Constructing the guru: ritual authority and architectural space in medieval India

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Inscriptional sources also indicate that Natesha held a specific significance for the Mattamayuras. At Bilhari, Chandrehe, and Ranod, benedictory verses in inscriptions carefully describe the potency of the dancing lord. The language they employ reveals a reverent and almost fearful fascination with Shiva's dance, which had the power to bring about liberation but whose potential for destruction made even the gods anxious. (54) The inscription from Chandrehe distinctly evokes the power of the dance as both a joyful and ferocious force:

  The great snake's hood bows down as the bowl of the Earth spins,
  turned by nimble feet dancing a quick step. The elephants of the
  quarters flee. The Cosmic Eggshell whirls without end, twirled by his
  long arms to the dense beat of the damaru drum. May Shiva's wild dance
  bring you delight! (55)

A late-tenth- or early-eleventh-century inscription affixed to another Mattamayura matha at the site of Ranod (Fig. 3) perhaps even better highlights the liberating and destructive aspects of Shiva's dance:

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  May the fully formed posture of dancing Shiva, remover of all sin,
  grant to you the things that are best (liberation). Although [his
  dance] is joyful and performed with care, it causes anxiety to both
  the gods and demons through its vehemence, as [it] destroys [even] the
  stability of [the sacred] Mount Kailasa, which bends at the pounding
  of [Shiva's] foot. (56)

The power of Shiva's dance to bring about both delight and destruction remains a source of tension within these verses. Yet within a medieval Shaiva context, delight and destruction may be seen as complementary rather than opposites, for it was Shiva's power to destroy a practitioner's ritual impurities that made liberation possible. Nirvana-diksha, or a liberating initiation, involved the destruction of ties binding the soul to the world, thus allowing the realization of one's innate divinity. Although a nirvana-diksha was performed by a guru, he acted not as himself but as a literal embodiment of Shiva. It was ultimately Shiva himself, acting through the body of the guru, who granted the highest form of grace. (57) Medieval Shaiva texts described this initiation as consisting of a ritual reenactment of the cyclical process of cosmic emission (that is, creation) and reabsorption (that is, destruction) that. Natesha was understood as embodying. Following initiation, the practitioner was expected to perform regular rituals that would reenact the process, often on a daily basis, in order to assure eventual liberation. (58) To the practitioner, the reenactment of the cycle was no symbolic gesture, and its force exceeded the duration of the performance; it was understood as effecting real transformations of body and mind that could bring him closer to the liberated state of becoming like another Shiva. It is therefore possible that the placement of Shiva as Natesha in the central position of the door lintel leading into the building may have been specifically intended to signify the kind of ritual universe that was reenacted continually by those who lived within the matha.