Why Shiva Crushed Ravana for a Thousand Years

Indrasuran

Indrasuran

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Ravana had conquered heaven, enslaved the gods, and never lost a fight. Then a white mountain stopped his chariot, he tried to tear it out of the earth, and a god he had never heard of pinned him underneath it with a single toe. For a thousand years.

This is the story of the night Ravana, the ten-headed king of Lanka, tried to lift Mount Kailash and hurl it into the sea, and of what Shiva did about it without standing up, without opening both eyes, and without reaching for a weapon.

Ravana was the most powerful being in all three worlds. He had defeated the gods of heaven and made servants of them, and no weapon in creation could touch him. When a shining white mountain blocked the path of his flying chariot, his pride would not let it stand, so he set his twenty arms beneath its roots and lifted the home of the gods into the air. On the summit sat Shiva, calm as still water, with Parvati beside him. Shiva did not rise. He pressed down with the big toe of one foot, and the mountain came back to earth on the king's trapped hands.

What followed was a thousand years in the dark. Ravana screamed until the sound rolled across the worlds, and not one of the gods he had enslaved came to help him. But somewhere in those thousand years the rage wore away, and the proudest being who ever lived understood at last what held him down. Not a rock. A god. So he strung a veena from a tendon of his own arm and a length of his own bone, and he began to sing. His scream of agony became the most beautiful hymn of praise ever composed, the Shiva Tandava Stotra, a song we still sing today. Moved at last, Shiva lifted his toe, gave him an unbreakable sword, the Chandrahasa, and a new name earned from beneath a mountain: Ravana, the one who made the universe scream.

In this video: Ravana lifts Mount Kailash, Shiva and the single toe, a thousand years under the mountain, the origin of the Shiva Tandava Stotra, the sword Chandrahasa, and how Ravana earned his name. Hindu mythology stories explained.

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