The Sacred Image in Hindu Religious Thought

The ritual worship of sacred images occupies a central role in the religious practice of many of Hinduism’s devotionally-oriented traditions. Indeed, Hinduism’s rich and diverse iconography often distinguishes it from other great world religions, who, notwithstanding certain exceptions, tend to view the practice of image-worship with severe disapproval. These latter traditions have often conceived, thought and spoken of image-worship in largely denunciatory terms seeing it, for example, as a theologically ill-informed departure from ideal norms of devotional conduct. The practice was also attacked for the metaphysical connotations it seemed to engender: it was argued that portraying God in an image was to suggest that God could be described or defined; to do so however was to imply an unthinkable limitation on the part of God.

My intention in this post is not to study these critiques in any great detail but simply to bring to light the ways in which these critiques are themselves sustained by certain assumptions and metaphysical positions that cannot be said to be of universal applicability. I would like to suggest that these critiques derive their cogency, in part at least, by operating within or by reference to certain ontological and/or metaphysical theories that end up shaping the way discourse around the issue of image worship is expressed or conducted within those respective traditions. If what I am suggesting is true then, it seems to me, a number of implications follow. First, it suggests that any attempt to understand why it is certain traditions object to the practice of image-worship requires an understanding of the basic metaphysics undergirding that tradition. Second, and more pertinently for the purposes of this post, it indicates that understanding the practice of image-worship requires an intimate understanding of the ways in which that practice is informed by and operates within the cultural matrices of that particular tradition. The job of the theologian, then, is to render transparent or intelligible the cultural matrices that shape and inform a particular set of religious practices.

Many of the ideas and arguments that I express in this piece are developed and expressed far more systematically by Peter Bennett in a tremendously insightful article that he wrote for the Journal of Vaisnava Studies many years ago. (I would be more than happy to provide access to Bennett’s piece for those readers so interested). He alerted readers at the outset of his piece to a simple but all-too-often forgotten point about the nature of religious practice and its relationship to conceptual orientations more generally and urged readers to remember that ‘attitudes towards divine images are inextricably bound up with ideas about the universe held by their worshippers’. As such, ‘the philosophical premises underlying the relationship between humankind, the world and the divine, [in Indian religious traditions] are fundamentally different from those of the Near-Eastern monotheistic traditions [and so] it is all too easy to misunderstand devotees’ statements about their beliefs if they are interpreted using categories borrowed from alien systems of thought.’

To understand the ways in which attitudes towards divine images are shaped by a (potentially prior) commitment to a set of cultural or philosophical assumptions, a study of the status of sacred objects in Western thought is vital. Bennett argues that sacred objects in the West (and certainly in the East as well) have been conceptualized in terms of their communicatory potential: they straddle the boundary between the human and the divine and thereby create the means by which communication between the two realms can be effectuated. Importantly, this agent of communicatory potential is ‘revered not for itself, but for the entity for which it stands’. In this sense, Hindu devotional traditions differ in their conceptualizations of the sacred image insofar as they are far more likely to describe their sacred images as being actual manifestations of the Deity. In this sense then, and this is an important issue to which I shall return, discoursing about sacred images in ways that maintain a strict categorical distinction between the image and the Deity seriously misrepresents the nature and significance of the image in as it is conceived in such traditions. 

The deeply ambiguous manner in which sacred objects have been regarded or conceptualized in Western thought can be brought out somewhat effectively by examining, if only very briefly, the theological debates that took place in the later patristic period in the Eastern Byzantine Church. The image or ‘icon’ was understood by the Eastern Church as capable of acting as a window through which the devotee could catch a more intimate glimpse of the divine realm than would otherwise be possible. However, a faction known aptly as the ‘iconoclasts’ spoke and wrote derisively of the practice, condemning it for its role in seeking to juxtapose the sacred to the profane. Those defending the practice, however, often did so on explicitly theological grounds. The grounds they sought to rely on were many but one of the more cogent set of arguments they used to countenance the practice relied for its efficacy on ‘incarnational logic’, the same sort that was used to explicate Christ’s position in earlier Christological debates. A particularly compelling example of the use of such arguments is best provided by the important eighth century thinker, John of Damascus. John of Damascus argued that the theological fact of the incarnation of Christ provided a powerful foundation for the employment of images and icons in religious and devotional practice. In defending the use of sacred images for liturgical and devotional purposes, John employed a unique incarnational approach, asking first where the impropriety lay in using physical materials to depict or convey divine truth. The use of physical materials to depict divine truth cannot itself be the problem, surely, John argued: after all, bibles used paper and ink (material substances no less) to depict divine truth. Moreover, Christ himself died on a wooden cross to save the world- in which case, material objects were themselves implicated in the salvation of the world. Indeed, Christ’s incarnation itself was the greatest and most forceful expression of the immaterial assuming material form. And, of course, notwithstanding their transubstantiated status, were not the bread and the wine physical substances, and yet capable of mediating divine truth through their employment in the Eucharistic Sacrament. John argued that the same logic, therefore, applied to the use of icons: notwithstanding their materiality, they were capable of conveying divine truth and therefore to proscribe their use in devotional expression would be to preclude an important way of apprehending the divine world. As an aside, this recourse to incarnational logic to countenance the practice of image worship is mightily fascinating since it resembles the approach adopted by the Sri Vaisnava tradition in their attempt to develop a theology of the sacred image.

