The Dance of Śiva – Asymptote Weblog

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, these enduring tales that proceed to rework and reincarnate. On this essay, Kanya Kanchana follows the whirling story of Śiva by way of dance, science, and fable.

“A life wherein the gods should not invited is just not value dwelling. Will probably be quieter, however there gained’t be any tales.” 

– Roberto Calasso,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Concord

There was sound and the sound was colossal. From throughout the pulsing sound, from the guts of the creation and dissolution of the cosmos, a single beat might be heard—ḍam. Incantatory, the beat began to repeat—ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam. The beat was coming from the ḍamaru, a small handheld drum. There was a god and he was dancing. He was Śiva and he shook all of the worlds. 

His matted locks flew wild. Gaṅgā, the holiest of rivers who was nestled in them, swelled in spate, tried in useless to maintain him cool. The lambent crescent moon that adorned them, intoxicating soma, now glinted crazily. Vāsukī, the good serpent coiled round his blue, kālakūṭa-holding throat, reeled. Śiva’s locks had been a forest (jaṭa, matted locks; aṭavī, forest, because the asura king Rāvaṇa sings).

As soon as upon a time, one other forest: a forest of cedars (devadāru, wooden of the gods, Cedrus deodara), into which Bhikṣāṭana Śiva, the mendicant, wanders bare, deep in despair for the sin of getting killed Brahmā, his outheld palm an escutcheon, Brahmā’s cranium nonetheless caught to it considerably like an alms bowl. The illustrious sages within the forest should not happy to see this lovely beggar who drives their ladies mad with need. They ship a tiger to shred him to bits; he flays the tiger and wears its bloody pores and skin round his waist. They throw venomous serpents at him; he wraps them round himself as sinuous ornaments. They ship a demon dwarf, the malign Muyalaka. Śiva steps on him and breaks his again. After which he dances. He dances till it dawns on them that he’s none apart from Śiva. 

This story echoes in one other story, in one other forest down south: Chidambaram (cit, consciousness; ambaram, sky, house, additionally garment), a mangrove forest of tillai timber (Excoecaria agallocha) whose milky sap blinds upon contact. In such a time when the blinding timber develop wild, the sages who stay amongst them develop drunk on their very own energy. They attempt to tame Śiva. And he dances once more. Appar, the seventh century Tamil poet-saint sings:

For those who may see
the arch of his forehead
the budding smile
on lips pink because the kovvai fruit
cool matted hair,
the milk-white ash on coral pores and skin,
and the candy golden foot raised up in dance,
then even human delivery on this huge earth can be a factor value having.

Candy golden foot. This isn’t the candy, throbbing, insufferable anguish of Kṛṣṇa’s rāsalīlā, nor the unvarnished pleasure of Gaṇapati’s ānanda nartana. That is Śiva’s dance. 

Śiva, the lover, dancing his tender, hierogamous lāsya with Pārvatī. 

Śiva Śūlapāṇī, the spear-bearer, dancing at twilight on the snow mountain Kailāsa, surrounded by all of the gods, goddesses, and celestial beings in a divine choir. 

Śiva Mahākāla, Nice Time, the bare, ash-white ascetic, the primary shaman, eyelids heavy from the smoke of his chillum, with serpents for garlands, with canines for companions, churning up a mad, ecstatic froth on the charnel floor with the gorgeous terror that’s Kālī. 

Additionally, Śiva dancing in victory after triumphing over sundry demons for good measure, together with his devoted troops, his gaṇas, whooping about drunkenly. 

However that is Śiva Naṭarāja, the cosmic dancer within the golden corridor of Tillai, spontaneously dancing the universe into sṛṣṭi, creation, sthiti, preservation, saṃhāra, dissolution, tirobhāva, obscuration, anugraha, revelation. Rending the skies, lashing the celebs, roiling oceans, tossing mountains—his pañcakriyā, five-fold exercise—and nonetheless it’s play. The one who sees the candy golden foot is the one who doesn’t look with otherly eyes.

Ādiśeṣa, the best of serpents, the one that continues to be (ādi, first, primordial; śeṣa, remnant) when all else is destroyed within the remaining dissolution, yearns to see the dance he has heard a lot about from Viṣṇu. He assumes the type of Patañjali, the serpentine yogi, and goes all the way down to Chidambaram with one other sage Vyāghrapāda. Śiva Ādiyogi, the primordial yogi, dances within the thousand-pillared corridor. “I’m the originator, the god abiding in supreme bliss. I, the yogi, dance eternally,” says Śiva within the Kūrma Purāṇa (2.4.33). A thousand-petalled lotus blooms in Patañjali’s head. The tillai timber are solely in stone on the temple partitions now. However stroll the huge halls, and you will notice Śiva’s kind within the bronze Naṭarāja, his summary kind within the crystal phallus, liṅga, and his formlessness as empty house behind the veil. Sound develop into motion develop into yoga. The dance remains to be on. Patañjali goes on to write down the Sanskrit Yogasūtras wherein he talks in regards to the thoughts. He sees all of the actions of the physique, and but his thoughts is on the thoughts. 

