Indra

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Indra is the warrior-king of the early Vedic pantheon — god of storm and battle, wielder of the vajra or thunderbolt, and the deity to whom more hymns of the Rigveda are addressed than to any other. He is a god of force before he is a god of order: red-bearded, vast, prodigious in his appetite for the pressed juice of soma, which the hymns describe him drinking before he goes out to fight. He is not aloof. He eats and boasts and overreaches; he is praised as Maghavan, the bountiful, and called on as one who has more strength than the speaker has need of, and who can be moved to spend it.

The numbers themselves declare his standing. By the count of the philologist A. A. Macdonell, roughly two hundred and fifty of the Rigveda’s hymns are given to Indra — close to a quarter of the whole collection of more than a thousand, more than fall to any other god, more even than to Agni the fire, who stands at the very threshold of the sacrifice. Where the Vedic religion of the second millennium BCE had a king, it was Indra; where its poets reached for the figure of overwhelming power placed at the disposal of those who feed and praise him, they reached for the same name. He is invoked beyond the Rigveda too: the Atharvaveda, the fourth and latest of the Vedic collections, calls on Indra in its charms of protection and battle, setting his name on the warrior’s side and against the enemy’s host, so that the god of the great cosmic combat is also the god a fighting man names over his own quarrel.

The slaying of Vṛtra

His central deed is the killing of Vṛtra. The texts tell it as the founding act of the cosmos. Vṛtra — a serpent or dragon, áhi, his very name built from the root for covering, enclosing, holding back — lies coiled over the mountains and pens the waters within, and the world is stopped, withheld, unborn, until Indra, strengthened by soma, splits him open with the thunderbolt and lets the rivers run to the sea. The oldest sustained account is the hymn the tradition numbers Rigveda 1.32, attributed to the seer Hiraṇyastūpa of the Aṅgiras line, and it opens by announcing exactly this as the first and greatest of his manly deeds: that he slew the dragon and disclosed the waters and cleft the channels of the mountain torrents. The hymn ends with Vṛtra unmade, lying like a bank-bursting river while the waters he had penned take courage and flow over him.

The thunderbolt itself is not Indra’s by nature. In the older telling the craftsman-god Tvaṣṭṛ forges the vajra for him, the way a smith arms a champion; in the later and harsher tellings it is made from the bones of the sage Dadhīci, who yields up his body so that the weapon can be cut from it. Either way the point holds: the instrument that splits the world open is given, conferred, owed — the warrior is armed by the very order he then secures.

What the Vedic poets make of the combat is double. It is at once a thunderstorm breaking a drought — the dark cloud-mountain torn, the held rain falling, the dry beds running — and the victory of life and movement over a power that would keep everything stopped and unmade. The hymns return to it again and again, never as a single fixed narrative but as a deed re-performed: each pressing of soma, each sacrifice that strengthens the god, re-enacts the splitting of Vṛtra and the re-release of the waters, so that the cosmos is not made once but kept made, held open against the constant pull back toward the closed and the withheld. The fight is, in the language the hymns themselves use, about waters and light and the freeing of the dawn — the dragon is everything that holds, and Indra is the breaking of the hold.

The deed has a second face the hymns are equally clear about. In splitting Vṛtra Indra is said to have propped apart heaven and earth, to have steadied the world between them and set the sun in the sky — so the slaying is not only a release of water but an act of measurement, the fixing of the cosmos in its frame. He is praised as the one who made the unsteady firm and the dark light, who found the hidden cattle penned in the rock of the Paṇis and drove them out, who pierced the ninety-nine fortresses of his enemies. The same energy runs through all of it: whatever is shut, hoarded, or held back, Indra is the power that opens it, and the great enemy is always enclosure. That is why a people of herders and raiders on a hard frontier found in him their god above gods — he is the answer to every form of being penned in.

