Chapter 3: The King Must Protect the Difference: The Juridical Foundations of Tantric Knowledge

Captured in Stone: The Guru’s Command (Ājñā)

The only surviving temple belonging to the rājaguru of the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukya Emperor Vikramāditya VI (r. 1076–1126) CE lies tucked away out of sight on the far bank of a vast dried up lake, now little more than a sea of mud in which water buffaloes wallow.¹ Small, shorn of ornamentation, and fashioned in that unostentatious style favored by the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, it is difficult to distinguish from more modern concrete structures. Especially in contrast with the majestic landscape in which it is embedded, at first glance, Kūni Sōmēśvara is almost disappointingly ordinary. Only two features gesture towards the significant past of this deceptively simple place. On the one hand, there is a large boulder, framing a secluded grove found some paces to the right of the temple, on which one finds a two-foot-high engraving of a both a ghoul and a human devotee supplicating themselves before the awesome majesty of a standing Bhairava.² On the other, embedded in the temple complex itself, there are two stone inscriptions (śīlaśāsana), composed in a reasonably Sanskritic register of the old Kannada language, that serve as prelude to a fascinating and much neglected dimension of the religious life of the medieval Deccan.³

[[P347]]The typical texture of these inscriptions is such that it is customary to incorporate extensive highly formalized accounts of the lineage of the ruling monarch interspersed with flowery panegyrics regardless of the actual focus and function of the document in question. In contradistinction, at Karadkal such mentions of kings are confined to two relatively terse sentences, one for each document. In the first śāsana, the refuge of the world (bhuvanāśrayaṃ), beloved of the earth (śrīprithvīvallabhaṃ [sic]), defining mark of the clan of King Satyāśraya (satyāśrayakuḷatiḷakaṃ), the upholder of the Cāḷukyas (cāḷukyābharaṇaṃ) Vikramāditya VI,⁴ is introduced to us solely for the rhetorical purpose of clarifying the identity of the real subject under discussion: the king’s Śākta-Śaiva Rājaguru, Tatpuruṣaśiva and his disciples and successors Sūkṣmaśiva and Vyōmaśiva.⁵ In the second inscription,

[[P348]] Vikramāditya VI,⁶ one of the most significant rulers in the history of premodern India who over the course of his fifty-year reign remade the political, artistic, and literary landscape of the Deccan, warrants mention only in the context of clarifying the date when the document was issued (śrīcāḷukyavikramavarṣada).⁷

[[P349]] As we shall soon see, these declarations of sovereign independence were no mere rhetorical flourish enacted within some sequestered ritualized fantasy land hermetically sealed off from the brutal realpolitik of the medieval Deccan but were instead grounded in empirical realities underwritten by the law and defended by the state. In essence, as the present work will demonstrate, when the documentary record in its historical particularity along with the prescriptive discourse of medieval Dharmaśāstra is brought into dialogue with Tantric revelation, attending to discursive frames held in common by these diverse textualities, our understanding of the nature of Tantric traditions as they operated within the social realities from whence the emerged is irrevocably transformed.

Even in their current fragmentary form, as composite documents issued over the course of three generations at the direction of Tatpuruṣaśiva, Sūkṣmaśiva, and Vyomaśiva, the Karadkal śāsanas offer up a wealth of insight into the “public” self-representation of a Śākta rājaguru within his own domain. In much the same way that the office of kingship, however humble the extent of one’s kingdom, is represented in śāsana through a delimited canon of rhetorical tropes, in thousands of inscriptions issued throughout the Deccan between the seventh and fourteenth century, the sacerdotal authority of Śaiva and Śākta-Śaiva religious figures, especially self-described Pāśupatas, Mahāpāśupatas, Kālamukhas, and Somasiddhāntin Kāpālikas has been indicated through a single stock formula in which the figure under discussion is said to be well accomplished in a host of ritual practices and yogic virtues (yama-niyama-svādhyāya-dhyāna-dhāraṇā-maunānuṣthāna[sic]japa-samādhi-saṃp- annaṃ). While this catalogue incorporates precisely the sorts of activities a Śākta-Śaiva yogin might well be engaged in, its objective is not to offer a documentary account of the affairs in any particular religious community. Instead, like the blue uniform and badge of a police officer or the Rolex watch, briefcase case, and well-tailored suit of a businessman, its semiotic function is to instantly and unmistakably convey a particular social role and form of authority so as to provoke a specific mode of comportment. Tatpuruṣaśiva and his successors not only [[P350]] invoke these tropes, but embellish them, with additional practices (pārāyaṇa, adhyayana) and descriptors, such as depicting their disciples as ones foremost in the wealth of austerity (pramukhatapōdhana), with Sūkṣmaśiva in particular warranting the additional monikers devotee to God and guru who is devoted to the āgama (dēva-guru-bhaktan āgamayuktaṃ).

At the very same time, however, that our Śākta-Śaiva magnates are assuming the expected role of religious authority, they are also painting a picture of themselves as military and disciplinary authorities in the unmistakable idioms of royal rule and so-called sāmanta feudalism. Rājaguru Tatpuruṣaśiva, who advocates on behalf of (his devotees) to Śiva (śivacintāyaka)⁸ is thus terrifying to the enemy army (parabalabhīṣaṇaṃ), the one who keeps the fury of the enemy elephants in check (vairibhujamadanivāraṇaṃ), a foundation for people and kin (baṃdhujanānādharaṃ), the Bhairava of the dagger ([k]attigĕya bhairavaṃ), the one who pillages the hearts of his enemies (sūṟĕkāra hṛdayaṃ)—all titles commonly held by “secular” social actors such as daṇḍanāyakas. Indeed, in accordance with the social function he is executing in a particular context, our Śākta-Śaiva pontiff Tatpuruṣaśiva is addressed as king (śrīballav-arasa)⁹ and his chief disciple Sūkṣmaśiva is depicted as the empowered official ruling over the villages (śrīmatpĕggadĕ/śrīmathĕggadĕ). The appropriation of such offices is rendered all the more extraordinary when one takes into account that, in complete [[P351]] violation of the expected norms of both Brāhmaṇical śāstra and the more conservative strains within the Śaiva Tantras themselves, both of which limit the holding of the office of rājaguru to the Brāhmaṇas of exceptional pedigree, all of teachers in this line self-identify as bhāḷaras (T. vēḷāḷas, K. baḷḷāḷa) the old Kannada analogue to the class of landholding, an allegedly resource rich but status poor Śūdra caste prevalent throughout south India.

