Know the spirit as the master of the chariot and the body as the chariot.
Know the discerning faculty as the charioteer, and the controlling-sense as the reins.
They call the senses the horses, and sense-objects their paths.
The wise say that the agent of experience is the union of spirit, senses and
controlling-sense.
For the one who lacks understanding, with controlling-sense always unhitched,
the senses are uncontrollable, like unruly horses for the charioteer.
But for the one that has understanding, with controlling-sense ever hitched,
The senses are controllable, like docile horses for the charioteer.
The one who lacks understanding, who is rampant, always impure,
Does not attain the goal but returns to life's flow.
But the one who has understanding, who is restrained, ever pure,
Attains that goal from which one is not born again.
(Kaṭha Upaniṣad, 1.3.3–8)
And the Svetāṣvatara Upaniṣad (4.4) describes the Supreme Being in its creative omnipresence as follows:
You, the indigo bumble-bee,
The green parrot, coppery-eyed,
The cloud with lightning in its belly,
The seasons and the seas.
Boundless, you remain all-pervasive,
You, from whom all worlds are born.
This is but a sample of Upaniśsadic reliance on worldly imagery as an instructive medium. This trend is continued through the ages not only in scriptural texts but in other works too, including texts that might pass for prasthāna-vākyas in various traditions under the broad canopy of Hinduism. Here we have included Tantra and Śākta traditions in so far as they have become Brahminized and Sanskritized (see Chapters 3 and 4). The influence of these traditions, oftn modified, sublimated and ritualized, has become pervasive in Hinduism, extending to the ends of the subcontinental mainland. In a brief study, K.M. Skora writes of the ‘erotic mysticism’ of Abhinavagupta, ‘the Hindu Tantric sage of Kashmir (ca. 975–1025 C.E.)’ (Skora 2007:63). Abhinavagupta was an early Tantric thinker who had a powerful influence within and beyond his tradition. ‘For Abhinavagupta, the experience of Ultimate Consciousness was experienced both in and as orgasmic sexual union. The highest state of awareness was expressed in sexual ritual performance; this unique combination of pure awareness and sexuality in turn charged Abhinavagupta's model of reality and his poetic evocations of Ultimate Consciousness’ (ibid.:64).
Continuing with this sexual theme, we can consider now the verbal imagery of the Gītagovinda, a famous Sanskrit poem composed by Jayadeva (twelfth century C.E.), who came from the area of Bengal. In frankly erotic terms, the poet describes passionate love-making between Kṛṣṇa and a favourite milkmaid lover, Rādhā. No doubt the poem is meant to be a literary and sensual experience, but it is also intended to have religious connotations. Like other literature of this kind, its evocative descriptions may well have been drawn from a pool of stylized imagery shaped through such earlier works as the kāma Sūtra, but in typical Hindu fashion its multi-layered texture speaks to the reader/hearer simultaneously in different ways. For one of the lovers is Kṛṣṇa, already established previously over many centuries in Vaiṣṇava context as a devotional focus paṛ excellence of a loving personal God who out of concern for the world has taken on human form (the Bhagavad Gītā had been composed over a thousand years earlier). Kṛṣṇa's beloved is Rādhā, a persona who had been developing for several centuries as Kṛṣṇa's special companion, and who in a few centuries after the Gītagovindas composition would appear in Gaudiya Vaiṣṇava theology as Kṛṣṇa's counterpart in a ‘binitarian’ conception of the Godhead. It seems that at the time of the composition of the Gītagovinda, a number of bhakti-cults were using the theme of an erotic relationship between Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa to develop this conception. Jayadeva's poem both resulted from and fuelled this approach.
Jayadeva explicitly places the poem in a religious context. In the pithy verse of the first canto, Jayadeva lauds Kṛṣṇa as the subject of a number of well-known avatāras or divine descents into the world of human reckoning.
In the waters, Kṛṣṇa, of the sea of doom,
In the form of the fish you did float
To rescue the Vedas intact,
Gifted to us as life's boat.
Conquer, O Hari, Lord of the world! (1.5) ...
O Kṛṣṇa, when you were the Buddha, it was wondrous to see
That a rebuke you did impart
Against the slaying of animals (scripture's sacrificial decree),
Revealed to a compassionate heart!
Conquer, O Hari, Lord of the world! (1.13) ...
O Krishna, when you appear as Kalki,
To destroy the barbarian hordes,
Like a comet of doom for all to see
Will you wield that dreadful sword!
Conquer, O Hari, Lord of the world! (1.14)
These are just three of ten descents described in the text. It is this divine Kṛṣṇa who engages in passionate love-making with Rādhā in the poem. Is it stretching the imagination unduly to see Jayadeva's portrayal of the intimate, sensual relationship between the two lovers as symbolizing the closeness of the desired relationship between the devotee's soul and its God, as represented by Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa respectively – a relationship that is meant to rise to ecstatic and all-consuming heights? The poem's innuendoes that the lovers are involved in an illicit affair serve all the more poignantly to indicate that in our own lives nothing must stand in the way of whole-hearted commitment to our divine Lover, notwithstanding conventional barriers and complacencies. Generations of Hindus, savants and lay-folk alike, down to the present day, have drawn spiritual nourishment by interpreting the Gītagovinda in this light, and that is perhaps the most important consideration of all.
