शिवपञ्चाक्षरस्तोत्रम्

Śiva Pañcākṣara Stotram

The Five-Syllable Hymn to Shiva

Attributed to: आदि शङ्कराचार्य · Adi Shankaracharya
Metre: Indravajrā (v. 1), Vasantatilakā (v. 2), Upajāti (v. 3–5), Anuṣṭubh (v. 6)
Verses: 6

RecitationReligious India, 2024; music credited to Kanchan Jadhao

इतिहास · itihāsa

History

The Śrī Rudram is a litany in the middle book of the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda, and most of it is one word repeated. Namaḥ, salutation, over and over, to Rudra in every aspect the reciters could name: to the one in the trees, to the one in the potter, to the thief, to the dreadful and to the kindly. It goes on for eleven sections and it names hundreds of things.

One line of it, in the eighth section, runs namaḥ śivāya ca śivatarāya ca: salutation to the auspicious one, and to the one more auspicious still. There śiva is an adjective and not yet anybody's name. Those five syllables were lifted out of that litany and became the mantra of a religion, and this hymn is five verses built on them, one syllable to a verse.

Start with the word, because everything here follows from it. Śiva is an ordinary Sanskrit adjective meaning auspicious, kindly, benign, and in the oldest layer of the Veda it is used of Rudra the way you would use it of anything else. Rudra in the Ṛgveda is not a comfortable god. His name is traditionally derived from the root √rud, to howl. He is the archer whose arrows bring disease, and the hymns to him are largely requests that he point them elsewhere. Calling him śiva is not a description. It is a hope, and possibly a precaution.

The Śrī Rudram, which sits in the fourth book of the seven that make up the Taittirīya Saṃhitā, is where that hope hardens into liturgy. It is a namaskāra litany: the reciter salutes Rudra in every form he can be imagined to take, and the list is deliberately exhausting and deliberately unflattering. Salutation to the one in green leaves, to the one who is a carpenter, to the one who is a chariot-maker, to the lord of thieves, to the one who prowls, to the cheat. Nothing is left outside it. If Rudra is in the thief as well as in the mountain, then there is nowhere to stand that is not already his.

In the eighth anuvāka of that litany comes the line namaḥ śivāya ca śivatarāya ca. In context it is unremarkable: one more pair in a long series of pairs. Out of context it is the Pañcākṣara, the five syllables, na-maḥ-śi-vā-ya, and the adjective has become a name. The line is not peculiar to that recension either: the Śukla Yajurveda carries it too, in the fifth chapter of the Rudrāṣṭādhyāyī, so it stood in both branches of the Yajurveda before anyone thought to lift it out. Nobody recorded who first did, or when. What can be said is that by the time of the Śaiva Āgamas and the Tamil devotional poets it was the mantra, the one a Śaiva is initiated into, and śiva was no longer a word you could use of anything else.

This hymn is what a poet does with five syllables he cannot improve on. The structure is an acrostic and it is exact. The first verse opens with na, the second with ma, the third with śi, the fourth with vā, the fifth with ya. Every verse then closes on the same line: tasmai <that syllable>-kārāya namaḥ śivāya, to him, to the syllable in question, salutation to Śiva. So the mantra is taken apart across the five verses and said whole at the end of each of them. By the last line a reciter has said namaḥ śivāya five times without once being told to repeat it.

What fills the space between the opening syllable and the refrain is a portrait, and the details are chosen rather than heaped. The first verse gives him the serpent king as a garland, three eyes, ash smeared over his body, and no clothes but the directions. The word for that last is digambara, sky-clad, where ambara means both a garment and the sky, so the same word that dressed him in the second verse of the Manasa Puja leaves him naked here.

The second verse is the only one that changes shape. Its first three lines run to fourteen syllables where every other line in the hymn runs to eleven, and they are packed with long compounds: smeared with sandal paste and the water of the Mandākinī, worshipped with mandāra blossoms and many another flower, lord of Nandin and of the pramathas, Śiva's own strange retinue. The refrain that follows is back to eleven syllables. The verse swells and then snaps back to the mantra, which is a thing the metre does rather than the words.

