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Worship of Sacred Feet and Feet As Lotus
Worship of Sacred Feet and Feet As Lotus
Worship of Sacred Feet and Feet As Lotus
K. Chandra Hari1 Sacred Feet is a rare and unique worship tradition of the Hindus. Origin of the sacred feet tradition and the later day association of Lotus with the feet of Hindu Gods can be traced to the ancient Dravidian homonym for time and feet i.e. Kl. In the mother worship of time Kli-amm became Pad-m where Pad was the sanskritization of Kl. Thus gods of time and the sacred feet got associated with Lotus. Origin of P-ja likewise can be traced to the Dravidian worship of genitalia as goddess of time. Siddhas referred to genitalia as P or flower and thus Pja became the term for worship. Later day use of flowers in worship is an aberration or a substitute invented for worship of goddess of time as genitalia. The sacred feet in turn led to the honorific title Atikal for the Gods and Chieftains. TiruAti or Tiruvatikal meant the Supreme God. Ati in fact meant the bottom or feet and unless guided by some special rationale, Adikal could not have been a honorific title. Tiru-Atikal in Sanskrit became Srpad and its variants.
Go or cow may also be noted. Dravidian equivalent for Go i.e. Kli is also the Mother Goddess of time and means four footed with the implicit nl often attached in modern use as nl-kli. Also, Kli-amma may have received sanskritization as Go-mt and in turn lead to the worship of the cow. Influence of the above ideas can be traced in the portrayal of Krishna also. Krishna meant Dravidian Karuppan the black God notion arising from the homonyms of time and black. Lord of time or death as the black one may had its origin from Kla and Kalam, the latter meaning the floor drawn out for worship with blackish charcoal (Kari). Kla-rtri in fact means the darkest night or black night. Association of black and time may also be noted in historical Dravidian names like Kari-Klan. Kari had been a homonym for burning out (Kariyuka = burned, Kari = charcoal, black) and thus similar in action to time which cause everything to die out and thus death and black were synonyms in Dravidian conceptions.
worship of sex. These concepts are inseprably related to ideas of Maavlan alias Sanskrit Gandharvan and only Tantra can provide rationales for the origin of original terms like Maavlan. Maam/Gandham is essentially related to P or flower and Pja and the related siddha notions.
Both the height of the observer and the shadow length are measured in units of the observers feet. Pantrati meant 12 ft and the time was 5 ghatis after sunrise 8 AM.
Conclusion
It is apparent that the Dravidian notions stand at the root of many of the Hindu notions often described as the product of a Vedic paradigm. In fact the Vedic tradition is a posterior development of the Dravidian Siddha tradition through Sanskrit as a medium. Indus valley roots for the Hindu conceptions explain the so called apaurusheya doctrine on the origin of the Vedic wisdom. Siddha wisdom that went into the making of the Vedic wisdom a Dravidian to Aryan metamorphosis may be the reason that inspired the Vedic seers to credit the wisdom to the Gods, non-human authors. As the Rishi says, satyameva jayate and hence the truth can never be mitigated. As more and more excavations happen, Indus Valley may cast more light on the Indian antiquity. The south-north gap in the nature of siddha conceptions and the Dravidian-Sanskrit mutations coming to light is a pointer towards the umbilical connections to a Dravidian Indus Valley Civilization.
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