Comparative philology has set this combat among the oldest inheritances of the languages that carry it. The pattern of a sky- or storm-wielding champion who kills a water-hoarding serpent and frees what it withholds recurs across the related traditions descended from a common ancestral speech, and the linguistic correspondences — the verb han, “to smite,” that gives Indra his standing title Vṛtrahan, “Vṛtra-smiter,” set beside its cognates in the neighboring mythologies — are part of the documentary basis on which that common inheritance is reconstructed. What the Rigveda means by the fight, though, is bound to its own ritual world. It is not a generic dragon-slaying. It is the waters, the soma, the dawn, the sacrifice that feeds the smiter — Vṛtrahan addressed in the second person, here, now, over the pressed cup.

Titles and weapons

Around the deed cluster the epithets. He is Vṛtrahan, the smiter of Vṛtra, the title that became almost his proper name; Vajrin and Vajrabāhu, the one who holds the thunderbolt, the thunderbolt-armed; Maghavan, the generous, the lord of bounty; Puraṃdara, the breaker of strongholds, the splitter of the enemies’ walled places; Śatakratu, of the hundred powers — or, as the Brahmanical priesthood later reread the title, of the hundred sacrifices, the warrior’s raw strength re-described as the fruit of the rite that the priests command. The shift is small and total: in the priest-ordered world that grew up around the fire altar, the god who once tore the world open by his own fury holds his place by the sacrifices offered to him, and his power becomes a thing the ritualist underwrites. He rides, in the developed imagery, the white elephant Airāvata; he carries the vajra in his hand; he is lord of the eastern quarter and of the rains, and the heaven called Svarga is his, set on the cosmic mountain, its city Amarāvatī the seat of the gods. The Maruts, the young storm-band, ride at his side as his war-companions, and the keeping of cosmic order he shares — uneasily, in the oldest layer — with the sovereign Varuṇa, the binder, whose authority is law where Indra’s is force.

The decline

Indra’s standing did not hold. In the Vedic age he was effectively the chief god, the one a fighting, cattle-keeping people called on for rain and victory; but as the religion of the hymns grew into the vast theism of Hinduism he was displaced. The highest place passed to Viṣṇu and Śiva, the great gods of the developed traditions, and Indra was lowered into their service — still king of the gods and lord of Svarga, but fallible, anxious, repeatedly humbled, troubled by his own pride and by the ascetics whose accumulated heat threatens to unseat him. The figure of overwhelming strength became the figure whose strength is never quite enough.

The very deed that made him turned, in the later tellings, into the thing that broke him. The epics and Purāṇas rework the Vṛtra story along a moral grain the hymns do not have: Tvaṣṭṛ, the craftsman, begets a three-headed brahmin son, Viśvarūpa or Triśiras, and Indra kills him — and so incurs brahmahatyā, the guilt of killing a brahmin, the gravest of stains. From Tvaṣṭṛ’s vengeful sacrifice Vṛtra is then born to destroy him; Indra fells Vṛtra in turn, often reckoned a brahmin too, and the guilt doubles and pursues him. He hides, shrunken, inside the stalk of a lotus; the throne stands empty and is seized by the mortal king Nahuṣa; Indra must be found, purified, restored. The same arc shows elsewhere as appetite and pride: in the tale loved by the devotional traditions, the cowherds of Vraja withhold their yearly offering to Indra the rain-god at Kṛṣṇa’s urging — Kṛṣṇa, the cowherd who is an incarnation of Viṣṇu — and Indra, enraged, looses a seven-day deluge, only to be answered by the boy lifting Mount Govardhana as a shelter, and to come down at last and bow, recognizing in the cowherd the supreme that is above all heaven’s kings. Where the older hymns celebrate his strength, the later literature turns it into a lesson about its limits.

The Bhagavad-Gītā fixes the new rank in a single line. When Kṛṣṇa names the foremost of every order of things as his own manifestation, he names Indra — called there Vāsava — as the chief among the gods; but he names him only as his glory, a splendor of the lesser heaven held within the higher truth. The king of the gods survives, and is honored, precisely as a token of what now stands over him.

