Smells and Bells

Unlike Abrahamic religions, Hinduism does not view idol worship as a sin. In fact, idols are an important part of Hindu traditions. Many Hindus feel like their gods can see them through the idols and in turn while they look at the idols they are looking at the gods. The act of seeing a deity (through an idol) and being seen in return is called Darsan. Darsan promotes connection between people and the divine. This reminds me of the way looking at portraits or statues of people throughout history often feels, as it allows the person viewing the artwork to connect with a person that lived centuries ago. I think a good example of this that I personally connect with are the Fayum mummy portraits. These portraits, painted on wood, adorn the tombs of upper class Romans in Egypt and depict the deceased person. These portraits likely date to the early 1st century AD, and are therefore the faces of people who lived two thousand years ago. When I look at these portraits, knowing they depict a rea...

Darśan To See & Be Seen By Ava Barry Darśan, a term that is seemingly unknown for may Americans who don't practice Hinduism. This term means to see or view a deity, sacred place, or sacred person and be seen back. Darśan is at the center-view of Hindu worship, for in Hinduism one believes that that the eyes are the windows to the divine. Images in Hinduism hold great meaning because the deities reside in the images of themselves. Moreover, images of deity's in your home must be taken care of by performing pūjā. The deities entrust themselves to the human to take care of them, and by doing this the people are given blessings.  Image of the deity Shiva- creative commons license Shivacropped.jpg " God is present in image, whether for a moment, for a week, or forever. It is this fact which is at the basis of darśan. People come to see because there is something powerful there to see. " - Diana L. Eck While I do not practice Hinduism, I can say that this act of seeing...

  I am notoriously bad at color choices. I am always first to back out of PowerPoint design as I cannot for the life of me make it look decent, most of my closet contains clothing somewhere in the realm of blue, black, and gray, not to mention the time in high school wearing jeans and a t-shirt that was the exact same shade of navy blue. That last one I will blame on the fact that I was always running late and got dressed in the dark in my rush. This was also a clear issue when I started to make more and more friendship bracelets. It was always clear when I had picked out a bad color combination because those bracelets would stay on the door for a fairly long time before being claimed.  My early solutions to this problem were to ask people what colors they wanted in a bracelet, however, this isn’t as easy to do with strangers who are just grabbing off of a door. This then led me to a random hex code color generator. I would generate 4+ colors at a time and picked the group...

It was deeply interesting and upsetting to learn through Diana Eck that before the early 20th century, the common reaction of Westerners to Hindu idols was repugnance. The amount of effort and intention that goes into creating the massive and elaborate idols, in my opinion, deserves to be respected and appreciated. Moreover, what Hindus choose to do with the idols they created, should be entirely up to them. Eck explains that over a hundred years ago, most Westerners had a “biblical mindset”. They thought that idolatry was worshipping a created thing rather than worshipping the creator. I guess I thought that this was kind of silly, because if they had educated themselves on the perspective of the Hindus, then they would know that the idols were only meant to be temporary representations of their deities, and they did not consider it disrespectful to dispose of these creations after they served their purpose. I had no idea how big a role idols and representations of holy religious b...

 In her book Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India Diana Eck discusses the importance and role of vision in Hindu religious practices. One element of this that stood out, is how the idea of looking in Hindu practice seems to be reciprocal. Looking upon the statue of a deity is a significant religious act and so is being looked at by one. The gaze of a newly sanctified statue is considered powerful enough that when their eyes are painted on they must not be looking directly at someone. This significance of looking, with vision having the power to transfer blessings and curses between humans and gods is particularly interesting when considered in comparison with other religious contexts. In The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch by Constance Classen, an important topic is the importance of touch in Medieval Christianity. During the era of relics, a different example of a religious object thought to be imbued with holiness, in some sense, and able to bestow its blessings on...

 In Diana Eck's book  Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India she talks about how being able to see and interact with the Gods is a big part of Hinduism. For some reason, it made me think of the weeping paintings/statues of Mary and how they have been proven fake.                                             A Virgin Mary statue in New Mexico weeping olive oil                                                https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/virgin-mary-statue-olive-oil-weeping-new-mexico-catholic-church-a8454546.html The statues of Mary weeping have been found all across the world weeping different substances such as blood or oil. Thousands of people will flock to see these statues thinking that they are seeing something divine, but unf...

