This book offers a new exploration of the mythology of the Hindu god Siva, who
spends his time playing dice with his wife, to whom he habitually loses. The
result of the game is our world, which turns the god inside-out and changes his
internal composition. Hindus maintain that Siva is perpetually absorbed in this
game, which is recreated in innumerable stories, poems, paintings, and
sculptural carvings. This notion of the god at play, arguee Handelman and
Shulman, is one of the most central and expressive veins in the metaphysics
elaborated through the centuries, in many idioms and modes, around the god.
The book comprises three