Purāṇa / The eighteen / Śiva Purāṇa
Śiva Purāṇa (शिवपुराण)
About 24,000 verses in the traditional lists. Tamas in the Padma Purāṇa's sorting. Neither figure is this shelf's own measurement.
About twenty-four thousand verses in the lists. Tamas, in the Padma sorting, which is a Vaiṣṇava rank for a Śaiva book and not this shelf's opinion of it. The printed text a reader can hold is seven saṃhitās. The map of those seven is the Śiva Purāṇa hub. This profile is the narrative essence.
The fire-liṅga is the book's image of what cannot be measured. Brahmā goes up to find its top. Viṣṇu goes down to find its root. Neither returns with an end. The argument about supremacy is settled by a form that has no edge. Satī, daughter of Dakṣa and wife of Śiva, comes to her father's sacrifice uninvited, is insulted in the insult to her husband, and gives up her body. The page says she gives it up. It does not say how, and it does not list the parts of a body. Dakṣa's sacrifice is destroyed. The later marriage is Pārvatī's, won by austerity, not by the insult. The household pages are Satī, Pārvatī, and Paśupati.
The teaching is Śiva as the undivided consciousness and the liṅga as the mark that refuses a picture of a limited god. Devotion here is not softer than knowledge. The yogin and the householder are given the same god, one by leaving and one by the marriage the leaving made necessary. The book is vast, repetitive, and doctrinal at the close. The shelf does not sit those doctrinal chapters as verses.
What it tells
The endless liṅga; Satī at Dakṣa's sacrifice; Pārvatī's austerity and the marriage; the destruction of the sacrifice.
The teaching
What has no top and no root is not a loser in a contest of gods. The marriage is the doctrine lived in a house.
What a reader keeps
- About twenty-four thousand, as a list-number.
- Tamas only in the Padma list.
- Satī gives up her body. This page does not say how.
A line
A line people recite from this book is not sat here. The shelf does not print a verse it has not checked.
नेपालीमा
सूचीले करिब चौबीस हजार श्लोक भन्छ। पद्मको तमस् वैष्णव श्रेणी हो, यो तहको राय होइन। छापिएको पाठ सात संहिता हो। आगोको लिङ्गको टुप्पो ब्रह्माले भेटेनन्, जरो विष्णुले भेटेनन्। सतीले दक्षको यज्ञमा अपमान सहिन्, र शरीर त्यागिन्। यो पृष्ठले त्यागिन् भन्छ। तरिका लेख्दैन, अङ्ग गन्दैन। पछिको विवाह पार्वतीको हो, तपस्याले। शिक्षा असीम चिह्न हो, र घरमा बाँचिने विवाह पनि त्यही शिक्षा हो।
Where it sits
The seven saṃhitās are on the hub. Nepal's valley pages for this god stay on the household shelf, not in this profile.