Shankara

(“auspicious”) Epithet of the god
Shiva. With the honorific suffix
acharya (“teacher”), this is also the
name of the most significant figure in
the Advaita Vedanta philosophical
school, Shankaracharya, who is popularly considered to be Shiva incarnate. As noted above, the generally
accepted meaning of the name
622
Shalagram
Believed to be a manifestation of the god Vishnu,
a shalagram is a black stone that contains the
fossilized spiral shell of a prehistoric sea creature.
Shankara has intensely positive connotations, yet the verb shank, from
which this name is almost certainly
derived, has associations with doubt,
uncertainty, and anxiety. This sort of
ambivalence has a long association
with Shiva; the earliest accepted reference, in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, mentions both his death-dealing arrows, and his kindness to his
devotees (bhakta). The traditional
meaning of this name may thus be a
form of propitiation—knowing that
Shiva wields awesome and unpredictable power but describing him as
“auspicious” in the hope that he will
show his kinder side.