Saivism

e figure of Caṅḋeśa (Caṅḋeśvara) in earlyŚaivism has been the subject of two recent studies by Diwakar Acharya and Dominic Goodall. e present article proposes to identify a sculpture in the British Museum, hitherto identified as Lakulīśa, as representing Caṅḋeśvara. Attention is drawn to the iconographical similarities to aŚaiva deity depicted on the Cālukya shrines of Mahākūṫa and Paṫṫadakal. A passage from the layŚivadharma proves crucial in understanding the identity of Caṅḋeśvara in earlyŚaivism, which leads to a renewed consideration of the deity invoked in the final line of the Mathurā Pillar Inscription of Candragupta. Finally theŚivadharma's descriptions of two other Gaṅas, Bhṙṅgiriṫi and Vināyaka (Gaṅeśa), are briefly analyzed in the light of the significant fact that both Gaṅas are referred to as 'son of Rudra'. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, . *) e present paper was written as part of the research project 'EarlyŚaiva Mythology: A study of the formative period of an integrated religious vision', a collaboration between Peter Bisschop and Harunaga Isaacson (Hamburg), kindly funded by a three year grant of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). I would like to thank Hans Bakker and Harunaga Isaacson for their comments upon an earlier version of this paper.  Peter Bisschop / Indo-Iranian Journal  () -

Modern Tamil Saivism as a global discourse emerged concurrently in India as well as in other places. Yet, recent scholarship has barely given attention to these global entanglements and their wider consequences for conceptualising Saiva Siddhanta and Saivite religious practice today. This article focuses on reformist Tamil Saivite movements in South Africa and explores their origins and development during colonial and Apartheid South Africa in the twentieth century. It will discuss the complex interplay between modern interpretations of Saiva Siddhanta philosophy and notions of a con-textualised 'Tamilness' in the South African setting. It will further explore how Saivism in South Africa relates to back to Saivite scriptural traditions from South India and elaborate how the close but hybrid connection between local and global forms of Tamil religious identity is mirrored by questions of authenticity and canon as well as recent attempts to reframe relations between the (perceived) 'centres' and 'peripheries' of Saivism.

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.

The propagator of Neo-Vaishnavism was Srimanta Sankardeva (1449-1568). When he was born, the socio-cultural situations of Assam were too much lamentable. Around then different misbehaviours were submitted for the sake of religion, which vitiated the social structure. There were individuals who approximately clung to Saivism or Vaishnavism and other people who rehearsed Saktism. The supporters of these factions enjoyed malicious practices like animal and human sacrifices, mystical ceremonies and so forth. Furthermore, the outcomes were poor people and oppressed individuals became survivors of these horrendous practices. To spare this circumstance Sankardeva, established the Neo-Vaishnavism in Assam, which is normally known as the Eksarana-Nam-Dharma. Sankardeva's Neo-Vaishnavism has given birth of new a social and social life for Assamese individuals and zeroed in on a public character moulded by social conventions and language through Cultural Nationalism, which presented to the Indigenous individuals with the assistance of Sattras and Namghar. Sankardeva was not only a religious propagator, but also a great social reformer and the pioneer of the socio-religious or cultural movement of medieval Assam in the Sixteenth Century.

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 Periyapurāṇam, a twelfth-century collection of hagiographies of Tamil Śaiva devotees, and the Tamil devotional poems of the Tēvāram, composed in the seventh century, both feature violence and invectives against Jains as a prominent theme. This paper examines the place of these themes in each work as part of an overall strategy of establishing Śaivism as the sole legitimate religion of Tamil-speaking South India. It further examines the historiography of South India that has been written using these sources to argue that there has been a problematic connection made between aesthetic claims of violence and actual historical events, as other historical, literary, and archaeological evidence points to a continuous, if diminishing, presence of Jains in Tamilnadu throughout this period and afterward.

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.

swung or rotated from a pole by hooks imbedded in one's flesh, piercing one's own flesh with skewers, lying on a board studded with iron nails, or swinging on a seat of thorns, the ultimate goal of all religious tests appear to be one and the same: to show the bystanders the penitent or the shaman is insensitive to bodily torments, wounds, loss of blood, burning heat, etc.

