Bhimashankar

Bhīmaśaṅkara

A Jyōtirlinga in the forest, and Bhima's knee in the rock

Bhīmaśaṅkara is the sixth of the twelve Jyōtirlingas in the common enumeration — and the enumeration itself is worth a note, because the two lists in the Śiva Purāṇa (vamśa and śikhara) differ in both order and membership, and popular listings follow a third, largely Chola-based, order. Bhīmaśaṅkara is one of the two Jyotirlingas in Maharashtra, the other being Tryambakeśvara near Nashik, and it stands in the Sahyadri in a landscape that is now, since the creation of the Bhīmaśaṅkara Wildlife Sanctuary, among the better-protected wild landscapes of the Western Ghats.

Its story is a Mahābhārata story rather than a Purāṇa one. Bhīma, the son of Kuntī and Pāṇḍu, is said to have come to this forest and performed tapas here, and the lingam is held to have appeared from that tapas. The companion legend is the one that gives the shrine its visitors: Bhīma is said to have driven a dāśyuka (a dasyu, demon) before him and, in the pursuit, to have set his knee or his foot into the rock, leaving the mark of it — the bhim-mark that pilgrims are shown, and which is the reason many of them arrive barefoot to touch the stone. This is folk narrative with almost no textual anchor, and it should be presented as what it is: a leelā attached to a place, told to make the forest legible.

The temple itself is of relatively modern construction, and its history has included destruction and rebuilding; the lingam and the kund beside it are treated as svayam-bhūka in local tradition, which is a claim of the tradition and not an archaeological finding. The Bhīmaśaṅkara Kund and the Mansapurna waterfall in the sanctuary are part of the same complex of places. A frequent source of confusion is the name: Bhīmaśaṅkara is a form of Śiva, not Bhīma, though the leelā makes the two difficult to separate, and Bhīma in his own right is worshipped at Bhimashankar as well as at the Bhim shrines of the Deccan, which are a different set of institutions.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Śiva Purāṇa — for the two Jyotirlinga lists, at work level; no chapter cited.
• Mahābhārata — for the Bhima narrative frame, work level.
• K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Colas — for the Chola-period enumeration tradition.
• Pune District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — for the temple and the sanctuary.
• Unverified: the frontmatter's "svayambhu massive lingam", the temple's rebuilding chronology, the dāśyuka legend, and every festival date listed.