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March 3 - March 4, 2021
Food, they say, keeps the hunger pangs away. Food, they say, with its many flavours and textures, excites the senses, and helps them experience the variety of nature. Food, they say, provides contentment and allows the mind to move away from fear.
Shiva feels the pain of his Ganas. He experiences what they experience. He yearns for what they yearn. He realises that these needs and cravings of the body force him to think about mortality. From fear of death stems the yearning for immortality and this yearning for immortality eventually paves the path towards spirituality.
food plays a key role in the human journey from Prakriti to Purusha.
As a reminder of the value of the Goddess and her kitchen, uncooked food in the form of nuts and raw milk is offered to the hermit Shiva of Kailasa while the householder Shankara of Kashi is offered cooked food.
The concept of debt to ancestors or Pitr-rin is an integral part of culture aimed at preventing men from becoming indifferent, self-absorbed hermits and forcing them to become householders, responsible for others.
She anoints her body with a paste of turmeric and oil, then scrapes it off, collects the rubbings which have mingled with her sweat, and moulds out of it a doll into which she breathes life. This is her son whom she calls Vinayaka, the one born without (vina) a man (nayaka).
The Goddess thus turns the table on Shiva through Vinayaka. All this time, Shiva had shut his eyes to Shakti. Through Vinayaka, Shakti shuts her eyes to Shiva. When humanity ignores imagination, there is no growth, no quest to outgrow fear, no desire for spiritual reality.
Ganesha draws attention towards the value of nature, of food and of worldly life.
No one wanted to marry a man with the head of an elephant. So, his mother draped a sari around a banana plant and gave it to Ganesha as his wife. This is the reason a banana plant with a sari is found next to Ganesha during Durga Puja, celebrated in autumn. She is called Kola-Bau, the matriarch of the clan.
In folklore, tusks are associated with pretension: elephants show one set of teeth while they eat with another set of teeth. By breaking off one of the tusks, Ganesha is breaking pretension. The tusks are symbols of aggressive power. Ganesha is breaking it so that strength is used only to defend and nourish, not dominate and exploit.
Ganesha’s association with wisdom is endorsed by his association with the Muladhara Chakra in Tantra.
Tantra is the technology for the finite Brahma to reach the infinite Shiva w...
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Ganesha’s wisdom manifests as the two symbols he carries in his hand. In one hand, he holds an axe and in the other hand he holds a noose. The axe represents analytical skills that enable one to separate objective from subjective reality, thought and form, animal instincts from human conditionings, sense of self from the sense of other, me from mine. The noose represents the ability to outgrow these divides, to unite the opposites, synthesise solutions, to recognise that ultimately, in nirguna brahman, Shiva and Shakti are not separate but one.
In some images, Ganesha holds a sugar cane in one hand and the elephant goad or ankush in the other. Sugar cane represents Kama, the god of desire and freedom. The elephant goad represents Yama, the god of death and bondage. Ganesha thus acknowledges the life-giving aspect of nature as well as the life-taking aspect of nature.
A restless Goddess may dance to arouse Shiva but Shiva also has to dance to calm the Goddess. It is not a one-way street. It is in the human imagination that Purusha and Prakriti can move towards each other and finally meet. Ganesha embodies that possibility.
Kubera thus seeks a world where he is the dominant overlord, while Ganesha symbolises a world where there is no need for a pecking order.