Despite their aestheticized character and value for the modern social historian of religion however, śāsanas are not literature, nor were they composed with the aim of being subject to fine-tuned rhetorical and critical analysis. Instead, like the more perishable material documents we have just explored, they served the concrete evidentiary purpose within the legal system of establishing property ownership and modalities of zoning, demarcating the exact boundaries of plots of land, and specifying the scope of the duties and liabilities incumbent on specific people or certain classes of social actors. As our texts make evident, like most if not all of the esoteric power centers in the medieval Deccan, Karadkal was classified as an undying land grant (San. akṣayavṛtti, K. sarvamānya) to be protected by the ruling powers, so long as the sun and the moon would continue to shine (caṃdrārkkatāraṃ saluttamirĕ). Within its domain no taxes were collected by the state nor were its inhabitants to be subject to its direction. Read from within such an emic perspective, the Karadkal śāsanas reveal themselves to be not merely documents about some Śākta-Śaiva rājagurus but as proclamations with the force of binding law issued by these rājagurus themselves in a register that, despite its linguistic difference, is entirely consonant with the technical terminology of medieval Dharmaśāstra.

In the first document, standing in place of the king or his daṇḍanāyaka, instead of being the recipient of a grant, it is Sūkṣmaśiva, acting on behalf of his guru, who bestows financial [[P352]] and material resources on the Kūni Sōmēśvara temple, including twenty-six additional mattars of land with black soil, along with a nearby Brāhmaṇa agrahāra, reaffirming their longstanding endowments and privileges by washing the feet of the sacerdotal authority in situ. Assembled for the occasion under Sūkṣmaśiva’s authority are the two village headmen, the merchant councils from two neighboring cities, and most importantly, the collectivity (samūha), a technical term drawn, as we shall see, from the Dharmaśāstra literature, where it refers to the body that advocates for the community, tries legal disputes in the sabhā, and executes punishment. Far more spectacularly, in the second śāsana¹⁰, which is comprised of two edicts, we find first Sūkṣmaśiva, acting on behalf of the rājaguru, and then a generation later Vyōmaśiva, Tatpuruṣaśiva’s successor, handing down concrete legal fiats, delineating specific fines and punishment for crimes and social transgressions,¹¹ to the hereditary descendants of the founding families of the village and the tenders of the temple, along with councils of merchants.¹² These are the usual categories of people in the inscriptional record of this period responsible for the practical implementation of administrative affairs on behalf of sacerdotal authorities. While the contents of many of these edicts remain obscure, especially as they contain unusual vocabulary not found in our lexicons, make use of irregular spelling and are damaged in many places, the first of these edicts from each part of the second document run roughly as follows.

Persons belonging to any of the untouchable castes (antyajātiy ār’ adŏḍav) are not permitted (barasalladu) to drive (ēṟu) their marriage carts (maduvĕyalu baṃḍi) into the [[P353]] market street (aṃgaḍi-bīdi). But, if this does occur (bandan-appaḍĕ) they will [have to] pay (tiṟuvar) a fine of 12 (paṃnnĕraḍu) gadyāṇas of gold (pŏnnam). It is Ballavarasar Rajagurudēva’s command (HK. āṇe, S, ājñā) for it to be (appudakĕ) this way (aṃtu). . . .

Be well! Vyōmaśiva Bhaḷāra, the venerable Rājaguru of Karaḍikalla. . . issued the edict to Cāmuṇḍasĕṭṭi, the merchant’s guild, and the family of the founding line of settlers (pādamūlaparivāra), as follows (ĕṃt’ ĕndoḍĕ):

[They] enstated (biṭṭar) a year-long (ŏndu śrāhi) “shop-tax” (aṃgaḍi tĕṟĕyam). Afterwards (allim mēgĕ), [in that] year (barisa) there was a two paṇa tax¹³ for each necklace shop¹⁴ and for the grass shop¹⁵ it was two paṇas.¹⁶

Quite apart from the bare fact that we are being presented here with concrete examples of regulations, formulated using the same technical language and format but whose substance are independent of Dharmaśāstra prescriptions, issued by actual Śākta-Śaiva rājagurus— documents of a sort that have till now scarcely been encountered in our literature—the particularized contents of these regulations are themselves quite intriguing. They point towards a social reality significantly out of step with the picture we usually paint of the medieval social order. That our Rājaguru took the time and effort to have inscribed in stone a special law prohibiting untouchable castes (antyajāti)—what we would now call people from a Dalit background—from driving their marriage carts into the market street, presumably after a wedding, and that they are to be fined 12 gaḍyānas of gold if they commit such an offence suggests surprising things about the social positions of Dalits in this domain. It tells us they [[P354]] had property, such as the aforementioned marriage cart. It tells us that they participated in the multitiered mixed cash barter economy of the medieval world in a substantive enough way that they could be expected to pay fines in gold coins and not in a share of the crop they harvested or the goods they produced. The fact they there are being fined and not having corporal punishment inflicted upon them, suggests this is a comparatively minor transgression of social norms. Finally, it suggests that under other circumstances, Dalits were permitted to enter into the market; otherwise, the regulation would have simply read, antyajātis are not permitted to enter the market street. Succinctly, it points to a world where, under the direction of Śākta- Śaiva gurus who scriptures offer either a range of mixed messages about varṇāśramadharma or advocate its irrelevance, caste strictures, while not absent, are least somewhat attenuated. In the second edict, on the other hand, we are presented with evidence of specialized, period specific, revenue collection; in other words, we witness Śākta rājagurus acting like they run a state and are responsible for its day-to-day operations.

