Who is Shiva?

The euphemism that became a god

There is a habit in the oldest surviving Indian poetry of not naming a dangerous thing directly. You call the deadly snake “the rope.” You call the cremation ground “the auspicious place.” And you call the storm-god who can kill your children and your cattle śiva, which means kind, gentle, auspicious, benign.

Śiva. Auspicious. The word is not, at first, a name. It is a hope spoken toward a god you are afraid of.

The god underneath the adjective is Rudra, and even his name is uncertain. The tradition most often derives “Rudra” from the root rud-, “to howl” or “to roar,” which would make him the Howler. Other scholars disagree. Pischel and Grassmann connected the name to a root meaning “to be red” or “to shine,” the Red One, the Brilliant. Stella Kramrisch read it instead as raudra, “wild, fierce,” the Wild One. The philologist Manfred Mayrhofer proposed a different link again, to rodasī, “heaven and earth.” The honest position is that the name’s meaning is genuinely uncertain, and these readings have stood unresolved for a long time. We do not know which is right.

A caution before we go on. The move I am about to trace, from a fear-driven adjective to the name of God, is the way scholars reconstruct the history. It is a reading of the evidence, not a sequence the texts narrate about themselves. But the pattern in the language is real, and it begins with fear.

The archer in the mountains

Rudra is a minor figure in the Rigveda by sheer hymn-count. Three hymns are addressed to him alone, RV 1.114, 2.33, and 7.46, with a fourth, RV 1.43, shared with Soma, and he appears in scattered verses elsewhere. Set beside Indra or Agni, who command dozens of hymns each, he is a god at the edge of the pantheon. But what those hymns say about him is unlike anything said about the others.

He is a healer and a killer at the same time, and the poets seem unable to separate the two. They praise the very hand that could destroy them:

“Him with the braided hair we call with reverence down, the wild-boar of the sky, the red, the dazzling shape. / May he, his hand filled full of sovran medicines, grant us protection, shelter, and a home secure.” Ralph T.H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rgveda (1896), RV 1.114.5

That hand is “filled full of sovran medicines.” Rudra is a physician. (The renderings here are Griffith’s, from 1896, Victorian in their English and quaint in places, but faithful in substance.) Another of the Rudra hymns says it more plainly still:

“Let us not anger thee with worship, Rudra, ill praise, Strong God! or mingled invocation. / Do thou with strengthening balms incite our heroes: I hear thee famed as best of all physicians.” Griffith (1896), RV 2.33.4

Best of all physicians. And in the next breath, the same archer is the one whose arrows the singer prays will fall on someone else:

“Praise him the chariot-borne, the young, the famous, fierce, slaying like a dread beast of the forest. / O Rudra, praised, be gracious to the singer. let thy hosts spare us and smite down another.” Griffith (1896), RV 2.33.11

Read enough of these and you notice that the dominant grammar is the plea. Much of RV 1.114 is a list of people the poet asks Rudra not to harm:

“O Rudra, harm not either great or small of us, harm not the growing boy, harm not the full-grown man. / Slay not a sire among us, slay no mother here, and to our own dear bodies, Rudra, do not harm.” Griffith (1896), RV 1.114.7

He is called the father of the Maruts, the wild storm-troop of the sky, and a dweller in the mountains. He gives medicine and he carries arrows. He is begged for compassion and begged not to shoot. It is tempting to read the whole later history of Shaivism as the long domestication, and then the apotheosis, of this fear. That is a narrative we impose, and the later tradition drew on a great deal besides. But the duality is here at the root, the healer who is also the destroyer, and it never leaves him.

The word becomes a name

The turn from epithet toward name happens in the chant of the Yajurveda. The Śatarudriya, the “hymn to the hundred Rudras,” sometimes called the Śrī Rudram, sits in the Taittirīya Saṃhitā of the Krishna Yajurveda. It is the oldest sustained litany to Rudra, a flood of names that addresses him as everything at once, the terrible and the gentle, the thief and the lord, the one in the trees and the one in the rivers. It is the seed of the later Aṣṭamūrti, the eight forms in which the tradition came to see Shiva everywhere, the five elements together with the sun, the moon, and the sacrificer.

