There was, one day on Kailasa, a philosophical discussion between Shiva and Parvati that went further than philosophy.
The discussion, as philosophical discussions on Kailasa often do, concerned the nature of maya — the divine principle of illusion, the creative power that makes the world appear as it does, the force that makes temporary things seem permanent and material things seem essential. Shiva was arguing for his position, which was that everything in the material world — everything that could be touched or tasted or measured — was maya. It had no ultimate reality. It was appearance without substance.
Parvati listened. She had her own relationship with this question, because in the philosophical tradition she is herself often identified with maya — the creative power, the material manifestation, the energy that gives the divine its forms and the world its substance. This made her response to Shiva’s argument more than academic.
‘Everything maya, is it,’ she said.
‘Everything,’ Shiva confirmed. ‘Food, shelter, the body itself — all illusion.’
‘Including food,’ Parvati said.
‘Including food,’ Shiva agreed, with the firmness of someone who has meditated past the need for food for thousands of years and may have somewhat lost track of what ordinary life requires.
Parvati left.
When Parvati leaves, she takes with her the principle she embodies. She is Shakti — the energy that makes material life possible. When she departed, she took nourishment with her. Not just the food on Kailasa. The food everywhere. The principle of nourishment itself withdrew from the world the way warmth withdraws from an area when the sun goes away.
Nothing grew. Nothing ripened. The beings in the three worlds found themselves hungry in a way that went beyond ordinary hunger — the stores ran out, the crops failed, the rivers of milk dried, the cows produced nothing. Every living thing that required sustenance experienced the withdrawal of the principle that had been sustaining them, and it was immediately and unmistakably clear that this was not an ordinary famine.
The gods realized what had happened. The sages realized what had happened. Slowly the message reached Kailasa: Shiva, your philosophical position is causing a practical crisis. In the absence of Parvati, the three worlds are starving.
Shiva, who is not without the capacity for honest self-examination, looked at what had occurred. The philosophical position — everything is maya — was in some sense correct. But correctness in philosophy and wisdom in application are different things. The world in which hungry beings exist is the world they are in, and for beings in a world, the food in that world is not a secondary concern.
He went to find Parvati.
She was in Kashi — the city of liberation, the city Shiva loves above all others — and she had set up a kitchen. The most magnificent kitchen in the three worlds, with vessels that were never empty and a fire that never went out. She was feeding everyone who came: the poor, the wandering, the hungry, the destitute, the gods who had descended from their starved heavens, the animals. She fed with the complete attention of someone who finds in the act of feeding a full expression of the divine.
Shiva came to her kitchen as a wandering mendicant and held out his bowl. She looked at him. She placed food in his bowl with hands that did not tremble and with an expression on her face that was neither triumph nor reproach — just the expression of someone feeding a hungry person.
He ate. He understood.
He named her Annapurna — ‘full of food’, or more precisely, ‘she whose fullness is nourishment’, the goddess of food and abundance and the act of feeding. He declared that he himself would bear her image in his city of Kashi, that every act of feeding was sacred, that the kitchen was a temple and the cook a priest and the act of sitting down to eat a moment of grace.
Annapurna temples are found throughout India. The kitchen prayer in many households is addressed to her. The principle she represents is not just that food is necessary — it is that nourishment is a form of love, that the act of providing sustenance to another being is inherently divine, and that no philosophical position that dismisses this is complete.
Even the Destroyer comes with his bowl to the kitchen. Even the infinite must be fed.