Śivānanda Laharī in English IAST: All 100 Verses

|| iti śrīmacchaṅkarācāryaviracitā śivānandalaharī sampūrṇā ||

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About the Shivananda Lahari

Shivananda Lahari means a wave of Shivananda. The word Shivananda can be taken as the bliss that comes from Shiva, or as the bliss that is Shiva himself. This is a devotional hymn of a hundred verses. Tradition holds that Adi Shankaracharya composed it. It should also be said that modern scholars do not agree about the authorship of many of the hymns that carry Shankara’s name.

It reads like a companion to the Soundarya Lahari, which this site already has. There the form and power of the Mother of the world are at the centre. Here the centre is the mind of a devotee in search of Shiva: its restlessness, its longing and its honest admission of its own shortcomings all find a place in the verses. There are verses here that compare the mind to a monkey and to an elephant in must.

Structure and metre

The first twenty seven verses are in the Shikharini metre, the metre of the Soundarya Lahari as well, with seventeen syllables to each quarter. From verse twenty eight onwards most verses are in Shardulavikridita, with nineteen syllables to each quarter. In the last thirty or so verses the metre changes often, and shorter metres such as Vasantatilaka, Malini and Arya appear. The metre of each verse is noted in the commentary on its meaning page.

Shlesha, the art of writing so that one word yields two meanings, runs through the whole work. So does the habit of carrying a single image through an entire verse. On the meaning pages we therefore give the main sense in the full meaning and unpack the second sense in the commentary.

Images of bhakti

Bhakti takes many forms in this work. In the second verse the stories of Shiva flow as a river and come down through the channels of the intellect into the lake of the mind. The wave that settles there is the Shivananda Lahari, and the work takes its name from this image. In verse sixty two bhakti is a mother. She feeds the child who is the devotee with the nectar of Shiva’s stories from the conch of speech, ties on a protective charm of rudraksha and sacred ash, and lays him to rest on the couch of meditation on Shiva.

In verse sixty eight bhakti is a cow. Living in the cowshed of Shiva’s feet, she yields the nectar of joy again and again. Calling Shiva Pashupati, lord of cattle, the devotee asks him to look after this one cow of his. In verse seventy seven the intellect, fixed on Shiva’s feet, thinks of him always, like a wife parted from her husband. In verse eighty four the devotee says he will give the maiden that is his own intellect to Shiva in marriage.

Verse sixty one defines bhakti through five comparisons. An old belief holds that the seeds of the ankola tree return to the parent tree. The needle goes to the magnet, the faithful wife to her husband, the creeper to the tree and the river to the sea. In the same way, when the movement of the mind reaches the feet of Shiva and stays there always, that is called bhakti.

Verse sixty three gives an example of that bhakti. The sandal worn on the path becomes a brush for Shiva’s body, water carried in the mouth becomes his sacred bath, a morsel of meat already tasted becomes a fresh offering, and a hunter of the forest becomes the crown jewel of devotees. The verse names no one, but tradition connects it with the story of Kannappa the hunter. The story of how Shiva accepted the love of a devotee who knew nothing of the rules of worship is very familiar to Kannada readers.

About this page

The text here follows the edition on sanskritdocuments.org, checked against the text on stotranidhi.com. In verse fifty seven we print svodarapūraṇāya. Another version reads svodarapoṣaṇāya. In verse ninety five we give veśaḥ, and we note that a version with veśmaḥ also exists. In verses thirty, thirty one, eighty two and eighty eight we follow the regular sandhi forms, such as svāmiṃstrilokīguro.

For the first ten verses, pages with word meanings, full meanings in Kannada and English, and the two boxes of commentary and of thoughts for life today are ready. Pages for the remaining verses are being added one by one.

Sources: several.