Bhikshatanaभिक्षाटन

Bhikshatana (भिक्षाटन), the wandering mendicant, is Shiva as the supreme outcaste: naked but for serpents and sandals, holding out a begging bowl that is the skull of Brahma. The form continues the Bhairava myth — having severed Brahma's fifth head, Shiva must expiate the killing of a brahmin, and the skull clings to his hand until the sin is discharged. He therefore walks the worlds as a beggar, the lord of everything owning nothing, until the skull at last falls from his palm at Varanasi.

The Daruka forest

The best-loved episode of the wandering takes Shiva into the Daruka pine forest, home of orthodox sages. The beggar's beauty undoes the settlement: the sages' wives, entranced, follow him with offerings, and the enraged sages unleash their sacrificial power against him — a tiger, serpents, a fierce dwarf — all of which Shiva takes up as ornaments and footstool, the encounter flowing, in the Tamil tradition, into his great dance as Nataraja. The story is a parable the texts tell against ritualism without devotion: the sages command the sacrifice but fail to recognise God at their door.

Iconography

Bhikshatana was a favourite of the Chola bronze workshops: a slender, four-armed youth in walking posture, nude, a serpent at the waist, sandals on his feet — a detail unique to this form — feeding a morsel to an antelope that leaps at his hand, attended by a dwarf gana carrying the alms bowl. The closely related Kankalamurti carries a corpse-staff. In Tamil temple processions the beggar-god has his own festivals, and the poets of the Tevaram return often to the paradox at the form's heart: the beauty of the lord who has renounced even clothing, begging at the doors of those he sustains.