Mṛtyu Prajāpati Saṃvāda

Mṛtyu is Death, the one who ends the lives of beings. This account tells where she came from. The Mahābhārata gives it in the Mokshadharma Parva of the Śānti Parva. Bhīshma tells it to Yudhishṭhira, who asks who is truly the doer of death after the great war.

The frame

Yudhishṭhira stood on the battlefield of Kurukshetra and looked at the thousands of fallen warriors. They were kings of great might who had armies and could not be stopped in battle, and now all lay dead. He asked Bhīshma who was the real agent of death. Each warrior had been killed by another warrior of equal strength, so no single force could explain them all. What is the real cause? What is Mṛtyu? Where does she come from?

Bhīshma answered by telling a conversation from ancient times between Nārada and King Akampana. Akampana had lost his son Hari in battle and asked Nārada to help him understand the nature of Mṛtyu.

Brahmā’s anger

In the earliest ages of creation Brahmā made countless beings, devas, humans, animals, plants and every kind of life. They multiplied without end, but they did not die. Creation filled and overflowed. The weight of the beings pressed on the earth. Brahmā had given life but had not given death, and this was more than the world could bear.

In this crisis a great anger rose in Brahmā, stronger than anything in his nature. Flames burst from his three eyes. From the flames, from the third eye, the eye of fire and dissolution, a figure came forth. She was a dark woman of supreme beauty and terrible power, dressed in crimson and wearing golden ornaments. Her eyes were coppery red with the heat of her birth. This was Mṛtyu.

Mṛtyu refuses

Mahādeva saw what Brahmā’s anger had made. He came to Brahmā with folded hands and persuaded him to draw his anger back into himself, and Brahmā did so. The anger went, but Mṛtyu remained.

Brahmā spoke to Mṛtyu: “You were born from my anger for a purpose. Go and take the lives of beings, so that creation does not break down under its own weight.”

Mṛtyu refused. She was afraid of the pāpa (sin) of killing, which is adharma. She could not bear to kill the good and the wicked alike, the young and the old, mothers and children. She wept, and her tears fell as drops of water. Brahmā was moved by her grief. He gathered the tears in his hands, and they became the diseases that now go with death. Each tear became one kind of illness, which would carry beings toward their end in the course of nature and not by a direct blow.

Mṛtyu’s tapas

Mṛtyu still refused. She went to a remote place and did hard tapas (austerity). She stood for ages, ate nothing, and fixed her mind on dharma and truth. She was looking for a way to escape the terrible work she had been given.

Brahmā came to the place of her tapas. He gave her a series of truths.

  • The beings she would take had already, by their own karma, made ready the conditions of their going. She would not be choosing. She would be carrying out what karma had already fixed.
  • Disease, old age and the natural wearing out of the body’s strength would do the work. Mṛtyu would be only the last moment of a process long under way.
  • The pāpa of brahmahatyā (killing a brāhmaṇa) or of any other killing would not touch her. Pāpa attaches only where there is saṃkalpa (intention) to harm another. Mṛtyu’s act is impersonal. It is the movement of dharmic time itself and not the will of one who acts.
  • Without her, the order of the world would be destroyed. The dharma she wished to protect would be wiped out by the disorder of a creation that cannot dissolve.

Mṛtyu accepted. She became the means through which karma and time work. She is not a destroyer but a precise carrier-out of the principle of dharma that what is born must return to its source.

Sources

  • Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Mokshadharma Parva, Chapter 256 (the frame; Brahmā’s anger)
  • Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Mokshadharma Parva, Chapter 257 (Mṛtyu’s refusal)
  • Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Mokshadharma Parva, Chapter 258 (Mṛtyu’s tapas)