The Shiva Mahimna Stotra

Pushpadanta opens with an admission. He says that the praise of even the greatest sage cannot touch the far edge of your glory, that the speech of the likes of Brahma tires and halts before you, so what standing does he have. And at once he raises a gentle argument: everyone sings to the limit of their own understanding, and to sing that much is no fault. Then he goes deeper. Your glory lies past the road of both speech and mind; even the Veda can only say “not this, not this” and point in astonishment. The greatest text makes do with a hint. Here is the amusing turn: on small subjects everyone’s tongue and mind race ahead in an instant. Our understanding is built for small things, not for the boundless. In the third shloka he makes his aim clear: he sings so that the singing will purify his own speech. A prayer works more on the one who prays than on the one who is prayed to.

Now the stotra descends into philosophy. One single power does three works: it makes the world, guards it, and gathers it back in, and the Veda shows this same power split into three forms across three qualities. Behind them the reality stays one. Some dull-minded people slander this beautiful truth, but Pushpadanta does not curse them; he only calls them “unfortunate,” people who are missing this rasa, the flavor of it. Then he takes up a particular kind of question: by what desire, with what body, by what means, and on what foundation does the maker fashion the three worlds. These questions wear the look of wisdom. They are a colossal mistake. A potter needs clay, a wheel, and hands to shape a pot, because the potter is separate from the pot, but the one who is all things, where would he get materials from outside himself. Shiva’s sovereignty is “atarkya,” past the grip of reasoning. Seen from the other side the answer grows clearer: worlds whose parts are plainly visible cannot be beginningless, and without some capable power they cannot hold together on their own. Still, some slow minds keep on doubting.

Now comes the most generous shloka of the stotra. Vedic Mimamsa, Samkhya, Yoga, Pashupata, Vaishnava, these are different roads, and each one holds itself to be correct. But people’s tastes differ; one likes the straight road, another the winding one. As the water of every river finally meets the sea, so the one destination they all reach is you alone. A path being crooked does not make its water dirty. Then he comes to Shiva’s gear: one old bull, a khatvanga (a skull-topped staff), an axe, a hide, ashes, snakes, and a skull, only this much. And the gods, who hold all the splendor of heaven, receive even their own riches from a single glance of Shiva’s grace. The one who is “svatmarama,” who delights within himself, is not driven here and there by the mirage of sense-objects. And at the end Pushpadanta lives an honest moment. The philosophers do not agree among themselves; one says everything is eternal, another says all of it is fleeting. Singing to you in the middle of all this, he feels shy. But he says it plainly: there is no insolence in this outspokenness. A plea of love does not answer to the rules of debate. A debate demands that you be correct; love asks only that you be sincere.

From here the stotra descends into the Puranic stories, and the first katha (story) is the Lingodbhava. An argument broke out between Brahma and Vishnu over who was greater. Just then an endless pillar of fire appeared, and the two set out to find its ends, Brahma upward, Vishnu downward. Both wore themselves out; the end never came. Then they gave up measuring and praised him with devotion and faith, and Shiva appeared on his own. The end that measuring could not find, bowing found. The last line gives an assurance: when following the gods bore fruit, ours is certain to bear fruit too. Then Ravana enters, and an unexpected side opens up. Even after conquering all three worlds, an itch for battle still remained in his arms, and he carried that intensity all the way to cutting off his own lotus-like heads and offering them at Shiva’s feet. This was the power of his unshakable bhakti. But in the next story that same Ravana flips. With the very strength he had won by serving Shiva, when he tried to shake Kailasa, the light pressure of Shiva’s big toe pinned him down, and he found no resting place even in the netherworld. A power received from its source cannot stand against that same source.