""Rituals devoted to the propitiation and supplication of the sarpa, as the common snake is called in Sanskrit, as well as the snake’s supernatural counterpart the Naga, have been in evidence on the Indian sub-continent for more than two millennia . It has been suggested that snake veneration, within the vast corpus of fertility and ancestor cult practices which permeated the South Asian pre-historic devotional landscape , are the ritual seeds from which medieval iconography and devotional practice evolved . The snake figures prominently in the art and narrative of contemporary Saivism, Vaisnavism, Jainism and Buddhism , in addition to the many popular devotional practices of rural village and nomadic peoples throughout India. In part to lingering colonial sentiment dogging the subject of popular religious practice, too often dismissed as primitive , superstitious , peasant or folk practices, serious academic examination of the impact of snake veneration on the religious landscape of India has been limited.

Building on Robert Redfield’s notion that one can construct a valid characterization of pre- or proto-historic peoples through the combined efforts of archaeology and ethnography , and Clifford Geertz’s call for “thick description ” in the interpretation of culture, this paper looks to “thicken” the phenomena of snake sacrifice as a lived practice within distinct cultural theatres, integrated within textual and material referents of sacrifice to, and of, the snake.""

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.

One of the features of the Gupta-Vākāt . aka age is the growth ofŚaivism. In this article some of the epigraphical evidence for this process is assembled and discussed. While the direct evidence for the adoption ofŚiva worship among the Guptas is limited to ministers of the Gupta court, it is clear that the Vākāt . aka kings were predominantly Māheśvaras. New fragmentary wall inscriptions uncovered from Mansar, the site of Pravarasena II's palace, hint at a possible connection with the teachings of thé Svetāśvatara-Upanis . ad. Two post-Gupta inscriptions from the area around Mandasor are discussed in the light of a tendency towards religious hierarchisation, an attitude which came to be increasingly characteristic of early medievalŚaivism. In the second part attention is drawn to the variety of Pāśupata and Māheśvara worship in the Gupta-Vākāt . aka age, as well as to the trifold organisation of the Pāśupata movement. The article ends with a note on the interaction with non-Śaiva traditions, in particular Buddhism, and its possible impact upon the formation of the Pāśupata movement. * This article is an extended version of a paper I gave at the Symposium 'The Gupta-Vākāt . aka Age ', British Museum, London, June 29-30, 2009. I would like to thank the organisers, Hans Bakker and Michael Willis, for inviting me to give a presentation on the present subject. This is the first publication to appear in the context of the research project 'EarlyŚaiva Mythology: A study of the formative period of an integrated religious vision', a collaboration between Peter Bisschop and Harunaga Isaacson, kindly funded by a three year grant of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). I am grateful to Hans Bakker, Harunaga Isaacson and Michael Willis for their critical comments on an earlier draft.

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.

In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, Elizabeth A. Cecil explores the sacred geography of the earliest community of Śiva devotees called the Pāśupatas. This book brings the narrative cartography of the Skandapurāṇa into conversation with physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons in order to examine the ways in which Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional landscapes and to emphasize the use of material culture as media through which notions of belonging and identity were expressed. By exploring the ties between the formation of early Pāśupata communities and the locales in which they were embedded, this study reflects critically upon the ways in which community building was coincident with place-making in Early Medieval India.

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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.

As the emblem of Pāśupata identity, representations of the deified teacher called Lakulīśa (the ‘Lord with a Club’) became a prominent feature of the expanding Śaiva religious landscape in early medieval northwest India. This study works to recover some of Lakulīśa’s historical contingency by reading his appearance in both text and image as a reflection of or response to particular concerns of the developing Śaiva religious community. The significance of Lakulīśa’s literary debut in the Nepalese recension of the early Skandapurāṇa is examined first. I then explore the visual representations of this figure by considering patterns in Lakulīśa’s iconography and the place of his images within sanctified spaces. Since temples were vital loci of interaction across a wide spectrum of social groups and religious communities, even ostensibly Śaiva centres would have accommodated a range of deities, religious practitioners, and devotional repertoires. Given the multivocality of these sanctified spaces, I propose that Lakulīśa images would have been subject to multiple ‘readings’ or interpretations. With his attributes signifying power, fertility, and protection, I suggest that Lakulīśa functioned not only as a potent sign of Pāśupata identity, but as a multivalent persona, facets of which would have resonated with a broader religious community.

