Sadashivaसदाशिव

Sadashiva (सदाशिव), the ever-auspicious, is the supreme form of Shiva in the Agamas, the scriptures that govern Shaiva temple ritual and theology. Where the Puranic imagination gives Shiva stories, the Agamic imagination gives him structure: Sadashiva is the godhead with five faces and, commonly, ten arms, standing above the active deities as the fountainhead from which revelation and cosmic function flow. In the Shaiva Siddhanta system he occupies one of the highest rungs of the tattvas, the levels of reality, mediating between the utterly transcendent Shiva and the manifest world.

The five faces

The five faces bear the names of the Panchabrahma mantras of the Yajurveda tradition: Sadyojata, Vamadeva, Aghora, Tatpurusha and Ishana — the last facing upward, beyond the four directions. Each face is correlated with one of the five cosmic acts of God: creation, preservation, dissolution, concealment and grace; and with one of the five elements, so that the whole of nature is read as the god's visible body. Tradition also holds that the Agamas themselves were spoken from these five mouths, giving the scriptures a divine point of origin.

In image and rite

Sadashiva is rarely the object of narrative art; his natural representation is the linga itself, and especially the mukhalinga, the linga carved with faces — five-faced examples render Sadashiva exactly, with Ishana implied at the summit. In temple liturgy the Panchabrahma mantras are recited over the linga during worship, addressing each face in turn. The form's importance is thus less in the sculptor's gallery than in the daily rite: whenever the priest invokes the five faces upon the pillar in the sanctum, it is Sadashiva who is being worshipped.

Legacy

The five-faced schema organised Shaiva theology across the subcontinent and beyond, from Kashmir to the Tamil country and into Southeast Asia, wherever Agamic ritual travelled. Sadashiva remains the tradition's most complete answer to the question of how an absolute God can also act: eternally still, and eternally performing the five acts through his five faces.