The Archer Who Also Heals

Yet Rudra is not only a bringer of harm, and it is this double aspect that carries forward into Shiva. The same god who sends disease is also invoked as a healer, the possessor of a thousand remedies, the physician of physicians, the power that can afflict is the power that can cure. This ambivalence is developed most fully in the Shatarudriya, the litany of the hundred names of Rudra found in the Yajurveda, which addresses the god in an extraordinary range of aspects, fierce and benign, and which remains an important Shaiva liturgy to this day.

Over the centuries the fearful outsider Rudra is drawn to the centre and transformed: the epithet Shiva, meaning the auspicious or kindly one, begins as a propitiatory way of addressing the dangerous god, calling him gracious in the hope that he will be so, and in time becomes his chief name. The development from the Vedic archer of the wilderness to the great god Shiva of classical Hinduism is a model case of how an Indian deity grows and is reinterpreted while keeping the essential tension, here between destruction and grace, at the heart of his character.