Evil Never Dies

Evil never dies 

Nataraja  (Pixabay image)

Tucked into a tiny fold at the foot of mountains which vault, thick with forest, into Himalayan skies, is Triyuginarayan. Here, the temple custodian informs us, Shiva married Parvati.

The same Shiva who manifested when Brahma and Vishnu were slugging it out to affirm their primacy over the universe? From a translation of the Shiva Purana, by Ramesh Menon:

“As the devas watched in horror, flames from the astras began to consume the three realms. Suddenly, between the two maddened gods, a column sprung up through the ground - a column from nowhere, without top or bottom, a column of light and fire, into which the apocalyptic astras were absorbed like two sparks. It was a linga! With thousands of garlands of flames, flames like galaxies spewing in every direction, an incomparable, incomprehensible linga. Awe-struck, Vishnu and Brahma fell silent.”

Vishnu took the form of a boar, and dived through the ground, while Brahma became a swan, and flew quicker than light, but above and below, there was no end to the blazing linga. Eventually:

“Shiva stepped out of the linga, taller than the phallus of fire, a wild, matt-haired yogi, bright as a billion suns.”

It defies imagination that this towering force which straddled worlds could be contained in this stone temple, built on a human scale. Earthly locations like Triyuginarayan can only stand in as maps, representations of the religious cosmology in which such forces warred, and married; the shrine of Triyuginarayan must be regarded only as a miniature simulacrum of the heavenly mandap in which Shiva walked around the fire of marriage with Parvati, on a day we now celebrate as Mahashivratri.

Legend upon legend, literal belief and ritual layered upon depths of philosophy, the Hindu traditions of our gods are an ocean of stories, a vast Kathasaritsagar in which I get hopelessly lost every time I take a dip. One can revel in the richness of the literature, but what I marvel at most is the depth of the philosophy, the insights into the human condition which these tales paint through the gods.

In the introduction to The Siva Purana Retold, Ramesh Menon writes, of the Puranic description of time, “this is hardly the invention of brutish man scrabbling to create the spoke and the ploughshare.”

Indeed, these inventions, or inspirations, hold lessons for the ages. On Friday, as the street outside my home throbbed with DJ trucks pumping bass beats to celebrate Shiv-ji’s baraat, I thought of the Samudra Manthan. When the devas and asuras churned the oceans, Lakshmi emerged, seated on a lotus. But so did the halahal poison, which threatened to extinguish life itself. Shiva swallowed the poison, which stuck in his throat, turning it blue, but also saved the universe.

For this tiny mortal, the lesson here is ‘swallow’; swallow your pride, swallow rebukes, swallow gossip, swallow setbacks, swallow and move on. Regurgitation, retribution, retaliation, the automated responses of our egos, achieve nothing. They spread the poison, without and within. There is the tiniest spark of divinity, or the inspired, within each of us. Ingest the poison. It may stick in your throat for a bit, but slowly, ever so slowly, it will dissolve.

And then there is the tandava, Shiva’s dance which Ananda Coomaraswamy described as the “manifestation of primal rhythmic energy”, the never-ending cycle of creation and destruction. As a student of economics, I have often made a facile comparison between the tandava and Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, the notion that capitalism is never stationary, that “over time, a newer technology will replace and render obsolete what we consider to be on the cutting-edge technologically today”* We must temper our romantic view of the past with the hope of the future, and the triumphalism of the present with the knowledge of its demise. Time dances on.

Unlike the earthly dancer, performing in a stone temple, or a wooden stage, Nataraja dances upon the dwarfed figure of Apasmara, the demon of spiritual ignorance. Apasmara can never be slain, but he must always be contained. And so Shiva dances on, he dances for illumination, for the world to be released from “the snare of illusion”, the source of evil.

As must we. Released we never shall be, from the illusion that is the fate of the mortal, but dance we must, to part a few veils in our lifetime. And in that dance, find joy.

 *https://www.cmu.edu/epp/irle/irle-blog-pages/schumpeters-theory-of-creative-destruction.html#:~:text=On%20the%20other%20hand%2C%20the,ways%2C%20hinder%20the%20next%20innovation.