About Basava

[This poem] dramatizes several of the themes and oppositions characteristic of the protest or 'protestant' movement called Virasaivism.

For instance: Indian temples are traditionally built in the image of the human body. The ritual for building a temple begins with digging in the earth, and planting a pot of seed. The temple is said to rise from the implanted seed, like a human. The different parts of a temple are named after body parts. The two sides are called the hands or wings, the hasta; a pillar is called a foot, pada. The top of the temple is the head, the sikhara. The shrine, the innermost and the darkest sanctum of the temple, is a garbhagrha, the womb-house. The temple thus carries out in brick and stone the primordial blueprint of the human body.

But in history the human metaphor fails. The model, the meaning, is submerged, The temple becomes a static standing thing that has forgotten its moving originals. Basavanna's poem calls for a return to the original of all temples, preferring the body to the embodiment...

The poem draws a distinction between making and being. The rich can only make temples. They may not be or become temples by what they do. Further what is made is a mortal artifact, but what one IS is immortal.

This opposition, the standing v. the moving, sthavara v. jangama, is at the heart of Virasaivism... Sthavara is that which stands, a piece of property, a thing inanimate. Jangama is moving, moveable, anything given to going and coming. Especially in Virasaiva religion a Jangama is a religious man who has renounced world and home, moving from village to village, representing god to the devoted, a god incarnate. Sthavara could mean any static symbol or idol of god, a temple, or a linga worshipped in a temple. Thus the two words carry a contrast between two opposed conceptions of god and of worship. Basavanna in the above poem prefers the original to the symbol, the body that remembers to the temple that forgets, the poor though living moving jangama to the rich petrified temple, the sthavara, standing out there...

- from Speaking of Siva, by A. K. Ramanujan