From the broader perspectives of modern Indology and the comparative study of law, the documentary evidence we have just been examining offers concrete examples of legal pluralism. In its particularly Indic incarnation, what this meant in practical terms was that specific places and communities were obliged to adhere to their own standards of what constituted normative behavior. Just how far such differentiation extended has been the subject of much discussion. In a series of articles the represent the most recent and cogent treatment of these matters, for example, Donald Davis has advocated that a range of these so-called “conventional dharmas” that governed medieval corporate communities were best understood as offering supplements to the primary rules of the normative Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra.¹⁷ [[P355]] In other words, they are seen to operate in much the same manner that modern religious community-specific customary law complements the standard Indian legal code. As he writes they “work in the interstices of the textual prescriptions” so that where “Dharmaśāstra is silent or ambiguous. . . conventional and legislated pāribhāṣika-dharmas may be enacted as primary rules in their own right.”¹⁸ As we will see, while the interpretation Davis is advocating coincides with an emic school of thought within the dharma literature, it is a poor match with much of what is found in our documentary records, with the self-understanding of many of our so called “corporate communities,” and even with the conceptual possibilities native to the dharma literature itself. Instead, I will argue, as they frequently do in the grammatical literature, these community-specific meta-rules were understood by those who enacted them as having a supersessionary force whereby key general norms—like the definition of what constitutes murder and how it was to be addressed or the strictures associated with caste sociality—could be nullified in a manner that opened a space up for radical difference with concrete sociological implications. Indeed, I would suggest that the repeated use in our literature of the generic phrase the “corporate community” or the “compacts” has concealed under a secularized veil of false familiarity some more fundamental denotations. Thus, as we shall see, the word that Davis has rendered “compact” samaya, from the fifth century onward has often served as the generic term of art in the Śaiva and Śākta sources for the observances of the Tantric practitioner—or samayin. In other words, what our literature has until now represented as a somewhat tertiary dimension of “corporate law” in fact forms the conditions of possibility for the defining feature of the medieval Indic religious landscape, namely, the mass institutionalization of Tantric communities openly recognized and patronized by the [[P356]] state—what the doyen of Tantric Studies Alexis Sanderson has described as “the Śaiva Age.”¹⁹

To make sense of such an archive, and the social order at which it gestures, which will prove fundamental to furthering our understanding of the social situatedness of Tantric knowledge, we must redirect our attention and reimagine our scope of inquiry. We must turn from an obscure village in Raichur district to Basavakalyāṇa, one of the most famous imperial centers on the subcontinent, and from the fascinating but difficult register of regionalized old Kannada to the more familiar environs of śāstric Sanskrit textuality as embodied in the Dharmaśāstra literature.

The Differential Establishment of the Dharmas: Legal Pluralism in the Śāstra

Composed, so its author tells us, within the confines of Kalyana itself at the express command of the Cāḷukya emperor Vikramāditya VI, the Ṛjumitākṣarā (c. 1055–1126) offers an extended learned commentary, suffused throughout with modes of reasoning inflected by Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, on the circa fifth-century Yājñavalkyasmṛti. This work of Dharmaśāstra, critically edited by Patrick Olivelle, was far more fundamentally responsible for shaping the organizational structure of subsequent legal literature as well as the curriculum of study expected of those who participated in courtly proceedings than its more famous archaic [[P357]] predecessor, the Mānavadharmaśāstra, and yet it has received substantially less attention.²⁰ For our purposes, what is most relevance is the title of law contained within the fifteenth chapter on the division on jurisprudence (vyavahārādhyāya) which bears the rather ungainly title “the division on the non-violation of the compacts (saṃvidvyatikramaprakaraṇa) to which Vijñāneśvara’s brief but rather pithy commentary offers the ideal introduction.²¹ Before [[P358]] turning to a close reading of the verses, Vijñāneśvara introduces our subject of study in the following manner:

And now the non-transgression of compacts is described, and its definition was shown by Nārada, who is the mouth of the [doctrine] of differentiation (vyatireka): “Samaya is said to be the establishment (sthitiḥ) of the heretics (pākhaṇḍa), Pāśupatas (naigama), and so forth. The non-transgression of the samaya is remembered by the word ‘legal case’ concerning that (tadvivāda).” Another definition is that samaya is the differentiation of domains (vyavasthānaṃ) by means of meta-rules (paribhāṣika) pertaining to dharma.

Non-transgression, in other words, [means] protection (paripālana). The sense is when one is transgressing such a thing, then a legal action comes about.²²

While in fact containing few if any fundamental innovations, these observations of Vijñāneśvara digest at least half a century of legal discourse on the transgression of compacts into elegant and accessible commentarial prose. Despite the fact that the work he is commenting on, the Yājñavalkyasmṛti itself contains some of the same contents, Vijñāneśvara attributes the legal principle that governs this title of law and its implementation to “Nārada who is the mouth of the [doctrine] of differentiation (vyatirekamukha).” The reference in question is almost certainly to the Nāradasmṛti, a perhaps seventh-century treatise on jurisprudence, which introduces the following verse, much cited in other works of medieval Dharmaśāstra, in its own tenth chapter on the non-observance of samaya conventions [[P359]] (samayasyānapākarma):

In the forts and in the (mahā) janapadas, the king must protect (saṃrakṣet) the samaya of heretics, “Pāśupatas,”²³ merchant guilds, councils, military collectives, groups and the like. Whatever their dharmas, duties, rules for worship, or mode of livelihood, he must permit them.²⁴

Thus the “doctrine of Nārada” in essence amounts to mandating in unambiguous terms that the state must defend religious plurality, albeit within certain domains.²⁵ Such a vision of religious freedom is founded not on an enlightenment-style appeal to individual conscience, but rather on the right of essentially autonomous communities to manage their own affairs according to their own internal standards. At the same time, unlike its later Western analogues, in defending religious freedom Nārada incorporates a defense of the economic foundations that make specific ways of life possible. In other words, the state’s responsibilities are directed towards communities and the life-worlds they engender instead of towards individuals and their particularized concerns and desires.

