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On the eastern flank of Mount Mandara, Mahadeva had made his seat. He had come there from Kailash with his hosts (ganas), drawn by the wish to wander and delight; along the way he had entered the city of Kashi, made it his capital, and set a warrior named Bhairava over it as its guardian. Living there beside Parvati, he wove one divine play (lila) after another for the joy of those who loved him, and then, with the lords of his ganas and with Parvati, he climbed Mount Mandara to lose himself in every kind of sport. In the middle of that sport, one day, half in laughter, Girija stole up behind him and laid her two hands, lovely as coral and gold and the lotus, over Shankara’s eyes.
The touch of those palms did what no one had foreseen. The instant his eyes closed, a heavy darkness swept over all three worlds and held them for a moment. Where Parvati’s hands rested against the fire of Maheshwara’s brow, sweat broke out, and many beads of water began to fall. Those drops gathered into the shape of a womb, and out of it appeared a being with a monstrous face. It was hideous, seething with rage, matted of hair, black as coal, unlike any man and utterly misshapen. A deep grating rumble came from its throat. One moment it sang, the next it laughed, the next it broke into weeping, and all the while it danced, licking its own jaws.
Shiva watched the strange sight and smiled. “Beloved,” he said to Parvati, “it was you who brought this about, when you covered my eyes. Why then are you afraid of it?” Gauri laughed at that and lifted her hands away. Light flooded back at once, yet the creature’s form stayed as fearsome as before, and because it had been born of darkness, its eyes too were blind. Studying the odd being, Gauri asked, out of curiosity, who this misshapen thing was, and whose son.
The Son of Hiranyaksha
Smiling still, Shiva told Gauri the heart of it. In those very days, Kashyapa’s son Hiranyaksha, whom Shiva himself had inspired to undertake austerities for offspring, was performing fierce tapas (austerity) out of longing for a son; craving the darshan of Maheshwara, he had brought anger and the other faults under his control and had sat down in samadhi, motionless as a tree stump. Pleased by his austerity, the Pinaka-bearing Mahesha appeared before him and said, “Lord of the daityas, name your desire; I am Shankara, the giver of boons, and whatever you long for I shall grant.” Hiranyaksha bowed at his feet and begged for one excellent son worthy of the race of the gods, and Shiva handed him that same fierce being born of darkness as his son. The daitya was overjoyed; he worshiped Rudra and circled him in reverence, then took up the infant and returned to his own kingdom.
In time that same mighty Hiranyaksha conquered all the gods and carried the earth off into the depths of Rasatala; then, at the prayers of gods and munis, Vishnu took on the terrible form of Varaha, the boar, plunged into Patala, churned the demon army with his tusks and snout, and with the Sudarshana chakra, blazing like millions upon millions of suns, severed Hiranyaksha’s flaming head. With Hiranyaksha slain, Indra, king of the gods, anointed that same blind boy, Andhaka, on the throne of the asura kingdom.
The Boon and the Blind Pride
One day Andhaka was lost in pleasure with his brothers. Drunk on their own indulgence, those brothers taunted him. “You, blind one! What claim have you now on this kingdom? Hiranyaksha too turned out a fool, who did such fierce tapas to please Shankara and got in return a son as ugly, misshapen, and sightless as you. Think about it: does a son begotten by another ever come into a kingdom? To speak the truth, it is we who have a rightful share in this realm.”
Andhaka was humbled to hear it. He said nothing that showed; he smoothed the moment over with pleasant words and let them go on with their game, and that night he went off into a lonely forest. There he performed tapas for ten thousand years, standing on one leg, fasting, arms held up and never lowered, repeating the mantras, a penance no god and no asura could have carried. Then for a year he did a thing beyond even that: every day he cut a piece of flesh from his own body and gave it to the blazing fire with his blood, saying the mantras while he did it. By the end of that year the blood was gone out of him and the flesh off him, and what sat there was bones and sinew. When there was no flesh left to offer he made ready to offer the rest of himself, the whole body, into the fire. The gods saw him do it and lost their nerve; they went straight to Brahma and praised him and begged. So Brahma stopped him and said, “Danava, wait. Ask for a boon. Whatever rarest of rare thing in the world you desire, take it from me.”
With humility and meekness Andhaka said, “Lord, may all those cruel ones who seized my kingdom become my servants; may I, the blind one, receive divine sight; may Indra and the other gods pay me tribute; and may my death never come at the hands of gods, daityas, gandharvas, yakshas, nagas, humans, of Narayana the enemy of the daityas, of all-pervading Shankara, or of any other creature whatsoever.” Brahma heard that out and grew wary. “Lord of the daityas, all this shall come to pass, but you must accept some one cause of your own destruction. No one born, and no one yet to be born, slips past the jaws of death. And a good man in your position should not want too long a life anyway.”
