The problem was unusual even by the standards of problems the gods typically faced: the earth was missing.
Hiranyaksha was the elder brother of Hiranyakashipu — the demon father who would eventually be defeated by Narasimha for the sake of his son Prahlada. But that story came later. This story is Hiranyaksha’s, and it is the story of a being whose strength was so absolute and whose desire for conquest so thoroughgoing that he went beyond conquering kingdoms and armies and even the gods themselves, beyond claiming territories and taking thrones, to the action that no one had previously attempted: he picked up the earth and dragged it to the bottom of the cosmic ocean.
He could do this. This is worth pausing on. The strength that the demon had acquired through austerities and boons was the kind of strength that makes the difference between ordinary problems and the truly exceptional ones. Most problems are problems of conflict or shortage or mismanagement. This was a problem of the earth simply not being where it was supposed to be.
The beings who lived on the earth were consequently homeless. The gods whose functions required the existence of the earth found their functions without an object. Brahma, who had created the earth and watched over it, found himself looking at the place where the earth had been and finding ocean.
He prayed. And from his nostril — in a detail the Bhagavata Purana presents without apology as entirely natural — a tiny boar emerged, no bigger than a thumb. Brahma looked at it, puzzled. The tiny boar grew. It grew rapidly, past the size of an elephant, past the size of a mountain, until it was a boar whose scale defied ordinary spatial reasoning. Its tusks were gleaming white, its body massive, its snout capable of detecting what was at the very bottom of the cosmic ocean.
It dove.
Hiranyaksha, who had been waiting at the bottom of the ocean, celebrating his unique acquisition, encountered the boar descending through the waters. He challenged it. What followed was a battle at the bottom of the cosmic ocean — the demon with all his boons and strength fighting the divine boar whose tusks had the edge of cosmic purpose — and the battle lasted, by some accounts, a thousand years of divine time.
Hiranyaksha lost. Vishnu in the form of Varaha, the great boar, defeated the demon and then — and this is the action the story was building toward — lifted the earth on his tusks and carried it back to the surface.
The image that has been sculpted and painted for millennia is this: the enormous divine boar standing in the primordial waters, the earth balanced on his tusks, Brahma and the sages seated on the earth in gratitude, the waters parting around the god who has just retrieved the world from the bottom of everything.
The earth-goddess Bhudevi (or Prithvi) is sometimes depicted in the image as well — smaller, grateful, her hands raised in welcome as she is lifted. The boar regards her with the steady gaze of the preserver who has completed what needed to be done.
The Varaha temple at Pushkar and the great Varaha sculptures at Udayagiri and Mahabalipuram are among the finest surviving examples of Indian rock-cut art. At Udayagiri, the Varaha is carved in high relief from the cliff face — the boar enormous, the earth-goddess small beside it, the cosmic rescue preserved in stone for fifteen hundred years.
What the Varaha avatar means, in the tradition of interpreting the Dashavatara: the earth is not just the planet but the principle of stability, of the material world as the ground of human life and possibility. When that ground is taken away — when the material conditions for living are undermined, when what should be solid proves to be absent — the preserver takes the form necessary to retrieve it. Not always the beautiful form, not always the form expected. Sometimes a boar.
The earth was returned. The beings who live on it got their world back. And the boar went back into the ocean of divinity, available to dive again whenever the earth needs retrieving.