Paśupati

Paśupati is one of Śiva’s oldest names. In the Vedic hymn to Rudra he is honoured as the lord of creatures — the one who guards the herds and the wild alike. A paśu is any living being that can be led and tied; Paśupati is the one to whom every such being belongs.

The Śiva Purāṇa tells how the name came to be his. As Śiva mounted the chariot to destroy the three cities, he told the gods that he would strike only if they accepted that they were all paśus, with him as their Lord. The gods hesitated, troubled. Śiva laughed and reassured them: whoever keeps his Pāśupata vow — for twelve years, or six, or three — would be freed from that state. The gods agreed, and the Purāṇa says: gods and demons alike are his paśus, and Rudra, who frees the paśus from their bonds, is Paśupati.

Later Śaiva philosophy built a whole teaching on these three words. Pati is the Lord; paśu is the soul; pāśa is the noose that binds it — traditionally three strands: āṇava, the sense of being small and separate; karma, the weight of past action; and māyā, the world that dazzles and confines. The soul cannot cut the noose by itself; the Lord’s grace loosens it. The Śiva Purāṇa’s list of Śiva’s eight forms names Paśupati as the form that dwells in every soul and cuts the bond of the paśu.

The name also gave its title to one of the oldest Śaiva paths, the Pāśupata, whose followers took on vows of ash, solitude and disregard for the world’s opinion, to become free. And it is the name of Nepal’s greatest temple, Paśupatinātha, on the Bāgmatī, where the liṅga’s faces look to the four directions and Īśāna, the fifth, rises above them all.

Devotees come to Paśupati not as masters but as beings who know they are bound — by habit, by fear, by the past — and who trust that the one who holds every creature also holds the knot. At Paśupatinātha, pilgrims circle the temple, offer bel leaves and water, and on Mahāśivarātri the banks of the Bāgmatī fill with ascetics and lamps through the night.