Of all the images Hindu artists have made, none has travelled further than the bronze Nataraja. A four-armed Shiva dances inside a ring of fire, one leg raised, hair flying, a serene half-smile on his face, his right foot planted on the back of a small, squirming figure. Cast by the sculptors of the Chola kingdom in Tamil Nadu around a thousand years ago, the form now stands in museums on every continent, and a large one dances outside the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva.
Most people who pass it sense that it means something. Fewer know what. The image is a sermon in metal, and once you learn to read it, you cannot see it any other way.
The lord of the dance
Nataraja joins two Sanskrit words: nata, dancer or actor, and raja, king. Shiva's dance is called the Ananda Tandava, the dance of bliss. Tandava is the vigorous, masculine form of dance, as opposed to lasya, the gentle form associated with Parvati. The two together are said to make up the whole of movement, just as Shiva and Shakti together make up the whole of existence.
The home of this dance is the temple at Chidambaram, in the Tamil country, where tradition says Shiva performed it before the sages. The name itself is a teaching: chit means consciousness and ambaram means sky or space. Chidambaram is the sky of consciousness, and the dance, in the deepest reading, takes place not in a shrine but in the heart of every living being.
Reading the image
Stand before a Nataraja and go round it slowly.
The upper right hand holds a small hourglass-shaped drum, the damaru. Its beat is the first sound, the pulse of time starting up. Sound, in the Vedic view, comes before form: the universe is spoken into being. The damaru is creation.
The upper left hand holds a flame, agni. Fire ends what the drum began. The same Shiva who sets the rhythm going will bring it to a close, and the two hands are held at the same height, in balance. Creation and dissolution are not opposites; they are the in-breath and out-breath of a single act.
The lower right hand is raised with the palm facing outward, the abhaya mudra, the gesture that says "do not fear". Between the drum and the fire, between coming into being and passing away, there is this reassurance.
The lower left hand sweeps across the body and points down towards the raised foot. This is the gaja hasta, the elephant-trunk gesture, and it directs the devotee's attention to where release is to be found.
The raised left foot is release itself. The dance lifts the devotee out of the cycle of birth and death. To take refuge at that foot is the goal of the whole image.
The right foot presses down on a dwarf named Apasmara, whose name means forgetfulness. He is ignorance: the forgetting of who we really are. Notice that Shiva does not kill him. Apasmara is subdued but alive, and alive he must remain, because without ignorance there could be no knowledge, no striving, no dance. He looks up at the god with something between fear and wonder.
The ring of flames, the prabha mandala, circles the whole figure. It is the universe, the endless round of samsara, within which the dance goes on. It is also the halo of Shiva's own energy, which both contains the cosmos and burns away its limits.
The flying hair shows the speed of the dance. Caught in its strands are the crescent moon, the river Ganga, who descends to earth through Shiva's locks, and sometimes a skull. Time, life-giving water and death, all swept along together.
The face is calm. Amid all this movement, Shiva's expression does not change. That stillness at the centre of motion is the heart of the teaching.
The five acts
Shaiva philosophy, especially the Shaiva Siddhanta tradition of the Tamil south, speaks of God's five acts, the panchakritya. The Nataraja image lays them out in a single body.
- Srishti, creation, in the drum.
- Sthiti, preservation, in the hand that says "do not fear".
- Samhara, dissolution, in the flame.
- Tirobhava, concealment, in the foot that stands on Apasmara. God veils himself so that the play of the world can go on and souls can grow through it.
- Anugraha, grace, in the raised foot and the hand that points to it. The veil is lifted for the one who seeks.
The first three are familiar from the idea of the Trimurti, where Brahma creates, Vishnu sustains and Shiva dissolves. The Shaiva tradition gathers all three into Shiva and adds the last two, which are the ones that touch us most directly. Concealment is why we do not see the truth; grace is how we come to see it.
What the image teaches
The Nataraja is often described as a picture of physics, and the comparison is not foolish. Matter is movement; nothing in the universe stands still. But the image was made as a picture of the soul's situation, and that reading is older and deeper.
It teaches that destruction is not evil. The flame is held with the same ease as the drum. In our own lives, the ending of a job, a stage, a relationship or a body is part of the same rhythm that brought it into being.
It teaches that fear is answered not by stopping the dance but by the hand that is raised in the middle of it. Security does not come from the world holding still. It comes from the one who dances.
It teaches that ignorance is to be stood upon, not hated. Apasmara is small. He only has power when we let him up.
And it teaches that the whole thing can be found inside. At Chidambaram, beside the image of Nataraja, there is a curtained space in which there is no image at all, only a garland hanging in the air. This is the Chidambara Rahasyam, the secret of Chidambaram: the real dance happens in empty, formless consciousness, and the bronze is only a finger pointing there.
Bringing it home
You do not need a Chola bronze. Any image of Nataraja, or none, will do for this exercise. Sit quietly and go through the hands one by one. Something in your life is being created: name it. Something is being dissolved: name that too, without resentment. Hear the "do not fear". Then look for your own Apasmara, the habit of forgetting what you are, and imagine the foot resting on it, lightly, not crushing but holding. Finally, rest your attention on the raised foot. The whole of Shaiva devotion fits in that moment, and it takes less time than making tea.