God Inside Out: Śiva's Game of Dice

by Don Handelman, David Shulman, Carmel Berkson (Photographer)

This book offers a new exploration of the mythology of the Hindu god Siva, who spends his time playing dice with his wife, to whom he habitually loses. The result of the game is our world, which turns the god inside-out and changes his internal composition. Hindus maintain that Siva is perpetually absorbed in this game, which is recreated in innumerable stories, poems, paintings, and sculptural carvings. This notion of the god at play, arguee Handelman and Shulman, is one of the most central and expressive veins in the metaphysics elaborated through the centuries, in many idioms and modes, around the god.
The book comprises three interlocking essays; the first presents the dice-game proper, in the light of the texts and visual depictions the authors have collected. The second and third chapters take up two mythic "sequels" to the game. Based on their analysis of these sequels, the authors argue that notions of "asceticism" so frequently associated with Siva, with Yoga, and with Hindu religion are, in fact, foreign to Hinduism's inherent logic as reflected in Siva's game of dice. They suggest an alternative reading of this set of practices and ideas, providing startling new insights into Hindu mythology and the major poetic texts from the classical Sanskrit tradition.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1997

Reviews

[Obsidian Eagle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is among the most interesting pieces of philosophical literature that I have read in recent years. "Le Ne Plus Ultra" on the subject of Shiva and a Ludic Telos that underlyies Hindu literature and aesthetics. A worthy rebuttal to Eintein's famous claim that God does not play dice!