It is also where the most famous Shaiva formula first appears: namaḥ śivāya ca śivatarāya ca, “salutation to the auspicious one and to the more auspicious one,” in the Namakam of the Śatarudriya, Taittirīya Saṃhitā 4.5.8.1. The tradition derives from this litany the Pañcākṣara, the five-syllable mantra na-maḥ-śi-vā-ya, in which the words namaḥ śivāya already stand. Its elevation into the central mantra of all Shaivism is a later development, but the words are here, in the Veda.

Notice what is happening. In the Veda, śiva is still functioning partly as an adjective, “auspicious,” even as it begins to point at a single being. The adjective is becoming a name. It will take the Upanishads to finish the work.

The Upanishadic turn

The hinge is a single text. The Śvetāśvatara Upanishad is the first major Upanishad to take Rudra-Śiva and place him at the summit of everything, a single personal God who makes the worlds, holds them, and withdraws them. Where the Rigveda begged an archer, the Śvetāśvatara worships the Absolute.

“For there is one Rudra only, they do not allow a second, who rules all the worlds by his powers. He stands behind all persons, and after having created all worlds he, the protector, rolls it up at the end of time.” F. Max Müller, The Upanishads, Part II (Sacred Books of the East 15, 1884), Śvet. Up. III.2

One Rudra only. No second. This is the language of a single sovereign God, theistic and, in its own idiom, close to monotheism, though it is set within a Vedāntic frame the text also speaks in Sāṃkhya and Yoga terms. And the same text reaches for the old auspicious word and turns it toward the supreme:

“That Bhagavat exists in the faces, the heads, the necks of all, he dwells in the cave (of the heart) of all beings, he is all-pervading, therefore he is the omnipresent Śiva.” Müller (1884), Śvet. Up. III.11

Müller renders śiva here as “the blessed,” the happy one, and adds in a footnote that the Śaivas cited exactly this verse as their Vedic authority, a point Wilson had already noted in 1828. The text seems deliberate in its choice of the old word. To know this Shiva is to be freed:

“He who knows Śiva (the blessed) hidden in all beings, like the subtile film that rises from out the clarified butter, alone enveloping everything,—he who knows the god, is freed from all fetters.” Müller (1884), Śvet. Up. IV.16

And then, most movingly, the text reaches back across centuries and quotes the old Vedic plea almost word for word, the prayer of the frightened villager now set inside a hymn to the ground of being:

“‘Thou art unborn,’ with these words some one comes near to thee, trembling. O Rudra, let thy gracious face protect me for ever! / O Rudra! hurt us not in our offspring and descendants, hurt us not in our own lives, nor in our cows, nor in our horses!…” Müller (1884), Śvet. Up. IV.21-22

These are the old Vedic Rudra-pleas returning, the very “harm us not” formulas of RV 1.114 and the Śatarudriya, now folded into a hymn to the ground of being. The archer who must not strike the cattle is the unborn Absolute. Much of the transformation is compressed into that single quotation.

When was this written? Here the honest answer is a range, not a date. The Śvetāśvatara is usually placed in the last few centuries before the Common Era. Patrick Olivelle, in The Early Upaniṣads (1998), counts it among the later texts of that early corpus, and cautions that any dating closer than a few centuries is unstable. Some scholars push it earlier, some later. What is not contested is its significance. Whatever the date, this is the text in which Rudra-Śiva is, for the first time in a principal Upanishad, identified as Brahman.

A note worth keeping in view. People often say “Shiva is in the Vedas.” That is true and not true. What is in the Veda is Rudra, and the word śiva used as an adjective. The fully Puranic Shiva, the dancer, the husband of Parvati, the destroyer in the trinity, is not there yet. He is being assembled.

The seal that proves nothing

There is one more origin story people reach for, and it has to be handled carefully because it is so often overstated.

Between 1928 and 1931, Sir John Marshall, excavating Mohenjo-daro, published a steatite seal showing a seated figure, possibly horned, possibly three-faced, surrounded by animals and sitting in what looked to him like a yogic posture. He called it a “proto-Śiva,” a Paśupati, Lord of Beasts, and proposed it as an ancestor of historical Shiva worship. This identification, from Marshall’s Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization (1931), entered the popular imagination and has stayed there.

