Gokarṇa Mahabaleshwara

Gokarṇa Mahābaleśvara

The linga Ravana put down

The Śaiva shrine on the hill at Gokarṇa in Uttara Kannada district, Karnataka, holds what the tradition identifies as the Ātma-liṅga — the "self-existent" linga, the form of Śiva that is not fashioned but simply is. It is the object at the centre of one of the most widespread pieces of Śaiva storytelling in India, and it is worth telling accurately, because the details are frequently garbled.

The story as Gokarṇa has it: Rāvaṇa carried the ātma-liṅga from Mount Kailash to Lanka. Stopping, he was approached by Gaṇeśa in the form of a small boy, who asked him to set the linga down to be weighed against a paṭṭikā, a poetics text Rāvaṇa was writing. The linga sank into the earth. Rāvaṇa tried to lift it out and could not, and it was left crooked in the ground. That crooked linga is what the hill shrine houses.

We record one caution. An earlier version of this entry glossed the crooked linga as "Mahā-balā-liṅga", "great power linga". That is a false etymology and it has been removed. The Gokarṇa name is generally connected with go and karṇa, "cow's ear" — a conventional and unremarkable derivation — and the twisted linga has no accepted Sanskrit name that we have found.

A Śakti Pīṭha, and a "Kashi of the south"

Gokarṇa is named in the local and regional tradition as one of the Śakti Pīṭhas — a site associated with the pīṭha of the goddess, and in the lists of the fifty-one each pīṭha is assigned the body-part that fell. We have not been able to verify the specific assignment for Gokarṇa against a critical edition, and the assignment differs between the enumerations, so we do not state it. A guardian should check D. C. Sircar's study of the Śakti Pīṭhas in Indian art, which is the standard work.

The town is also widely called the Kashi of the Konkan or of the south, a comparison drawn on the strength of its river, its ghats, its cremation ghats and its standing as a tirth in its own landscape. A local epithet is a local claim, and a good one, but it is rhetorical rather than canonical and is marked here as such.

The rest of Gokarna

The hill shrine is only one part of a considerable pilgrimage town. Gokarṇa also holds a Parshurāma shrine, associated with the sage's settlement of the west coast, and the Koti Theertha sacred tank by the sea, a large pilgrimage tank. These are separate sanctuaries with separate stories, and an entry that folds them into one is misleading. The town's ritual calendar is shaped by its own coastal and Konkan tradition, which has its own fasts, its own temple music, and its own relationship to the sea.

Sources and what a guardian should check

The Atma-linga story should be read against the epic material rather than a summary. The Śakti Pīṭha status needs the critical enumeration, which we have not used. The dating of the present temple buildings is not established in anything we have consulted, and the earlier claim of extreme antiquity should be treated as devotional rather than chronological.