There’s, nonetheless, a later āsana referred to as Naṭarājāsana, the posture of the King of Dancers. One leg is straight, the foot anchored to the earth. The opposite is lifted manner again, and the arms go up and again down, bringing the foot as much as contact the crown of the top. Once I lastly handle to do the total posture (years in the past now), it shoots up a surge of power. I by no means wish to come out of the posture for concern I would by no means be capable of repeat it. I repeat it however I by no means get the identical one twice. Le Guin says in Dancing on the Fringe of the World, “To make a brand new world you begin with an previous one, definitely. To discover a world, perhaps you must have misplaced one. Possibly you must be misplaced. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was at all times danced right here on the fringe of issues, on the brink, on the foggy coast.”

I additionally be taught from my trainer a set of very previous motion patterns that Bodhidharma is alleged to have carried over the Himalayas into China and launched into Chan Buddhism, and additional into Japan, the place it shaped the precursor patterns of Shaolin kungfu. The patterns, collectively referred to as Śiva Naṭa, disintegrate me after which reconstitute me in follow. Creation of a sample can solely be subsequent and consequent to the destruction of an earlier one. They assemble a maṇḍala round me, an lively structure wherein I set up myself. The rhythms I intuitively select for my music are from konnakkol, the South Indian artwork of rhythmic percussion, paying homage to the ḍamaru. The ḍamaru within the South is onomatopoeically referred to as uḍukkai in Tamil, uḍukku in Malayalam, and right here the sound heard is ḍuk. Incantation has the identical Latin root, incantare, as chant, as enchantment. “And abruptly she understood what fable is, understood that fable is the precedent behind each motion, its invisible, ever-present lining,” Calasso once more.

Patañjali is just not solely a grasp of yoga, but in addition a grammarian within the custom of the sage Pāṇini. Pāṇini, throughout his twelve-year-long tapas (fervour, passion) to Śiva, hears the ḍamaru beat fourteen occasions. Fourteen courses of syllables drop, resonant, into his fervent ears.

a i u ṇ
ṛ ḷ okay
e o ṅ
ai au c
ha ya va ra ṭ
la ṇ
ña ma ṅa ṇa na m
jha bha ñ
gha ḍha dha ṣ
ja ba ga ḍa da ś
kha pha cha ṭha tha ca ṭa ta v
ka pa y
śa ṣa sa r
ha l

Pāṇini activates and tunes in, however doesn’t drop out. He compiles the akṣarasamāmnāya, an ordered itemizing of phonemes, a foundational association that can feed into his legendary Sanskrit grammar. Sound develop into syllable develop into grammar. There’s a motive the sages are referred to as seers, and never hearers.

Patañjali could not have cared an excessive amount of in regards to the bodily postures, however not so the sage Bharata, who very a lot notices them. Śiva, a bit too busy for private tutoring, instructs Taṇḍu to instruct Bharata on all of the finer factors—the 108 karaṇas, doings, coordinated actions of arms and ft; the 32 aṅgahāras, advanced actions of limbs made up of karaṇas; the 4 recakas, the separate drawing up of limbs; and several other different options. Bharata goes on to explain all of them in Tāṇḍavalakṣaṇam, the fourth chapter of his efficiency arts treatise Nāṭyaśāstra, which then turns into a foundational textual content for actors and classical dancers, together with the practitioners of the dance named after him, the Bharatanāṭyam. The motion patterns wrap round temple partitions in Chidambaram, in Thanjavur, and elsewhere. The dance taught by Taṇḍu, tāṇḍava. Who is that this Taṇḍu? He’s none apart from Nandi, Śiva’s stupendous bull.

Is tāṇḍava then simply the one dance, albeit infinite and immeasurable? Sivaramamurti paperwork a number of in his monumental labour of affection, Naṭarājā in Artwork, Thought and Literature, every carried out at a particular sabhā (cabai in Tamil), a corridor, a court docket, an meeting, at a particular location: Adrisabhā, the primary stage on Kailāsa (adri, mountain) within the Tibetan Himalayas, homeground for Śiva; Ādicitsabhā, the corridor of first consciousness, at Tiruveṅgāḍu, the place he performs not one, however seven dances— ānandatāṇḍava, sandhyātāṇḍava, saṃhāratāṇḍava, tripurāntatāṇḍava, ūrdhvatāṇḍava, bhujaṅgatāṇḍava, lalitatāṇḍava; Ratnasabhā, ruby corridor, at Tiruvālaṅgāḍu, the place he performs the fearsome caṇḍatāṇḍava with Kālī; Rajatasabhā, silver corridor, at Madurai, the place he performs the gorgeous sundaratāṇḍava; Citrasabhā, painted corridor, at Kuttālam the place he dances as Ardhanārīśvara, his physique half male and half feminine; and the primary amongst equals, Kanakasabhā, golden corridor, at Chidambaram, the place he dances the ānandatāṇḍava, the dance of bliss. It’s telling that Chidambaram is the koil, the temple, that sabhā defaults to the golden corridor. Chidambaram is the human coronary heart.

There are numerous extra halls the place many extra dances happen in countless fractals. Issues are getting somewhat out of hand. We’d like an image.

*

“An amazing motif in faith or artwork, any nice image, turns into all issues to all males; age after age it yields to males such treasure as they discover in their very own hearts. Regardless of the origins of Shiva’s dance, it turned in time the clearest picture of the exercise of God which any artwork or faith can boast of,” says Coomaraswamy in his 1918 essay, The Dance of Shiva, which introduced this Indian picture earlier than the eye of the world, illustrating the story with extracts from a number of Tamil texts.

Once we consider Śiva Naṭarāja, what he would possibly appear like, we’re considering of the incomparable late mediaeval Chola bronzes. Dehejia says of them in The Physique Adorned, “a imaginative and prescient of divinity and sensuousness inextricably mingled.” Motion frozen, but not static, in sculpture. Paśupati of the Indus Valley has come a good distance, and as we uncover, has misplaced none of his ithyphallic attraction.

“To work magic, to place enchantments upon others, one has first to place enchantments on oneself,” says Zimmer in Myths and Symbols in Indian Artwork and Civilization. What do the bronzes present? 

In a blazing full-body halo of fireplace, prabhāmaṇḍala, indicating the dance of nature, atop a lotus pedestal, stands the four-armed, minimally but fantastically clothed, bejewelled Śiva, half his matted locks piled excessive upon his head like a crown and half whirling wildly about. Someplace throughout the matted locks, Gaṅgā flows, a cranium grins, a crescent moon illuminates, flowers of the entheogen datura (Datura metel) glow. A hooded serpent wraps round him, sways with him. In his prime proper hand, the ḍamaru, the instrument that causes the vibrations that trigger all matter; in his prime left, agni, the tongue of fireplace that causes transformation by destruction. The underside proper hand reveals the abhayamudrā, the signal of fearless refuge; the underside left crosses his torso to level elegantly to his personal left foot lifted weightlessly in mokṣa, liberation. The fitting foot holds down firmly the demon of ignorance, Muyalaka. The prostrate demon is also called Apasmāra (apa-, a prefix akin to mal-; smṛ, remembrance, reminiscence): ignorance as forgetfulness, a type of misremembrance of the true nature of issues. Kramrisch calls him Amnesia in The Presence of Śiva.

Campbell data in The Ecstasy of Being, “an artwork that carries phrases to us from nice distances.” Śiva’s face stays equanimous, serene, silent.

*

“Within the night time of Brahma, Nature is inert, and can’t dance until Shiva wills it: He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends by way of inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! matter additionally dances showing as a glory spherical about Him. Dancing, He sustains its manifold phenomena. Within the fulness of time, nonetheless dancing, he destroys all varieties and names by fireplace and provides new relaxation. That is poetry; however none the much less, science,” Coomaraswamy writes.

There was a protracted line of physicists—Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer, and lots of others—who, no matter whether or not they’re confounded or outraged or intrigued or impressed by Indian mental traditions, interact with its philosophies, texts, and practitioners. However it’s not till Capra’s much-lauded and much-criticised 1975 ebook The Tao of Physics that the door to such crossovers is unlocked within the standard creativeness. When a door is open, all types of issues are likely to blow in, however I digress.

Calling creation myths throughout cultures a ‘tribute to human audacity’, Sagan, in 1980, goes on to say in Cosmos: “Essentially the most elegant and stylish of those [manifestations of gods sculpted in bronze] is a illustration of the creation of the universe initially of every cosmic cycle, a motif often known as the cosmic dance of Shiva, […] these profound and beautiful pictures are, I wish to think about, a type of premonition of recent astronomical concepts. If there’s extra matter than we are able to see—hidden away in black holes, say, or in scorching however invisible fuel between the galaxies—then the universe will maintain collectively gravitationally and partake of a really Indian succession of cycles, enlargement adopted by contraction, universe upon universe, Cosmos with out finish. If we stay in such an oscillating universe, then the Massive Bang is just not the creation of the Cosmos however merely the tip of the earlier cycle, the destruction of the final incarnation of the Cosmos.”

