Devalok
Temple legend · 2 tellings · South India, The Himalaya

The antelope's horn at Pashupatinath

Who is in it

Places: Pashupatinath · Texts: Nepal Mahatmya, Skanda Purana

The story, beat by beat

  1. Shiva and Parvati, tired of the gods, wander the Kathmandu valley as an antelope and a doe.
  2. The gods come looking and find Shiva unwilling to return.
  3. They seize the antelope by its horn.
  4. The horn breaks off and stays in the ground as a linga.
  5. Ages later a cow is seen pouring her milk on one spot every day.
  6. A cowherd digs there and uncovers the linga.
  7. The temple of the lord of beasts rises over it.

disguise deer linga cow

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Temple tradition

Nepal Mahatmya (Skanda Purana)

The Himalaya · Kathmandu, Nepal Shaiva

Shiva once grew weary of Kailash and of being asked for things. He and Parvati went down into the valley of the Bagmati, took the shapes of an antelope and a doe, and lived in the forest by the river. The gods missed him and searched, and when they found the antelope it would not turn back into a god. They took hold of it by the horn to drag it home, and the horn snapped and fell, and where it lay it became a linga that no one saw again for a very long time. Then a herdsman noticed that one of his cows walked off every day to the same place and let her milk run out onto the ground. He dug there and found the horn-linga, and the temple of Pashupati, lord of the animals, was built around it. Nepal's records of the temple begin about 400 CE.

Pashupatinath Temple — Wikipedia

Encyclopedia

Tevaram mention

South India · Tamil Nadu Shaiva

The Tamil saints of the Tevaram name Nepal's Pashupati among the shrines of Shiva, evidence that the Kathmandu temple was known in the far south by the seventh to ninth centuries.

What is different here:

A reference, not a telling; shows the shrine's early pan-Indian fame.

Pashupatinath Temple — Wikipedia

Sources: Pashupatinath Temple — Wikipedia

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