Ganesha

The Standoff at the Door

At that very moment the ever-playful Shiva arrives at the door, in the mood of a man walking into his own house, and the boy does not know him; no one has told him yet what a trident means or whose throat wears a serpent. He raises his staff. “Lord, without my mother’s leave you may not go in just now. My mother has sat down to bathe. Turn back from here for the present.” Shiva snaps at him, “You fool, whom do you think you are stopping?” and tells him that Shiva himself, and no other, is standing there; the boy will not budge, and when the lord makes to walk past him anyway, the staff comes down and strikes him. The ganas come to reason with the child: they are the chief ganas of Shiva, the doorkeepers of this place, they took him for a gana too and have not raised a hand against him, “Why call your own death upon yourself for nothing?” The son of Girija stands unafraid, rebukes them, and does not leave the door; the text says that his answer was the simplest thing on that mountain, that they were standing where their lord had told them to stand and he was standing where his mother had told him to stand. When the ganas return with the tale, Maheshvara rounds on them. “Who is this that speaks up so boldly, like an enemy? Drive that new doorkeeper far off. What good is it to stand here reciting his story to me?” They go back, and the boy stops them again, and only then does it come out that he is the son of Girija, appointed as her doorkeeper. Shankara resolves on a strange piece of play, meaning to melt the pride of his own ganas along with it. Gods and ganas are summoned, a terrible battle breaks out, and no one can defeat Ganesha; Nandi seizes one leg and Bhringi the other, he breaks both grips and sweeps the doorway clear with an iron club, and Brahma comes to make peace and goes back with his beard plucked. At last the trident-bearer himself comes forward, and while Vishnu draws the boy’s face aside, by his own trident Ganesha’s head is cut off and falls. Keeping guard over his mother’s command to the very end, the boy gives up his life and never leaves the door. Brahma tells Narada that the tale in which the head is severed by the gaze of Shani belongs to another kalpa; in this one it was Shiva himself who staged the play.

The First Creature to the North

When the news reaches Parvati she fills with rage: either she destroys every one of them, she says, or she drowns the worlds, and she brings forth a host of shaktis and orders a deluge of destruction without a second thought. Shiva’s ganas flee and stand far off; the gods and sages bow at Girija’s feet, and the supreme goddess only looks at them with wrath-filled eyes and says nothing, until compassion wells up in her and she names her price. “If my son comes back to life and is held worthy of worship among you all, then there will be no destruction. The day you grant him the office of chief over all, that day peace will come to the worlds; short of that, there will be no relief.” The sages carry the condition to the gods and the gods to Shiva, and Shiva says, “So be it; do whatever will bring peace to all the three worlds. Go toward the north, and the first creature you meet, cut off its head and join it to this boy’s body.” The very first creature is an elephant, one with a single tusk. The gods bring back its head, join it to the boy’s body, sprinkle him with water consecrated by Vedic mantras, and at its touch he fills with consciousness and sits up as though waking from sleep, an elephant’s face, a glowing body the color of red dawn, a happiness playing across his features; the head taken from a beast on a road sits on him as though it had always been his. His mother presses him to her breast with both hands, kisses his face, and gives him his boon. “Son, this time you have suffered greatly, yet now you are fulfilled, now you are blessed. From today your worship will come first among all the gods, and you will never have to know sorrow.” Indra and the gods seat the boy in Shiva‘s lap, and the hand that took the head off is the hand that now rests on it: “This is my second son.” Ganesha rises, bows to Shiva, to Parvati, to Brahma, Vishnu, Narada and all the rest, and says with humility, “Pride is the very nature of a person, so may you all forgive my offense.” He had held a door against the lord of the universe, and he is the one who apologizes. Then the three gods give their boon together, “Let people worship him first and us after, and only then will our worship be complete,” and Shiva adds his own: “In the work of removing obstacles your name will stand above all others. You are worthy of everyone’s worship, so become now the chief of all our ganas.” The ganas he is given to rule are the ones he scattered with a club that morning. With great affection Shiva adds one boon more, that since his form first appeared in Girija’s mind on the fourth day of the dark fortnight of Bhadrapada, his finest vow is to be kept on that date.