Nevertheless, in foregrounding a defense of the dharma, rituals, and the social comportment of heretics (pāṣaṇḍa), people who by definition stand outside of the Veda and [[P360]] thus are assumed to conduct their lives independent of the strictures of varṇāśramadharma, Nārada offers a vision of the social texture of the medieval world that flies in the face of almost everything our textbooks have told us about the religious ecologies of medieval India at the supposed zenith of “Brāhmaṇical religion.” As we will continue to see, for the medieval commentators well into the thirteenth century, “the doctrine of Nārada,” with minor quibbling, was treated as simply a matter of common sense, not some wistful scholastic musing but the fixed law of the land.²⁶

More precisely, we might well say it was the law of some lands, for as a careful examination of the root text reveals, this irenic vision of religious freedom is context-specific and confined to carefully delineated social spaces. The nature of the first of these jurisdictions, the janapada or mahājanapada, will become apparent over the course of Vijñāneśvara’s analysis. The other domain is the “fort” itself. Unlike the Nāradasmṛti, which begins its discussion of the non-transgression of the samaya by offering a speciation of the samaya’s various manifestations, the Yājñavalkyasmṛti consigns this issue to the final verses of its corresponding chapter. Instead, its initial focus is directed towards what at first glance appears [[P361]] to be an entirely unrelated subject, namely, the re-settlement of Brāhmaṇas, especially ones with military capacities, as residents of forts and the issuing to them of a land grant. Yājñavalkya’s root text and Vijñāneśvara summary run as follows:

The King, having made, in the pura, a place, and having set down the Brāhmaṇas, who are knowers of the three Vedas and possess a land grant there, he should say, “Your own dharma (svadharma) is to be protected.” That dharma which pertains to the samaya, being not in conflict with one’s own dharma, that eternal dharma is to be protected with effort. It is done by the king.

Vijñāneśvara: In the pura means in the fort (durga) and so forth. . . . Having established means having set down some Brāhmaṇa there; “traividyam” means a Brāhmaṇical warrior band (vrāta) endowed with the three Vedas. Having made them to be vṛttimat or possessing a vṛtti means to be endowed with gold and land and so forth. Then he should say to those Brāhmaṇas: you do your svadharma, you should practice that which is enjoined in śruti and smṛti and is determined by varṇāśramadharma. . . .

What is also to be protected with effort is that dharma which arises from the samaya, which might take the form of herding the cows, or protecting water, or protecting the temple of the gods, and so forth. Likewise, whichever samayin dharma there is, precisely by being non-contradictory with one’s own dharma (nijadharma), that is to be protected, which is made to be of such a form as the statements, “traveling provisions are to be given,” and “horses and so forth [in other words the army] are not to be established in enemy territory.”²⁷

Commenting on this same passage Vijñāneśvara’s eighth- to ninth-century predecessor Viśvarūpācārya in his Bālakrīḍā, immediately before introducing Nārada’s proof text, offers the following helpful clarifications.

Vṛtti exists for the cause of providing a livelihood or stipend. One endowed with that is vṛttimat. Having made (kṛtvā) means having given money (artha), which causes to be established a village (grāma), home (gṛha), field (kṣetra), or imperishable [[P362]] endowment (akṣayanidhi).²⁸

Essentially what this passage has done is to introduce a social institution that amounts to a funded space set aside in perpetuity, providing for the needs of a collectivity of Brāhmaṇas in accordance with their own rules and values. It has also begun to disclose that such a space is autonomous and should be protected. In order to recognize how the positing of such an unabashedly “Brāhmaṇical” institution might hold some relevance to our own investigation, which after all takes as its focus recovering the necessary preconditions for explicitly “Tantric” social formations and communities, many of which had an ambiguous if not outright hostile relationship to Brāhmaṇical normativity, we need to think about the mode of argumentation that governs Sanskrit legal discourse.

As Donald Davis has made evident,²⁹ our normative Western assumptions are that legal reasoning functions as a movement from the general to the particular, where one begins from an abstract principle such as “rights,” moves on to a generalized status such as the “citizen,” and then adds details to arrive at the hyperparticularized status pertinent to a specific case, for example the “rights of a citizen who is a disabled mother undergoing a divorce.” Dharmaśāstra, in contrast, reasons in reverse. First it posits a hyper-particularized status that is context and identity specific, usually a twice-born Brāhmaṇa householder who is studying the Veda, and explores the dynamics pertinent to that specific status. Then, it proceeds by adducing structurally parallel cases while erasing details found in the original test case so as to [[P363]] account for either increasingly distinct or increasingly generalized cases. Thus, while we might be inclined to look at the above passage and see in it a mandate for “Brāhmaṇical normativity,” a medieval Dharmaśāstrin would see a template for making sense, if but in passing, of other types of social spaces organized in a parallel fashion, inasmuch as they are endowed by a king, possessing their own land grant, administered according to their “own dharma” (svadharma) and protected by the state. We have seen glimmers of this in Bṛhaspati already. This, for example is how Viśvarūpācārya reads the situation, albeit without displaying terribly much interest, writing that “the injunction of the collectivity (samūha) of Brāhmaṇas [referring to the endowing of a land grant and its protection] is stated here. This directive (vidhi) applies equally in regard to the gaṇas, śreṇīs, naigamas, the pāṣaṇḍins, and so forth.”³⁰ It is for this reason then that our root text secondarily gestures towards the existence of other sets of dharmas, labeled “those that pertain to the samaya,” but which remain otherwise undefined, and grants them protection. It is only in the commentaries, especially that of Vijñāneśvara, that specific examples are offered of what some of the samayin dharmas might entail, inclusive of such things as the practices pertaining to caring for cattle or tending a temple; in other words, these are the activities that people outside of proper society preoccupy themselves with, the exact character of which is of little interest to educated legal scholars.

