Ekadas Rudra

In the series of little known places in India, this time I bring you Mangrauni, a non-descript village on the outskirt of a small district town of Madhubani in Bihar. What is has - Probably few villagers, a couple of temples and lot of ponds (waterbody). You see we don’t have lakes and tanks – we call them ponds or Pokhars or Talaabs. Even in Madhubani town, I counted 10, way back in 1983 and stopped the process. Who get what I mean, right! So, back to Mangrauni – it is this village that you find a temple called Ekadas Rudra Mahadev temple.

It is said that Shiva has eleven forms of Rudra and his mantra is – “Om namo sivay” but in this temple, it is eleven letter matra – “Om namo sivay, Om ekadas rudray” pertaining to 11 Rudra mentioned in Ekadas Rudrabhishek. It is said that listening to this, Kanchi seer said - “ if today Aadi Guru Shankaracharya were here, he would certainly enchant this mantra”. He is said have told - “this is the only Temple in the whole world of its kind”.  Reason is simple – it has all the eleven Rudra:

11 Shivalingas

• Mahadev
• Shiv
• Maha Rudra
• Shankar
• Neel Lohit
• Ishan Rudra
• Vijay Rudra
• Bheem Rudra
• Devdeva
• Bhavod Bhav
• Adityatmak Srirudra.

Ekadas Rudra is also one of the biggest Hindu festivals in Indonesia, observed every 100 years, last completed in May 1979. But if you look at the largest temple in the world – Angkor Wat, in Combodia, you can easily understand the reasoning.

A disputed story of carvings on the shivlingas needs proper historic and evidence based verification; nevertheless, I was mesmerized to see all those carvings of Bhagwan Ram, Bajrang Bali, sun, snakes, Sudarshan Chakra etc. We had reached the temple in the evening when it was time for avishek and aarti. The sloka chant during aarti is equally captivating. A divine and spell-bounding  mesmerizing experience indeed!