The paper gives an account of Rāmakaṇṭha's (950-1000) contribution to the Buddhist-Brāhmaṇical debate about the existence or non-existence of a self, by demonstrating how he carves out middle ground between the two protagonists in that debate. First three points of divergence between the Brāhmaṅical (specifically Naiyāyika) and the Buddhist conceptions of subjectivity are identified. These take the form of Buddhist denials of, or re-explanations of (1) the self as the unitary essence of the individual, (2) the self as the substance to which mental properties belong, (3) the self as the agent of both physical actions and cognitions. The difference of Rāmakaṇṭha's position from both Nyāya and Buddhism is then elaborated. He posits a self, but not one that is an eternally unchanging substance, nor one that is anything other than consciousness. Hence his difference from Nyāya. He falls with Buddhism in holding that consciousness does not require anything other than itself to inhere in, but departs from Buddhism in holding that consciousness is not momentary but enduring. The guiding metaphor here is light, but light considered as a dynamic, qualitatively unchanging repetition of the action of illumination.

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.

Following up my paper “Patterns of Tejas in the Epics” delivered at WSC 12 (Helsinki 2003) this paper purposes to examine the way the notion of tejas — formerly (in vedic times) just yet another of many kindred Daseinsmächte or substance-powers such as ojas, varcas, yaśas and the like — attains paramountcy in the puranic synthesis of common traditional lore, becoming a regular attribute of the parameśvara in his different personae, on the one hand, as well as crystallizing specific tejas mythologemes around the most characteristic traits of each of the great hindu gods, on the other.

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.

The hill-fort of Kālañjara (Kalinjar), has been an important centre of Śaivism for many centuries. Its presence in the list of Śiva's abodes (āyatana) in Skandapurā˙na 167 and in other early sources indicates Kālañjara's importance in early Śaivism. The major royal inscriptions from the Chandella period have been edited, but many other inscriptions from the hill remain unpublished. Following a survey of references to Kālañjara in early literary sources, this paper presents two pre-Chandella inscriptions from Kālañjara: 1) an inscription already reported by Cunningham, but never transcribed beyond the opening verse, and 2) a newly discovered inscription. for their comments on earlier versions of my reading and interpretation of the two inscriptions which form the subject of this paper. Any remaining errors in reading and interpretation are naturally entirely my own.

The article considers what happened to the Buddhist concept of selfawareness (svasam : vedana) when it was appropriated by Ś aiva Siddhānta. The first section observes how it was turned against Buddhism by being used to attack the momentariness of consciousenss and to establish its permanence. The second section examines how self-awareness differs from I-cognition (ahampratyaya). The third section examines the difference between the kind of self-awareness elaborated by Rāmakan : t : ha ('reflexive awareness') and a kind elaborated by Dharmakīrti ('intentional self-awareness'). It is then pointed out that Dharmakīrti avails himself not only of intentional self-awareness but also of reflexive awareness. Some remarks on the relationship between these two strands of Dharmakīrtian Buddhism are offered. The conclusion points out that although self-awareness occurs in Buddhism as inextricably linked with anātmavāda, the doctrine of no-self, and sākāravāda, the view that the forms we perceive belong not to external objects but to consciousness, it is used by Rāmakan : t : ha to refute both of these views. An appendix addresses the problem of how precisely to interpret Dharmakīrti's contention that conceptual cognition is non-conceptual in its reflexive awareness of itself.

The paper gives an account of Rāmakaṇṭha's (950-1000) contribution to the Buddhist-Brāhmaṇical debate about the existence or non-existence of a self, by demonstrating how he carves out middle ground between the two protagonists in that debate. First three points of divergence between the Brāhmaṅical (specifically Naiyāyika) and the Buddhist conceptions of subjectivity are identified. These take the form of Buddhist denials of, or re-explanations of (1) the self as the unitary essence of the individual, (2) the self as the substance to which mental properties belong, (3) the self as the agent of both physical actions and cognitions. The difference of Rāmakaṇṭha's position from both Nyāya and Buddhism is then elaborated. He posits a self, but not one that is an eternally unchanging substance, nor one that is anything other than consciousness. Hence his difference from Nyāya. He falls with Buddhism in holding that consciousness does not require anything other than itself to inhere in, but departs from Buddhism in holding that consciousness is not momentary but enduring. The guiding metaphor here is light, but light considered as a dynamic, qualitatively unchanging repetition of the action of illumination.

