The Wrist Holds the Vow

Raksha sutra, the temple thread, and Raksha Bandhan: how a single coloured cord on the wrist became the oldest documented protective technology in human civilisation, and how the same wrist-thread now sells on Etsy as an intention bracelet

A priest ties a red and yellow thread on a soldier's wrist before he leaves for battle. A sister ties the same thread on her brother's wrist on the full moon of Shravana. A devotee ties a small piece of silk on the iron grille of a Sufi dargah and on the trunk of a peepal tree at a Vaishnava temple. The thread is the same thread. The vow is different at each tying. The lesson opens the raksha sutra, the temple-and-tree thread, and Raksha Bandhan, and shows how the Baudhayana Grihya Sutra's soldier-and-traveller protection thread became the world's most distributed protective technology, and how the Kabbalah Centre, the Buddhist Sai Sin tradition, and the Etsy intention bracelet are all in lineage with a wrist-thread protocol the Atharva Veda prescribed three thousand years before any of them appeared.

A Priest at a Temple Gate, Tying a Thread on a Driver's Wrist

At the Tirumala foothills in Andhra Pradesh, on a Tuesday morning in 1998, a long-distance lorry driver named Subramanyam stops at the Govindaraja Swamy temple at Tirupati before beginning the ascent up the seven hills. He is forty-two years old, a Telugu Vaishnava, and has been driving cement consignments between Chennai and Vijayawada for eighteen years. He has stopped at this temple before every long trip for the last eleven years. He removes his slippers, walks to the small priest at the side gate, presses a five-rupee coin into the priest's palm, and holds out his right wrist.

The priest takes a length of red and yellow cotton cord from a small basket. The cord is the colour of turmeric and kumkum mixed. It has been blessed at the morning archana. The priest ties the cord around Subramanyam's right wrist with three loose knots, murmuring a single line in Sanskrit. Yena baddho bali raja. Danavendro mahabalah. Tena tvam anubadhnami. Raksha ma chala ma chala. By the binding of which Bali, the demon king of great strength, was bound, by that same binding I bind you. Protection, do not move, do not move. The driver bows, places his hands on his eyes, and walks back to his lorry. He will not remove the thread. The thread will fade and fray over the next four to six months until it falls off on its own, at which point the next trip's stop at the temple will produce the next thread. He has worn this thread continuously, in successive instances, for eleven years.

Four months later, on the full moon of the lunar month Shravana in August, his sister Lakshmi ties a different thread on the same wrist. The thread is silk, woven with small beads, sometimes with a small flower or a tiny brass charm. She has come from her marital home in Vellore for the festival. She places a small tilak on his forehead, performs an arati with a brass plate, feeds him a piece of sweet, and ties the thread with the same single line spoken differently. I tie this thread on my brother's wrist. May it protect him. May he, in turn, protect me. Subramanyam gives her an envelope with money and a sari. She takes them and leaves. The Raksha Bandhan thread will sit alongside the Tirupati priest's raksha sutra on the same wrist until both fade and fall.