Andhakasura, the Blind Demon

Andhakasura’s story is unusual because, in the Purana’s telling, he is Shiva’s own son — and Shiva had to end him.

It begins this way. Once, on Mount Kailash, Parvati came up behind Shiva and playfully covered his eyes with her hands. The whole world went dark — because Shiva’s eyes are what give light. From the darkness, the sweat that came from Parvati’s palms — mixed with something of Shiva that came out through his closed eyes — produced a small dark figure. The figure was a boy: blind, ill-formed.

Shiva and Parvati looked at the strange child they had — not exactly produced, but accidentally caused. Parvati was uneasy. Shiva looked at the boy for a long time.

“He cannot live here,” Shiva said. “He is born of a moment that should not have been. He carries that moment in his body. Let him be raised elsewhere.”

There was a demon king at the time, Hiranyaksha (the same one Vishnu had once killed as Varaha — in some accounts a related figure), who had no son. He was praying for one. Shiva sent the dark blind boy to him.

The demon king was overjoyed. He raised the boy as his own. He named him Andhaka — “the blind one.” He gave him every privilege of a demon prince. He encouraged him in austerity. Andhaka did intense austerity to Brahma and won, like other demons before him, a vast boon: he would not be killed by any common weapon, in any common way, by any god — except, the boon said, by his own father.

Andhaka assumed this clause was harmless. He believed his father was the demon king who had raised him. He went out and conquered the worlds. He defeated the gods. He took every territory he wanted.

But there was one place he could not enter. He could not get into Mount Kailash. The mountain belonged to Shiva. And Andhaka, hearing of the great goddess who lived there — the wife of Shiva, of extraordinary beauty — decided that she would be the prize of his final conquest.

He marched his army to Kailash.

He demanded that the goddess be handed over.

Shiva came out. He looked at the demon. He recognised, immediately, who Andhaka was — the boy he had sent away long ago, raised as he was raised, returning now in this shape, asking for his own mother.

The Purana lets this moment have its weight. Shiva did not strike yet. He gave Andhaka the chance to know.

“Andhaka,” Shiva said. “Do you know who you are asking for? Do you know who I am to you?”

Andhaka did not. He laughed and drew his weapon.

The battle began. It went on for a long time. Andhaka was a formidable warrior — his boon had given him near-invulnerability. But Shiva had been doing this longer than the demon had been alive.

At the end, Shiva lifted his trident and ran it through Andhaka’s chest, holding him aloft on the three prongs. The demon hung there for a long time. The blood that fell from him — the Purana says — was a kind that, where it touched the earth, gave rise to many more demons. But Shiva ordered a goddess to drink the blood before it hit the ground. (In some tellings this was Kali; in others, a form of Parvati herself.)

While Andhaka hung on the trident, the long meditation began. Slowly his demon nature drained out. He began to remember. He saw, at last, that Shiva was his father. That the goddess he had come for was his mother. That his whole life had been an attempt to take from his own parents.

He wept. He repented. He asked for forgiveness.

Shiva lowered him. The trident wound healed. Shiva forgave him — and went further. He made Andhaka the chief of his ganas, renamed him Bhringi (some traditions; others keep them separate). Andhaka was redeemed by his own father, who had also been the only one who could end him.

The Purana takes a moment with this story’s lesson. The blind one who attacks his parents is, the wise have said, in everyone — the part of the self that, not knowing what it is asking from, asks for exactly what would destroy it. The trident through the chest is not revenge. It is the moment of being held still long enough to remember.

The next story is the day the gods and demons together churned the ocean — and the poison that came up first.