The story of Banasura says this same lesson from the other side. He was a supreme devotee of Shiva, and before him even the sovereignty of Indra, the highest wealth of the world of the gods, fell short; all three worlds became his attendants. What is there to wonder at in this, says Pushpadanta; whose advancement does a head bowed before you fail to bring. The thing the world calls height grows through bowing. Then comes the most beloved shloka of the stotra, the story of Nilakantha. The churning of the ocean gave up nectar and also poison. The gods flew off with all the nectar; no one took the poison. Shiva lifted it, drank it, held it in his throat, and that killing poison turned his throat blue and became an ornament. If you must drink poison, do not let it go down inside you; hold it in your throat, and watch, that same poison becomes your mark of recognition. When the bitterness of life stops at the right place, it makes you deeper.

Now it is Kama’s turn. His arrows never failed on anyone, god, asura, or human. Trusting in that, he aimed an arrow even at the meditating Shiva, as if Shiva too were some ordinary god. The third eye opened, and Kama was burned to ash and left as mere “smara,” remembrance alone, without a body. For one who is fully composed within himself, a desire moving toward him cannot shake him; it runs out on its own. This comes as the natural outcome of inner steadiness, with nothing forced down. Then the stotra turns toward Shiva’s dance, and catches a paradox. This dance is for the protection of the world, and that same dance of protection sets all three worlds trembling. When his foot comes down, the earth begins to doubt its own footing; when his arms wheel, Vishnu’s realm staggers along with the planets; when his matted locks swing, the edges of the sky start to collide. What you take to be steady and solid is only one held pose of that dance.

Now the stotra opens the eye of proportion. The Milky Way, spread across the whole sky with its foam of stars, looks like a tiny droplet on Shiva’s brow, and from that one vast stream the entire world of continents and oceans was made. From this alone, gauge how immense that divine body is. Here the glory reveals itself through proportion. Then comes the scene of the burning of Tripura, and it is magnificent. To burn the three flying cities to ash, the earth became Shiva’s chariot, Brahma the charioteer, Meru the bow, sun and moon the two wheels, and Vishnu who holds the discus became the arrow itself. But Pushpadanta asks with a smile: why so much pomp for a Tripura no sturdier than a straw, why would the one whose will moves everything need a chariot and bow. The answer hides in the last line: the mind of one who is truly capable makes playthings of its instruments. All this arrangement was lila, sheer play. The third story is the summit of bhakti. Vishnu offered a thousand lotuses every day; one day, by the count, a single lotus fell short, so he refused to leave the worship unfinished and plucked out his own eye to offer it. That surging devotion became the Sudarshana discus, which guards the world to this day. What is offered with a true heart returns in a changed form, carrying even greater power.

Now the stotra touches an old philosophical knot. A yajna (fire-rite) happens today, its fruit comes much later, and in between the act itself has vanished, so where does that fruit come from. Pushpadanta answers directly: God is the one who grants the fruit, and God stays awake even when the karma itself has gone to sleep. On this conviction people bind their faith to the Veda and perform their fire-rites with easy minds. Between the act and its fruit there is an unseen link, and that link is the wakefulness of God. Then the next shloka shows the reverse side of this, through the story of Daksha’s yajna. Daksha was “kriya-daksha,” a master of ritual, an expert in its inner workings; every rule in his yajna was correct, rishis served as priests, gods sat as the assembly. Only one thing was missing: in his arrogance he gave Shiva neither invitation nor reverence, and the whole grand yajna was destroyed. However complete the procedure, once reverence for the root is gone, the affair falls apart and brings ruin in its place.

Two tender stories come together, one of anger, one of laughter. The first is the source of the deer-constellation in the sky. Prajapati, forgetting all propriety, advanced toward his own daughter who had taken the form of a doe, himself becoming a stag to follow after her. Then Shiva took the form of a hunter and raised his bow, and pierced by the arrow that deer fled trembling into the sky, where even today it can be seen enduring the hunter’s chase still fixed at its back. Shiva’s wrath is never arbitrary; it rises only when some boundary of order is broken. Compassion and anger both rise from the same protection of dharma. The second story carries a light laughter. Kama burned like a straw before Shiva, yet if Parvati, on account of his Ardhanarishvara form (half woman, half man), takes Shiva to be under a woman’s control, that is only her innocent love. Whoever keeps count of wins and losses in love is still standing outside love. Where two truly become one, each the other’s half, the question of who controls whom simply falls away.