It has not survived scholarly scrutiny intact. In 1975 to 1976, Doris Meth Srinivasan published “The So-Called Proto-Śiva Seal from Mohenjo-Daro: An Iconological Assessment” in Archives of Asian Art and rejected the reading, proposing instead a divine bull-man, a fertility figure, a humanized image of cattle rather than a yogi. Asko Parpola and others have read the seated figure in still other ways, including links to Near-Eastern and Elamite seals.

Underneath every reading sits one decisive problem. The Indus script is undeciphered. No one can read the seal’s caption. No one knows the figure’s name. The current scholarly position is that Marshall’s identification is unproven and probably overstated, and that the seal cannot bear the weight that popular accounts place on it.

So the honest sentence is this. We do not know whether the Pashupati seal has anything to do with Shiva. It is an open question, and it should be left open. The seal is not “the first Shiva.”

The great myths and what they carry

By the time of the epics and the Purāṇas, Shiva is no longer at the edge of anything. He is at the center, and a vast cycle of stories has grown up to say who he is. These are tradition, the myth and doctrine of the texts, and I present them as such rather than as dated history. Each one carries an idea.

Daksha’s sacrifice and Sati. Shiva marries Satī, daughter of the patriarch Daksha. Daksha, who despises his unkempt, ash-smeared son-in-law, holds a great sacrifice and pointedly does not invite him. Sati goes anyway, is humiliated, and in her grief and rage gives up her body, in the tradition consuming herself by her own yogic fire. Shiva’s grief becomes fury. He looses a terrible being, Vīrabhadra, who destroys the sacrifice. The Śiva Purāṇa tells this at length in the Satī Khaṇḍa of its Rudra Saṃhitā, and the Kūrma Purāṇa carries a version. Sati is later reborn as Pārvatī and wins Shiva back through long ascetic discipline, the story Kālidāsa shapes into the Kumārasaṃbhava. The cycle carries a theme that runs through all of Shiva, the outsider god, the one outside Brahminical propriety, who is nonetheless the highest.

The swallowing of the poison. When the gods and the asuras churned the ocean of milk to win the nectar of immortality, the churning first threw up Hālāhala, a poison so virulent it threatened to destroy all creation, long before any nectar appeared. Shiva drank it. He held it in his throat, which turned blue, and so he is Nīlakaṇṭha, the blue-throated one. The episode of the poison is told in the Purāṇas, in Bhāgavata Purāṇa 8.7 and Viṣṇu Purāṇa 1.9; the great churning of the ocean itself, the samudra-manthana, is told already in the Mahābhārata, in the Ādi Parva. The image the tradition reads from it is self-sacrifice, the god taking the world’s poison into his own body and holding it there.

Tripurantaka. Three asuras built three flying cities, Tripura, fortresses of gold, silver, and iron, and became nearly invincible. The gods turned to Shiva. In the telling, the cosmos itself became his weapon, the earth his chariot, the mountains his bow, with Brahma as charioteer, and he destroyed all three cities with a single arrow at the one instant they aligned. The Mahābhārata tells this most fully in the Karṇa Parva, with a briefer telling in the Vana Parva, and the Śiva Purāṇa gives its own account in the Yuddha Khaṇḍa. The tradition reads the three cities as the three states of bondage, dissolved in a single act.

Kamadeva and the third eye. While Shiva sat in deep meditation, the gods needed him to father a son who could defeat a demon, so they sent Kāmadeva, the god of desire, to fire his flower-arrow and make Shiva long for Parvati. Shiva opened his third eye and burned Kama to ash in an instant. The Śiva Purāṇa and the Matsya Purāṇa carry this. The third eye, here, is the eye whose glance destroys, the perception that reduces desire itself to ash.

Gangadhara. When the heavenly river Gaṅgā was to be brought down to earth, her fall would have shattered the world. Shiva caught her in his matted hair and let her trickle out gently, so the earth survived. The locus classicus is the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, in the Bāla Kāṇḍa, with versions in the Mahābhārata and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. As Gaṅgādhara, bearer of the Ganga, Shiva is read as the one who breaks the force of an overwhelming descent so that finite creatures can receive it.

