Rama with the Axe: The Brahmin Avatar Who Kills Kings

Parashurama, Rama with the axe (parashu), is the sixth avatar of Vishnu and the only brahmin among the avatars, given his weapon by Shiva. His is the most morally uncomfortable of the avatar stories. At his father's command he beheads his own mother, then asks, as his granted boon, for her to be restored to life; and when the warrior-king Kartavirya Arjuna kills his father, Parashurama destroys the entire kshatriya (warrior-ruler) class twenty-one times over, a divine slaughter of the ruling order that the tradition preserves without quite domesticating. He is one of the chiranjivi, the immortals held to be alive still, which lets the epics place him as the teacher of Bhishma, Drona and Karna in the Mahabharata, inside a story set long after his own age. Coastal Karnataka and Kerala are said to be land he reclaimed from the sea by hurling his axe, and he is a patron figure of that coast.