Now the most startling shloka of the stotra. Everything about Shiva is held to be inauspicious: the cremation ground is his playground, ghosts and spirits his companions, funeral ash on his body, a garland of skulls at his throat. Shiva lives among the very things society shrinks away from. And then the shloka turns: this same Shiva is the highest blessing for those who remember him. Shiva is in the cremation ground because he has no fear of death, and only one who has no fear of death can grant true fearlessness. Our division of auspicious and inauspicious sits on the surface; whoever has crossed past it stays a blessing in every condition. And then the stotra steps away from the Puranic stories and descends into the experience of meditation. The yogi turns the mind inward, masters the breath, and takes something like a plunge into a pool full of nectar; then every pore blooms, the eyes fill with bliss. Whatever unspoken thing is found in that depth, Pushpadanta gives it no name, he only says “kimapi,” a certain something, and he adds: that is you. Shiva is right here, the experience that meets you the moment you dive within.

Now the stotra begins to call Shiva everything, but with a beautiful twist. You are the sun, you are the moon, you are the wind, fire, water, sky, earth, and the atman (self) within is also you. Yet listing you in this way is itself a kind of limiting, because counting has a boundary. The real point is that there is nothing at all that you are not. You do not need to go searching for God anywhere, because there is no place at all where God is not. Then Om is laid out in the open. Om is the joining of three sounds, A-U-M, and each sound gathers up a triad: three Vedas, three states, three worlds, three gods. So Om is the summary of the entire created world. Yet beyond it there is a fourth, the turiya, which watches all three states and is bound to none of them, and that faint silent hum after Om points toward that very fourth. The next time you say Om, keep your attention on the silence after the final “m”; that is the true address.

Now come the shlokas of salutation, and the tone turns into something like a mantra. First, Shiva’s eight names, the Ashtamurti, meaning eight forms: earth, water, fire, air, sky, sun, moon, and the conscious yajaman, the one who offers. Each name is the lord of one portion of creation, and each name is a door to reach that same one. The names differ, the destination is one. Then Pushpadanta, in a single breath, sets down opposing pairs: salutation to the nearest and also to the farthest, to the most subtle and to the most vast, to the most ancient and to the newest. Logic asks how one thing can be both, but Shiva is both ends of every pair, and everything in between as well. This works by holding the opposites together, carrying the mind to a place where the “either this or that” way of thinking loosens on its own. Then the same salutation settles into a clean structure: three works, three gunas, three names, for creation rajas and Bhava, for destruction tamas and Hara, for sustenance sattva and Mrida. But the real point is in the last line, “nistraigunya,” beyond all three gunas. Shiva does work with the gunas, yet is never bound within them, and somewhere in this, we too are that fourth who watches the three come and go.

Now Pushpadanta almost closes the full circle. The theme of the first shloka returns: here is his small mind, swaying under the control of sorrows, and there is your glory that overleaps every limit. Seeing this gap, the mind would freeze in fear, but now a discovery has been added: who made him sing this. The answer, bhakti. Devotion made the mind “amanda,” pulled it out of its dullness and had it lay flowers of words at the feet. Singing comes from the love that lifts us above the very question of worthiness. And right after this comes the heart of the whole stotra, the very lines we heard at the start. Pushpadanta turns the cosmos itself into writing materials: the black mountain for ink, the ocean for an inkpot, the wish-granting tree for a pen, the earth for paper, and the writer herself the goddess of learning, with no limit of time. Even after such boundless means, the answer is the same, the end does not come. But this shloka belongs to joy. Anything whose end can be reached turns out to be small, and the endlessness of glory is its most beautiful quality. This is the answer to the first shloka: speech fell short for this reason, and falling short for this reason is nothing to be ashamed of.

