Vishnu- where the waters of sky and earth converge

Vishnu is the domain of manifest reality and of all the movements that go to shape this experience. In Natya Sastra (text on Indian temple dance), the symbol (pindi) of Vishnu is the eagle Garuda. Garuda today has been relegated to be the mount or vehicle of Vishnu. However Pindi is more than a symbol—it is a theriomorphic form of Vishnu himself. Therefore Garuda is not an adjunct to the Vishnu space, but is the essence of the Vishnu experience. It is through the movements of Garuda as expressed in karana approach that we perceive the qualities and attributes of Vishnu nature of reality.

The karanas and dance movements associated with Garuda suggest the confluence of the spaciousness of the skies as an eagle soars in the high heavens, and the laser-sharp precision of the self-same bird when it spies its prey from high above. It the swoop from the heavens to the earth is the movement of Vishnu. The movement/dance is the confluence of the waters of the sky and the earth.

Garuda is the beauty of the flight of the soaring bird, but equally the aggression of the ruthless hunter as it attacks its prey with its talons and beak. The expanse of the sky and the penetrating movement into the bowels of the earth to snatch the prey, the immanence and the infusion, the cosmic and the particular, the freedom and the directed force—the Vishnu experience holds all of these polarities as a continuum of dance/movement.

Garuda’s dance pindi is at once the spacious and soaring flight and the intricate and precise groundedness of the feet. It brings us to the heart of Vishnu as invoked in the first two lines of the 1000 names chant—the one who is the cosmos, the one who is infused in everything, and the one who directs all life. The king of the skies is also the force that hunts the serpent in the bowels of the earth. The presence in the deepest recesses of all matter is also that which acts to create the cosmos.

This dance of sky, earth, immanence and force is the dark waters on which Vishnu reclines. The waters move and dissolve the separations we bring to reality. The waters are Garuda, sweeping across the vast skies, swooping down into the centre of the earth, deep within with forceful agency. When we inhabit the dance of Garuda we taste the vast sweep of Vishnu’s Rasa.