Leshan

I was going through some old pictures I took several years ago in Leshan, a city in Sichuan, known widely for a statue of a Giant Buddha.  The area is strewn with Buddhist temples, sculptures, statues, found in caves, tunnels, the hillsides.  In one of the tunnels I ran across the statue on the right, depicting an androgynous form, its right-half being that of a woman.  The statue reminded me of Ardhanarishvara, a form of the Hindu god Shiva.

Ardhanarishvara

I had first become aware of Ardhanarishvara and seen statues many years ago, in South India.  The deity made a very strong impression on me, and before I left India I purchased a small bronze statue, a tourist trinket, a picture of which is on the left.

A western eye might stay with the half-male/half-female aspect, glide over differences from the Leshan statue, such as which side is the male, which the female.  In Hinduism, Ardhanarishvara depicts the union of Shiva and his companion Parvati, the union of masculine and feminine forces.  In the body of a marriage, the right side is that of the male, the left that of the female.  And this is reflected in the somatization of marital problems by women in North India: they are sometimes embodied as pain or even paralysis of the left side (described in Helman, C.G. (1994) Culture, Health and Illness).