What is the meaning behind Tandava?
Tandava, the dance of Shiva, represents the yogic ideal of ‘effervescence and stillness, exuberance and equanimity’, as Sadhguru puts it in Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga. It is the dance of the cosmos; of creation and destruction. It is symbolic of life at its peak.
There are various version of how the dance came about. One concerns Adiyogi as he wanders around in all his nakedness, oblivious to social expectations. The men folk, people of standing, remonstrated with him to cover up. He roared with laughter, chopped of his penis and a shaft of light emerged, illuminating ignorance and cultural conformity. The laughter echoes throughout the forest and Adiyogi starts to dance. The dance of triumph over darkness, ignorance, greed and other cherished notions we create with the mind.
Another is that on seeing Shiva wandering through the woods naked, the Mimansikas (those with power) feel fear and inadequacy. They unleash creatures to destroy him; a tiger which he skinned alive, a serpent which he wrapped around his head, and a demon which he jumped on breaking its back. He then proceeds to dance on the remains. As they all watch their fear turns to awe. Their whirling minds begin to still as they come to see how they use rituals to fight change and try to control nature, and they fail. So they create more rituals because they know no other way.
Tandava then is a symbol of change, a letting go of ignorance and control, of the mind and ego. Dance is only dance when there is movement; what is created in one moment is destroyed the next. Daniel Odier, in his commentary in Tantric Kali, notes that in the Kularnava Tantra text yogic practices such as asanas and pranayama are not part of the tantric tradition. The only physical practice that is, is the ‘slow dance of tandava’. He further quotes Attilia Sironi,
“When you allow your body to move slowly in the dance,
it can happen, O Goddess,
that the nature of mind becomes calm
and it is then that we receive
a flooding in of the Divine.”
But we have a choice. The two upper arms of Shiva represent this choice. On the one hand we can go through life ignorant, focussed on meaningless activities; busy, busy, busy passing time; searching, searching, searching for distractions; chasing one limited desire after the other. Or, on the other hand, we can practice self-enquiry, asking what shapes our desires and decisions. We can stay in maya (illusion) or shift (through wisdom) beyond ignorance and fear. This is when we reach Moksha (liberation) and are flooded by the Divine.
Bringing it all together
As I mentioned in Imagination and Shiva-Linga we can be shaped or self-create. We have a choice. We can wait in the hope of outgrowing our animal nature or we can introspect and reach for our higher nature; the wisdom mind, beyond our delusions, in tranquillity, when the mind stands in its true nature, purged of all prejudice. This is not reached by more doing, but by letting go. One way of letting go is through using the symbolic language of dance and movement to convey what the literalism of words can’t.
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And for those who enjoy historical fiction, stories of underrepresented life’s, see my first novel Fermented Spirits published through Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1398437159