The Linga of Sand

The war was over. Ravana was dead, and Sita was free, and the flower chariot that had carried them out of Lanka came down on the island at the southern tip of India where the army had camped before it crossed.

Rama did not feel like a victor. He sat on the sand and looked at the sea.

"What troubles you?" Sita asked him.

"Ravana was a Brahmin," said Rama. "He was the grandson of a sage, and he knew the Vedas, and he was the greatest devotee Shiva ever had. I killed him. Whatever he did, that killing is on my hands."

The sages who had come to greet him agreed. A sin like that, they said, could only be washed away by worshipping Shiva himself, here, on this shore, in a linga set up by Rama's own hand. And they named the hour when it must be done.

Rama turned to Hanuman. "Go to Kailasa," he said. "Ask Shiva for a linga and bring it back before the hour."

Hanuman went up into the sky and was gone.

The day passed. The sun began to go down towards the hour the sages had named, and there was no sign of Hanuman anywhere in the north. Rama watched the sky. The sages watched the sun.

Sita got up without a word and went down to the edge of the water. She knelt in the wet sand, scooped it up in her hands, and shaped it into a linga, patting it smooth, the way a girl makes a little god for a festival.

"There," she said. "The hour will not wait for him. Worship this."

So Rama worshipped Shiva in Sita's linga of sand, at the right hour, with the sages chanting, and Shiva was pleased and took the sin away. That linga is the Ramalinga, the one Rama worshipped, and it is in the sanctum of the temple today.

Hanuman came down out of the sky soon after with a linga from Kailasa in his arms, and found the worship over.

He was hurt. He had flown to the top of the world and back, and they had not waited.

"Take that one away," he said, "and put mine in its place."

"Try," said Rama.

Hanuman wrapped his tail round the linga of sand and pulled. It did not move. He pulled until he fell back on the shore, and the sand linga stood where Sita had made it.

Rama lifted him up, and put his arm round him.

"Yours shall stand beside it," he said. "And every pilgrim who comes here will worship yours first."

They still do. Hanuman's linga, the Vishwalinga, stands in its own shrine beside Sita's, and the priests honour it before the other, every day.

The texts put the worship on the other side of the war.

Rama has reached the shore with the army, and the sea lies between him and Lanka, and he does not yet know how he will cross it. He has lain three nights on a bed of grass asking the ocean to let him through, and the ocean has not answered. Sita is on the far side of the water, a prisoner for ten months already, and every day of waiting is a day more for her.

"Before I go against him," Rama says, "I will ask the one he worships."

Before the bridge is begun, the Setu section of the Skanda Purana says, he goes to the island and sets up a linga and worships Shiva there, with hymns and meditation, even with dancing.

Shiva appears to him.

"What do you want?" he asks.

"Victory over Ravana," says Rama, "and that you stay here, on this island, for the good of the world, so that everyone who comes here is made clean."

Shiva grants both. Then the bridge is built from that shore, and the army crosses on it, and the war is fought and won.

The Ramayana itself, on the flight home in the flower chariot, has Rama point down and show Sita the place: here, he tells her, before the bridge, the great god gave me his grace. Pilgrims call the shore Setu, the bridge, and the god Ramanatha, the lord whom Rama worshipped, and one of the twelve lingas of light.