Shiva

Daksha’s Assembly

In the Sati khanda the yogi who has turned away from the world agrees to marry. Brahma and Vishnu climb Kailasa to ask it, and Mahadeva smiles and says, “I am a yogi turned away from the world.” “Marriage means being tied into another’s bondage, and only a man with no knowledge in him makes much of it and goes looking for it.” Still, for the good of the world he consents, on one condition: that the woman be able to bear his splendor, a yogini while he is in yoga and a passionate lover in the hour of love. In Daksha’s courtyard that woman has been keeping a vow for twelve months, and on the ninth day Shiva himself appears before the girl in her meditation and tells her to ask a boon. Shyness keeps the wish from reaching her lips, and the knower of every heart presses her eagerly, over and over, “Ask a boon, ask a boon,” and when the sentence still will not come to its end he cuts across it himself. “Goddess, become my wife.” Daksha puts Sati’s hand into Shankara’s. Years later, on a Himalayan peak, Sati asks for the highest truth, and the answer of that detached yogi is the nine limbs of devotion, hearing, chanting, remembrance, service, servitude, worship, salutation, friendship and self-surrender, and this: “I remain forever under the sway of my devotees; by the power of their bhakti I go even into the houses of those thought lowly.”

Then the assembly at Prayaga, where every sage bows to Daksha and one Maheshvara stays seated as he was. Daksha pronounces it: “I curse him: let him be shut out of the yajna, and let him receive no share in the sacrifice alongside the gods.” Nandi roars back, and Shiva, half smiling, calms him in gentle words. “Nandin, you are supremely wise; anger does not suit you. You cursed them thinking I had been cursed, and I have not been. No curse from anyone can so much as touch us.” Then the great sacrifice, to which the one is not invited without whom no sacrifice is a sacrifice. Sati wants to go, and the heart already wounded by Daksha’s words answers her gently. “Devi, your father has turned into our particular enemy. Those who go uninvited into another’s house meet a dishonor there more painful than death itself.” The decision is made all the same, and he sends her with his hosts. In the hall there is no share for Shambhu anywhere; Sati sits on the ground, draws her breath into the navel by yoga, and in that same instant her sinless body drops and, by her own will, by the fire of yoga, is reduced to ash on the spot. The text says that no flame reached her from outside; the fire rose within her own body, in the hour she chose. The Shiva Purana’s chapter stops there, with the news of it not yet reached Kailasa. The same khanda holds the scene in the Dandaka forest where Shiva, riding his bull with Sati beside him, comes on Rama searching for Sita and bows to him in gladness and goes his way; Sati asks how a master worthy of worship can kneel to his own servant, and Shiva laughs. “It was by the power of a boon that I bowed to them with such reverence, and it was I who granted that boon.”

The Third Eye, and His Own Slander

The Parvati khanda opens with Tarakasura, for whom one death only has been foretold, at the hands of a son born of Shiva’s body, and with Indra sending Kama against the yogi whose service the mountain king’s daughter attends every day. Kama shoots, and here the text parts company with the story as the world tells it: the arrow worked. “In Shankara’s mind an attraction toward Parvati began to stir, and his composure began to slip.” Looking for the cause, he sees Madana on his left with the bow drawn, and from the third eye in the middle of the forehead of the enraged lord a vast and terrible fire breaks out all at once; the gods have not finished saying forgive before Kama is ash. To Rati’s weeping the same angry god says what has come from his anger cannot be undone, and in the same breath promises that when Kama is born again from Rukmini’s womb as Pradyumna, Rati will have him back, and then, “I will bring Kama alive in every being’s heart.” Parvati goes to the tirtha of the Ganga’s descent and sits down to austerity, gives up fruit, then leaves, then even the leaf, and so is named Aparna, and stands on one foot for three thousand years. The three worlds burn with that penance, the gods come to Kailasa behind Vishnu, and at Nandi’s word Shambhu slowly opens his eyes and asks them, “Whatever the reason for your coming, tell it quickly.”

