Dakshinamurtiदक्षिणामूर्ति

Dakshinamurti is Shiva as the teacher, and he is among the most widely carved images in South India — because the canon fixes his position. In the standard programme of a South Indian Shiva temple the outer wall of the sanctum carries three figures: Dakshinamurti in the south niche, Lingodbhava in the west, and Brahma in the north. Walk round any of several thousand temples and he is there, on the right-hand wall, seated under a tree.

Every element of the image is argued. He is young. His pupils — four sages, the mind-born sons of Brahma — are old. He sits under a banyan. His right foot presses a dwarf. His right hand makes the chin mudra: thumb and forefinger joined in a circle, the other three fingers open.

And he says nothing. The teaching is maunavyākhyā, exposition by silence, and the verse the tradition quotes about him turns on exactly that:

citraṃ vaṭataror mūle vṛddhāḥ śiṣyā gurur yuvā / guros tu maunaṃ vyākhyānaṃ śiṣyās tu chinna-saṃśayāḥ — a wonder: under the banyan, the disciples are old and the teacher is young; the teacher's exposition is silence, and the disciples' doubts are cut through.

Why south? Because dakṣiṇa is the south, and the south is Yama's direction — the one that domestic building practice is careful to avoid. The teacher is the figure who faces it.

A Shaiva form and an Advaita text, two overlapping traditions that do not always agree.

As an iconographic form he is prescribed in the Shaiva Agamas and the Shilpa literature — the Manasara, the Amshumadbhedagama and their relatives — which fix his posture, his attributes and, decisively, his placement in the south niche. That prescription is what put him in thousands of buildings, and it belongs to the period when the South Indian temple's sculptural programme was being standardised, broadly the Pallava and early Chola centuries.

As a teaching he is the subject of the Dakshinamurti Stotra, ten verses attributed to Adi Shankara and a compact statement of Advaita Vedanta. It opens viśvaṃ darpaṇa-dṛśyamāna-nagarī-tulyam — the universe is like a city seen in a mirror, appearing to be outside though it is within.

The stotra is studied in the Advaita mathas, and the Dakshinamurti Upanishad, a short Atharvan text, supplies his mantra and meditation. Between them a Shaiva temple form became the presiding image of a non-dual philosophical school — which is why the Shankara mathas keep him, and why he is worshipped by people who would not call themselves Shaivas.

The four sages. Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatana and Sanatkumara, Brahma's mind-born sons — perpetually young in their own mythology and shown aged here, for the contrast. They ask the question that cannot be answered in words and receive the silence.

Why the teacher is young. The Kurma Purana and the commentaries make it explicit: knowledge is not a function of age, and the one who has it is not made venerable by years. A deliberate inversion of the ordinary Indian ordering of seniority, placed on the outside of a temple.

Not the guru cult. Dakshinamurti is the principle of teaching, not a teacher with a lineage. Dattatreya is the guru with a living sampradaya behind him. The two occupy neighbouring ground and their pages should be read together.

Seated, and how. Usually in sukhasana or virasana on a rock or low seat, the left leg folded across and the right leg hanging, the right foot on a dwarf.

The chin mudra. The defining gesture: the tip of the thumb and the tip of the index finger joined in a circle, the other three fingers extended. The standard gloss is exact and worth having — the three open fingers are the three ordinary conditions of a person (body, mind and ego, or waking, dream and deep sleep); the index finger is the individual self; the thumb is the absolute. The teaching is that the self bends away from the three and touches the thumb, and that the two, so joined, are not two.

A hand gesture stating a philosophical position without a word, on a temple wall, to people who could not read. It is among the most efficient things in Indian art.

The other hands. Four arms is standard. Upper right a rosary or a small drum; upper left a flame or a serpent; lower left resting on the knee or holding a palm-leaf manuscript. A manuscript in the hand of a teacher who does not speak is a deliberate juxtaposition.

The dwarf. Apasmara — heedlessness, forgetfulness — the same figure Nataraja stands on, and pressed down rather than killed in both forms, for the same reason. The Nataraja page argues it.

The banyan. Vaṭa, the tree that sends roots down from its branches and spreads without a single trunk, and under which teaching happens. It is behind him in nearly every image.

The sages. Four small seated figures at his feet, aged, hands joined. Some images add a deer and a gana or two.

And the direction. Facing south, always, on the southern wall. An image facing another way is not this form.

Vyakhyana Dakshinamurti. The expounding form, with the chin mudra and the manuscript. The commonest.

Jnana Dakshinamurti. Emphasising knowledge, with rosary and book.

Yoga Dakshinamurti. Seated in yogasana with the yogapatta, the band tied round the knees and back, and no pupils shown. The teaching has become the practice.

Vina Dakshinamurti. Holding a vina — Shiva as the teacher of music, and the form musicians invoke. Uncommon in stone, prominent in the Tamil musical tradition.

Medha Dakshinamurti. The form invoked for memory and study, and the one students approach.

Rishabharudha and Kalajnana Dakshinamurti — mounted on the bull, and the form associated with knowledge of time — are regional variants.

In the Shankara mathas. Sringeri, Kanchi, Dwaraka, Puri and Jyotirmath keep Dakshinamurti as the adi guru, the first teacher from whom the Advaita lineage descends. The standard lineage verse runs from Narayana through Brahma, Vasishtha, Shakti, Parashara, Vyasa, Shuka and Gaudapada to Shankara; the Shaiva version puts Dakshinamurti at its head.