Indeed, displaying an absence of curiosity that pains the social historian of religion, the Indic legal tradition, especially the part directly associated with the Yājñavalkyasmṛti, restricts its interest in engaging the rich legal and religious pluralism of the medieval world to a narrow band of practical concerns. First, it sets out to define the precise duties incumbent on the king when there is a transgression (laṅghana) of the property rights, security, autonomy, or well- [[P364]] being of a samaya, and the fines and punishments that are to be meted out for specific types of crimes. Thus, for example, Vijñāneśvara tells us that “the one who steals the “common” property connected to a collective (samūha), which is the people of a village and so forth—in other words, a gaṇa—or the one who oversteps the samaya made by the king or by a collective. . . . Having taken away all of his money, you should deport him from the kingdom.³¹” Second, it sets out to identify the representatives of these communities (samūha or samudāyin) that might make an appeal to the king to be protected and to understand their internal decision- making procedures, which involves arriving at a formal consensus. In Yājñavalkya’s root text, such a figure is called “one who is concerned about the affairs (of the community)” (kāryacintaka), “who speaks for the benefit of the collectivity” (samūhahitavādin).³² Viśvarūpācārya, in passing, associates this office with the “numbered” descendants of the settlers that are present for the founding of a land grant, an ubiquitous designation in the inscriptional record throughout the medieval Deccan, as in the famous trading company “the Ayyāvoḷe 500.”

It is only after having addressed these, from their perspective, more significant topics, that Yājñavalkya and his commentators arrive at the place where Nārada had started, and the set of concerns most pertinent to our own interests, namely, the juridical foundations that make possible institutionally rooted Tantric knowledge.

Yājñavalkya: This injunction also applies to the śreṇis, naigamas, heretics, and gaṇas. The king must protect the difference (bheda) pertaining to them and protect the previously endowed land grant. [[P365]]

Vijñāneśvara: By śreṇis we mean people who subsist from artisanal craft and temple building (śilpa) or by trading in a single commodity [such as merchants]. By naigamas, we mean those who advocate for the veridicality of the Vedas because they are inculcated by learned people [as opposed to on the basis of it being divinely authored]—in other words Pāśupatas and so forth. Heretics are those ones who do not advocate for the veridicality of the Vedas: naked ones (digambara), wanderers, Buddhists, and so forth. By gaṇas, we mean vrāta, a band of military people and so forth, those who subsist by a single trade.

Although they are of four sorts, there is one single injunction, which is taught by the phrase “non-contradictory with one’s own dharma” and so forth: “the king must protect the difference (bheda),” meaning the differential establishment of dharma (dharmavyavasthāna), of these groups, the śreṇi and so forth. And he should protect the land grant and endowment (vṛtti) that was previously given.³³

Despite their great value in enabling us to recognize that the protection by the state of a certain type of religious and social plurality was a matter of settled law for Medieval jurists, the sources we have examined thus far offer little insight into the social realities such laws were intended to govern and how they might pertain to the Tantric communities of medieval India. Thankfully, the dharma literature enshrines another source that makes far more explicit how these legal strictures form the conditions of possibility for the Śaiva Age.³⁴ Composed in the early thirteenth century, the definitive deliberation on the law (Vyavahāranirṇaya) bears a most unlikely author, a Vaiṣṇava jurist named Varadarāja whose authority continued to be invoked among Śrīvaiṣṇavas well into the time of Vedānta Deśika.³⁵ In other words, instead [[P366]] of representing some sort of partisan perspective advocating on behalf of the non-normative collectivity, Varadarāja emerges as a largely disinterested documenter whose objective is to offer a profound and comprehensive study of all of the pertinent titles of law. His Vyavahāranirṇaya is not a work of commentary, but rather of what is called dharmanibandha, in which a palimpsest of citations from a range of root texts on a given subject are compiled together in the service of making evident the range of legal thinking on a specific topic as well as producing an argument. As we might expect, Varadarāja begins his discussion of the non- violation of the samaya with the passages we have already explored, but instead of ending his inquiry there, he then proceeds to turn to an entirely different, and much more particularized, canon of sources. Succinctly, he reads the institutional life of the non-Brāhmaṇa world through a lens provided by Bṛhaspati and his successors.

Varadarāja: Thus Kātyāyana says: “It [a collectivity] would be established by certain merchants (vaṇijs) who are the original ones (mūlabhūta), being not greedy, being possessed of resources (vitta), lineage, good conduct, and seniority.” The remainder is one should make a seat of dharma.³⁶

Bṛhaspati says: “The kārukas, farmers, bards, temple builders (śilpins), śreṇis, actors, bearers of religious signifiers (liṅgins), and thieves, should carry out the adjudication with their own dharma. . . . and likewise is the case of the military folk with regard to the army, and of the merchant folk (vaṇij) with regard to their business. But he [the king] should cause the duties of the ascetics to be done, according to the [dharma of the] triple knowledge [i.e., the Veda] alone and likewise for Vedāntins and [knowers of] yoga.” The sense is: by the cause that is the dharma that is established by their own samaya.

On this matter, Vyāsa says: Those who are appointed to the duties of kings, the grāma, śreṇi, gaṇas, and the kula. . . . they should see to addressing disputes of men with regard [[P367]] to a subject under their control (svādhīna).³⁷

Varadarāja and his sources make explicit what was only implicit in the discourse surrounding Yājñavalkya, namely, that different communities not only have the right to manage their own internal affairs and conduct their own legal proceedings for those within the community, they are also empowered to do so on the basis of their own values and standards. Indeed, Varadarāja’s canon states quite plainly that the king is empowered to forcibly implement adherence to the standards of varṇāśramadharma as derived from the Veda only in regard to communities comprised of Brāhmaṇical ascetics, Vedāntins, and practitioners of Patañjali’s yoga. Having spelled out what is really intended by the notion of a differentiation of domains entailing a differential application of the law, Varadarāja next surveys the domains themselves in the service of demonstrating the functional equivalence between different species of collectivities (samūha).

