VISHNU: THE GOD WHO TRIES TO PRESERVE THE WORLD
I traveled to India twice. On one of those trips, I crossed practically the entire north of the country, from the border with Pakistan to Calcutta, catching endless train rides and watching the landscape, the cities, and the people change before my eyes. I especially remember the feeling of traveling from the paradise of the Himalayas to the hell of Calcutta. I don't use these words as a religious description, but as a memory of two worlds that, for me, seemed to be at opposite ends of the human spectrum. In the north, I had known the silence of the mountains, the temples, the cold air, and a sense of immensity difficult to explain. Then, the trains slowly descended toward the great plains of India. And finally, I arrived in Calcutta. The heat. The humidity. The noise. The bodies. The poverty. Life overflowing everywhere. I had never seen anything like it. And yet, throughout that entire journey, something appeared again and again: the gods.They were in the temples, in the houses, on small shrines by the roadside. Painted on walls. Hanging on trains. In markets. On car dashboards. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Rama, Ganesha, Kali… When I first began to explore Hinduism, one of the hardest things for me to grasp was precisely that apparent multitude of gods. From our Western perspective, it's tempting to imagine a vast pantheon of independent deities. But the more I traveled through India and the more I tried to understand its symbols, the more evident it became that things were far more complex. Perhaps my mistake was trying to understand India with too Western a way of thinking. We tend to separate. A god is a god. A person is a person. A thing is a thing. But Hinduism seemed to constantly tell me something different: multiplicity can also be a manifestation of the One. And one of the ideas that helped me begin to understand that immense universe of gods was the Trimurti.
KRISHNA: FROM THE PASTORES OF VRINDAVAN TO THE BHAGAVAD GITA
I bought these two silk paintings in Jaipur during one of my trips through India. In both Krishna appears surrounded by women in the midst of a lush nature. For years I have kept them without dwelling too much on the enormous story behind those scenes. To understand them, we must return to Vishnu. As we saw before, Vishnu is the great preserver of the order of the world. But when that order breaks, it doesn’t stay contemplating it from a distance. Descend the world by taking different forms.
They are their avatars. And one of the most important is Krishna. Few religious figures have come to have so many lives within the same tradition.Krishna is a boy, teenager, lover, hero, counselor and spiritual teacher.As a child, he is the little naughty god who steals butter, plays and baffles those around him. It is an extraordinarily popular image still today in India. Krishna boy appears in houses and temples and is treated with an intimacy that, from our Western tradition, can be surprising: he is dressed, fed and cared for almost as a member of the family. Then Krishna grows. And we arrive precisely at the Krishna of my Jaipur silk paintings. The young Krishna lives among the shepherds of Vrindavan and appears surrounded by the Gopas, the young shepherdesses fascinated by him. Krishna plays the flute and they abandon their tasks to follow the sound. They dance with it. They look for it. They want it. But these scenes did not end up being understood simply as love stories. With the development of tradition Bhakti, the love of the gopīs for Krishna became one of the great spiritual metaphors of India.Krishna is the divine. The gopīs are the human soul.and the flute is the call. The soul hears something that it does not know how to explain and momentarily abandons the everyday world to look for what it feels lacking. Perhaps that is why these scenes continue to have so much force in modern India. Krishna is not only a figure of ancient religious texts. It is present in temples, in houses, in music, in cinema, in celebrations and in devotional movements that have taken its name far beyond India. But Krishna will still undergo one last transformation. The young man who plays the flute and dances with the gopīs It reappears years later in one of the greatest epic stories of humanity:
RAMA: THE AVATAR OF DUTY
But Vishnu not only descends the world like Krishna.
Another of his great avatars is Branch, protagonist of the Ramayana, one of the fundamental epics of India.
If Krishna represents the game, the love and then the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, Rama embodies another dimension of the divine: Duty, righteousness and fidelity to the moral order.
Rama is the righteous prince. The Obedient Son. the husband who looks for Sita. The warrior who must face the demon Ravana to restore the lost balance.
And next to Rama appears one of the most beloved figures of Hinduism: Hanuman.
Hanuman: The Force of Devotion
Hanuman is the monkey god, but reducing him to that would not understand his importance.
In the Ramayana, Hanuman puts his strength, his intelligence and his bravery at the service of Rama. He crosses the ocean, finds Sita, burns Lanka and participates in the defeat of Ravana.
But the most important thing about Hanuman is not his power.
Is his absolute devotion.
Hanuman represents the strength that is born when one stops acting only for himself and gives himself to something greater.
That is why my statue of Hanuman seems to me such a special piece within the museum: it does not speak only of physical strength, but of Fidelity, service and devotional love.
After Krishna, the God who loves and teaches, Hanuman shows us another spiritual path: The force placed at the service of love.
