A Dummy's Guide to Hinduism by a Dummy - or Gods Galore

Since Pondicherry I have spent about five days temple hopping, first in Chidambaram, then in Thanjavur and now in Madurai. This is appropriate, since the state of Tamil Nadu is best known for its temples, which are mostly old, sometimes ancient and nearly always still in active religious use. Hinduism is still going strong - with an ever increasing amount of gods and deities to worship.
This also means that most of the temples have been heavily renovated during the centuries more with a view of the everyday use of the place than with an eye on preserving historically unique structures intact. Compared to the magnificience and age of many of these buildings, relatively few in India are listed in the Unesco World Heritage listing due to this.
One of the exceptions is this beautiful temple above in Thanjavur. The main attractions were a 6m long and 3m tall cow statue (nandi) hewn from a single piece of granite (and estimated to weigh 25 tonnes. Imagine dragging that thing up the stairs 1000 years ago, when the temple was built!) and a 4m high lingam or stone fallos in the heart of the main temple building. Lingams are a common holy statue - here below a lovely scene (from my mobile phone) of the family unit, father, mother and two overweight and strange coloured sons (plus a cow) gathered to worship the Fallos.
(The images from inside temples on this posting will be from the crappy camera of my Indian OPPO mobile phone. This is because, strangely enough, taking photos inside some temples on a mobile phone is allowed, whereas taking photos with a camera or even bringing a camera onto the premises is not.)

The structure of your average temple seems to be rings of pillared hallways with statues and carvings of deities on the pillars. In bigger temples the pillared outer rings are quite a magnificient sight.
The closer to the core you get, the holier the effigy. So a temple's most prized statue tends to stand in the heart of the complex in a room called the womb room. Normal worshippers - even hindus - can't get right up to this statue. Instead it is officiated upon by priests or holy men or whatever the going term is for a religious official hereabouts - men of the cloth and nothing else, meaning the priests are topless with white loincloths (again, or whatever they are called). It is the job of these priests to wave flames and holy twigs and what-nots at the deitys, drape them in different silky cloths, bring them bananas and coconuts, wreathe them in flowers and dab their foreheads with pigment. Sometimes chanting or clanging of bells is involved. And the show is performed to doting crowds of pilgrims and temple visitors. It's all very serious as religion tends to be and reminds me a bit of Indiana Jones in one of his lost temples.
Among the millions and millions of hindu gods, Ganesha, the elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati (and whose brother, by the way, is a peacock - there's very some strange family history there) seems to be a big time favourite. But then the Indians are very pragmatic about which god they workship: if you are ill, worship a god, whose big on healing, if you want to get pregnant the god of fertility etc. And Ganesh is the remover of obstacles, spiritual or financial. And who wouldn't want some of that?
So each temple has many sculptures of different gods to choose from. Sometimes the worshipped deity is not a separate statue, but a carving on the pillars of the temple. There are any amount of these, but only some are paid due homage, while others, equally attractive to the untrained eye, remain unadorned and unworshipped. The method by which a particular statue or carving in the temple pillars becomes a particular favourite to worship seems, to the uninitiated, completely random. It feels like someone accidentally spilt some pigment on a carving, after which everyone else was like: "Wait! Pigment! Should we know this one? Best to be sure!" And sprinkled more pigment and coconut oil on the staute, thereby laying the foundations for fully fledged deification.
Pigments tend to be white, yellow or dark red. Though I've seen bright green pigment sold as well. The pigment is used to cover the statues and carvings of gods (basic rule seems to be, the more pigment, the more worshipped the statue).
Pigment is also used to make those iconic dots on the forehead. But some don't leave it at a dot, but paint bold stripes weither vertical (Vishnu worshippers) or horizontal (erhm... worshipping some other deity - possibly Shiva).
And sometimes for good measure, you can just paint your whole forehead and cover all bases.
Though you don't need to leave it at that, since especially devout women often cover their whole face with yellow or green pigment - the resulting green skintone is not too appealing to the novice eye.
Apart from pigment and coconut oil candles, the gods are also partial to wreaths of sweet smelling flowers and gifts of coconuts and bananas and little lime fruit, which are either stinged into a kind of lime-bead necklace or stuck on the spikes surrounding statues - oh, and money of course. Many of these offerings give the temples quite a lovely smell - the burning of coconut oil lamps especially gives a pleasant smell, more pleasing than e.g. the Bhutanese butter lamps.

I read an article many years ago already, on how the importance laid on making these offerings to the gods meant that many desperately poor people were using money to make offerings for the gods, instead of to feed their own children or some other, many would think, more worthwhile pursuit. However people see this homage as a kind of deposit for the afterlife - to ensure a better starting point for the next reincarnation.
I must admit, I'm getting slightly templed out. And the temples are unlikely to end just yet, as I head yet more South tomorrow for some more temples and sun - and back to the sea, which I have sorely missed these past few days. Let's see when I am reconnected with the internet the next time. Until then, peace laddies and lassies, peace!

Comments

Popular Posts