History of Śaivism

The biography of Sri Swami Satchidananda, depicts the life of one of the first Yoga masters to bring the classical science of Yoga to the western world. Satchidananda was born as "Ramaswamy" into a deeply spiritual family, steeped in the values of the Tamil Saiva tradition. After losing his wife after only five years of marriage, Ramaswamy became a wandering ascetic spending time with great Tamil Siddhars and saints, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Papa Ram Dass and in 1949 arriving in Rishikesh and taking Sannyas vows from his Guru, Sri Swami Sivananda. In the 1950s, Sivananda sent his disciple to teach the science of Yoga throughout India, Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka (where he taught for 13 years). Invited to the West in 1966, he went on to become one of the most well-known and beloved Yoga masters in the world. He opened the famed Woodstock Festival, founded Satchidananda Ashram–Yogaville/Integral Yoga International, and became a leading trailblazer in the interfaith movement. He built the first interfaith shrine in the West (lotus.org), served on numerous advisory boards of Yoga, interfaith, and world peace organizations and received many honors for his service. This book covers this story up until 1986.

Transmitted to us in a well-preserved ninth-century Nepalese manuscript, the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā has come in recent years to be recognised as probably the oldest surviving complete scripture of the Mantramārga.  Although its historical importance has been hinted at by a range of scholars across the twentieth century, this is the first time its text appears in print.

This volume presents a critical edition and annotated translation of the three earliest layers of the text: the Mūlasūtra, Uttarasūtra and Nayasūtra. The topics dealt with include cosmology, rituals of worship and initiation, and forms of yoga. A lengthy introduction sets these sūtras in context, in particular by examining the evidence for dating them. There follow a summary of their contents, an account of the early manuscript and its three twentieth-century apographs, and a treatment of the various ways in which the language of the Niśvāsa deviates from Pāṇinian norms.

In the frame of my work towards a critical edition of the hitherto unpublished Śivadharmottarapurāṇa, this paper purposes to present a brief analysis of the contents of the upapurāṇa in 12 chapters, (i. e., according to the colophons of some MS: goṣaḍaṅgavidhi, vidyādānaphala, pañcamahāyajñaguṇādhyāya, satpātraguṇa, śivasaṃgati, pāpabheda, narakaviśeṣa, saṁsāraprasavākhyāna, svarganarakacihna, jñānayoga, prāyaścittakathana and [lokanirūpaṇa]), highlighting in particular some noteworthy aspects of the doctrines of śivajñāna, bhukti and mukti, as well as a rather unusual version of ṣaḍaṅga yoga.

A translation of the Īśvara Gītā, a parallel text to the Bhagavad Gītā that promotes religious inclusion.

While the Bhagavad Gītā is an acknowledged treasure of world spiritual literature, few people know a parallel text, the Īśvara Gītā. This lesser-known work is also dedicated to a god, but in this case it is Śiva, rather than Kṛṣṇa, who is depicted as the omniscient creator of the world. Andrew J. Nicholson’s Lord Śiva’s Song makes this text available in English in an accessible new translation. A work of both poetry and philosophy, the Īśvara Gītā builds on the insights of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra and foreshadows later developments in tantric yoga. It deals with the pluralistic religious environment of early medieval India through an exploration of the relationship between the gods Śiva and Viṣṇu. The work condemns sectarianism and violence and provides a strategy for accommodating conflicting religious claims in its own day and in our own.

The aim of this exam is to provide a strong foundation and overview of the academic study of Śaivism and tantric traditions. The exam draws upon a variety of disciplinary approaches including philology, art history, philosophy, and religious studies, and considers how they may be brought together most fruitfully. The exam has been heuristically divided into six sections. The first four provide a broad overview of: 1) general and early Śaivism; 2) general studies of tantra, including Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions; 3) tantric Śaivism; and 4) the tantric body. The final two sections of the exam provide surveys of particular Śaiva/tantric orders or religious movements: 5) Nātha, Siddha, and Mahāsiddha traditions; and 6) Vīraśaiva or Liṅgāyata traditions.

