Chapter 6 Religions of South Asia 205With temples, the gods became more vivid and approachable; the worship-
per at a temple enters the presence of the deity in a way not previously possible.
The deity is visually present in a temple; you can see Shiva or Vishnu or Devi,
and more astonishingly, they can see you. This mutual seeing is called darshan, a
powerful exchange of human–divine interconnectedness. In her book, Darshan,
Diana Eck writes:
When Hindus go to a temple, they do not commonly say, “I am going to
worship,” but rather, “I am going for darshan.” They go to “see” the image
of the deity—be it Krishna or Durga, Shiva or Vishnu—present in the sanc-
tum of the temple,... The central act of Hindu worship, from the point of
view of the lay person, is to stand in the presence of the deity and to behold
the image with one’s own eyes, to see and be seen by the deity. (Eck 1998:1)
You may bring a gift of food to offer the god: garlands of flowers, coconuts,
bananas, incense, and camphor are all fitting gifts. The gods have their food
preferences, but most of them like sweets: Shiva and Ganesh love milk;
Krishna likes butter; Lakshmi likes kheer and laddus. Kali likes red flowers and
blood. Shiva also loves bhang. The deity partakes, and then you take back and
eat the leftovers; this is prasad. Eating the leftovers of a god passes a bit of his or
her nature into you (the opposite of what happens if you were to eat the left-
overs from a person of lower ritual status), thus improving or blessing you.
When Kali is offered a chicken or goat, the blood is for her, while the flesh is
taken home to be cooked and eaten as prasad.
Seeing the deity, being in the physical presence of Shiva or Krishna or
Durga, bringing the god or goddess food and sharing it as prasad, lavishing
devotion on the image in clothes and incense and gifts, all this was powerful
stuff. It developed into an increasingly emotional form of worship known as
bhakti, a term connoting love and adoration of god. Poets began writing hymns
to individual gods to be sung during temple worship, and because this move-
ment began in South India, the new bhakti poetry in Tamil joined with Sanskrit
as the linguistic vehicle for inspirational literature. Increasingly two sects
emerged, especially in the south, joining temple worship with passionate per-
sonal relationships to a particular deity; these were the devotees of Shiva
(Shaivism) and the devotees of Vishnu (Vaishnavism).
In some ways, bhakti religions are analogous to Christian protestant move-
ments, as A. K. Ramanujan put it, in suggesting some parallels:
Protest against mediators like priest, ritual, temples, social hierarchy, in the
name of direct, individual, original experience; a religious movement of and
for the underdog, including saints of all castes and trades... , speaking the
sub-standard dialect of the region... ; a religion of arbitrary grace... ; doc-
trines of work as worship leading to a puritan ethic; monotheism and evange-
lism, a mixture of intolerance and humanism, harsh and tender. (1973:53–54)
Shaiva bhakti focused on emotional encounters with Shiva that often
involved possession by the god and altered states bordering on madness: