Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India

"This is a short book, and Diana Eck does a beautiful job. She talks about sighting the deity. This is not about just going to the temple; this is about the deity visiting with you. And how do I explain the concept of divine visitation, if you’re not in the space where visitation is sought by the devotee in an active sense of the way? I just cannot explain the importance, the essence, the depth of Hindu devotion, or a Hindu’s relationship to the divine, unless we have visited and collectively been in a ritual space. To visit a Hindu temple during peak festival times is important to understand what we mean when we say it’s an orthoprax religion. It is extremely important to embody the space, to embody the ritual, the devotion, even if you’re not necessarily partaking in the ritual, but to be present. I hesitate to say it’s not polytheistic because, unfortunately, our culture today looks at religious space in a very binary form. We have this tendency to put religious beliefs in boxes, and Hindu tradition cannot be put in a box. As soon as I say it is not polytheistic, I can bet that people will land on monotheism, even though I never said it’s monotheistic. These boxes apply possibly very well to some other religious traditions, but do not truly do justice to Hindu traditions. So it’s okay to live termless. Why do we have to define? Why can we not have a wordless category that allows for greater inclusivity? There is no clarification that will answer and satisfy everybody’s relationship to the divine, but here is how I see it. If we go with the dotted line history, with the Indus Valley civilisation, there is some continuity. When we look at the Vedic period, the Vedas were composed sometime in 1500-1200 BCE, we find nature being personified as the divine. We have a deity for storms, Rudra. We have the sun as Surya, the moon as Chandra, the dawn as Usha, Vāc, who will then become the goddess of speech, so on and so forth. Next, we come to the Upanishadic period. In this, the physical body gets questioned. Here we’ll start thinking about “Where is the sun in my body? Where is the moon in my body?” If I’m saying I am a representation of the divine and the world is divine, then where are the mountains? Where are the rivers? Over a period of time, Rudra will be understood as Shiva. If we look at Shiva’s name, there are more than twenty different names for the same divine being or energy. We have an organic understanding of the divine and divine representations. Additionally, we have to consider the importance of mythology . There are mother goddesses, trees that are sacred trees, animals have a place with the divine, and all this starts to come into the trope of what is understood as divine and sacred. Finally, we have to consider the representation of the divine. Everyone has a right to see the divine in their eyes. If I were to take Shiva as the example again, he looks so very different from region to region, because people are now starting to depict him in the ways that they look, after all, the divine is me. If it’s me, and if I have to draw and my only access point is the people around me who have a similar nose structure, a similar eye structure, I’m going to portray Shiva in that fashion. That is what brings us to several forms of divine beings. And within a single divine being, we can have lots of different imagery, different names, and different understandings. The Vedas are understood as shruti texts. Shruti is translated, loosely, as something that is heard. The epics that we spoke about are understood as smriti, something that is transmitted from memory. So the divine world transmitted these texts, which were heard by some higher beings. One part of the Vedas is all about the rituals; they document how the rituals need to be performed. This is what, in many ways, Gavin Flood, Diana Eck, and Vasudha Narayanan are talking about in their books. And then there is another part in the Vedas that gives us the personification of nature. What very soon happens with the Vedas is that the ritual spins on its own, and the philosophy spins on its own, and the deities or the nature gods that were somewhere in the mix, they become a third category. Even today, if you want to be a Vedic practitioner, it is oral history. The Vedas are supposed to be chanted in a particular meter, which you must learn, and so they continue to be the centre of ritual specialists. The philosophy would spin as the Upanishads , and the nature beings would develop into a wide range of deities."