In the frame of my ongoing research devoted to the elucidation of the notion of tejas (‘ardent/fierce energy’), the present paper purposes to investigate an aspect that has so far lurked in the background of the former contributions, despite its crucial significance to the notion of tejas itself: namely, its liability to transference.
As a prominent instance of so-called “substance-powers” or Daseinsmächte, as Glasenapp originally termed them, meaning by such term “hypostases of qualities and processes conceived as self-standing substances”, tejas shares the transferability which is an essential property of substances — in contradistinction to qualities, which, existing only in alio and not enjoying an independent status, cannot be transferred as such. (As has already been noted, Indian thought is apt to hypostatize what would elsewhere be counted a mere quality: a well known case in point is puṇya, i.e. ‘virtue/merit’, which is not regarded in the śāstras as the inherent attribute of the virtuous, but rather as a stock of goods liable to be alienated to someone else).
The basic mechanics of tejas transfer, configuring either an increment or a decrement, can be further specified according to a fourfold typology: i) bestowal with inception of being; ii) bestowal with promotion of status; iii) withdrawal with demotion from status; iv) withdrawal with cessation from being. Such fourfold typology depends on a twofold acception of the notion of tejas, either (in a broader sense, brought out, e.g. in Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa I, 171, 2-7: ajeyaṃ vaiṣṇavaṃ tejas tac ca nityaṃ ca jantuṣu | nāśam āyānti te sarve hīnā vaiṣṇavatejasā) as the Lord’s selfsame cosmic life-sustaining energy, or (in a more restricted sense, brought out, e.g. in Bhagavad Gītā 10, 41: yad yad vibhūtimat sattvaṃ śrīmad ūrjitam eva vā | tat tad evāvagaccha tvaṃ mama tejo’mśasaṃbhavam) as a special supererogatory dispensation, building up the pre-eminence of exceptionally powerful beings. Whereas the bestowal and withdrawal of tejas in the general sense cannot but entail, respectively, origination and dissolution, the shift of (supererogatory) tejas in the special sense can have less drastic consequences.

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.

A famous fragment of sculpture preserved in Da Nang Museum of Cham Sculpture (Vietnam) and found in the remains of the main saivite temple of Tra Kieu (Quang Nam province, Vietnam)  has always been published as part of a "pedestal". The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that this high relief, showing dancing ladies with male musicians, was once part of the decoration of the base of the tower itself or, at least, of its front terrace.

Rituals devoted to the propitiation and supplication of the sarpa, as the common snake is called in Sanskrit, as well as the snake’s supernatural counterpart the Naga, have been in evidence on the Indian sub-continent for more than two millennia . It has been suggested that snake veneration, within the vast corpus of fertility and ancestor cult practices which permeated the South Asian pre-historic devotional landscape , are the ritual seeds from which medieval iconography and devotional practice evolved . The snake figures prominently in the art and narrative of contemporary Saivism, Vaisnavism, Jainism and Buddhism , in addition to the many popular devotional practices of rural village and nomadic peoples throughout India. In part to lingering colonial sentiment dogging the subject of popular religious practice, too often dismissed as primitive , superstitious , peasant or folk practices, serious academic examination of the impact of snake veneration on the religious landscape of India has been limited.

Building on Robert Redfield’s notion that one can construct a valid characterization of pre- or proto-historic peoples through the combined efforts of archaeology and ethnography , and Clifford Geertz’s call for “thick description ” in the interpretation of culture, this paper looks to “thicken” the phenomena of snake sacrifice as a lived practice within distinct cultural theatres, integrated within textual and material referents of sacrifice to, and of, the snake.""

An important message to our readers: The asanas in this book should not be attempted without the supervision of an experienced teacher or prior experience. Many of the other practices should not be attempted at all. The ideas expressed in this book should not be used to diagnose, ...