In the story of the test Shiva first sends the seven sages, with the order that they are to speak nothing but deceit, and then goes himself to her hermitage in the shape of an aged Brahmin with matted locks, staff and umbrella in hand. The picture that Brahmin draws of Mahadeva is Shiva’s own account of himself: ash over the whole body, a tiger’s hide for a loincloth, a begging bowl, one old bull for a mount, and “Of the qualities a bride looks for, he possesses not a single one.” Parvati tells the slanderer that Maheshvara puts on strange forms by his own power of play and is in truth the supreme Brahman, and that whoever hears Shiva reviled shares the sin; she rises to leave, and Shiva stands before her in his own form and takes her hand. “Beloved, where would you go, leaving me behind? Never again will I forsake you.” And the sentence that gives the whole khanda its name: “Goddess, from this day I am your servant, bought at the price of your austerities, bought by your beauty; without you a single moment passes like an age.” At the wedding the same god says to the seven sages, laughing, “A wedding I have never seen nor heard of; you yourselves must tell me its rite.” The mother goddesses come to adorn him and his own natural form becomes the ornament. Mena sees the bridegroom among his ghosts and falls like a creeper cut from its root, and then Shiva reveals his supremely beautiful divine form; when Himavan asks the groom’s lineage and family and name, it is Narada who answers, with his lute, that Shiva has no lineage, no family, and no name. In the same pavilion Rati lays Kama’s ashes before him, and one merciful glance brings Kama up out of them with his bow and his old smile.

The Lap, the Door, and the Trident

In the Kumara khanda the gods come climbing the slopes with a child in their arms, a tiny body crowned with six faces, and the one whose wrath sets the worlds shaking turns his lap, in that hour, into a cradle; when the gods ask for the boy to kill Taraka, he hands his son over in that very instant. The second son is met at a door. Parvati shapes a being from the scurf of her own body and sets him to guard her threshold, and the god who delights in play arrives and is stopped by a boy. “You fool, whom do you think you are stopping?” He asks whether the boy fails to recognize him, and tells him that Shiva himself, and no other, is standing there. The boy will not budge, the ganas fail, and at last the trident-bearer comes forward himself, and by his own trident Ganesha‘s head is cut off and falls; the text says the boy gave his life guarding his mother’s command and did not leave the door. At Shiva’s word the gods go north and bring back the head of the first creature they meet, an elephant with a single tusk, and join it to the boy’s body. They set the child in Shiva’s lap, and he passes his hand over the boy’s head. “This is my second son.” The hand that had taken the head off is the hand that now rests on it, and he makes the boy the chief of all his ganas. In the Yuddha khanda Andhaka is born from those same eyes, when Girija, half in laughter, steals up behind him and lays her two hands over them; from the fire of his brow sweat breaks out, and out of the drops comes a blind and fearsome creature, and Shiva smiles at his frightened wife. “Beloved,” he says to Parvati, “it was you who brought this about, when you covered my eyes. Why then are you afraid of it?”

The Emperor’s Chariot

Taraka’s three sons win three cities of gold, silver and iron, which can fall only if Shankara himself sits in some impossible chariot and pierces all three with a single extraordinary arrow. The gods come to him, and here lies the strangest knot in the story: Shiva will not take up a weapon. “I may be hardy and powerful in battle, yet how could I knowingly turn malice on my own friends? Brahma himself has said that a great sin attends even a casual act of malice.” When at last Brahma names him the sovereign emperor of the gods, a fresh obstacle arrives, smiling. “Brahman, if I am to be proclaimed emperor of the gods, where are the trappings that mark such a lordship? I have no divine chariot and no charioteer, and none of those bows and arrows that carry a battle.” So the chariot is built in which Brahma himself holds the reins and the sacred syllable is his whip, the mountain is the bow, Shesha the string, and the arrow is Vishnu. On the road Rudra sets his price, that every creature, the gods among them, take the state of a beast under his lordship; the gods’ hearts sink, and he laughs and promises that the state will not degrade them, and from that day the name Pashupati, lord of the beasts, spreads through the worlds. Even then the three cities will not come into the path of his aim, because Ganesha is seated on the tip of his thumb sending a steady ache through it, and the bearer of the trident worships the elephant-faced god with full ceremony before the cities show clear against the sky. In the Abhijit hour the arrow goes out like a crore of suns, and out of that fire rises the gentlest note in the whole story, Tarakaksha burning and praying: “Shiva, you are known to be pleased with us, and if in some hour to come you burn us, you will burn us with our kinsfolk beside us; let it be by the truth of that. What is difficult for the gods and inaccessible to the asuras has been secured by us.” One survives, Maya, whom Shiva sends down to Vitala, more beautiful than heaven, to stay there without fear.

