Lingodbhavaलिंगोद्भव

Lingodbhava (लिंगोद्भव), the emergence from the linga, is the form in which Shiva revealed his supremacy to Brahma and Vishnu as a column of fire without beginning or end. The myth, told in the Puranas, is the charter story of the lingam itself: the aniconic pillar in every Shaiva sanctum is that infinite column, scaled to human worship.

The story

Brahma and Vishnu, disputing which of them was supreme, were interrupted by a blazing pillar that rose and fell beyond sight. Agreeing that whoever found its end would be acknowledged the greater, Vishnu took the form of a boar and dug downward through the ages; Brahma became a swan — in southern tellings, a gander — and flew up. Neither found a limit. Vishnu returned and confessed his failure. Brahma, in the best-known southern version, produced a falling ketaki flower as false witness that he had reached the summit; for the lie he was cursed to have no temple worship of his own, and the ketaki flower was barred from Shiva's altars. Shiva then emerged from the pillar's side, and both gods bowed to him. Tradition associates the night of the revelation with Maha Shivaratri.

Iconography

Lingodbhava is a fixture of Tamil temple architecture: the niche on the western outer wall of the sanctum, directly behind the linga, customarily carries the image, so that the manifest form stands back-to-back with the aniconic one. Shiva appears standing within an oval aperture in a flaming pillar, his lowest portion left uncarved to signal the unfathomable; a small boar burrows at the base and a swan flies at the top, the two seekers caught mid-failure. The composition is the tradition's own commentary on the lingam — a reminder that the pillar in the sanctum is a doorway onto something without measure.