To know well, must we know through difference? Can human beings know more through comparison with the other than through the most rigorous study of the same? Although there has been much debate on this subject, little concrete evidence has been offered either way. This study hopes to provide such evidence. To do so, we compare the Nataraja of Shaivite devotionalism and Picasso’s 1930 Crucifixion, reflecting on each work first in isolation and then in relation to the other. Through this comparison we will generate em-pirical data regarding the relationship between difference and interpretation. The study will conclude that excellence in interpretation is only achieved through the encounter with difference.

The early Skandapurāṇa maps the origins of the Pāśupata tradition. Framed by a series of narrative episodes that eulogise the Śaiva terra sancta writ large, the text’s authors designate a small region of northwest India as the ‘Pāśupata landscape’, a salvific region celebrated as the birthplace of the Pāśupata movement. It was here that Śiva assumed a human form and disseminated the Pāśupata doctrine via four students, each of whom presided over a prestigious locale—the storied cities of Ujjain, Mathura, Jambumarga, and Kanauj. The text’s claim to colonise a region that occupied the sociopolitical heart of northwest India presents an imagined geography—not a fanciful representation; rather, a spatial rhetoric intended to localise, order, and authenticate a particular vision of community. This process of localisation served three discrete, yet intertwined aims: (i) it presents a cosmological vision of a sanctified world or Śaiva hierotopy, (ii) provides a normative model for community, and (iii) stakes a geopolitical claim.

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.

Paraśuràma, later to be regularly reckoned as the 6th in standard daśāvatara lists, does not yet appear to entertain any special reationship to Viṣṇu in the earlier portions of the Epics, where the first details of the main features of his legend are to be found: i) the uncanny circumstances of his (and Viśvāmitra's) birth; ii) the killing of Kārtavīryārjuna and the 21-fold extermination of the kṣatriya-s; iii) the beheading of his mother Reṇukā; to which the Rāmāyaṇa adds the episode of the meeting of the two Rāmas and the defeat of the elder at the hands of the younger. Indeed, in the Karṇaparvan of the Mahābhārata he is rather depicted as Śiva's bhakta, as would seem more in character with the “deviant” traits of his behaviour. How then did he win acceptance among the ranks of Viṣṇu's avatāra-s? The Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa (VDh) I, 23-73, is arguably the first full-fledged account wherein we may inquire for the mode of his newly acquired dignity. As it turns out, such acceptance, which even later was seldom unreserved on account of the scarcely Viṣṇu-like ruthlessness of his exploits, is right from the beginning only partial, and qualified by certain doctrines which, if not altogether peculiar to the VDh, do nevertheless come in a distinctive flavour in that Purāṇa, such as the doctrine of the “thousands of manifestations” (pràdurbhāva-sahasrāṇi) and above all that of vaiṣṇava tejas. In the VDh Paraśurāma is certainly not what will be later termed a pūrṇāvatāra, not even an aṁśāvatāra, but just another instance — side by side with his arch-enemy Kārtavīrya — of those powerful beings which partake in an eminent degree of Viṣṇu's own world-sustaining energy.

A detailed summary of the contents of the Arbudakhaṇḍa, constituting the third section of the Prabhāsakhaṇḍa, the 7th khaṇḍa of the Skanda Purāṇa. Like the other three sections of the Prabhāsakhaṇḍa, numbering 491 adhyāyas in total, also the Arbuda-khaṇḍa, counting 63 adhyayas and 1825 ślokas, is a māhātmya, devoted to the magnification of the region of mount Arbuda (or Ābū, as it is called nowadays), the highest peak of the Aravalli range in southern Rājasthān near the Gujarat border. Today mostly renowned for the magnificent Dilvāṛā jaina temples, the region was known in ancient times as a Śaiva tirtha, already mentioned in the Tīrthayatraparvan of the Mahābhārata.

A tentative report of fieldwork in the area of present day Mount Abu hill station, site of the famous Dilwara jain temples, in the light of the description of the former tīrtha-kṣetra (place of pilgrimage) sacred to Śiva in the Sanskrit Arbuda Māhātmya of the Skanda Purāṇa.