     Hinduism has always been of interest to me, for a lot of reasons. Now, granted, I don’t know a lot about it, but it’s always been visually interesting to me. I find the idea of the integration it has into the overall life, surroundings, and culture to be interesting and while I don’t necessarily wish that for a society I live in (or, rather, the society I do live in, since I very much wish religion would kindly remove itself from many places in which it has engrained itself), it’s beautiful and fascinating and interesting all the same. I feel like Eck’s book, and the added lecture from Dr. Tuggy, have not only filled in important context to me, but also made me realize a lot of things about my own faith and experience with faith.        I was drawn to paganism for many reasons, one of which is that I don’t like or have a lot of emotional investment in many Christian doctrine. I don’t like the idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing deity that punishe...

Diana Eck's description of the richness associated with Hinduism was one of the most interesting reads for me. Reading the manner in which she described the opulence and relevance that goes into the preparation and viewing of holy sites and statues in India made me view my own origin in a new light.  I feel like sometimes when you're reply engulfed in a particular surrounding it somehow takes you father from appreciating its nuances, however looking at it from someone else perspective allowed me to see the beauty in practices that to me have to an extent lost their luster as I have been accustomed to them for so long. I found the way she spoke about there being an air of divinity not just in the idol but also in the location that holds it, when she talks about the process of "taking darshan" very interesting. This is something I have experienced countless times my life, as the belief is that the location that houses a specific idol has meaning to itself which in some ...

     One thing I found interesting in Diana Eck’s reading was the differences between Western monotheistic religions and Hinduism, specifically in their views of images in worship. In the West, the use of images is often seen as idolatry, that is, the worship of an object or something other than God as if it were God. As Dr. Dale Tuggy points out in his video lecture on Eck’s book, Western ideas and beliefs are often applied to Hindu devotion, claiming that the use of images, or idols, is wrong or bad. As mentioned in the video, the term idolatry is actually an outsider term, meaning that it has been used to describe Hindu practices from a Western viewpoint. I would argue that this goes against the concept of cultural relativism, the idea that a person's beliefs and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture, norms, and values From a comparative religious perspective, I think it’s important to keep cultural relativism in mind and try not to compare ...

Whenever I see a piece of art, I often immediately think about how I interpret it and then how someone else can. The main reason being that something obviously had to have been the basis for the piece. In a way, interpretting art and religion are very similar. Hindu temples contain varying statues and with one statue,"One can see the silver mask of the goddess Durga, or the stone shaft of the Sive linga , or the four-armed form of the god Visnu" (Eck 36). A person's interpretation varies based on their own religious background and their environments. Whatever someone interprets they are doing so because of how the art affects them as well how others affect the art simply by viewing it.

I think there is beauty in the process of creating ritual artwork. The creation process Eck describes is really interesting. The process that for me can become a sort of mindless thing. I mean, art isn't really mindless, even if you find you just paint things that you think are 'pretty.' All throughout high school, my art teacher told us not to do that, but I did anyway and created some meaning behind everything I did. My focus for the entirety of my high school art career was myth and folklore. I painted mythological characters like Daphne (Greek) and Sif (Norse), along with Mexican figures like la Llorona and el Principe Oso. For the most part, I've abandoned the strict structure my teacher showed us: the idea, reference photos, three thumbnail sketches, color studies, then your painting. I have an idea, I start sketching, then I figure the colors out as I go. It's not efficient and it's definitely not a good way to go about traditional artwork, but I'm so...

Our eyes allow us to remain alert and get precise understandings of where certain threats are. They are quick to identify things that are out of place, that seem dangerous or maybe delicious, and all in all, just let us know what is up right in front of us. There are certain sights that bring me a lot of peace, and there are certain sights that make all the hair on my neck stand up. Basically everyone in my house has some level of trypophobia, which is phobia of like small bunched together holes. I get super grossed out because my immediate association and primal thought process is seeing holes and imagining them in flesh, like a bunch of tiny bot fly entrances on a small animal's back. It repulses me, random sets of holes gross me out, though things like honey combs are fine. I never really know what is gonna gross me out or not, so I tried to avoid weird groupings of holes in general, but I used to be way worse. That is, however, until I started painting and found myself looking ...

I love religious art. I think that there's a quality to it which cannot be explained. It doesn't stir feelings of faith in me, but I feel the weight which people's faith and devotion lend the piece. I've been struck by the beauty of Hindu devotional art and architecture for a few years now. I love looking at the richly decorated Shiva Linga , the revered statues of gods and goddesses, the rainbow-adorned temples, and the massive Ratha chariots (which I had always thought were called Juggernauts). However, my appreciation for devotional Hindu art had been only surface-deep. Until I read Darsan  by Diana Eck, I never knew the significance of these things, especially the statues. It was easier for me to associate the "aniconic" manifestations of the gods, like the Linga , than it was for me to imagine a deity in a statue, and I'm still unsure why. Shiva Linga (center left, near crack) being worshiped by Gandharvas c. 100 BCE Crucif...