Not Dattatreya, not Brihaspati, not Hayagriva. Four deities of teaching and learning from four traditions, each with a page here. That the religion produced four separate answers to the question of who presides over knowledge is itself informative.

Dakshinamurti has almost no narrative, and that is consistent: a form whose content is silence does not generate incident.

The four sages. Sanaka and his brothers, having exhausted what can be learned, come to Shiva and ask about the nature of the self. He answers by saying nothing, and their doubts end. The episode is in the Kurma Purana and the commentarial literature, and it is less a story than a demonstration.

The tradition's gloss is worth having, because the silence is easily sentimentalised. The point is not that words are vaguely inadequate. It is that the thing being asked about is the one asking, and that any answer in words would place it at a distance, as an object. Silence is not a refusal to teach. It is the only form the teaching can take without falsifying itself.

The banyan at the burning ground. Some accounts set the scene at the northern edge of a cremation ground under the tree, which is consistent with the southward orientation and with Shiva generally.

Shankara and the stotra. The Advaita mathas hold that the Dakshinamurti Stotra was composed before this image, and reciting the stotra facing the south niche is still the practice at a number of temples and mathas.

And a piece of temple practice that works as a story. Because the south is Yama's direction, and because ordinary building avoids it, the teacher's presence on that wall is read as a statement — that the direction the householder shrinks from is the direction the teacher faces. Whether the Agamas intended it or it accrued later, the reading is old and is repeated by temple guides and commentators alike.

Thursday. Guruvar, the day of Brihaspati, is his, and Thursday worship at the south niche is standard in Tamil Nadu — lamps, a garland, and abhishekam of the niche image where that is done.

Guru Purnima. The full moon of Ashadha, the day for teachers. The Dakshinamurti Stotra is recited, and in the Shankara mathas the day belongs to him as the first teacher.

Before study. Students visit the south niche before examinations, and Medha Dakshinamurti is invoked for memory. In parts of Tamil Nadu vidyarambham — a child's first letters — is performed before him.

Circumambulation. Because he occupies the south niche, every pradakshina of a Shiva temple passes him, and the ordinary practice is to pause on the south side. A very large number of people worship this form daily without going anywhere specially.

Recitation. The stotra's ten verses; the Dakshinamurti Upanishad's mantra; and the Medha Sukta in some usages.

Mauna. Keeping silence — for an hour, a day, or the new moon — is undertaken in his name by some practitioners. It is the one observance that takes its form from the deity's own.

DharmSetu records these observances as practised and makes no claim about outcomes, including about examinations or memory.

The south niche of every South Indian Shiva temple is the honest answer, and it is a very large number of buildings. Some particular ones:

Brihadeeswarar Temple, Thanjavur (Tamil Nadu) — the Chola Dakshinamurti in the south niche of the great vimana.

Gangaikonda Cholapuram (Ariyalur district) — widely held to be the finest in India; the Chola treatment of the seated figure and the sages beneath is exceptional.

Darasuram Airavatesvara and Tribhuvanam — later Chola, with elaborate versions.

Kailasanathar, Kanchipuram (Pallava, eighth century) — among the earliest organised examples.

Alangudi (Thanjavur district) — the Guru sthala of the Navagraha circuit, where Dakshinamurti is the form in which Brihaspati is worshipped, and which is exceptionally busy at the Guru transit. The Navagraha page carries the circuit.

Sringeri, Kanchi and the Advaita mathas — where he is the adi guru and the stotra is recited daily.

Chidambaram, Madurai, Thiruvannamalai and Rameswaram, and effectively every major Tamil Shiva temple.

Kerala and Karnataka carry the form, but the fixed south-niche convention is a Tamil and Chola inheritance and is strongest there.

Silence as a method, not a mood. The most important thing about this form is that its teaching is not withheld — it is given in the only form it can take. What the sages ask about is the one who is asking, and a verbal answer would turn the questioner into an object of the answer. The tradition worked that out and then put it on a wall as a seated figure with a raised hand, where it has been ever since.

A hand that argues. The chin mudra states an Advaita position — the individual self bent away from body, mind and ego, touching the absolute, the two indistinguishable — without a word and without literacy. India produced a great deal of philosophy that required Sanskrit and years of study. It also produced this, which requires neither, and which several thousand people a day walk past.

The young teacher and the old pupils. A society organised around seniority put, on the outside of its temples, an image in which the teacher is the youngest person present, and the Kurma Purana says why. It is the tradition arguing with its own default, in public, in stone.

Facing the direction nobody faces. South is Yama's, and Indian building practice avoids it. The teacher sits there. Whether the Agamas intended the reading or it accrued afterwards, it is the one the tradition has made: the person who can look at the thing you are avoiding is the one to learn from.

Five gods of knowledge. Dakshinamurti for the Shaivas and Advaitins, Hayagriva for Sri Vaishnavas and Madhvas, Saraswati and Vac for nearly everyone else, Brihaspati for the Vedic ritualists, Dattatreya for the guru traditions. A religion with five answers to who presides over learning is one in which learning was contested ground, and each page here carries a side of it.

And the one nobody looks at. The practical fact about Dakshinamurti is that he is in thousands of temples, on the route of every circumambulation, and the great majority of people who pass him do not stop. He is the most available and least attended image in South Indian temple art — a curious fate for the teacher, and a fairly exact one.