Ganesha

views updated

GANESHA

GANESHA In Hinduism, no other god is as often invoked as Ganesha, or Ganapati, "lord of the ga?as,"or Shiva's dwarf attendants, Gaj?nana, "he with the elephant's head." Predominantly the god of good luck, Ganesha is worshiped at the start of any important enterprise. Son of Shiva and P?rvat?, he is, however, not their natural offspring. His real origin lies in India's far distant past; even the compilers of the Pur??as and other ancient writers have lost all track of it.

There are many different accounts of Ga?esha birth. According to the Shiva Pur??a, P?rvat? fashioned a handsome boy out of the unguents and other applications she had used in her bath, and asked him to guard the entrance to her apartment against strangers. When Shiva, her husband, arrived, the boy barred him, not knowing Shiva to be his father. Shiva, not knowing the boy's identity, decapitated him in anger. To placate the disconsolate P?rvat?, Shiva quickly brought the child back to life by placing the head of the first living thing he could find on the boy's body.

As the god's birth is narrated in the Skanda Pur??a P?rvat? was amusing herself by forming a figure out of the remains of her bath; she could make only the torso with the remains. Later, her elder son Skanda finished the task by adding the head of an elephant to the incomplete body.

In the Var?ha Pur??a, it is Shiva himself who gave his handsome young son an elephant's head, a portly form, and serpents for the sacred thread. The story in the Brahmavaivarta Pur??a is that the malevolent planet Shani (Saturn) bore a curse: the head of anyone at whom he looked would fall off. Not knowing this, P?rvat? made him gaze at her newborn son, whose head fell off at once; it was later replaced by that of the king of the elephants.

References and Iconography

References to Ganesha, Gaj?nana, Vin?yaka, and Ga?apati can be traced back to the Vedic period. The name Vin?yaka occurs already in the G?ihas?tras, books of rules for worship by householders. As many as six Vin?yakas are named, who are malevolent—or at least mischievous—beings. Under their influence, men and women are afflicted by many misfortunes. In slightly later texts, the six Vin?yakas coalesce into one, but by then he has come to be associated with Ambika, or "Mother," that is, P?rvat?. He is her son, and he can be pacified when offerings are made to him.

Vin?yaka, Ganesha, and Gaj?nana all fit into the type of yakshas, the fickle-minded, temperamental beings of early mythology. Indeed, what may be perhaps a prototype of Ganesha comes from Amaravati in South India. There, on a fragmentary beam of a stupa railing, a corpulent gana with an elephant's head is pulling a thick cord.

A portly form and an elephant's head are of course the god's most distinctive characteristics. Among the attributes of Ganesha images are a bowl of modaka sweets, his own broken tusk, an ax, and a radish in his hands; his mouse mount; and his sacred thread of a cobra. He has many colors—red, white, turmeric-yellow, and even black—but the predominant colors are various hues at the red end of the spectrum, which are described imaginatively as molten gold, rising sun, and vermilion.

Not only does Ganesha have the head of an elephant, he may have two of them, or three, four, five, or even six. These forms, however, are extremely rare, with the exception of the five-headed form. Sometimes, instead of five heads, there are five images of Ganesha, or pañcaga?esha.

It is obvious that a god with such universal appeal would be represented in many ways. Images of the god for worship in the household and in his temples portray him as having two, four, or more arms, occasionally numbering up to as many as twenty. He may be seated, standing, or dancing; alone, with his consorts, or in the company of his parents and his brother Skanda-Kartikeya. As a god presiding over good luck, Ganesha may be represented together with his other "partner gods," Kubera and Lakshm?.

One of the earliest images of Ganesha is in a cave at Udayagiri in central India, of the early fifth century. He has only two arms; the right hand is broken, but the left hand holds a bowl of his favorite sweets, with the trunk curving to partake of the contents. Ganesha's penis is erect. This is a trait of some Shaiva images, suggesting the retention of the semen, and continence—paradoxical though it may seem. And though Ganesha indeed was influenced by the Tantric cult, in an image of so early a date, not too much should be inferred; perhaps it is only evidence of the god's impish nature and origin.

The posture of sitting at ease seems to come naturally to this portly deity, with one thick leg folded on the seat and the other folded at the knee and resting also on the seat. It is as such that Ganesha has come down to us from the fifth-century P?rvat? temple at Nachna in entral India. One hand of this two-armed god holds the sweet bowl, while the other holds a large radish, another of his favored foods. A string of pearls with many loops serves as his coronet, and a cobra playfully forms the sacred thread.

In the Deccan, in the sixth century, representations of Ganesha were created at Elephanta, Aiholi, and Badami. In the great cave at Elephanta near Mumbai (Bombay), for example, a two-armed Ganesha is participating in his own way in his father's dance, his trunk curving in delight. In the Ravalphadi cave at Aiholi and in cave 1 at Badami in Karnataka as well, the sparsely and simply clad adolescent god witnesses the cosmic dance of Shiva, the bowl of sweets in one hand, as ever. In North India, a charming panel from the brick temple at Bhitargaon shows a spirited tussle between Ganesha and Skanda over a bowl of modaka sweets.

When Ga?esha is endowed with more than two arms, they are most often four, but there are sometimes six or eight, and occasionally even up to twenty. When he has four hands, among the most frequent attributes are the elephant goad, the battle-ax, the noose, the single tusk, and the bowl of sweets. There is also a very beautiful six-armed Ganesha, dancing and listening to the sound of his own bell-ornaments, from Kannauj in North India.

Ga?esha also figures in panels of the Saptamatrkas, or the Seven Divine Mothers, where he guards one flank of the row of the Mothers, with Shiva or Virabhadra guarding the other. There are also more esoteric forms of Ganesha, his many forms and uses described in the Tantras.

Ga?esha's wives are Siddhi ("Success") and Buddhi ("Wisdom"), who are the god Brahm?'s daughters. For while Ganesha is on the one hand the facilitator of all enterprises, he at the same time also presides over the higher functions of the mind. Ganesha has profound wisdom and a prodigious memory—it was he who undertook the task of writing down the epic Mah?bh?rata, verse by verse, as soon as the sage Vyasa composed it. In all cases, the notions of wisdom, knowledge, success, accomplishment, and well-being are present.

Worship of Ga?esha

There are a number of days that are sacred to Ga?esha but the most important is the Ganesha Caturthi, the fourth day in the bright fortnight in the Hindu month of Bhadrapada (August–September). In Maharashtra in particular, nine places came to be known as being sacred to the elephant-faced god. They are Morgaon, Theurgaon, Sidhtek, Varad, Murud, Ganagapur, Lenyadri, Ranjangaon, and Ojhar.

The worship of Ganesha spread beyond the present boundaries of India. His sculptures have been found in Afghanistan. Ganesha also entered the Buddhist Mahayana pantheon of Tibet, Japan, and countries of Southeast Asia.

As discussed above, the authors of the Pur??as asked how Ganesha came to have an elephant's head on a human body, and came up with many mythical explanations. But perhaps the correct question to pose is: how did an elephant come to have a man's body?

All these mythological stories have the distinctive appearance of being retrospective; they attempt to explain the god's unusual form by invoking some other previous mythological happenings. Is it possible that they are approaching the question of the human body and elephant head from the wrong end, trying to explain the origin of the elephant's head on the human body? In other words, is it possible that it is the elephant—such as the Amaravati yaksha—that is the original god, so to speak, and that therefore we are to explain rather how a human body came to be associated with it, and not the other way around.

Kirit Mankodi