hibis, the reality, nothing else.

hibis   Curiosity.
  • Theme summary
    •  architecture, arts and technics
      frontages and houses - fountains, campaniles, sundials, wall paintngs.. - bildings, towers, other housing -
      ancient constructions, art objects- religious edifices and religions
      technics and materials, evolving - arts works, huge sizes
    •  surprising, funny (or not)
      city and nature, street signs and placards, shops, trade, humans, animals, foods, vehicules, arts, things, habits and faith.
    •  Science et Technics
      first things. numbers, percentages, slopes, angles - forces and composition - energy, mass, speed - liquids - pressure, temperature..    -    Life just visible or too tiny, complex and créatie world - birth.. - atoms - univers - to wonder ?    -    electricity batteries, lightings, electric current, (electro)magnetism, gigantism - électrostatic - dangers..  data technology..
  • global summary

email         update   


French
this page,   Multiple Gods religions, India -    temples..


The principal temples are dedicated to Vishnu (Viçnu) and Shiva (çiva), a very ambiguous God. The majority of the historians agree to classify hindouist temples in three categories, founded on the structure of their higher part : the tower sanctuary with curvilinear roof, the temple with pyramidal roof (India of the south), the temple covered in cradle, named thus because of the form and the function of their higher part.

A multitude of temples are for local divinities. The latter are more attended than the large ones, mainly religious sanctuaries reserved to the priests (shamans). The religion is primarily practised at home and in the daily life. There are however great pilgrimages, or more modest processions towards a small temple dedicated to some local god or a vestige, a relic, an animal statue as for the giant statue of the holy bull Nanda, the mounting of Shiva/çiva at Mysore.

The very ambiguous god Shiva (Siva, çiva), who carries the inevitable death of all the beings. It often seems a death smiling, dancing, almost tempting. Multiple arms, carrying symbols



India, procession. Le Figaro magazine, December 96.
gesture of the anjali, Indian greeting. It is both a mark of social and  religious cortesy, which not only addressed to the greeted individual but to his law interior, its god.   The Indian wheel of the life and the chariot of God through the vault of heaven (temple of the sun (Konarak).

Indian cross

The Indian cross (swatiska), religious symbol with four bent branches. Its four branches turned to the right, represent the man, the mammals, the birds and the reptiles. Only the man can escape from it to reach the Nirvana while passing by the right knowledge, the right control and the meditation.


The temples “sanctuaries” evolve to settings with multiple enclosures, giving access to a progressive rise by staged levels. They thus represent a link between the world of the men and the field of the gods on their inaccessible mounts.
One reaches there by gigantic doors which are an evolution of the temples “in cradle”. The latter evolved in the time, gaining height and getting enclosure, fortress and palate. From the XII century, they will circle the city-temples of their gigantic entrance doors (gopuram).

The most famous is the the city-temple of Madurai : “defying gravity and the laws of balance, a true stone flood surprises the visitor at each of the nine entries of the enclosure. Three quarters detached from the walls, they are only animal pulled up, gesticulating caryatids, unchained monsters, caricatural gods, all tangled up, superimposed, distorted.

Le Figaro magasine picture, december 96.

Temple of Chenna Keshava

Le figaro magazine, december 96.

Temple Tejahpâla (Luna Vasahi. Encycl. Larousse.


Madurâ City-temple. Here, one of the "sanctuaru" door





Temple Srirangam, selon un magasine

Most of time, one knows Indian's temples only by their erotic sculptures ; left hand picture is another wonder, the horses backyard of the temple of Srirangam, surrounded by seven concentric enclosures and dedicated to Vishnou..   Le Figaro, 17 janvier 2004.

However, you can admire, on the right, a very special activity and rarely revealed, so to speak. Without a doubt in honor of a god.

Religious or incantatory, eroticism is integral part of the art in oldest civilizations, from the prehistoric man (sexes raised on the walls of the caves), the Chinese, the Greeks with their giant phallus alleys or the Mochicas Indians and their erotic statuettes of pleasure in couples or alone. India has surpassed this art that is said not to be felt as erotic at the time, as we interpret it nowadays. On a wall of an Indian temple, a little person takes care of the lady, with what seems to be a stick. Magazine.