Śaiva Advaita, or Śivādvaita, is typically regarded as an invention of the late sixteenth-century polymath Appayya Dīkṣita, who is said to have single-handedly revived Śrīkaṇṭha's commentary on the Brahmasūtra's from obscurity. And yet, the theological rapprochement between south Indian Śaivism and Advaita Vedānta philosophy has a much richer history, and one that left few south Indian Śaiva communities untouched by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The present essay is an attempt to trace the outlines of what we can call a " Greater Śaiva Advaita, " defined as the interpenetration of non-dualist Vedānta and a number of discrete south Indian Śaiva lineages, including the Śaiva Siddhānta in present-day Tamil Nadu (both Sanskritic and Tamil), the Sanskritic Vīraśaivas (writing in both Sanskrit and Kannada) based in heartlands of Vijayanagar, and the Brahminical Smārta Śaivas. I argue, specifically, that Appayya Dīkṣita did not coin the term " Śivādvaita " but drew on an entire discursive sphere known variously as Śivādvaita or Śaktiviśiṣṭādvaita, a school of Vīraśaiva theology that provides a crucial missing link in the transmission of Śrīkaṇṭha's Śaiva Vedānta across regions and language communities in early modern south India.

The article investigates the history and scope of usage of the term lokadharmiṇī dīkṣā, one of the most accessible and mainstream-conform classes of Śaiva tantric initiation. In essence, this category denotes a form of initiation that allows the practitioner to maintain his exoteric register of religious practice (the lokadharma), which in this context means the brahmanical mainstream. As such, it is contrasted with the śivadharmiṇī dīkṣā, which operates on purely Śaiva ritual and soteriological premises. It will be shown how the terminology of the lokadharmiṇī dīkṣā was used in different initiation-classification schemes within the tradition, reflecting the changing modalities through which the interface between initiatory and exoteric practices was regulated in different Śaiva tantric groups throughout the early medieval period. Thus, the article will identify and analyse three scopes of application for this terminology, considered with a historical perspective: Firstly, the earliest extant occurrence of the lokadharmiṇī dīkṣā will be traced in the context of initiation types for Sādhakas, that is to say tantric practitioners that seek benefits and super-natural powers (bubhukṣu) as opposed to pure liberation–seekers (mumukṣu). Here the lokadharmiṇī dīkṣā constitutes an inferior type of tantric initiation that offers a spiritual path operating on the basis of exoteric brahmanical practice, a classification found in the Śaiva scriptures Svacchanda and Mṛgendra. Secondly, it will be shown how in the Jayadrathayāmala and Bṛhatkālottara the terminology of the lokadharmiṇī dīkṣā is then recast in context of the liberation-seeker (mumukṣu), integrating the level of exoteric religious practice into the soteriological path for certain groups of practitioners. Thirdly, the case of the 12th-century ritual manual Jñānaratnāvalī will be discussed, where the terminology of the lokadharmiṇī dīkṣā is used to broadly denote Śaiva initiation for householders as opposed to ascetics. The classification is here applied on the basis that practitioners who receive a lokadharmiṇī initiation are full Śaiva initiates – thus by default mumukṣus – but maintain their exoteric religious duties incumbent on them according to their socio-religious status in mainstream society (the lokadharma), a common principle amongst Śaiva initiates of the early medieval period. Thus, by the time of the 12th century the terminology of the lokadharmiṇī dīkṣā had lost any association with an inferior type of tantric initiation as well as with the bubhukṣu context but evolved to denote the standard Śaiva householder initiate, a usage of the terminology that is also found in subsequent South-Indian Saiddhāntika sources. By tracing the history of the lokadharmiṇī dīkṣā terminology in pre-12th century Śaiva tantric sources, the article thus also points to the complexities of interpretation of terminology relating to initiatory categories due to the changing strategies and socio-religious systems envisaged by the authors at different times and places.

