There was a king named Hiranyakashipu who believed he had conquered death.

Through terrible austerities — standing on one foot for years while termites built mounds around his body and fire ants crawled across his skin — he had won a boon from Brahma. No man or beast could kill him. Not indoors or outdoors. Not by day or by night. Not by weapon or by hand. He looked at this fortress of conditions and decided he was God.

But his son, Prahlada, knew something the king did not.

Prahlada was five years old. He had large, calm eyes that looked at you as though they could see the space behind your thoughts. When his tutors taught him the arts of power — how to tax, how to punish, how to make an enemy kneel — Prahlada listened politely and then said, "But none of this is real. Only Narayana is real. Only the Self that shines in every creature."

This drove Hiranyakashipu to a rage so white-hot that the palace walls trembled. He ordered his soldiers to throw the boy off a cliff. Prahlada fell — and landed softly, as though the air itself had caught him. He ordered poisonous snakes released into the boy's room. The snakes coiled around Prahlada's ankles and slept. He ordered war elephants to trample the child. The elephants stopped, knelt, and touched their trunks to Prahlada's feet.

Then Hiranyakashipu ordered the fire.

His sister Holika had a boon — a cloth that made her immune to flame. She sat on a pyre of sandalwood and ghee-soaked logs, Prahlada in her lap, and the priests lit the fire. The flames rose — orange, gold, roaring — and the heat was immense, enough to melt iron, enough to turn stone to powder.

Prahlada closed his eyes. He did not pray for rescue. He did not think of escape. He thought: I am not this body. What I am cannot be burned, because what I am is the same awareness that looks through every eye in every creature in every world. Fire cannot touch it, because fire itself exists within it.

The wind shifted. Holika's fireproof cloth flew from her shoulders and wrapped itself around Prahlada. She burned. He did not. When the fire died and the smoke cleared, the boy sat in a circle of warm ash, unharmed, his eyes still closed, his breath as steady as a sleeping river.

The soldiers stared. Hiranyakashipu stared. And Prahlada opened his eyes and said, gently, the way you might explain something obvious to someone you love: "Father, He is everywhere. In the fire that tried to burn me. In the ash beneath me. In you. There is nothing in all this world that He does not pervade, and what He pervades, nothing can destroy."