Nandi's Birth and Coronation in the Linga Purana
नन्दीश्वराभिषेक
The sage who asked for a son, and the son who was Shiva himself
The Linga Purana tells Nandi's story in chapters 42 and 43, with Nandi himself narrating to a sage. The sage Shilada wins a deathless son by austerity, Shiva takes birth as that son, the boy is told he will live only a year, and he answers the prophecy by meditating on Shiva and receives the headship of the ganas. This page follows the Linga Purana's own telling, which differs in several places from the Nandikeshvara chapters of our Shiva Purana.
Shilada's austerity
The brahmin sage Shilada has been offered a boon by Indra, but he turns away from that and gives himself to austerity before Mahadeva. A thousand divine years pass as though a moment. An anthill rises around him, worms and biting insects eat at him, and he is left skin and bone, standing like a wall. Shiva thinks of him, touches him with his hand, and his weariness goes. Shiva comes with Uma and his ganas, says he is pleased, and offers a son who is omniscient and knows all the scriptures. Shilada asks for a son who is not born from a womb and who does not die.
Shiva agrees to be born
Shiva answers that Brahma, the sages and the gods had earlier prayed to him to take birth, and that he will now be born as Shilada's son, called Nandin. The father of the worlds will become the sage's son, and the sage in a sense his father. Then he disappears.
The child in the sacrificial ground
Nandi describes the birth in the first person. At the place where his father had prepared the ground for a sacrifice, the child appears at Shiva's command, blazing like the fire at the end of an age. Clouds rain, heavenly beings sing and Vishnu showers flowers. The infant has matted hair and a crown, three eyes and four arms holding a trident, an axe, a mace and a thunderbolt, with diamond-hard fangs, earrings and a voice like thunder. Brahma, Indra and the great sages praise him, and a long list of gods stands around him, among them Vishnu, Rudra, Indra, Ambika, the planets and elements, Dharma and many goddesses. Shilada bows and says that since the child protects him and the worlds he must be called his father. Because he delights his parents he will be named Nandin, and Shilada asks him to delight the ancestors who have gone to Rudra's world. He asks pardon for having treated the lord as a son and says that his fortune is beyond that of gods and demons, since the unchanging lord has been born in his own sacrificial ground.
A human boyhood
Shilada takes the child home, as a poor man brings home found treasure. At the hut Nandi puts aside his divine form and takes a human one, and his divine memory fades for a reason the text does not give. Shilada, seeing a mere human child, grieves, then performs the birth rites and teaches him the Vedas with their branches, medicine, archery, music, and the signs of horses, elephants and men.
The prophecy
When Nandi has completed seven years, two divine sages, Mitra and Varuna, come to the hermitage at Shiva's bidding. They look at the boy again and again and say that although he has mastered all the scriptures, he will not live beyond a year, and that they have never seen such a thing. Shilada embraces his son and cries out in grief, then falls to the ground. The people of the hermitage gather, make protective amulets and perform rites to turn away the evil, praise Shiva, and offer ten thousand blades of grass dipped in honey into the fire with the Tryambaka mantra. Father and grandfather lie as though dead.
Nandi meets Shiva in the river
Nandi, afraid of death, walks round them and goes to a river. Standing in the middle of it he repeats the Rudra mantra and meditates on Sadashiva, with five faces and ten arms, in the lotus of his heart. Shiva appears with Uma and the crescent moon on his head and asks him why he is afraid. He says the two sages were sent by him, that Nandi is like himself, and that this body is the worldly one, whereas the form that Shilada, the gods and the sages had seen at the birth was the divine one. He adds that happiness and misery come one after the other in this world and that a wise person tries to be free from rebirth through a womb.
What Shiva gives him
Shiva touches Nandi, looks at Uma and the leaders of the ganas, and declares that Nandi and his father will be ageless and deathless, free from pain, with Shiva's own vigour, and will be his favourite chief of the ganas and always at his side. Shiva takes off his lotus garland and ties it on Nandi, who then looks like a second Shankara with three eyes and ten arms. Shiva asks what boon he would like.
The five rivers
Shiva takes water from his matted hair, tells it to be a river and casts it down. It flows white, full of lotuses and lilies, and he names it Jatodaka and says that bathing in it frees a person from sin. He presents Nandi to Uma as her son, and she kisses and strokes him and bathes him with three pourings of water, which flow away as a river with three branches called Trisrotas. Shiva's bull bellows with joy and from that sound a river called Vrishadhvani begins. The sun showers water on Shilada and it becomes Svarnodaka, and a fifth river from the golden crown becomes Jambunadi. The text says the five flow near Japyeshvara, and a footnote of the translators names the confluence of the five rivers Panchanada. It adds that one who bathes at Panchanada and worships Japyeshvara attains identity with Shiva.
The crown and the beginning of the coronation
Shiva sets a golden crown made by Vishvakarman on Nandi's head and fits earrings of diamond and lapis lazuli. He tells Uma that he will make Nandi lord of the goblin hosts and leader of the ganas and asks what she thinks. Bhavani is delighted and says he is her son. Shiva then remembers the chiefs of the ganas, and chapter 44 begins as they arrive in crores, each with weapons in a thousand arms, three eyes and matted hair, offering to do whatever he wishes, even to dry the oceans or bind Indra. The rest of the coronation follows in that chapter, which this page does not retell.
How this compares with our Shiva Purana pages
The Shata Rudra Samhita on this site also gives the Nandikeshvara avatara and his abhisheka and marriage. The two Puranas share Shilada, the wish for a deathless son, the early-death prophecy and Nandi's rise to the leadership of the ganas, but they differ in the details, so read them side by side rather than expecting one to match the other. The pronouncement that Nandi is ageless and deathless is the text's own statement about him, not a promise offered to the reader.
Read the source chapters
Source note
Retold in our own words from the English translation of the Linga Purana by a board of scholars led by J.L. Shastri (Motilal Banarsidass), Part 1, chapters 42 and 43 and the opening of chapter 44 (pages 171 to 175), read line by line against the book's text. It is condensed and does not reproduce the translation. The chapter 37 account of Shilada's earlier request to Indra is not covered.