Chidambaram Natarāja

Chidambaram Natarāja

The temple of the element that has no shape

Chidambaram, in Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu, is one of the Pañca Bhūta Sthalas — the five temples in which Śiva is worshipped as one of the five classical elements, in the sequence Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Space. Chidambaram is the last: ākāśa, space or ether, the element with no form at all.

That fact dictates everything about the inner shrine. There is no linga here. The garbhagriha contains an empty space, and what the pilgrim approaches is a curtained void with nothing in it. The worship is performed at the space rather than before an object: lamps are lit and waved into the empty air, and a garland of golden bilva leaves hangs above and stirs in the air currents drawn through the shrine, marking the presence that cannot be seen. This is often called the chidambara-rahasya, the "secret of Chidambaram", and the temple's own tradition treats the emptiness as the point rather than as an absence. It is the most conceptually demanding of the five elemental shrines and the one most likely to be misunderstood by a visitor.

The Natarāja of the golden hall

Outside that secret, the complex is a substantial Śaiva establishment with a long chronicle. The oldest phases belong to the early Chola period, and the shrine is repeatedly described in inscriptions from the imperial Cholas onward. Most visitors, however, come for the Nāta-maṇḍapa, the pillared hall in which stands a gold-plated bronze Naṭarāja — the dancing Śiva, with the lifted right foot, the drum in the upper left hand, the fire in the upper right, and the dwarf of ignorance crushed underfoot. The Natarāja image was traditionally linked to the one taken from the Kaveri course during the Kalyāṇi floods, a claim the temple authorities make and one that a guardian should record as temple tradition rather than settled history.

Chidambaram is a Paadal Petra Sthalam, one of the shrines named in the Tēvāram hymns of the Nāyanārs. It is also the seat of the Kōḍambhūr Śrī Kālaīśvara Liṅgam tradition, and its Brahmins and the shrine's śaiva identity are deeply embedded in Tamil Śaivism. The temple is administered by hereditary priests rather than by a devotional trust, which is a significant difference from how most North Indian large temples are run.

Two Śaivas, not one temple

It is important not to conflate two different institutions with the name Chidambaram. The ArunachalESHvara temple at Chidambaram, where the great bronze Nataraja and Kālī are housed, is a separate temple in a separate tradition, and a reader who wants the Natarāja of Chidambaram in the "Aṇṇāmalai" sense may land in the wrong building. The Pañca Bhūta Śiva temple and the Ānandaśrama / Arunachala shrine have separate histories and separate custodians.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Tēvāram and the Paadal Petra Sthalam corpus — the canonical basis for the hymn tradition.
• Chola inscriptions of the temple — the primary epigraphic record; these exist in published epigraphia and should be consulted before any date is asserted.
• Tamil Nadu district gazetteer (Cuddalore) and standard works on Śaiva temple institutions and on the Pañca Bhūta Sthalas.
• David Shulman, Tamil: A Biography — for how Chidambaram functions in Tamil Śaiva religious and social imagination.

Still to be checked by a named guardian: the flood-recovery story of the Natarāja, the chronology of the garbhagriha and the Naṭarāja hall, and the etymology of "Chidambaram" itself (often connected to cid-, a split or crevice, which would suit a sanctuary in a rock fissure) are all traditional claims that need a real source. A previous version of this file carried invented quotations attributed to Ibn Battuta describing this temple; none could be located in the Rihla and the block has been deleted.