Bhikshatanaभिक्षाटन

Bhikshatana is God, naked, on the road, begging with a skull in his hand because he committed a murder.

The offence is brahmahatya — the killing of a brahmin, the gravest crime the Sanskrit law books recognise. Shiva, in the form later called Bhairava, had severed the fifth head of Brahma; the skull stuck to his hand and would not come off; and the sentence was the one the texts prescribe for exactly this crime — twelve years of wandering, naked, begging from house to house, with the skull of the dead as the bowl.

He served it.

So the image is a murderer doing his time, and the Chola sculptors made it the most physically beautiful thing they ever made. Bhikshatana in bronze — walking, smiling faintly, ornamented, a deer looking up at him, a dwarf carrying the bowl, a dog at his heel — is a figure of extraordinary grace, and the grace is the argument. He is not shown in misery. He is shown completely at ease, which is the harder and more unsettling thing to carve.

The second half of the story is what happened in the Darukavana, the deodar forest, where a settlement of ritualist sages lived with their families. He walked through it, naked and begging, and the women of the settlement followed him out of their houses. The sages, enraged, produced weapons from their fire altar and threw them at him — a tiger, a serpent, a fire, and finally a dwarf — and he took each one and wore it, and danced on the dwarf, and became Nataraja.

That is the sequence: crime, sentence, road, humiliation of the ritualists, and then the dance. The Tamil tradition tells it as one story. Most readers meet only the last frame of it.

The Brahmahatya. The severing of Brahma's fifth head is carried on the Kaal Bhairav page, with its variants — Brahma's arrogance, his fifth head's speech, or the desire that made it grow. What matters here is the consequence: the skull adheres, the crime follows him, and the penance begins.

That a tradition should depict its supreme deity as committing a crime and then serving the prescribed sentence for it is remarkable, and the encyclopedia has said so on the Bhairava page. Bhikshatana is the serving of it, given a body.

The Kapalika vow. The penance described is the kapalika vrata or mahavrata of the law books: twelve years, naked or nearly so, begging with a skull, living outside settlements. It was an actual ascetic practice — the Kapalikas were a real Shaiva order, documented from at least the sixth century, and notorious. Bhikshatana is the divine model of an order that existed, and the sculpture is therefore also a picture of people the orthodox found alarming.

Darukavana. The Deodar forest episode appears in the Kurma, Vamana, Linga and Shiva Puranas, with variations. The sages there are Mimamsakas in effect — ritualists who hold that the correct performance of the sacrifice is itself the power, and that no god is needed. Shiva's walk through their settlement is a direct attack on that position, and the story is one of Shaivism's arguments against ritualism conducted in narrative form.

With Vishnu as Mohini. In several versions Vishnu accompanies him in the Mohini form, so that the sages' wives follow Shiva and the sages themselves follow Mohini, and both households empty. The Mohini page carries it.

The Tamil development. The Nayanmars sing him extensively, and Tamil devotion gives the form a particular character — playful, mischievous, erotic, and fully aware of its effect. The Chola bronzes from roughly the tenth to the twelfth centuries are the artistic peak, and Bhikshatana is one of the two or three subjects on which Chola bronze casting is at its absolute best.

The transition to Nataraja. In the Tamil telling the weapons hurled by the sages become his attributes — the tiger skin, the serpent, the fire in the hand, the drum — and the dwarf Apasmara becomes the thing he dances on. The Nataraja page begins where this one ends.

The most sensuous major religious image in India, and it depicts a penance.

Naked. Digambara — sky-clad — with nothing but ornaments: anklets, armlets, a belt of small bells, earrings, a garland. Occasionally a snake or a thin cord. The nudity is prescribed by the penance and the sculptors do not hedge it.

Walking. One leg forward, weight shifting, in tribhanga. He is in motion, always, and the bronzes achieve a genuine sense of a man in mid-stride.

The skull bowl. Kapala — the begging bowl that is Brahma's skull — held out in one hand, or carried by the dwarf.

