Nourishing Arts

Shiva-The Sensuous Yogi

There once dwelt in a dense forest a group of hermits engaged in the most difficult of austerities. The hermitage had a large number of knowledgeable and mighty sages, but they were for the most part ritualists, more involved in the actual process rather than appreciating the symbolic significance behind the liturgies they performed.

Lord Shiva in his role of an ascetic mendicant once approached this group of recluses to beg for alms. The force of Shiva's tapas or meditations glowed forth form his auric body. Combined with the spectacular flicker in his eyes, it presented him as extraordinarily handsome. This comely young ascetic, his naked body smeared with ashes, exerted a powerful influence upon the womenfolk of the hermitage. The wives and daughters of the sages rushed out to greet the naked yogi. The hermits were utterly shocked at the sight of this unclad monk who drove their well-born wives and mothers to a demented level of desire. The women came with offerings of fruits and flowers. When they approached Shiva the sensuous yogi, they shed all restraint, taking hold of his hands, pleading for his attentions. They shed away their inhibitions, their ornaments, their clothes, and embraced the naked stranger with the skull in his hands.

The saints were left speechless. Their years of solitude and penance and the hard monastic life were all repudiated by the inexplicable aberrations of their noble wives. Confused, pained, bewildered and also very angry, the sages asked the stranger for his name and identity. Shiva greeted their queries with a silence. Driven to a level of frenzy the same as their chaste women, these sages in their uncontrolled outrage tore off Shiva's organ of generation from his body. But Shiva, the first amongst yogis, remained supremely unaffected both by the women's adoration and the sages' anger.

As soon as Shiva's organ fell to the ground it assumed a gigantic proportion, making everyone aware of the divine status of this handsome ascetic. Thus is said to have originated the emblematic worship of Shiva's organ, popularly known as the Shiva linga.

The rapture of love, the moment of euphoria in which we forget everything else (reason, wisdom, prudence, social rules, human interests etc), is but an image of the mystical bliss. The lover ceases to be himself and becomes one with the object of his/her desire. Indeed, for an instant, he/she ceases to exist as an individual, merging with the other being in totality. The sole reality at that defining moment is the voluptuousness of desire that unites them: "Just as in the embrace of his beloved, a man forgets the entire world, all that exists within himself and without, so in union with the Being of knowledge, he no longer knows anything, either within or without" (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 4.3.21).

For an instant, one achieves one's true goal, forgets one's own interests, ambitions, problems, and duties, and participates in that feeling of bliss that is one's true and immortal nature. Mystical rapture is a marvelous feeling of pleasure, similar to the effect produced by bhang, the Indian hemp and favorite drink of Shiva.

In order to be genuine, love and rapture of pleasure must be absolutely irrational. They must not be "useful," "normal," or according to law." They must not be a mere procreative act used to beget children for the continuance of our house, to look after us and defend our property. They must not be the outcome of marriage, which stabilizes our social position and represents a communion of interests. True love must be wholly useless and disinterested, far from any idea of family, progeny, or social order. Only then it is pure, true love. This is why the mystical poets sing of illicit love, the love of what does not belong to you (parakiya) and not of what you already possess (svakiya). Loving a wife, or someone who belongs to us, is part of what binds us to the world of forms and not of what can free us from it. According to Alain Danielou, only adulterous, abnormal love can be considered pure and truly free from all ties, and only it can give us some idea of the mystic experience - it is absurd, disinterested, and destructive of all that is human.

Thus we should not wonder at the fact that representations of human love - the search for voluptuous pleasure - recognize none of the limits that social ethics wish to impose.

Hence the conduct of the virtuous ladies in the hermitage though shocking at first sight, is perfectly understandable from the above viewpoint. In fact the story also brings our attention to the fact that these women were more spiritually advanced than their men folk, who were engaged in endless itineraries of rituals whose symbolic significance they were unable to fathom and were thus far away from the true import of these spiritual pratices. The ladies on the other hand were more intuitively fine tuned to appreciate the true nature of physical desire, sprung naturally from their archetypal inner being and in harmony with their primordial nature uncontaminated by man made constructs, including both social and moral.

The canonical iconography of Shiva further shows him with certain characteristic attributes which emphasize his sensuous nature, while retaining his essentially yogic profile. Some of these traits making up the character and personality of Shiva are:

The Dance of Shiva
It is said that man danced before he spoke. He certainly danced before he painted and sculpted reliefs on his walls. All cultures of the world have given dance a ritual status before any formal ritual or liturgy was codified in texts, or recreated through relief or paint.

Yoga, like dance, is much more than a mere physical exercise. It is a holistic way of relating to the body that involves an increasing awareness on all levels: the physical, the mental, and the spiritual. Yoga unites the functions of each of these aspects of our personality. This is true for dance also. Certainly any successful dance performance is characterized by a balanced harmony between the body and spirit. What is suggested here is that dance, like yoga, is a conscious attempt at integrating all the tiers of our existence. It does not negate but on the contrary affirms the sensual nature of our objective physical being, and treats it as fundamental to any attempt at spiritual awareness as our subjective intangible soul.

Dance is thus a spiritual channel, an opening of both metaphysical and sensuous doorways. Whirling his limbs, gracefully carved as if a woman's, Shiva as Nataraja gyrates to the rhythms of his essentially fleshy dance - an outpouring of sensual stimulation in free and unrestrained exuberance. His dance is both supremely sexual and sublimely spiritual. He is the god of destruction, his dance too is thus essentially of a similar nature. A ring of flames encircles him.

These are the cremation fires which are ultimately going to consume our mortal bodies. But on the other hand dance is also an act of creation. It brings about a new situation and transforms the perpetrator into a higher realm of reality and personality. Thus the forces gathered and projected in his frantic, ever-enduring gyration are both of creation and annihilation. According to Clarissa Estes, in her book "Women Who Run with the Wolves."

"To make love we dance with Death. There will be flowing, there will be draining, there will be live birth and still birth and yet born-again birth of something new. To love is to learn the steps. To make love is to dance the dance". Applying the same criterion, we observe that Shiva's dance of death and regeneration is nothing but the recreation of the sexual act itself, which is composed of an interplay of desire, sensuality, highs and lows, and of course an overriding sensation of ecstasy, all an integral part of Shiva's dance.

A poet has beautifully described dance as "nature struggling to express itself, in terms of the joy of the dance." Hence by extension, in the frenzy of the actual physical act of mating can be discerned the ultimate truth of all manifested existence. This truth is that of birth and inevitable death. These are the defining qualities of Shiva's dance, as also of the sexual act, both of which communicate through an exhilarated appreciation of the body, for its own sake.

This article is adapted from a book called "Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization" by Heinrich Zimmer.