A jyotirlinga is not a statue of a god. The word joins jyoti, light, to linga, mark or sign, and the shrines are understood as points where Shiva is present as an unbounded column of light rather than as a form a sculptor gave him. Twelve of them are counted across the subcontinent, from Somnath on the Arabian Sea to Rameshwaram at the southern tip and Kedarnath in the Himalaya — a set that maps the whole of India before India was a country.

Counted by these texts

• Shiva Purana, Koti Rudra Samhita, ch. 1 — 12 — Gives the twelve in the geographic order followed here, naming each by its place — Saurashtra, Srisailam, Ujjain, and so on.
• Dvādaśa Jyotirliṅga Stotra (traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya) — 12 — The same twelve as a memorised verse ("saurāṣṭre somanāthaṃ ca…"). It agrees on the count and on ten of the identifications; for Vaidyanath and Nageshwar it names the shrine without settling which of the competing modern temples is meant, which is where the two live disputes in this set come from.

Places written so far

• Somnath — Rebuilt at least six times on the same stretch of coast — the first of the twelve, and the one whose story is mostly survival.
• Mallikarjuna — Two of the tradition's great circuits stop on the same hill — Shiva as Mallikarjuna, Parvati as Bhramaramba, a few steps apart.
• Mahakaleshwar — Woken before dawn with ash from the river ghats — the one shrine of the twelve where the day begins with a cremation-ground rite.
• Omkareshwar — An island the Narmada splits around, read as the syllable ॐ — and a jyotirlinga the tradition has never settled is one shrine or two.
• Kedarnath — The hardest of the twelve to reach, and the only one with a season: snowed shut half the year, its deity wintering downvalley.
• Bhimashankar — The jyotirlinga at the head of a river: the Bhima is said to rise from the sweat of the fight that put Shiva here.
• Kashi Vishwanath — Pilgrims come here to die: the tradition holds that Shiva speaks the mantra of crossing into the ear of anyone who ends at Kashi.
• Trimbakeshwar — Not a pillar but a hollow in the sanctum floor holding three small faces, which the temple reads as Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.
• Vaidyanath — Three temples in three states are worshipped under this name, and the verse that names the ninth jyotirlinga does not say which.
• Nageshwar — Ten of the twelve are on the map without argument. This is not: one name in the verse, three temples in three states.
• Rameshwaram — Named for its worshipper rather than its god — and the shrine where the tradition says a pilgrimage to Kashi is completed.
• Grishneshwar — The last of the twelve, and the only one whose name the tradition traces to a woman rather than to a god, a sage or a place.

Questions to explore

• Why is Shiva worshipped at these twelve places as light rather than as an image, when almost every other shrine in the tradition gives its deity a form?
• Two of the twelve — Vaidyanath and Nageshwar — are claimed by more than one temple. How did the tradition end up uncertain about its own list?
• Is there an order in which the twelve are meant to be visited, or is the recited sequence just a way of remembering them?