The third verse names the two events a Śaiva audience would want named. He is the sun to the cluster of lotuses that is Gaurī's face, which is a compliment paid through her; and he is the destroyer of Dakṣa's sacrifice. That second one carries the whole of a story the hymn does not tell. Dakṣa, a son of Brahmā, held a great sacrifice and pointedly did not invite his own daughter Satī or her husband Śiva. Satī went anyway, and when her father insulted him she gave up her body in the sacrificial fire. Śiva tore a lock from his hair and from it came Vīrabhadra, who wrecked the rite, scattered the gods, blinded Bhaga and knocked out the teeth of Pūṣan, and beheaded Dakṣa, who was later revived with the head of a goat. The hymn compresses all of it into one word, dakṣādhvara-nāśakāya, and moves on.

The fourth verse is the one that names people. Vasiṣṭha, one of the seven great ṛṣis and the household priest of the solar kings; Kumbhodbhava, the pot-born, which is Agastya, said to have been generated in a water-jar and known for having drunk the ocean and for carrying the Vedic tradition south; and Gautama, another of the seven. What the verse actually says is that his crest is what they worship: the compound makes śekhara, his crown, the thing worshipped, and the sages and the gods the ones doing it. Then it names his three eyes: candra, arka, vaiśvānara, the moon, the sun, and fire. That is the hymn quietly explaining the epithet it opened with, since trilocana in the first verse was left unexplained for three verses.

The fifth verse returns to the plainest words in the hymn and repeats digambara from the first, which closes the circle. Then the sixth stands outside the set of five, changes metre, and states the fruit: whoever recites this in the presence of Śiva reaches Śiva's world and rejoices there with him.

The hymn is attributed to Ādi Śaṅkarācārya, and the attribution should be held loosely. Something near three hundred works are ascribed to him in all, by some counts more than four hundred, and most of those are hymns; the scholars who have examined the question allow him about thirteen, of which the commentaries on the Upaniṣads, the Gītā and the Brahmasūtras, together with the Upadeśasāhasrī, account for nearly all. This hymn is not among the ones they accept. A short, memorable stotra accrues to a famous name the way a river accrues water. Whether he wrote it cannot be shown either way, and the hymn is not diminished if he did not: what it is built on is older than he is by the better part of two thousand years, and belongs to nobody.

मूलपाठ · mūlapāṭha

The Text

Tap any word to open it into the roots it is built from.

