Darśan: Seeing the divine image in India

By Diana L. Eck

You don’t really notice your assumptions about religion until something quietly unsettles them. Although she starts the book by breaking down the assumptions Western readers bring to Hinduism, a few pages in she is already talking about things I hadn’t quite seen in those terms.

For Christians, there’s usually an unspoken sense that God isn’t something you physically see. You read scripture, you listen, you interpret. Even when images are present, as in Catholic or Orthodox settings, they carry a bit of tension. There’s a long memory behind that: the Hebrew resistance to idols, the early Church trying to sort out what to do with images, and then the Reformation pulling things back toward the Word again. The same instinct shows up in Islam as well.

So without saying it outright, there’s a bias that gets inherited. Meaning comes through language. Images are secondary, sometimes even suspect.

Eck doesn’t argue against that directly. She just describes something else.

Hindus go to temples to see the deity. It’s closer to a visitation. They expect to stand in front of Durgā or Śiva or Viṣṇu and actually see them there. But this is not a one-sided act. The deity is also there to see the devotee.

That idea sits quietly at the center of everything.

You notice it in how people talk about going for darśan. It’s not about studying the image or spending time analyzing it. People wait for a brief moment in front of the deity at Tirupati, in Kāśī, in Puri, and that short encounter is enough. There’s a sense that something has passed between them, even if nothing was said and nothing was explained.

Once you see that, a lot of other things start to fall into place.

The question of “how many gods” doesn’t feel as pressing. From the outside, it looks like a crowded system: Śiva, Viṣṇu, Devī, Jagannāth, each appearing in multiple forms. But in practice, people don’t seem to experience it that way. You stand before one form, and for that moment, it’s complete. There isn’t a need to reconcile it with everything else.

That’s why the forms don’t get reduced or simplified.

Śiva shows up as Naṭarāja, caught in motion; as Dakṣiṇāmūrti, quiet and still; as Tripurāntaka, drawn into action; as Ardhanārīśvara, where male and female are held together in one body; or as a liṅga, where there’s barely any human form left at all.

If you tried to work through all of that in writing, you would end up explaining and qualifying things out. Here, none of that happens. The forms stay as they are.

Eck uses Betty Heimann’s phrase, “visible thought,” to make the point. These images don’t explain ideas the way words do. In a text, you move step by step, sorting out contradictions as you go. An image doesn’t have to do that. It can hold things together all at once.

A form like Ardhanārīśvara, half Śiva, half Śakti, doesn’t argue for how something can be both male and female. It just presents it. Naṭarāja doesn’t explain how creation and destruction happen together. He embodies both in a single frame.

You don’t follow the logic in sequence. You take it in at a glance, and over time you get used to letting those tensions sit without resolving them. That’s what Heimann means by “visible thought”: thinking that doesn’t unfold in language, but rests directly in form.

The forms themselves are made carefully, following patterns that have been passed down in the śilpaśāstras. How the hands are placed, the proportions of the body, what the deity holds, the stance, the expression, none of it is arbitrary. Each detail is part of a way of shaping the form so it can hold a certain presence. The image is worked through with attention, almost like a set of constraints that guide what can and cannot appear.

Even then, it isn’t treated as complete just because the carving is done. There is still a moment when the eyes are opened, when the form shifts from being something made into something you can stand before.

And yet, not everything needs this kind of making.

Some forms don’t go through any of it.

A bāṇa liṅga from the Narmadā, a śāligrāma from the Gaṇḍakī, these are already taken as forms of Śiva or Viṣṇu. Nothing is added to them. They’re not shaped into meaning. They’re recognized as already holding it.

So you have both kinds of things at once: carefully made images that are ritually prepared, and ordinary objects that are simply acknowledged.

When you walk into a temple, the space itself follows the same logic.

You start outside, where everything is visible: figures, animals, scenes carved into the walls. Then you move inward. It gets quieter, darker, more contained. The center, the garbhagṛha, is small, almost enclosed.

You don’t stay there long. The line moves. You step forward, look, and then you’re guided along.

But that brief moment feels like the point of the whole movement inward.

The sensory side of it doesn’t drop away either.

There’s sound: bells, voices. Smell: incense, camphor. Color: flowers, cloth. Food being offered and then shared. It’s dense, but it doesn’t feel distracting. It feels like everything is converging toward that moment in front of the deity.

Later, Eck talks about Jagannāth at Puri.

The images there are replaced periodically in navakalevara. New forms are carved. The old ones are opened, and something is transferred into the new ones. The old bodies are buried.

There isn’t a clean explanation of what is being passed on. It’s left deliberately unclear.

And then the deity moves.

During Rath Yātrā, Jagannāth comes out into the streets on a chariot. People gather along the route, waiting for a glimpse. In Madurai, Aḻagar travels from the hills toward the city. The encounter isn’t confined to the temple.

By the end, the contrast with a text-centered tradition feels clearer, but not in a confrontational way.

In one, meaning unfolds through words: read, interpreted, discussed.

In the other, you stand in front of a form that doesn’t explain itself. It is simply there.

And over time, you get used to that.

You stop expecting everything to be spelled out.

You start to understand why a brief moment of standing in front of an image can feel complete.

Because it isn’t just about what you see. It’s about being there, in that exchange, however short it is, and then stepping away from it.