Bhairava and Brahma’s fifth head. Brahma once had five heads, and the fifth grew arrogant. Shiva, in his fierce form as Bhairava, severed it, in the common telling with the nail of his thumb. For this he incurred brahmahatyā, the gravest of sins, here the slaying of Brahmā himself, the archetypal Brahmin, and the severed skull stuck fast to his hand. He wandered as the Kapālin, the skull-bearer, begging with the skull as his bowl, until the sin was at last expiated at Varanasi. The Śiva Purāṇa tells this in its Śatarudra Saṃhitā, and the Skanda, Matsya, and Kūrma Purāṇas carry versions. It is the strangest of the cycles, the god who himself takes on sin and exile.

Ardhanarishvara. Shiva appears as a single body split down the middle, half male and half female, the female half being Parvati. The myth is told in the Liṅga, Skanda, Śiva, Viṣṇu, and Matsya Purāṇas. But here the chronology is worth being precise about, because it runs the other way from what you might expect. The image precedes the texts. The earliest known Ardhanārīśvara is a Kushāṇa-period stele from Mathura, of roughly the first to second century CE, older than the Puranic descriptions that later explained it. The tradition, and Kramrisch reads it this way in The Presence of Śiva, takes the form as the non-duality of Shiva and Śakti, the male and female principles as one. That is an interpretation, and a beautiful one, laid over an image whose first sculptors left no caption.

The body read like a text

Shiva’s image is dense with attributes, and the tradition reads each one. The careful way to handle this is to separate what the images and the iconographic manuals actually prescribe from what the tradition reads into them. The classic authority is T.A. Gopinatha Rao’s Elements of Hindu Iconography, Vol. II (1914 to 1916), which works by quoting the Sanskrit meditation-verses, the dhyāna-ślokas, that prescribe each form.

So, what the image shows, and what it is read to mean.

The third eye, trinetra, set vertically on the forehead, is standard across the meditation-verses. The tradition reads it as the eye of higher perception, the eye whose glance burned Kama.

The crescent moon fixed in the matted hair gives Shiva one of his named forms, Candraśekhara, “moon-crested.” The tradition reads it as mastery over time, the moon being the measure of the months.

The Ganga in the matted locks gives the Gaṅgādhara form, read as a flood of grace broken gently so the world can bear it.

The serpent coiled at his neck, often named Vāsuki, is a standard attribute, read as mastery over death and fear. The later yogic tradition also reads the serpent as kuṇḍalinī, and that is a later gloss laid on an older image.

The ash, vibhūti or bhasma, smeared on the body, and the tiger skin, vyāghracarma, he sits and stands on, are both prescribed in the meditation-verses. The ash is read as what remains after the fire of dissolution, the residue of a burnt cosmos, and the cremation ground as his true home. The tiger skin is read as mastery over the animal nature.

The trident, triśūla, is his chief weapon, and the hourglass drum, the ḍamaru, is standard especially in his dancing forms. The trident is read as the three strands of nature or the three functions, and the drum as the first sound, the nāda, from which creation issues. The seed-rosary, the rudrākṣa, is a prescribed attribute, its name read as “Rudra’s eye” or “Rudra’s tear,” with a tear-origin myth in the Śiva Purāṇa that is itself Puranic tradition. And his mount, Nandi the bull, is a documented attribute, his epithet vṛṣabha-dhvaja meaning “bull-bannered,” with the bull read devotionally as dharma and as the model devotee.

That is a great deal of meaning hung on a single figure. The image is something close to a sacred text you read with the eyes.

The pillar of fire

The most common form of Shiva worship is not a statue at all. It is the liṅga, the aniconic pillar, usually set in a yoni-pīṭha base, and it is the principal cult object in Shaiva temples. The liṅga is Shiva without a face, Shiva as the formless ground.

The myth that explains it is Lingodbhava, “the arising of the liṅga.” Brahma and Vishnu once fell to disputing which of them was supreme. As they argued, a pillar of fire appeared between them, blazing, without visible top or bottom. Vishnu took the form of a boar and dug downward to find its base. Brahma took the form of a swan and flew upward to find its top. Neither reached an end. The pillar was infinite, and it was Shiva, the jyotirliṅga, the liṅga of light, the limitless reality beyond both the creator and the preserver. The Liṅga Purāṇa and the Śiva Purāṇa carry this, with versions in the Kūrma, Vāyu, and Vāmana Purāṇas. The twelve jyotirliṅgas, the great shrines from Somnath to Kashi to Rameswaram, are the places where this pillar is said to have appeared.

