ucchishta
उच्छिष्ट ucchistaLeftover or ritually 'polluted' food, normally taboo; deliberately offered to the Mahavidya Matangi as a teaching that the sacred is found beyond purity boundaries.
Where this term appears
- From the margins to the Lord of beginnings Treatise
The ucchishta sits on the border of the self, neither food nor waste, neither me nor not-me, the charged line where the pure becomes used and finite.
- Kin and cousins Treatise
A single transgressive god, with no kin and no parallel, might be dismissed as an aberration, a local oddity the tradition produced once and never repeated. Ucchishta Ganapati is the opposite of alone.
- Matangi: The Goddess of the Margins Treatise
Her epithets make this explicit: she is Ucchishta-Chandalini , "the Chandala woman of the leftover food," and Shyamala , "the dark one." Her dhyana varies more than most.
- Reading the body Treatise
To stand before Ucchishta Ganapati without knowing the language is to see a strangeness.
- The consort and the union Treatise
The union of Ucchishta Ganapati is one more instance of a language the whole tradition speaks.
- The diagram and the coiled power Treatise
Its grammar is shared across the tradition, and reading it for Ucchishta Ganapati is reading it as it is read everywhere.
- The form across regions Treatise
There is no Ucchishta Ganapati the way there is a Nataraja, a single overwhelming icon repeated in a thousand bronzes and known to every eye.
- The history, and the shadow it works on Treatise
…graphers who catalogued the sects, Anandagiri among them, noticed the Ucchishta-Ganapatyas as a distinct and disreputable current.