A section from the journey

The "Pashupati" Seal

On a small stone seal from Mohenjo-daro sits a horned figure, ringed by wild animals. Many in the tradition look at it and see Shiva, the great lord of beasts and seated yogi. Many scholars look and see a horned figure whose name is simply lost. We will hold up this one little stone and look at it both ways, with care.

Picture a of pale stone, no bigger than a large coin. It comes from Mohenjo-daro, and it was carved perhaps four and a half thousand years ago. On it, a figure sits. He wears a tall headdress crowned with curving horns. Around him stand wild animals.

This little stone is the most famous religious object the cities left behind. People have stared at it for a hundred years. And it asks us a hard, beautiful question: who is this seated one? Hold that question gently, because honest people answer it in two different ways.

Look first at what we can simply see. The figure sits with legs drawn in. The headdress carries great horns and seems to spread wide at the sides. Around him are an elephant, a tiger, a rhinoceros, a buffalo, and below, two deer. That is the picture. Everything past that is reading, and reading is where the care begins.

When the archaeologist John Marshall studied this seal in the cities' first great report, he saw something familiar. He saw an early form of , the great god who is lord of beasts and the prince of yogis. Remember the name . It means "Lord of the Creatures," and it is one of Shiva's own names.

Marshall set out his reasons plainly. He wrote of the seated god: "in the first place the figure has three faces … secondly, the head is crowned with the horns of a bull … thirdly, the figure is in a typical yoga attitude … fourthly, he is surrounded by animals, and Siva is par excellence the 'Lord of Animals' (Pasupati)."

You can feel why this reading is loved. If it is right, then Shiva the seated yogi, the lord of beasts, was already honoured on this soil deep in the Bronze Age — and a thread runs straight from these cities into the heart of later Hindu life. That is a moving thought. But a good teacher must also bring the careful doubts, for they are just as honest.

Later scholars went back to the seal and asked simple, searching questions. Those shapes at the sides of the head — are they three faces, or are they the wide ears of a buffalo? Is the seated pose truly a yoga posture, or just the way people sat? And there is a deeper problem. We cannot read a single word these people wrote. With no text to tell us, can we honestly pin any god's name to the figure at all?

So here we reach the Threshold, the calm place where we set both honest readings side by side. Let us look at them together, fairly, the way a patient teacher should — and let us be willing to leave the stone its secret.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differIs the horned seated figure on the Mohenjo-daro seal an early form of Shiva, or a figure whose name is lost to us?

What scholars find

Most scholars today read the seal cautiously and decline to name the figure with confidence. Doris Srinivasan argued that the side projections are best understood as a bull's or buffalo's ears, not human faces, and that the "three faces" and "yoga posture" have been over-read; she noted that in early Vedic texts the god Rudra, later Shiva, is not described as a protector of wild animals, so reading "Shiva-Pashupati" back into the seal is anachronistic. Alf Hiltebeitel and others link the horned imagery instead to the later buffalo-and-Goddess complex rather than to Shiva. The mainstream conclusion is that some broad continuities are possible — a seated posture, horns, an animal-lord theme — but because no Indus text can be read, any confident identification with a named god is unprovable. Scholars stress this is a question about images and evidence, never about whose tradition is older or truer.

As the tradition holds

Within the tradition, and following the reading first set out by John Marshall, many recognise the seated figure as an early form of Shiva in his aspect as Pashupati, the Lord of the Creatures. They point to the horns, the seated pose read as the posture of a yogi, and the ring of wild animals around a still, meditating lord — all of which match Shiva as the great yogi and lord of beasts so well known in later worship. In this reading, the seal is a precious early glimpse of a god still loved today, and a sign that the spiritual life of this land reaches back into the cities themselves, an unbroken thread carried down the ages.

And perhaps that willingness is the real lesson of the seal. Two careful people can look at the same small stone and see different things, each with good reason. The wise way is not to shout one reading down. It is to hold both, to weigh them, and to wait for the evidence we do not yet have.

Sit a moment with the figure among the beasts. Whatever its name, someone long ago felt it worth carving with care. Where in your own life do you meet something old and unexplained, and choose to honour the mystery rather than rush to name it?