Śiva: form, formless form and formless

I’ve been reflecting on Dorathick’s simple explanation that Śiva can be experienced in form, in a formless form, or formless. I did a bit of research on it both from some books in the library here and also referring back to a chapter I wrote on Tantra for Spirit Soul Body (one of the chapters that wound up on the cutting room floor, as it turns out).

 

As for in form, at the level of poplar devotion Śiva is worshipped as one of the trimurti, the trinity of Hindu gods, along with Brahma and Vishnu. The typical iconography of Śiva has a good deal of primitivism about it, which scholars say gives evidence of its pre-Aryan origin among the tribes of southern (Dravidian) India. (The Aryans migrated to the subcontinent of India around 2000 BCE, perhaps by way of the Khyber Pass. They fused with the indigenous peoples of that region who already had a thousand-year-old civilization that was thriving in technology and trade.) In this version Śiva is often shown wearing or sitting on a tiger skin holding a trident with snakes coiled around his neck and arms. So many of these elements, including his matted hair, his ornaments of skulls and snakes, and the wild dance that will be associated with him, recall the costume and practice of tribal shamans. He is often also represented as a yogi. There is some conjecture that the Yogic tradition in general probably derived from the pre-Aryan culture as well. Many sources, for instance, point to a pre-Aryan “proto-Shiva” statue of a man in lotus position.

 

It’s the image of the “Dancing Śiva” that is the form that’s best known in the West and the modern world, though it did not become known there until the beginning of the 20^th century. I found this paragraph in the book The dance (sic) of Śiva*:

 

How and when Śiva, the pre-Aryan deity who is associated with such savage rites and sacrifices among the primitive tribes and devil-fearing castes of South India, became the mystic dancer, the ultimate embodiment of rhythm in the visible universe of created things and in the invisible universe of the human soul, we have no means of knowing.

 

The image dates back to at least the 5^th century CE. First evidence of the version specifically called “King Dancer”–Natarāja comes from the 10^th century. The dance itself is called ānandatāndava–“the dance of bliss.” It is danced in an arch of flames, with the right foot supported by a crouching figure and the left foot raised elegantly. Like the typical image, this Śiva too has four arms: one swings downward pointing to the raised foot, one with the palm up, signaling “Do not fear,” and the other hands hold a drum and a flame, with a cobra around the left forearm. The river Gangā is flowing from his hair.

 

Natarāja is meant to be the Lord of the universe, and the dance represents the state of bliss he enjoys and embodies. Here is the Ananda Coomaraswamy’s famous description:

 

Nature is inert and cannot dance until Śiva wills it. He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! Matter also dances appearing as a glory round about Him. Dancing, He sustains its manifold phenomena. In the fullness of time, still dancing, he destroys all forms and names by fire and gives new rest.**

 

Fritjof Capra shows how modern physics has caught up with this, writing that “The dance of Śiva is the dancing universe, the cease flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another.”

 

Note from the quote above that the Dancing Śiva is not only “the ultimate embodiment of rhythm in the visible universe of created things”; he is also in “the invisible universe of the human soul.” To some extent this plays out in all Hindu symbolism, more explicitly in some than others: Natarāja is not only at the heart of the universe; he is to be found in every human heart, as the consciousness found in every human being. That will tie in with the third meaning, the formless, below.

 

The temple that Dorathick and Jeremias visited last week, Cidambaram, is about 244 km south of Chennai, and is legendarily the place where the dance was first performed. (Now after all this research, I wish I had gone with them, discomfort aside.) It has been the center of worship of Dancing Śiva since the 7^th century and is considered to be the most important of all Śiva temples, some will even say that it is “the heart of the world.” The shrine in which Natarāja is housed there is within a hall known as Cit Sabhā–the “Hall of Consciousness”–in Tamil tirucirrambalam, the “holy little hall.” (The second half of that Tamil term––cirrambalam––gets Sanskritized and shortened into the “modern” name Cidambaram.)

 

The formless form on the other hand is the lingam. It is typically just a kind of upright cylindrical object, phallic in nature. Originally the Sanskrit word lingam meant simply “sign.” In the Śvetaśvatara Upanishad, for instance, it says that “Śiva, the Supreme Lord, has no liūga,” meaning the Divine is beyond all name and form. The lingam is considered to be an outward symbol of the formless reality that Śiva is in essence, “the form of the formless,” as Dorathick would say. The lingam is a non-iconic representation of Śiva. Typically, it is the primary murti–image in temples devoted to Śiva, and it is recognized in natural objects such as Mount Arunachala in Tiruvanamalai. In Tantra and Shaivism it represents both generative and destructive power.

