Shiva's Emblems: The Trishula and the Damaru

Look at almost any image of Shiva, dancing or seated on his mountain, and two objects keep his hands company. In one, a trident, tall and three-pronged. In the other, small enough to hold between two fingers, an hourglass-shaped drum. The trident is a weapon anyone can read as power. The drum is stranger, and it carries the deeper claim.

These are the trishula and the damaru, and the tradition has thought about them for a very long time.

The trident and its threes

The trishula is Shiva’s weapon, and like much in his iconography it has gathered meanings the way a stone gathers moss. The constant is the number three. The three prongs are read as the three great functions of divinity: creation, preservation and destruction, the whole turning of the cosmos held in one hand. They are read as the three gunas, the strands of sattva, rajas and tamas from which all nature, prakriti, is woven. They are read as past, present and future, time itself gripped at the haft.

It is worth saying plainly, in the way careful writers on Hindu iconography do, that these are interpretive readings, not a single verse of scripture. The trident is genuinely Shiva’s, ancient and his alone among the great gods. The elegant triads are the tradition reflecting on its own symbol, layer after layer, century after century. They are true as meditation. They are not a caption the texts agree on.

The drum that makes the world

The damaru carries the heavier freight, and here the tradition speaks with more force. It is the drum of sound, and sound, in this tradition, is where creation begins.

The clearest statement comes from the dance. In the form of Nataraja, the lord of the dance, Shiva holds the damaru in his upper right hand, and its beat is the pulse of the cosmos coming into being. The great Indian art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, whose 1918 study The Dance of Siva remains the classic account, translated the old Tamil verse that names what each hand does:

“Creation arises from the drum: protection proceeds from the hand of hope: from fire proceeds destruction: the foot held aloft gives release.”

Creation arises from the drum. The whole dance begins with that small sound.

There is a further claim, dear to the grammarians, that takes the idea to its limit. The tradition holds that the very sounds of Sanskrit, the ordered alphabet that the grammar of Panini rests on, the same sacred speech the Vedas are made of, came from Shiva’s drum. The commentator Nandikeshvara, in his Kashika, tells how the fourteen Maheshvara Sutras, the foundational sequence of sounds, issued from fourteen beats of the damaru at the end of Shiva’s dance. Whether one takes that as history or as theology, the meaning is unmistakable: language itself, the instrument of all knowing, is said to fall out of the rhythm of the god.

The weapon and the vow

The trishula is a weapon, and it is worth asking what a god of Shiva’s kind does with one. He is the great ascetic, the lord of yogis, who sits in meditation on Kailasa with almost nothing. The trident in such a hand is not the sword of a warrior-king. It is closer to the staff an ascetic carries, a sign of mastery rather than conquest, and what it destroys is read inwardly as much as outwardly: the three bonds of ego, action and illusion that hold a soul, the obstacles between the seeker and release. The same god who holds the weapon is the one the tradition turns to for the cutting of attachment. The trident’s three points, on this reading, are aimed less at an enemy than at the three knots in oneself.

The god of the burning ground

The rest of Shiva’s signs all point the same way, toward what lies past the body. The ash on his skin, vibhuti, is taken from the cremation ground, the place where every life ends, worn deliberately by the god who is unafraid of it. The crescent moon caught in his hair makes him the master of time’s waxing and waning, untouched by the cycle he wears as an ornament. The third eye in his brow is the eye of inner fire that once burned the god of desire to ash, the sight that sees through the surface of things to what is real beneath. Each sign says, in its own way, that this is the deity who stands on the far side of death and craving, which is precisely why seekers after moksha have always turned to him.

The five acts of the dance

The dance that the damaru opens is not a performance. The tradition reads it as the whole work of God, compressed into a single figure, and it counts five acts in it, the panchakritya. Creation pours from the drum in the upper right hand. Preservation is held in the open palm raised in reassurance, the gesture that says do not fear. Destruction burns in the fire of the upper left hand. Concealment, the veiling of reality that keeps beings bound, is shown by the foot planted on the demon of forgetfulness. And grace, the release that the tradition calls moksha, is the foot lifted free, the way out, raised for the devotee to take refuge beneath. Five acts, two hands, two feet, one still face at the centre of the whirling. The great temple of Chidambaram in the south is built around exactly this image, the dancing Shiva as the form in which the formless does its work.

The serpent and the river

Two more signs complete him, and both are about mastery. A cobra coils at his throat, the most dangerous creature in the land worn as an ornament, the venom of death itself rendered harmless around the neck of the god who has gone past dying. And the river Ganga falls through his matted hair, caught and slowed by the ascetic so that her descent from heaven will not shatter the earth. The same god who holds time in a crescent and death in a snake holds the river of life in his hair. Power, in Shiva’s iconography, is always shown as power tamed, the wild thing held still in the hand of the one who has stopped fearing it.

Ash, crescent, and the third eye

Around these two emblems cluster the rest of Shiva’s signs, each with its own weight. The ash, vibhuti, smeared on his body, is the residue of everything burned away, the cremation ground worn as a garment. The crescent moon in his hair makes him Chandrashekhara, the one who wears the moon, master of time’s waxing and waning. And the third eye, trinetra, the eye of inner fire that once reduced the god of desire to ashes, is the sight that sees past the surface of things.

But it is the two in his hands that hold the centre. The trident, where the threefold structure of reality is gripped as a single weapon. And the drum, beating at the edge of silence, from which, the tradition insists, the world and the word both come.

The trident holds the cosmos still. The drum sets it moving.