The Mahabharata's thirteenth book, the Anushasana Parva, is the epic's great storehouse of instruction delivered from Bhishma's deathbed of arrows, and it holds both of Hinduism's most famous name litanies. Beside the Vishnu Sahasranama stands the Shiva Sahasranama, and the epic gives it a frame of unusual interest, Krishna himself is the reciter, telling how he undertook austerities and received the thousand names from the sage Upamanyu, whose own devotion to Shiva had been rewarded with the vision of the god.
Vaishnava and Shaiva devotion are thus interlocked at the source, Vishnu's avatar reciting Shiva's praise, a point Indian tradition has never tired of drawing out against sectarian rivalry. The names themselves range across Shiva's whole character, the steady one and the pillar at the litany's opening, the lord of sleep and of cattle, the wearer of matted locks, the blue throated drinker of poison, the wild archer and the gentle healer, the dancer, the ascetic seated on Kailasa, destruction and grace named in alternation. The litany exists in several versions beyond the epic, in the Linga Purana and Shiva Purana among others, differing in names and arrangement, and the tradition treats the multiplicity easily, a god of eleven hundred aspects being under no obligation to a single list. Kisari Mohan Ganguli's complete Victorian translation of the epic put the Anushasana version into English.