The lord who rose from the earth at Avanti

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Namaste. Let us settle for a moment. One breath in. One breath out.

Welcome to the first sitting of our series on Ujjain and the temple of Mahakaleshwar. Ujjain is an old city on the banks of the Shipra river in Madhya Pradesh. The Puranas call it Avanti or Avantika. Poets called it Ujjayini, the city of victory. Over five sittings we will stay with this city, its stories, its temple, its river and the people who come to it. Today we hear how the Shiva Purana tells the story of this jyotirlinga, and why Shiva is worshipped here as Mahakala.

First, a word on that term. A jyotirlinga is a place where Shiva is worshipped as a pillar of light. Tradition counts twelve of them across India. There is a short hymn, the Dvadasha Jyotirlinga Stotra, traditionally attributed to Adi Shankaracharya, which names all twelve. In its line on this city, it names Mahakala in Ujjayini. Many families recite that hymn every morning, and for them the name of the city and the name of the lord come together.

In the Kotirudra Samhita of the Shiva Purana there are chapters about Avanti. They open quietly, inside a household. There is no king and no battle at the start.

In Avanti lived a learned brahmin named Vedapriya. He kept the sacred fire and worshipped Shiva every day with a linga, the simple form of Shiva without a face or figure, which he shaped from earth. A linga made from earth like this is called a parthiva linga. Vedapriya had four sons, and the Purana gives their names: Devapriya, Priyamedha, Sukrita and Suvrata. The sons learned from their father and kept up the same daily worship. After Vedapriya passed away, they did not let it lapse.

In those days, the Purana says, a powerful asura named Dushana troubled the region. An asura, in these stories, is a being who stands against the gods. Dushana had gained great strength and used it to stop people from their religious duties. He came to Avanti too, and those around the four brothers grew afraid.

Here the Purana gives us a quiet detail that I think is the centre of the whole story. The brothers were not warriors. They did not run and they did not fight. They sat down and continued their worship of Shiva, calmly, as they did every day.

Then, the Shiva Purana says, the ground near their earthen linga opened, and Shiva appeared in a great and fearsome form. He is named Mahakala in this moment. Kala means time, and it also means death. Mahakala is the one who is greater than time itself. The Purana tells that Dushana was reduced to ash, and the city was at peace again.

The brothers then prayed that Shiva would remain in that place for the good of all who came there. The Purana says he agreed, and stayed at Avanti as the jyotirlinga Mahakaleshwar.

Notice what the brothers asked for. They did not ask for wealth, or for a reward for themselves. They asked that the lord stay, so that others who came after them could also find him there. In a sense, every pilgrim who walks into Ujjain today is walking into the answer to that prayer. When you stand in the queue for darshan, which means seeing the deity and being seen, you are one of the many people those four brothers were thinking of.

I want to stay with that picture a little longer. Four brothers, in a difficult time, keep doing the small daily thing they were taught to do. The Purana does not praise them for being brave or clever. It shows them being steady. That steadiness is what the story remembers.

There is one more small thing worth noticing. Their worship was with a linga they made with their own hands from the soil of Avanti. And in the story, it is from that same earth that Shiva appears. We will not build a large idea on this. It is simply there in the telling, and many listeners find it touching that the answer comes from the ground they were kneeling on.

The same chapters of the Shiva Purana have a second story about Ujjain. It is about King Chandrasena, who was a devotee of Shiva, and a young cowherd boy named Shrikara. The boy watched the king's worship and, with a simple stone, began his own worship at home, with full attention. The Purana tells this as a story of how devotion does not depend on wealth or learning. We will hear that story fully in the next sitting.

Now, let us come to the temple as it stands today.

The Shri Mahakaleshwar temple sits near the Rudra Sagar lake. It rises on several levels. The main linga is below ground level, in the garbhagriha, the inner sanctum, and it faces south. People in Ujjain will tell you with some pride that Mahakal is dakshinamukhi, south-facing, which is unusual among the jyotirlingas. In the tradition, the south is the direction of Yama, the lord of death. So the one who faces the south is understood as the lord who stands above time and death. This meaning is taught in the temple tradition. The Purana itself gives us the name Mahakala.

On the upper floor is a shrine to Nagchandreshwar, which is opened only once a year, on Nag Panchami. The temple committee publishes these customs, and they are followed carefully.

You will also hear the name of the lord all around the city, well outside the temple walls. Many people in Ujjain greet one another with the words Jai Mahakal, on the street, in shops, on the phone. It is a local habit, and a visitor picks it up within a day. For the people of this city, Mahakal is part of ordinary life, spoken of the way one speaks of an elder in the family.

The most famous worship here is the Bhasma aarti, held before dawn. An aarti is worship with lamps, and bhasma means sacred ash. Ash is offered to the linga with chants and bells while the city is still dark. Places for it are limited and are arranged through the temple committee, and those who attend follow a dress code the committee sets. If you have seen it, you will remember the sound more than anything: conches, damaru, and hundreds of people chanting together in the early hours. We will give a whole sitting to this aarti later in the series.

The temple has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once over the centuries. The present structure largely dates from the eighteenth century, when the Maratha period saw it restored under the Scindia administration. The temple committee's published history is our guide for these dates.

Ujjain has also been loved by poets. The great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, in his Meghaduta, the Cloud Messenger, asks a monsoon cloud to pause over Ujjayini on its journey north, and to be there at the time of evening worship at Mahakala, so that its thunder can join the drums. Imagine that: nearly two thousand years ago, as many scholars place him, a poet was already writing about the sound of evening worship at this temple.

And there is an old verse, remembered widely, that names seven sacred cities of India: Ayodhya, Mathura, Maya which is Haridwar, Kashi, Kanchi, Avantika which is Ujjain, and Dvaraka. Ujjain is one of the seven. Every twelve years, the Simhastha Kumbh is held on the Shipra here, and pilgrims come from across the country. That gathering will be the subject of our last sitting.

So when a pilgrim arrives in Ujjain, they arrive in a city that holds many layers at once. A jyotirlinga, a city named among the seven, a river of great gatherings, and a place that poets wrote about long ago. We will walk through these layers slowly, one sitting at a time.

Let us gather what we heard today.

The Shiva Purana's Kotirudra Samhita tells of Vedapriya's four sons at Avanti, who kept their daily worship even in a troubled time. Shiva, the Purana says, rose from the earth as Mahakala, the one greater than time, and at their prayer remained there as a jyotirlinga. The linga faces south, and the temple is known for its Bhasma aarti before dawn. Kalidasa wrote of evening worship here, and Ujjain is counted among the seven sacred cities.

One thing to take with you. The four brothers did not do anything dramatic. They kept their small daily practice. Pick one small practice you already do, even lighting a lamp or saying one line of prayer, and do it tomorrow at the same time as today. Steadiness is built one day at a time.

In the next sitting, we hear the full story of King Chandrasena and the cowherd boy Shrikara, and we ask what it means to call Shiva the lord of time.

Keep going

• Listen: The lord who rose from the earth at Avanti
• Next: The cowherd boy, the king, and the lord of time
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• All episodes of Ujjain: Mahakal's court