A Surprise For Pushpadanta

Om Namah Sivaya

Lord Siva is often accompanied by his bull, a wonderful shiny creature, whose statue you can see crouched on the ground in front of Siva, in most of the temples built in his honor in India. Nandi is the name by which the bull is usually known, and he is considered very wise and powerful. After all, he has to carry the Lord of the Universe around on his back! You can imagine, too, what big white teeth Nandi has.

This story is about a worshipper of Siva named Pushpadanta. Pushpadanta was a great scholar and poet, and a disciple of the philosopher Sri Adi Sankara. He wanted to write a deep philosophical poem celebrating Siva, the object of his devotion. So he labored hard and spent years in perfecting this poem. But you know, even when people do great things, they often get big egos as a result: they are overly proud of their work. So it was with Pushpadanta. When the poem was finished he presented it to the Lord in the temple, with great flourish.

Siva just glanced at it. "Go, look into the mouth of Nandi," he said. "Ask him to open his mouth wide." The poet was taken aback! Why do that? But he went up to the bull and asked him to open his mouth. There, to his great surprise, he found every verse of his poem, on the teeth of Nandi, engraved in tiny letters. "You are not the author of anything," Siva explained. "All this was written long ago; you are merely the instrument of its coming out."


Sivaya Namah