Shivoham: Becoming Shiva

The closing call, back into the world

At the age of eight, Shankara took sannyasa, walked north, and spent his life saying one thing: Shivoham. I am Shiva. The Shiva Purana closes its teaching here. The final lesson asks what it means for a person who has read the whole course to sit with that sentence, not as a claim but as a recognition.

The Boy at the Cave

On a winter morning sometime in 788 CE, a small Brahmin boy of about eight years old walked into a cave on the bank of the Narmada river. The cave was the residence of an old sannyasi named Govinda Bhagavadpada, the disciple of the great Gaudapada. The boy had walked north for several weeks from his home village of Kalady, on the banks of the Periyar in Kerala. He had taken sannyasa at the age of eight, with his mother's reluctant permission, after a crocodile in the village pond had grabbed his ankle and let go only when he had vowed to renounce the world. He had walked alone. He had carried nothing. His name was Shankara.

Govinda Bhagavadpada was sitting in meditation when the boy arrived. The cave was lit by a single oil lamp. The Narmada flowed below the entrance. The teacher opened his eyes, looked at the boy, and asked the question every teacher asks an unknown disciple at the door.

Who are you.

The boy did not answer with his name. He did not say Shankara, son of Shivaguru and Aryamba, of the Nambudiri Brahmin community of Kalady village in Kerala. He spoke six Sanskrit verses, six lines each, that he had composed in his head on the walk north. The first line of the first verse was a single phrase that the Shaiva tradition has held, for the twelve centuries since, as the most uncompromising one-line statement of the dharmic vision.

Shivoham. Shivoham.

I am Shiva. I am Shiva.

The rest of the verses unpacked what those two words meant by listing what the speaker was not. Not the mind. Not the intellect. Not the ego. Not the breath. Not the five elements. Not pleasure or pain. Not bondage or liberation. Not even the act of giving or the giver. Each verse closed with the same refrain. Shivoham. Shivoham. Cit-ananda-rupah. The form of consciousness and bliss. That, said the boy, is what I am.