The Upanishads mark the turn from another side, and more searchingly. In the Chāndogya, hosted here in Müller’s translation among the Upanishads, Indra comes to the creator Prajāpati as a student — he and Virocana, lord of the asuras, sent up from the two contending hosts to learn the self that does not die. Virocana takes the first, easy answer, that the self is the body reflected in water, and carries it back to the demons as a creed of bodily indulgence. Indra alone keeps coming back, dissatisfied, term after term, because each account of the self he is given breaks down under the simple objections of dream and dreamless sleep, until the self is shown at last as the deathless ground that no condition touches. The king whose might once needed no instruction is here the one figure patient enough to be taught — and the knowledge he wins is the one thing the thunderbolt could never take.

Śakra and the afterlife of the thunderbolt

He kept a wide presence even so. The Buddhist tradition absorbed him as Śakra — in Pali, Sakka — under the formula Śakro devānām indraḥ, “Śakra, lord of the gods,” ruler of the heaven of the Thirty-Three on the summit of Mount Meru and a frequent attendant in the life of the Buddha, present at his birth and descent and turning to him for instruction. The Buddhist Śakra is not simply the Vedic Indra renamed: the canonical scholarship is careful that the two figures, for all they share a title, are drawn quite differently, and that Sakka’s character owes little to the Rigvedic storm-king. What the Buddhist cosmos kept of Indra was less the warrior than the throne — a king of the gods long-lived but mortal, splendid but bound to the wheel of rebirth, holding his high seat by the merit of past lives and certain in the end to fall from it. In that role he traveled across Asia with the spreading teaching, and his thunderbolt traveled with him.

For the vajra outlasted the god’s supremacy. Cut loose from the king who first wielded it, the word kept both of its meanings — thunderbolt and diamond, the thing that shatters and the thing that cannot be shattered — and became the name of the indestructible itself. The eighth-century tantric master Padmasambhava is remembered as carrying the vajra into Tibet and turning its force against the local powers, and in the Vajrayāna — the “thunderbolt vehicle” that takes its very name from the implement — it became the central ritual object, the five-pronged scepter held in the right hand and paired with the bell in the left, the emblem of an adamantine wakefulness of mind that the practices of deity yoga take as their ground. The weapon forged to split a dragon and free the waters became the sign of a mind nothing can break.

Texts and scholarship

The primary witness is the Rigveda itself, where Indra is everywhere — most concentratedly in the dragon-slaying hymn 1.32, and across the great Indra collections of the so-called family books. The standard complete English rendering is the three-volume The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, translated by Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton (Oxford University Press, 2014), whose accompanying running commentary is published openly online (rigvedacommentary.alc.ucla.edu); it supersedes the older complete version of Ralph T. H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rigveda (1889–92), long in the public domain and still the most widely quoted English Indra. The classic synthesis of the god’s mythology remains A. A. Macdonell, Vedic Mythology (Strassburg: Trübner, 1898), which set the count of Indra’s hymns and the morphology of the Vṛtra combat that later study has worked from. On soma and the ritual that feeds the warrior, the fundamental modern study is Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda: An Anthology (Penguin, 1981), with its selection and apparatus on the Indra hymns. For the figure’s later humbling, the relevant narratives sit in the Mahābhārata, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, and the Upaniṣads — the Chāndogya’s instruction of Indra by Prajāpati available here in F. Max Müller’s The Upanishads (Sacred Books of the East I & XV, 1879–84) — while the theological demotion is stated outright at Bhagavad-Gītā 10.22, readable in Edwin Arnold’s The Song Celestial (1885). For the thunderbolt’s second life, the entry on the vajra in the Encyclopædia Britannica traces the implement from Indra’s hand into Vajrayāna ritual.

The deed is what the hymns keep returning to, and the deed is repeatable. The Vedic poets never told the slaying of Vṛtra as a thing done once at the start of time; they told it as a thing re-performed at every pressing of the soma, the warrior re-armed and the dragon re-split so that the waters run again. The throne on the cosmic mountain passed in the end to greater gods, and the king who held it was led, in the Chāndogya, to learn the one self his thunderbolt could not reach. But the gesture the oldest hymns asked of him keeps its shape: the held let go, the closed cut open, the stopped world made to move. That is the work the hymns set Vṛtrahan to do, and in the telling it is never finished — only begun again, each time the waters are released.

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