Tapasya: Parvati’s Burning Love for Shiva

Pārvatī is the daughter of Himavan, lord of the Himalaya, and she became the wife of Shiva. Before that marriage, though, came one of the most famous episodes in Hindu storytelling: her tapasya, a long period of severe austerity undertaken in the forest to win a god who seemed beyond reach. It is a love story, but an unusual one. The ordinary story of love has the beloved notice the lover and respond. Parvati’s story does not follow that pattern — which is probably why it has been told and retold for so many centuries, with a depth of devotion that ordinary love stories rarely inspire.

The background: Sati, grief and a gods’ problem

To understand why Shiva was so hard to reach, it helps to know what came before. Shiva’s first wife was Sati, the daughter of Daksha. When Daksha insulted Shiva by excluding him from a great sacrifice, Sati gave up her life in protest. Shiva withdrew from the world in grief and sank into deep meditation in the mountains.

Sati was reborn as Parvati, the daughter of Himavan and his queen Mena. From childhood she was drawn to Shiva. Meanwhile the gods had their own reason to hope for the marriage: a demon named Tarakasura had been granted a boon that only a son of Shiva could defeat him, and a Shiva lost in meditation was not going to have a son.

Service at the meditation seat

Parvati first came to Shiva as a young woman bringing flowers and sweeping the path around his meditation seat — patient, attentive, tender service. He noticed her. But noticing is not the same as being moved. Shiva was sealed in a grief that had become indistinguishable from deep meditative stillness, and he could notice her without being moved at all.

Why the flower arrow failed

The gods sent Kama, the god of desire, to help matters along. Kama’s weapons are a bow of sugarcane and arrows tipped with flowers. He shot his flower arrow and, for a moment, broke Shiva’s meditation. For this intrusion into his stillness, Shiva opened his third eye and burned Kama to ash. The god of desire was destroyed by the fire of the god of dissolution — not an encouraging sign for anyone hoping for a wedding.

Parvati was present for this. She saw Kama burn. She watched Shiva return to his stillness as though nothing had happened, because for Shiva nothing significant had happened. And she understood something: she would not reach him through the usual instruments of beauty and attraction.

She goes to the forest

She went into the forest and took off her jewels. In place of silk she wore bark or rough cloth; she let her hair become matted like an ascetic’s.

What she did next is called tapasya. The word comes from tapas, which literally means heat or burning. In Indian religious language tapas is the spiritual heat produced by deliberate self-discipline — fasting, enduring the elements, controlling the body and mind. Tapasya is the practice that generates it. Yogis and sages had practised it for ages, and in the stories tapas is a real force: it gathers power, and gods take notice when someone accumulates a great deal of it. What Parvati did in the forest went beyond what most of them had attempted.

Her mother Mena tried to stop her. In Kālidāsa’s poem Kumārasambhava, Mena’s cry of “u mā” — roughly “oh, don’t” — is given as the origin of one of Parvati’s best-known names, Uma.

The austerities

In summer she sat surrounded by four fires, one in each direction, with the blazing sun as the fifth fire above her. This is the practice known as the “five fires” (pañcāgni). In the monsoon she sat in the open, the rain falling straight on her without any shelter. In winter she stood in the rivers with water up to her neck, the cold as deliberate and intense as the summer’s heat.

She ate nothing but leaves; then only dry, fallen leaves; then she stopped eating even those. For this reason she is also called Aparṇā, “she who is without even a leaf.” She stood on one leg for long periods, her arms raised, so that her whole body became a gesture of upward intent.

The forest around her began to fill with the force of her tapas. The stories say that animals grew calm in her presence rather than fleeing, and the trees seemed to bend towards her. Fire, water, earth and air surrounded a woman who asked nothing of them but sat in the full force of their extremes without complaint.

In heaven the gods watched with the particular unease of those who understand what a great accumulation of tapas means: it has to go somewhere. It produces power. It demands a result. A being who has sat among five fires through summer and stood in rivers through winter for years is not a being who will be refused.

