Ekambareswarar Temple: Kanchipuram’s Shrine of the Earth and the Mango Tree

In the temple city of Kanchipuram, about seventy kilometres south-west of Chennai, one great Shiva temple stands for the very ground beneath your feet. Ekambareswarar — Ekambaranathar, the lord of the mango tree — is among the largest temple complexes in India, spreading over some twenty-five acres behind a pale, towering gateway that can be seen from far across the surrounding fields. It is one of the four celebrated Shiva temples of Kanchipuram, a Paadal Petra Sthalam sung by the Tamil saint-poets, and, above all, the temple that represents the element of earth among the five great shrines known as the Pancha Bhoota Sthalams.

Earth among the five elements

Hindu tradition groups five Shiva temples of the south as the Pancha Bhoota Sthalams, each honouring the god as one of the five elements that make up the physical world. Ekambareswarar is the temple of earth; the others are water at Thiruvanaikaval near Tiruchirappalli, fire at Thiruvannamalai, air at Srikalahasti and ether, or sky, at Chidambaram. Here the presiding lingam is revered as a Prithvi Lingam, believed to be formed of earth or sand, and for that reason it is not bathed directly in the usual way. The temple sits at the heart of Kanchipuram’s cluster of shrines: a short walk away are the Kamakshi Amman Temple, home of the goddess bound up with this temple’s own legend, and the older Pallava sandstone Kailasanathar Temple. You can find practical details on the Ekambareswarar Temple on its own page.

Ekamranathar, the lord of the mango tree

The temple takes its name from a single mango tree — eka amra, ‘one mango’ — and its most beloved story turns on that tree. As the legend is told, the goddess Parvati, worshipped here as Kamakshi, was performing penance to win Shiva as her husband, seated beneath the mango tree on the bank of the Vegavathi river. To test her devotion, Shiva is said to have sent the river down in flood towards the sand lingam she had fashioned with her own hands; rather than let it be washed away, she embraced the lingam and shielded it with her body, and tradition holds that the marks of her bangles can still be seen pressed into the stone. Moved by her love, Shiva is believed to have married her here. The mango tree in the inner courtyard is said by devotees to be immensely old — some traditions put it at several thousand years — and its four branches are held to stand for the four Vedas, each said to bear mangoes of a different taste. Whatever the true history, the tree and the sand lingam together make this, in the eyes of pilgrims, the earthly heart of the five elemental shrines.

Pallavas, Cholas and Krishnadevaraya

A temple has stood on this spot for well over a thousand years. Its earliest fabric is credited to the Pallavas, the dynasty that made Kanchipuram its capital, and the Tamil devotional hymns confirm that the shrine was already famous by around the seventh century. The Cholas later rebuilt much of it in granite, adding enclosing walls and pillared halls, but the temple owes its present grandeur above all to the kings of Vijayanagara. In the early sixteenth century Krishnadevaraya, the greatest of those rulers, raised the enormous raja gopuram over the southern entrance — a gateway tower climbing close to fifty-nine metres, nearly a hundred and ninety feet, and long counted among the tallest in South India. Small carved portraits of the king and his queen can still be picked out on it. The same era gave the temple its outermost walled enclosure and its great thousand-pillar hall, a forest of carved columns of the kind you can walk through in the long, shadowed corridors that ring the sanctum.

Visiting

Ekambareswarar is an easy day trip from Chennai and is usually combined with the other temples of Kanchipuram, a city famous in equal measure for its shrines and its silk. The temple is generally open in the morning and again from late afternoon into the evening, and it is worth timing a visit for either end of the day, when the light is kind to the gopuram and the corridors are cooler. Remove your footwear before entering, dress modestly, and allow a good hour or more to walk the enclosures, the pillared halls and the courtyard of the mango tree; some inner areas may be restricted to non-Hindus. To plan a route among the five elemental shrines, see our guide at /india/tamil-nadu/guides/pancha-bhoota-sthalam-shiva-temples, and to weave the temple into a wider day among Kanchipuram’s silk looms and sanctuaries, read /india/tamil-nadu/guides/kanchipuram-silk-and-temples-story.