Trimbakeshwar — at the Godavari's Source

The eighth Jyotirlinga is Trimbakeshwar, near Nashik in Maharashtra, at the source of the Godavari river. The name comes from trimbaka — “three-eyed one” — Shiva’s epithet from his third eye.

The story behind Trimbakeshwar is unusual: it is not the story of a demon defeated, but the story of a sage atoning for an accidental sin.

The sage was Gautama (one of the great rishis, but in this story he is just a man who has done something terrible). He lived with his wife Ahalya in a forest hermitage in the western hills. The region was suffering a long drought. Many people had come to Gautama’s hermitage because Gautama, by his own austerity, had brought water and food to the spot — a small garden of grain grew there even when the wider land was dry.

But the other sages, who had lived in the region longer, grew jealous. Gautama’s hermitage was thriving while theirs were not. They did not want to praise his austerity. They wanted to find something to use against him.

They arranged a trick.

They had a cow — old, sick, near death anyway — sent into Gautama’s field of grain. The cow ate the grain. Gautama, seeing the cow destroying his crop, took up a handful of darbha grass and waved it toward the cow to drive it away.

The grass was sharp. It struck the cow’s flank. The cow — already weak — collapsed and died.

The other sages came at once. Gautama has killed a cow! they cried. Cow-killing was, in the Vedic order, one of the worst sins a brahmin could commit. The other sages spread the news as widely as they could.

Gautama was devastated. He had not meant to kill the cow. He had been brushing it away with grass. But the cow had died at his hand, even if unintentionally.

He asked the other sages how to atone. They — knowing the cow was unlikely-to-live anyway, and seeking maximum trouble for Gautama — told him a long and difficult penance: he would have to bathe in Ganga water, and Ganga did not flow in the south. He would have to bring the river down.

Gautama did austerity to Shiva. He prayed for the river to come.

Shiva at length came. He gave Gautama a portion of the river from his own matted hair — a stream that flowed down through a small opening in a rock and became, on earth, the Godavari river. The Godavari is sometimes called Gautami Ganga — “Gautama’s Ganga” — because of this story.

Gautama bathed in the newly-arrived river. His sin was washed away. The cow, by some accounts, also revived.

Shiva, having come down for the sake of Gautama’s atonement, decided to remain at the spot. He installed himself as the Trimbakeshwar linga, near the source of the Godavari, at a place called Brahmagiri (“the hill of Brahma”) near Nashik.

A few features of Trimbakeshwar:

• The linga has three small mukhas — faces — representing Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva together. This is unusual; most lingas are smooth conical forms with no carved faces. The three faces are why the linga is called Trimbaka — “three-eyed” — though here the meaning is also “three-faced.”
• The Godavari source. The Godavari literally begins at this site — at a small pool called Kushavarta inside the temple complex. A pilgrim who walks the pradakshina here is walking around the source of a river that crosses most of South India.
• The Nashik Kumbh Mela. Trimbakeshwar is one of the four sites of the great Kumbh Mela festival (the others are Haridwar, Prayagraj, and Ujjain). Every twelve years, millions of pilgrims gather on the bank of the Godavari for the bathing days.

For a reader, Trimbakeshwar is the Jyotirlinga of atonement. The story is unusual in the canon because it is not about a great warrior defeating a great demon. It is about a sincere person who has done something wrong — even by accident — and has been willing to do the long work to clean it up. The river that flows from this place across South India is the visible form of an atonement accepted.

The next Jyotirlinga is in the eastern hills — and the story behind it involves the demon king of Lanka, Ravana, in one of his more sincere moments.