In our previous contribution, we discussed the belief in the Goddesses that predominates in South India and the Kolam (Rangoli) auspicious Chakra drawings as a symbol of this belief, meanwhile, I realized that the belief of the Goddess also plays an essential role in yogic thought.
Kundalini in yoga chakra thought has been lightly mentioned in an earlier post, ‘The Lotus Wheel to Sanctify and the Yoga Chakras’, but this thought was closely linked to the belief in Devi Shakti, which deified the fertility (or activity) power of the goddess as cosmic energy.
It would be, in a sense, the hidden Supreme Deity of Hinduism.
Kundalini Yoga philosophy is derived from the Hindu Tantra scriptures. According to it, we have an invisible spiritual body, called the “Sukshma Sharira” (subtle body), which overlaps the visible gross body. Along the Sushumna Nadi, which is the spine of the subtle body, there are two nadi channels, the Ida and Pingala, and seven Chakras are arranged in stages to connect these three nadi channels.
In the lowest Mooladhara chakra, the Linga (phallic symbol) is present, and in the form of the snake wraps around it three and a half rounds, the Shakti goddess, called Kundalini, is sleeping.
When this Kundalini Shakti is awakened by the practice of yoga and runs up the Nadi, opening the chakras at each stage, and unites with Lord Shiva, who resides in the Sahasrara chakra at the top of the head (or Ajna chakra on the forehead), the soul of meditator unites with the Supreme Lord and the Moksha (liberation) is achieved, it explains.
Some say that Shiva symbolises all male deities, while Kundalini Shakti symbolises all female deities.
In the Shakta school, it is said that only through the union of these masculine and feminine principles can the whole of this phenomenal world unfold. The Goddess as Cosmic Energy plays a leading role here, and the male God is merely a passive one, unable to even move without the action of the Goddess, the unfolding force of the world.
Similarly, in yoga practice, where the human body, the “miniature” of the macro cosmos, is the ritual place, the seeker can never attain Moksha (liberation) without Devi Shakti.
Here the spiritual centres called Chakras, are depicted as lotus flower forms rather than wheels as their names suggest. This is an identification of the wheel (Chakra) with the lotus flower because of the overlay I have previously pointed out. There may have also been a trend in yoga philosophy, where the adoption of the lotus flower was used to emphasize femininity more due to the predominance of the idea of devi shakti (goddess sexual power).
This belief in the vitality of the goddess is said to have originated in the belief in the mother goddess of fertility found in the distant Indus civilisation and could be regarded as a restoration of the matriarchal indigenous culture against the patriarchal Aryan culture.
The embodiment of this Devi Shakti is a sacred Yantra called Shri Chakra. Yantra means instrument or tool, and the Shri Chakra is a sacred mandala created to protect people in their daily lives by the divine authority of the Great Goddess.
The shape consisted of five downward-facing triangles symbolising the female principle and four upward-facing triangles symbolising the male principle overlap, surrounded by a double lotus wheel, forming a beautiful chakra design.
At the Harshiddhi temple in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, which I visited later, I had the opportunity to witness the beautiful Shri Chakra painted on the ceiling dome. It is a living example of the triple fusion of the Shri Chakra, the Chhatra (a holy umbrella), and the Padma Chakra (Lotus wheel) as a sanctifying boundary.
According to one theory, the characteristic convergent design of the Sri Chakra Yantra can be traced back to the Shvetashvatara Upanishad.
We explore first the question of the antiquity of the Sri Chakra by showing that it figures in a very early text, the Svetashvatara Upanishad (SU).
～～～Svetashvatara’s Yantra
The sage Svetashvatara, who belonged to the late Vedic period, asks in his Upanishad whether time (Kala) or nature (Svabhava), or necessity (Niyati) or chance (Yadṛccha), or Puruṣa is the primary cause of this reality. He answers in a riddle that goes:
tamekanemi trivṛtaṃ ṣoḍaSantaṃ Satardharaṃ viṃSatipratyarabhiḥ aṣṭakaiḥ ṣaḍbhirviSvarupaikapaSaṃ trimargabhedaṃ dvinimittaikamoham .1.4
“Who (like a wheel) has one felly with three tires, sixteen ends, fifty spokes, twenty counter-spokes, six sets of eight, one universal rope, with three paths and illusion arising from two views”. SU 1.4
This looks like the description of a Yantra, but we don’t have enough information on how to proceed to draw it.
Swarajyamag
The allegory of the enigmatic world-wheel (Cosmic Chakra), where meaningful ‘numbers’ converge, is said to be the origin of the similarly converging Sri Chakras, they said.
This passage from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad has been discussed previously in ‘The Origin of Lord Vishnu and the Suriya Chakra’, where it states,
This verse assumes the world creation as a turning wheel (=chakra) to be a manifestation or projection of Lord Shiva (=Brahman).
This is a complicated issue of so-called Nondualism (Monism) and Dualism, depending on the stance of the information source, but the point is where to look for the main cause of the development of this world. It’s whether to see the unfolding ‘wheel world’ as a manifestation of the male god Shiva Brahman himself or to separate Shiva Brahman (Purusha in Samkhya) from the phenomenal world once and for all, then instead look to Devi Shakti (Prakriti in Samkhya) as the activating cause of the wheel world.
