The Hare Swallowed the Razor: The Rigveda's Impossible Verses

A God Sets a Riddle and Nobody Answers It

Somewhere in the tenth book of the Rigveda, a hymn about a missed dinner invitation turns into an interrogation. It opens with a woman’s complaint: everyone else has turned up, she says, and the one guest who matters has not. Then a second voice arrives, boasting, and the hymn settles into the exchange between a poet named Vasukra and the god Indra that the tradition says it is. So far this is ordinary enough. The Rigveda has a dozen or so hymns built as conversations, and gods in them behave much as patrons behave.

Then the god stops the conversation and asks for something.

idaṃ su me jaritar ā cikiddhi pratīpaṃ śāpaṃ nadyo vahanti

lopāśaḥ siṃhaṃ pratyañcam atsāḥ kroṣṭā varāhaṃ nir atakta kakṣāt

“Take note of this for me, singer: the rivers carry their driftwood upstream. The fox goes at the lion head on. The jackal has driven the boar out of the thicket.”

Rigveda 10.28, verse 4. My rendering; Griffith (1896) has “the rivers send their swelling water backward”. [1] [2]

The next verse is the poet’s answer, and it is one of the most disarming lines in the collection. How, he asks, should a simpleton like him make out the mind of someone clever? He does not solve the riddle. Nobody in the hymn solves it. Four verses later the god simply piles on more of the same: a hare has swallowed a razor coming at it, a mountain has been split from a distance with a lump of earth, the big will be handed over to the small, the calf will grow strong and eat the bull.

A reader meeting this for the first time usually reaches for one of two explanations. Either the text is damaged, or it is mystical. Neither is right. The Rigveda states impossible things on purpose, often, in fixed formulas that its oldest poets shared, and it does so in at least four distinct kinds of work: to set a puzzle, to define what only a god can do, to point at the edge of what language can describe, and to threaten. Getting those apart is what this piece is for. It also has a long tail: the technique outlives the Vedic period by three thousand years and surfaces, still doing the same job, in the mouth of a fifteenth-century weaver in Banaras.

Methods note. The counts above are mine, made by pattern search over a romanised text of the Saṃhitā and then read by hand. Two cautions. Vedic is transmitted with words fused across boundaries, so a search of this kind gives floors rather than ceilings; treat the figures as close, not final. Anyone who wants to check a repeated formula rather than a single word should use Bloomfield’s Vedic Concordance, which indexes whole lines. [17] My source text is also unaccented, so the Sanskrit here is quoted without the Vedic pitch marks rather than with invented ones. And the brahmodya count needs a word of explanation: four verses do contain the string, but in every case it resolves as brahma plus a form of ud-yata, “the formulation held up, offered”, and not the later noun brahmodya meaning a riddle contest. The institution is visible in the Rigveda. The word for it is not yet there.

Twelve Verses, Two Speakers, No Solution

RV 10.28 runs to twelve verses. The traditional index of authorship assigns the first to a woman, Vasukra’s wife, and the remainder to Vasukra and Indra in alternation, which is as much attribution as we ever get in this collection and rather more than we can verify. Her verse turns on an absence: every other stranger has come, only my father-in-law has not come, and if he did come he would eat the grains, drink the soma, and go home well fed. Since the tradition makes Vasukra a son of Indra, the missing father-in-law is the god himself, invited and late. She gets one verse and disappears. Readers interested in what happens to the women who speak once in this text and are never heard from again should see the dialogue hymns and their erased voices.

Sāyaṇa, commenting in the fourteenth century, supplies the connective tissue that the hymn withholds: Indra came to Vasukra’s sacrifice in disguise, and the conversation exists to convince the household that the god had really turned up. [3] It is a reasonable guess and it is a guess, which is the normal condition of reading this hymn. Anyone wanting to test a reading of this hymn should set the standard modern translations beside each other, Jamison and Brereton’s English of 2014 and Geldner’s German of 1951, with Renou’s volumes for the harder words. [12] [13] [14] What the Sanskrit gives us with no ambiguity at all is the demand in verse 4. The imperative cikiddhi, “take note, make this out”, occurs four times in the Rigveda, and only here does a god use it to hand a puzzle to a human being.