। ॥ १ ॥
nāgendra-hārāya trilocanāyabhasmāṅga-rāgāya maheśvarāya |nityāya śuddhāya digambarāyatasmai na-kārāya namaḥ śivāya ||1||
To him whose garland is the king of serpents, to the three-eyed,
whose body-paint is ash, to the great Lord,
to the everlasting, the pure, the one clothed in the directions:
to him, to the syllable Na, salutation to Śiva.
NoteSix epithets and then the refrain, and the refrain is the pattern for all five verses. The first word of the verse is the syllable the last line names.
। ॥ २ ॥
mandākinī-salila-candana-carcitāyanandīśvara-pramatha-nātha-maheśvarāya |mandāra-puṣpa-bahu-puṣpa-supūjitāyatasmai ma-kārāya namaḥ śivāya ||2||
To him anointed with sandal paste and the water of the Mandākinī,
the great Lord, master of Nandin and of the pramathas,
well worshipped with mandāra blossoms and many another flower:
to him, to the syllable Ma, salutation to Śiva.
NoteThe one verse that changes metre. Its first three lines are vasantatilakā, fourteen syllables to the line, and then the refrain drops back to the eleven of the rest of the hymn. The verse swells and the mantra pulls it back.
। ॥ ३ ॥
śivāya gaurī-vadanābja-vṛndasūryāya dakṣādhvara-nāśakāya |śrī-nīlakaṇṭhāya vṛṣadhvajāyatasmai śi-kārāya namaḥ śivāya ||3||
To Śiva, who is the sun to the cluster of lotuses
that is Gaurī's face; to the destroyer of Dakṣa's sacrifice,
to the blessed blue-throated one, whose banner is the bull:
to him, to the syllable Śi, salutation to Śiva.
NoteThe middle verse of five, and the syllable it carries is the first sound of his name. The compliment in the first line is paid to him through her: a lotus opens only for the sun.
। ॥ ४ ॥
vasiṣṭha-kumbhodbhava-gautamāryamunīndra-devārcita-śekharāya |candrārka-vaiśvānara-locanāyatasmai va-kārāya namaḥ śivāya ||4||
To him whose crown is worshipped by Vasiṣṭha, by the pot-born Agastya,
by Gautama, by the venerable chief sages and by the gods;
whose eyes are the moon, the sun and fire:
to him, to the syllable Va, salutation to Śiva.
NoteThe only verse that names people, and the only one that explains an earlier epithet: trilocana, three-eyed, was said in verse 1 and is itemised here.
। ॥ ५ ॥
yajña-svarūpāya jaṭādharāyapināka-hastāya sanātanāya |divyāya devāya digambarāyatasmai ya-kārāya namaḥ śivāya ||5||
To him whose very form is the sacrifice, to the matted-haired,
with the Pināka in his hand, to the ancient one,
to the shining, to the god, to the one clothed in the directions:
to him, to the syllable Ya, salutation to Śiva.
NoteHe destroyed a sacrifice in verse 3 and is the sacrifice in verse 5. The other reading here, yakṣa-svarūpāya, makes him a yakṣa instead, which is the form he takes in the Kena Upaniṣad when he appears to gods who have forgotten who is behind their power.
। ॥ ६ ॥
pañcākṣaram-idaṃ puṇyaṃyaḥ paṭhec-chiva-sannidhau |śivalokam-avāpnotiśivena saha modate ||6||
Whoever recites this holy Five-Syllable
in the presence of Śiva
reaches the world of Śiva,
and there rejoices together with him.
NoteOutside the set of five, and in a different metre: anuṣṭubh, eight syllables to the pada, the ordinary verse of Sanskrit narrative. The hymn stops singing and states its terms.

दर्शन · darśana

The Inner Meaning

An adjective that became a name

In the Ṛgveda, Rudra is dangerous. He is an archer; his arrows carry disease; the hymns addressed to him mostly ask him to aim elsewhere and to spare the cattle and the children. The word śiva, auspicious, is applied to him there as it is applied to many things, and when it is applied to him it is doing a particular job. You do not call the god of the fever kindly because he is kindly. You call him kindly because you would like him to be.

The Śrī Rudram is that practice at full length. Salutation to Rudra in the leaves, in the dust, in the sound of the bowstring; salutation to the lord of thieves, to the one who prowls at night, to the cheat and to the one who cheats the cheats. The litany refuses to divide the world into the parts he governs and the parts he does not. And in the eighth section of it, almost in passing, comes namaḥ śivāya ca śivatarāya ca.

What happened afterwards is one of the largest things that ever happened to a Sanskrit word. Five syllables were taken out of a list, and the adjective inside them stopped being an adjective. By the time of the Āgamas, śiva is a name, śaiva is a religion, and namaḥ śivāya is the mantra a person is given at initiation and says until they die. The hymn on this page is a commentary on a phrase that was, in its first home, a hedge against a god who shot people.

Why five

Five syllables invite five of everything, and the tradition has obliged. The commonest scheme gives each syllable an element: na is earth, ma is water, śi is fire, vā is air, ya is space. Another assigns them to the five faces of Sadāśiva, Sadyojāta, Vāmadeva, Aghora, Tatpuruṣa and Īśāna, which between them hold the five acts of creation, maintenance, dissolution, concealment and grace.

