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One day the six-faced Kartikeya asked Mahadeva, who rests upon the mountain, why the rudraksha should carry such glory. The story Lord Shankara told him then is the very one that Shri Narayana would later recount to Narada.
A demon named Tripura had conquered every god, Brahma and Vishnu among them, and no one could hold him back. So Mahadeva, lord of Kailasa, began to contemplate an unthinkable great weapon called Aghora, meant for the demon’s destruction and the rescue of the gods, a divine and blazing thing that annihilated every obstacle. For a thousand divine years he sat in that meditation with his eyes held open. Then a few drops of water fell from his weary eyes onto the earth.
From those teardrops great rudraksha trees sprang up. By Mahadeva’s command, for the welfare of all living beings, they became thirty-eight kinds of rudraksha. The beads born from his right eye, the sun, were tawny brown, twelve in kind; from his left eye, the moon, came white ones, sixteen in kind; and from the third eye, fire, came dark ones, ten in kind. This rudraksha, born of tears, would in time become Shiva’s most beloved emblem throughout the three worlds.
The color and the faces of the rudraksha
The white rudraksha was assigned to the Brahmin class, the red to the Kshatriya, the mixed hue to the Vaishya, and the dark to the Shudra. Yet the greater matter lies in its faces. A rudraksha of one face is Shiva himself in form, and it wipes away even the sin of killing a Brahmin; one of five faces is the Rudra called Kalagni, and it frees a person from the sins of eating forbidden food and of forbidden union. The bead of six faces is the form of Kartikeya, and it should be worn on the right hand; the eight-faced is Vinayaka himself, and it increases one’s grain, cloth, and gold; the ten-faced is Janardana, lord of the gods, and it quiets the troubles raised by planets, ghouls, vetalas, and brahmarakshasas. The eleven-faced is the eleven Rudras, and the fourteen-faced sprang from Shiva’s own eye; the body of the one who wears it upon the forehead becomes the equal of Shiva.
A garland strung from such beads is purified with fragrant water and the five products of the cow, then consecrated by placing the mantras upon it. It should be worn every day, with reverence, at the throat, the forehead, the ears, the arms, and the wrist, and upon that same garland one should recite with a disciplined mind. The rule holds that it must be worn during bathing, giving, recitation, the fire offering, the worship of the gods, penance, the rites for the ancestors, and initiation; a mantra told over this garland yields endless fruit. Whoever wears a garland of one hundred and eight rudraksha beads gains, in every passing moment, the fruit of the horse sacrifice, and carries twenty-one generations of his line across before he is at last established in Shiva’s world.
The glory of a single rudraksha
Mahadeva said: My son, there is no hymn greater than the rudraksha, and no vow. Among all the gifts that never diminish, the gift of a rudraksha stands apart. When a man gives a fine rudraksha to a serene devotee of Shiva, even I cannot name the limit of the merit he earns. A man who has sinned and yet takes up the rudraksha is loosed from every sin; so the Jabala Upanishad says. Whoever wears the sacred ash and the rudraksha, be he Brahmin or Chandala, virtuous or without virtue, a foreigner or a man laden with every offense, becomes the very form of Rudra by the wearing of the rudraksha alone. Even a dog with a rudraksha tied at its neck wins release when it dies, and what then of a human being. Whoever meets death at the hour of departure while wearing a rudraksha attains the state of Rudra and is not born again. The man who holds in his mind the wish to wear it, yet never manages to, is himself worthy in this world of reverence, like a shivalinga. And the one who, out of nothing more than idleness, only wears a rudraksha is untouched by sin, the way darkness cannot touch the sun.
Mahadeva told a proof of this very glory. Along a mountain road a donkey used to carry loads of rudraksha. One day a traveler piled on too heavy a load and drove it forward; the tired donkey could not manage the weight, fell to the ground, and gave up its life. Yet the moment it died, by Mahadeva’s grace, it reached him bearing a trident, three-eyed, in the form of Maheshvara. When even a beast was carried across by the touch of the rudraksha, who could ever measure its glory.
Gunanidhi gone astray
Then Mahadeva told one more ancient tale. In the land of Kosala there lived a Brahmin named Girinatha, immensely wealthy, righteous, a master of the Vedas and their limbs, and devoted to sacrifice. He had a son, well known by the name Gunanidhi, young and as handsome as Kamadeva. His name made him a treasury of virtues. His conduct went the other way. Filled with his own beauty and pride, the young man seduced Muktavali, the wife of his guru Sudhishana.
For some days this affair went on. Then, in fear of the guru, he poisoned him and settled in there without a care. When his mother and father caught wind of it, he poisoned them too and killed them. Once all the family wealth had been spent on pleasure, he began robbing the houses of Brahmins. Always drunk on liquor, he was cast out by his caste, and the villagers drove him out of the village. So he took Muktavali with him into a dense forest, and, sitting by the road, out of greed for their money he began to murder many of the Brahmins who passed to and fro.
The messengers of Yama and the messengers of Shiva
A long time passed, and at last that base creature met his death. Thousands of Yama’s messengers arrived to carry him off; but in that same moment Shiva’s own attendants came down from Shiva’s world, and a dispute broke out between the two sides. The messengers of Yama asked: ‘You servants of Shambhu, tell us, what merit is there in this man that you would take him to Shiva’s world?’
Shiva’s messengers answered: ‘At the very spot where he died, ten hands beneath that ground, a single rudraksha lies buried. By the power of that one rudraksha we will take him to Shiva.’ And indeed, that Gunanidhi took on a divine form, climbed into a celestial chariot, and went with Shiva’s messengers to Shankara’s world. A man who had done not one good deed in his whole life, who had murdered even his guru and his mother and father, was carried across all the same by a single rudraksha that lay near him without his ever knowing.
Hearing this glory, the six-faced Kartikeya felt fulfilled. Shri Narayana told Narada that this is why those who see into the truth of things call the wearing of the rudraksha a great vow, and why this same rudraksha is the destroyer of every sin and the giver of vast reward.
Source: the Shrimad Devi Bhagavata Mahapurana (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)