Either way, ancient Indian thinkers (seekers) grasped the macrocosm and world as an image of a revolving wheel unfolding, and when they sought its activating cause in Devi Shakti, they represented it in the Yantra figure of the Shri Chakra.
In the design of the Sri Chakra, the ‘Bindu’ struck at the central point signifies the union (fertilisation) of the male and female deity, so not that the male deity itself is disregarded. However, the main actor there is the goddess Shakti.
The fact that the spiritual centres in the body are called Chakra (wheel) in the aforementioned Kundalini philosophy is also, I think, the projection of the Devi Shakti (Cosmic Energy) as the driving force of this world wheel (Cosmic Chakra).
The Devi Shakti, which is the driving force of the macrocosm, must be naturally at work in the microcosm, the human body, too.
As if to symbolise this, there is a picture like the one below, in which the Shri Chakra is held up in the position of the Sahasrara (A thousand petaled Lotus) Chakra. It makes sense to think that the multiple-petalled lotus of the highest Sahasrara Chakra originally derived from the multiple triangle images of the Shri Chakra.
This depiction is a true representation of the status of Shri Chakra (Devi Shakti), the Supreme Lord Behind.
Devi Shakti is revered by various names, one of which is ‘Lalita’. This means ‘play’ and carries the image of a mother innocently playing with her child. In this context, a reality of the phenomenal world is the very form of the “Playful Leela” of the Mother Goddess of Creation.
Further research revealed that there is in fact a three-dimensional version of the Sri Chakra Yantra, which is also known by the alias Maha Meru (Holy Meru Mountain).
At first glance I thought I had seen this Meru Chakra configuration somewhere before, but then I realised it bore a striking resemblance to the famous Borobudur temple. The Borobudur site is said to embody esoteric Buddhist thought and is very interesting from the perspective of the connection between Buddhist Tantra and Devi Shakti beliefs.
As mentioned above, a single dot, Bindu, is placed at the central point of the Shri Chakra, which represents the very beginning of the creation of the universe as the union of the divine male and female. This would correspond perfectly to the Dainichi Nyorai (Mahāvairocana) installed at the summit centre of the Borobudur site.
This Dainichi Nyorai, also known as ‘Daikoumyou-Hensyou (Great Light Pervasive Illumination)’, is essentially symbolizing the sun’s divinity to illuminate the world or the root cause of the world itself, and is also referred to as the ‘Compassionate Mother of All Beings’.
In the first place, Mount Meru is a sacred mountain that is considered to rise at the ‘centre of the world’ in pan-Indian cosmology, including Buddhism. The fact that it’s being identified with the Shri Chakra is an embodiment of the idea that Devi Shakti is the main cause and central principle of the development of this phenomenal world.
As being seen in the ideological background of the Balaji Venkateshwara deities mentioned earlier, belief in a Supreme Cosmic Energy was remarkably developed, especially in South India. It was a deity that consists of the three male deities Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva as Trimurti with the Goddess Trimurti of their respective divine consorts, Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati (or countless indigenous goddesses such as Durga and Kali). It integrated all Godhood together while symbolising the fuse of both male and female principles, becoming the One Supreme God of the Universe.
One basic figure that symbolises this in a straightforward manner is the Hexagram, called Shatkona.
This is a simple extraction of the complex and intricate form of the Shri Chakra and its philosophy by means of two relative triangles representing male and female deities, but conversely, there is a possibility that the Shri Chakra would have been derived from the basic hexagram.
There, a downward-facing triangle represents the female deity and an upward-facing triangle the male deity, at the same time, the former represents the grace of God descending from the heavens, while the latter represents the desire for God of the human beings on earth, and only when the two merge and unite into one will the great Samadi (Moksha or Liberation) be achieved.
This overlaps exactly with the aforementioned Kundalini philosophy, in which the male deity remains only a ‘follower’ who just desires the main goddess to establish the world, beautifully implying that the true supreme deity is in fact the female principle.
This hexagram-based motif is largely developed as a yantra for various deities, as a yogic chakra symbol and even as an Esoteric Buddhist Mandala.
The fact that the Hexagram was the basic motif of the Kolam (Rangoli), which symbolises the belief in the South Indian goddess, was mentioned in the previous post.
As I pointed out at the time, if you connect the three pairs of diagonals of this hexagram with a line, you will realise that it represents the Indus seal script. The fact is that this design has been handed down as the simplest and most basic auspicious chakra marks to the present day.
The design of the six-pointed hexagram symbolising the union of male and female deities and the belief in the Devi Shakti of Sri Chakra, which subsumed it, subsequently swept across northern India, engulfing the Aryan Vedic world in which originally the male principle prevailed.
It is not too much to say that almost all Hinduism found in India today has been influenced by this Shaktism (goddess worship).
When the gods were unified by Devi Shakti, which originated in the belief in the mother goddess, dating back to the ancient Indus civilisation, it may have been the moment when the religious thought of the native Dravidians, once conquered by the advancing male god Indra, was finally fully restored and regained the Indian world with its power.
~to be continued~
INDIA~The Land of Holy Chakra 