What the aforementioned discussion does, I hope, is to alert readers to the type and sort of vocabulary and grammar employed in talking about sacred images in devotional worship in the West. I am going to argue that the sort of assumptions and underlying principles that engender the use of such vocabulary are in certain important respects foreign to the cultural matrices that shape and inform image worship in Hindu devotional traditions. In other words, the monotheistic, dualistic tendencies that inform the interpretation of sacred objects in the West are ‘less than useful as they stand for understanding the internal dynamics of Indian beliefs and practices.’ In a remarkably perspicacious passage on this issue, Bennett writes: ‘In contexts where the subject and object of worship are not opposed in a binary way, but are seen as manifestations of the same entity, then the appropriateness of dualistic analysis is open to question for it tends to place an undue emphasis on categorical dichotomies at the expense of understanding categorical overlapping, merging, and ultimate categorical identity.’

Conceptualizing the sacred image exclusively in terms of its communicatory or mediatory potential overlooks the sense in which for some Hindu traditions, the significance of the sacred image lies not so much in its alleged mediatory potential but rather in its status as an object of devotion itself, ‘that is as [a] viable, tangible manifestation [of] divinity.’ In other words, the mediatory potential of the image then lies not so much in its ability, if at all, to symbolize the divine either didactically, representationally or analogically, but rather in its capacity to manifest the divine.

In other words, in contrast to Western religious traditions wherein the distinction between the sacred image, the devotee, and the deity are reducible to categorical and absolute dichotomies, Indian religious philosophy entertains the possibility of such distinctions being dissolved in view of the fact that the devotee, the image and the deity are particularized aspects of divinity, manifestations then of a single entity. This understanding then forms part of Hinduism’s cultural matrix and therefore informs the practice of image worship within Hindu communities.

The issue here, to be clear, is not so much about the status or reducibility of the aforementioned dichotomies but rather the extent to which they problematize discourse in this area. So, for example, an Islamic critique of image worship is itself shaped by a set of philosophical and theological premises that view the universe in dualistic terms, based invariably on ‘dichotomies of humane-divine, earth-heaven, profane-sacred and material-abstract’, assumptions that are then intrinsic to that system itself and not therefore necessarily applicable to alternate systems of thought. I suggested at the outset of my essay that any attempt to understand why it is certain traditions object to the practice of image-worship requires an understanding of the basic metaphysics undergirding that tradition. Thinking theologically then, as a member of a Hindu devotional tradition, I may grant that the Islamic objection to image-worship makes sense and works at least on its own terms- however, I would then go on to argue that under altered premises, the critique loses much of its cogency and effectiveness. If Hinduism shared the philosophical premises of Islam, the Islamic critique of image-worship would be fatal- but given that it doesn’t share such premises, the latter critique cannot be said to add or detract meaningfully from Hindu understandings of the status of sacred images.

Much of the same could be said for the Christian objection to image worship in Hinduism. In Christian ritual and religious art, the image is conceptualized in an intellectual environment that shares many of the premises that inform Islam’s understanding of image worship. The acceptance of a dualistic universe and the dichotomies referred to above shape the way in which the image is reflected upon in the Christian setting. It’s function has primarily been conceived of in functional or symbolic terms: that is, the symbol’s value lies either in its didactic function (e.g. an image that stimulates devotion in the devotee) or in its status as representing and thereby participating in the reality of that for which the symbol stands. Bennett writes that ‘in the latter sense its meaning reflects an influential Neoplatonic strand in Christian thought which treats divine images as symbols and hence as gross forms standing for an abstraction and only partly fathomable reality, ever vulnerable to misinterpretation by the ignorant who might take the imperfect reflection for the reality’. Christian critiques of image worship then tend to focus on the devotee’s tendency to elide the image and its prototype. However, again, this critique works only if the premises underlying it (e.g. dualism and enduring dichotomies) are true. As Bennett writes: ‘But surely in a universe where the apparent gulf separating the two worlds is unreal, then the reverse might hold true. Enlightenment might only occur when image and prototype, material and abstract, man and divine, signifier and signified, are experienced in their underlying unity.’

In contrast to the tendency ever-present in western philosophical traditions to treat the sacred image as at best a symbol standing for a higher, more intangible reality, Hindu devotional traditions have evolved an understanding wherein the material image and supreme divinity are ultimately undifferentiated: that is, ‘the symbol is that which it symbolizes’. As Bennett writes then, to call the image a symbol in a Neoplatonic or Aristotelian sense would be to devalue its inherent sanctity and thereby to misrepresent the nature and significance of the sacred image in Hindu devotional traditions.

So as to conclude, I tried to argue at the outset of this piece that conceptualizations of sacred images are deeply rooted in a set of philosophical premises that shape and inform the way the sacred image is spoken or written about. I have sought to argue that an understanding of the role of sacred images in Hindu religious practice requires an understanding of the cultural matrices that shape Hindu religious thought and practice. Theologizing about the sacred image in Hinduism then is best achieved, as Bennett writes, by rejecting the imposing categories of western thought in favour of terms indigenous to the Hindu devotional traditions. The assumptions and prejudices that we bring to bear in our discourse on this area has for too long obscured our understanding of the status of sacred images in the Hindu setting and precluded us thereby from deeper engagement with the theological issues at play in the debate. As Bennett’s important summation points out: ‘it is necessary to expose the inappropriateness of those theories which presume universal relevance and yet, in their binary and dualistic frameworks, remain steeped in the cultural universes wherefrom they are derived.’ Hindu devotional traditions operate within a different cultural universe, with different beliefs and practices. ‘Western categories would serve only to disguise its underlying principles, impose significant issues of its own, and misinterpret the dynamics of the relationship between human and divine.