the one out of sight. They call it Vishnu's highest footprint. It is fixed in heaven, they say, like an open eye. A spring of honey rises in it. People who loved the gods are happy there, and the singers on earth keep it bright with their songs.

One poet ends his hymn with a wish, and it is the wish of everyone who ever sang of the three steps.

"May I reach that dear place of his," he says, "where the well of honey is."

Long after the hymns, the Ramayana tells of the three steps again, and now there is a king who loses by them.

The sage Vishvamitra was leading the young prince Rama through a forest when they came to an old hermitage. He stopped.

"This place is called Siddhashrama, the hermitage where the work was done," he said. "Vishnu once lived here, Rama. Listen to what happened."

In those days, the sage said, a king of the Asuras named Bali, the son of Virochana, had beaten Indra and ruled all three worlds. Bali was holding a great sacrifice, and while it lasted he refused no one. Whoever came to him and asked, for anything at all, received it.

The gods came to Vishnu at this hermitage.

"Bali gives to everyone who asks," they said. "Go to him for our sake. Take the shape of a dwarf and ask."

At that same time the sage Kashyapa and his wife Aditi finished a vow that had lasted a thousand years, and Vishnu offered Kashyapa a gift.

"Be born as our son," Kashyapa said. "Be Indra's younger brother, and help the gods in their trouble."

So Vishnu was born to Aditi. He set out as a small wandering student, with an umbrella over him, a water gourd in his hand and a tuft of hair on the crown of his head. He came to Bali's sacrifice and asked for a little ground.

"Three paces," he said. "Three of my own."

Bali gave them.

Then the dwarf was a dwarf no longer. With one step he covered the whole earth. With the second he covered the air. With the third he covered the sky. He gave Bali a home in Patala, the world below, and handed the three worlds back to Indra.

"That is the work that was done," Vishvamitra told Rama, "and this is the place it started from."

In Kerala people tell this story for the sake of the king.

There he is Mahabali, and the people remember him as their own ruler. The dwarf's third step sent him to the world below, as it does in the old books. But Kerala adds what the king was given afterwards. Once every year he may come home and see his people.

"He is coming," families say when the month of Chingam arrives, in August or September, and they get the house ready as they would for a guest they love.

The welcome lasts ten days. It opens on the day called Atham at the temple of Thrikkakara, whose name means the place of the holy foot and whose god is Vamana, the dwarf himself. A flag goes up there. At every doorstep a circle of flowers is laid on the ground, and each morning it is made a little larger than the day before. Small clay figures are set at the entrance of the house. On the tenth day, Thiruvonam, the family sits down to a feast of many dishes, on the day the king is believed to be among them.

Farther north the visit falls in a different season. In Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra the fourth day of Diwali belongs to Bali. It is called Bali Padwa or Bali Padyami, and it comes on the first day of the month of Kartika, in October or November. People bathe with oil, put on new clothes, draw patterns on the floor and light lamps. Bali and his queen are worshipped in the house, and in Gujarat the day begins the new year.

So in both places the god who took the three steps and the king who lost the three worlds are honoured on the same days.