with the esoteric teaching of the Saiva cult, as indeed is the case in all religions.
The Madras Museum has several very fine Nātārājas of the Chola period,[1] but the image still worshipped in the great temple of Tanjore is perhaps the most impressive rendering of the Saiva conception of the cosmic dance which the Chola sculptors achieved. The temple was completed about the beginning of the eleventh century: the image may have belonged to an earlier shrine. Mr. O. C. Gangoly, who first published the Tanjore image in his excellent book on South Indian Bronzes, makes it older than any of the Madras Museum Nātārājas; but apart from the evidence of style and technique, the introduction of the crocodile-dragon in the halo, or "arch of radiance," of the Tanjore bronze points to a later date. In the earlier Indian rendering of this sun-symbolism, as seen in the Buddhist "horse-shoe" arches, the crocodile-dragon, the demon of darkness, who swallows the sun at night and releases it in the morning, is not combined with these sun-windows until after the development of the Mahāyāna school.
The Silpa-Sāstrās distinguish between two forms of the dance—the Sādā-nritta, the Dance of Dissolution shown in the Tanjore image, which symbolises Siva's spiritual and material manifestations in the cosmos, and the Sandhyā-nritta, which is much quieter in movement, and is directly associated with the time of the Brahman's evening prayer at sunset. This latter is shown in the bronze from the Colombo Museum (Pl. LXV, b).
A legend told in the Koyil Purānam reads like the attempt of a Brahman littérateur to answer the
- ↑ See Pl. VII and VIII in Ideals of Indian Art, and Pl. XXV in Indian Sculpture and Painting.
