How a tradition frames it · 2 tellings · Pan-India, South India
The Sharanas' Shiva of the meeting rivers
Basavanna and the Kannada vachana poets addressed Shiva as their own personal lord, rejecting temple, caste and ritual, with the body itself as the shrine.
South India · Karnataka; Kudalasangama; BasavakalyanShaivaKannada Lingayat / Virashaiva
The vachanas are short, spoken-sounding poems in Kannada that the Sharanas of twelfth-century Karnataka addressed to Shiva. Basavanna, who rose to be a minister at Kalyana, called his god the lord of the meeting rivers after the confluence at Kudalasangama where he had grown up, and used that name as his signature. Akka Mahadevi wrote to Chennamallikarjuna as her only husband; Allama Prabhu to Guheshwara. The poems turn against stone temples, priestly ritual and caste rank, insisting that a devotee's own body is the shrine. A. K. Ramanujan described the movement as a protest against established religion. Out of it came the Lingayats, who wear the linga on the body and whose status as a separate religion is itself a live political question in Karnataka.
The Shiva of the Puranas is the great god of Kailash, worshipped in temples through the linga and served by priests according to the agamas.
What is different here:
The vachana Shiva is a personal lord met without temple, priest or caste; the poems replace the Puranic cosmic destroyer with a god one talks to directly. The Kannada originals are public domain; Ramanujan's English is not.