This dissertation, entitled A New Public Theology: Sanskrit and Society in Seventeenth-century South India, examines the rise of Hindu sectarianism as the defining feature of public religious culture in south India. I document for the first time the origins of the Smārta-Śaiva community of the Tamil region, which first emerged as a distinct religious tradition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Beginning in this period, Sanskrit public intellectuals forged an unprecedented alliance with new religious institutions, including monasteries and temple complexes, fundamentally transforming the shape of public religious culture in south India.  In particular, I demonstrate that the public Śaiva religiosity of contemporary Tamil Nadu owes its shape to the theological enterprises of seventeenth century intellectuals, whose polemical encounters defined the boundaries, both conceptual and institutional, between competing sectarian traditions.

Much ink has been spilt on the status and rôles of the Devadāsī in pre- modern times, but some Sanskrit works that contain potentially useful nuggets of information have until now, for various reasons, been neglected. To cite one instance, some scholars have drawn passages about dancers from an edition of what purports to be a Śaiva scripture called the Kāmikāgama. In 1990 however, Hélène Brunner denounced that ‘scripture’, as a late-19th-century forgery concocted for the purpose of winning a legal case, and thereby called into question the value of the text as evidence for much of what it had to say about, for instance, the initiation of dancers in pre-modern times. Meanwhile, hiding, so to speak, in plain view, passages from a rather older Kāmikāgama, one that has been published by the South Indian Archaka Association and that appears to survive in many South Indian manuscripts, actually also contain information about the status of Rudragaṇikās in medieval times. But these seem not to have been examined to date by historians of dance and dancers. The purpose of this paper is to draw into the debate some hitherto unnoticed passages of relevance that are to be found in pre-modern Sanskrit texts.

The recent discovery of a hoard of debased gold coins with the names of four early Kashmir Kings, Tujina, Pravarasena, Meghama and Toramana,  invites a reappraisal of the early coinage of Kashmir, from post-Kushan issues to the beginnings of its medieval coinage. The progression of issues from the late Kushan period until the issues of these four kings presents an anomaly in the previous accounts of early Kashmir coinage, as the sequence created for early Kashmir coinage excludes from the series a group of coins attributed to Kashmir since the late nineteenth century. The excluded coins appear to have been issued in the Punjab and further east. The new hoard also exposes the chronological problems of using the Rajatangini in constructing a chronology for Kashmir before the ninth century.

This article considers the evolution of ideas that led to the classical Śaiva doctrine that the universe is to be divided up into thirty-six tattvas, ranging from the coarsest, that of earth, at the bottom, to the subtlest, namely that of Śiva, at the top, thus forming an ontological catalogue of what the universe contains and also a map of the levels of the Śaiva cosmos. The article points out that the earliest tantric work accessible to us, namely the Mūlasūtra, contains no trace of this distinctive tantric doctrine and that subsequent layers of the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā reflect various stages in its evolution. The article proceeds to consider how the tattvas that the Śaivas added to extend the Sāṅkhyas’ ontological ladder might originally have been conceived.

In this introductory paper, we attempt to set down concisely what we have learned about the shared ritual features of the early tantric traditions in the course of the ‘Early Tantra Project’, as well as remarking on some that are not shared, and speculating a little from time to time about why they might not be shared. The paper focusses particularly on features shared between the Śaiva Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā and the Buddhist Mañjuśriyamūlakalpa. No doubt there is still much to discover in the way of similarities, and much that we have not yet noticed in the way of significant differences; but we hope that this may prove a useful beginning and a stimulus to others. A detailed table of contents appears at the beginning of the article.

