A picture, they say, is worth a thousand
words, except in the case of Shiva Nataraja,
the "Lord of Dance," whose form
is beyond any price that human speech can
pay. By expressing through His image the
point where the manifest and the unmanifest
intersect, Nataraja blazes forth as the divine
symbol of nada, the "soundless sound."
Nataraja stands, goldly resplendent, illumined
eternally by the lamps that flare in the
garbhagriha ("womb room") of the
temple at Chidambaram, in the South Indian
state of Tamil Nadu. Poised forever on one
leg, encircled by a halo of bright flame,
forever crushing beneath him the demon of
ego-ignorance, Nataraja smiles gently as
numberless universes pulse to the beat of
His damaru (twin-headed drum). The ancient
Tamils assigned each one of the Five Elements
(pancha mahabhutas) that make up earthly
existence to a separate temple. Earth is
worshipped at Kanchi, Water at Jambukeshwara,
Fire at Tiruvannamalai, and Air at Sri Kalahasti.
Space (akasha or ambara), the primal Element,
the source of the other four Elements and
the font of awareness, is worshipped at Chidambaram.
Traditional Indian philosophy speaks of three
different "levels" of space: ghata
akasha, matha akasha and chid akasha. Ghata
akasha (literally, the space inside a clay
pot) is effectively represents every space
that humans can effectively control. Matha
akasha, the "space inside a building,"
represents those environmental spaces that,
being larger than us, force us to respond
to and cooperate with it. Chid akasha, or
Chid-ambaram, is "awareness space,"
the subtle space that hosts consciousness.
Actually all space is alive and aware; chid-ambaram
is merely space that is awake and alert to
an exceptional degree, space that mainly
houses consciousness. Nataraja dwells calmly
immobile within "awareness space,"
His attitude, posture, and gestures all testifying
to motion. His profoundly dynamic stasis
displays most excellently His perfect aplomb,
situated precisely between zero and infinity,
in the region where action and inaction,
form and formlessness, matter and energy
meet. Nataraja shines with the reality of
Unqualified Awareness at the instant it takes
on qualification, the moment that the Sound
of the Unutterable is uttered. The Element
of Space evolves from shabda tanmatra, the
"subtle element" of sound, and
Nataraja is "frozen music," his
static form revealing to us a mellifluous
rhythm that redolent of nada. Viewed from
the perspective of creation, nada is "that
which expresses," the sound current
from which manifestation occurs. From the
perspective of dissolution, however, nada
is the resonance that follows bindu, the
last point that the experiencer holds to
before relinquishing all sense of time and
space. The transcendent bruit that is nada
begins to reverberate through one's self-awareness
as soon as all differentiating thought disappears.
Nataraja straddles the bindu fence between
creation and destruction, everlastingly awash
in the nada tide that He Himself engenders.
Nothing in the universe moves but Nataraja;
all else that shifts position, form or condition
does so solely through His whirl. Nataraja
is the perfect embodiment of a Vedic formula
for compressing Reality into words: satyam,
rtam, brhat ("the true, the harmonious,
the vast"). Reality exists (it displays
truth, satyam), it has a natural order or
rhythm (rtam) which is self-perpetuating
and self-correcting (it is harmonious), and
it is all-pervasive, extending beyond the
farthest reaches of the human imagination
(it is vast, brhat). Nataraja's form expresses
the solidification of resonance, the congealing
of music and dance into form. The word ambara
can also mean "garment," and chid-ambaram
thus also means "clad in consciousness,"
in the same way that a naked sadhu is sometimes
spoken of as being dig-ambara, "sky-clad,
clothed in the ten directions." Awareness
covers the Lord of Dance, it surrounds Him
as it emerges from Him. Alone at the center
of the cosmos, He is the embodiment of the
consciousness that gave the cosmos birth.
Within the human microcosm Nataraja relentlessly
dances a tarantella of blood and lymph at
the heart-center, thumping out the rhythm
of heartbeats endlessly disseminating oxygen
and prana, the life force. Like the heart,
which sits at the core of the chest, the
center of any space or image, in or out of
the body, should be relatively empty of matter
but full of prana. Any central area is a
"heart," a chid-ambaram that should
reflect and express ultimate nature, ultimate
sound and rhythm by concentrating prana there.
Prana, mind and breath all work together,
in the internal and the external universe
alike. Turned outward, Nataraja's nada generates
the four levels of speech, beginning with
para, continuing with pashyanti and madhyama,
concluding with vaikhari. Turned inward,
that same nada evolves in reverse, from vaikhari
to madhyama and pashyanti, then para. In
para, the highest form of speech, there is
absolutely no thought of "this, thus,
here or now," of any particularized
entity, form, space, or time. Para reflects
the total absence of any object whatsoever.
In pashyanti sound becomes more perceptible,
without being yet particularized. Phonemes
are present, but only faintly differentiated,
unable to be isolated from the overall energy.
In madhyama the sound becomes particularized;
madhyama is the "inner speech"
of thought. Only at the stage of vaikhari
does the full, outward manifestation of speech
take place. The revealed word manifests the
Godhead, in this context as Nataraja. In
the body or out of it, at the subatomic level
or in a galactic cluster, wherever we become
able to locate that tangential space where
the "zeroness" of silence and the
infinity of sounds meet, we find ourselves
in the presence of the Great Dance Lord,
the primal image of that articulation of
energy and effort that, by using bindu to
generate nada, returns its viewers back to
the Ultimate.
Copyright © 2001
Robert Edwin Svoboda
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