V: Thus, Kātyāyana says: “A collectivity (samūha) of merchants and so forth is known to be a pūga. A collectivity (samūha) of Brāhmaṇas and so forth is called a gaṇa by wise people. That which is a collectivity (samūha) of the Buddhists and Jains is called a saṅgha and so forth. A vrāja is said to be a collectivity (samūha) of gavas (cow herders) and four-footed creatures. A puñja is said to be a collectivity (samūha) of people who understand false teachings. A gulma is said to be a collectivity (samūha) of caṇḍālas, dog cookers and so forth. A śreṇi is said to be a collectivity (samūha) of a multitude of temple builders or kārus (kārukas). Those who are concerned with what should be done (kāryacintakas) would be the ones concerned with the welfare of the pūgas, śreṇis, gaṇas and so forth. . . . They who profess the welfare of the collectivity (samūha), by them should the address be made [to external authorities or in legal deliberation].”

V: This injunction [pertains] also to the pūgas, naigamas, pāṣaṇḍas, and saṅghas.³⁸ [[P368]]

As Kātyāyana makes plain, the Brāhmaṇical samūha represents but the archetypal form of a much more wide-ranging institution that instantiated itself throughout the social hierarchy. Defined both in terms of what we would think of as caste and professional identities as well as religious or ideological commitments, the pluralistic social realities of medieval India made room for such unthinkable institutions as the gulma, a collectivity of Caṇḍālas and dog cookers and the puñja, a collectivity comprised, through euphemistically, “of those who understand false teachings.” Not only did such social spaces exist, but moreover, they were conceived of as self-governing bodies administered according to their own rules by officials hailing from within the appropriate community. In other words, the judge and council who decided one’s fate within a gulma after reviewing the evidence against a person would have belonged to what we would now label a Dalit caste.

As his own short snippets of commentarial prose make evident, Varadarāja’s interests lie elsewhere, not with questions of caste, but rather with matter of heresy, for he is particularly intent on ensuring that the by-laws we have been discussing are recognized as being addressed to all manners of heretical communities. Towards this end, he offers an unusually detailed series of definitions of the range of belief systems that are deemed heretical, but which nevertheless are to be protected.

Varadarāja: The definition of the heretic (pāṣaṇḍalakṣaṇa) is signified in the 36 doctrines:

“Those ones with bad views who do not say that there is only authoritativeness with regards to the Veda, of such folks, being Buddhists, Jains and so forth, the name of pāṣaṇḍa is proclaimed. . . . But those ones who say that the Veda has authoritativeness [[P369]] [solely] as authored product [and is not unauthored revelation] on the part of those folks—such as the Vaiśeṣikas and so forth, the name of naigama is applied” . . . .

V: And likewise, in the Svayambhuvāgama, the six samayas are stated:

“The Bauddha and also the Jaina, and Śaiva, and Pāśupata; likewise, the Kāpālika, and Pāñcarātra: these are remembered to be the six samayas.”

V: With regard to that, Vyāsa says:

“For vaṇij and śilpins and so forth, those who subsist off agriculture or artisanal craft, it is not possible to have an adjudication by others [such as learned Brāhmaṇas, on their behalf], but one should have [the adjudication] done by ones who are knowers of that [system of knowledge].”

V: This is stated regarding all samayas. It is established that vyavahāra is to be adjudicated on the basis of the path articulated in the śāstra or one’s own samaya.³⁹

Here, Varadarāja demonstrates conclusively that the medieval form of mainline jurisprudence he has exhaustively cataloged viewed the codes of comportment and religious practice underlying the value systems of Buddhists, Jainas, Śaivas, Pāśupatas, Kāpālikas, as well as his own Pañcarātras as religious identities protected by the state, at least inasmuch as they remained operative within their own prescribed domains. It is almost certainly this title of law that underlies the perennial occurrence in the old Kannada inscriptional records, especially among the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyas and the Hoysaḷas, of a variety of formulas which invoke the king and his wife as supporters and upholders (samayasamuddhāraṇa) of either the six samayas, all the samaya, or specific samayas, such as that of the Kālamukhas or Śrīvaiṣṇavas, all of which must be protected (pratipāḷisi).⁴⁰ [[P370]]

Before we leave Varadarāja’s company to bring our new understanding about the sociality from which they were almost inextricably linked to bear on the Tantric texts themselves, the Vyavahāranirṇaya has one last insight to offer us, namely, how the legal tradition theorizes community-specific exemptions from normative law and the inextricability of its theorization of punishment from rites of expiation. These it seems are of two types, those transmitted within a lineage (gotrasthiti, kuladharma, or jātidharma) and those associated with specific places and their inhabitants (deśācāra).

Varadarāja: That [what is practiced by those aforementioned people] one should conceive of as being non-contradictory with the dharmas of place, kula, and jāti.

Kātyāyana says: “On the part of which people there is a ‘gotrasthiti,’ the establishment of gotra that has come down in succession according to dharma, they call this a kuladharma.” And likewise, one should protect it. The dharma that is operative at all times relating to a [particular] place is called a deśadharma, because it is not contradictory with śruti or smṛti.”

