Maha Shivaratri: The Great Night and What Is Recited

Maha Shivaratri — “the great night of Shiva” — is the one major observance of the Hindu year that is deliberately nocturnal. Almost everything else in the festival calendar is done at sunrise or midday. This one is kept awake, through the dark, in four parts.

This page explains what the night is, why it is kept the way it is, the different stories attached to it, and — most practically — which texts people actually recite through it, with links to each one in full.

When it falls, in the terms the tradition actually uses

Hindu festivals are fixed by the lunar calendar, not by the solar calendar most of the world uses. The unit that matters is the tithi, a lunar day defined by the angle between the Sun and the Moon, and the month is divided into two halves, or pakṣas: the waxing half (Shukla paksha) and the waning half (Krishna paksha).

Maha Shivaratri falls on the Chaturdashi of Krishna paksha — the fourteenth tithi of the waning half — in the lunar month of Phalguna. Some regional reckonings place it in Magha. The difference is one of month-naming convention rather than of astronomy: some calendars end the month at the new moon and others at the full moon, so the same waning fortnight can carry two different month names. Both land on the same night.

That is a tithi, not a date. It is the second-darkest night of the month, immediately before the new moon, and the darkness is the point rather than an inconvenience. If you want to know why a tithi does not map cleanly onto a calendar day, what a tithi is sets that out, and what a panchang is explains the almanac in which tithis are recorded.

AdiVeda does not publish festival dates — take those from a panchang that states its conventions. We also do not calculate tithis or give auspicious timings (muhūrtas) for the night; a local temple or a panchang prepared for your location is the right source for that.

A note on the name

Every month has a Shivaratri — the Krishna paksha Chaturdashi of any month is sometimes kept as a smaller monthly observance, often called Masik Shivaratri. The one in Phalguna (or Magha, by the other convention) is the Maha, the “great” one, and it is this night that the Purāṇas describe and that temples keep on a large scale.

The four watches

The night is divided into four praharas, or watches, roughly three hours each, and the classical observance performs an abhiṣeka in each one. Abhisheka is the ritual bathing of the Shiva linga — the smooth, upright stone form in which Shiva is most commonly worshipped — by pouring liquids over it while chanting. Traditionally the four watches use milk, curd, ghee and honey, one after another, and in many traditions water and bilva leaves are offered throughout.

The bilva (bael tree, Aegle marmelos) has a three-part leaf, and it is the leaf most closely associated with Shiva’s worship. Offering bilva leaves to the linga is one of the most common acts of the night, in homes as well as temples.

Two things are worth noticing about that four-part structure. It makes the observance an act of staying rather than of attending: you cannot do four watches by turning up once. And it puts a vigil, jāgaraṇa, at the centre of the observance, so that wakefulness itself becomes the offering. Other festivals may include a night of wakefulness; Shivaratri is the great festival that is built around one.

In practice, people keep the watches in very different ways. A large temple may perform four full abhishekas with priests chanting. A household may keep a small linga or a picture, offer water and leaves at intervals, and read or sing between them. Some people stay awake through the whole night; others keep the first watch or two. The structure is there to be used, not as a test.

Why this night, and why the answers differ

Ask why Shivaratri is kept, and the tradition gives several accounts. They are genuinely different stories rather than variations of one, and honesty is better here than a tidy single explanation.

• Lingodbhava — Shiva appearing as the pillar of light whose top and bottom Brahma and Vishnu could not find. The two gods had been arguing over which of them was greater; the endless column of fire settled the argument by showing them something neither could measure. This is the account most closely tied to Shivaratri in temple practice. In many South Indian Shiva temples a Lingodbhava image — Shiva emerging from within the pillar — is worshipped on this night, and special worship around midnight is associated with it. The narrative is on the pillar of light.
• The drinking of the Halahala — the night Shiva held the poison in his throat. When the gods and asuras churned the ocean for the nectar of immortality, a deadly poison, hālāhala, rose first and threatened everything; Shiva drank it and held it in his throat, which turned blue. In one popular telling the gods kept him awake through that night, and the vigil remembers it. Told on Neelkanth.
• The marriage of Shiva and Parvati — kept in several regions, where Shivaratri is celebrated as the wedding night of the ascetic god and the mountain’s daughter. See the divine wedding, and the long penance that led to it on Parvati’s tapasya.
• The tandava — the night of the cosmic dance, in Tamil Shaiva tradition. The tāṇḍava is Shiva’s dance of creation, preservation and dissolution, in the form of Nataraja, the Lord of Dance. See Nataraja.

No single one of these is the reason. Different regions keep different accounts, and a page that picked one and suppressed the rest would be misrepresenting the tradition rather than clarifying it.

