Matsya

Summary

Matsya is, in the myths of India, the fish that warned Manu of the flood and towed his ship to the mountain, and that later books make one of the forms in which Viṣṇu comes down into the world, the first in the list of ten. Its Sanskrit name, मत्स्य, matsya, means simply "fish".

The oldest telling is in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, a work explaining the acts of sacrifice. One morning Manu was brought water to wash his hands, and a fish came into his palms and said: rear me and I will save you. From what will you save me? he asked. A flood will carry away all these creatures, it said; from that I will save you. It told him that fish devour fish while they are small, so he should keep it in a jar, then dig a pit for it when it outgrew the jar, then take it down to the sea. It became one of the largest of fish, told him the year the flood would come, and ordered him to prepare a ship. When the water rose Manu went into the ship, the fish swam up to him, he tied the ship's rope to its horn, and it carried him to the northern mountain. Then it said: I have saved you; tie the ship to a tree, and do not let the water leave you stranded on the mountain; go down little by little as it falls. He went down, and the slope of the northern mountain is named after his descent. The flood swept away every creature, and Manu alone remained.

This text does not name the fish as a god. In later books its identity grows as its body grows in the story. In the Mahābhārata the fish tells the seven sages, once they have tied the ship to a Himalayan peak, that it is Brahmā, lord of creatures. In the Matsya Purāṇa and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa it is Viṣṇu himself. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa counts it among more than twenty forms in which he came down, while the familiar list of ten begins with it, and the dictionary records for Viṣṇu the epithet "who descends as a fish, a tortoise and the rest".

The idea the story turns on is a kindness that returns larger than it was given. Manu protected a small fish from the big fish, and the fish, grown larger than the sea, protected him from the great water. What once fitted in a jar came to fill the ocean, and the weak creature that needed a human palm became the one that towed humanity's ship. In the later tellings the ship also carries the seeds of every living thing and the books of knowledge, so the fish saves life and learning together.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Without its final short vowel, the Sanskrit stem vowel, matsya is matsy. The project's Hindu essay reads it as māʾ + ḥayy, "water" and "living": life in water. The m and its vowel are māʾ, water; the joined t and s, with the y after them, are ḥayy, living. Arabic puts the two words together in the Qurʾānic verse "We made from water every living thing". In another branch of the same languages this very name became māhī, the Persian word for fish, in which t and s turned into h, leaving mā and hī. On this reading the fish is the living thing that lives in water, which is what the story makes it: when the water covered every living thing, a man was saved by a living creature of the water.

Linguistic Root

Monier-Williams records matsya, fish, from the Ṛgveda on, sets beside it the forms matsa and maccha, and notes that the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa personifies the fish as a prince named Sāmmada. The first edition of the dictionary glosses the word as "the gay one", tracing it to a verb of rejoicing. Steingass's Persian dictionary gives māhī, "a fish", and sets Sanskrit matsya beside it.

Lane enters water under m-w-h, where amāha al-ḥāfir means the digger reached water. Ḥayy is the opposite of dead, and Abū Ḥayyān glosses al-ḥayawān as "life, and every creature with a soul".

The essay's reading divides the name in two and sets the joined t and s against ḥ. That path is visible in Persian, where the fish became māhī once t and s had gone to h; Sanskrit itself kept t and s as they were. Elsewhere the essay compares the fish with Jonah's whale, which swallowed the prophet and then let him go, and makes both an instrument of rescue from the water.

Key Mythic Narratives

The horned fish in the Mahābhārata

The hero of the Mahābhārata is Manu son of Vivasvat, doing austerities in the jujube forest of Badarī. The fish came to him on the bank of the river Cīriṇī and asked him to protect it from bigger fish. He moved it from a vessel to a tank, then to the Gaṅgā, whom the text calls "the favourite spouse of the Ocean", then to the sea. It told him to build a strong ship with a long rope, to board it with the seven sages, and to keep every kind of seed apart, and said he would know it by a horn on its head. It towed the ship through the water for many years to the highest peak of the Himalaya, where they tied it, and so that peak is called Naubandhana, "the mooring of the ship". Then it said: I am Brahmā, and Manu will create the beings again. Mahābhārata, Vana Parva 186. Eggeling notes that Atharvaveda 19.39.8 names a place on the Himalayan summit "the gliding down of the ship".