There isn’t any such factor as a pure creation fable, in fact. Any good creation fable holds inside itself the spark of destruction. And no good destruction fable is with out the seed of creation inside. Fairly just like the yin–yang image, the place the white oceanic swirl has a luminous black dot inside, and the black, a white. 

CERN, the European Group for Nuclear Analysis in Switzerland, residence of the Massive Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and strongest particle accelerator, has hosted a towering two-metre statue of Śiva Naṭarāja for over eighteen years. I come throughout a word by a CERN postdoc: “So within the gentle of day, when CERN is teeming with life, Shiva appears playful, reminding us that the universe is continually shaking issues up, remaking itself and isn’t static. However by night time, when we’ve got extra time to ponder the deeper questions, Shiva actually casts a protracted shadow over our work, a bit just like the shadows on Plato’s cave. Shiva jogs my memory that we nonetheless don’t know the reply to one of many greatest questions offered by the universe, and that each time we collide the beams we should take the cosmic steadiness sheet into consideration.” Or as Huxley places it extra succinctly in Island, “rub-a-dub-dub—the creation tattoo, the cosmic reveille.”

In 1993, a one-kilo aluminium sculpture referred to as the Cosmic Dancer is launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and ‘put in’ on the Russian Mir house station. Weightless in multiple manner, this geometric paintings spins freely. Cosmonauts dance with it. They plan to ship a 2.0 in 2020 however Covid strikes. And now, the warfare. I ponder what is occurring with the brand new sculpture.

*

Once we are completed with the standard tedious companies of fable vs actuality, fable vs historicity, fable vs authenticity, fable as religion, fable as phantasm, fable as falsehood, fable as metaphor (shut however not fairly), and so forth. (such discussions, maybe needed, maybe not, are meant for a special kind of café serving extra prosaic drinks), we’d get all the way down to the duty at hand.

Right here we’ve got a mythopoeic fable whose genesis is, in itself, an bold act of translation. Sound develop into motion develop into yoga develop into sample develop into grammar develop into language develop into story. Śiva strikes in dance, in sculpture, in portray, in poetry, in ritual, in physics. He strikes our bodies dwelling and useless. And nonetheless he isn’t completed. What are we to do? Can we watch; can we take notes; can we dance?

*

We now not eat; we eat meals. We now not learn books; we eat content material. We now not take heed to music or watch movies; we eat media. We’re now not artists and aesthetes (sahṛdaya, these ‘possessed of coronary heart’); we’ve got allowed ourselves to be redefined solely as producers and customers within the international market, and what’s extra, began to take delight on this vocabulary of manufacturing and consumption. 

Myths, too, haven’t escaped this flip. We produce them. We eat them. We see them by way of eyes infected by our personal agenda, parse them to our personal pressing preoccupations. Overwhelmed, we flatten their layers, boring their nuances, right and homogenise our responses to them. We coopt their simulacra to inform our never-ending trauma memoirs. We applicable their phrases till they imply nearly nothing—ages, aeons, ritual, journey, storytelling, epic, iconic, incredible, nice, superior! We mine them for obscure artifacts—talismans and totems. We declare to “work with the accessible materials,” as Lenin stated someplace. 

Obsessed, determined to have a hand in one thing that feels near the marrow, we endlessly remake them in our personal picture, reimagining, retelling, working out of re–s, till realising that every one myths are acts of translation echoing multiply, tracing a variform path by way of house and time, thoughts and phrase—a technique or one other. Whereas a case could also be made for the fashionable human intuition for intervention and curation as an final result of the unique (and helpful) civilising intuition, we’re pulling flowers off branches and arranging them, already useless, in fairly vases. We should have a look at the entire bloody tree. What can we want to convey into being? What can we want to maintain shut? What’s going to go along with us the space?

The twelfth century poet Akkā Mahādevī calls Śiva Cannamallikārjuna, lovely lord, vibrant as jasmine. A jasmine-bright fable yesterday remains to be a jasmine on the mattress the morning after—a little bit crushed, a little bit worse for the wear and tear maybe, indoles rising within the scent, however holding all of the staggering data, all of the incandescent fantastic thing about the world in itself, gathered in a single, winding, heartbreaking night time. We start once more.