The words themselves are hard in a way worth watching. Śāpa is rare and obscure; the standard nineteenth-century lexicon of the Rigveda glossed it as driftwood, which gives the fine image of a river carrying its flotsam the wrong way up its own current. [4] Griffith, working without that reading, wrote “swelling water backward”, which loses the debris and keeps the impossibility. Then the fauna: lopāśa, fox, and kroṣṭṛ, jackal, occur nowhere else in the Rigveda, a detail pursued further in the piece on Rigvedic animals. They exist in this text so that the scrub jungle can be described with its hierarchy inverted. The riddle works only if the audience knows perfectly well that foxes avoid lions.

Verse 9 escalates, and the escalation is structured:

śaśaḥ kṣuraṃ pratyañcaṃ jagārādriṃ logena vy abhedam ārāt

bṛhantaṃ cid ṛhate randhayāni vayad vatso vṛṣabhaṃ śūśuvānaḥ

“The hare has swallowed the razor coming at it. With a clod I split the crag from far off. Even the great one I shall hand over to the small. The calf, grown strong, shall eat the bull.”

Rigveda 10.28, verse 9. My rendering, checked against Griffith (1896). [1] [2]

Four statements, and they are not interchangeable. The first is a small animal’s absurd triumph over a blade. The second is the speaker’s own claim, and it is the only one in the first person: I split the mountain with a clod of earth. The third announces a policy, the reversal of rank as something the god intends to bring about. The fourth returns to the farmyard with the calf eating the bull, which is the domestic version of the fox and the lion. The hare, incidentally, is the only hare in the Rigveda. The razor turns up just once more, in a simile about being sharpened. These animals and objects were summoned for this one occasion.

Cooked Milk in a Raw Cow

If RV 10.28 were the only place the Rigveda talked like this, we would be entitled to call it an oddity of a late hymn. It is not. The most revealing case is not a riddle at all. It is a formula, and it belongs to the oldest stratum of the collection.

Eight verses, spread across Maṇḍalas 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8, four of them family books, state that a god has put pakva, cooked or ripened, inside āma, raw or unripe. The thing cooked is milk. The raw container is the cow.

Notice what happens when the formula is read as the poets’ own physics rather than as a figure of speech. In this culture, edible things are made edible by pac-, cooking. Grain is eaten roasted, as in the first verse of RV 10.28, and bulls are dressed and cooked, as in its third; the sacrificial meal exists because someone applied heat to raw material. Milk breaks the rule. It arrives finished, sweet, white and ready, out of an animal that has never lit a fire. On its own terms this is not a poetic conceit. It is an anomaly in the local theory of nourishment, and the poets put it exactly where they put every other anomaly, in the hands of a god.

tava kratvā tava tad daṃsanābhir āmāsu pakvaṃ śacyā ni dīdhaḥ

aurṇor dura usriyābhyo vi dṛḷhod ūrvād gā asṛjo aṅgirasvān

“By your will and your wonder-workings you set the cooked inside the raw ones. You opened the firm doors for the cattle of dawn, and with the Aṅgirases released the cows from the pen.”

Rigveda 6.17, verse 6. After Griffith (1896), with diacritics standardised. [1] [2]

That pairing is the argument in miniature. Cooked milk in a raw cow stands in the same verse, done by the same power, as the release of the dawn cattle from the rock, which is the collection’s central cosmogonic act. The impossible statement is not decorating the myth. It is doing the same work as the myth, on a smaller and more domestic scale, and it is doing it with an observation anyone could make while milking.

Two consequences follow, and they run in opposite directions from the usual assumptions about this text. First, these poets were not indifferent to how things work; they located divine agency precisely at the seams where their own account of the world gave out. Second, the god of the formula is not primarily a fighter or a moralist. He is the one who can make the category violation happen. That is a definition by impossibility, and it is worth setting beside what the same poets did with māyā, the form-making power that a god exercises and an enemy can be stripped of.

