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Shiva - Nataraja . - Page 4

© Kalyani Subramanyan

The symbolism of Siva Nataraja is religion, art, and science merged into one. Gods endless dance of creation, preservation, destruction, and paired graces holds a hidden, deep understanding of our universe. Carved in stone or cast of bronze from the Chola age, his ananda tandava, fierce ballet of bliss, dances the cosmos. AUM Namah Sivaya.

The mantra AUM represents the divine. The Upanisads explain it as standing for the whole world and its parts including the past, present, and future. It is the primal vibration that all manifestation issues forth. Its three letters represent the three worlds and the powers of creation, preservation, and destruction. Correlated with the divine triad, trimurti, represented by Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. Though Siva is part of the trimurti, he is greater than the whole as well. He is the only eternal being, as we see by the skull.

Nowhere else in the human world is there a clearer symbol of what a god is and does.

He dances the dance of creation, the dance of destruction, the dance of solace and liberation. Beneath his left foot ignorance is crushed; from his head springs the life-giving waters. His are the flames, the moon, the drum, and the lotus. His mount is the white bull, and the tiger has given its skin to gird his loins. Serpents coil about his limbs, and from his right hand flows the promise of release.

This dance is not just a symbol. It takes place within each of us at the atomic level at every moment. The birth of the world, its maintenance, its destruction, the covering of the soul and its revelation...these are the five acts of this dance. All that has been made will be unmade, and all that has been destroyed will be resurrected.

Shiva has a thousand names, and a thousand faces. Shiva is the essence of the Vedas, and he source of the Word. He is inextricably woven into all that the eye can see. He is the first among the gods of this world, who made the world so that others could make the things in it. Energy is his name, and he moves through all things, never static. All that is made, every generation of life, all the wondrous forms that fill our world, all flow from his dancing loins.

He is not male, nor female. He is neither human nor inhuman. He has four arms, and he has none. Shiva's nature at once transcends and includes all the polarities of the living world. What things we are we do not know. We wander all of our lives secluded, burdened by our minds. It is when the Word, the first born of truth, comes to us, we come into the presence of Shiva mind.

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