Anthropology is not a suitable hobby for young men. Only white-haired scholars can understand evil as well as good, war as well as peace, pain as well as joy, terror as well as ecstasy. All these experiences are concentrated in the character of Shiva in Indian Mythology. Of all the facets only anthropology, the study of religion is the hardest and deepest, since the secrets of human religion cannot be understood without personal experience. The student of religion has to understand not only human beings, but also the gods they created, and who rules them, the cosmos in which they live immortally, and the illusions they create, and which created them. For the gods are not men: they have their own laws; they do not obey human laws, nor human ethics.
As a young student of Sanskrit and Hinduism forty years ago, my sympathy lay with Vishnu. Here was a god who knew compassion, who descended upon earth whenever an evil demon caused suffering here below. Vishnu would assume the shape of a man or an animal, slay the demon, and restore law and order, and human happiness.
Vishnu is the sun god of the plains, the warm and sunny central lands of India; there he was born as Krishna the naughty boy who becomes Krishna the lover, playing with his sweetheart Radha the game of creating. We all know the colorful paintings only Krishna and the gopis, the milkmaids with whom he flirts and who worship him. It is beautiful, but it is too easy.
In the older layers of Indian myth there is still the realization that God rules not only the beautiful but also the hideous, not only the cheerful but also the sad; all of life is ruled by God. God or the gods? Here again, Hinduism eludes the Western thinker, who likes fixed facts: Vishnu and Shiva merge into one, sculptured as Harihara, the twin god; together with Brahma they form the Trimurti, sculpted as three enormous heads looking in three directions from one body. Elsewhere we see Brahma alone with four heads, creating the four horizons of the universe. Hindu sages and artists understood at an early date that religion is full of contradictions because human language is unfit to express the divine. The divine is not subject to numbers, so God can be one and three at a time.
Hindu mythology is the brilliant creation of the Indian mind. Artists, sculptors, poets, and philosophers have together worked for centuries to build this magnificent monument of faith: Hinduism. What follows is an attempt to glimpse the effulgent personality of Shiva: the Himalayan God.
Shiva is the moon god of the mountains. He has the moon in his hair, out of which flows Ganga, the River Ganges. As its water poured down from the heavens, Shiva protected the earth against the mighty goddess Ganga who would certainly have flooded all India. Shiva forced her to stream through his jata, his matted hair, a sign of his asceticism, until, after a long time, the waters reached the earth. That is why we see many small streams converging in the lower Himalayas to form the one great divine river Ganges. Her beneficent power is so strong that all people will be purified by her holy waters, the living as well as the dead.
As Lord of the Mountains, Shiva is seated on Mount Kailasa, facing south, toward India, while he is teaching the Rishis, the Brahmin priests. Thus Shiva is seen as the master of the mountains
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