Shiva temple

“ We are told that the temple, including the tower, is fifty-one feet in height. "Outside the enclosure is a large collection of deities, raised upon a platform, called by the natives 'The Court of Mahadeo.'" Though the gods in the Hindu books are represented as continually quarrelling with each other, and their devotees take up their quarrels, not only at the temple of Bisheshwar, but throughout the city which is regarded as Shiva's own, they are seen side by side, as in perfect amity, and there is not a single god who does not secure the special devotion of some worshippers. ”

“ The Hindu woman replied: "Yes, sahib, you shall escape, but not immediately. Tonight I will hide you where none will be able to discover your place of concealment; when morning dawns you must make the effort upon which your life will depend. Hidden within this temple, you will hear to-morrow the Brahmins as they utter their chants calling upon Shiva to accept the sacrifice which they intend to make. ”

“ Many of these buildings are covered with fine cement, and others are painted with miserable frescoes.
The streets are for the most part both dirty and ugly, and many of them are so narrow, that there is scarcely room for a palanquin to pass. At the corner of almost every house stands the figure of the god Shiva.
Among the temples in the town, the handsomest is the “Bisvishas:” it has two towers connected by colonnades, with their summits covered with golden plates. The temple is surrounded by a wall, but we were allowed to enter the fore-court, and to go as far as the entrance. ”

“ Devotees in countless numbers crowded the streets puffing their cheeks, and shaking their sides, as they shouted aloud in enthusiasm: Oh, Mahadeva! Lord of the Universe! Women, devotees of Shiva, carrying tridents in their hands, and wearing scarlet raiment, were perambulating in their hundreds, about the temple of Shiva, engaged in their devotions to Shiva and Durga, and laughing madly the while. Ascetics there were in great numbers, who striving hard to subdue their bodies, and their passions, sat solitary with their hands uplifted, hair all matted, and bodies covered with ashes. ”

“ Well of the Knowledge of Salvation. It is close to the Golden Temple. There you will see, sculptured out of a single piece of black marble, a bull which is much larger than any living bull you have ever seen, and yet is not a good likeness after all. And there also you will see a very uncommon thing—an image of Shiva. You have seen his lingam fifty thousand times already, but this is Shiva himself, and said to be a good likeness. It has three eyes. He is the only god in the firm that has three. ”

“ Many of the vast carved and ornamental masses which diversify the canon have been fitly named temples, as Shiva's Temple, a mile high, carved out of the red Carboniferous limestone, and remarkably symmetrical in its outlines. Near it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the Buddha Temple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyramid of Cheops. Farther to the east is the Diva Temple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster, and the Tomb of Odin. Indeed, everywhere are there suggestions of temples and tombs, pagodas and pyramids, on a scale that no work of human hands can rival. ”

“ The huge daghopa that hides the holy of holies from the eyes of the worshippers is sheltered by a mushroom-shaped roof, and resembles a low minaret with a cupola. Roofs of this description are called "umbrellas," and usually shelter the statues of Buddha and of the Chinese sages. But, on the other hand, the worshippers of Shiva, who possess the temple nowadays, assert that this low building is nothing but a lingam of Shiva. Besides, the carvings of gods and goddesses cut out of the rock forbid one to think that the temple is the production of the Buddhists. ”

“ The temple was built a thousand years ago by a pious raja, who had seen Shiva and Parvati dancing on the near-by sea-shore; and the holy of holies is a golden shrine dedicated to the god of dancing. Another tradition says that a Kashmir prince of the fifth century brought three thousand Brahmans with him from the north and founded the temple. The greatest popularity was given the temple when "the golden-colored emperor," a leper prince who had come south on a pilgrimage, was cured by bathing in the temple tank, and thousands emulate him every year. ”

“ Here a deep vihara, a cave cell of a Buddhist bhikshu saint, there a rock protected by the symbol of Shiva, further on a Jaina temple, or a holy tank, all covered with sedge and filled with water, once blessed by a Brahman and able to purify every sin, all indispensable attribute of all pagodas. All the surroundings are covered with symbols of gods and goddesses. Each of the three hundred and thirty millions of deities of the Hindu Pantheon has its representative in something consecrated to it, a stone, a flower, a tree, or a bird. ”