The Tree With Its Root in the Air

A third group of impossible statements has no riddle frame and no farmyard. They describe the structure of things, and they describe it upside down.

abudhne rājā varuṇo vanasyordhvaṃ stūpaṃ dadate pūtadakṣaḥ

nīcīnā sthur upari budhna eṣām asme antar nihitāḥ ketavaḥ syuḥ

“In the bottomless, King Varuṇa of purifying skill holds up the crest of the tree. They stand downward, their base above. May their beacons be set deep within us.”

Rigveda 1.24, verse 7. My rendering after Griffith (1896). [1] [2]

A tree with its base in the air and its crown pointing down, planted in a region that has no bottom, is not a thing anyone has seen. It is also not a mistake. The image was durable enough to be inherited: the Kaṭha Upaniṣad opens its sixth chapter with an eternal aśvattha whose root is up and whose branches are down, and the Bhagavad Gītā repeats the figure at 15.1. Ananda Coomaraswamy devoted a study to the inverted tree in 1938 and traced the line from this verse forward. [5] For where the Vedic hymns sit relative to those later texts, see the map of Hindu scripture; for what Rigvedic poets did with actual timber, the piece on trees and wood.

Then there is a small family of verses about feet, and these are genuinely unsolved.

apād eti prathamā padvatīnāṃ kas tad vāṃ mitrāvaruṇā ciketa

garbho bhāraṃ bharaty ā cid asya ṛtaṃ piparty anṛtaṃ ni tārīt

“Footless, she goes first of those with feet. Who has made this out, Mitra and Varuṇa? The unborn one carries this world’s burden, fulfils the truth and overcomes the falsehood.”

Rigveda 1.152, verse 3. My rendering after Griffith (1896). [1] [2]

The verse builds in its own answer key, or rather the absence of one: kas tad ciketa, who has understood this. Dawn is the usual candidate for the footless one who precedes the footed, and it fits the Rigveda’s habits, since Dawn goes ahead of the cattle and the herders every morning. But the same trick recurs elsewhere with different possible answers. At RV 1.185.2 two motionless, footless beings support a moving, footed offspring, and there the pair is Heaven and Earth. At RV 6.59.6 a footless one comes before the footed, chatters with her tongue, and goes thirty steps downward. Thirty invites a calendar, thirty days of a month, but the hymn does not say, and a Vedic riddle that does not say is not being coy. It is being a riddle.

graph TD
    A["Impossible statement"] --> B["Riddle: solve it"]
    A --> C["Formula: only a god does this"]
    A --> D["Cosmology: the world's real shape"]
    A --> E["Threat: rank will be reversed"]
    B --> F["RV 10.28.4, 10.28.9"]
    C --> G["cooked milk in raw cows, 8 verses"]
    D --> H["RV 1.24.7 inverted tree"]
    E --> I["RV 10.28.9 and 10.28.11"]

What the Impossible Was For

Set the four jobs side by side and the technique stops looking like a mood and starts looking like a tool with settings.

The riddle setting needs an audience that shares a firm sense of the ordinary. You cannot shock anyone with a fox attacking a lion unless foxes reliably run away. This is why the inversions are so often drawn from animal behaviour and hydrology, the two domains in which a herding people’s expectations were most exact. The formula setting needs the opposite: not surprise but repetition, the same anomaly cited in the same words across centuries of transmission as evidence of what a god is for. The cosmological setting uses impossibility as a boundary marker, a way of saying that the structure of things is not built to the scale of a human standing in a field. And the threat setting weaponises all of it. When Indra says he will hand the great one over to the small, the impossibility is the point: he is claiming the power to suspend the rule that keeps hierarchies in place.

The fourth setting has a sting in the tail. Verses 10 and 11 of RV 10.28 take the trapped eagle and the captured wild steer and turn them into a curse against people who “eat up the brahman’s portion” and devour bulls that were let loose. Someone in this hymn is angry about priests who live well. The upside-down world stops being a puzzle and becomes a wish.