In marvellous imagery which plays on a similar theme to different effect, the Viraśaiva (or Ligāyat) poet-saint Mahadevi (twelfth century C.E.) expresses in Kannada free verse her anguished devotion, this time to Śiva, her divine Lord:
Like a silkworm weaving
her house with love
from her marrow,
and dying
in her body's threads
winding tight, round
and round,
I burn,
desiring what the heart desires.
Cut through, O Lord,
my heart's greed,
and show me
your way out,
O Lord white as jasmine.
(Ramanujan 1973:116)
And here is a more recent poem from the Bengali, entitled Dust-Temple, from the work of the social commentator and religious visionary, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941):
Chanting, incense, striving worship – cast all this aside,
Behind closed doors, in temple-corner –do you think to hide?
In darkness, hiding in your mind,
Whom will your secret worship find?
Look well about you, friend, and see – there's no God inside!
He's gone where peasant cleaving earth,
Ploughs the ground anew,
Where rocks are split to forge a path,
Where they toil the whole year through.
In sun, in rain, with all He'll stand -
Look there's mud on both His hands! -
Come on, throw off those spotless clothes,
and like Him muck in too!
Deliverance?
Where's that, my friend,
Where's deliverance to be found?
The Lord Himself is chained to all,
The Lord's creation-bound.
Leave off your meditating, friend,
Flower-offerings are now amiss.
Torn clothes, dust that sticks -
Now it's time for this.
Be one with Him in the way of work,
Let sweat pour to the ground.2
These are only a few examples from an inexhaustible stock of verbal images of the manner in which Hindus from different times, backgrounds and religious persuasions have called upon experience of the world to express and share their faith. There is a keen appreciation of the world at work here, based on the common belief that the deity pervades all things and that worldly reality is a transparent medium, if one has but eyes to see, of the deity's active presence. A line from Tagore's poem offers a clue to this perception: ‘The Lord Himself is chained to all, the Lord's creation-bound’. As teaching about the avatāras indicates, the divine engagement with and immersion in the world (pravṛtti) is a free act on the part of the deity.
It is not only verbal images that are used in this way. Lavish use is also made of visual and auditory images, to convey a religious idea and to express an appropriate accompanying mood. The arts of painting, dance, instrumental music, recitation, sculpture and architecture, for instance, have traditionally been developed and patronized in large measure in the service of religion. This is still the case, not only with respect to the pan-Indian, so-called high Sanskrit culture, but also the more localized, popular expressions of these skills. The way in which the epic of Pābūjī is presented with its graphic screen and musical accompaniment exemplifies this point, as does the Pāṭha or recitation in the vernacular of sacred texts (see Chapter 8).
As an icon of Sanskrit literature, the Gītagovinda demonstrates this blended approach. After the prologue, each section begins by recommending the musical mode and mood (rāga) that is calculated to best evoke its content. So the poem can be set to music and enacted by dance. In her edition of the text, Barbara Miller observes:
Established traditions of commentary and manuscripts [of the poem] exist in every part of India. Its songs are an important part of the devotional music and literature of Orissa, Bengal, and South India. The songs were introduced into Kerala in the sixteenth century and are still sung in temples there. Portions of the poem represent one of the major subjects in medieval Rajput painting ... Because of the role of the songs in the nightly worship of the deity in Jagannātha Temple at Puri, they are venerated and sung throughout Orissa. Their performance is an essential aspect of Orissi dance, which has developed through the religious art of temple dancers called Mahāris who still dance Gītagovinda songs before Jagannātha ... In Bengal, the singing of Gītagovinda is especially prominent at an annual spring fair in the village of Kenduli in Birbhum district, which is identified as the birthplace of Jayadeva in Bengali tradition ... In Nepal, the Gītagovinda is sung during the spring celebration in honor of the goddess Sarasvatī, in which worship is offered to the god of love, kāmadeva, and his consort ... In much of South India the poem is sung according to the classical Karnatic system of music ... Gītagovinda songs ... are sung by members of a drummer caste in the courtyard of GuruVāyur and other temples of Kerala while certain rituals are being performed by Brāhmaṇ priests within the sanctuary.
(Miller 1977:ix–xii)
In fact, the landscape of Hindu painting is dotted with portrayals, susceptible of a religious interpretation, from the Gītagovinda theme and others like it. Some of the finest of these are displayed in galleries around the world. Prints and contemporary paintings of these themes – some of them very beautiful – are easily available in India, and adorn numerous homes in the subcontinent and abroad.