Bṛhaspati says: “By southern twice-borns, the daughter is married to the maternal uncle; in the Madhyadeśa, there, men who are ritualists and artisans (śilpins) are cow eaters. In the east, [the people] are fish eaters and women are devoted to infidelity. In the north, the women drink liquor and they are to be touched by men while menstruating. . . . According to this conduct, these things are not demanding of punishment or expiation.”⁴¹

As one can already begin to see, and as will become even more apparent as we turn to the Tantric sources, community and lineage specific exceptions that nullify the application of [[P371]] punishment or expiation in regard to actions that are generally understood to represent ritual infractions and outright crimes do not just pertain to quaintly deviant cultural folkways, but provide social and legal license for people in these communities, including Brāhmaṇas, to do things like kill and eat cows and commit adultery, practices the normative legal codes would deem serious infractions of the law.

Varadarāja’s subject is law, especially courtroom proceedings (vyavahāra) and thus his analysis largely foreswears any engagement with question of statecraft (nīti)—in other words, with the larger implications of the state supporting and implementing the type of social order we just been exploring. In the primary sources he has invoked, however, the two domains are often intimately connected. In the two verses that immediately precede the passage on deśadharma we have just exploring, Bṛhaspati, once again likely predating the Nāradasmṛti and thus much less attuned to the application of this mode of reasoning to explicitly thinking through questions of the social place of heresy, makes the following pointed observation justifying the application of a differentiated dharma attuned to the commitments of different communities.

Bṛhaspati: When it comes to whose children are conceived against the grain of caste, and likewise for those who dwell in forts: those dharmas, deśa, jati, kula and so forth are operative for them. In just the same way, they must be protected, otherwise the people will revolt. There will be an uprising of the people and the power⁴² and treasury will be destroyed.⁴³

In short, for at least some of the authors we have been exploring, the accommodation of religious and social diversity was as much as matter of pragmatics as principle. Not interfering in the affairs of the parts of the population that might not share your values or social [[P372]] and religious customs, and not permitting others to interfere with, prey upon, or attempt to “reform” these communities increased the chances that the king would have a long and stable reign as well the possibility that notable figures hailing from such communities, such our Tatpuruṣaśiva, might contribute their talents to his political and military agenda. From the perspective of these communities themselves, being rendered socially legible and protected by the state was its own reward.

Tantric Compacts: Rethinking Samayācāra

As we direct our attention away from the how Tantric communities were perceived and juridically and administratively accounted for by interpretive communities with Brāhmaṇical commitments and return to apply the knowledge we have gained to making sense of the self- understandings operating within Tantric communities, certain observations, independent of a close reading of any particular text, pointedly present themselves. The most important of these concerns the basic nomenclature for designating a Tantric initiate. Except perhaps in the earliest sources, such as most archaic parts of the Niśvāsa corpus, the generic term for a Tantric initiate within the traditions of the Mantramārga is samayin—literally, one who possesses or is connected to the samaya. While the scholarly literature has presented this lexeme to us as effectively a Tantric term of art, the evidence on hand suggests that this is a secondary connotation, and its primary conceptualization is as a legal term. In other words, before it conveys an esoteric content such as access to a specific mantra and maṇḍala, the lexeme samaya and its related agentive noun samayin denotes a juridical status vis-à-vis the state and in relation to other legislative and disciplinary bodies. It confers certain privileges and rights as well as obligations and renders the actions of the agent socially and legal legible in a manner that enables other categories of people to understand how they should comport themselves [[P373]] when relating to someone who bears the status of samayin.

That the primacy of this mode of conceptualization also has substantial ramifications for how we should think about the initiating Tantric ācārya or guru and his relationship with an initiated disciple who continues to dwell in his domain becomes apparent when we turn to the texts and begin to read them in tandem with the Dharmaśāstra literature. Here for example, shorn of the sort of tradition-specific ritual detail that would have been of little interest to the practical concerns of juridical authorities from outside the community, is how the pre-seventh- century Svāyambhuvasūtrasaṃgraha of the Śaiva Siddhānta presents the topic of the role of the ācārya and his samayin disciple.

Now an excellent ācārya should be illustrious: of excellent birth: very handsome: he should have true knowledge of what is to be done and what is to be avoided (heyopadeyatattvajñāḥ), be intent on the śāsana from Śiva (śivaśāsanatatparaḥ). . . . He should know the actions that confer authority regarding the śāstra (śāstrādhikārakarmajña). . . . He should know the rules relating to [expiation] for transgressions. . . . The samayin [is so called] in as much as he is established in the samaya (samayastha)⁴⁴ He is a man who has received the entitlement (adhikāra) from the scripture. . . . He has received the Śiva-hand [of the ācārya laid on his head]: he venerates Śiva, the fire, and his guru. He is subject to the guru (gurvadhīno) at all times (sarvadā) in all his actions (sarvakāryeṣu) and cannot act independently (asvatantra).⁴⁵

In purely functionalist terms, the social role of the guru outlined in the Svāyambhuvasūtrasaṃgraha corresponds to the function delineated, for example in Vyāsa, where an appointee overseeing the affairs of one of any number of collectivities (samūha) or [[P374]] clans (kula), acting independent of the king, is empowered to address disputes and manage the affairs of those who are under their sovereign authority (adhīna). From this perspective, at the moment of initiation, not only does an ontic transformation of the status of the soul of the samaya initiate take place, at the very same moment his legal status is permanently altered. Reborn as a new kind of person, in many cases specified in the Tantric texts as having undergone a change in caste identity and gotra, he is now subject to distinctive laws. Instead of the state and the norms of varṇāśramadharma, the final authority binding legal authority in this person’s life, so long as he remains under his care and in his jurisdiction, is now his guru. As far as the state and formalized judicial proceedings are concerned, it is the guru that is now essentially liable for his actions, entrusted with enforcing the values and laws upheld by the community to which this person belongs, and responsible for his rehabilitation or punishment. Like all authorities in the Dharmaśāstra literature, from the perspective of the state, the Śaiva ācārya holds an office on the basis of his mastery (adhikāra) over a particular body of knowledge, that in the most basic terms tells a particular class of people how to execute their duties and defines what they and should and should not do. Integral to the codification of these values and norms is the category of the śivaśāsana, counterpart to the textual genre of rājaśāsana, the legal edicts handed down by kings. This canon would have been comprised of both the general Dharmaśāstras adhered or at least appealed to by most kinds of Śaivas and Śākta-Śaivas, namely, the corpus of Śivadharmaśāstra, as well as the individual śāsanas issued by Śaiva authorities, such as the decrees mandating a new investment in the regional temple and delineation of fines and punishments penned by Tatpuruṣaśiva and Vyōmaśiva found at Karadkal.