Seven Circles

In the next chapter of the Kumara khanda there are two sons on Kailasa, six-faced Kartikeya on one side and elephant-faced Ganesha on the other, whose intelligence has no measure. Shiva and his consort sit in private weighing their weddings, both boys guess what is on their parents’ minds, and a rivalry springs up over whose wedding should come first. The text says plainly that the contest is over the order of the weddings, and that the fruit some tellings put into the story is nowhere in the Shiva Purana. The parents set a single condition: whoever circles the whole earth and returns first will be married first. Kartikeya rises at once and sets off, and Ganesha stays standing exactly where he is, thinking: what should I do now, where should I go? This circling is not something I can manage. After walking a single kos my feet will refuse to go farther. How then will I ever find happiness by wandering the whole earth? He goes home, bathes by the proper rites, and says to his parents, “I have set two seats here for your worship. Be seated on them, both of you, and let my wish be fulfilled.” He worships them by the rites, circles them seven times, bows seven times, and asks for his wedding. Keeping up their play, the parents tell him to go and circle the earth himself, since Kumara has already set out, and Ganesha, firm about the rule, answers with a touch of indignation, “I have already circled the earth seven times, so why do you speak to me like this?” When did you ever circle the earth of seven continents, they ask, and the answer is the hinge of the whole chapter: “With my intelligence I worshiped the two of you, Shiva and Parvati, and circled you, and by that alone my circling of the earth to the very oceans was completed.” The Vedas and the shastras say that the son who worships his parents and circles them gains the fruit of wandering the entire earth, and that the son who leaves them at home to go on pilgrimage takes on sin, because for a son the lotus feet of his parents are the greatest tirtha. “For a son and for a wife the tirtha is inside the house.” And then the sentence that leaves his parents nowhere to go: “So either perform my wedding at once, or declare that the Vedas and shastras are false.”

The lords of the world are astonished at their son’s words and praise his truthfulness. “The one who has intelligence is the strong one; where is strength for the one without it?” Every duty the Vedas lay down for a child, they tell him, he has carried out in full. “We accept your word; now we will do nothing against it.” The Prajapati Vishvarupa has two daughters, Siddhi and Buddhi, attainment and intelligence; Shankara and Girija settle the marriage, Vishvakarma brings the wedding to completion, and in time Siddhi bears Kshema and Buddhi bears Labha, well-being and gain, and Ganesha settles into his home enjoying a happiness beyond thought. Meanwhile Kartikeya comes back from circling the earth, Narada meets him with the whole news, and the Kumara, shaken, leaves for Mount Krauncha against his parents’ pleading; from that day his celibacy is famous through the three worlds. The text never sets the two brothers face to face. It settles one in a house and the other on a mountain, and sends the parents up that mountain on every festival day.

The Obstacle on the Thumb

In the Yuddha khanda the chariot of all the gods is built against Tripura, Brahma holds the reins, and in the Abhijit hour Shambhu stands at its head, strings the bow, fits the arrow, and goes still. Yet the three cities will not come into the path of his aim at all; Ganesha is seated upon the tip of his thumb, sending a steady ache through it. Then a voice sounds from the sky: “Lord of the master of the universe, you will not kill the Tripuras as long as the lord Ganesha goes unadored.” The bearer of the trident summons Bhadrakali and worships the elephant-faced god with full ceremony, and when Vinayaka stands pleased before him the three cities show clear against the sky. The Purana itself pauses to ask how the supreme Brahman, whom all others worship, can be said to have won his success by another god’s grace, and answers simply that in the deeds of that giver of boons everything happens in play. The boon given in the Kumara khanda, that whoever worships any other god without first worshiping Ganesha loses the fruit of his worship, is here turned on the one who gave it, and the father can loose his arrow only after worshiping his son. In the Koti Rudra Samhita the same Ganesha plays a different part. Some sages, burning with envy at Gautama’s standing, worship him and ask for a boon: that by some means Gautama be driven out of his hermitage. Ganesha refuses them. “Sages, what you are doing is not right. To wound, without cause, one who has done you a kindness is to summon your own ruin.” In the days of famine this man arranged water and kept you alive, he tells them; ask for some other boon. They will not relent, and Ganesha, bound by the will of his devotees, gives way: “What you have asked will come to pass; whatever is fated to follow will follow.” Then one day he comes himself into Gautama’s field, where the rice stands ripe, in the form of a frail cow, staggering and faltering, and begins to graze; Gautama, moved by kindness, takes a handful of straw and shoos her, and at the touch of the straw the cow falls and dies on the spot. From that killing of a cow comes Gautama’s penance, the Ganga he brings down, and the jyotirlinga at Tryambaka.