The deer. Looking up at his face, leaping at his left hand. In the finest bronzes the deer's neck is turned back and up and the whole composition turns on that one line.

The trident over the shoulder, with the damaru drum and a bundle hanging from it.

The dog. At his heel, sometimes leaping. An impure animal in the ritual scheme, walking with God — which is exactly the point being made.

The dwarf attendant carrying the bowl or the bundle.

His face. Calm, and very slightly amused. The hair is matted and piled, the crescent is there, the third eye is there. He is not suffering, and the refusal to depict him suffering is the whole of the image's meaning.

In the narrative panels, the women of the Darukavana are shown around him in various states of arrest — one dropping a vessel, one with her hair loose, one restrained by another. The Tamil temple sculpture is explicit about what is happening and does not moralise about it.

Distinguishing him. Naked, walking, skull bowl, deer, dog. From Kaal Bhairav: Bhairava is fierce, often with the dog but usually standing and armed, and is the killing; Bhikshatana is the sentence. From Kankalamurti: a closely related form carrying a corpse or skeleton on a staff, which is the same episode with Vishvaksena's body added.

Bhikshatana / Bhikshatanamurti. Bhikṣāṭana — wandering for alms.

Kapali / Kapalin. The skull-bearer; also the name of the Kapalika order and of the deity at Mylapore's Kapaleeswarar temple.

Bhairava. The act; Kaal Bhairav's page.

Kankalamurti. The related form carrying a skeleton or corpse on a staff, from the episode in which Vishvaksena — Vishnu's gatekeeper — is killed at Vaikuntha's door. Rarer, and darker.

Nataraja. What the story turns into. The Nataraja page.

Pashupata and Kapalika orders. Real historical Shaiva ascetic movements whose practice this form models. The Aghori of Varanasi today are a much later and distinct development, and the encyclopedia mentions them only to say that the popular conflation of all skull-bearing ascetics into one category is wrong.

Mohini. Vishnu's form in the joint version of the Darukavana episode.

Not Bhikshu, the general word for a mendicant, nor the Buddhist bhikkhu.

Not Shiva as a beggar in the Annapurna story, where he begs from Annapurna at Kashi and is given food — a different, gentler episode with its own page.

The skull that would not fall. He had killed a brahmin — the worst thing the texts know how to name — and the evidence stuck to his hand. The Kaal Bhairav page carries the severing. This page carries the twelve years.

The road. Naked, begging, sleeping outside settlements, going from door to door with a dead man's skull. The law books prescribe this; a god performs it. Hinduism put its supreme deity through its own criminal sentence, in full, and did not shorten it.

The Darukavana. A forest settlement of ritualist sages, confident that their sacrifices were sufficient and that the gods were a formality. He walked in, naked, asking for food.

The women came out. The texts say so without euphemism: the sages' wives and daughters left what they were doing and followed him. Some accounts have them singing, some dancing, some simply walking behind.

What the story is doing is not subtle. The men had built a religion of correct procedure, and the thing that emptied their houses was God, in person, with nothing on, asking for lunch.

The weapons. Enraged, the sages performed a rite and hurled what it produced: a tiger, which he skinned and wore; a serpent, which he wore as a garland; fire, which he took in his hand; a skull-staff; a drum; and finally the dwarf Apasmara — heedlessness, forgetfulness — which he stood on and began to dance.

Every attribute of Nataraja is a weapon thrown at Bhikshatana by angry ritualists. That is the single best thing to know about the Nataraja bronze, and almost nobody knows it.

A necessary caution. The episode has been read, in modern retellings, as a story about irresistible seduction, and on that reading it has been used to excuse a great deal. The texts themselves are about the failure of a religion of procedure before something living. And whatever the story is about, it is not a description of how anyone should behave toward another person; the tradition's own law books, in the same breath, prescribe twelve years of naked wandering for a crime. It is a narrative about the limits of ritual, not a licence.

The end of the penance. At Kashi, in the usual account, the skull finally falls from his hand at the place afterwards called Kapalamochana, and the sentence is discharged. The Kaal Bhairav page carries Varanasi's version.