“ In the main temples of the Parambanan group, with the exception of tyanḍi Shiva, there was no place for these lights. The altar-shaped 20 pedestals of the images were much smaller there, and round about them there was but little room.
This temple’s walls hewn with exquisitely modelled festoons had also no niches, and could not have had them unless one would have partly sacrificed its panels. ”

“ The bust, including the head-dress, measures certainly as much as eight feet. On the walls and in the niches, there are a number of giant statues and figures; in fact, whole scenes of the Hindoo mythology. The female figures are remarkable; they all have the left hip turned out, the right turned inwards. The temple appears to be devoted to the god Shiva. ”

“ It is in love that religion exists and not in ceremony, in the pure and sincere love in the heart. Unless a man is pure in body and mind, his coming into a temple and worshipping Shiva is useless. The prayers of those that are pure in mind and body will be answered by Shiva, and those that are impure and yet try to teach religion to others will fail in the end. External worship is only a symbol of internal worship; but internal worship and purity are the real things. Without them, external worship would be of no avail. Therefore you must all try to remember this.
People have become so degraded in this Kali Yuga that they think they can do anything, and then they can go to a holy place, and their sins will be forgiven. ”

“ Another sculpture (W. L., 106, the seventh after the second corner) is still note-worthy, because the temple wherein it sits (not on a lotus-cushion) has been crowned by five shivaïtic trisyulas. Should this be a woman’s image it then may represent a Târâ or female deity, but it hasn’t any token to be recognised as Durgâ, the syakti of Shiva [65] .
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Unique of its kind is the sixty-ninth sculpture on the back-wall of the following, third, gallery (northern staircase, second corner, 2) .
To the left we see a deity (a Bodhisattva, perhaps) in a temple crowned by eleven trisyulas. ”

“ The Temple was dedicated to Siva, but the whole Hindu pantheon of the Vedic gods appeared to be sculptured in this marvellous place, as well as the different avators of Siva.
The Hindu religion is really a great system of nature worship, all the powers, forces, and influences being personified and symbolised, nothing being accounted “common or unclean”—the elephant-headed Ganesha and the monkey god Hunuman taking their place as “eligible deities”—the whole scheme resting on the acknowledgment of the sexual origin of life. ”

“ It is now the idol worshipped there, and is a figure of black marble, or perhaps basalt, highly polished, small, but of elegant proportions, with features of the pure Hindu type. The eyes are composed of large uncut rubies; and, as the image stands upon its altar, clothed in a woman's garment, in the small dark sanctum of the temple, they have always a strange, weird, and, to the worshippers, a fascinating appearance, glittering through the gloom, and smoke of lamps and incense always burning. ”

“ But there is nothing here which impresses one more than its squalid filth, and the abject degradation of the people which crowd its streets. The temples are extremely dirty. There is not one of imposing size or of decent attractiveness. There stands the monkey-temple, where scores of mangy, tricky brutes are daily sumptuously fed by devout pilgrims. On one side of [68] the precinct a clever butcher-priest severs with one stroke the heads of goats which are brought for sacrifice to the thirsty deity. As in Madura, so in Benares, the great god of the Hindu is Siva. ”

“ Yet, here the gods are worshipped—this is a holy place, and to visit it an act of piety! Such is Hinduism, and such the moral sense of the Hindus! Such, rather, is human nature left to reveal its own depravity.
The great temple of Siva has not a monopoly of the sacred city. The worshippers of the rival god Vishnu have also a famous temple here. It is not Christianity alone, as many suppose, that is divided into sects. Hinduism has its sects, who have engaged in bloody wars to decide whether Siva or Vishnu was the supreme ruler ”

