Dakshinamurti

Dakshinamurti is Shiva as the supreme teacher (guru), seated beneath a banyan tree and facing south (dakshina), one foot pressing down the dwarf of ignorance and the other drawn up, surrounded by aged sages who are, in the paradox the image insists on, younger than the youthful god who teaches them. The heart of the icon is that he teaches in silence, and the silence is itself the highest instruction: the deepest knowledge, the identity of the individual self (atman) with the absolute (brahman), is held to be beyond words, so that the disciples' doubts are resolved without anything being said. His right hand forms the chin-mudra, thumb and forefinger joined in a circle, read as that very identity of self and absolute. The Dakshinamurti Stotra is traditionally ascribed to Shankara, the great Advaita philosopher, an attribution conventional rather than textually secure. In South Indian Shiva temples a niche for Dakshinamurti stands, fittingly, on the south wall.

The elderly disciples seated at Dakshinamurti's feet in the traditional icon are identified in the textual and iconographic tradition as a specific, well known group: the four Kumaras, Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatana and Sanatkumara, described in Puranic literature as the mind-born sons of the creator god Brahma, created directly from his thought rather than through ordinary generation, and famous in their own right for having remained eternally youthful in body while accumulating the wisdom of untold ages, having chosen at their creation to pursue perpetual celibate asceticism rather than to fulfill Brahma's original wish that they help populate the universe. Their presence at Dakshinamurti's feet gives the icon's central paradox its specific content: these four sages are ancient beyond ordinary reckoning, among the very first beings created at the dawn of the current cosmic cycle, and yet the god who teaches them appears youthful, so that supreme wisdom is visualized as untouched by mere accumulated age, a point reinforced by the fact that his pupils are already renowned as figures of exceptional attainment who have sought instruction for ages without arriving at final realization until this silent transmission.

The choice of the Kumaras specifically, rather than some generic group of unnamed sages, also connects Dakshinamurti's icon to their own extensive mythological role elsewhere in Puranic literature, where they appear repeatedly as wandering teachers in other philosophical narratives, so that viewers already familiar with the Kumaras would recognize in the Dakshinamurti image a meeting between two of the tradition's most venerable embodiments of wisdom, the eternally youthful ascetic sons of Brahma and the timeless teacher-god himself.