But above and beyond any of this, the true defining characteristic of Rudra-Siva is as the God of all Knowledge and of insight and inner wisdom (jnana – gnosis). This is why we read, in Book VIII of the Rig Veda: ‘That mind of Rudra, fresh and strong, moves conscious in the ancient ways.’34
This is why Siva is frequently portrayed in Hindu religious art as Jnana-Dakshinamurti, Master of all Wisdom, ‘sitting under a tree on Mount Kailasa with his foot on a dwarf who symbolizes human ignorance’.35
The highest knowledge to the most humble
The particular nature of Rudra-Siva as the God of Knowledge in the form of a powerful rishi with unkempt hair who lives in mountains and wild places is connected to a subtle and complex system of ideas which, even if one does not agree with it, must be admitted to be extremely well thought-out and (in view of the Mohenjodaro seal) extremely ancient. Ultimately, it seems to state that enlightenment, and true knowledge, cannot be attained without becoming the master of one’s impulses and renouncing the lures of the material world – or at any rate one’s ‘attachment’ to it. Conversely, a person’s material wealth and physical beauty can tell us nothing useful about that person’s mind and soul. It is to drive this point home, perhaps, that when the gods come to seek advice from Siva they find him ‘accompanied by myriads of devoted followers, all of them naked, all deformed, with tangled curly hair’.36
Likewise the Orientalist Alain Danielou observes that:
Already the Vedas picture Rudra as living in the forests and mountains, ruling over animals tamed and wild. The Saiva mythology shows him as the divinity of life, the guardian of the earth, who wanders naked through rich forests, lustful and strong. He teaches the highest and most secret knowledge to the most humble.37
The idea that true wisdom does not clothe itself in finery is also conveyed in another story of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, where Brahma and Vishnu are once again contending as to which one of them is the supreme being:
Thus Vishnu and Brahma disputed, and at length they agreed to allow the matter to be decided by the Vedas. The Vedas declared that Siva was the creator, preserver, destroyer. Having heard these words, Vishnu and Brahma, still bewildered by the darkness of delusion, said, ‘How can the lord of goblins, the delighter in graveyards, the naked devotee covered with ashes, haggard in appearance, wearing twisted locks ornamented with snakes, be the supreme being?’38
The answer, since Rudra-Siva is in fact the supreme being, is that he can take any form he chooses. And it is his choice that leads him to smear himself with ashes and consort with the poor and humble who are pure in spirit. According to Professor Stella Kamrisch:
He stood apart and was an outsider to other Vedic gods. He could be recognized by his weird, mad looks. He seemed poor and uncared for, neglectful of his appearance; the gods despised him, but he intentionally courted dishonour, he rejoiced in contempt and disregard, for ‘he who is despised lies happy, freed of all attachment’. The fierce, self-humiliated Lord was a yogi … He provoked contempt as a test of his detachment.39
So there is an idea here, a fairly consistent idea – perhaps it is better to say a system of ideas – behind the conception of Rudra-Siva as the God of Knowledge. Whatever knowledge and powers he possesses have been acquired through meditation, austerity and self-sacrifice – practices that are likely to have been part of a wider curriculum. And the same is true, unconditionally, of the Seven Rishis of the Vedas. They also, John Mitchiner observes,
smother their bodies with ashes, and have their hair uncut, matted and tied in a knot: in other words they are depicted as being in appearance much as many other – especially Saiva – ascetics.40
There is even a tradition in the Bhagvata Purana that the greatest sages ‘range over the world in the guise of mad persons’ whilst imparting wisdom.41
At the very least the lesson of this is that it is worth showing respect and listening carefully to the words of any person. Appearances can be deceptive and you never know who you’re dealing with.
In such a spirit I hoisted my weary body up the last few metres of Arunachela’s crumbling granite scree and on to the muddy path overlooked by sloping rocks that led to Narayana Swami’s mountain-top lair.
Tea and prayers
The rishi did not occupy the summit of the mountain – he would have been roasted by the sacred fire that is lit there every December to mark the apotheosis of Siva as a column of flame – but had set up his hermitage in a tree-lined bower that lay off to one side a few minutes’ walk below the summit. He was attended by the young man who had passed us earlier on our climb, and four other Siva ascetics (Sivachariars) clad in orange rags, who now peered down from the rocks and greeted us from either side of the muddy path.
Suddenly, as soon as we’d arrived, we found ourselves in the middle of some sort of ceremony or routine. The young acolytes indicated that we should take off our shoes – because we were now approaching holy ground – and beckoned to us to accompany them down a little incline to the edge of the bower where Narayana Swami had presumably been sitting for the past ten years. In the shady gloom, buzzing with enormous hornets, we could just make out a little half-tent, like a refugee lean-to covered in plastic, underneath the overgrowing branches of the trees.
We never actually did get to see the rishi, this embodiment of Siva, face to face, let alone speak to him. He didn’t speak to anyone, at least not in any known language, although he did mumble and grunt incoherently to his followers from time to time and they seemed to understand. The most we saw was a thin but strong arm with leathery skin reaching out sometimes, and a bony finger making patterns in the mud in front of the little plastic tent – and there was a great deal of mud around the rishi’s bower and pools of water lying in the hollows of the rocks.