The correspondences are worth knowing and worth holding lightly. They are not in the Rudram, where the phrase is a salutation and nothing more; they are later, and they are the sort of thing a system builds once it has decided a formula is central. But they are not arbitrary either. A mantra with five parts, in a tradition that already counts five elements and five faces and five acts, is going to be mapped onto them, and the mapping is how the tradition thinks: not by argument but by putting two structures side by side until they line up.

One detail is sharper than the rest. The order of the syllables is doctrinally live. Namaḥ śivāya and śivāya namaḥ are the same five sounds and are treated as different mantras, belonging to different faces. The first puts the bow before the name; the second puts the name first. Which one you are given, and in which order, is a fact about your initiation and not a matter of taste.

The form is the instruction

Read what the hymn actually does with its structure. Each verse begins with one syllable of the mantra and ends by saying the mantra whole. Across the five verses the syllables come in order, na, ma, śi, vā, ya, so the mantra is spelled out down the left edge of the poem while being said complete five times down the right.

That is not decoration. A mantra is meant to be repeated, and the ordinary problem with repetition is that attention leaves it. What this hymn does is make it impossible to say the mantra without also having just thought about a serpent garland, or a wrecked sacrifice, or three particular sages, or the moon and the sun and fire. The content is different every time; the formula is identical every time. It is a machine for keeping a repeated phrase from going dead.

And the last verse quietly admits the whole thing is a container. Pañcākṣaram idaṃ puṇyam, this holy five-syllabled thing: not this hymn, this stotra, this poem. The name it gives itself is the name of the mantra. Five verses of epithets, and the poem's own final word for what you have been reading is the five syllables it was built to carry.

प्रमाण · pramāṇa

Source

Text: Collated against independent witnesses and machine-diffed probe by probe: vedadhara.com, shlokam.org, divineaarti.com, greenmesg.org and the English Wikipedia. Our text is the reading carried by the first four. Every pada was then scanned mechanically. Verses 1 and 3 to 5 are of the eleven-syllable tristubh class, each pada being either indravajrā (gā gā la gā gā la la gā la gā gā) or upendravajrā (la gā la gā gā la la gā la gā gā). The distinction matters and is usually glossed over: verse 1 is four indravajrā padas with no upendravajrā among them, which makes it indravajrā proper, while verses 3, 4 and 5 each mix the two, which is what upajāti actually names. Verse 2 is vasantatilakā, fourteen syllables, in its first three padas only, its refrain reverting to eleven; verse 6 is anuṣṭubh, eight to the pada, with the pathyā cadence in both even padas. The opening pada scans as indravajrā under the standard licence by which a following consonant-plus-r cluster need not close the preceding syllable, which is what the -ya of nāgendrahārāya requires before trilocanāya.
Translation: Translation, transliteration and word-by-word glosses prepared for Saunskruti from the Sanskrit. Not adapted from any existing English rendering, including that of greenmesg.org, which was consulted for the Devanagari text only.
Notes: Verse 3 as printed by the English Wikipedia differs from every other witness in its second and third padas, reading sūryyottamaṃ paṅkajahastvalaye and sarvavedasārasahitaṃ mahādevaṃ where the others read sūryāya dakṣādhvaranāśakāya and śrīnīlakaṇṭhāya vṛṣadhvajāya. We print the majority reading, and the metre agrees: the Wikipedia padas scan to eleven syllables in a pattern matching neither indravajrā nor upendravajrā, and to thirteen syllables, so neither is a tristubh pada at all. Its mahādevaṃ is also accusative where every other epithet in the hymn is dative, which is the case the refrain requires. Verse 5 is a genuine variant and not an error: yajñasvarūpāya, whose form is the sacrifice, is carried by shlokam, vedadhara and Wikipedia, while yakṣasvarūpāya, whose form is a yakṣa, is carried by divineaarti and by a number of printed editions. The two scan identically, so the metre cannot decide between them; we print yajña as the majority reading and note the other in the verse. The attribution to Ādi Śaṅkarācārya is traditional and uncited, here as in the English Wikipedia article; see the history above for why a hymn this short and this memorable attaches itself to a famous name.