“ It is not worth while to try to get any grip upon the cloud of minor gods, there are too many of them.
It is even a justifiable economy to leave Brahma, the chiefest god of all, out of your studies, for he seems to cut no great figure in India. The vast bulk of the national worship is lavished upon Shiva and Vishnu and their families. Shiva's symbol—the "lingam" with which Vishnu began the Creation—is worshiped by everybody, apparently. It is the commonest object in Benares. It is on view everywhere, it is garlanded with flowers, offerings are made to it, it suffers no neglect. ”

“ As Hindu ritual is individualistic and not congregational, the temple service does not necessarily require more than a fitting shrine for the deity and a verandah or porch for the custodian of it. Many thousands of Hindu temples are of this simple type, either with the sikhara steeple, as in Pl. XV, or with the stūpa dome, which can be seen in the Buddhist stūpa-houses at Ajantā (Pl. XI) . ”

“ The truth of the matter is, that one of the greatest difficulties an antiquary experiences before the 8th century, is to ascertain to what divinity any temple or a cave is dedicated. In the three caves, for instance, at Badami, the sculptures are wholly Vaishnava, and no one would doubt that they were dedicated to that deity, but in the sanctuaries of all is the lingam or emblem of Siva. ”

“ The Vedic rites were therefore not independent of the builder's craft, as Fergusson and other writers have assumed. In later Vedic times the development of the Yoga cult would have made the building of a private royal chapel almost a necessity. There is much historical significance in the name given to a temple in Southern India—a kōvil, or King's house.
The limited view of ancient Indian life afforded by early Buddhist sculpture gives no indication of any kind of royal chapel other than the domed stūpa shrine. Buddhism was a protest against the rites celebrated by Aryan kings in Vedic India. ”

“ Niched among these alleys are the numerous shrines and temples already mentioned—some a mere image of Vishnu or Siva, with a lingam in front of it, some little enclosures with several shrines—the so-called Golden Temple itself only a small affair, with one or two roofs plated with gold. In many of the temples brahman cows wander loose, quite tame, nosing against the worshipers, who often feed them ”

“ The ordinary South Indian Vaishnava Brāhman has nothing to do with the Shaiva temple over the way, and takes no part or interest in the Shaiva festivals. Siva is to the Nambūtiri the supreme deity, but he has temples also to Vishnu, Krishna, Narasimha, Sri Rāghava, Ganapathi, Subrahmanya, Bhagavati, etc. There are said to be temples to Sāstavu and Sankarnārāyanan — amalgamated forms of Siva and Vishnu. The lingam is the ordinary object of worship. ”

“ From this central square narrow alleys radiate in all directions, and these lead to shrines, temples, and pagodas in endless succession. In the narrowest of lanes some of the most remarkable buildings are to be found, one temple standing in a particularly unsavoury gully, attracting attention on account of being plated from pavement to pinnacle with sheets of embossed copper gilt. Near this, and almost blocking up the passage, is a shrine to Ganesh, with the attributes of this popular divinity in the shape of two colossal bronze rats crouching on pedestals in front. ”

“ After one more tunnel staircase we gained the open summit, climbed a last pinnacle, and found ourselves two hundred and thirty-six feet above the city, that lay like a relief-map at our feet, the fortress-like gopuras of the Srirangam temples rising from green groves southward, A little temple to Ganesha crowns the rock, the goal of the breathless pilgrimage. ”

“ To correctly understand the situation in India at this period, it must be realized that the religion of the country was a Pantheism, and that the sacred edifices of the Hindus rioted in sculptured representations of the deities and their attributes, the thousand and one gods of the national creed, in all their various forms and incarnations. Natural and living creations were introduced into all ornamentation, in wood, stone, or metal, and "graven images" were the chief feature of every temple and shrine. ”

“ Up to a height of seven feet the walls were covered with stucco, white on white, ivory and snowy enamel skilfully blended with shiny white lac, and overlaid with a silver-threaded spider’s web of arabesques, as exquisite as the finest Mechlin lace, and of Sanskrit quotations in the Devanagari script, showing that the temple had been built many, many centuries earlier, in the golden days when Hindu priests first brought the peaceful words of the Lord Gautama Buddha from across the Himalayas and before the Mongols twisted the gentle message according to their tortuous, mazed mentality. ”