mahāmṛtyuñjayāṣṭakam

Eight verses to Shiva as the conqueror of death, and the first states the claim the whole hymn rests on without softening it: Mrityunjaya, supreme lord, destroyer of the world's disease — by meditation on you, lord of the gods, even one who has reached death lives. The second gives the form to hold while doing it, and it is the five-faced one: five faces, ten arms, ten feet, the sun and moon at the rim and the moon at the brow, attended by the ganas, with the mountain's daughter at his left side — I salute the form that is the destruction of the great death. The closing verse makes an unusually generous concession for a text of this kind: even if it is read at the wrong times, out of laziness, without occasion and with a mind lacking faith, it still turns death away.