What is the Kapaleshwar temple?

A लिङ्ग ling is the form Shiva is worshipped in, an upright stone in the shrine. A नन्दी Nandi is the bull who sits outside a temple of Shiva, facing the ling. Walk up to almost any Shiva temple in India and the first thing you meet is the Nandi. Here there is none. There is the ling, and nothing in front of it.

The temple has a story for that, and the name comes out of the same story. This is the story the temple tells.

Brahma had five faces. Four of them recited the Vedas. The fifth had a habit of running down Vishnu, and one day, in the assembly of the gods, it started on Shiva as well. Shiva lost his temper, snatched Brahma’s own weapon, and cut the fifth head off.

Then the trouble began. Brahma is a brahmin, and killing a brahmin is ब्रह्महत्या brahma hatya, the worst sin there is. The skull would not leave Shiva. It clung to him, and he could not be rid of it, and he could not find peace anywhere. So he began to wander, looking across the whole world for a way to be clean of it.

His wandering brought him to Panchavati, on the Godavari. He rested at the house of a brahmin called Dev Sharma. And while he was resting there he overheard a cow talking with her calf.

The calf was Nandi, born again as a calf. It was telling its mother that Dev Sharma had treated it badly and that it was going to take its revenge and kill him. Its mother was frightened. You cannot kill a brahmin, she said. That is brahma hatya, the worst sin there is. And the calf said: even Shiva has done that, and he will surely find a way to be free of it. And so will I.

Shiva, lying there listening, sat up. Whatever this calf did next, he was going to watch.

The next morning the calf killed Dev Sharma. And then, black with the sin of it, it walked down to the Godavari at Panchavati and went into the water. When it came out it was white again, milk white, and the sin was gone.

Shiva had seen the way. He went down to the same river and bathed the same way, and came out free of the skull that had clung to him all that time. And he stayed here, on the rise above the water. Vishnu himself set up the ling on that spot and gave it its name — Kapaleshwar, the lord of the skull, the one who was rid of it.

And because a calf had shown him what all his wandering could not, Shiva took Nandi as his guru, his teacher. A teacher does not sit outside his student’s door. That is why there is no Nandi here.

Above Ramkund, on the left bank of the Godavari, on rising ground behind the pool. From the river you go up a long flight of stone steps to reach it. Its address is Ramkund, Panchavati. Across the water from it is Sunder Narayan’s temple.

Ramkund is the pool below the temple, where the rites for the dead are performed through the year. The bathing places along the river on either side of it are on the tirthas on the Godavari.

The Koli community, in 1738. The hall was added in 1763 by a Maratha sardar, Jagajiwanrao Pawar, and a relation of his, Krishnaji Pawar Patil, built the flight of steps up from the river. The trust that runs the temple renovated it in 2024.

Mahashivratri is the great day of the year here. An अभिषेक abhishek is the pouring of water or milk over the ling. On Mondays there is a procession round the town and then an abhishek at Ramkund, down at the water.

Come to it from the river. Stand at Ramkund and look up, and the temple is on the rise behind the pool. Then climb the steps — there are a lot of them, and people stop on the way up — and at the top, turn round before you go in. The river is below you, the temples on the far bank are across from you, and you can see why Shiva, in the story, stayed on this spot.

Inside, notice what is not there. No bull at the door, no bull in the courtyard, nothing between you and the ling. People who have grown up with Shiva temples feel the gap before they know what it is.

Then go back down to the water. Ramkund is at the foot of the steps, and the temples of Nashik has what is along the bank on both sides of it.