Shiva and Mohini
Parikshit stayed quiet a while, then said, “Bhagavan, yesterday you told the katha of Shri Hari taking Mohini’s form and winning the amrita back from the asuras. I have turned it over in my mind ever since. That the asuras lost their heads before that form, this I can follow. But tell me: did anyone else waver before it? Anyone we hold to be beyond wavering?”
A faint light came into Shukadeva’s eyes, as though he were smiling inwardly at what he was about to say. “Rajan, you have set your finger on the exact spot. Before that form, Mahadeva himself could not hold steady. Listen.”
Word of Mohini’s lila traveled far, and it reached Mount Kailasa.
The devas were content, the asuras undone. But the story had lodged in one more mind and would not leave it.
Shankara.
He was seated with Parvati, in that stillness of Kailasa where even a breath carries.
He had heard that Vishnu had taken the form of a woman, and that this single form had emptied the asuras of their senses and their sense.
A curiosity stirred in him, quiet, unspoken. “What could such a form have been? I would see it too.”
He rose, mounted his bull, and with the whole host of his ganas around him set out for Vaikuntha, where Shri Hari keeps his abode. Parvati, Uma, rode at his side.
Shri Hari received him with great warmth, rose to embrace him, gave him a seat of honor, and welcomed Uma who had come with him. Two of the oldest powers in creation, each holding the other in deep regard. Settled at ease, Shankara returned his homage, and Shri Hari, smiling, waited for him to speak.
Shankara offered his praise first. “Devadeva,” he said, “you pervade the world and you are its Lord; you are the world’s very form. You are the cause of all that moves and all that stands still, and its controller both; you are the Ishvara, and you are the atman within it. This world finds its beginning, its middle, and its end in you, yet no beginning, middle, or end can be laid upon you. You are the truth. You are Brahman, pure consciousness, without a second and yet distinct from everything else.
“You alone are cause and effect, and you are neither, being the source of both. Gold worked into an ornament and gold left unworked is gold all the same; there is no difference of substance between the two. It is only our ignorance that reads division into you, who are without division; what we call diversity in you is no more than your touch upon the three gunas.
“Some call you Brahman, some call you dharma, some the Parameshvara beyond prakriti and purusha. Some hold you to be the imperishable Purusha crowned with nine shaktis: Vimala, Utkarshini, Jnana, Kriya, Yoga, Prahvi, Satya, Ishana, and Anugraha. I myself, and Brahma whose life runs to a pair of parardhas, and the rishis from Marichi onward, live inside your own sattva-born creation, and even we cannot find the far shore of the maya you have spun. What then will the asuras and men, whose minds that maya already holds, ever learn of it?
“Whenever you descend for your lila, I come for that darshan. Now I long for the darshan of one avatar more: the form you wore as a woman, the form by which you bewitched the daityas and set the amrita on the tongues of the devas. That, Swami, is what we have all come to see. A great eagerness for that sight has taken hold of our minds.”
A graver shadow crossed Shri Hari’s smile. “Shankara ji, the pot of amrita had passed into the daityas’ hands then; that is why I took that form. If you wish to see it, I will show you. But know what it is. That form is prized by men full of desire; it was made to wake kama.”
And with that, where he stood, Shri Hari was gone.
For a moment the air itself seemed to hold still. Shankara waited where he sat, Uma beside him, his gaze moving over everything around.
Then he saw it. A garden had opened before him, trees of every kind heavy with bright blossom and red-tipped new leaves. And in that garden a woman was at play, tossing a ball high and catching it as it fell, a fine sari about her, the strands of a jeweled girdle swinging at her waist.
With every throw and quick catch her garments and her necklaces swayed, and it seemed at each step that her slender waist must break beneath their weight. When the sari slipped or the braid of her hair began to loosen, she would gather it back with her left hand and keep the ball going with her right, and so, playing, she was bewitching the whole world with her maya.
Shankara watched her.
The same Shankara who is yogi to the yogis, whose one glance had burned Kamadeva to ash, whose meditation nothing in all the ages had shaken: his awareness slid out of his hands. Uma sat close beside him, the ganas too, but who now remembered them.
The ball bounced away a little distance and she ran after it, and in that instant the wind lifted the thin sari from her, girdle and all.
Mohini smiled, a touch of bashfulness in it, and glanced at Shankara from the corner of her eye. That was all it took. Shankara’s mind left his keeping. He was drawn toward her by a pull he never stopped to weigh. Before Bhavani herself, all shame set down, without a thought in his head, he started toward her.
Shankara stepped forward. Mohini drew back.
His steps quickened. She broke into a run.
What the shastras themselves set down here is not easy to believe.
Shankara, Mahadeva, bearer of the matted jata, bearer of the third eye, left every last thing of himself behind and ran after that fleeing shape like a rutting bull elephant after a she-elephant.