The study of ritual in India is indissociable from the study of prescriptive texts. Now the Śaiva scriptures of the Śaivasiddhānta purport to lay down every aspect of the Śaiva religion, from doctrine to comportment, but they are for various reasons typically not straightforward guides to the performance of rituals and, in spite of their presenting themselves as revealed literature, they do not teach one body of ritual activity that is coherent and free from internal contradictions, as Śaiva exegetes have long freely acknowledged. One way of helping practitioners to perform rites ‘according to the rules’ was to write commentaries on particular scriptures.  The tenth-century Kashmirian theologian Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha, a back-to-the-texts fundamentalist at least in the matter of ritual correctness, clearly advocated this strategy and has left us commentaries on the ritual portions of the Mataṅgapārameśvaratantra and the Sārdhatriśatikālottara.  Another strategy was to craft ritual handbooks, paddhatis, that clearly set out ritual practice step-by-step.  Almost all surviving paddhatis, as Sanderson has observed (2004:358), are notionally based upon a single scripture, the Dviśatikālottara; but in practice this strategy gave ample room for innovation, typically by eclectic blending of ritual elements from different sources. A large number of Śaiva ritual manuals composed from the tenth century onwards survive (the best known are listed by Sanderson in his fn 24 on p. 358 of Sanderson 2004), only a few of which have been published to date.  Because these manuals acknowledge themselves to be the works of human authors rooted in time and place, they can be of particular interest to the religious historian partly because they allow us to map the spread of different currents of Śaivism in time and place.  Like the scriptures, they borrow generously from each other, thus demonstrating  how they are mutually related. This article, to be followed by a few others on the same general theme, is intended as a small contribution to the history of Saiddhāntika paddhati literature.

This article explores neglected currents in Vīraśaiva intellectual history by way of narrating an institutional microhistory of a single monastic lineage, situated in the village of Hooli in northern Karnataka. The lineage of what is today known as the Hooli Bṛhanmaṭha exemplifies Vīraśaivism's contribution to Sanskritic thought particularly through its close connection with the emergence of Śivādvaita as a philosophical school, best known for its expression in the writings of the sixteenth-century poly-math Appayya Dīkṣita. As attested in understudied works of Sanskrit and Kannada, moreover, pontiffs of the Hooli lineage from the sixteenth century onward were actively involved in the early systematization of what is now the Pañcācārya Vīraśaiva community, a project that drew no hard and fast boundaries between Sanskrit and the vernacular, or śāstric philosophy and devotion.

Skandapurāṇa 167 is concerned with a description of Śaiva sacred sites and may be dated to the latter half of the 6th or first half of the 7th century. As such it is a very valuable source for the history and topography of early Saivism. In addition it contains an account of the origins of the Pasupata movement in its descriptions of Karohana, the site of Siva's descent as Lakulisa.
The present volume contains a critical edition of two different versions of Skandapurāṇa 167, one transmitted in early Nepalese palm-leaf manuscripts, another transmitted in two later recensions styled Ambikakhanda and Revakhanda. The latter version has never been published before and opens up new perspectives for the study of the transmission of Puranic literature and the historical development of Śaivism. The introduction deals with the sacred topography of Śaivism, the early Pasupata movement and editorial principles. The editions are preceded by an English synopsis and are accompanied by an extensive philological and historical commentary.

What is 'early modern' about religion in South India? In theorizing early modernity in South Asia, the category of religion has been viewed with scepticism, perhaps to avoid painting India as the exotic 'Other' that failed to modernize in the eyes of Western social theory. And yet, Western narratives, drawn from secularization theory, fail to do justice to our historical archive. As a vehicle for approaching the experience of religion in early modern South India, this article invokes the category of space as a medium for the publicization and contestation of meaning across diverse language, caste, and religious publics. In the process, it excavates the codification of the 'Sacred Games of´Siva' as public religious canon of the city of Madurai, exemplifying the distinctive role played by religion in public space in early modern South India.

