Boons That Went Wrong

Five of this site's great Asura kings each asked a god — usually Brahma, whose willingness to answer sufficiently intense tapasya makes him this whole pattern's most frequent unwitting accomplice — for a list of named protections, and each list turned out to have exactly one gap, discovered only by the being clever enough to notice it.

Hiranyakashipu asked to be unkillable by man or beast, by day or night, indoors or outdoors, on the ground or in the sky, by any weapon crafted by hand — and never thought to exclude a being who was neither man nor beast, arriving at twilight, on a threshold, in Vishnu's own lap, killed by claws that were never forged by anyone. His twin Hiranyaksha made the same mistake in miniature: his own list of exclusions simply forgot to name a boar. Ravana's decade of austerity produced invincibility against gods, gandharvas, and asuras — a list so proud of its scope that it never occurred to him a mere man was worth naming as a threat. Mahishasura's boon excluded every man and every god by name, and so a being who was neither — Durga herself, created for exactly this occasion — had to be brought into existence to close the gap. And Tarakasura's wager was cannier than the rest: he didn't forget a category, he bet an entire war on Shiva never fathering a child again, a bet that held for years and then, at devastating cost to others, didn't.

Where the Asura kings' boons left a gap somewhere outside themselves — a category of killer they hadn't thought to name — Bhasmasura's boon turned the danger inward, and did it almost immediately. A demon of relatively minor standing, he won Shiva's favor through fierce austerity and asked for a single, terrible power: that any head he touched with his own hand would instantly turn to ash. Shiva granted it — the request itself contained no forbidden category, no impossible cosmic exception, nothing a god would ordinarily think to refuse.

The first thing Bhasmasura did with his new power was test it on the god who had just given it to him. Shiva fled. What followed is one of the tradition's most famous rescues: Vishnu, taking the form of the enchantress Mohini, approached Bhasmasura and offered to dance with him — matching him step for step, gesture for gesture, until the demon, lost in her rhythm, unthinkingly raised his own hand to his own head in imitation of one of her poses. The boon did exactly what he'd asked of it. It simply didn't care whose head it was.

This is a different flavor of the same underlying failure this whole series is charting: Bhasmasura didn't forget to name a category of enemy. He forgot that a power with no built-in exception for its own wielder is, sooner or later, a power that will be turned back on him — by trickery if not by accident. This article's fifth entry, Vali, will show the same structural blindness from another angle. And this pattern of a boon quietly engineering its own holder's downfall is exactly what this series' sixth article, on boons in disguise, will take up directly — Bhasmasura's ending, viewed from one angle, looks like a demon outwitted; viewed from another, it looks like a boon that was never going to end any other way.

Kumbhakarna, Ravana's younger brother, appears in that article's fuller chronicle mostly for the scale of his appetite and the length of his sleep — but the reason he slept at all deserves its own telling, because it's the single cleanest example in the entire Puranic tradition of a boon's danger having nothing to do with what was excluded, and everything to do with the mechanics of asking in the first place.

Alarmed by how powerful the boon Kumbhakarna was about to request from Brahma might prove — he intended to ask for Indra's throne itself, Indrasana — the gods pleaded with Saraswati, goddess of speech, to intervene. She settled quietly on his tongue. When the moment came and Kumbhakarna opened his mouth to ask for Indrasana, what came out instead was Nidrasana — a bed of sleep. Brahma, bound to grant precisely what was asked, gave him exactly that: not a throne, but an unbroken sleep of months at a stretch, waking only briefly before falling under again.

Not every boon in this article backfired on the one who received it. Vali, the vanara king of Kishkindha, was granted a boon by his father Indra that worked exactly as intended for his entire life — and it was precisely that success which made his death, at Rama's hands, controversial enough that the epic itself has Rama pause to explain his reasoning to the dying king.

Indra's gift to Vali was simple and, in isolation, entirely fair: in any face-to-face combat, half of his opponent's strength would transfer to him the moment the fight began. Against any single opponent, however powerful, this made Vali effectively unbeatable — the harder his enemy hit, the stronger Vali became by the same stroke. When Vali's estrangement from his brother Sugriva eventually drew Rama into their conflict, Rama recognized immediately that meeting Vali in open, honorable combat was no combat at all — it was a boon doing exactly what it had always done, absorbing half of Rama's own strength the instant the fight began. Rama chose instead to remain concealed and loose a single arrow while Vali fought Sugriva, a decision the tradition has argued over for centuries: a violation of a warrior's code, or the only rational response to an opponent whose boon made the code itself unworkable?

This is worth holding apart from Bhasmasura's and Kumbhakarna's failures, because Vali's boon never turned on him directly — it turned the world around him instead, foreclosing the one kind of confrontation that might have let him die with the dignity his strength should have guaranteed. This series' sixth article, on boons in disguise, returns to Vali from an entirely different direction: a second boon, given not to him but to him by Rama in the moment of his death, promising he would face Rama again — a promise whose fulfillment belongs to a different avatar and a different age entirely.

Meghnad — Ravana's son, better known by the title he earned defeating Indra, Indrajit — won a boon of near-total invincibility in battle on the condition that he complete a particular fire sacrifice uninterrupted before each engagement. The boon held exactly as promised for the length of the war, right up until Lakshmana's forces, learning of the condition, made certain the sacrifice was disrupted before it could be finished — a defeat achieved not by matching his power, but by denying him the one ritual precondition his boon quietly depended on.

Jayadratha, king of Sindhu and Duryodhana's brother-in-law, won a narrower and more clearly time-boxed boon from Shiva: for one single day of the Kurukshetra war, he would be able to hold off all four of Yudhishthira, Bhima, Nakula, and Sahadeva — everyone except Arjuna. The boon worked exactly as granted, and that was precisely the problem it created rather than solved. Its one careful exclusion was also the only name that mattered: it was Jayadratha's blockade of the other Pandavas, not any personal strength of his own, that trapped Abhimanyu alone inside the Chakravyuha formation and left him to be killed. When Arjuna, enraged, swore to end his own life by sunset if he failed to kill Jayadratha that same day, the boon's tight one-day window stopped being an asset and became a countdown — Krishna's eclipse trick drew Jayadratha out from hiding at the day's final hour, at the exact moment the boon's protection was due to expire on its own. A second boon compounds the story's irony: Jayadratha's father, Vridhakshatra, had once been granted by a sage that whoever caused his son's severed head to fall to the ground would themselves die instantly. Krishna, aware of this, instructed Arjuna to shoot Jayadratha's head not to the ground but directly into his father's lap, deep in forest meditation many miles away — the old man, startled, rose and let the head fall from his own hands, triggering the very boon meant to protect his son against him.