If Krishna in the Gita identifies himself with time, the Shaiva traditions go one step further and name Shiva Mahakala: great time, or, in the reading the tradition itself prefers, the one beyond time, who swallows time as time swallows everything else. The name is most closely tied to Ujjain, where the Mahakaleshwar temple houses one of the twelve jyotirlingas and where the day still opens with the bhasma aarti, the linga worshipped with sacred ash before dawn. Ash is the substance that remains after fire has finished; offering it to Mahakala is a small daily rehearsal of the end that time brings to every form.
Ujjain’s association with time is not only devotional. In classical Indian astronomy the city sat on the prime meridian: the Surya Siddhanta and the astronomers who followed it reckoned longitude from a line running through Ujjain, much as modern maps reckon it from Greenwich. Ujjain was, quite literally, where Indian astronomers set the zero of their clocks, and the observatory Jai Singh II built there in the eighteenth century continued that role. The fact that the city of Mahakala was also the reference point of astronomical time is one of those convergences this tradition produces often: a theological idea and a practical measurement sharing the same address.
The feminine form of kala is Kali, and the iconography follows the grammar. Kali is the power of time in motion, dark because time devours light and form alike, garlanded with the heads of what has already passed. She stands on Shiva lying beneath her, still, and the image is usually read as a statement about the relationship between the two: time as active power, Shakti, moving over a ground that does not move. In that reading Mahakala is not a bigger clock but the stillness in which the clock runs, the witness that time presupposes and cannot touch. Other traditions took up the name too; in Tibetan Buddhism Mahakala became a fierce protector deity, a sign of how widely the idea travelled.
Read together, Krishna’s kalo’smi and Shiva’s Mahakala describe the same structure from two angles. Time is real and total within manifestation: nothing born escapes it. And there is, the tradition insists, something prior to it, not a very long duration but the absence of duration altogether. Most of this series will stay inside time, among its units, stories and calendars. Mahakala is here near the start as a reminder of where the series is ultimately heading.
Part 3 of 30 — Series V: What Time Is Made Of
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