The story of
Akka mahadevi goes like this: She was a very beautiful lady who was a great devotee
of Lord Shiva from the childhood. She never felt like getting married as she was
worshippping the Lord,as her husband. But the king of the place got attracted
towards her beauty and convinced her father to marry Akkamaha devi. She took it
as the divine will and married the king on 2 conditions that the king , who was
by then in a religion which was not vaidika should convert himself as a follower
of sanatana dharma and the second that he should not touch her till she finished
her Shiva dixa. As the king was very keen in marrying her, he immediately
conveyed his acceptance for the 2 conditions and had the task fulfilled.
After few months passed post the marriage, and she was
still in her dixa, the kinig couldn’t control
his desire to own her as wife and went and touched her. She was so upset with
that action of him and said “ as you
are attracted towards this mere body
bcoz of the beautiful covering it has, come, and satify your craving”. Saying so she removed her outfit
and threw it on his face to stand nacked covering her body with her long hair. At
this completely unexpected reaction, the king got shocked and seeing her bear
bodied, remembered the the gurus of the religion he followed and just
prostrated before her with all respect and devotion. He thus became her first
desciple. She then left that place and became the desciple of Basaveswara, the
great Shiva bhakta and spent the rest of her life in complete Shiva worship.
The caves we see today in
Srisailam are the place where she did penance for Lord Shiva for 40 years. Later
she went to Kadalivanam and got kaivalya there by becoming one with the Shiva
there. Looking at the caves, one can
understand how deep her penance was, since there was not even proper place in
the cave to sit comfortably and the way to reach the cave was not so easy to
access, especially in those days. She could do penance for a long time there as
she was already a grat soul requiring nothing as per bodily comforts.
As the cave appears
to be so narrow that a single person can go in at a time, care should be taken
that not a big crowd enters the cave at a stretch. This can lead to suffocation
due to lack of oxygen. One should enter
inside the cave with proper light in hand and should be able to walk with heads
bent. The one hour boat ride to reach the caves is definitely a feast to the
eyes and nature lovers. The same bot
rides takes one to kadalivanam too, but one has to walk 8 more km to reach that
place, which is a treck up the hills.
The boat ride starts from patalaganga and drops at the caves.