The principal works that have emerged from our stimulating project on ‘Early Tantra’ are critical editions and translations of previously unpublished primary material, which have begun to appear in this new series. This volume complements those publications by gathering together some of the fruits, direct and indirect, of the wide-ranging discussions that took place during the project’s workshops.  By way of introduction, the volume opens with an attempt by the editors to draw together our findings about the “shared ritual syntax” of some of the earliest known works of the tantric traditions, with a particular emphasis on the Buddhist Mañjuśriyamūlakalpa and the Śaiva Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā. Seven further contributions, by Dominic Goodall, Peter Bisschop, Judit Törzsök, Diwakar Acharya, Anna A. Ślączka, Libbie Mills and Péter-Dániel Szántó, throw light on a wide range of topics : the Śaiva tattvas and their evolution, yoginī-temples, alphabet-deities, an early treatise of snake-related magic, iconographic prescriptions in early pratiṣṭhātantras, the implications of the use of the bhūtasaṅkhyā system, and a fragment of a Buddhist tantric sādhana.

The present compilation of articles Investigates the Saiva tradition in India both at abstract philosophical and concrete inconographic levels,  In Iconic and non-lconic forms, In geographical space and sequential time . The tradition has been explained In its denotative aspect as the fertility cult and in Its connotative aspect as celebration of the creation of the universe. Paintings, sculpture and architecture, terracotta and stone
images, coins, literary and eplgraphic references have been examined in order to explore the multiple forms of Siva and the multivalence of meanings to which the Saiva tradition lends itself. Interaction of Saiva, Buddhist, Jaina and other Brahmanical traditions has been examined and impact of Saivism on the formation of Indigenous and esoteric sects has been analysed.

This book  provides us with information that is—if at all—sparsely documented in other sources. Its most remarkable feature is its structural framework, which presents a large range of religious teachings as five streams of knowledge originating from Sadāśiva. A significant feature of this narrative is its incorporation of both Śaiva and non-Śaiva teachings. The text does not just put distinct traditions together or merely acknowledge their validity, but it effectively encompasses discrete beliefs, philosophies, and rituals, and makes them function in harmony under a single authority. This account of the five streams of knowledge is reminiscent of what some would call the inclusivist character of ‘Hinduism’, since it gives authority to all other systems of thought, at least to some degree. Thus the present research sheds light on the religious and cultural history of ancient India, particularly around the 7th century.

In the sixteenth Āhnika of the Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta sets out to harmonize two apparently conflicting views on the nature of the ideal candidate for ritual sacrifice, the “six times reborn victim.” The problem can be stated quite simply by juxtaposing the two inherited scriptural teach- ings generating this conflict:

1. Sacrifice liberates the sacrificial victim, uniting it with Śiva.
2. The ideal sacrificial victim has been reborn *as a sacrificial victim* six times before.

Evidently, if [1] holds and the victim is liberated by sacrifice, then it should not be reborn, making the occurrence of [2] an impossibility.

(This is an unpublished paper I wrote in 2010)

This article makes the case that Vīraśaivism emerged in direct textual continuity with the tantric traditions of the Śaiva Age. In academic practice up through the present day, the study of Śaivism, through Sanskrit sources, and bhakti Hinduism, through the vernacular, are generally treated as distinct disciplines and objects of study. As a result, Vīraśaivism has yet to be systematically ap-proached through a philological analysis of its precursors from earlier Śaiva traditions. With this aim in mind, I begin by documenting for the first time that a thirteenth-century Sanskrit work of what I have called the Vīramāheśvara textual corpus, the Somanāthabhāṣya or Vīramāheśvarācārasāroddhārabhāṣya, was most likely authored by Pālkurikĕ Somanātha, best known for his vernacular Telugu Vīraśaiva literature. Second, I outline the indebtedness of the early Sanskrit and Telugu Vīramāheśvara corpus to a popular work of early lay Śaivism, the Śivadharmaśāstra, with particular attention to the concepts of the jaṅgama and the iṣṭaliṅga. That the Vīramāheśvaras borrowed many of their formative concepts and practices directly from the Śivadharmaśāstra and other works of the Śaiva Age, I argue, belies the common assumption that Vīraśaivism originated as a social and religious revolution.