There is also a story attached not to why the night is sacred but to what keeping it does. In the Purāṇic account of the Shivaratri vow, a hunter caught out in the forest at night climbs a tree to stay safe from animals. To keep himself awake, he plucks leaves and lets them fall — the tree is a bilva, and a linga lies beneath it. Without meaning to, he has fasted, kept vigil and offered bilva leaves to Shiva through the watches of the night. The story is told as a teaching that the act counts even before the understanding arrives, and it is often recounted during the night itself.

What is recited

Recitation is what fills the hours between abhishekas. There is no single prescribed text for a household; people choose according to their language, their region and what they can sustain. These are the texts most commonly used, and all of them are published in full on AdiVeda, with Devanagari, transliteration and translation.

The core set

• Rudrāṣṭakam — Tulsidas’s eight verses to Rudra, and among the most widely recited Shivaratri texts in the Hindi-speaking regions. Rudra is the older, Vedic name under which Shiva is praised; an aṣṭakam is simply a hymn of eight verses.
• Liṅgāṣṭakam — eight verses to the linga, sung during abhisheka. Because each verse ends with the same refrain, it is easy to join in even without knowing the whole text.
• Shiva Tāṇḍava Stotram — attributed to Ravana, and the most metrically demanding of the set. Its rushing, heavily alliterative rhythm is meant to echo the dance it describes.
• Shiv Chalisa — the forty verses in Hindi, for those who want something to hold the whole night. A chālīsā is a devotional poem of forty verses, and it can be repeated at each watch.
• Shiva mantras — including the Panchakshara and the Mahamrityunjaya.

The two mantras, briefly

The Panchakshara, “the five-syllable mantra”, is namaḥ śivāya — “salutation to Shiva” — usually preceded by Om. It is the simplest thing a person can repeat through the night, and many people do nothing else. It has its own page at Panchakshari mantra, and the hymn built on its five syllables is the Shiv Panchakshara Stotram.

The Mahamrityunjaya, “the great victory over death”, is a verse from the Vedas addressed to the three-eyed Shiva (Tryambaka). It is chanted as a prayer for release from the bonds of mortality. See the Mahamrityunjaya mantra.

Also often used

• Shiva Manasa Puja — a hymn in which the whole worship, from bathing the deity to offering food and lamps, is performed in the mind. Useful for anyone keeping the night without a temple or a linga at hand.
• Dwadasha Jyotirlinga Stotram — naming the twelve jyotirliṅgas, the “lingas of light” at twelve pilgrimage sites, which ties naturally to the pillar-of-light story.
• Shiva Ashtottara Shatanamavali — the 108 names, often recited while offering one bilva leaf per name.
• Om Jai Shiv Omkara — the aarti commonly sung at the close of a watch, when a lamp is waved before the deity.

A simple way to use them

If you are new to the night, one workable pattern is: open each watch with the Panchakshara repeated for a while, recite one longer text (the Lingashtakam at the first watch, the Rudrashtakam at the second, and so on), and close with the aarti. That is an illustration, not a rule; the tradition gives households wide latitude.

The fast

Most observers keep a fast through the day and the night, breaking it the following morning. Practice varies from nirjala (without water) through fruit-and-milk to a single evening meal, and the tradition does not impose one standard. What is consistent is that the fast supports the vigil rather than being the observance itself.

A fast is a personal undertaking. Anyone with a medical condition, pregnant, elderly or otherwise vulnerable is generally expected to choose a lighter form or not to fast at all, and a stricter fast does not make the night more valid.

Questions people often ask

Do I need a temple or a priest?

No. Temples keep the night on a grand scale, but the observance is equally a household one. Water, a few leaves, a lamp and a text you can read are enough.

Do I have to stay awake all night?

The vigil is the ideal the observance is built around, but people keep it as far as they are able. Many keep one or two watches.

Is Maha Shivaratri only for Shaivas?

Shaivas — those for whom Shiva is the supreme deity — keep it most intensely, but it is observed very widely by Hindus of every orientation.

Where this comes from

The Shivaratri observance is described in the Śiva Purāṇa and the Skanda Purāṇa, which also carry the associated narratives. The four-watch abhisheka is set out in the Śiva Purāṇa. The regional variation in which account is attached to the night is a matter of living tradition, not of textual disagreement, and this page reports it rather than resolving it. Details of household practice — which texts are chosen, how strictly the vigil and fast are kept — are living, regional custom rather than scriptural prescription.

Read on AdiVeda

• All Shiva texts on AdiVeda
• Shiva stotras and Shiva ashtakams
• The pillar of fire without beginning or end
• What is a tithi?