The Role of Icons in Hinduism
The religious sentiment is universally present in all human beings. It is an essential component of every culture - from the most primitive to the most developed. It is the basis on which the society is organized - the norms of social behaviour, the distribution of wealth, the roles, the rights of individuals and so forth are defined in terms of certain beliefs about the nature and origin of the universe.
The religious impulse underlies man’s quest for going beyond the given, immediate world - the world of friends and foes, property and poverty, delight and disgust. It appears to be an attempt by the self to be in touch with something transcendent - immensely vast, immensely powerful, in comparison with which even this vast universe is like a speck of dust.
It is a kind of reality categorically different from what we perceive, conceptualise and describe. However it is somehow given to human consciousness through some channels of communication that forms that substance of depth psychological experience.
The fact that it is different from what we normally perceive and describe does not mean that it is not real or illusory.
The substance of this depth psychological or religious consciousness, by virtue of its intrinsic character requires a media for representing it distinct from language where the ordinary knowledge of the world is articulated. The non-discursive forms of presentation such as is available in art, music and poetry seems to be more apt than the language of words and syntactic structures. The icons of Hinduism along with its temple architecture and religious music and dance must be viewed as visual means of communicating this mute but deep consciousness of reality that goes beyond the bounds of sense and reaches the unconscious realms.
The icons point towards something that cannot in fact be represented or symbolised adequately in all its comprehensiveness. They are not like traffic lights where green means go, red means stop. They are functionally a bit like an arrow which points towards a direction outside itself. They tend to direct the attentional and thought processes of an individual not outwardly towards hither and thither but rather inwardly towards deeper levels of consciousness of reality. It is in this regard, I believe, icons differ from sculptures which are also visual, three dimensional communicative presentations.
We should not obfuscate the distinction between icons and sculptures, paintings and photography, mythology and science, poetry and logic. Most of the skepticism and unfounded criticism of religious life in general and Hinduism in particular arises from obliterating the above distinctions and mis-constructing their functional characteristics. The icons and sculptures belong to opposite poles of a continuum where three dimensional material media are used to communicate something incommunicable through language. Similarly for the others.
What poetry, mythology, paintings and icons communicate arise from religious consciousness. What sculptures, photographs, science and logic reveal is the structure of ordinary, normal human consciousness. There is a dynamic relationship between the two. One is deep and mute and the other surface level and articulate. But one forms the basis of the other - they interpenetrate each other. There are mythological elements in science and scientific elements in mythology. When we go from one to the other, we are not discarding one and adopting the other, rather we transform one into the form of the other. The unconscious is made an element of consciousness through conceptual understanding.
What I have said so far is general - it applies to icons of all religions. But each religion has its own icons that are characteristically different.
Why do we have, for example, so many icons in Hinduism? When god is one, why Murugan, Sivan, Vishnu, Kali, Uma, Laxmi and so forth? Why are they so much like human beings even though it is said that God is formless? Why again unusual and bizarre qualities like having four arms, long and sharp teeth that strike terror; sleeping on a snake, having a lotus growing on the navel, having a human like body but animal like face and so forth?
In order to understand this we should turn our attention to the vast store of Hindu mythologies or puranas - great and small. To the great tradition belongs to the puranas about Siva, Sakti, Vishnu and Kandan. To the smaller tradition belongs the innumerable puranas revolving around the minor deities, the village devatas and other subordinate elements in the Hindu pantheon. The best of Hindu icons such as Siva Nataraja, MahaVishnu in his many avatars, Sakti as Kali, Kandan as Murugan; the sacred marriage of Minatci to Siva, Siva as Trimurti, Taksinamurti, Mahayogi and so forth derive the motfits and themes from these puranas.
But what are these puranas? What do they signify? What is their relevance to the religious quest? I shall react to this in my personal capacity as a Hindu who has found Hinduism meaningful after a lengthy period of skepticism. I shall be speaking as a prodigal son who has returned to the fold after wandering far and wide.