Vyasa’s Pen

The Adi Parva of the Mahabharata brings Ganesha in once, and in that once hands him the whole book. In the Naimisha forest Sauti tells how Vyasa finished the greatest of all narrations and found himself with a finished poem held in his own mind and no one on earth to write it down. Brahma comes to him in person, hears the full table of what the work contains, names it a poem, and tells him to think of Ganesha. Vyasa calls Ganesha to mind, and the remover of obstacles has no sooner been thought of than he stands in the clearing. The rishi gives him a seat and puts the request plainly: “Guide of the Ganas, be the writer of the Bharata that I have formed in my imagination and am about to recite.” Ganesha hears him out and sets his terms. He will become the writer of the work, “provided my pen does not stop writing for a single moment.” A poet who composes as he speaks needs his pauses, and Ganesha has just taken them away; so Vyasa answers with terms of his own. “Wherever there is anything you do not understand, stop writing.” Ganesha says Om and begins to write, Vyasa begins to speak, and by way of diversion the poet ties the knots of his composition very tight, verses that fold their meaning in on itself so that even a god’s pen has to hover over them. Sauti counts eight thousand eight hundred such verses, known to himself, to Shuka, and perhaps to Sanjaya, and says that no one to this day has been able to penetrate them: “Even the all-knowing Ganesha took a moment to consider them, and in that moment Vyasa went on composing other verses in great abundance.” The boy who stood at a door on Kailasa holding one instruction sits here holding one condition, pen in hand, and in both places the one facing him has to invent something of his own to get past him.

His Path

The Birth of Ganesha · A son shaped from his mother’s body, the standoff at the door, and the first creature to the north.

The Circling of Ganesha and Kartikeya · Two seats, seven circles, and a wedding to Siddhi and Buddhi.

Tripurari · The chariot of all the gods, an ache in the thumb, and an arrow that flew only after a worship.

Tryambak, Vaidyanath, Nageshwar · The boon of envious sages, a frail cow, and the Ganga that Gautama brought down.

Shankhachuda · Ganesha in armor beside Kartikeya in Shiva’s army.

The Mahabharata, the opening of the Adi Parva · Brahma’s instruction, a pen that must not stop, and verses tied in knots.

The One Who Holds the Instruction

In every story the Shiva Purana gives him, Ganesha stands holding a rule, and whoever faces him has to make something new to get past it. At the door he has one order from his mother, and to pass it Shiva needs an army of ganas and finally his own trident; in the circling he has one sentence from the Veda, and his parents concede sooner than call it false; in the Mahabharata he has one condition, and Vyasa has to tie eight thousand eight hundred knots to survive it. What he gains is the fruit of that hold: first worship in place of a severed head, Siddhi and Buddhi in place of the single kos he could not walk, and his own father’s worship before the arrow at Tripura. Yet the text never calls him stubborn; it calls him an ocean of intelligence, and gives him the sentence that intelligence is strength and that without it there is no strength at all. The Ganesha of the Koti Rudra Samhita shows the other face of that intelligence, when he tells envious sages that their wish is wrong, grants it anyway because he is bound to those who worship him, and goes down himself as a cow in a field under a handful of straw. The boy who could give his life at a door can come down from Kailasa and die of straw in a rice field, and in both places he is keeping someone else’s word, never his own.