The Thunderbolt Maker

The Rigveda never sits down to tell this as a story. It says it in passing, in one hymn after another, the way people mention something everybody knows. Put the lines side by side and a workshop comes into view.

The dragon Vritra lay on the mountain with the waters of the world shut up behind him. Indra was the only one who could fight him. But Indra, at that moment, had nothing to fight him with.

So the poets turn for a line or two to another god, one who almost never gets a hymn of his own. He is Tvashtri. They call him the deft-handed one, the fair-handed one, the best of all workmen, who knows every craft. An iron axe is in his hand, and he is sharpening it. The cups from which the gods drink are his work.

"For Indra," says one poet, "Tvashtri forged the thunder, the finest of his work, a thing of heaven, made for the battle."

Another poet watched more closely, and tells how it was made. Tvashtri did not simply hammer it. He turned it, as a wheelwright turns a hub, round and true.

"When Tvashtri of the skilful hands had turned the thunderbolt," this poet says, "golden, with a thousand edges, Indra took it up to do his manly deeds."

A third adds that the craftsman did more than hand over a weapon. He put strength into the one who would carry it. And a fourth simply calls it "your bolt that glitters".

The hymns do not agree on what it was made of. One says gold. In another, Indra himself is speaking, boasting as a warrior does after a victory.

"For me Tvashtri forged the iron thunderbolt," he says. "In me the gods have set their power."

It could be gold or it could be iron. The poets do not settle it, and it does not trouble them. What they agree on is the maker, and what the thing did. With it Indra reached the dragon's weak places. Vritra fell, and the flood of the waters came out.

That is one side of what the hymns remember. There is another, and the same poets say it without embarrassment.

On the day Indra was born, he was thirsty, and what he wanted was Soma, the drink of the gods. There was Soma in the house of Tvashtri.

"From the moment of his birth," says a hymn of the third book, "Indra overcame Tvashtri. He carried off the Soma and drank it from the cups."

A stranger, older hymn about Indra's birth says the same thing in a single line: in Tvashtri's house Indra drank the Soma, a hundred measures of the pressed juice.

So the craftsman's house was robbed by the very god he armed. The hymns do not say which came first, the theft or the gift, and they do not say that Tvashtri ever refused him the weapon. They only set the two things down, in different places, and leave them there.

The Rigveda keeps Tvashtri at his work. He sharpens the axe and shapes the cup. He turns the bolt on its axis until it is true, and he gives it to the one who will use it. After that the poets look away from him and back to Indra and the dragon, and the craftsman is not mentioned again until something else needs making.

The Mahabharata knows a time when the old thunderbolt was not enough.

In the first age, the sage Lomasha tells the Pandavas, a fierce tribe of Danavas gathered under Vritra and drove the gods before them in every direction. The gods went to Brahma and stood with joined hands.

"I know what you have come for," said Brahma. "There is a great sage named Dadhicha. Go to him together and ask him for a gift. Say to him: for the good of the three worlds, give us your bones. He will give up his body. From his bones make a weapon with six sides and a terrible roar, and call it Vajra. With that, Indra will kill Vritra."

Dadhicha's hermitage lay on the far bank of the river Sarasvati, among trees loud with bees and cuckoos. The gods bowed at his feet and asked for what Brahma had told them to ask.

"I will do what is good for you," said the sage. "I give up this body of my own will."

And he let go of his life, there in front of them.

The gods gathered the bones and carried them to Tvashtri, and told him what they needed. The epic says that Tvashtri was filled with joy when he heard it, and that he built the weapon with great attention and care. When it was finished he put it into Indra's hands himself.

"With this best of weapons, exalted one, burn that enemy of the gods to ashes," he said. "And when he is dead, rule heaven in happiness, you and those who follow you."

Indra took the Vajra from the craftsman's hand, gladly and with proper respect.