None of the four is knockably wrong, and the honest position is that a hymn of this kind may have been doing several at once. What can be said firmly is that the verses are not corrupt. They scan, their grammar is in order, and their vocabulary was chosen with care from the far edges of the lexicon.

A Sport With Stakes

The riddle in RV 10.28 is not a private literary gesture. It is a trace of an institution.

Vedic literature after the Rigveda describes a formal contest of enigmas called the brahmodya, staged at sacrifices, in which participants put questions about hidden connections and the loser pays. F. B. J. Kuiper, in a long 1960 study, reconstructed the ancient verbal contest as a real, seasonal, agonistic event with the poetic competition at its centre. [6] Michael Witzel, in a 1987 paper whose title has entered the field’s shorthand, followed the motif of the loser’s head shattering or being cut off, a threat that survives from Vedic prose into Buddhist debate literature. [7] George Thompson, writing in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1997, argued that the brahmodya is best read as a performance with its own rules of discourse rather than a quiz with an answer sheet: what the exchange establishes is standing, competence and the limits of what can be said. [8]

That reading fits RV 10.28 disconcertingly well. Its riddle has no solution in the text because the exchange is not about getting to a solution. The poet’s reply, calling himself a pāka, a simpleton, opposite the god’s ghṛtsa, the clever one, is a move in a contest whose currency is the acknowledgement of who can and cannot make things out. The Rigveda has a venue for exactly this kind of encounter too: the assembly, treated in the piece on sabhā and samiti.

Aside. The chain of evidence here runs backward, and that is worth flagging. The institution is described in the Brāhmaṇas and the Upaniṣads; the word brahmodya is theirs, not the Rigveda’s; what the Rigveda offers is hymns that look like the kind of thing such an institution would use. Reading the later rules onto the earlier poems is a reasonable inference and not a proof, and the risk is circularity: we identify the riddle hymns using the later contest, then use the riddle hymns to date the contest early. Kuiper, Witzel and Thompson are all careful about this. Popular accounts of Vedic riddling usually are not.

How to Get These Verses Wrong

Three cautions, in increasing order of how often the mistake is made.

The first is to solve them too fast. A verse that says the footless goes before the footed will accept dawn, speech, the earth, a river, the year and the sacrificial ladle as answers, and the pleasure of fitting one in is exactly the pleasure the hymn is engineered to produce. That is a reason for suspicion, not confidence. The Rigveda’s habit of withholding is itself a subject: see what the Rigveda hides.

The second is to treat impossibility as mysticism. Nothing in RV 10.28 asks the reader to transcend logic, and nothing in the cooked-milk formula is about the limits of reason. These are statements about who can do what to a cow. The philosophical vertigo that later Indian traditions built out of paradox is real, and it is later. The Rigveda’s own most searching hymn about the limits of knowledge, the Nāsadīya, gets its effect from grammar and negation, not from reversal.

The third is to underestimate how many apparent impossibilities are ours rather than theirs. At RV 10.79.6 Griffith has Agni “gold-hued and toothless” cutting his food to pieces like a knife, which is a splendid impossibility; the Sanskrit form he read as “toothless” can also be read as a participle meaning “eating”, and then the verse is merely vivid. Vedic is full of forms that sit on that fence, and the grammar of the hymns was built for exactly this kind of productive ambiguity, which is the subject of Elizarenkova’s study of Rigvedic style and of Gonda’s work on the poets’ vision. [15] [16] So is idiom: if a future philologist recovered a scrap of English containing “when pigs fly” with no context, they would face the same problem, and might solemnly classify it among our cosmological beliefs. Some of the Rigveda’s stranger lines are probably proverbs whose ordinariness we have lost. The safest rule is to trust the ones that repeat, like the cooked milk, and hold the singletons loosely. On how much can hang on a single particle, see the piece on na.

Three Thousand Years of Upside Down

Inverted worlds are not a Vedic speciality. They are one of the oldest devices in recorded poetry, and comparing the cases sharpens what the Rigveda is doing.