Next we had to sit down in the mud and the acolytes brought us dirty half-coconut shells of what they announced to be tea that had been blessed by the rishi. Into this tea, which was lukewarm, they melted finger-sized dollops of butter and asked us to drink. We did so, with some trepidation (I was thinking amoebas, right from the start). Then there were prayers, reminding us that the tea had been blessed and that it would make us well in our bodies. Then more tea and more prayers. Then we were brought a cold, but somehow greasy, herbal drink with leaves floating in it – also blessed by the rishi. We drank it. More prayers followed, and more tea with butter and intestinal parasites.
After that one of the acolytes beckoned to us to line up behind him and led us in a clockwise direction on a brisk walking circuit (with each circuit requiring only twenty or thirty seconds to complete) of the path that runs around the inside of the bower and in front of Narayana Swami’s shelter. There we knelt down in the mud and sacred ash was placed on our foreheads. Then we completed a few more circuits chanting as we went ‘Siva, Siva, Siva, Raga Ra, Raga Ra’ – or something like that.
It was very strange. We didn’t ask for the ceremony and – most unusually in India – no money was required of us for participating in it.
Arunachela and Kumari Random
Was Narayana Swami genuinely mad, I wondered, as we made our way down Arunachela that afternoon. Or was he one of those great rishis, lit with the inner fire of tapas, said to roam the world disguised as a madman whilst imparting knowledge? To believe him to be wise if he was in fact mad would be the height of gullibility, but to believe him to be mad if he was in fact wise might be an even bigger mistake. Besides, whatever he was, his presence testified to the continuing vitality of the pan-Indian tradition that mountains such as this one had served as centres for the collection and repromulgation of the Vedas after the flood and as places where a brotherhood of ascetics preserved antediluvian knowledge that would be used to plant ‘the seeds of the future’.
Setting aside for a moment its connection with Rudra-Siva, the Yogic god of wisdom, I felt that I needed more information on this ‘flood’ aspect of the Arunachela story. Specifically, I wanted to find out if was connected in any way to the
mysterious lost land called Kumari Kandam that was said to have been swallowed up by the sea around south India thousands of years before. By the time Santha and I reached Tiruvannamalai in February 2000 I was already familiar with some details of this tradition – which is widely known amongst India’s 200 million Tamils but almost unheard-of outside India. I now hoped to learn more from a Tamil pundit whom I had arranged to meet after our climb. A retired ship’s captain who had given himself over to the life of contemplation, he now resided permanently at the Ashram of Sri Ramana Maharishi, which is positioned at the foot of Arunachela about 2 kilometres from the Arunacheles-war temple.
A loin-cloth, a water-pot and a walking stick
Maharishi means ‘great rishi’ and Sri Ramana seems in every way to qualify for this title. Like Naryana Swami, he had at one stage of his life exposed himself for several years on the slopes of Arunachela after first arriving there in 1896. At the time, it is recorded, Sri Ramana
was completely oblivious to his body and the world; insects chewed away portions of his legs, his body wasted away because he was rarely conscious enough to eat, and his hair and fingernails grew to unmanageable lengths.42
This fugue had been brought on by a flash of spiritual insight that the real nature of the human creature is ‘formless, immanent consciousness’.43 After two or three years in this state Sri Ramana ‘began a slow return to physical normality, a process that was not finally completed for several years’.44 During this period followers began to gather about him and by the time of his death in 1950
he was widely regarded as India’s most popular and revered holy man … He made himself available to visitors twenty-four hours a day by living and sleeping in a communal hall which was always accessible to everyone, and his only private possessions were a loin-cloth, a water-pot and a walking stick.45
Since Sri Ramana’s death his Ashram has continued to attract devotees and is a thriving, busy place today with a good library, extensive offices, private and communal accommodation, a canteen and a beautiful prayer hall. The pundit I had come to meet, Captain A. Naryan (no relation to Naryana Swami), was a tall, heavy-set moustachioed man in his early seventies, who explained to me that he was no great scholar, but that he had a personal interest in Tamil traditions which he had been able to pursue since his retirement, and that he hoped his small knowledge might provide me with a few clues for my search. ‘Everyone calls me Captain,’ he said, when I asked how I should address him.
As old as the hills
We began by talking through the story of Arunachela and how it was said that the mountain would never be submerged or swept away – even by the waters of the great deluge at the end of a world age. ‘So we may assume that this has been the case in the past?’ I was half asking, half affirming ‘because there is a destruction at the end of each cycle of yugas, so somehow Arunachela has remained constant throughout all of this?’
The Captain nodded sagely.
‘So it is the centre of everything,’ I continued. ‘Now the area which I’m trying to explore is the borderland between history and what comes before history. And we know that, historically, the temple here at Arunachela, there are documents which speak of its construction, and probably the temple as we see it now, most of it is less than 1000 years old and some parts may go back closer to 2000 years old, but at the heart of it is the Sivalingam, which is said to be much older. Can you tell me a bit about that lingam – which is supposed to be “self-created”? What does this mean?’
