As Tirupattur tells it
Brahmapureeswarar temple tradition · 3 min read
There was a time when Brahma had forgotten who he was.
He was the maker. He sat on a lotus and wrote the lives of every creature before it was born: how long it would live, what it would suffer, what it would have. He had done this for so long, and so well, that he began to think himself greater than the god who had given him the work.
Shiva took two things from him. He took the fifth head, the proud one. And he took the power to create.
Brahma, with four heads and no work, came down to the earth. He did not know what else to do with himself. He wandered south, through forests and along rivers, and one day, in the Tamil country, he found a linga that no one had made. It had come up out of the ground by itself.
He stopped.
"Here," he said to himself. "I will stay here."
He set up twelve more lingas, one by one, in a ring around the one that had made itself, and he worshipped them all. He did it every day, and the days became years. He did not ask for anything. He only worshipped.
At last Shiva came to him there.
"Enough," said Shiva. "You have learned."
He gave back what he had taken. The power to create came back into Brahma's hands.
"There is something else," said Shiva. "Your fate was written once, and here it has been written again. So this is now your work, in this place. Whoever comes here to you, you will rewrite their fate, as I have rewritten yours."
And he gave Brahma a shrine of his own, inside Shiva's temple, which is called Brahmapureeswarar, the lord of Brahma's city.
Brahma sits there now in the lotus posture of meditation, cross-legged and calm, with his four faces looking out. People come to him from all over the Tamil country and beyond. They come with their horoscopes, with their bad years and their stalled marriages and their illnesses, and they ask him for one thing.
"Write it again," they say. "Write it better."
It makes a kind of sense. If he is the one who wrote their lives, who else would they ask to change them?
There is another presence in the same temple, quieter. In one corner is the living tomb of the sage Patanjali, who wrote the sutras of yoga, and who is said to have entered his final meditation here and never come out. People sit there too, more quietly, with their eyes closed.
The punishment of Brahma is an old story, told in many Puranas, and in most of them it is simply a punishment. He loses a head, or his worship, or both, and that is the end of it. Only here, in a small town in the Tamil country, does the story go on, and have a happy ending: the god who was humbled is forgiven, and given work that is kinder than the work he had before.