An annotated edition and French translation of K. 1320 has recently appeared in Aséanie 33 (Goodall
and Jacques 2014), but, given the importance of the document and its potential appeal for the many
visitors to Vat Phu, an English translation seems desirable. For the inscription is not only a major new
source for the history of Vat Phu, testifying once again to the centrality of this Śaiva site in the religious
landscape of the Khmers, but also the only document hitherto discovered that furnishes any sort of
detailed information about taxation for the entire Angkorian period.

In this paper, I intend to examine a Nepalese palm-leaf manuscript that transmits a small portion of the Jñānaratnāvalī, a twelfth-century ritual manual written in Benares by Jñānaśambhu, a Saiddhāntika guru from the Cōḻa country.  The portion in question treats the annual spring rite of reparation known as damanotsava, a rite that appears to have been introduced into the liturgy of the Śaivasiddhānta from elsewhere and that seems to duplicate another festive annual rite of reparation prescribed for three months later in the year, in the month of āṣāḍha, known as pavitrotsava. Instead of using threads braided by maidens that are called pavitras as expiatory offerings, Śiva is here worshipped with the various parts of the damana plant (Artemisia indica).  The account of the rite in the Nepalese text of the Jñānaratnāvalī is much shorter than that of the two Southern manuscripts, omitting discussions and justificatory quotations. Is this because the Southern text has been expanded? The matter is of some importance because the Southern sources present Jñānaśambhu's work as a rich, digest-like manual that is interesting to the historian of religion largely because of the wide-range of material it quotes and thereby helps to date. If the much shorter style of the Nepalese fragment is authorial, then the value of the Jñānaratnāvalī for historians is diminished.

This article considers the relationship between printed, written, and oral traditions in Hindu purāṇas and stotras along with their interaction and intersection with the development of sacred topographies. The question of the universalizing tendencies of purāṇic literature vs. the regionally specific concerns of stotras is raised. After this general discussion, special consideration is given to the Dvādaśajyotirliṅgastotra and the development of the cult of the twelve jyotirliṅgas (liṅgas of light) in the Deccan region.

Galley Proof from - Material Culture and Asian Religions: Text, Image, Object, ed. Benjamin J. Fleming and Richard Mann, Routledge 2014.

As Alexis Sanderson has argued in his magnum opus, " The Śaiva Age, " between the sixth and thirteenth centuries, Śaivism became the site for a host of developments that fundamentally transformed the religious landscape of the Indian subcontinent. Over the past two decades, Sanderson and his students have demonstrated on philological grounds that the vocabulary of the Śaiva Mantramārga, or Śaiva Tantrism, provided a model through which doctrinal and ritual innovation crossed religious boundaries. Kindred currents of Buddhism, Jainism, and Vaiṣṇavism came to share a common ritual syntax, and strategic modes of engaging with royal polities. Where this narrative leaves off, however—and what follows in its wake—inspires as many questions as answers. By reframing both the ruptures and continuities heralded by the demise of the Śaiva Age, this symposium draws together the latest currents of research in south Indian Śaivism. In our classical narrative of Indian religions, for instance, the thirteenth century—the end of the Śaiva age—dovetails neatly with the transregional expansion of the bhakti movement, a form of religiosity often framed in opposition to the traditional values of Sanskrit textuality. As genre boundaries are rendered increasingly permeable with the spread of vernacularization, the many Śaivisms of south India, as entextualized in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam, inherit formative features of the earlier canon while speaking in a new idiom to local audiences. Śaiva institutions, such as the temple complex and monastery, established a framework for the efflorescence of new communities and publics, which engaged strategically with shifting social fabric of south India across regions. In drawing attention to key examples of rupture and continuity in the post-Śaiva age, each of the papers in this Symposium works in concert to rethink our inherited narratives about the history of religions in south India.