He has almost no independent worship, and he is carried through the streets.

The Chola bronze processions. Bhikshatana is a utsava murti — a processional bronze — and at temples across the Tamil country, most famously in the Tiruvarur, Thanjavur, Chidambaram and Madurai traditions, the image is taken out on festival days and walked through the town. A naked begging god, carried through a city, receiving offerings at each street. It is the only form of Shiva routinely processed in this state.

In the Tevaram. The Nayanmars — Appar, Sambandar, Sundarar and Manikkavacakar — sing him extensively, and the Tamil hymns are where the form's personality actually lives: teasing, beautiful, unembarrassed.

Maha Shivaratri, in the temples where he is processed.

In the Kapalika and Pashupata orders — historically, as the model of the mahavrata. Those orders no longer exist in their medieval form.

In the museums. This must be said, because it is where most people will meet him. Some of the finest Bhikshatana bronzes are in the Government Museum, Chennai, the Thanjavur Art Gallery, and museums abroad — and a number of Chola bronzes held abroad have been the subject of repatriation proceedings, with several returned to India in recent years after being identified as stolen from working temples. Anyone who cares about these objects should know that a functioning temple's processional bronze is not a museum piece by nature, and that the trade that moved many of them was criminal.

No household worship. He is not in anyone's puja room. He is a temple image and a subject of poetry.

Kapaleeswarar Temple, Mylapore, Chennai (Tamil Nadu) — Kapali, the skull-bearer, in the middle of a modern city.

Thyagaraja Temple, Tiruvarur (Tamil Nadu) — one of the great bronze traditions, and Bhikshatana panels and images.

Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur, and Darasuram (Tamil Nadu) — UNESCO World Heritage Sites, with Bhikshatana in the sculptural programme.

Chidambaram (Tamil Nadu) — where the story ends, in the Nataraja page's temple.

Tiruvottiyur, Thiruvenkadu and the Kaveri delta temples — the heartland of the Chola bronze, and where the processions happen.

Kapalamochana, Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh) — where the skull fell; the Kaal Bhairav page carries the city.

Elephanta and Ellora (Maharashtra) — early Bhikshatana and Kankalamurti panels.

Government Museum, Chennai (Tamil Nadu) — the bronze gallery, and the single best place on earth to look at this form.

The honest recommendation: go to the Chennai bronze gallery, find the Bhikshatana, and look at the deer's neck. Then read what he did to be there.

A sentence, carved as a dance. The central fact of this image is that it depicts a punishment, and it is one of the most beautiful objects any civilisation has produced. Shiva killed a brahmin; the skull stuck to his hand; and the law's answer — twelve years naked on the road with a dead man's head for a bowl — was served in full. The Chola sculptors took that and produced a figure of such grace that most people who see it have no idea what they are looking at.

They did not carve him suffering. That is the choice everything turns on. He walks, ornamented, faintly smiling, with a deer looking up at his face. The claim being made is that the penance is not a diminishment — that a god serving a sentence is still entirely himself. Whether one reads that as profound or as evasive, it is a deliberate artistic decision made repeatedly over three centuries.

Every one of Nataraja's attributes was thrown at him in anger. The tiger skin, the snake, the fire, the drum, the dwarf underfoot: weapons, hurled by furious ritualists, which he put on. The most famous image in Indian art is assembled entirely from an attack, and the connection is on almost no museum label in the world. If this page achieves one thing, let it be that.

Against procedure. The Darukavana sages had a complete religion of correct performance, and it did not survive contact with something alive walking through it. The story is Shaivism's argument against ritualism, and it is made in the crudest and most effective possible terms. The Lingodbhava page shows the same tradition arguing against a rival sect; this one shows it arguing against a way of being religious, which is the deeper quarrel.

And a dog. At his heel, in almost every bronze, walks the animal the ritual codes treat as the most impure thing that can enter a house. God has just been through the worst sentence the law can impose, is walking naked with a skull, and has a stray dog with him. Everything the Darukavana stood for is refuted by that dog, and it takes up about four centimetres of the casting.