Andhaka thought a while and answered, “Lord, among the highest, the middling, and the lowliest women of the three ages, one shall surely be my mother as well. She is unconquerable to the world of men, unapproachable in body, mind, and speech. On whatever day desire for that mother wakes in my heart, on that very day let my death come.” Hearing so strange a boon, the self-born Brahma was filled with wonder; he called to mind the lotus feet of Shankara, and, on receiving Shambhu’s own command, he granted it. Stand up, he told the demon, and go and have what you want. Only see that you always pick your fights with heroes.
Then Andhaka folded his hands and pleaded, “Lord, when only bones are left in this body, how shall it wage war? Touch it with your holy hand.” Brahma laid his hand on the withered body; it filled out and grew full, strength coursed through it, its eyes came into being, and it turned beautiful to look upon. Prahlada and the other foremost danavas, learning that he had come back bearing a boon, handed over the whole kingdom to him and became his servants. Then Andhaka took up his army and marched upon heaven, defeated all the gods in battle, made the thunderbolt-wielding Indra his tributary, and conquered nagas, suparnas, rakshasas, gandharvas, humans, the great mountains, the trees, and even the four-footed beasts such as lions, until the whole moving and unmoving triple world lay under his hand. Pride so blinded his mind that, though he had gained eyes, he had forgotten how to see. No reverence for the Veda, none for the gods, none for Brahmins, none for the guru. He went after the great scholars with arguments that would not hold water and beat them down with them, and he and his daitya friends roamed about breaking up the Vedic rites wherever they found them lit, all the while carrying himself like a great soul. He gathered thousands of beautiful women out of Rasatala, the earth, and heaven, and wandered the lovely banks of mountains and rivers with them, drinking what they left in their cups, and he sank into every wilful indulgence, and never once thought that something should be done for the world to come as well. Ten thousand years went by him like that, and every year of it took years off him, and he never noticed.
At Parvati’s Door
One day his three ministers, Duryodhana, Vaidhasa, and Hasti, came back from Mount Mandara and described a sight to him. In a cave of that mountain sat a great ascetic with his eyes shut in meditation, his fair body smeared with ash, the crescent moon at his head, an elephant hide about his hips and serpents moving over his limbs, a necklace of skulls at his throat. He had four arms and long matted locks, a bow near him and a quiver, a rosary, a sword, and he carried a trident, a khatvanga (skull-staff), and a club. A white bull sat close by, old, and steady as a rock. A fearsome warrior, terrible as a monstrous ape, stood ready with every weapon to guard the ascetic. And beside that ascetic, they said, was a woman, young, worked over with corals and pearls and gold as though the ornaments had been waiting all their lives for her, a gem set out under the sun. The man who has looked at her, they told him, is the only man alive who can be said to have seen anything. What is there left for a pair of eyes to do afterward? She is the wife of that ascetic, and she is worth going to look at, and worth bringing back here.
The moment he heard talk of that woman, the lust-blinded rakshasa was smitten. It never crossed his mind, or perhaps the boon itself kept the memory from him, that she was the mother of all three worlds, that same Gauri by whose play he himself had once been born. Taking a vast army, he marched up Mount Mandara and closed with Nandishwara. A dreadful battle broke out; the field turned to a mire of fat, marrow, and blood, severed heads left their trunks to dance, and flesh-eating creatures wheeled overhead. In a short while the daityas broke and fled.
Then the Pinaka-bearing Shiva steadied Parvati and said, “Beloved, this obstacle has fallen across the Pashupata vow I began earlier. An assault like this upon immortal beings is like some malefic planet that devours all merit. I will go once more into a lonely forest and take initiation into that hard vow; let your grief and your fear be gone.” So saying, he sounded his horn and went off into a fearsome forest, and for a thousand years he was lost in that vow, whose keeping lies beyond the strength of gods and asuras alike.
Meanwhile Parvati stayed on Mount Mandara, waiting for Shiva to return; the warriors stood watch, and yet, alone in the cave, she was never free of fear. In this while Andhaka, driven mad once more by the arrows of desire, came back with his chief warriors. The battle raged five days and nights. At the last, under the blows of weapons the daityas flung, Nandishwara’s body was shattered; he fell right at the mouth of the cave and lost his senses, and his falling so blocked the doorway that it could no longer be opened. When the daityas had buried all the warriors under their weapons, Parvati called upon Vishnu and Brahma.
