To retreat is a vital act. Here are walls, many walls, colonnades, ambulatories, chapels, inner altars, niches and the silence that goes with the shades. Then come the staircases of the temple with lions, horses, legendary eagles, then the sound of the conch shell, and now the hall of ceremonies, with the divinely armoured guardians, their heads bowed down. Now we enter the sanctuary but remain at the door, for we are not, as the Brahmins, familiar with the gods and goddesses. But one can see them from the third doorway: the goddess in rubies and diamonds, with the eyes of a fish, with a fan of the hair of a yak, and a palanquin, and some lights that run up the rungs of the lamps, first to the right and then to the left. The camphor burning in them reminds us again and again that, as the burnt camphor, one should live without leaving any trace behind. It is this flame of the sanctuary that holds one’s eyes. When all is burned out, what remains over is the Absolute. That is why a Brahmin can enter the sanctuary.

But we are all of us Brahmins, and when the time comes, we retrace our vital breath to seek our own divinity. Sometimes one retreats so far as to seem in a dense forest or on a mountain peak. One wishes always to go deeper still. One penetrates the rock as if to make an entrance into oneself. Thus the hero, the dhira, of which Upanishads speak. Finally one reaches the sanctuary where there is nothing. As in the temple of Chidambaram, where, when you have passed through door after door, the Brahmins show you a circular, empty space and say: ‘Here, here is Shiva dancing.’ One sees nothing. One perceives all.

Those who conceived the zero (for it was in India that it was conceived first) have also conceived the idea of Shiva dancing in nothingness. This grotto is nothingness become concrete, zero become sanctuary. Who among the Indians first conceived of the zero—the Sankhyans? the Buddhists? Metaphysically speaking, zero could emerge only from Vedanta. Historically, it might well have come from the Buddhist or the Sankhya philosophers, this negative that reveals the positive; this zero that lights the darkness of the grotto. When there is nothing: ‘I’ am. When darkness overwhelms the universe, Shiva shines. Hence the Kailas of Ellora.