Many different stories are told about the birth of Ganesha, but one of the best known begins with Parvati taking a bath and longing for someone to keep Shiva from barging in on her, as was his habit. (This is yet another example of the ritus interruptus, the interruption of a sleeping, meditating, or conferring god or king or of an amorous couple or a bathing woman or goddess.) As she bathes, she kneads the dirt that she rubs off her body into the shape of a child, who comes to life. When Shiva sees the handsome young boy (or when the inauspicious planet Saturn glances at it, in some variants that attempt to absolve Shiva of the inverted Oedipal crime), the child’s head falls off; it is eventually replaced with the head of an elephant, sometimes losing part of one tusk along the way.65 Thus, just as Skanda is the child of Shiva alone, Ganesha is the child of Parvati alone—indeed a child born despite Shiva’s negative intervention at several crucial moments. Ganesha’s name means “Lord of the Common People” (gana meaning the “common people”) or “Lord of the Troops” (the ganas being the goblin hosts of Shiva, of whom Ganesha is the leader). He is the god of beginnings, always worshiped before any major enterprise, and the patron of intellectuals, scribes, and authors.
Parvati’s problematic relationship with her son Viraka (“Little Hero”), usually equated with Skanda, is narrated in several Puranas, of which the earliest is the Matsya Purana, dated to the Gupta age, though this passage may be later and is reproduced, with variations, in the still later Padma and Skanda Puranas:
THE SPLITTING OF GAURI AND THE GODDESS KALI
One day the god Shiva teased his wife, the goddess Parvati, about her dark skin; he called her “Blackie” [Kali] and said that her dark body against his white body was like a black snake coiled around a pale sandalwood tree. When she responded angrily, they began to argue and to hurl insults at each other. Furious, she went away to generate inner heat in order to obtain a fair, golden skin. Her little son Viraka, stammering in his tears, begged to come with her, but she said to him, “This god chases women when I am not here, and so you must constantly guard his door and peep through the keyhole, so that no other woman gets to him.”
While she was gone, an antigod named Adi took advantage of her absence to attempt to kill Shiva. He took the illusory form of Parvati and entered Shiva’s bedroom, but Shiva, realizing that this was not Parvati but an antigod’s magic power of illusion, killed Adi. When the goddess of the wind told Parvati that Shiva had been with another woman, Parvati became furious; in her tortured mind she pictured her son and said, “Since you abandoned me, your mother who loves you so, and gave women an opportunity to be alone with Shiva, you will be born among humans to a mother who is a heartless, hard, numb, cold stone.” Her anger came out of her body in the form of a lion, with a huge tongue lolling out of a mouth full of sharp teeth. Then the god Brahma came to her and granted her wish to have a golden body and to become half of Shiva’s body, in the form of the androgyne. She sloughed off from her body a dark woman, named the goddess Kali, who went away to live in the Vindhya Mountains, riding on the lion.
Parvati, now in her golden skin [Gauri, “The Fair” or “The Golden”], went home, but her son Viraka, who did not recognize her, stopped her at the door, saying, “Go away! An antigod in the form of the Goddess entered here unseen in order to deceive the god, who killed him and scolded me. So you cannot enter here. The only one who can enter here is my mother, Parvati, who loves her son dearly.” When the Goddess heard this, she thought to herself, “It wasn’t a woman; it was an antigod. I cursed my son wrongly, when I was angry.” She lowered her head in shame and said to her son, “Viraka, I am your mother; do not be confused or misled by my skin; Brahma made me golden. I cursed you when I did not know what had happened. I cannot turn back my curse, but I will say that you will quickly emerge from your human life, with all your desires fulfilled.” The Goddess then returned to Shiva, and they made love together for many years.66
The goddess Parvati sloughs her black outer sheath (the goddess Kali, often called Kaushika [“the Sheath”]) to reveal her golden inner form (Gauri). (This act of splitting apart reverses the act of coming together that creates the South India goddess from the head of one woman and the body of another.) In the end the golden Gauri, goddess of the breast, has the son, and the dark goddess Kali, very much a tooth goddess, has the toothy lion.
