The Thousand Names of Shiva

The days had grown quiet on the field where the war had been fought and won and mourned. Bhishma lay still upon his bed of arrows, waiting for the sun to turn north before he would let go of his life, and each evening Krishna brought Yudhishthira to sit at the old man's side and draw out from him what wisdom remained to be given. Already Bhishma had spoken the thousand names of Vishnu, and that great recitation - how the god of preservation is named and known by his devotees - had settled over the assembly like a benediction; it need not be told again here, for it is its own story.

But Yudhishthira was not yet satisfied. He knelt by the grandsire and said, "You have shown us Narayana in his thousand names. Yet there is another god whom the world calls Mahadeva, the Great God, terrible and gentle both, who dances at the end of ages and sits in silence upon the mountain. Grandsire, tell us of Shiva, that we may know him as we now know Vishnu."

A stillness came over Bhishma's face, the stillness of a man measuring the size of a question against the smallness of his own voice. "Of Rudra, of Shankara, of the one who is beyond the counting of names," he said slowly, "I have not the strength to speak as he deserves. There is one among us who has stood before Mahadeva himself and received his grace and his teaching direct from Uma's own household. Let Krishna tell you of Shiva, for what I would only repeat, he alone can remember."

Every head turned. Krishna, who had sat so long as listener and charioteer and quiet witness to Bhishma's teaching, smiled the smile of one asked to open a door he had long kept closed, and began.

"Long before this war was thought of," Krishna said, "I wanted a son worthy of my house, and I knew that such a son is not had by wanting alone. So I went into the forest to perform tapasya, and there I came upon the hermitage of a sage named Upamanyu, a boy once beloved of Shiva himself, who as a child had been given by the Great God a whole ocean of milk to drink because his own mother had none to give him. Grown old in his devotion, Upamanyu had never once let go of the god who had come to him in his hunger.

I told him what I sought, and he said to me, plainly, 'You will not gain a son such as you desire from any god but Shiva. Vishnu and Shiva are not two, Krishna, though the ignorant count them so; worship him, and you worship what you yourself are.' I did not fully understand him then. But I trusted the sage, and so I put aside my discus and my flute and my thousand comforts, and for six months I lived on air and water, standing in the cold streams at dawn, my mind fixed on nothing but the syllable that is Shiva's alone.

Upamanyu stayed near me through all of it, neither encouraging nor discouraging, only watching, the way a gardener watches a seed he trusts more than he trusts the season. On the days when my resolve thinned he would tell me a little more of the god he loved: how Shiva had once let him drink an ocean rather than see a child go hungry, how terror and tenderness lived in the same throat, how a single glance from that god could burn a kingdom to ash or heal a leper's skin in a breath. He was preparing me, though I did not know it, not merely for a boon but for a teaching that would outlast the boon by an age."

"At the end of six months," Krishna said, "the forest itself seemed to hold its breath. The wind stopped moving through the leaves. Upamanyu, sitting near, rose suddenly to his feet, and when I opened my eyes I understood why.

Before us stood Uma and her lord, though 'stood' is a poor word for what filled that clearing - a light that was also a stillness, a majesty that did not need to raise itself above the trees to be seen by all the worlds at once. I fell to the ground as any devotee falls, forgetting for that moment that I too carry divinity, because there are forms of grace so complete that even a god kneels before them without shame.

Uma spoke first, gentle where her lord was vast, and asked what I desired. I said only, 'A son, if it pleases you, equal to myself.' Shiva looked at me a long moment, and in that look I felt him weigh what I was asking against what such a son would cost the world, for the mighty are not born without also being dangerous. Then he granted it: a son who would be radiant and strong and, in time, humbled by his own pride and freed of it. That son is Samba, who sits even now among my children, and who has already begun to learn the lesson his birth foretold.

But the greater gift was not the boon. Before the vision closed, Upamanyu, who had waited a lifetime for this moment, begged Shiva to speak his thousand names aloud, that they might be given to me and, through me, to whoever afterward had ears to hear them. Mahadeva consented. And so I received them not as a scholar receives a text but as a starving man receives food, each name a mouthful of the god himself, and I have carried them within me since that day the way one carries the memory of a face seen once in a flash of lightning, never to be forgotten."

Yudhishthira leaned forward, and Krishna, closing his eyes as though to see the clearing again, began to let the names fall from him one into the next, the way a river does not pause between one stretch of water and the next.

He is Rudra, the roarer, whose cry at the world's grief is fiercer than any lion's, and he is Shambhu, the source of joy, in whom that same grief is somehow made into a shelter. He is Trilochana, the three eyed, whose third eye sees what the other two cannot bear to look upon, and whose glance, when it opens, unmakes what it falls on - yet those same eyes rest on Uma with nothing but tenderness, so that the god who can burn away the three worlds in an instant is also the god who cannot bear to see his wife's brow furrow with worry. He is Nilakantha, the blue throated one, who once drank the poison churned up from the ocean of milk rather than let it destroy the gods and demons who had made it, holding that death in his own throat forever rather than passing it on to anyone else - the poison did not kill him, but it stained him, and he wears that stain as gladly as another god wears jewels. He is Nataraja, lord of the dance, whose steps at the end of an age burn away everything that has grown false and leave only what is true, so that his dancing, which looks like destruction, is in truth the world's cleansing. He is Pashupati, lord of all creatures, tender to the smallest and least of them, and he is Mahakala, time beyond time, older than time and yet not bound by its passing. He is Gangadhara, who caught the river Ganga in his matted hair when she fell from heaven, breaking her fall so that the earth would not be shattered by her descent, holding a goddess in his hair the way another might hold a wildflower.

He is terror, and he is the hand that heals what terror has broken. Both are true at once, and neither is the whole of him.

Krishna opened his eyes and found the whole assembly silent, even the birds seeming to have stilled themselves to listen.

"Understand this above all," he said, "because it is the one teaching Upamanyu pressed on me hardest, and the one the ignorant miss most often. Hari and Hara, Vishnu and Shiva, are not two gods competing for the devotion of the world. They are one truth wearing two faces, as a single flame may be seen now as warmth and now as light, though it is only ever one fire. I who preserve and Shiva who destroys are bound together the way a beginning is bound to an end - neither can be understood alone, and whoever worships one truly and calls the other lesser has understood neither.

Whoever hears these names of Shiva with faith, whoever repeats them at dawn with a clean heart, is freed from fear, for what is there left to fear once you have seen that the god of terror is also the god who caught a falling river in his hair rather than let it break the world? Sorrow loosens its grip on such a listener. Enemies find no purchase against him. And at the end, when the body is set down like a garment no longer needed, such a listener goes to that same stillness where Uma and her lord stood in the clearing that day, needing nothing more, afraid of nothing more."

Bhishma, listening from his bed of arrows, closed his eyes and nodded slowly, as a man nods who has just heard the very thing he could not himself have said. Yudhishthira sat a long while without speaking, the fever of grief that had not left him since the war's end quieter now than it had been in many days, as though something vast and steady had reached down and set a hand, at last, upon his shoulder.