ருத்ராத்யாய ஸ்துதிஃ

A verse rendering of the Shatarudriya — the Rudra chapter of the Yajurveda — given by its colophon to Ganesha and taken from the third part of the Shiva Rahasya. It exists because the Vedic anuvakas are hard to recite without training, and this puts their substance into shlokas that anyone can read. The meditation that opens it is one of the great images of the Shaiva corpus: a crystal linga blazing out from the underworld through the sky to the ends of the world-egg, the full moon shining at its crown and vomiting nectar, the whole of it endlessly bathed in that flood. What follows takes the anuvakas in order across eighty-odd verses, and the ash-smeared, serpent-wound, moon-crowned Shambhava forms crowd the opening of it.