Lingam

What the lingam signifies is genuinely disputed, and the dispute is old, internal to Hinduism, and then badly aggravated from outside.

The Sanskrit word linga means a mark or a sign, in logic, the evidence from which something is inferred. A substantial body of Shaiva theology takes the object in exactly that sense: the formless Shiva has no image, and the lingam is the sign of that formlessness rather than a depiction of anything. Many practitioners hold this position firmly and reject the anatomical reading outright.

Other texts within the tradition, including parts of the Puranic literature and some tantric material, treat the phallic reading as intended and theologically meaningful, and pair it deliberately with the yoni base as the union from which the world proceeds. This is not a scandalous reading smuggled in from outside; it is inside the corpus.

What happened from outside is a third thing. Nineteenth-century European scholarship and missionary writing seized on the second reading and presented it in a register of prurience and disgust, as evidence of a degraded religion. That framing was intended to demean and did. Hindu writers have been objecting to it since, and modern controversies over how the lingam is discussed in Western textbooks and scholarship are continuous with that history rather than separate from it.

The result is that a question with two defensible answers inside the tradition became, from outside, an accusation. Anyone writing about the object now is writing into that, and pretending otherwise is not neutrality.

Most temple lingams are carved from black stone or marble to a size fixed to the sanctum they will occupy, but a particular category, banalingam, smooth ovoid stones taken from the bed of the Narmada river, are used uncarved, valued precisely because they are considered self formed rather than shaped by a sculptor's hand.

Installation and daily care

A carved or river-found lingam is installed with the same consecration rite, prana pratishtha, used for other murtis, performed by a qualified priest, after which it receives daily ritual bathing, abhisheka, with substances that can include milk, water, honey, yogurt and sacred ash, poured over it in a fixed sequence by temple priests as part of the temple's regular schedule rather than as an occasional event.

Who is permitted to touch the sanctum image

In many temples the principal lingam in the inner sanctum is touched only by initiated priests carrying out these daily rites, while ordinary devotees view it from outside the sanctum or receive prasad, offerings returned after being presented to the deity, rather than approaching the image directly. Smaller personal lingams, kept in a household shrine, carry none of this restriction, and are handled and bathed by the householder themselves as part of daily devotion, a much less formal practice than the temple rite.