But the original Parvati, who contains both of the other two goddesses in her in nuce, is already a cruel mother. Not only does she ignore her son’s pitiful pleas as she goes away, abandoning him, but she even throws his words back in his face when she curses him, accusing him of abandoning her by failing to restrain his father’s sexuality. Viraka fails to recognize her when she returns, mistaking her for a non-Parvati (just as his father had mistaken the antigod for Parvati); his failure to recognize her seems to be superficial—she has changed the color of her skin—but it has deeper, darker overtones, for he believes his mother loves him, and this woman has cursed him (though he does not yet know it); indeed she has cursed him to have (another) unloving mother. The peeled-off goddess Kali is banished to the liminal area of the Vindhya Mountains (the southern region that composers of ancient Sanskrit texts in the north of India regarded as beyond the Hindu pale, the place to dump things that you did not want in the story anymore), and so she is called Vindhya-vasini (“She Who Lives in the Vindhyas”). (The myth may be reversing the historical process, for the goddess Kali may have come from the Vindhyas, or from the south in general, into Sanskrit culture.) The remaining golden form, the one that counteracted her son’s curse, becomes the female half of the androgyne.
Though Shiva and Parvati are depicted in both sculpture and painting together with Skanda or Ganesha or both, clearly this is not a Leave It to Beaver type of family: Each member is really a separate individual, with a separate prehistory and a separate role in Hindu worship. Nor are they joined together as members of a family usually are: Parvati does not bear the two children that are depicted with her, nor does Shiva father them in the normal way. The family represents, rather, the forces of the universe that humans must sometimes contend with, sometimes call on for help, though they are often clustered together in a group that presents the form, if not the function, of a family. The family is a way of grouping them together in an image that is “with qualities” (sa-guna), in this case, the qualities of a human family, while in their more commonly worshiped forms, they are not a family at all.
ANIMALS
VEHICLES
Many Shaiva family portraits include the pets. Skanda has his peacock, Ganesha his bandicoot, Shiva his bull, and Parvati her lion. For this is another way, in addition to full-life avatars and periodic theophanies, in which the Hindu gods become present in our world. Most gods and goddesses (apart from the animal, or animal from the waist or neck down, or animal from the waist or neck up forms of the deities) are accompanied by a vehicle (vahana), an animal that serves the deity as a mount. In contrast with the Vedic gods who rode on animals you could ride on (Surya driving his fiery chariot horses, Indra on his elephant Airavata or driving his bay horses), the sectarian Hindu gods sit cross-legged on their animals or ride sidesaddle, with the animals under them presented in profile and the gods full face. Sometimes the animal merely stands beside the deity, both of them stationary.
The Vedic Indra also rode on the Garuda bird, which later became the mount of Vishnu. Garuda is sometimes represented as an eagle from the waist down or the neck up, otherwise anthropomorphic. Some South Indian Vishnu temples have a special landing post for Garuda to alight upon. Shiva’s vehicle is the bull Nandi, a symbol of Shiva’s masculine power and sexuality; the bull expresses something of the god’s own nature as well as his ambivalent relationship to that nature: As the greatest of all ascetics and yogis, Shiva “rides” his own virility in the sense that he controls, harnesses, and tames it. We have met Chandika’s lion, and the goddess Kali’s lion or tiger (which she sometimes lends to Parvati too). Skanda’s vehicle is the peacock, a brilliant
choice that needs no explanation for anyone who has ever seen a general in full ceremonial dress, medals and all.
Even some of the half-animal deities have their own entirely animal vehicles: Ganesha’s vehicle is an Indian bandicoot or bandicoot rat, a large (six-pound) rodent (the name is derived from the Telugu word for “pig-rat,” pandhikoku), chosen for Ganesha not because elephants (or even elephant-headed, potbellied, anthropomorphic gods like Ganesha) are likely to canter about on rats, however big, but because rats, like elephants, can get through anything to get what they want, and Ganesha is the remover of obstacles. The bandicoot shares Ganesha’s nimbleness of wit, as well as his path-clearing abilities. The rat has now more recently become a mouse, with intellectual pretensions appropriate to Ganesha; there are modern representations of Ganesha in front of a computer with his bandicoot serving as the mouse.67
Images of animals are very old indeed in India, as we saw in the Indus Valley, but they may have become newly attractive in the Gupta period because of the need to produce visual representation of icons and emblems to distinguish different gods under sectarianism. The vahana is also a vehicle in the sense that a particular drama is sometimes said to be the perfect vehicle for a particular actor, or in the sense of (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) “a material embodiment or manifestation, of something.” Or perhaps it is a vehicle in the sense that mosquitoes may “carry” malaria. Wherever the animal is found, the deity is also present. Thus the animals carry the gods into our world as a breeze “carries” perfume. This may be seen as a more particularized expression of the basic Hindu philosophy that the ultimate principle of reality (brahman) is present within the soul of every living creature (atman).
