Religion

Shiva Nataraja -The Lord of the Cosmic Dance

2023-09-21
Rohan Balthasar

The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”

Carl Sagan 
Of all the creation myths The Shiva Nataraja combines Theology, Science and Art is perfect harmony.  Shiva embodies those perfect physical qualities as he is frozen in the moment of his dance within the cosmic circle of fire that is the simultaneous and continuous creation and destruction of the universe. The ring of fire that surrounds the figure is the encapsulated cosmos of mass, time, and space, whose endless cycle of annihilation and regeneration moves in tune to the beat of Shiva’s drum and the rhythm of his steps. A great description of the Shiva Nataraja is from  Joseph Campbell

The contents of the upper two of Nataraja’s outstretched hands are meant to demonstrate the eternal balance between the forces of creation and those of destruction. In the upper right hand, Shiva holds the sacred damaru, a drum in the shape of an hourglass, with which Shiva beats out the rhythm of his dance and with it the ceaseless creation of the universe and all of its infinite forms.

 This drum, writes Joseph Campbell, “is the drum of time, the tick of time which shuts out the knowledge of eternity,” as a result of which “we are enclosed in time.” Moreover, it is said to signify the primordial sound from which all things emanate, connoting in Heinrich Zimmer’s words “Sound, the vehicle of speech, the conveyer of revelation, tradition, incantation, magic, and divine truth.”

 Opposed to this force of creation as represented by the drum is the flame of extinction held in Shiva’s upper right hand. That flame symbolizes all of Shiva’s awesome powers of destruction, the terrible but necessary burning away of all things existing in time and space, the fire which, Campbell writes, “burns away the veil of time and opens our minds to eternity.”

While the lower right hand is held in a palm-outward gesture said to signify the reassurance of the god that those approaching this image should “fear not,” the lower left hand is gracefully pointed downward in the classical dance position is known as “elephant hand,” signifying the concept of spiritual teaching. “Where an elephant has gone through the jungles,” observes Cambpell, “all animals can follow, and where a teacher leads the way disciples follow.”

The Shiva Nataraja bronze was the creation of the Tamil Chola Empire that was in power from the 9th to the 13th century. Even though concept is original Tamil the artists followed the strict interpretations of the ancient Sanskrit treaties on visual depiction
 the Shilpa Shastras (The Science or Rules of Sculpture), which contained a precise set of measurements and shapes for the limbs and proportions of the divine figure. Arms were to be long like stalks of bamboo, faces round like the moon, and eyes shaped like almonds or the leaves of a lotus. 
The Shilpa Shastras were treaties on the ideals of beauty and physical perfection within ancient Hindu ideology. The masterpiece is one of the defining Icons of Hinduism and South Asian art.
 
French sculptor Auguste Rodin saw some photographs of the 11th century bronze Shiva Nataraja in the Madras Museum around 1915, he wrote that it seemed to him the “perfect expression of rhythmic movement in the world.” In an essay he wrote that was published in 1921 he wrote that the Shiva Nataraja has “what many people cannot see—the unknown depths, the core of life. There is grace in elegance, but beyond grace there is perfection.” The English philosopher Aldous Huxley said in an interview in 1961 that the Hindu image of god as a dancer is unlike anything he had seen in Western art. “We don’t have anything that approaches the symbolism of this work of art, which is both cosmic and psychological.”
The Lord of the Cosmic Dance is the product of a culture in which dance is central to temple worship and the 10th century concept of Shiva was influenced by the classical dance of Bharatanatyam that predates it by a thousand years. Bharatanatyam has shaped South East Asian classical dances and influenced modern ballet.  Today Shiva Nataraja stands in front of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Switzerland CERN. The inscription states the following

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, seeing beyond the unsurpassed rhythm, beauty, power and grace of the Nataraja, once wrote of it “It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of.”

More recently, Fritjof Capra explained that “Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter,” and that “For the modern physicists, then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.”

It is indeed as Capra concluded: “Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics.”

What say you?

https://www.fritjofcapra.net/shivas-cosmic-dance-at-cern/

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/south-east-se-asia/india-art/a/shiva-as-lord-of-the-dance-nataraja

R&I  TP

Rohan Balthasar

Article URL : https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/category/religion/