The story is also a quiet argument about supremacy. In a tradition where each sect makes its own god the highest, here is the Shaiva answer to the question, told as fire.

The dance

Perhaps the most widely recognized image of Shiva anywhere is a bronze, and it was cast in the Tamil south.

The Naṭarāja, “Lord of the Dance,” is the signature bronze of the Chola dynasty, cast roughly between the tenth and thirteenth centuries by the lost-wax method, and elevated under royal patronage, with the great temple at Chidambaram as its cosmic home. The art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy gave the form its classic description in his essay “The Dance of Shiva.”

The pose is the Ānanda Tāṇḍava, the dance of bliss. Coomaraswamy describes the four arms:

“In his case … one right hand holds a drum, and the other is uplifted in the sign of do not fear: one left hand holds fire, the other points down upon the demon Muyalaka, a dwarf holding a cobra; the left foot is raised.” Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “The Dance of Shiva” (1918)

So the upper right hand holds the ḍamaru, the drum. The upper left holds agni, fire. The lower right is raised in abhaya mudrā, the gesture of “do not fear.” The lower left sweeps across the body in the gajahasta, the “elephant-trunk” gesture, pointing down at the raised foot. And the feet matter precisely. In the standard Ānanda Tāṇḍava the right foot stamps down on a dwarf and the left foot is raised. The dwarf is Apasmāra in Sanskrit, Muyalaka in Tamil, the same figure under two names, often read as ignorance or forgetfulness trodden underfoot. The same dwarf sits beneath Dakshinamurti, Shiva as the silent teacher of the south-facing wall, who rests a foot on him rather than dancing. Around the whole dancing form runs a ring of fire, the prabhāmaṇḍala.

Now the careful part. There is a famous reading of the dance as a Pañcakṛtya, five cosmic acts, creation from the drum, preservation from the fear-not hand, destruction from the fire, veiling from the planted foot, and grace from the raised foot. This reading is genuine and old, but it is a reading. Coomaraswamy himself draws it from a thirteenth-century Tamil text, the Unmai Vilakkam:

“Creation arises from the drum: protection proceeds from the hand of hope: from fire proceeds destruction: the foot held aloft gives release.” Unmai Vilakkam v.36, quoted in Coomaraswamy, “The Dance of Shiva”

This is a medieval Śaiva Siddhānta theological overlay, not a label the Chola sculptors inscribed on their bronzes. Coomaraswamy was careful enough to note that the founding legend of the dance “has no very close connection with the real meaning of the dance.” So the five-acts gloss belongs to the tradition’s later reflection on the image, beautiful and serious, and worth holding slightly apart from the bare iconographic fact of a four-armed god dancing on a dwarf inside a ring of flame.

At Chidambaram, the temple’s innermost secret, the Chidambaram Rahasya, is an empty curtained space venerated as the Ākāśa Liṅga, Shiva as ether, as formlessness. The most elaborate image of the god and his most complete absence sit in the same temple.

The many who call him supreme

Shiva is not the property of one theology. Several distinct schools have each taken him as the highest reality and disagreed, sometimes sharply, about what that means. The Sanskritist Alexis Sanderson, who set out the framework in his 1988 survey of the Śaiva traditions and restated it in The Śaiva Age (2009), maps a broad division, an older path of ascetics seeking only liberation, the Atimārga, and a later Tantric stream seeking both liberation and power, the Mantramārga. Across most of them runs a shared vocabulary, pati–paśu–pāśa, the Lord, the bound soul, and the bond. Each school reads those three words differently.

The oldest organized order is the Pāśupata, whose first preceptor and systematizer was Lakulīśa, whose date is heavily contested, most often placed around the second century CE. Their goal was duḥkhānta, the definitive end of all suffering, a union with Rudra in which the soul gains Shiva’s qualities, his omniscience and power, without becoming numerically identical to him. Their path was famously antinomian, the ascetic deliberately courting public disgrace as a spiritual discipline.

