Source: TW
It’s reflective of the narrative of the play and the author, Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s Āgamaḍambara is a “college-drama” (as Csaba Dezső calls it) following an orthodox Mīmāṁsaka graduate named Saṃkarṣaṇa, through whom Jayanta presents the contemporary affairs of various religious schools and their relation to the politics of his king, who he served as a court advisor.
He’s young, passionate and desperate to fight heretics, and sets out to “humiliate the enemies of the Veda, who dirty their speech with incessantly brandished pernicious argumentation” (Āg 1.60).
In the first act he annihilates the Buddhist monk and wins “against the depraved logicians who try to undermine Vedic order”, in the second he lets the Jains slip by because he does not consider them a serious threat, but the Nīlāmbara-s (Black-Blanket-s) who engage in sexual indulgences and unrestrainted liquor consumption wrapped under a single black shawl as a ritual and shady Śaiva-s threaten the social order and he sets out to persecute them.
By the third-act he’s been tasked by the king to refine the circle of sects acceptable in the kingdom, thus he allies with a Śaiva-Siddhānta professor (representing the moderate Śaiva-s) to defeat the Cārvāka-s.
In the fourth and final act, it becomes clear that he’s in a dilemma, though he’s an orthodox non-sectarian, he possesses personal devotion to Viṣṇu, and must defeat the Vaiṣṇava Bhāgavata-s, who are also supported by the queen and her faction. If he defeats them it is at great trouble to his conscience and draws the ire of the queen, if he defends them then he loses face among fellow Mīmāṁsaka-s and defeats himself.
This is solved by the appearance of Dhairyarāśi who is a Smārta-Naiyāyika (this in some way representative or self-insert-ish of Jayanta), he pours water over the fire and gives a long lecture esposuing (Jayanta’s) inclusivist model for a religious policy:
- All religions possess some validity in the sense that their Āgama-s (scriptures) were divinely inspired or authored by a divinely inspired, but one’s own path is the supreme one.
- An acceptable faith must have traditions and antiquity.
- Must not be recently sprung.
- Must not be based on flimsy materia such as unreliable founders or having risen out of sinful motives like greed or lust.
- Must not be repulsive to the Ārya (Orthodox-Vedist - and thus the Veda-s themselves).
- Must not be antisocial or a threat to social order.
- The right person to arbitrate this is the monarch of the state.
Keeping this in mind, it represents what Jayanta perhaps considered the core of the Vedic religion and the truest path, that of a Vaidika/Smārta order based on Nyāya and the Mīmāṁsaka as the orthodoxy with the sectarian faiths affiliated to the Veda-s closely allied, the Vaiṣṇava-s moreso than the Śaiva-s, whose moderate orders though deviating more from the core are close to the Vedic fold.
The Jaina-s, Bauddha-s and Cārvāka-s are false paths, but are tolerable traditions. The Nīlāmbara-s (Black-Blanket-s) however are an affront to society due to their public sexual rites and cannot be tolerated (i.e. must be persecuted).
The Śākta-s have only begun becoming their own thing from a Śaiva subsect, and Jayanta is (quite explicitly) alluding to real demographic conditions in his country of Kaśmīr and actual persecutions of shady Tantric groups.
Bhaṭṭa Jayanta as an “inquisitor” against the Black-Blankets under Śankaravarman (885 – 2/3 February 902), and a later persecution of the Nīlāmbara-s by Bhoja Paramāra (1010–1055):
The Āgamadambara provides valuable details about Jayanta’s political career. We learn that he was an adviser of the Kashmirian king Śaṅkara-varman (883–902), and played a great part in banishing the heterodox sect of the “Black-Blankets” (nīlāmbaras) from Kashmir.¹⁰ The sad fate of the Black-Blankets is also mentioned in the Nyāyamañjarī:¹¹
“Some rakes, as we are told, invented this Black Blanket Observance, in which men and women wrapped together in a single black veil make various movements. King Śaṅkara-varman, who was conversant with the true nature of Dharma, suppressed this practice, because he knew that it was unprecedented, but he did not suppress the religions of Jains and others in the same way.”
The Jaina Jinavijaya Muni narrates in his Puratānapra bandhasaṃgraha that the Nīlapaṭa-s had grown so prominent in Mālava during the reign of Bhoja Paramāra that his own daughter desired to join the cult, hearing of this, he asked his daughter to invite the Nīlapaṭa-adherents for a private audience under the pretense of interest in joining, and when they met, he confirmed that they did the Ms when they responded with “There aren’t rivers flowing with wine; there aren’t mountains made of meat; and the whole world doesn’t consist of women. How [then] can a Nīlapaṭa [“one of the Black Shawl (cult)”] be satisfied?” (This btw. is an almost unchanged variant of a citation on Kaulism by Rājānaka Jayaratha on Tantrāloka 15.169c–170b), following this affirmation he promptly had all of the men executed and the women sent into exile.