Dakshinamurthy
தட்சிணாமூர்த்தி दक्षिणामूर्ति
Also Jnana Dakshinamurthy, Medha Dakshinamurthy, Veena Dakshinamurthy, Guru.
SaivaSmarta
Who this is
Dakshinamurthy is Siva as the teacher, and he teaches in silence. He sits under a banyan facing south, which is the direction of death and of Yama, and four old sages sit before him as pupils. The whole doctrine of the form is that the teaching was given without a word and was understood, which the tradition takes as its statement about what the highest knowledge is like. He is in a niche on the south wall of nearly every Siva temple in the Tamil country, and a student stops there on the way round. Where he is the presiding deity he is approached for learning and for Guru, the planet, at the same time.
How to recognise them
Seated under a banyan on a rock, the right foot on the dwarf of forgetfulness and the left drawn up, the right hand in the chin mudra where thumb and forefinger meet, the left holding fire, a snake or a palm leaf book. Four sages at his feet, old and listening. A deer and an axe in the upper hands. He faces south, which no other form of Siva does.
Family and companions
Siva, alone in this form: no consort stands with Dakshinamurthy and no vehicle. The four sages Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatana and Sanatkumara are the pupils and are shown as old men being taught by a young man, which the tradition points out deliberately.
How they are worshipped
Thursday; Guru Purnima; the Guru hora.
Thursday is his day, as it is Guru’s, and Guru Purnima is kept for him in the Smarta houses. Yellow cloth, channa dal and jaggery are offered. A student does the pradakshinam and stops at the south niche before an examination. At Alangudi he is the Guru sthalam of the navagraha circuit and is visited for a difficult Guru period.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
The teaching that was silence
The four sages, born of Brahma’s mind and already learned in everything that could be said, came seeking what could not. Siva sat under the banyan and said nothing, and sat, and the four understood. Adi Sankara’s hymn on the form turns on the strangeness of it: the teacher is young and the pupils are old, the teaching is silence and the doubt is cleared. The tradition uses the image against its own tendency to multiply commentary, and keeps multiplying commentary about it, which it is aware of.
Why he faces south
South is the direction of Yama and of the ancestors, and a house is not built facing it and a corpse is carried out that way. Siva as teacher is placed facing it on the outer wall of the sanctum, so that the devotee doing pradakshinam meets him on the side everything else avoids. The reading the tradition gives is that knowledge is precisely what is to be sought in the direction of death, and that a teacher who cannot be approached there is of no use.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Tamil Nadu
- In the south niche of nearly every Siva temple, and the presiding deity at Alangudi, the Guru sthalam of the navagraha circuit.
- Kerala
- Kept in the Siva temples and invoked at the start of a lesson in the traditional schools of Sanskrit and of the arts.
- Karnataka
- The Smarta mathas keep Guru Purnima for him, and Sringeri reads Sankara’s hymn to him on the day.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own
Where to see them
From the temple directory
- Alangudi Apatsahayesvarar Temple Alangudi, Thiruvarur, Tamil Nadu
- Thillai Nataraja Temple Chidambaram, Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu
- Arunachaleswarar Temple Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu
What is said
From the mantra library
In the almanac
Their graha