Ravana and the Lifting of Kailash

Ravana, the demon king of Lanka, appears in the Shiva Purana more than once. We met him at Vaidyanath, where Shiva tricked him into leaving the linga behind. The Purana keeps another Ravana story — older, more famous — about the time he tried to carry Mount Kailash itself home with him.

Ravana was, in his early life, a great devotee of Shiva. He had done long austerity. He had composed praise-songs of unusual beauty. He had received boons. He had been (at least in his own mind) deeply favoured.

One day, returning south from a victorious campaign, Ravana stopped near Mount Kailash for rest. He looked up at the great mountain where Shiva lived.

“Why,” he thought, “should I have to come here to worship? Lanka is my city. I should have Shiva there. I should have the whole mountain there. I will lift it and take it home.”

This was a thought so ambitious it could only have come from Ravana. He went to the base of Kailash. He braced himself. He slipped his many arms under the foot of the mountain. He began to lift.

The mountain was enormous. But Ravana, with his ten heads and twenty arms and boon-strength, was also enormous. He began to raise the mountain off the ground.

On top of the mountain, Shiva and Parvati were sitting together, talking. They felt the ground shake. They felt the mountain begin to tilt.

Parvati was alarmed. She held onto Shiva. “What is happening?”

Shiva looked down. He saw what Ravana was doing.

He did not say anything for a moment. Then, almost without moving, he pressed one foot down — just the toe — onto the mountain.

Kailash settled back. Then it settled further — pressing down exactly where Ravana’s arms were caught under it.

Ravana’s arms were trapped.

The pain was extraordinary. Ravana — who had defeated kings and gods — could not free himself. The mountain on top of his arms was being pressed down by a single toe he could not see. He struggled. He could not move.

He realised what was happening. He recognised Shiva’s power. And he did something the Purana takes as the most beautiful moment of his life. Trapped under the mountain, in great pain, he began to sing.

The song he composed in that moment is the Shiva Tandava Stotra — the famous hymn to Shiva’s dance — which is one of the most loved devotional poems in the tradition. It is still chanted today, all over India. Ravana, the worst villain of the Ramayana, is also the author of one of the great Shiva hymns. The Purana holds both these things about him with no embarrassment.

Ravana sang the hymn — Jaṭāṭavīgalajjalapravāhapāvitasthale, galelambya lambitām bhujangatungamālikām… — long enough for Shiva to be moved. He sang verse after verse, sweating, his arms crushed, eyes shut.

Shiva lifted his toe.

The mountain rose. Ravana’s arms were freed. He fell back, weeping from a mix of pain and relief and the song still pouring out of him.

Shiva himself came down. He looked at the demon king. He said, “Ravana — you tried to take my mountain. You should be dead. But the song you have sung is one of the great gifts of devotion. I will not kill you. I will give you a name from this. You will be called Ravana — ‘the roarer’ — because you have roared today the praise that the worlds will keep singing. Go home.”

Ravana, chastened, went home to Lanka. He took with him a chandrahasa (a moon-shaped sword) Shiva gave him as a parting gift, and the knowledge that even his enormous strength could be held by a single toe.

It would be many ages later that Ravana would unlearn the lesson and try, in the Ramayana, to take what was not his again — and the second time the consequence would be his death. But on this day, on Kailash, he was let go. Because of the song.

The Purana’s lesson from this story is plain. Devotion that breaks through pain is worth more than victory without pain. Ravana, crushed under the mountain, became — in that crushing — for one moment what he is most loved for in the canon. The song he sang that day still lives.

The last story of this book is about another famous request to Shiva — by a king who needed a river to be slowed enough that the earth could bear it.