It would be appropriate here to comment on Hindu classical dance. This developed in a religious context and was given high profile as part of temple worship. There are a number of regional and other styles as well as source-texts (see Vatsyayan 1968), but the point we wish to stress is the paṛticipative nature of such dance. In form and content, the heart of dance as worship in Hinduism has always been ‘expression’ (abhinaya), i.e. the enacting of various themes. In highly stylized fashion, the aim of such dance is to enact stories and portray characterization from religious sources, not only to tell a story but also to evoke an emotional and personal reaction from the onlookers (who are more than passive ‘observers’). The audience must be drawn into the changing mood and sentiment of the performance. Classically there are eight –sometimes a ninth is added – basic emotions (bhāvas) from which corresponding sentiments or aesthetic moods (rasas) are meant to arise. These rasas are the erotic, the comic, the sympathetic or compassionate, the wrathful, the heroic, the fearsome, the repulsive, the wondrous, and the peaceful. With consummate skill, the expert female or male dancer aims to evoke these rasas in the audience as the content of the dance might dictate, so as to enable the beholder to participate in the religious experience that the performance is. Thus the dance becomes a shared experience. It is not the aim of the dancer to express his or her own individual personality through the enactment of the dance (as a Western performer might seek to do);ideally such individuality must be submerged in the atmosphere of the dance. The Sāṃkhya Kārikā, of which we spoke earlier, gives a very early indication of this goal. When describing the relationship between Nature (Prakṛti) and Spirit (Puruṣa), the author of the Kārikā says: ‘Just as a dancer stops dancing after having shown herself to the audience, so does Prakṛti desist, having displayed herself to the Spirit ... (vr.59) ... I believe there is nothing more sensitive than Prakṛti, who aware that she's been seen never again comes into Puruṣa's sight (vr.61)’. In other words, Prakṛti is self-effacing in the way the traditional dancer should be, in order to accomplish her ends.
Not only divine focuses from a Vaiṣṇava context, but also those from śaiva and Goddess cults, have traditionally been worshipped by reference to empirical experience. Śiva, in particular, is at home in a luxuriant mythology of the sensual. In this context, on occasion, his sexual appetite and prowess seem more striking than Kṛṣṇa's, and more upsetting to conventional sensibilities. In rounded portrayals, Śiva seems to emerge paradoxically as the ‘erotic ascetic’, as W. O'Flaherty (1981a) has described him – as a figure of contrasts, the God of the unexpected. His best-known symbol is the liga, identified with the phallus, usually a smooth, tubular shaft of dark stone standing in the centre of a shallow, tear-drop shaped bowl of the same material which represents the female sexual organ or yoni. Both are ‘aniconic’, i.e. they do not depict the natural features of what they represent, so that it would be difficult to identify them without explanation. Their union in this form can be taken to symbolize God at one with Goddess, God united with the devotee, the reconciliation of opposites in a higher synthesis, the Creative Seed in the Womb of Becoming. These and other insights emanate from the liga-yoni conjunction, its aniconic form a study of contrasts – the warmth of sexual union sited in the cool depths of a million canopied shrines situated around the land, from mighty temples to tiny wayside grottoes in villages or busy urban streets.
I remember once trudging through paddy fields in the company of some pilgrims during the rainy season in Bengal. A great storm was brewing. Before long the rain lashed down under lowering black clouds; the wind whipped and howled about us. Since no shelter was at hand we continued our journey as best we could. Suddenly there was a thunderous flash as a bolt of lightning struck the field a short distance ahead. For a moment, the landscape was bathed in brilliant white light. I remember the expressions of terror on the faces of a number of my companions. Some of them cried out in fear; we instinctively huddled together for safety. But then an old woman smiled and said in Bengali, ‘Don't be afraid. Can't you see that this is Mother's māyā? In other words, can't you see that God our Mother is displaying her wondrous power? This was meant to console, and it worked. We continued more confidently on our way. It is not uncommon for Hindus to interpret the eruptions of elemental phenomena – fire, wind, sea – as manifestations of divine power or agency.
Notwithstanding centuries of repressive influence on Hindu culture by various external agencies, Hindus still retain a robust naivete about the sensual as a more or less translucent veneer of the divine. This is manifested in all sorts of ways, some of which we have no
ted. But we must include in this epiphany the expansive figures of the deities populating temple facades or their terraced roofs, or housed in temples or domestic shrines. Wander about the tangled lanes of Kumartuli, the image-making locality of Kolkata, for example. There, most of the year round, you can follow in the dank gloom of workshop after workshop the skilful emergence – from its rough frame of straw and dark clay to its final, painted, gorgeously apparalled sensual form – the larger-than-life image of the God or Goddess to be worshipped at some forthcoming festival. It has been claimed that the voluptuous form of the Hindu icon symbolizes the expansive influence of the ātman or spirit within. Perhaps. But it signifies no less the traditional Hindu idea of wellbeing, physical health and joy of life, an idea which continues to find its material expression in the mortal frames – displayed ubiquitously on TV screen and billboard – of the surrogate gods and goddesses of another popular pantheon, that of the Indian film star. No willowy figures here! In particular, it seems as if the Hindu idea of womanly beauty has been dominated by a famous description of feminine charms composed many centuries ago by the renowned poet Kālidāsa (ca. fifth century C.E.), in his Sanskrit masterpiece, Meghadūta (‘Cloud-Messenger’). In the poem, a wandering cloud is requested by a lovelorn husband to journey afar to the house of his young wife and convey a message of yearning love. The husband then describes his beloved's appearance:
Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) Page 37