The young ascetic who argued against Shiva

At last Shiva came to her himself — but in disguise. He appeared as a young brahmin ascetic, and after admiring her discipline he asked what she hoped to gain from it. When he heard it was Shiva, he began to describe Shiva in the most unflattering terms available: the cremation grounds he haunts, the ghosts that follow him, the skulls and ash he wears, the snakes, the lack of family, home or property — none of the usual signs of a desirable husband. Why, he asked, would a woman of her birth and quality pursue such a person?

Parvati listened until he was done. Then she rose. Her face was thin from the austerities and her ornaments were long gone, but her eyes had the clarity that comes when fire and water, heat and cold have burned away everything but what is essential. What showed in her face was neither anger nor argument. In substance, she told him that what he described was only the surface, and that it was not the surface she was seeking. In some versions she turns to leave rather than listen to more insults against Shiva.

Then the brahmin revealed himself. Shiva — ash-covered, ghost-attended, the destroyer who dwells in cremation grounds — looked at the woman who had sat among five fires for him. What moved in his face was not the fire of the third eye. It was the other thing, the one that takes more to awaken in him than fire: love.

The Śiva Purāṇa adds a further test: before this, Shiva sends the Seven Sages (the Saptarṣis) to try to talk Parvati out of her resolve, and she refuses them too.

What tapasya achieved

The tapasya did what the flower arrow could not. Not because Kama aimed badly, but because love of this kind — love that will sit through five fires, stand in winter rivers and answer every slander with calm, unshaken clarity — calls for a different response. It is earned rather than attracted. It becomes undeniable rather than merely appealing.

Shiva yielded to the undeniable. He sought Parvati’s hand from her father Himavan; in Kālidāsa’s telling he sends the Seven Sages as his messengers to make the proposal. The wedding that followed was attended, the stories say, by the whole of creation, and from the union was born Kartikeya (Skanda), who went on to defeat Tarakasura.

Where this story comes from

Parvati’s penance appears in several texts, and the details differ between them.

• The Śiva Purāṇa, especially its Rudra Saṃhitā, tells the whole sequence of Sati’s death, Parvati’s birth, the burning of Kama, the tapasya and the marriage at length.
• Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhava (“The Birth of Kumara”), a classical Sanskrit poem, gives the most celebrated literary version. Its fifth canto describes Parvati’s austerities and the conversation with the disguised young ascetic.
• Other Purāṇas and many regional and devotional retellings tell the story too, varying in who tests Parvati, how long the penance lasts and exactly what is said.

Because the story is so widely told, it is best to think of it as a shared tradition with several versions rather than a single fixed text.

How the story is understood

The tradition draws several meanings from the episode. These are interpretations, and different teachers emphasise different ones.

• Desire and devotion. Kama’s arrow tries to reach Shiva through desire, and fails. Parvati reaches him through disciplined devotion. The story is often read as saying that the divine is not won by attraction but by a love that has been purified and made steady.
• Tapas as transformation. Parvati does not change Shiva by force; the austerity transforms her until she stands on equal footing with the great ascetic himself. Many readers see in this the idea that Shiva and Shakti — pure consciousness and creative energy — meet as equals.
• Seeing past appearances. The disguised ascetic lists everything about Shiva that looks unsuitable. Parvati’s reply, that she seeks what lies beneath the surface, is often read as a lesson about seeing the essential rather than the external.
• Steadfast resolve. Parvati is honoured as a model of determination: she keeps to her path even when her mother, the sages and Shiva himself in disguise all try to turn her from it.

The penance in practice today

Parvati’s tapasya for Shiva lies behind several observances. In parts of North India, women keep the fast of Hartalika Teej in remembrance of her penance, often praying for a happy marriage. Unmarried women in various regions keep vows and fasts associated with Gauri (another name of Parvati) in the same spirit. The story is also frequently recalled at Maha Shivaratri, a night sacred to Shiva that many associate with his union with Parvati.

Read on AdiVeda

• More on Pārvatī — her forms, her stories and the texts published here: Parvati
• The Burning of Kama and Parvati’s Grief — the episode that led to the forest
• The Wedding of the Mountain and the Destroyer — what happened next
• The General of the Gods: Kartikeya and the War with Tarakasura
• Parvati Chalisa