Numerous publications of recent years have shaped our picture of the early history of installation-rites (pratiṣṭhā), beginning with Brunner 1998, Einoo and Takashima 2005, Slaczka 2007, Willis 2009, Mills 2011*, and Colas 2010, recently republished in French as part of Colas 2012. This paper is intended to highlight the accounts of some still unpublished and some inadequately edited early Śaiva sources that should be drawn upon for a fuller picture of the development of installation-rites in the early Mantramārga (tantric Śaivism). In his survey of a handful of Śaiva accounts of liṅga-pratiṣṭhā, Jun Takashima (2005) opines that the practice of adopting an already existing liṅga (liṅga-parigraha) must predate the practice of installation (pratiṣṭhā) in the Mantramārga and he does so partly on the basis that the earliest scriptural source to which he refers in his survey, the Svāyambhuvasūtrasaṅgraha (c. seventh-century), does not give an account of pratiṣṭhā. But what of other early Mantramārgic accounts?

A number of coins from the Taxila region recently made public show that an object inside a frame must be a metal bell, and not a śaiva liṅga, as was maintained in the recent past. The coins date to the early second century BC and show a bell in an area where Buddhist establishments were founded already by Asoka.

This dissertation centers on a reception historical study of the Kāmikāgama—or Kāmika for short—which is frequently cited as a primary source for carrying out rituals associated with the worship of Śiva in the major Hindu Śaiva temples of Tamil Nadu. In so doing, the dissertation traces the Kāmika’s evolution from its earliest attestations down to the present day with a specific focus on the processes through which the text came to be regarded as authoritative, and in more recent times came to be elevated and stabilized, especially in the context of Śaivasiddhānta, a dominant Hindu tradition in contemporary Tamil Nadu. In particular, the dissertation develops an account of scripturalization to argue that the Kāmika’s evolution as scripture involved an open-ended process of composition, which reflected historical developments in theology and practice, and over time supported a range theological viewpoints, ritual practices, and social configurations.
    In addition to providing a philologically grounded account of the Kāmika’s textual evolution, the dissertation offers a deeper understanding of the historical contexts through which it came to prominence. It presents the first longue-durée study of the Kāmika (indeed, the first such study of any Śaiva Āgama) and raises key questions about the textualized constitution of religious authority and its reproduction over time. More broadly, the dissertation contributes to the study of religious texts and the historical processes through which texts come to be regarded as authoritative.

On K. 1049, a tenth-century cave-inscription from Battambang, and on the sectarian obedience of the Śaiva ascetics of non-royal cave-inscriptions in Cambodia

Best known among the magnificent Khmer inscriptions in Sanskrit are the huge royal stelae engraved with hundreds of verses in high kāvya style that celebrate the achievements of kings of the Angkorian period. Apart from their beauty and their importance for SouthEast Asian history, Cambodian inscriptions hold up a hazy but often illuminating mirror to intellectual and religious developments that were taking place in the Indian subcontinent. The focus of this article, however, is K. 1049, an unpublished inscription that belongs to the small corpus of typically non-royal cave inscriptions that attest to the presence over several centuries of Śaiva ascetics dwelling in sculpted mountain caves. It provides some clues that can help to tell us who some of these Cambodian Śaivas were.