The Shiva of Other Texts

Valmiki’s Bala Kanda touches Shiva twice. Vishvamitra tells Rama that Himavan had two daughters, the Ganga and Uma, and that Uma, whose austerity was fiercer than any, was given to Rudra, who has no rival; when the gods, afraid of the child such a pair would make, interrupt the married pleasure of the two, Shiva answers, “Uma and I will hold our energy within ourselves by the strength of our own glory,” and the energy already dislodged is taken by the earth, out of which, in a thicket of white reeds, Kartikeya is born. Bhagiratha’s Ganga comes down in pride meaning to sweep Shankara to the netherworld, and the three-eyed god hides her in his matted hair for years. At Mithila, Janaka tells how Rudra took up the great bow to wreck Daksha’s sacrifice, “Since you have set aside no share of the offerings for me, though I wanted one, gods, I will cut off your most worshipful heads with this bow,” and then, pleased, gave that bow to the gods; it is the bow Rama breaks. The Vana Parva of the Mahabharata puts Shiva before Arjuna in a hunter’s disguise, and after the quarrel over the boar he says, “Because I am pleased with you, I will give you a weapon that cannot be resisted,” and gives the Pashupata. In the Drona Parva, Vyasa tells Arjuna that the spear-bearing figure who walked before his chariot was Shankara, and in the Sauptika Parva the same Mahadeva appears at the gate of the sleeping camp and says to Drona’s son, “For that there is none dearer to me than Krishna.” And the Bhagavata sees him twice as a man. In the eighth skandha, hearing of Mohini, Shankara goes to look, and the one whose single glance had once burned Kamadeva to a drift of ash leaves every shred of himself behind and runs after that fleeing shape in front of Bhavani; and when he comes back to himself, “He hid nothing from Uma.” In the fourth skandha, Daksha’s sacrifice goes on past the point where the Shiva Purana’s chapter stopped: the news reaches Kailasa, Shiva tears a single lock from the mass of his matted hair and it shines in his fist like a torn strip of lightning, out of it Virabhadra rises with his head among the stars, and Daksha’s severed trunk is later given the head of a goat.

His Path

Creation and the Appearance of the Shivalinga · The darkness of the dissolution, Vishnu from the left side, and the column out of which Om was heard.

Daksha’s Sacrifice and the Burning of Sati · A seat in the assembly at Prayaga that did not bow, and a fire that rose from within.

The Burning of Kamadeva · A composure that slipped, the fire of the third eye, and Kama alive in every heart.

The Wedding of Shiva and Parvati · A natural form that became the ornament, Mena’s fear, and a groom whose family is sound itself.

Kartikeya and Tarakasura · A boy with six faces, and the lap that became a cradle.

Andhakasura · Eyes covered in play, a moment of darkness, and a son born of the sweat of the brow.

Kashi Vishvanath · A city of five kos, lifted on a trident, that no dissolution drowns.

A Guest in His Own World

The Shiva of the Shiva Purana arrives late in every story and only when asked. For the marriage Brahma and Vishnu must climb Kailasa, for the austerity Nandi must get his eyes open, and for Tripura the gods must first call him emperor and then build him a chariot. What he gives is always larger than the measure asked, to Kama every heart in place of one body, to Maya a realm, to Tarakaksha death at his own hand, to Ganesha first worship in place of a severed head; and what he asks is only that whoever comes near him tell the truth, as Parvati told it to the Brahmin with matted locks. Daksha’s curse cannot touch him, and Sati’s fire of yoga does; that is the measure of this figure. The Bhagavata shows him running after Mohini and coming back to hide nothing from Uma, and that too is inside the measure. The column whose end Brahma and Vishnu could not find appeared of itself when they bowed, and every story after it repeats that one event: the ones who measure come back, and before the ones who call he stands with all his ganas around him.