Rudra

Rudra is the Vedic god out of whom the later Shiva develops, and the relationship between the two is one of the most instructive in the history of Indian religion, for they are neither simply one figure under two names nor wholly distinct. In the Rigveda Rudra is a comparatively minor deity, addressed in only three of the collection's more than a thousand hymns, and he is a figure of fear: a fierce and unpredictable archer, the howler (which is one way his name is read), who dwells apart in the wild and the mountains and who looses arrows of disease upon people and cattle. The hymns to him are largely attempts to turn his terrible power aside, praising him and begging him to spare the worshipper and his family and to keep his shafts away.

Rudra is also the subject of one of the most important liturgical texts to survive from Vedic religion into living Hindu practice, the Shatarudriya or Rudram, a litany embedded in the Yajurveda that addresses him under a vast range of names and forms, presiding over mountains, forests, rivers, thieves, physicians, potters and every corner of ordinary life alike, both fierce and benevolent aspects addressed together in a single sustained prayer. Recitation of the Rudram, often paired with a related section called the Chamakam, remains part of temple ritual in traditions that worship Shiva today, one of the clearest unbroken threads connecting the feared archer-god of the earliest Rigvedic hymns to the daily devotional life of contemporary Shaiva Hinduism.

Yet Rudra is not only a bringer of harm, and it is this double aspect that carries forward into Shiva. The same god who sends disease is also invoked as a healer, the possessor of a thousand remedies, the physician of physicians, the power that can afflict is the power that can cure. This ambivalence is developed most fully in the Shatarudriya, the litany of the hundred names of Rudra found in the Yajurveda, which addresses the god in an extraordinary range of aspects, fierce and benign, and which remains an important Shaiva liturgy to this day.

Over the centuries the fearful outsider Rudra is drawn to the centre and transformed: the epithet Shiva, meaning the auspicious or kindly one, begins as a propitiatory way of addressing the dangerous god, calling him gracious in the hope that he will be so, and in time becomes his chief name. The development from the Vedic archer of the wilderness to the great god Shiva of classical Hinduism is a model case of how an Indian deity grows and is reinterpreted while keeping the essential tension, here between destruction and grace, at the heart of his character.