‘ “Self-created”,’ replied Narayan, ‘means it is not chiselled by man in the way that other lingas are chiselled by man. But there are certain other lingas which come out of the earth, not made by man, but which conform to all the characteristics – like the proportion, the width, the circumference and the height. So just like a man-made Sivalinga it conforms to the correct proportions.’
‘So it would look like a man-made one, but it’s not?’
‘It is not!’ affirmed the Captain. ‘It is more perfect. And it must be as old as Arunachela itself. Because as the Purana says, when the primal gods were beseeching the supreme being: “Since the mortals cannot see you in your effulgence form, you should take the form of a lacklustre hill. Even if you assume the form of a lacklustre hill, only the clouds can anoint you and only the sun and the moon can be the lamps lit for you. But we have to do puja [prayers, offerings] before you so you should assume the form of a smaller lingam.” So Arunachela granted their wish and he told them I will appear in the form of a lingam and you may worship me …’
‘And that is the lingam that’s in the temple?’
‘That is the lingam.’
‘OK, fair enough. A naturally formed lingam that’s literally as old as the hills. But at some point human beings must have found it, begun to treat it as a cult object, and built some sort of structure around it. What I’m trying to get at is when did the anointing and worship of this naturally formed lingam begin? It’s presumably much earlier than the date of construction of the temple that’s standing on the site today?’
‘Yes. Yes, naturally. What the Puranas say is that gods came here and they were the first to build a temple around the self-generated lingam of the Lord. That’s what the Puranas say. The primal gods Brahma and Vishnu built the temple, and cities were created by the heavenly builder Visvakarma around this place, around Arunachela.’
Cities of the gods
I was already familiar with the origin myth of Arunachela as it is told in the Tamil Puranas46 and knew that it was like many other tales from around the world of cities and temples built by gods.47 Frequently – as in the case of the Edfu Building Texts of ancient Egypt, for example – such traditions tell us that the gods embarked on these works of construction at carefully chosen locations on earth in the aftermath of a global cataclysm, typically a flood.48 This is not what the Puranas say about the temples and cities supposedly built around Arunachela by the gods; nevertheless the central motif of the story is the eternal endurance of the Red Hill through the cataclysms that accompany the end of world ages, and it is specifically stated: ‘Oceans will not submerge it, even at the time of the great deluge.’49 So it was here that I wondered if there might be some crossover with the Kumari Kandam myth.
‘This memory of gods building the first temple and cities at Arunachela,’ I now asked, ‘what period do you think it originates in? If those cities are supposed to have been built at the same time as the formation of the mountain and the self-generated lingam, then that’s surely an awfully long time ago.
‘Geology says it must have been 3.5 billion or 2.5 billion years ago that Arunachela first took its form as a mountain. But such a time-span seems outside any reasonable scale for the construction of cities and temples, since we know that the human race only came into being, what is it, 100,000 or 200,000 years ago? No “memory” of ours can be older than that.
‘But if they’re to be placed in the human scale, if they’re not just something that’s been made up by stortytellers, then shouldn’t archaeologists be able to find at least some traces of these former cities of the gods?’
The Captain shrugged. ‘Probably during the previous destructions of the world their remains have been hidden from us and if we could search sufficiently widely probably we could find many cities below the surface of the earth.’
He seemed to reflect for a moment. ‘You see,’ he said at last, ‘Arunachela is in the land of the Dravidians, where our language goes back more than 10,000 years.’
He then told me that the Red Hill was referred to in the most ancient surviving work of Tamil literature, the Tolkappiyam,50 which itself makes reference to an even earlier work now lost to history which in turn had supposedly been part of a library of archaic texts, all now also vanished, the compilation of which was said to have begun more than 10,000 years previously. This had been the library of the legendary First Sangam – or ‘Academy’ – of the lost Tamil civilization of Kumari Kandam, swallowed up, as Captain Naray
an put it, ‘by a major eruption of the sea’.
And one of the members of the First Sangam, he added, finally making the direct connection that I suspected to the Arunachela story, had been Siva himself,51 the god in the mountain, the god of yoga performing tapas beneath a tree at the top of the mountain, the god of cosmic knowledge compressed into the lingam at the foot of the mountain.
Academies of the gods
As Captain Naryan walked us to the gate of the Sri Ramana Ashram later that afternoon, he gave me the name and telephone number of a friend who he hoped might be useful to me in the city of Madurai, the next great centre of the cult of Siva that we intended to visit in south India. There, he told me, there were knowledgeable professors at many colleges and universities – for Madurai has been always been a place of scholarship and learning – who would certainly be able to tell me much more about Kumari Kandam and the Sangam tradition. Nor could there be any more appropriate place to mount such an inquiry, since Madurai itself was an important part of the Sangam tradition – having served as the headquarters of the Third Sangam …
‘So let me see if I’ve got this right,’ I asked in parting. ‘We have a First Sangam thousands of years ago and it gets flooded – the city which it’s in gets flooded?’
‘You are right. Permanently flooded. It was overwhelmed by the sea.’
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