 

There are some anatomically realistic versions of the lingam as a phallus, such as the Gudimallam Lingam. But the masculine aspect of it is only one side of the story. It is usually inside of a yoni, a horizontal disc-shaped platform designed to allow liquid offerings to drain away. And yoni literally means “womb/vagina” or “abode/source,” either way definitely a feminine image. The lingam and the yoni together represent, obviously, the union of masculine and feminine, as well as the merging of the microcosm and the macrocosm. In Samkhya and yoga terms, this is the symbolization of prakrti–primordial matter with puruśa–pure consciousness. Of course, this is all related to the yin-yang of Taoism, though in that case they both represent half of consciousness; and the Tibetan pestle and bell, the dorge and dril-bu. An additional feminine note is that the shrine room in which the lingam is housed in a temple is called a garbhagriha a term made up of the Sanskrit roots garbha–womb and griha–house, the “womb house.” (Other deities might also be enshrined instead in a temple’s garbhgriha. At one temple in Bhuvaneshvara the garbhagriha is empty, which leads to...)

 

And finally, the formless. The deeper understanding is that Śiva is simply a name for the all-pervasive supreme reality who manifests in functions, qualities and principles but that/who is actually beyond all name and form or “in the form of bliss consciousness.” Here, for example, are the first and last verses of the famous hymn of Shiva attributed to Shankara, the great 8^th century sage of advaita-Vedanta:

 

I am not mind, intellect, ego and the memory.
I am not the sense organs.
I am not the five elements. 
Chidhaanandha roopah shivoham shivoham

I am Shiva in the form of bliss consciousness.

 

I am formless and devoid of all dualities.
I exist everywhere and pervade all senses.
Always I am the same,
I am neither free nor bonded.
I am Shiva in the form of bliss consciousness.

 

One might be tempted to think that the experience of the Divine beyond name and form is so iconoclastic as to be impersonal, as if God were just a nameless force of some sort, or solely the Ground of Being (brahman) and/or the Ground of Consciousness (atman). (I worry about this for myself at times.) The opposite is true for some Hindus, as it was for our Abhishiktananda: the encounter with this Ground anamarupa–beyond all name and form, can spark a whole new strain of devotion, of bhakti––devotion to this Ground of Being who is formless and devoid of all dualities. One can become a lover of this fathomless abyss of the godhead. There is a beautiful compound word in Sanskrit that describes this well––bhakti-rūpāpanna-jñāna: not just love of God, but knowledge that has become a form of devotion. Abhishiktananda himself entered into this apophatic experience––the God beyond all name and form––and came out of it a lover of God in a whole new way, writing poems and prayers to this formless Śiva, who is here no longer one of the trimurti of Hindu gods, but another name for the 1^st Person of the Trinity, the “Silence of the Father,” perhaps.

 

That’s where I go with that… I see Śiva as one way of understanding the 1^st Person of the Trinity, particularly in that formless understanding. I also am very attracted to the lingam with the yoni, as a first elaboration of the 1^st Person manifesting, the first aspects that can be discerned, the female and male, "our Father in heaven" and "the Great Mother." 

 

I also like the image of Natarāja a lot and I keep singing “The Lord of the Dance” in my head. And of course, the English songwriter Sydney Carter was writing about Jesus when he wrote that text, but he was also inspired by the Natarāja statue on his desk. He wrote about it:

 

I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other Lords of the Dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus.

 

Again, at the risk of being argumentative and contrarian­­––and knowing that we cannot separate the Persons of the Trinity, especially by their function––while I can see Dancing Śiva as a Christ figure, a personification of the 2nd Person of the Trinity, Word-Tao-Consciousness I see the Dancing Śiva as an image of the 1^st Person of the Trinity more, the Creator and Destroyer. I keep thinking too of the line we sing from the Canticle in 1 Samuel (2:6): The Lord puts to death and gives life; casts to the nether world and raises back up. We don’t like facing this fierce aspect of Absolute Reality, but death is what brings new life. Even what looks like decay, like a fallen tree, can from another angle be seen as new life, a thriving ecosystem for insects and moss.

 

I hope I haven't offended or shocked anyone with this. Remember: this is speculative theology.

In my original blog about this a few days ago, I was putting this in the context of the evolution of consciousness. (This is basically the argument I was making in Rediscovering the Divine.) I’ve realized that one of the things that originally enticed me about the Upanishads was that they did not talk for the most part in archaic-magical-mythical language, but in the language of phenomenon and direct experience. I believe Wilber would call that injunctive language, language that says, “This is how you experience That.” It’s very hard to extricate the archaic-magical-mythical language in Christianity from the phenomenological without being accused of heresy of some sort, especially the deeper you get into Christians taking every word of the Bible––Old and New Testaments––to be literally, historically, scientifically true. (Are there really “gates of heaven”? Does God have a “mighty arm”?) Hence, though it is fascinating from an anthropological even psychological point of view, my hesitation to dive too deeply into Hindu archaic-magical-mythical iconography. I would rather stay as close as possible to the formless. And maybe start all over again from there, “from the ground up” (the original title of Rediscovering the Divine), the ground of Being and Consciousness who is God.

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*The dance of Śiva: Religion, are and poetry in South India, David Smith,1998, 3.

* Ibid., 2.