A few months ago I wrote a poem in the style of the ancient aarrupadai where an invitation is extended to the young and old alike to visit Raja Rajesvari in a beautiful temple in Jalan Ulu Kelang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A human being grows from a stage of helpless infancy to adulthood through various stages of childhood and youth. Towards the end, old age creeps in making the person helpless again. This origination, development and decay proceeds inexorably - we cannot do anything about it. Each stage of development is characterised by its own set of problems and I wanted to convey the idea that the temple has something to offer to each and every person - no matter in what stage of development he is and no matter what kind of predicament he currently is facing. Also of course, instead of stages of development, it could also refer to the various moods an average person enters into.
To the infant the God is a mother who beacons lovingly and awaits with an open breast where the milk of knowledge flows.
To the child who through play, imitation and action removes the ignorance by developing its intelligence, the God is a lady of wisdom who removes puzzlement, a lady of grace who removes doubts, a lady of enormous intelligence who removes ignorance.
To the young girl who pines sexual love and laments the absence of attractive physical endowments, the Sakti manifests itself both in the infinitely beautiful and benign form of Uma and the vastly ugly and terror striking form of Kali. Also she appears as the mother who has on her right the eternally youthful Murugan without however, at this instance, his two consorts.
To the youth who stands aloof because of skepticism born of the intoxication with the immense advances of science and technology, Sakti is presented as the inseparable consort of Siva Nataraja. This itself is seen as the dynamic conception of reality where antagonistic principles meet to enact a drama where beings of different grades and forms come and go in an endless series of progression and dissolution.
A woman deserted by the husband, ridiculed by the relatives, mocked by the friends and misled by the community leaders by vain promises, grieves over her inability to even feed her children. The archetype of the goddess destroying the evil demon Mahisasuran with spears and riding on a tiger emerges in her soul, thereby giving her enough courage to be like the goddess Kali to destroy her own asuras.
A man fully grown and who has enough experience of the world is grieved by the inhumanity, fanaticism and blind cruelty of his fellow beings. Caught up with an idea of a just society where love and humanity dominates, he seeks the company of Vinayakar, to give him that deep courage that could enable him to achieve his ideal society by overcoming all the obstacles.
The old age has crept in. The limbs and senses are losing their power. The mind goes back to the past - the future is not around anymore. The thought of death looms large with a question: What is after that? To such a person, the sacred marriage of Siva to Sakti, the union of opposites that makes this universe deathless that continuously dissolves and regenerates itself is commended to convey the idea that the end in death is not the end of everything - it is only a single termination in a long series of origination and termination.
Certainly all these images are anthropomorphic - they are projections from things and forms of thought we are familiar in ordinary life. What is stated is not a proposition, a scientific hypothesis to be verified or disproved by observation of some sort or other. But what are communicated and given thus are not meaningless.
In these descriptions, the resources of ordinary language is being stretched from its normal area of use to something new. These images are the product of forms of cognitive functioning where thoughts and feelings are inseparably united.
These are the images through which I give meaning, make this vast, ceaseless universe that is superficially indifferent and remorseless, meaningful to me. These are the images through which I make my presence in the universe significant to me, comprehensible to me.
The icons of Hinduism are three dimensional representations of such images that arise in the context of myth-making process of the human mind. As such, they are not products of ignorance or lower levels of religious development. They are expressions of the basic religious sentiments of the human beings just as valid as any other.
And also they are not simple imaginative constructions of the individual as certain school of Hindu philosophers are given to say. These are archetypes that emerge into consciousness from the unknown depths. They are mantric configurations that are products of the Dance of Siva that take hold of the human psyches and channel the perceptual processes thereby creating understandings that give meanings to the individuals.
Whether we recognise them and worship them or not, we cannot function as human beings without the assistance of these archetypes. It is this deep understanding of the role of archetypes in our cognitive processes that has necessitated the institution of image worship and the numerous fine arts that go along with it as central in Hinduism.
( editing and re-paragraphing by his student )
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