TN Tour 7: Kamakshi and Ekambareshwara

Late afternoon turned to evening as we arrived at the temple of the Devi Kamakshi.

The story goes that Parvati heard from Shiva about the technical and ritualistic worship that forms the Agamic way. The Agama traditions include yoga, self-realisation, kundalini yoga and asceticism, and she wished to worship the lord in this way. At Kanchi, Shiva had taken abode at the root of a mango tree and that is where Parvati as Kamakshi made a linga from sand and began to woo him with tapas and yogic austerities. Playfully, and perhaps also as a test, Shiva took the form of the Kamba aka Vegavati river and the waters began to surge. Abandoning all her rituals, the Devi embraced the shivalingam to protect it from erosion, and unable to resist her Bhakti, he melted into her. 

Created by me with Dall-e 2

At Kanchi, the Goddess sits in padmasana. 

We snaked around the shrine in the darshan queue, made our offerings, took darshan. Because the queue wasn’t too bad, we managed to sneak in for another round, hehe. One of the guards was kind to us, and indicated a quiet place on a landing in front of the shrine, permitting us to sit for a while without either being in anyone’s way or our darshan being blocked. She is quite something, Kamakshi.

Adi Shankara is supposed to have installed the Sri Chakra mandala here, and there is a shrine to him to one side, with various sages and rishis depicted along the upper lintel of the structure. These were familiar names to us – the Guru Pooja we chant every day invokes a line of Gurus: Narayana, Padmabhava, Vasistha, Vyasa, Shuka, Goudapada… the Guru Pooja simply poured out of us as we stood there at the twilight hour, the sandhyakala.

We had made good time and bespoke an auto to take us to the Ekambareshwara Temple but what happened there, I wrote about in this earlier post.

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We returned the next morning and this time, he was in residence. Hardly any people at all and we went right in. 

 

Now, Ekambareshwara is one of the Pancha Bhoota Stalas of southern India, and is the deity for the element of earth or Prithvi. With Save Soil, Sadhguru was specifically seeking the healing of the earth element. With the rampant use of chemicals, by stripping away verdure and leaving precious topsoil open to all manner of erosion, we have let soil health slide in every corner of the globe. A critical aspect of planetary health that has gone shockingly unnoticed and unaddressed – which is now slowly gaining world attention. Naturally, Ekambareshwara was a very important stop for us.

We went up to the sanctum, requesting an ‘archana’. 

"In whose name?" the priest asked us briskly. We looked at each other, a bit lost as to how to express ourselves. 

“For everyone… for the world…” we fumbled. 

“Ah, ok! Lokahitam?” he prompted. Beneficial to the whole world. 

We nodded rapidly, pleased with his quick grasp of what we needed. Barely pausing a beat, he launched into the most beautiful Sanskrit shloka I’ve heard… fresh air, he asked for, clean rivers that were neither too scarce nor too abundant, bounty for all creatures… prosperity and well-being for humans and mukti for each one at the appropriate time. We were close to tears by the end of it. It was most fitting. I have no idea which source that was from, I was too dazed to ask. We sat for a moment or two and were soon hustled out to make way for the next archana. “Go to the mango tree,” they told us kindly, “you can sit around there as long as you want.”

So we went to the ‘mango tree’ – a dignified arbour that marks the spot of Kamakshi’s penance. This is a beautiful enclosure and here also we prayed for the regeneration of the earth – its soil, its waters, a rise of empathy and consciousness, and for the safety of our Master who was risking life and limb in a brutal journey across continents.

This is a large temple, with long corridors, beautiful columns, high ceilings… we sat for a bit, pondering the massive effort and conviction that went into making these gems that are strewn in the Tamil land. 

My Experiments with Dall-E

In November 2022, Dall-E 2 was opened to the public without a waitlist. This is a deep learning AI model that generates digital images from natural language descriptions called ‘prompts’. I signed up just to see what the buzz was about and since then, I have been quite thoroughly enjoying the artificial intelligence experience.

A new user gets 50 credits to play around with, after which you get 15 free credits every month – each prompt or variation uses one point. You can buy credits also. I have not yet explored ‘Outpainting’ which is an editor interface that lets you tweak the images that get thrown up with your prompts.

Alas, I did not use my 50 credits too well. First prompts were extremely mundane – a log cabin in the woods, for instance. Nice but meh.

I played a bit with watercolours and some nostalgia. The effects were pretty.

Photo-real images with my rudimentary prompts were a bit hit or miss.

Then I learnt that with its heavy learning material, the AI interface was aware of thousands of artist styles and aesthetics. A muddled prompt for something in the Mughal Art style threw up a pretty but somewhat confused assortment of elements.

I tried a couple of classical elements together: a koel, a mango tree, and an ornate window in the style of Amar Chitra Katha, and I was really pleased with these images.

Line drawings were satisfactory, illustrations of flowers in the botanical style were near-perfect and even this render of a phoenix was very acceptable.

I wanted to represent the epic road trips my sister and I undertook last year and I was pretty happy with a couple of results in a cartographic rendering.

As you see from the column on the right, I seized the chance to represent this blog’s title in an expressionist output.

I explored what might emerge if I suggested ‘EH Shepard’ or ‘Raja Ravi Varma’ or ‘MC Escher’.

A photo-real request for a Pallas’ Cat (this gorgeous feline was one of the highlights of the trip we took to Ladakh in August 2022) was quite stunning.  

Since many users were bingeing on androids and ghostly apparitions, I didn't go down too much the futuristic route, although a neon digital art image of a mesmerising phone screen delivered to the brief.

As this column says, we may never have to use stock images again, or struggle to express an abstract idea. I have mourned for years that I cannot draw. Now who cares?