The Śaiva Siddhānta, which became the great theology of the Tamil south, is dualist-realist, and crystallizes in Meykaṇḍar’s Śivajñānabodham in the thirteenth century, resting on a body of revealed scripture, the twenty-eight Āgamas. It holds three eternal, real categories, Lord, soul, and bond, and teaches that the soul is veiled by three impurities, the malas: āṇava, primal finitude, karma, and māyā. Liberation comes by Shiva’s grace, aruḷ in Tamil, which removes the impurities, and the soul attains intimate union and likeness with Shiva, Śiva-sāyujya, while never becoming identical to him. That eternal distinctness is the school’s signature.

The Trika, the non-dual Shaivism of Kashmir, says the opposite. Here there is no real, eternal bond at all. Bondage is Shiva’s own free self-forgetting, the one consciousness contracting itself into the appearance of countless finite souls who have forgotten what they are. This school rises in the early ninth century with Vasugupta and the Śiva Sūtras, develops through Somānanda and Utpaladeva, and reaches its height in Abhinavagupta around the year 1000, whose Tantrāloka is its summit. Its path is Pratyabhijñā, “recognition,” the sudden re-cognition that one has always already been Shiva. Nothing is acquired. The hidden is recognized. And liberation can be reached while still living, jīvanmukti.

The Liṅgāyats, or Vīraśaivas, are a twelfth-century movement from Karnataka associated with Basava, who founded or decisively shaped it and whose followers wrote in fierce Kannada free verse, the vacanas. They wear the iṣṭaliṅga on the body and reject Vedic authority, caste, and temple priesthood, affirming instead work as worship, kāyaka, and social equality. For them, bondage is ego and the entanglements of ritual hierarchy, and liberation, aikya, is merger with the liṅga one carries. Whether Liṅgāyats and Vīraśaivas are one tradition or two, and whether Basava founded the faith or reformed an older one, is a live dispute in modern Karnataka, legal as well as scholarly.

And alongside the philosophers stood the poets. In the Tamil country, from roughly the sixth to the ninth centuries, the Nāyaṉārs, the sixty-three Shiva-devotee saints of tradition, sang. They came from every layer of society, kings and outcastes alike, and that social range was itself a theological claim, that grace is open to all. Three of them, Sambandar and Appar in the seventh century and Sundarar in the eighth, composed the hymns later gathered as the Tēvāram. The most anguished and ecstatic of all is the Tiruvācakam, the “sacred utterance” of Māṇikkavācakar, centered on Shiva as the dancer at Chidambaram. His date is among the most contested in Tamil literary history and is now usually placed in the ninth century. G.U. Pope’s 1900 Oxford translation gives the feel of him:

“That I, with mind erewhile embruted,—pure one!—should / Become commingling love, in soul-subduing rapture melt!” G.U. Pope, The Tiruvāçagam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900), from the Śivapurāṇam

A mind once “embruted,” made animal, melting into commingling love. That is the far end of the journey from the Rigveda. The frightened villager who begged the archer not to strike his cattle has become the poet who asks only to dissolve into the god.

A word on the trinity

One thing should be said plainly, because schoolbooks repeat it as if it were ancient. The Trimūrti, the neat triad of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer, is a later schematization. It is not in the Vedas. It takes shape in the epics and Purāṇas and appears in art only from the Gupta and post-Gupta period, from roughly the fifth and sixth centuries CE. And in lived practice it has never quite worked the way the tidy formula suggests, because each sect exalts its own god as the whole rather than as one-third of a fixed triad. For the Shaiva, Shiva is the destroyer and also the creator, the preserver, the concealer, and the giver of grace, all of it, the one reality the triad only divides.

A resonant close

Trace the line and it is almost too neat to be true. A storm-god at the edge of the Rigveda, addressed in a handful of hymns, begged not to shoot. An adjective, śiva, “auspicious,” whispered toward him out of fear. A litany in the Yajurveda that turns the adjective toward a name. An Upanishad that quotes the old plea back and calls the archer the one Brahman. Then the myths, the poison and the dance and the severed head and the pillar of fire, and the schools that built whole philosophies of bondage and freedom around him, and the poets who asked only to melt.

Perhaps it was not so much the god that changed, as the seeing.

What began as a name spoken in fear became a name spoken in love. And the tradition that carries Shiva does not need this article to know who he is. It has known for a very long time, in chant and bronze and silence. We are only tracing the line.