Devalok
Temple legend · 2 tellings · Pan-India, South India

Rama's linga at Rameswaram

Who is in it

Places: Rameswaram · Texts: Valmiki Ramayana, Shiva Purana, Skanda Purana

The story, beat by beat

  1. Rama wishes to worship Shiva on the island before crossing to Lanka, or after killing Ravana, to be cleansed of killing a brahmin.
  2. He sends Hanuman to Kailash to fetch a linga.
  3. Hanuman is late; the auspicious hour is passing.
  4. Sita shapes a linga out of sand and Rama worships it.
  5. Hanuman returns with the linga from Kailash and is distressed.
  6. Rama orders that Hanuman's linga be worshipped first, always.
  7. Twenty-two wells on the island stand for Rama's arrows; the sea is the Agni tirtha.

worship of shiva by vishnu sand linga bridge atonement

How it is told, place by place

Base telling · Temple tradition

Ramanathaswamy temple (Skanda Purana Setu Mahatmya)

South India · Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu Shaiva

On the island at the tip of the land, before the bridge to Lanka was built, or in the temple's other telling after Ravana was dead and a brahmin's blood was on him, Rama wanted to worship Shiva. There was no image. Hanuman went north to Kailash to bring one. The hour the priests had fixed came nearer and nearer and the monkey did not come, so Sita gathered sand from the shore and shaped a linga with her hands, and Rama worshipped that. When Hanuman arrived with a linga from the mountain he was hurt, and Rama, to console him, ruled that the one Hanuman carried, the Vishvalingam, should be worshipped before the sand one, the Ramalingam, and so it is to this day. The island's twenty-two bathing wells are named for Rama's arrows and the sea in front of the temple is the Agni tirtha. The shrine counts as the southernmost jyotirlinga and one of the four Dhams; its stone was shipped from Sri Lanka's Koneswaram around 1400, and the Setupati kings built the corridors of more than a thousand pillars.

Ramanathaswamy Temple — Wikipedia

Encyclopedia

Ramayana Yuddha Kanda and Shiva Purana Koti Rudra Samhita

Pan-India All traditions

The texts differ on the timing. The temple page cites the Yuddha Kanda for Rama telling Sita that he worshipped Shiva here before building the bridge, and the Shiva Purana's Koti Rudra Samhita for a worship that won him victory over Ravana. Popular debate calls Valmiki's passage a later insertion.

What is different here:

Before the bridge vs for victory; no Hanuman-and-sand detail in the textual citations.

Ramanathaswamy Temple — Wikipedia; The Siva Purana (4 vols), tr. J. L. Shastri — via Wisdom Library unverified

Sources: Ramanathaswamy Temple — Wikipedia; The Siva Purana (4 vols), tr. J. L. Shastri — via Wisdom Library

More stories with the same people

Legend

Ravana's boon at Gokarna

Ravana and his brothers Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana perform austerities at Gokarna for ten thousand years.
How a tradition frames it

Kamban's Rama stands above the three

In the Tamil Ramavataram Rama is divine from the start, yet the poem sets him above Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva rather than inside the triad as an avatar.
Local story

The Rama found in an anthill

A tribal woman finds Rama's images in an anthill on the Godavari; a tax official builds the temple with state money and is jailed for it.
Origin

The fish that warned the Bhils

A fish warns a brother and sister of a flood; afterwards Bhagwan, or in one telling Rama, sends them to repeople the world.
From the epics

Rama in Thailand and Cambodia

Thailand's Ramakien makes Phra Ram an incarnation of Phra Narai and a Bodhisatta; Cambodia's Reamker reads Preah Ream almost as a mortal through a Theravada lens.
How a tradition frames it

Rama the monk and Krishna the cousin

Jain tellings keep Rama and Krishna as great men in a fixed roster of sixty-three: Lakshmana kills Ravana, Rama becomes a monk, and Krishna is Neminatha's cousin.
Temple legend

Rama installs the linga at Rameswaram

Rama worships Shiva as a linga on the island of Rameswaram — before the bridge in the Ramayana, or after Ravana's death to expiate the killing of a brahmin in temple tradition, where Sita's sand linga and Hanuman's linga from Kailasa stand side by side.
How a tradition frames it

Hanuman as Shiva's own avatar

Shaiva texts and popular tellings say that when Vishnu chose to be born as Rama, Shiva chose to be born as Hanuman — his eleventh Rudra — to serve him; Vaishnava schools call Hanuman the son and incarnation of Vayu.