Vaidyanath, Parli

Ravana goes first to Mount Kailasa to worship Shiva, and Shiva is not moved. So he goes to a grove on the southern side of the Himalaya, digs a pit, kindles a fire in it, installs an image of Shiva beside it and begins a sacrifice. He keeps the hardest disciplines the seasons allow: in summer he stands among five fires, in the rains he lies on the bare ground, in winter he stands in water. Shiva still does not come.

Ravana begins to cut off his own heads and offer them, one at a time. When nine are gone and one remains, Shiva appears. He restores the nine heads without pain and grants Ravana his wish and a strength no one can match.

Ravana asks for one more thing: to take Shiva, in the form of his linga, home to Lanka. Shiva is reluctant. He agrees, with a condition. Wherever the linga is set down on the ground, there it will stay, fixed.

Ravana accepts and sets off. On the way, by Shiva's own maya, he is seized by an urgent need to urinate. He hands the linga to a cowherd and asks him to hold it. Ravana is gone for about an hour. The cowherd, unable to bear the weight any longer, puts the linga down.

It does not move again. The text describes it as made of the essence of diamond, fixed where the cowherd placed it. It is called Vaidyanatheshvara. The gods, led by Vishnu and Brahma, come, worship it, consecrate it, and name it Vaidyanatha, and later in the chapter Ravana himself acknowledges that Shiva stayed at that spot permanently under that name.

The chapter never names the place where the cowherd set the linga down. The Purana's list of twelve Jyotirlingas locates Vaidyanatha only as being "in the cremation ground". Parli, in Maharashtra's Beed district, is one of several places that identify themselves as that spot, alongside Deoghar in Jharkhand and Baijnath in Himachal Pradesh. The story belongs to all three claims equally; it does not decide between them.