Dattatreya

The Eternal Guru.

In the Hindu tradition, Dattatreya occupies a singular place, revered as the archetypal Guru, a teacher beyond lineage, institution, or time. His form embodies the triune form of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the sustainer, and Shiva the dissolver.

The two images below are from the Dattatreya Temple near Panjim. A short video follows.

Dattatreya is at once ascetic and cosmic. He appears as a digambara, unclothed and unbound, a yogi who has renounced the world yet moves freely within it. His iconography is unsettling to the literal minded. Three faces, six arms, a cow, and four dogs are not decorative excesses but symbolic condensations.

Across centuries, Dattatreya has stood apart from spiritual conformity. He belongs to no single school and submits to no dogma. In him are joined devotion, knowledge, and renunciation, different expressions of the same insight.

The name Datta surfaces briefly in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where the poet reaches toward Upanishadic wisdom while confronting the spiritual exhaustion of the modern West.

A longer essay on Dattatreya, his provenance and nature, is available here.