The Trimūrti

Ask almost anyone to sum up the Hindu gods in one sentence and you will probably hear this: Brahmā creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys. It is a good sentence. It appears on school charts, in the opening of countless books, and in the sculpture of temples from Tamil Nadu to Bali. But a devotee of Vishnu, a devotee of Shiva and a devotee of the Goddess will each add a quiet “however…” — and the history of the idea is more interesting than the slogan.

Three faces of one work

Trimūrti means “three forms”. The idea is that the one divine reality carries out three great works in every cycle of the universe: creation (sṛṣṭi), preservation (sthiti) and dissolution (saṃhāra or laya). Each is given a face:

• Brahmā, the creator, linked with rajas, the quality of activity;
• Vishnu, the preserver, linked with sattva, the quality of clarity and goodness;
• Shiva (as Rudra), the dissolver, linked with tamas, the quality of rest and inertia.

“Dissolver” is better than “destroyer”. What Shiva ends is a cycle, so that a new one may begin — and his dissolution is often read as grace: the end of what binds us. The three guṇas are explained on Samkhya; the cycles of time on Time & Cosmology. Step through one turn of the wheel:

Seeker’s synthesis This sequence combines several Purāṇic images into one picture. Śaiva Purāṇas tell the birth of Brahmā differently, and each tradition places its own Lord at the start and end of the cycle.

Where the idea comes from

The Vedas have no trimūrti. Brahmā hardly appears in the Ṛgveda; Vishnu and Rudra are there, but as two gods among many. The triad grows later, as the three rise in importance. Historians usually point to these stages:

• The Maitrī Upaniṣad, a late Upaniṣad, identifies Brahmā, Rudra and Vishnu with the three guṇas — the parts of the one Self that are active, dark and good (5.2).
• The epics and Purāṇas, in the first centuries CE, develop the three as creator, preserver and dissolver, though usually with one of them on top.
• Classical poetry gives the idea its most even-handed expression. Kālidāsa, writing around the fifth century, has the gods praise Brahmā in these words:

Later in the same poem, describing the wedding of Shiva and Pārvatī, Kālidāsa states the ideal of perfect equality:

Historians note that the trimūrti remained more a theological idea than a living cult. There was never a large “trimūrti sect”; real devotion flowed to Vishnu, to Shiva and to the Goddess. The triad works best as a map of divine functions, and each tradition then redrew the map with its own Lord at the centre.

Equal three, or one supreme?

Brahmā, the creator

Brahmā (masculine, not to be confused with Brahman, the Absolute) is shown with four faces, looking in the four directions and traditionally linked with the four Vedas. He holds a water-pot, a rosary, a book of the Vedas and a ladle for offerings; his mount is the haṃsa, a swan or goose; his consort is Sarasvatī, goddess of learning and speech. He is often called Prajāpati, “lord of creatures”, Pitāmaha, “grandfather”, and Vidhi, “ordainer”, who in popular belief writes each person’s fate on their forehead at birth — the Tamil talai-viti, “head-writing”. Popular tradition

Why does the creator have so few temples? The Purāṇas give their own answers:

• The pillar of fire. In the Śaiva Purāṇas, Brahmā as a swan and Vishnu as a boar fail to find the ends of a pillar of fire; Brahmā lies that he reached the top, and Shiva, emerging from the pillar, declares that he will not be worshipped. The story of this Liṅgodbhava is told on Shiva.
• Sāvitrī’s curse. A story linked with Pushkar in Rajasthan says that Brahmā began a sacrifice there without his wife Sāvitrī, who was late, and she cursed him to be worshipped almost nowhere else. Popular tradition The Pushkar temple, by its sacred lake, is the most famous of his few temples.

Historians give a simpler answer: as devotion to Vishnu, Shiva and the Goddess grew, the creator, whose work was done, had no great devotional movement of his own. He did not disappear. In Tamil Shiva temples Brahmā has his own niche on the north wall; in Vedic ritual the supervising priest is called the brahman; and in Thailand the four-faced Phra Phrom is hugely popular — his Erawan Shrine in central Bangkok, set up in 1956, draws Thai and Chinese devotees day and night, and similar shrines are common among Chinese Malaysians too. Community practice

Dattātreya: the three in one

In one figure the three gods appear together as a single person: Dattātreya, or simply Datta. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa tells how the sage Atri and his wife Anasūyā performed austerities, and Brahmā, Vishnu and Shiva together appeared and granted them sons from their own portions; Datta is born from Vishnu’s. A much-loved later story says that the three gods, testing Anasūyā’s virtue, came as beggars, and by her power she turned them into three infants. Popular tradition

In art Datta has three heads and six arms, stands under a fig tree with a cow behind him and four dogs at his feet — read by devotees as earth, or dharma, and the four Vedas. He is the great guru of the wandering ascetics, and devotion to him is strongest in Maharashtra and Karnataka, around the saints Śrīpāda Śrīvallabha and Narasiṃha Sarasvatī, whose lives are told in the Marathi Gurucaritra, and pilgrimage places such as Ganagapur. Datta Jayantī falls on the full moon of Mārgaśīrṣa. Community practice See also The Guru.

Elephanta: three faces, one god

On an island in Mumbai harbour, in a sixth-century cave temple now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stands one of the masterpieces of Indian art: a colossal bust of a god with three faces, nearly six metres high. For centuries it was known as the “Trimūrti”, and guidebooks explained it as Brahmā, Vishnu and Shiva.

Scholars now agree it is not. The cave is entirely dedicated to Shiva, and the three faces are all his: a fierce face with moustache and serpents, a calm and majestic face at the centre, and a gentle, feminine face holding a lotus. It is Maheśa or Sadāśiva, Shiva in his all-encompassing form — in Śaiva theology he has five faces, of which a sculpture can show only three, the fourth turned away at the back and the fifth beyond sight. The correction matters: the masterpiece once taken as proof that “Hindus worship three equal gods” is in fact a vision of one God holding terror, peace and tenderness together. The Śaiva reading of the triad, carved in stone.

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Sources & further reading

• Kālidāsa, Kumārasambhava — Hank Heifetz (trans.), The Origin of the Young God: Kālidāsa’s Kumārasaṃbhava (University of California Press, 1985).
• J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad: A Critical Essay, with Text, Translation and Commentary (Mouton, 1962); or E. B. Cowell’s 1870 edition in the Bibliotheca Indica.
• Greg Bailey, The Mythology of Brahmā (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1983).
• Charles Dillard Collins, The Iconography and Ritual of Śiva at Elephanta (SUNY Press, 1988).
• Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of Śiva (Princeton University Press, 1981).
• Antonio Rigopoulos, Dattātreya: The Immortal Guru, Yogin, and Avatāra (SUNY Press, 1998).
• Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (trans.), Hindu Myths (Penguin Classics, 1975) — includes Purāṇic tellings of the Liṅgodbhava.
• Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge University Press, 1996).