From here the stotra begins to speak about itself. First the composer records his own name, but very lightly, introducing Shiva first and then himself, “a gana by the name of Pushpadanta.” The artist stays behind, the work in front. And one thing stands out: he calls Shiva “nirguna,” beyond all qualities, and yet the whole stotra sings those very qualities. On the surface this is a contradiction; in truth it is the nature of bhakti. We know that the one we are singing to is larger than words, and we sing anyway, in order to connect. Then the phalashruti begins, the first shloka that tells the fruit of the recitation, and it speaks of both worlds: hereafter a place like Rudra’s in Shiva’s realm, and here in this very life wealth, long years, children, fame. But there is one condition, “shuddha-chitta,” with a clean mind. The fruit comes from purity of mind. And then four short sentences, each one a “highest”: no god greater than Mahesha, no praise beyond the Mahimna, no mantra beyond the Aghora, and the highest principle, the guru. Without the guru a mantra is only sound, a stotra only words. Knowledge moves from one to another, hand to hand, in living form, and that living transmission is the highest.

Now the phalashruti says its most daring thing. Initiation, charity, tapas (austerity), pilgrimage, knowledge, yajna, all these great acts of merit together do not stand equal to even a sixteenth part of a true recitation of this stotra. Charity, pilgrimage, yajna, these are all acts of “doing”; in them a doer keeps standing there, “I did this.” But in a true recitation, where the mind goes under, the doer himself melts, and where the doer has melted, that is where the real thing happened. Then the stotra records its own birth-story, and now the humility of shloka 31 makes sense. Pushpadanta was a king of gandharvas, holder of the power to turn invisible, who each day stole flowers for the worship of Shiva from a certain garden. One day he stepped, without knowing, over the leaves already offered to Shiva, and that disrespect carried off his power; he became visible, he was caught, and in remorse he composed this stotra. The most beloved Shiva-stotra rose out of a mistake, out of a fall. And the third shloka gives an assurance: whoever reads it with folded hands and a focused mind reaches near to Shiva, praised by the Kinnaras along the way. This stotra is “svarga-moksha-eka-hetu,” the single cause of both joy and liberation, and it is “amogha,” it never returns empty.

Now the stotra slowly comes down to the ground, the way a deep conversation settles into quiet. First it announces its own completion with simplicity: this meritorious gandharva-speech is finished here, it is without parallel, it steals the mind, and from start to end it is only a description of God. One phrase draws attention, “sarvam ishvara-varnanam,” meaning Pushpadanta nowhere made his own story or his own sorrow the center, even though the stotra was born from his fall. To remove yourself from the work, so that only the subject shines. Then a beautiful thing becomes clear: this is a “vangmayi puja,” a worship made of words. He no longer had even the power to steal flowers, so he offered flowers of words, and worship made of words is just as real. Whoever has no flowers, let him offer his own words; the spirit of offering is what is real, never the cost of what is offered.

And at the end, after singing forty shlokas, Pushpadanta says something that gives the whole stotra a new depth: “I do not know your essence.” Even after composing a stotra this long and this beautiful, he does not claim that now he has understood. And right after that, the most beautiful turn: whatever you are, to that very form, salutation again and again. Knowing is no longer a condition for salutation. Love and respect do not wait for understanding; you come to understand someone slowly, in the very act of loving them. Then a lovely give in the final phalashruti: once, twice, or three times, as much as you can, no rigid rule. And the last shloka counts three ways: kanthasthita, meaning to commit to memory; pathita, meaning daily practice; and samahita, meaning to sink in with full attention. The first two are means, the third is the destination. First you memorize, then you repeat, and one day the repeating stops and only the sinking-in remains. The stotra closes by calling Shiva “bhutapati,” lord of all beings, the master of every creature, one’s own lord seated within everyone. The journey Pushpadanta began by stealing flowers is completed here by offering flowers of words. Falling, recognizing, singing, and then dissolving into the singing.