What are the twelve jyotirlings?

There is no end to the number of lings, and the whole earth is one. Wherever Shiva is remembered with devotion, he comes and stays, and takes the form of a ling there for the good of the world. But of all of them the most important are these twelve. Somanatha in Saurashtra. Mallikarjuna on Srishaila. Mahakala at Ujjain. Parameshwara at Omkara. Kedara on the Himalaya. Bhimashankar at Dakini. Vishvesha at Varanasi. Tryambaka on the bank of the Gautami. Vaidyanatha at the cremation ground. Nagesha in the Daruka forest. Ramesha at Setubandha. And Ghushmesha at Shivalaya.

Whoever reads or says the twelve names early in the morning is freed from his sins and gets what he says them for. Whoever says them wanting nothing at all, with a clean mind, is never born again. Worship at any one of the twelve, even one, for six months without a break, and it is the same. And the food offered to a jyotirling is to be eaten, and shared out for others to eat, and that alone burns sins to ash.

An उपलिङ्ग upaling is a smaller ling that belongs with a jyotirling, in another place. Somanatha’s is Antakesha, where the river Mahi runs into the sea. Mallikarjuna’s is Rudreshwara, at Bhrigukaksha. Mahakala’s is Dugdhesha, in the country of the Narmada. Omkara’s is Kardamesha, at the Bindu lake. Kedara’s is Bhutesha, on the bank of the Yamuna. Bhimashankar’s is Bhimeshwara, in the Sahya mountains. Nagesha’s is Bhuteshwara, on the bank of the Mallikasarasvati. Ramesha’s is Gupteshwara, and Ghushmesha’s is Vyaghreshwara.

The twelve are in twelve places, and most of them go by a slightly different name today from the one in the text. Here is where each one is, and what is told at each.

Somnath is on the shore of the Arabian Sea, at Prabhas Patan in the Gir Somnath district of Gujarat, with the waves coming in beside the temple. Near it three rivers, the Hiran, the Kapila and the Saraswati, come down to the sea together. A sound-and-light show in the temple grounds tells the temple’s story, and people walk along the sea front beside it.

Mallikarjuna is at Srisailam, in the Nallamala hills of Andhra Pradesh, above the river Krishna. Shiva is Mallikarjuna there, and the temple is named for the goddess Bhramaramba as well as for him. The temple is a big one, shrines and halls and tall gateway towers together, and Mahashivratri is its great day.

Mahakaleshwar is at Ujjain, in Madhya Pradesh, on the river Kshipra. Mahakal is the great lord of time and of death, and the ling faces south, the direction of death, which no other of the twelve does. Every morning the ling is woken with a bhasma aarti, an aarti of ash, and the ash is brought from the ghats of the Kshipra. Ujjain has a Simhastha Kumbh of its own, and the four Kumbh places has that.

Omkareshwar is in Madhya Pradesh too, on an island in the river Narmada.

Kedarnath is high in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand, on the river Mandakini, with snow on the peaks above it. Pilgrims reach it on foot, up a steep trail, and it is one of the four places of the Chhota Char Dham, with Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri. The ling is a cone of rock. After the war at Kurukshetra the Pandavas came looking for Shiva to be forgiven for what they had done in it, and Shiva did not want to forgive them, so he turned into a bull to get away. They chased him, and he dived into the ground, and the hump of the bull was left behind at Kedarnath. That is the ling, and the Pandavas built the temple over it.

Bhimashankar is in the Sahyadri, in the forest on the hills above Pune in Maharashtra, and the river Bhima rises there. A short trail into the forest goes to the place where the river comes out, and behind the temple is the Mokshakund, the tank where pilgrims bathe before they go in.

Kashi Vishwanath is at Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh, on the Ganga. Vishwanath is the lord of the world, and Kashi is another name for the city. Its spire and its dome are covered in gold, which is why people call it the golden temple, and a lane of smaller shrines runs beside the main one. A new corridor now leads straight up from the ghats on the river to the temple.

Baidyanath is at Deoghar, in Jharkhand. In the month of Shravan pilgrims in huge numbers walk from Sultanganj on the Ganga carrying Ganga water, and pour it on the ling here, and that is the Shravani mela. The temple of Parvati is beside the main temple, and the two are tied to each other with great red threads. Ravan won a jyotirling from Shiva, by penance, to carry to Lanka, on one condition — it must never touch the ground on the way. On the road Varuna made him need to stop, and he handed the ling to a shepherd boy to hold, and the boy was Vishnu. When Ravan came back the boy was gone and the ling was on the ground, and he could not lift it, and it has been at Deoghar ever since.

Nageshwar is near Dwarka, on the coast of Saurashtra in Gujarat. The ling is in a shrine below the ground, and there is a huge seated Shiva at the temple. A demon called Daruka tormented a woman called Supriya, who would do nothing but say Om Namah Shivaya, and Shiva came for her sake, killed Daruka, and stayed, as Nagesha.

Rameswaram is in Tamil Nadu, where Ram built his bridge across the sea to Lanka. There are two lings in the shrine. One is the ling Ram made out of sand, and the other is the one Hanuman brought from Kailash, and at Ram’s word Hanuman’s is worshipped first, still. One of the temple’s corridors is the longest in Asia, and inside the temple are twenty-two tirthas, and pilgrims bathe at them. A तीर्थ tirtha is a place of pilgrimage, and in the oldest sense a crossing place on a river.

Grishneshwar is at Ellora, near Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar in Maharashtra, a little way from the Ellora caves. It is the smallest of the twelve. Pilgrims may touch the ling with their own hands here, which is not allowed at most of the others, and men take off their shirts to go into the shrine. In the temple grounds is the Shivalaya tank, where pilgrims bathe before they go in.

Trimbakeshwar is the one on the bank of the Gautami, in the town of Trimbakeshwar at the foot of Brahmagiri, west of Nashik. The Godavari rises on Brahmagiri, the hill above Trimbakeshwar. People say she disappears into the hill and comes out again at Kushavarta, and the source of the Godavari tells the whole of that story. Gautami is the river’s other name, after the rishi Gautama, and the ling in the shrine has three faces, for Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva together. The jyotirling at Trimbakeshwar tells how Shiva came to stay on that hill, and the Trimbakeshwar temple is the temple as a place, with what to see when you go.