Sharabha and Narasimha in the Linga Purana
शरभावतार
Shiva restrains the Man-lion, as this Purana tells it
After the Man-lion kills Hiranyakashipu, he cannot be calmed. The Linga Purana tells twice how Shiva then restrained him, once briefly at the end of chapter 95 and once at length in chapter 96, through the form called Sharabha. This is a Shaiva account of a Vaishnava story, and it is reported here as the Purana's own view. The same story is also in the Shiva Purana on this site, so this page compares the two.
Where the story starts
Hiranyakashipu persecutes his son Prahlada, who has been devoted to Vishnu since birth and teaches the other daitya boys to say Namo Narayanaya. The weapons sent against the boy do not harm him. Vishnu takes the Man-lion form and tears Hiranyakashipu apart with his claws. The world trembles at his roar. The gods and sages praise him, but his fury does not settle.
The gods go to Shiva
The gods and Brahma go to Shiva on Mandara and praise him with a long hymn of his names. They tell him that Vishnu, in the lion form, is now troubling the universe, and ask him to curb it. Shiva promises them freedom from fear.
The short ending in chapter 95
Here the telling is brief. Shiva takes the form of a Sharabha, a fierce composite creature, approaches the haughty Man-lion and takes his life. The gods worship Shiva. Vishnu leaves the lion form, resumes his own, and slowly departs. Shiva leaves too.
Virabhadra and the long telling in chapter 96
In chapter 96 the sages ask how Shiva took the Sharabha form, and the answer is longer. Shiva recalls Virabhadra, the terrible form of himself that causes the great dissolution, who arrives smiling at the head of countless ganas. Shiva tells him to console the Man-lion first, and to show the terrible form only if that fails. Virabhadra goes in a calm form and speaks as a father to a son. He praises Vishnu's earlier forms, the fish, the tortoise, the boar, the Man-lion and the dwarf, and says the purpose is done and the form should be withdrawn.
The argument
The Man-lion burns hotter. He declares that he is above everything, that Brahma was born from his navel lotus and Shiva from Brahma's forehead, and that he is time and the death of death. Virabhadra laughs and answers point by point. He says Vishnu's power is lent and not his own, that his earlier forms survive only as stories, and that Shiva came out of Brahma's forehead only as a means of creation. He reminds Vishnu of episodes in which, in this Purana's telling, he was bested, among them Skanda's curse on the boar form, the burning at the trident's tip, Daksha's sacrifice and the fight with the sage Dadhichi. He ends by warning that otherwise death will fall like a thunderbolt on a stump, in the form of great Bhairava. These are the Purana's claims, and Vaishnava tellings of Narasimha do not include them.
The Sharabha form
The Man-lion roars and seizes Virabhadra, and a terrible form rises from Shiva's own splendour. It has a thousand arms, matted hair with the crescent moon, wings and a beak, great fangs and claws hard as diamond, and a blue throat. A footnote in the translation explains Sharabha as an eight-legged animal said to be stronger than a lion. At the sight, Narasimha loses his strength like a glow-worm under the sun. Virabhadra ties his legs with his tail, lifts him into the sky, drops him and catches him again, and beats him with his wings until he is unconscious, while the gods follow in fear.
The hymn, and how it ends
Helpless, the Man-lion praises Shiva with a long hymn of names, among them Rudra, Sarva, Ugra, Bhima, Mahakala and Nilakantha, and asks to be saved whenever ignorance and pride overtake him again. The gods thank Virabhadra and note that Rudra has two forms, the terrible and the auspicious. Virabhadra tells them that as water merges with water and ghee with ghee, so Vishnu has merged into Shiva, and then vanishes. The text closes by saying that Shiva has worn the Man-lion's skin as a garment ever since, and that the lion's face is the lead bead in his garland of skulls. The two endings differ: chapter 95 has Vishnu resuming his own form and leaving, while chapter 96 has the skin and face kept as ornaments. This page notes the difference and does not reconcile it.
Compared with the Shiva Purana
Our Shiva Purana tells nearly the same story in the Shata Rudra Samhita, chapters 10 to 12, with Virabhadra's calm approach, the Man-lion's boast, the argument and the Sharabha form. So the story is not unique to the Linga Purana, and the two Puranas present the same sectarian picture. The reading benefits listed at the end differ in places, and both texts recommend it for times of fear. Neither text should be read as a statement about Vishnu worship as practised today.
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), chapters 95 and 96, checked against page images of the printed book for the main passages. It is condensed. Some pages of the long hymn in chapter 96 were not individually checked, and the Sanskrit was not consulted. The Shiva Purana comparison rests on our own translation on this site.