The Burning of Kama

Kama is the god of love and desire — a beautiful young man with a sugarcane bow and five flower-arrows. When he shoots someone with one of his arrows, that person falls in love with whoever is in front of them. The gods use him whenever romance is needed.

(The Purana places this story a little before the previous one — Kama was sent first, to make Shiva fall in love with Parvati, before Parvati’s tapasya had its full effect. But the story is worth telling either way because it explains the third eye, and it gives Kama his later condition.)

The gods sent Kama to Kailash with one job: shoot Shiva with a flower arrow so that he would fall in love with Parvati and break his meditation. The world needed a son of Shiva to fight Tarakasura. Time was short.

Kama did not want to go. He understood the risk. Shiva was Shiva. You did not shoot the great ascetic with anything, let alone an arrow.

But the gods insisted. He went.

He took his bow. He took his five arrows — the Marana (death- inducing), Mohana (delusion), Stambhana (paralysis), Shoshana (thinning), and Tapana (heat). He went to Mount Kailash.

He approached. Shiva was sitting in deep meditation, eyes closed, unmoving. Parvati was a little distance away, attending him in her quiet daily way.

Kama waited for the right moment. He took an arrow from his quiver, strung his bow, and aimed.

The very instant the arrow was loosed, Shiva opened his eyes.

His third eye opened.

From the third eye came a flash of fire. The fire went straight to where Kama was standing. There was a moment in which the god of love stood there in full beauty, his bow drawn — and the next moment, he was a small heap of ash on the ground.

The arrow that had been loosed never reached Shiva.

Kama’s wife Rati — the goddess of pleasure, his constant companion — came running to where her husband had been. She fell on the ash. She wept. She told Shiva she would die there too if he did not bring her husband back.

Shiva, calmer now, took pity. He said, “Kama will live again. But not in the form he had. From this day, he will be Ananga — ‘the bodiless one.’ He will still do his work in the world — desire and love still need a god — but no one will see him. He will be present in the heart, not in a body.”

Rati was both relieved and grieved. She accepted the verdict. Kama would still be — but invisibly. (Later, the Puranas say, Kama would be reborn as Pradyumna, son of Krishna and Rukmini, regaining a body. But that is another story, for another book.)

The Purana takes a moment to explain what this means. Desire (kama) in the deeper Indian view is not destroyed by Shiva — that would be impossible; desire is what moves the worlds. What is destroyed is desire’s body — the way it tries to attach itself to particular objects. Shiva’s third eye burns the form of desire, not its function. After this, desire is still there, but no longer visible — no longer something a person can blame on a separate god. It is inside.

The wedding of Shiva and Parvati was, after this, only a matter of time — and the worlds, watching, breathed easier.

The next story is the wedding itself, and it is the strangest celebration in the literature.