The great complexity of Hinduism . Item 1714 121 July 2005. As is the tradition of India, where time is cyclic , Brahma sleeps in Vishnu's womb. When it comes time to recreate the world, it suddenly pops up on a sheet of lotus, and recreate all things in an instant.
Vishnu , the younger brother of Indra and protected by "the thousand heads of a serpent whose folds serve him as a floating cradle", is the one who keeps the world in shape. God of life , he always presents himself with a solar disk called chakra, which evokes the movement of the world and the force of thought, a sea conch, a sea a lotus flower. Vishnu is the backbone of the world, the reason for things. It hides in its folds the embryo of gold without which the world does not would not be. When things go very badly and life is threatened, it goes down and changes (this is the meaning of the word "avatara&dquo; avatar in French) in a form terrestrial, fish, turtle, boar, lion-man, Rama with an ax, Rama, Krishna, Buddha. The   seventh and eighth avatara are the very famous Rama and Krishna, hero of the two Indian epics the "Ramayana & quot; and the & quot; Mahabharata & quot ;.
The next avatara will be called Kalkin. He will be riding a white horse, that's all we know about him. It will come at the end of the time that name cross, which is the Kaliyuga; the black time of your destruction. Kalki will restore justice and order of the world.

Shiva is the third great god of Hinduism, and arguably the most complex. It is in principle the destroyer , which carries the inevitable death of all beings.    But it often appears as a dying death , dancing, almost seductive.    Unlike Vishnu, he is constantly in activity. At the rhythm of his incessant dance, he attends every creation. It is everywhere evoked in the form of an erect phallus. often black, a lingam, in relation visible with a yoni, a female sex. The mythological references that surround Shiva are sinuous and confusing. Beside the three great gods, it is necessary to quote the strange Kali, the goddess whom one approaches only while trembling. Goddess of the destruction and fighting against the Ravana demon. Its place gave has sacrifice human until the 19th S in Bengal. She touches to our fundamental fear. Three other female divinities, those beneficial, are attached to the three large gods, Sarasvati with Brahma, Lakshmi with Vishnou and Parvati with Shiva.


Lastly, among the very popular characters of the tradition hindouist, impossible not to mention Hanuman, the king of the monkeys, great and beautiful figure of the "Ramayana", and Ganesha (the knowledge), the god with an elephant head, friend of the artists and the tradesmen, “that which erases quarrels”, whose image is present in all the Indian homes.
Tout ce petit monde vit sur fond de renouvellement cyclique du monde, avec un imaginaire fantasmagorique qui met en jeux animaux, hommes, dieux et éléments de la terre, le tout dans un savant mélange où tout un chacun y retrouve son compte.

The purity. All in the Indian life is regulated by the religion. Of which purity. It is astonishing in this rather dirty country, where they do not seemimgly care too much about hygiene. However, one set off to the agricultural work with his vase copper containing water, because it is necessary to be able to wash the hands. Washing comprise a sprinkling of the head and the rinsing of the mouth. There, one takes food only with three fingers of the right hand (thumb, index, middle).

The woman is impure at the time of the menstruations and a possible report/ratio obliges the husband to bathe and change clothing.  Impure also at the the childbirth time and a few days after (duration according to sects' or areas). Only the untouchable ones can deliver women because they do not risk anything. Impure hairs of barb and clippings of nails because they are dead and thus impure: The barber is thus obligatorily untouchable. With obviously all those which work for cleaning and so much of other trades. There are subclasses between them, but it is true for all the other classes.



The fundamental belief of the hindouism refers to Samsara, the cycle necessary of the successive rebirths that all must traverse before arriving at the nirvana, the supreme release in the extinction. This cycle depends on our karma, which is the weight of our acts, which makes us reborn in such or such standard of living and risk to prolong, in forms often painful and humiliating, our cycle of existences.

Another central concept, the 4th , which is at the same time the order of the world and the obligation that have all the men to respect their personal (the duty), balance which allows the harmonization of the relationship between the men, and to remain in the (the social category, where they were born, in order to follow the right way.  An often quoted sentence affirms: The dharma, when it is protected, protects. When it is destroyed, destroy.

The society is organized as follows: at the top of the scale are the Brahmans, (priests), then come the “kshatriya”, the warriors, the “vaishya”, the tradesmen. At the bas of the scale are the “dalit”, untouchable, renamed the harijan (sons of God), which do not have the right to walk at certain hours because their impure shade can be harmful for the others !. At the origin, the Hindu is not born in a caste. The rule was tightened with the profit of the leading castes. India abolished it officially in 1949. With relatively little success, I believe.

Rather surprisingly, these spiritual and philosophical concepts does not bother too much, seemingly a not very scrupulous trade, robbery, corruption and baksheesh, various traffics and “wild” humans's organs taking away, murder and so much contemptible acts. the religion seems dumb on these subjects, contrary to the Abrahamiques religions ones, strong of their morals, their commands and their interdicts (see fondoc3 at the foot of the page). Let us add that 45.000 children disappear each year in India, while authorities, nor the police force do not worrying any.
The “right way” or "right attitude", leave me rather perplexed, unless it only relates to reincarnation, their true concern. Their passivity could be an explanation. India is however a country of field crop, modern in some of its aspects, industrialist even,  since many years yet.



   mosques, Taj Mahal, Black Stone -  see also abrahmic religions.



hibis Curiosity                   back to top