(East Asian mythology)
Literal meaning: ‘grower-remover’. Hari, a popular name for Vishnu, implies the renewal and growth of plants, while Hara, ‘he who takes away’, is a common epithet for Shiva. Together, they symbolize the great opposites, creation-destruction, life-death: the intimate harmony of the two supreme, antagonistic divine principles. Visual form is given to this mysterious concept in the figure of Hari-Hara, where the right side is Shiva and the left is Vishnu. Fine examples are found in the temple ruins of Cambodia, once a renowned Hindu-Buddhist kingdom.
Near their capital of Angkor Thom, in the middle Mekong valley, the Khmers under the leadership of King Suryavarman II began to build the immense temple of Ankor Wat in 1112. A palatial temple-residence, with walls and moats measuring some 300 yards along each side, Ankor Wat celebrated the mythical exploits of Vishnu, whose incarnation the Khmer monarch was supposed to be. Within the king's body reposed a portion of the deity, a formula which explains the Cambodian practice of fashioning statues of royalty in the attitudes of the highest gods. Others celebrated in the magnificent architecture are Shiva and the Buddha: the name ‘palace monastery’, ankor wat, seems to have been adopted during the reign of King Jayavarman VII (1181–1201), an ardent Buddhist. The famous mukha-lingams, ‘face lingams’, sculptured on the numerous towers of the Bayon temple, situated close to Ankor Wat, are the four faces of Shiva, deep in meditation. In late mythology the four-faced Shiva chopped off the fifth head of Brahma, which the latter had grown to prove his superiority. As a penance, Shiva was obliged to carry the severed head on a long pilgrimage, from which he was eventually released by the holy waters of the Ganges at Benares.
According to an Indian legend, the union of Vishnu and Shiva occurred as a joint response to the threat posed by Guha, ‘he who conceals’, a fierce demon of unlimited strength. Through appalling self-inflicted sufferings Guha had forced Brahma to make him invulnerable even to Vishnu and Shiva. Against the cosmic encroachment of the demon, first Vishnu, then Shiva, battled in vain. As a final resort, they combined as Hari-Hara, confronted the universal tyrant, and overthrew him. The underlying notion is the equality of Vishnu and Shiva: respectively, the maintaining and destroying aspects of divinity. Vishnu becomes Shiva when a life has reached its term, while Shiva becomes Vishnu when he bestows wisdom and peace. A parallel myth is the androgynous Shiva–ardhanari, ‘half woman’–where the god and his consort are merged to form an hermaphrodite; again Shiva is on the right side, the female on the left. In Tibetan Buddhism this late formulation of the coincidence of opposites mutually supporting each other takes the form of Yab-Yum, the sexual union of the bodhisattva and his sakti, ‘female aspect’. Explained in terms of meditation the female form, yum, is regarded as time and the male, yab, as eternity: as one, they stand for nirvana, transcendent repose.