HORSE SACRIFICES
In the horse sacrifice, as we have seen in the ancient texts as well as in the Mahabharata, the chief queen pantomimed copulation with the slaughtered stallion, which was said to be both the sacrificing king (to whom he transferred his powers) and a god, usually Prajapati or Indra. Indra is one of several gods designated as the recipients of the horse sacrifice, but he himself not only sacrifices (as the Vedic gods did, in “Poem of the Primeval Man”) but is unique in that as a king (albeit of the gods), he is famed for having performed more horse sacrifices than anyone else and is jealous of this world’s record (a jealousy that made him steal the hundredth horse of Sagara, whose sons dug out the ocean searching for it). Indra thus (unlike the usual human worshiper, who may combine the roles of sacrificer and victim) normally combines the roles of sacrificer and recipient. That paradox came to the attention of the author of this medieval commentary on the Ramayana: “There are two kinds of gods, those who are gods by birth and those who have more recently become gods by means of karma, such as Indra. The gods by birth receive sacrifice but cannot offer sacrifice; the karma gods, like Indra, perform sacrifice and pose obstacles to sacrificers.”68 The higher gods include not only the rest of the Vedic gods but the newer gods, the bhakti gods.
In the Harivamsha (“The Dynasty of Vishnu”), an appendix to the Mahabharata that functions much like a Purana, Indra combines all three roles: sacrificer, recipient, and victim:
JANAMEJAYA’S HORSE SACRIFICE
Janamejaya was consecrated for the sacrifice, and his queen approached the designated stallion and lay down beside him, according to the rules of the ritual. But Indra saw the woman, whose limbs were flawless, and desired her. He himself entered the designated stallion and mingled with the queen. And when this transformation had taken place, Indra said to the priest in charge of the sacrifice, “This is not the horse you designated. Scram.”
The priest, who understood the matter, told the king what Indra had done, and the king cursed Indra, saying, “From today, Kshatriyas will no longer offer the horse sacrifice to this king of the gods, who is fickle and cannot control his senses.” And he fired the priests and banished the queen. But then the king of the Gandharvas calmed him down by explaining that Indra had wanted to obstruct the sacrifice because he was afraid that the king would surpass him with the merits obtained from it. To this end, Indra had seized upon an opportunity when he saw the designated horse and had entered the horse. But the woman with whom he had made love in that way was actually a celestial nymph; Indra had used his special magic to make the king think that it was the queen, his wife. The king of the Gandharvas persuaded the king that this was what had happened.69
Like his snake sacrifice, Janamejaya’s horse sacrifice is interrupted. The Arthashastra (1.6.6) remarks that Janamejaya used violence against Brahmins and perished, and a commentator on that text adds that Janamejaya whipped the Brahmins because he suspected them of having violated his queen, though in reality it was Indra who had done it.70 At the start of this episode, Janamejaya defies Indra implicitly simply by doing the extravagant sacrifice at all, making him the object of the god’s jealousy.71 At the end, he defies Indra explicitly, by excluding him from the sacrifice because the god has spoiled it.