The Matsya Purāṇa: the book the fish taught

The Matsya Purāṇa opens with the same story and makes the whole book the fish's teaching. Vaivasvata Manu was doing austerities on a peak of the Malaya mountain when a tiny fish fell into his hands as he poured water for the spirits of his ancestors. He put it in a jar; in a day and a night it outgrew the jar, and he moved it to a larger pitcher, then a well, then a tank, then the Gaṅgā, then the sea, until it almost filled the ocean. He asked it: are you the chief of the asuras, or Vāsudeva? Then he recognised it and bowed. It told him that the gods had built a boat and that the world would be drowned within days. Then it described the dissolution: a hundred years without rain, seven suns scorching the earth, fire from the thousand mouths of the serpent Śeṣa and from the third eye in Śiva's forehead, then seven clouds raining until all the seas were one water. It told him to put the seed of creation and the Vedas in the boat. When the dissolution came the fish appeared with its horn, and Śeṣa, king of the serpents, appeared as a rope, and Manu tied the boat to the horn. Then he asked the fish about creation and dissolution, descent and duty, and its answer is the book.

King Satyavrata and Hayagrīva

In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa the hero is Satyavrata, a king of the Draviḍa country, who finds the fish in the water of his palms as he offers it in the river Kṛtamālā. The fish tells him to carry herbs, seeds and sages, to tie the boat to its horn using the serpent Vāsuki as a rope, and then teaches him aboard. The book tells of another appearance of the fish in an earlier cycle: when Brahmā fell asleep at the end of his day the Vedas came out of his mouth, a demon named Hayagrīva stole them, and Hari took the form of the fish, killed him, and gave the books back to Brahmā.

The fish in the stories of Kāma

The Matsya Purāṇa calls Kāma, the god of desire, the one "whose banner is the fish". When Kāma was born again as a son of Kṛṣṇa, the demon Śambara stole him and threw him into the sea; a great fish swallowed him, the fish was caught and brought to Śambara's kitchen, and the child was found alive in its belly.

Symbolic Reading

The Hindu rereading essay reads Viṣṇu's ten forms as a history of life and begins with Matsya: life began in water, then came the tortoise that lives in water and on land, then the land animal, then man.

In the texts themselves rescue rests on three things a fisherman or a farmer knows: a small creature kept until it is grown, a ship tied with a strong rope, and seeds kept each kind apart. In the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa the story ends with sacrifice: Manu offers butter and milk into the water, and from them rises Iḍā, the blessing from which descendants come. The first telling explains a rite; the later tellings make the fish the keeper of the books as well.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the Mesopotamian flood the warning comes from Enki, lord of the fresh water, who speaks to a reed wall so that the man will hear; Utnapishtim builds the ship and it comes to rest on Mount Nimush. In Greece Prometheus advises his son Deucalion to build a chest stocked with food, and it floats nine days until it reaches Parnassus. In India the warning comes from a creature of the water itself, one the man saved before it saved him. The Hindu essay compares Manu's flood with Noah's, and the fish with Jonah's whale. The warning, the vessel and the mountain in each version are set out in Flood traditions. Library 1.7.2.

The Matsya Purāṇa ends the cycle with fire and then water: suns that scorch, fire from the serpent and from Śiva's eye, then rain until the seas are one, and then creation begins again from what was kept in the boat. In the North Surtr's fire burns the world and it sinks into the sea, and then a green earth rises from the water, as in Ragnarök. The single water in which nothing stands is the primordial waters returning at the end of the cycle.

The fish, then the tortoise, then the boar are the first of Viṣṇu's forms.