The sixth descent, Paraśurāma ("Rāma with the paraśu," the battle-axe), is the most unusual of Vishnu's avatāras: a warrior who is born a brahmin, and an immortal who never departs the world. He must not be confused with Rāma of the Rāmāyaṇa, the seventh avatāra; Paraśurāma is the earlier figure, and the two famously meet in one tense episode where the elder, axe-bearing Rāma yields to the younger.

He is the son of the sage Jamadagni and Reṇukā, raised in an ascetic's hermitage. The household keeps Kāmadhenu (or her offspring, the wish-fulfilling cow), and it is over this cow that the great wrong unfolds. A haughty king of the Haihaya clan, Kārtavīrya Arjuna, covets the divine cow and, when Jamadagni refuses, seizes her by force and later has the sage killed. Returning to find his father slain, Paraśurāma is consumed by grief and righteous fury.

What follows is the story's hard core: Paraśurāma's vow to rid the earth of the corrupt warrior-aristocracy that had abandoned its dharma. The tradition says he cleared the earth of the unjust kṣatriyas many times over — a number given symbolically as twenty-one. This is not celebrated as simple vengeance; it is framed as the violent correction of an order in which those sworn to protect had become predators. Yet the tradition does not let him off lightly either. The blood-guilt of such killing weighs on him, and he undertakes long expiation.

The most luminous part of his legend is its ending — or rather, its refusal to end. Paraśurāma is a cirañjīvī, one of the deathless ones who remain in the world through the ages. Having completed his terrible task, he renounces violence entirely: he gives away the lands he has won (to the sage Kaśyapa, in many tellings) and withdraws to the mountains of the western coast to live as an ascetic. A beloved regional tradition holds that he reclaimed a strip of land from the sea by hurling his axe, creating the coastal country — a story claimed by Kerala (Paraśurāma Kṣetra) and parts of the Konkan.

In the great epics he reappears as a teacher of arms — guru to Bhīṣma, Droṇa, and Karṇa in the Mahābhārata. He is thus the bridge between the avatāras of myth and the avatāras of human history: the axe that fell on injustice, and the hand that finally laid the axe aside.