Symbolic Complexes: Siva/Sakti

In our account of the mythology of the dangerous goddesses we discussed how the goddesses were emitted as a kind of force, sakti , by Siva and by the other male benign divinities. These saktis operated sometimes independently, sometimes coalesced into one supreme Goddess. This supreme Goddess is quite independent of the gods who in some accounts emit her or her component goddesses; in other accounts she is, in fact, prior to them as the ultimate supreme creative deity. The tradition that emphasizes the worship of the Goddess as the supreme deity is Saktism^[*] . Both historically and in the way they are made use of in Bhaktapur Saktism^[*] and Tantrism are "two intersecting but not coinciding circles" (Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 6). Within Bhaktapur's Tantrism there is an important difference between the images, conceptions, and uses of the Goddess in herself, and the images, conception, and use of "Sakti." Sakti's use both in Bhaktapur's esoteric and exoteric doctrine is based on her relation to Siva—here once again the supreme deity, albeit at a problematic moment in his supremacy—at the

time of her emission from him, and the precursors and consequences of that act.

In Bhaktapur's imagery, Sakti has two implications that are quite different when seen in ordinary common-sense contexts, but which are related in the theory of Siva/Sakti. These conflicting implications and their resolutions generate shifting ways of viewing certain forms and events that contribute greatly to the aesthetics and mystery of Tantric conceptions and symbols. These two implications derive from ideas about sakti as power, on the one hand, and sakti as passive, receptive female sexuality, on the other.

Local characterizations of sakti often begin with nonesoteric statements about the nature and interdependence of form and function. Any living and vital or potentially effective entity has both a containing form and a potential or ongoing function. The function is the object's sakti or "power." The sakti of an eye is seeing; of a bell, ringing.^[32] When the object has lost its sakti , it is dead or powerless, it cannot function, and the eye becomes blind. In contrast, a function, sakti , that becomes disconnected from its form becomes diffuse and transformed in some peculiar way, in some cases uncanny, such as the sound of a bell that is not there. Siva/Sakti conceptions are a divinized version of this idea. Siva represents, at one point in a cyclical process, a living entity, a container with contained vitality; that is, he has his sakti within him. He is full of potential power. But in order to exercise power in the world (and not just social influence—we are at the edge of the non-moral arena of the dangerous deities here) he must emit his sakti , who now becomes Sakti, a divinity in herself. This emitted Sakti, often portrayed as a ray or an impersonal force, does actual "work" in the world, work that changes affairs through force, not by means of moral and social influence. Sakti is the power that is one of the goals of Tantric practice. But having emitted the power, Siva is now empty and dead. Siva without Sakti, the saying (based on a play on Sanskrit orthography) goes, is Sava, a corpse. The living Siva is male, but he contains a female principle within him. The dead (or weakened or exhausted) Siva is male, but now the female principle is external to him. He is incomplete. For his own sake and for that of society, it is essential to recapture the Sakti.^[33] Now a second step and a partial transformation of the imagery occurs here. Siva, the male principle, and Sakti, the female principle, can become reintegrated through the act of union of sexual intercourse—as well as through other and variously represented

unifications, which never lose their coital implications. For this purpose Siva may be represented as a phallus, a linga^[*] , and Sakti as a vagina, a yoni . But the phallus is active; the vagina is a passive receptacle, a container, in something like the way the form is the container for the force that gives it life. There has been a reversal in the signification of Siva and Sakti.

The Sukunda, an elaborately formed combined oil container and oil lamp used in major Hindu Newar rituals, consists of a semispherical container for oil to which is attached an oval or triangularly shaped shallow container, which is the oil lamp itself, and at whose apex a wick is placed. The oil container is the living Siva with his potential force, and both the burning wick and the triangular dish are Sakti, but in different ways. The burning wick is Sakti as energy; the triangular dish is Sakti as the sexual complement to the male, ready to restore his potential power. The oil from the container is put into the lamp dish as an act of union, and now the flame-Sakti can spring forth. Tantrism adds an emphasis on this vaginal and receptive Sakti as a consort in a sexualized act of union that is restitutive and which prepares the now enriched male for a new generation of power to the more general idea of the Sakti as Goddess and as an active and unrestrained (by civic order and morality) force in the world. Bhaktapur's religious, ritual, and festival imagery is replete with references to these ideas. Any pair of objects or events can be related to Siva and Sakti through one or the other of their interrelational meanings. Meat and alcohol presented to the dangerous deities are respectively Siva and Sakti: the flesh representing the embodied form and the alcoholic spirits, the vitalizing principle. A ritually presented grain of unhusked rice has Sakti as its potentially germinating kernel, Siva, as its husk. Dualisms of right and left, double lines (commonly used in marking out mandala^[*] s on the ground for Tantric puja s), overlapping pairs (or sets) of triangles, are used to represent the splitting and complementarity of form and function, male and female. Such opposities are symbolically brought together in festival and ritual enactments. The joining and collapsing of these oppositions is shown in visual imagery as a dot or point, a bindu , often placed in the center of the pairs or in a central position in a complex image (such as a dangerous god's face, where it may be placed at the bridge of the nose). The bindu represents unity in contrast to dualism—the beginning of phenomenological diversity—and it represents, among other things, the union of the separated Siva and Sakti into a revitalized and rebalanced albeit now problematically self-contained, Siva.

The oscillating meanings of the polarities of Siva and Sakti and their necessary eternal couplings, condensations, and separations are very powerful symbolic resources for representing personal and social dilemmas. At the personal level these are resonances of vital, self-contained, self-sufficient, omnipotential fullness on the one hand—so well represented in the classical imagery of Siva—versus the divisions that initiate a society and social identity on the other. These personal meanings also echo problems about the sexual other and the sexual act, problems that have special South Asian forms and emphases. On the social level, however, which is our present concern, the complex of Siva/Sakti ideas and practices represents a tension between moral order, the heavenly order of the gods, with its static eternal balance, and the periodic need to mobilize an amoral power, a socially unrestrained force that becomes problematic once its job is done (even while it is doing it) as it is socially unrestrained and dangerous. The question then becomes how to get that power back under control, back into the heavenly quietude again. The Tantric interpretations and enactments of Siva and Sakti represent and mimic all this.