Elephants take center stage in Indian culture. They serve as a testament to the interconnected history, culture, and society of India and, by extension, to Hinduism and Buddhism. Its embodiment may be seen in symbolism, as well as in its fundamental presence in history, Puranas, and daily life. Numerous texts have been written exclusively about elephants since they are revered as sacred animals.
Buddha as Vessantara
These types of tales make it quite evident that elephants are connected to rain and fertility in South East Asia, including India. The presiding god, Jagannath, is decorated with an elephant mask in Puri, Orissa, during the height of summer in the hopes that it will act as a jewel and usher in the monsoons sooner.
Indra’s Airavata
Gaja Lakshmi
In Erotic Literature
Kamasutra
Elephants are representations of untamed, primal sexual force in erotic literature. The Kamasutra describes an elephant-woman, also known as a Hastini, as the lustiest of women who is also crude and vulgar in her demeanour.
Mahabharata
Vishnu Purana
Vishnu saves Gajendra, the elephant king, from a crocodile’s teeth. The king of elephants, surrounded by cow-elephants, is a metaphor for the world’s sensual pleasures, with the crocodile standing in for materialism’s shackles. Liberation occurs when the elephant (sexual power) extends its trunk and presents the Lord with a lotus (devotion).
Bhagavat Purana
Tantrik Literature
The goddesses are frequently depicted riding elephants or holding impaled elephants in their palms in Tantrik literature. This proves the deities’ power over people in a sexual and violent way.
Derivations
The elephant is unstoppable and highly deadly when it is in heat, or musht. From this emerged slang terms that the youth use, like masti. An elephant will exude fluid from its temples when it is at the height of its sexual cycle. This is referred to as mada, from which the word madira for wine is derived.
Given that the god is known as the elephant-headed Ganesha in India.
The Supreme Ascetic
Elephants shouldn’t matter to ascetics if they stand for riches, power, and material grandeur. They also don’t. Shiva is known as Gajantaka, the supreme ascetic, because he killed an elephant, flayed it alive, and then used its thick skin, known as Gaja-charma, as a garment. Many religious texts depict the elephant as the terrifying demon Gajasura, a clear metaphor for the perils of sensuous desires. Elephant skin is difficult to tan. It then rots. Shiva furthers his image as someone who despises all things material by donning it.
However, as Hinduism developed in India, Shiva’s elephant-headed son replaced the demon with an elephant head that had been slain by the passage of time. Why did Shiva use an elephant’s head to raise the offspring that his partner, the goddess Shakti, had independently created? He gave his assistants the following directive: “Go north and fetch the head of the first living thing you come across.”
According to the Brahmavaivarta Purana, the white Airavata, Indra’s mount, was the first creature that Shiva’s attendants saw. The North is considered to be the direction of growth in Vaastu. It is obvious that the elephant murderer is using the pinnacle of material opulence to create his son. Shiva ceases to be the hermit who rejects the world and changes into Shankara, the householder who embraces the world, in the process of producing the elephant-headed Ganesha. Thus, the elephant spreads life and development wherever it travels.
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