She would slip behind one tree and then another, laughing, never once holding still. Shankara ran her down at tremendous speed, caught her braid from behind, and though she did not want it, gathered her into both his arms.
She twisted one way and the other, working to slip free, and in the struggle the hair of her head came all undone. Then she pulled herself out from between his arms and fled again at great speed.
Shankara ran on behind her. In that hour it looked as though his old enemy Kamadeva had at last taken his revenge and won.
Across river and lake, over hilltops, through forests and groves, wherever rishis and munis had made their dwellings, Shankara ran on behind that maya. And in the grip of that frenzy the seed of Mahadeva, whose creative power never fails, spilled and fell to the earth. Wherever it touched the ground, veins of silver and of gold broke open in the soil; those are the fields of silver and gold on the earth to this day.
With the seed fallen, his awareness came back to him all at once. He saw it plainly: ah, Bhagavan’s maya has led me a long chase indeed.
Yet knowing this to be the glory of Bhagavan, the self-existent, the soul of all things, whose powers no one can measure to their end, he felt no astonishment at all. He stepped clear of the whole matter in the same breath. No shame stayed in him, and no despair.
Then Shri Hari took up his own male form once more, appeared before him, and spoke with unhidden delight.
“Crown of the devas, my maya wore a woman’s shape and bewildered even you, and still you came back to your own footing by yourself. That is a great gladness to me. Consider it: what other man, once caught in this maya of mine, could ever have worked himself free of it? It throws up a thousand things to run after, and one who has not mastered his own mind cannot get past it.
“This guna-woven maya of mine confounds the very greatest, yet from this day it will never take hold of you again. For I am myself the kala who stirs it at the appointed hour, for creation and all that follows, and against my will it cannot send out its work of rajas and the other strands.”
So Shri Hari honored Shankara. Then Shankara took his leave of him, walked round him in parikrama, and returned with his ganas to Kailasa.
He hid nothing from Uma. In the assembly of the great rishis, before Parvati his own ardhangini, he told the whole maya of that Mohini, Vishnu in that form, exactly as it had unfolded, and he told it with love.
That day Shankara came to know something no guru had ever taught him.
That no yogi stands higher than the one who knows he too may waver one day, and walks on all the same.
Shukadeva stopped here.
Parikshit was quiet a long while. Then he said, “Bhagavan, so even the one we hold most beyond wavering, even he? Then what is left to hope for a man like me, with only a few days in hand?”
Shukadeva’s voice came low and warm. “Rajan, that is the very marrow of this katha. Mahadeva stood on his own strength, and so he wavered. But when a man lays his head at the feet of Shri Hari, the master of that maya, the maya folds her hands and stands still before him. And his remembrance is already with you. What is there to fear?”
Parikshit said nothing.
From the outside this katha looks like a small thing. Inside it holds a deep humility.
Somewhere in each of us sits the belief that one particular thing has no hold on us. Money cannot move this man, anger cannot move that one, some third weakness cannot reach a third. “We are above it.”
Then one day, with no footfall of warning, that very thing comes and stands squarely in front of us, and we find out how raw the foundation always was.
A yogi like Shankara, whose glance had turned Kamadeva to ash, could not hold steady before that one form.
The reason is that maya comes to each of us wearing a different face. Before Mahadeva she was Mohini. Before someone else she will be something else entirely.
The tenderest thing in this katha is that Shankara did not stay sunk in shame. He took what had happened exactly as it was, and before Parvati too he laid it all open, with great love.
Beneath the whole lila runs Shri Hari’s quiet word: the maya is his own, and before anyone who goes to his refuge, that maya stands still. In that wavering Shankara saw the edge of his own strength, and that seeing opened a new depth in him.
Literary context
The Shiva-Mohini episode comes in the eighth Skandha of the Shrimad Bhagavata, in its twelfth discourse, which the Gita Press edition titles the Infatuation of Lord Shankara. At the sight of Shri Hari in Mohini’s form, Shankara loses his composure and runs after her, and in this text his fallen seed turns the soil, wherever it lands, into fields of silver and gold. In the Bhagavata’s own telling the consort at his side through all of this is Uma, that is Parvati; she is the one who watches, and the one he forgets.
The birth of Ayyappan, the Hariharaputra, from the meeting of Mohini and Shankara belongs to later South Indian temple tradition; the Bhagavata itself describes no such union and no child. The core of the katha is plain: before the maya of maya’s own master, even the greatest of yogis can be brought to a standstill, and the measure of the yogi is that he rises from it without shame.
Why this katha matters now
The wall we count our firmest is exactly where maya most often makes her breach. That a yogi like Shankara could waver for a moment, and then accept it without shame, is this katha’s greatest lesson, and its greatest relief.