Is the Pashupati seal Rudra-Shiva?

Ajouté : 2026-06-04

[00:00:01]is pashupati shiva. You ask this question to yourself, others have asked it to you. It's always been a point of contention.

[00:00:12]So let us try to figure out what this seal is all about.

[00:00:17]So just as a start, there are parts of the seal that are actually writing the script. These are written after the actual image is carved. So a skilled carver will carve all the pictorial detail and then hand it off to a scribe who will inscribe the writing. This is why you will see sometimes one letter is far away or they have to make go around the existing art and so on.

[00:00:52]So there is nothing more to say right now about the uh inscription. We will address that later. But I want to show you what this seal is about and how closely it is related to RDRA or Shiva of Hinduism.

[00:01:11]So there was a academic by the name of HC Raja Chowuri and he identified that the pashupati seal is really a detail from two parawas of the Mahabharata. The first is the anushasana parva. The other is the shanti parva. So you can read his actual words uh if you want but I will just go over those very quickly.

[00:01:41]So going um anticlockwise from top left the first is Gundalin which means the one with the bump. It's a name for uh rhino and uh it is a known name for rdra.

[00:01:59]Second is Mahisha uh which means mighty. It is a name used for a lot of gods including Indra, agni and so on.

[00:02:10]The at the bottom there is aja which is a goat. It is a name only of rdra. It means the unborn.

[00:02:18]Shah dullah is one of the names of uh uh the tiger which is also a name of rdra.

[00:02:26]Viala is also a name of RDRA which means elephant.

[00:02:33]Once you pass over the animals we can look at the other features which are a little more in detail of the nature of RDRA.

[00:02:45]So going from uh the top left first you have kapardin which means the mattered person. The next is shrangin which is the one with the horns.

[00:02:56]Uh the next is yogeshwara which is the lord of yoga. He is sitting in the moola bandasana pose there. Moola bandasana is when your heels are facing out and you are sitting on your toes. Your ankles are completely turned around. It's a very very hard asa harder than any other asa. So that is why they have depicted it here. And it's very hard to argue that it is just a pose that he sitting in accidentally.

[00:03:27]Mahanaka means one with long nails. You can see that is been that's another detail that's been carved into the seal.

[00:03:36]In front of him he has a damaru which is a small drum. Damarin is also a name of RDRA.

[00:03:44]On the right side of the image we have Uruinga which means erect fallus.

[00:03:49]This is a symbol of creative power. So the only thing you can really create is consciousness. Everything else you're not creating. You are rearranging. You rearrange uh matter to create objects.

[00:04:01]You rearrange information to uh create more information. But the only creation anyone can really do is consciousness.

[00:04:11]And this is essentially a symbol that represents creative power.

[00:04:18]After that is bjanga pita which means covered in snakes. So rdra has snakes that are on his arms on his belt and his hair around his neck and so on. I don't want to go into all the names but you can look it up. Um Bujangapita is his name. There is also a stotra created by the name of Bjangapita stotra.

[00:04:42]Uh on his chest he's wearing um what could be three things. It could be a elephant skin, a tiger skin or just kawatcha. Kawacha is just armor.

[00:04:55]So these are all names of uh rdra. Uh one of them important names is thrica which means three-headed.

[00:05:04]So what exactly is thrisha?

[00:05:08]We can see a reference to this in rigua 4583hab rashabo roti which means the thrice bent bull roars loudly. Now what exactly is a thrice bent bull? You can see in the top right image from an industal that there is an animal that is that seems to have three heads. One head is looking into the past, one is looking into the future and the other is looking into the present.

[00:05:39]So this is a symbol of being trirical dashi. So rdra can see into the past, present and future. And the roaring loudly is essentially stating the the rata and the natural law. So this has been interpreted differently by many scholars. Shyana has interpreted this as a yajna.

[00:06:06]So the roaring uh is really depicted by the three heads. So the figure is a roarer. The animal motive there with the three heads is also roarer. And we see this along with the we see a congruence in the actual inscriptions. You see raa in many forms many grammatical forms. You have it in um ablative, genative and vocative and so on.

[00:06:39]And this is not the only depiction of Pashupati in Indas Valley. So this on the left here is a gold round in the Kuwait museum. And this is from Indus Valley and it shows Pashupati at the bottom in with the curled horns similar to a black buck and all the animals around him and on top you see a Ashwa tree. So that tree uh is also depicted in many um versions of pashupati where there is a in the industali where there is a tree growing out of his you know of his hair that's essentially haresha which means the one whose hair is young leaves and on the right you see a different version of the pashupati where there are a lot of animals around what looks like um uh aquatic animal and we know that is also Shiva Rudra because that motive continues into historic times. So on the left and center here the iron coins these are from Ujain which as you know is the site of Ujain Mahakar and uh it is a Shiva uh iconography. On the right we have a Tripura iconography of Pashupati from Tripura and Pashupati iconography doesn't stop in India. So here are two from Europe.

[00:08:16]So one is a Celtic one on the left which looks like an accent and uh on the right is this is kind of famous the Gundes trope cordon from Denmark.

[00:08:31]And you can see the correspondences.

[00:08:34]So the Pashupati has four animals. Three are facing him, one is facing away. In Denmark, they didn't have these animals.

[00:08:42]So they put the animals that they have and they put them in the same orientation.

[00:08:47]And in the Indust Valley iconography, Rudra wears the horns of the Mahisha.

[00:08:57]They don't have Misha, so they have a deer instead. And he's wearing the deer horns. And you can also see the leaves growing out of his head. That is also part of the iconography on some of the other scenes. The snake, they didn't know what to do. So, he's just holding the snake.

[00:09:13]But you can see it. It is too much of a similarity to be a simple coincidence.

[00:09:20]Now, where is this pashupati symbology originally from? So on the left you see a symbol where there is a figure sitting in a similar asa with the erect fallus and this is from conquan petroglyphs.

[00:09:38]This is dated to the misolithic about 10 12,000 years ago and they dated this because there were no domesticated animals depicted and there were animals depicted that were extinct for a long long time.

[00:09:55]So let us try to read the seal. So the indust valley script decipherment makes gives us the ability to read this in two different ways. And the reason is the sha and the s have essentially the sharoglyph. So you can read it as ashasan mana which would mean the honorable punisher which is a reference to Shiva burning karma for tempting him. Or it could be read asahamana which means the almighty meditating one and I have currently I'm leaning towards the second one because it matches more with the iconography.

[00:10:37]So to conclude is Pashupati Shiva? Yes he is Pashupati is Rdra Shiva and I don't think anyone who has gone in depth or watched this video would have a lot of doubts about this um question.

[00:10:55]Thank you.