At her call they came, all the gods, in the forms of the goddesses Brahmi, Narayani, Aindri, Vaishvanari, Yamya, Nairriti, Varuni, Vayavi, Kauberi, and Gauri, and with them yakshas, siddhas, and guhyakas, each mounted on its own vehicle and armed for war, and they closed with the rakshasas beside Parvati. Some while later Lord Shiva too returned, and the battle flared up again. When Shukracharya was reviving the dead daityas with the sanjivani lore, Bhutanatha swallowed him whole, and the daityas began to fail.
On the Trident
Andhaka’s body had been worn ragged by the blows of weapons, and still he conjured another maya and took on a body like the fire that burns at the end of an age. Bhutanatha Tripurari Shankara ran him through with the trident. But every drop of his blood that struck the earth raised up another Andhaka just like him, and in a short while countless monstrous-faced Andhakas spread across the whole battlefield. Then, at Shiva’s prompting, Vishnu took on a form of terror, a woman who was nothing but a skeleton; the moment that goddess set foot on the field, all the gods began to praise her; and then, moved again by the Lord’s prompting, famished, she began to drink the hot blood streaming from the bodies of those soldiers and of the daitya king. At this the rakshasas ceased to multiply, and only the one Andhaka remained.
Though the blood in his body had dried away, he remembered the eternal warrior-dharma of his line and went on grappling with Lord Shankara with slaps, with fists hard as the thunderbolt, with his feet, and with nails shaped like the thunderbolt. Then Pramathanatha Shiva tore open his heart on the battlefield and stilled him, ran him through on the trident, and raised him high like Sthanu, the fixed pillar. His ragged body hung downward; the rays of the sun scorched him, the clouds soaked him with torrents of rain, the moon’s rays, cold as blocks of ice, cut into him. Even so the daitya did not give up his life. He hung there three thousand years, doing the only thing left to a body on a spike: he held the lord in his mind and praised him, going through the hundred and eight names one after another, until on that trident, dried to nothing, he was performing a penance harder than the one that had won him the world. The fear went out of him somewhere in it. Shambhu, the fathomless ocean of mercy, was pleased. He poured a shower of nectar over that ruined body, lifted him down off the trident, and let him go, and what he had done before, the lord put out of account. Daitya, he said, your endurance pleases me, and your courage. You kept your life for three thousand years and the merit of it is yours. Choose a boon. Andhaka folded his palms and knelt, shaking. “Lord, what I said to you that day I said with my mouth full of my own pleasure. You, who are greater than the greatest, I spoke to as though you were some poor man with nothing. And what I did on that field, I did in delusion, and there is nothing lower in the world than that, and I did it because I did not know who you were. Do not hold it in your mind. The thing I wanted from Parvati came out of the meanest lust in me; forgive that too. A wretch is worth pitying, and the deeper the wretchedness the more so, and I am a wretch, and I am yours. Let the goddess, the mother of the worlds, be pleased with me, and put her anger down, and look at me once without it. Where is her anger and where am I? Let your son Viraka not be angry at the sight of me. Let me look at Parvati always as a mother and give her what is due to elders. Let me be devoted to you both, let me carry no enmity toward the gods, let my heart be quiet and turned toward the ways of yoga, and let me stay among your ganas. And by your mercy, let me never again remember the qualities I had as a danava.” Then he fell silent, holding the three-eyed lord in his mind and seeing Parvati as his mother; and Shambhu, that fathomless ocean of mercy, gave him the office of Ganadhyaksha, chief of his hosts.
Then Shiva turned his eyes on him, and they were glad eyes, and under that look the whole of his first birth came back to him: the mountain, the two hands laid over a god’s eyes in play, the darkness, the sweat, the drops, himself. He knew at last whose he was. He bowed to his mother and his father and was content, and Parvati and Shiva took his head and kissed it and breathed him in, the way parents do. The war was over. The lokapalas worshiped Shiva in due form, Brahma and Vishnu and the other gods bowed their heads and offered the finest of praises, and all of them raised cries of victory and gave themselves to joy. Then Shiva took them all with him and returned in delight to the cave of the mountain king; there he offered every kind of gift to those worshipful gods who were parts of his own being, sent them on their way, and, with the delighted Girija, took up his fine plays once again. The one who had been born from the darkness of eyes covered in jest, blind from birth and blinder still from the pride of a boon, found in the end, on the tip of a trident, the sight that had never truly been his.
Source: Shiva Purana (Gita Press, Sankshipta Shivapurananka), Rudra Samhita (Yuddha Khanda)