Reading the body

A tantric image is not a picture. It is a sentence in a language of objects, and every attribute in the deity’s hands is a word. To stand before Ucchishta Ganapati without knowing the language is to see a strangeness. To read him is to find an argument, set out limb by limb, about desire and the world and what the divine will accept.

This chapter reads the body the meditation verses give him. It reads it the way the iconographers do, as meaning made visible. Where the description ends and the operative work of installing the deity in the image begins, the treatise stops, as it said it would. You can learn to read a sentence without being handed the authority to command what it names.

The shape and the colour

The verses give him four arms, sometimes six, the count varying by source. He is heavy-bellied like all his forms, the round belly that the tradition reads as the container of the cosmos, the god who holds all the worlds inside himself. His mount, when shown, is the mouse, the small gnawing creature that reaches every hidden place, desire that slips through any gap, mastered and made to carry the god.

His colour divides the sources, and the division is itself instructive. Where he is red, he is the colour of rajas, of passion and energy and the active heat of the goddess, the god flushed with the power he embraces. Where he is blue, he is the colour of the boundless, the depth given to Krishna and to the night of dissolution, the immensity in which all distinctions drown. Colour here is doctrine. The red image leans toward energy, the blue toward the absolute, and a tradition comfortable with both kept both.

The things in the hands

Now the words themselves, the attributes the arms hold.

The pasha, the noose, and the ankusha, the goad, travel together through Ganesha’s iconography and carry a single paired meaning. The noose binds and draws in; the goad drives and spurs on. Together they are the two motions by which the god governs a soul, the pull that gathers the wandering mind back and the prod that pushes the reluctant one forward. They are also, read inwardly, attachment and the discipline that masters it, the very rope of desire and the instrument that turns it.

The pomegranate, the dadima, is the fruit packed with seeds behind a single skin, and the tradition reads it as the manifest cosmos, the one containing the uncountable many, fertility and plenitude held in a single round form fit for the hand of the god who contains the worlds. The sprig of paddy or rice, the ripe ear of grain, is abundance in its plainest form, the fed world, the harvest that is the visible mercy of the divine.

The blue lotus, the nilotpala, is the flower that opens on still water untouched by the mud it grows from, the standing image of the awakened mind, consciousness flowering clear above its origins. And the vina, the stringed instrument that appears in some of his hands, is sound itself, nada, the vibration the tantric traditions hold to be the substance of the cosmos, a theme a later chapter takes up at length. A rosary, where it appears, is the turning of recitation, the count of the sacred syllable.

The meditation verses give the picture directly. Rendered plainly and descriptively, the dhyana reads something close to this: a god the colour of the dark, or of the red dawn, elephant-faced, holding the noose and the goad, a pomegranate and a ripe ear of grain, a blue lotus and a lute, the goddess seated upon him. The art-historian T. A. Gopinatha Rao, who first systematised this material for modern readers in his Elements of Hindu Iconography, drew the attribute-sets of the Ganapati forms from exactly such verses and the sculptures that follow them, and Gudrun Buhnemann’s later study refined the readings form by form. What the descriptive verse holds back, and what this treatise holds back with it, is the seed-syllable and the installation that would turn the picture into a practice. The image can be read. The rite stays sealed.

Read the hands together and a single statement emerges. Here is a god who holds the cord of desire and the spur that masters it, the seeded fullness of the world and the grain that feeds it, the clear flower of the awakened mind and the sounding string of the cosmos. He holds, in other words, the whole of bound life and the whole of the means to freedom, at once, in the same set of hands.

The hand that does not hold

And then there is the attribute that is not an object at all, the one that makes this form what it is. In the ordinary images of Ganesha the tip of the trunk curls to a bowl of sweets, the modaka, the god’s famous appetite turned to its harmless delight. In Ucchishta Ganapati the trunk reaches elsewhere. It reaches to the body of the goddess seated on his thigh, and in the most explicit verses to her yoni, or it lifts to her lips to take the wine or honey there, the tasted, the ucchishta, from her mouth.

This is the hinge of the whole iconography, and it is the subject of the next chapter, which reads the union and the goddess with the care it requires. For now it is enough to notice what the gesture does to everything already described. The same trunk that, in the gentle forms, tastes the sweet of innocent pleasure here tastes the remnant of the goddess. The form takes the god’s defining feature, his appetite, and turns it toward the one substance the world forbids. Every other attribute in his hands has prepared the reader for this. The god who holds the cord of desire and the means of its mastery now demonstrates, with his own most characteristic limb, what mastery of desire actually looks like in the tantric reading: the transformation of the forbidden thing in the very act of taking it, where another path would only avoid it.

The body, read fully, is an argument. The next chapter reads its boldest line.

To see how a murti is read in general, and what an image of a deity actually is, the site’s guides set the wider frame this chapter works within.