In the seventh century BCE, the Greek poet Archilochus wrote that nothing could be considered impossible any more, now that Zeus had made night out of midday: let nobody be surprised if land animals take to the sea and the dolphins prefer the wooded mountains. The eclipse behind the poem is usually identified as that of 6 April 648 BCE. [9] The structure is identical to RV 10.28.4, and the reasoning is explicit in a way the Vedic hymn leaves implicit. One rule has broken, therefore all rules are in question, therefore here is a list of absurdities. Classical rhetoric named the figure adynaton, the impossible. Ernst Robert Curtius, tracing it through Latin and medieval European literature, showed that stringing impossibilia together is what generates the durable topos of the world upside down, a topos that ends up printed on popular broadsides in which animals take over human trades and every ordinary relation is turned around. [10]

India kept the device and gave it a teaching job. By the fifteenth century, the poems attributed to Kabir, a low-caste weaver of Banaras, include a genre that the tradition calls ulaṭbāṃsī, upside-down language, inherited from Nāth and Sahajiyā lineages. Its verses reverse the order of nature as casually as RV 10.28 does, animals behaving as people and the elements behaving as neither, and they leave the hearer holding something that will not resolve. Linda Hess, who translated the Bijak with Shukdev Singh, reads these as instruments rather than puzzles, comparable to a Zen koan in function: the verse is meant to leave you feeling foolish, and the feeling is the lesson. [11]

graph LR
    A["RV 1.24.7 inverted tree"] --> B["Katha Upanisad 6.1"]
    B --> C["Bhagavad Gita 15.1"]
    D["RV riddle hymns"] --> E["Brahmana brahmodya contest"]
    E --> F["Upanisadic debates"]
    F -.-> G["Kabir ulatbansi"]
    H["Archilochus fr. 122"] -.-> I["European world upside down"]

Solid arrows in that diagram are documented inheritance, where a later text takes over an earlier image or institution. The dotted ones are not: they mark places where the same device turns up again with no traceable line running back to it, which is the more interesting kind of resemblance and the harder one to write about honestly.

No line of transmission connects RV 10.28 to Kabir, and it would be silly to invent one; the Vedic hymn was being recited in Sanskrit by specialists for well over two millennia before a weaver started singing about a reversed world in a north Indian vernacular. What recurs is not a text but a technique, and the recurrence is the interesting part. Inversion is available to any tradition with a strong enough sense of the regular, which is a backhanded way of saying that it is a measure of confidence rather than confusion.

What Inversion Presupposes

Here is the thing that took me longest to see. You cannot write an impossible verse in a world you do not think is orderly.

Every one of these lines works by subtraction from an expectation so secure that it does not need stating. Rivers run down. Foxes flee lions. Calves do not eat bulls. Cooking requires a cook. The Rigveda’s poets could get an effect out of violating those rules because their world was, in their own account of it, lawful, and they had a word for the lawfulness: ṛta, the order that holds and that both gods and poets are answerable to. The impossible verses are evidence for ṛta from the far side, the way a photograph’s negative carries the same information as the print. Read them next to the hymns about cosmic order proper, and something that looks like whimsy turns into a second, independent witness to the same conviction. For the order itself, see Varuṇa and the watchful cosmos and dharman as the prop of the world.

There is also something in this for anyone who has assumed that the oldest religious poetry in an Indo-European language would be solemn. RV 10.28 contains a woman complaining about a guest, a god bragging, a poet calling himself an idiot, a hare beating a razor, and an unmistakable flash of resentment about clergy who eat well. It ends with a request for money. The people who made this were confident enough in their cosmos to play with breaking it, and confident enough in their craft to leave a riddle unsolved on the page for three thousand years, which is one way to make sure it is still being read.

Read RV 10.28 straight through in any translation, start to finish, in one sitting: ten minutes, and do not look up the notes until you have failed to solve verse 4 on your own. Doniger’s anthology is the friendliest place to meet the riddling hymns for the first time. [18] Then read the cooked-milk formula in RV 6.17 and notice that the poet is not joking at all. The distance between those two moods, held inside one technique, is the part of the Rigveda that rewards a second visit.