TEMPLES OF INDIA

[Music] of all the great religions of the world the strangest is the weird state of the Hindus dominating more than half the Indian people Hinduism is not merely a form of worship it is a way of life into the many inner mysteries no white man is allowed to penetrate into the bizarre beliefs of Hinduism none can be converted for the Hindu must be born and born again and yet again until the very duplication of his earthly life is halted in Nirvana the Hindu heaven of eternal peace [Music] every Hindu believes in one God the supreme spiritual being permeating men women animals and all the visible world but not in God's one and indivisible for the God of the Hindu can manifest himself in many forms and to each form of God its temples and its devotee here an idol of the goddess Kali is carried on the tour of her domain Kali is the foe of God which governs and delights in plan Kali the terrible whose anger must be laid with sacrifice once upon her after human beings bed to death now the blood of goats is held to be enough to satisfy her third idol is of solid gold inlaid with precious stones and hung with jasmine in Hindu mysticism Kali is the wife of Shiva the destroyer but the destroyer can delight in not destroying and in that mood he is Nandi the bull Nandi the joyous worshiped as an embodiment of the cost of reproduction for him - there are rights with prayers and incantations and with ceremonial processions round his sacred image for the delight of his pleasure-loving senses an offering of sandalwood is held below his nostrils to augment the many moods of God is one of the imperatives of Hindu ritual and every animal is pressed into the service car near the terrible who rides upon a tiger Lakshmi the goddess of wealth and beauty and beside her Krishna the Hercules of Indian mythology one of the incarnations of Vishnu Shiva the destroyer and reproducer the tendons are the snakes whose symbol is the bull and on the sons of Shiva garnish is the elephant headed god of learning and good luck and for the thumbs of God to exercise their powers upon there must be demons like this the demon of my soul who blatant relates was slain by Carly Carly and her other name of Durga whose temples are always blood-red like the blood she rules has made sacred another form of animal beside the tiger here in a temple of Banaras the white robed priestess inductor stranger congregation and can be found in any other quantum of the world at certain hours of the day the piping of a fruit invoked which the tribe of incarnated gods the sacred monkeys dwellers in the temple who are prayed to as the descendants of the god Hanuman in regularly fed with lumps of sugar Hahnemann in religious Hindu history was a monkey who befriended vishnu god the preserver when as rama he came down to earth in human form so long as the legend of Hanuman took since the monkeys will be worshipped in this blood-red temple of Benari [Music] [Music] as below and halibut stand temples which have been won back from the jungle built more than a thousand years ago they were in time engulfed by the encroaching under group for hundreds of years they were religion but recently the Maharaja had the ground clear of the giant jungle weed and the temples became again the houses of Hindu worship once more and acolytes daily makes the round of these sacred precincts toning the hand bell which is used to scare away the evil space [Music] the outside walls are richly carved with incidents from Hindu religion so rich that not one panel resembles any other and the labor must have occupied the lifetime but thousand may sir nothing else can so well illustrate the baffling complexity of Hindu faith for the one god of the Hindus beginning simply enough with a trinity of beings then B takes himself a multitude of wives to get children as divine as he is descends to earth in many forms and there makes friends and enemies by association become half divine so on in advance delivering variety of impish in all the modern world there is no parallel to such complexity of faith there had been nothing like it it's the pantheism of the ancient Greeks and Romans here are the saddest holy men of India sit upon the temple steps indifferent to the shimmering relentless heat meditating on the many Hindu forms of God and here within the temple is the holiest of holy sacred to Sheba and the dance of destruction [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] at Agra is a temple of love the taj mahai the world's most beautiful memorial and in itself most beautiful by moonlight the Taj Mahal was built in memory of the queen and Emperor adore the Mumtaz Mahal which is in Hindustani the elect of a palace the Mumtaz was beloved as no other woman has been loved before of cities in life she bore the Emperor fourteen children that she died in giving birth to the love in death the royal Shah Jahan made their passion deathless in this dream of beauty frozen into white mob which is inlaid with precious stones to one twenty years were spent in building a tomb beautiful enough to formulate an emperor's bereavement and according to a Jesuit who visited this part of India at that time the designer of the Taj Mahal was a Venetian jeweler it may well be so for this muzzle beer is the joy love ball architecture the supreme expression of human gratitude for happiness [Music]