Shiva Sahasranama

The Mahabharata's thirteenth book, the Anushasana Parva, is the epic's great storehouse of instruction delivered from Bhishma's deathbed of arrows, and it holds both of Hinduism's most famous name litanies. Beside the Vishnu Sahasranama stands the Shiva Sahasranama, and the epic gives it a frame of unusual interest, Krishna himself is the reciter, telling how he undertook austerities and received the thousand names from the sage Upamanyu, whose own devotion to Shiva had been rewarded with the vision of the god.

Vaishnava and Shaiva devotion are thus interlocked at the source, Vishnu's avatar reciting Shiva's praise, a point Indian tradition has never tired of drawing out against sectarian rivalry. The names themselves range across Shiva's whole character, the steady one and the pillar at the litany's opening, the lord of sleep and of cattle, the wearer of matted locks, the blue throated drinker of poison, the wild archer and the gentle healer, the dancer, the ascetic seated on Kailasa, destruction and grace named in alternation. The litany exists in several versions beyond the epic, in the Linga Purana and Shiva Purana among others, differing in names and arrangement, and the tradition treats the multiplicity easily, a god of eleven hundred aspects being under no obligation to a single list. Kisari Mohan Ganguli's complete Victorian translation of the epic put the Anushasana version into English.

The Shiva Sahasranama is a working liturgy. Its grandest hour is Maha Shivaratri, the great night of Shiva, when temples keep vigil through four watches and the names are chanted over the lingam as it is bathed in the continuous abhisheka of water, milk and honey, the litany measuring out the night. In daily temple practice the names supply the archana, the offering in which a priest recites name after name, each with the mantra formula om namah and each accompanied by a bilva leaf or flower laid on the lingam, the thousand names generating a thousand small offerings, and household devotion uses the litany the same way on Mondays, the day tradition assigns to Shiva. Alongside the full thousand stands a graded family of shorter forms, the ashtottara shatanamavali of one hundred and eight names for ordinary days, and the compact panchakshara mantra, om namah Shivaya, into which the whole litany is understood to condense, so a devotee moves between five syllables, a hundred names and a thousand as occasion allows.

Recordings of the Sahasranama in the great South Indian chanting styles circulate widely, and printed namavali booklets are standard temple stock. The litany's persistence makes the epic's frame story good sociology as well as good theology, the names Krishna learned from Upamanyu are still being counted out, leaf by leaf, every Monday.