This story of Janamejaya, which ends with an exclusion of the deity and a refusal to worship him (reflecting the historical fact that Indra, a Vedic god, was not worshiped any longer in the Puranic period), is thus in many ways an inversion of the story of Daksha, which begins with the exclusion of the god Shiva and ends with the promise that Daksha will in fact sacrifice to Shiva, after Shiva has both spoiled and accomplished the sacrifice (reflecting the historical fact that Shiva, a non-Vedic god, was not worshiped until the Puranic period). This inversion was made possible in part because Indra, the god of conventional Vedic religion, the most orthodox of gods, is in many ways the opposite of Shiva, the unconventional outsider.72
In the epilogue to the story of Indra and Janamejaya’s queen, the king is persuaded (by an appropriately equine figure, a Gandharva, a kind of centaur) that it all was an illusion. This is a common device used to undo what has been done in a myth, as is the device of the magical double that conveniently replaces a woman in sexual danger. (Or who is said to have replaced her; is the Gandharva telling the truth?) Here it also recapitulates precisely what the central episode of the myth has just done: It has revealed the illusion implicit in the sacrifice, the illusion that the sacrificial horse is the god Indra and not merely a horse. The horse sacrifice is similarly demystified and satirized in a twelfth-century text in which Kali, the incarnate spirit of the Kali Age, watches the coupling of the sacrificer’s wife with the horse of the horse sacrifice and announces, being no pandit, that the person who made the Vedas was a buffoon,73 which is to say that Kali takes it literally and misses its symbolism. As the cachet of the horse sacrifice and of animal sacrifices in general fell during this period (as satires like this suggest), kings often endowed temples instead of sacrificing horses74—sacrificial substitution in a new key.
RESTORING THE MAHABHARATA
Puranic rituals often replaced Vedic rituals. We have noted how Vedic rituals were devised to mend the broken parts of human life. Puranic rituals are devised for this too but also to cure the ills of previous ages and, indeed, of previous texts. Though many Puranas offer their hearers/readers Release, most of them are devoted to the more worldly goals of the path of rebirth, and the end of the line is not absorption into brahman but an eternity in the heaven of the sectarian god to whom the Purana is devoted. Moksha is ineffable, but the texts often describe the bhakti heaven.
The Puranas return to the moral impasses of the Mahabharata, some of which were resolved only by the illusion ex machina, and offer new solutions that were not available to the authors of that text. Yudhishthira’s dilemma in hell was occasioned by a kind of transfer of merit: Yudhishthira sent a cool breeze to ease the torment of his brothers and Draupadi, as well as a few other relatives. That concept, merely sketched there, is more fully developed a few centuries later in the Markandeya Purana:
MERIT TRANSFER IN HELL
Once, when his wife named Fatso [Pivari] had been in her fertile season, King Vipashchit did not sleep with her, as it was his duty to do, but slept i
nstead with his other, beautiful wife, Kaikeyi. He went to hell briefly to expiate this one sin, but when he was about to leave for heaven, the people in hell begged him to stay, since the wind that touched his body dispelled their pain. “People cannot obtain in heaven or in the world of Brahma,” said Vipashchit, “such happiness as arises from giving release [nirvana] to suffering creatures.” And he refused to leave until Indra agreed to let the king’s good deeds [karma] be used to release those people of evil karma from their torments in hell—though they all went from there immediately to another womb that was determined by the fruits of their own karma (14.1-7, 15.47-80).
The episode is clearly based on the Mahabharata, and uses some of the same phrases. (It also gives the sexually preferred second wife in this story the name of the sexually preferred second wife in the Ramayana, Kaikeyi.) But significantly, the people in hell now are not related to the king in any way; his compassion extends to all creatures. Now also the text begins to speak of Buddhist/Hindu concepts like nirvana and the transfer of karma, making it possible for the real, heaven-bound king to release real sinners from a real hell. Karma and samsara have the last word, though: In the end, having passed through heaven and hell, the sinners are reborn according to their just deserts, a theory that the final chapter of the Mahabharata had chosen not to invoke.
The Puranas expand upon the basic Mahabharata concept of the time-sharing aspects of heaven and hell, adding psychological details:
Sometimes a man goes to heaven; sometimes he goes to hell. Sometimes a dead man experiences both hell and heaven. Sometimes he is born here again and consumes his own karma; sometimes a man who has consumed his karma dies and goes forth with just a very little bit of karma remaining. Sometimes he is reborn here with a small amount of good and bad karma, having consumed most of his karma in heaven or in hell. A great source of the suffering in hell is the fact that the people there can see the people who dwell in heaven; but the people in hell rejoice when the people in heaven fall down into hell. Likewise, there is great misery even in heaven, beginning from the very moment when people ascend there, for this thought enters their minds: “I am going to fall from here.” And when they see hell they become quite miserable, worrying, day and night, “This is where I am going to go.”75
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