The Linga Purana is one of the eighteen Mahapuranas, a Shaiva Purana on the worship of Shiva in the linga. Sage Suta, a disciple of Sage Veda Vyasa, tells it to the sages at Naimisharanya, Sage Narada among them; by its own count it is the eleventh of the eighteen Puranas, with eleven thousand verses. Its two parts run to 108 and 55 chapters. Asked what the linga is, Brahma answers that it is pradhana, primal nature, and that Shiva, Parameshvara, is he whose sign it is.
Its seventeenth chapter, the Lingodbhava, tells how the linga arose. As Brahma and Vishnu disputed in the waters of dissolution, a pillar of fire blazing with thousands of flames appeared before them, without beginning, middle or end; Vishnu became a boar and went down, Brahma became a swan and flew up, and for a thousand years neither found its end, until Shiva appeared and Vishnu praised him. The Purana also tells how Shiva was born as Nandi to Sage Shilada, who had asked for a son not born of a womb, and how Vishnu, worshipping Shiva with a thousand names and a lotus for each, offered his own eye when one lotus was missing and received the Sudarshana chakra.
Tradition holds that the night Shiva appeared from the pillar is the night of Maha Shivaratri, and the scene, the Lingodbhava, is carved in the wall behind the sanctum of many Shiva temples. In this collection, at Thiruvannamalai Shiva is worshipped as that column of fire, which the hill itself is held to be, and each year the Karthigai Deepam crowns the hill with a beacon. The Purana's ninety-second chapter praises Varanasi, the city Shiva calls Avimukta, the never-forsaken — in this collection, the city of Kashi Vishwanath.