Sur K. 1049, inscription du 10 ème siècle d'une grotte de Battambang et sur l'obédience sectaire des ascètes shivaïtes des inscriptions non royales des grottes du Cambodge

Des magnifiques inscriptions du Cambodge en sanskrit, on retient surtout les grandes stèles royales inscrites de centaines de strophes, rédigées dans les plus beaux styles du kāvya, célébrant les prouesses des rois angkoriens. A part leur beauté et leur importance pour l'histoire de l'Asie du Sud-Est, les inscriptions du Cambodge contiennent bien des points flous qui sont en même temps autant de miroirs reflétant les développements intellectuels et religieux qui se produisaient dans le sous-continent. Le présent article porte sur K. 1049, une inscription inédite appartenant au petit groupe des inscriptions non royales, inscrites dans les grottes, qui témoignent de la présence des siècles durant des ascètes shivaïtes vivant dans des grottes aménagées. L'inscription fournit des indices qui nous aident à mieux cerner l'identité de ces ascètes.

Art history derives its sources from various canons and corpus-literatures, folk traditions and liturgical sources. Sahasranāmas and aṣṭottarams come under liturgies; these being the epithets of a God (e.g. Śivasahasranāma – a compilation of Śiva 1,000+ epithets) or Goddess (Lalitāsahasranāma or Devīsahasranāma); aṣṭottarams are 108+, meant for regular recital during worship in temples or personal meditation. These are cryptic that carry weight from the iconographical point of view. These epithets have not been examined in detail for a study of Indian, South Asian or Southeast Asian iconography. It is practically impossible to compress the 1,000 in a small conference paper. I consider most of the epithets of Śivasahasranāma (hereinafter SSN) here and choicest among them for illustration.  The SSN is an ancient compilation that forms part of the Mahābhārata in its Chapter XIV, anuśāsanaparva. The Mahābhārata undergoing a process of compilation, edition and reedition seems to have reached maturation by about the 5th century BCE (Macdonell 1979: 240). Interpolations took place down to the beginning of the Christian era of which the Bhagavadgīta is one. The Śiva- and Viṣṇu- sahasranāmas are likely to be such interpolations by about this time. According to mythology, the SSN was imparted to Kṣṇa by Upamanyu. Several such sahasranāmas are available that seem to have been cultivated after the early model set by the Mahābhārata and new epithets added from time to time. The present analysis classifies the epithets of Śiva under certain categories or intelligible units that may fall under a cluster such as:

i) Iconographical forms, ii) Cosmic Form, iii) the Lord’s attributes (such as weapons, ornaments and so on),  iv) Guṇāṃśa (Śiva by ethos is tāmasa),  v) Vedic thoughts, vi) Yogic qualities, and vii) Miscellaneous.

These epithets are viewed from the art historical point of view to find out whether there is any relevance between the epithets and the images in the art of South Asia and Southeast Asia. The article in the first part presents a crisp summary of the epithets and the second part points out the iconographical parallels. This is to confirm the thesis that the sahasranāma had an impact on artists working sculptural imageries.

"This book presents a short philosophical treatise in which twenty rival theories of the liberated state (mokṣa) are introduced and countered, and a long, discursive commentary that explores and develops the arguments that the treatise advances or implies. The original treatise comprises fifty-nine Sanskrit verses composed by Sadyojyotiḥ (c. 675–725 AD), the earliest named Śaiva philosopher of the Mantramārga of whom works survive. The commentator, Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha (c. 950–1000 AD), was a Kashmirian whose writings systematised the doctrines of the classical Śaiva Siddhānta, for some centuries the dominant school of tantric Śaivism.

Presented here is a first critical edition of these interlinked works and a richly annotated English translation. A lightly annotated introduction lays out clearly the ideas that the edited texts expound. Their study casts light not only on the history of Śaiva thought, but also on a number of religio-philosophical doctrines for which little other testimony survives."

The present issue of Puratan is organised mainly to present the proceedings of the Seminar held on the occasion of the exhibition on Saiva traditions in Madhya Pradesh in 1989 March. It does, however, in keeping with the larger aims of research, summarize results of recent archaeological explorations in India, both inside and outside Madhya Pradesh. It looks at Saiva iconography, iconology, excavations of Saiva sites and illustrates unique images. It also provides an overview of the philosophy, which inspired Saiva imagery.