As I was looking for an item to build for my charity fund raiser, I considered the Hindu God Shiva for my second item. Recently I saw an episode in Discovery channel "Lucy: Mother of Man". Lucy was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia. What makes her the mother of man was the fact that she routinely walked upright on two legs (Bipedalism) which is "the most distinctive, apparently earliest, defining characteristic of humans."
As I was watching this episode, I remembered a Hindu God, Hanuman, an incarnation of Shiva the God of Destruction and Death. Hanuman's story is depicted in Ramayana as a monkey god who fought with God to defeat the Evil. In one of the stories, he lifted an entire mountain "Dronagiri (in Himalaya)" and in another, he jumped the India ocean to Sri Lanka to fight a war with the king.
During his childhood, Hamunan wanted to learn vedas, so he approached Surya, the Hindu Deity of Sun. Surya refused to accept him as a student, said to Hanuman that it is impossible to learn from Him effectively because He has to be in constant motion. Undeterred, Hanuman raised his body over earth by stepping on the east and west mountains and faced Surya all day. Pleased by his persistence, Surya accepted him as a student.
Almost 400,000 years ago, Humans diverged from Neanderthal (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and conquered the world. Neanderthal were much stronger, taller and well built than humans. One theory is the Modern Humans killed all Neanderthals, another suggest a natural extinction. Whatever the case may be, when I saw Neanderthal and Hanuman pictures, in my mind Hanuman is a symbolic missing link between the Humans and the Creator, just like the Neanderthals who link Modern Humans to the "Australopithecus Afarensis", Lucy.
For me, Hanuman represents :
- The Persistence for Learning
- Courage to fight the Evil
- Not everything have an easy way out
- You need to be committed to whatever you do
- One can either quit or dig their heals deeper to reach the next level
- Victor not a Victim
This piece measures 24"x14", made with MDF, 2 coats of black paint and one coat of wipe on polyurethane.
-paul