And here is where our exploration comes full circle, for, in accordance with the [[P375]] evidentiary rules of the medieval courts and the expectations of medieval bureaucracies, as outlined in gloriously excruciating detail in the writings of Kātyāyana and Bṛhaspati, much of the operation of these social spaces had to be put down in writing, especially in case a cross community conflict arose and evidence had to presented in court. Indeed, when a samūha met in the assembly hall (sabhā) to hear a case or execute the business of the community, an accountant, documenting expenditures, and a scribe, recording the decisions arrived at in session, were supposed to be present at all times. In other words, despite the fact that we have very few surviving exempla, as we saw in the preceding chapter, institutions in medieval India produced a deluge of paperwork, almost all of it composed on perishable materials. Bṛhaspati, for example, specifies that the types of institutions we are concerned with primarily dedicated themselves to the production of a type of internal document called samayapatra or saṃvitpatras. As with any juridical authority, it was also incumbent on such communities to issue their own śucipatras, letters of proof ensuring that the designated agent, having completed ritual expiation for a crime or offense, was now purified, and thus a member of the community in good standing with whom one could share space or food.

While all that remains of such documentary evidence is the rare case, like our Karadkal śāsanas, where some slight fragments of this content was rather unusually transferred onto stone, there is reason to believe that another source survives that offers us more indications of the sort of evidence and authorities that would have been invoked when Tantric gurus acted as juridical authorities or when their communities went to court, namely, the entextualized content found within “community-specific śāstras.” In Tantric discourse, as it has frequently been noticed, the terms Tantra, āgama, and śāstra are often used interchangeably; in other [[P376]] words, in this case śāstra likely refers to the entextualization of social codes of conduct articulated with an eye to potential judicial review as found within the Tantras themselves.

In engaging with these exciting possibilities, we will restrict our analysis to two genetically related sources, both of which arise from traditions associated with the Bhairava Tantras. The first is found in the most familiar work in the corpus, the Svacchanda Tantra, and incorporates what is probably the most famous non-esoteric citation in our literature from the Bhairava Tantras, namely, the passage where all initiated devotees are declared to belong to “the caste of Bhairava.” The second, in contrast, is from an unpublished work on temple construction and ritual installation (pratiṣṭhā), the Piṅgalāmata, a plausibly late eighth century Tantra that I am currently editing from manuscript, which has a rhetorical and intertextual relationship with both the Picumatabrahmayāmala and the Jayadrathayāmala and is particularly rich in its representation of the social texture of Tantric life.⁴⁶

In her recent book, Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India (2017), as prelude to conceptualizing the distinctive logic of the sectarian age of early modern South India, Elaine Fisher directs our attention to a passage in chapter four of the Svacchanda Tantra as providing evidence of the self-conception of distinctiveness held by Mantramārga communities not aligned with Brāhmaṇical normativity. In light of this chapter’s recovery of the juridical foundations that both underwrite and inform of the conceptualization of much of Tantric social practice, the time is ripe for re-reading the rhetorical structure of this [[P377]] same text alongside the larger interpretive context in which it is embedded. What we will begin to see is the Svacchanda Tantra has been constructed in such a manner so that it can serve as both a work of revelation and an evidentiary legal text to be used in transactional settings.

Those who have been initiated by this very procedure, O Beautiful-Faced One, Brahmins, Kṣatriyas, Vaiśyas, Śūdras, and others likewise, O Dear One, All of these have the same dharma—they have been enjoined in the dharma of Śiva (Śivadharma).⁴⁷ They are all said to bear matted locks, their bodies smeared with ash. All Samayins should eat in one line, O Beautiful-faced one. There should be one [line] for Putrakas, one for Sādhakas likewise. And one for Cumbakas—not according to one’s prior caste. They are remembered in the smṛtis as having only one caste; that of Bhairava, imperishable and pure. Having had recourse to this Tantra, one should not mention someone’s prior caste. Should a man mention the prior caste of a Putraka, Sādhaka, or of a Samayin, he would require expiation (prāyaścitta), O Goddess. He burns in hell for three of Rudra’s days, five of Keśava’s days, and a fortnight of Brahmā’s days. Therefore, one must not discriminate, if he wishes to obtain the supreme goal.⁴⁸

At the same time that this text offers an emancipatory vision that rejects normative Brāhmaṇical standards concerning purity and impurity, at least among fellow initiates, it is also structuring itself in a manner that renders it legible within the domain of medieval jurisprudence. After first identifying the normative expectation that is going to be violated, it delineates a particular type of social agent, the initiate (starting from the samayin) and identifies that, in contradistinction to the general rule, initiates from all caste categories are subject to a single dharma, namely, śivadharma, inflected by a few divergences which will now be discussed. The physical indications of how to identify such people visually is then related, as well as the fact that for this status of people normative varṇāśramadharma caste rules are suspended, especially as pertains to eating and sharing food and space. Instead of [[P378]] rejecting conceptualizations of caste in toto, as many later Kaula texts will do, however, the Svacchanda Tantra appeals to the category of jātidharma, which as we have seen in Varadarāja’s sources amounts to a separate community-specific set of differentiated meta rules that can supersede expected norms and the defense of which is mandated on behalf of the state. Initiates in our tradition, we are told, belong to the bhairavajāti, a protected category the contents of which is outlined in the Tantras. Invoking precisely one of the same formulaic tropes one finds on copper plates and śīlaśāsanas issued at the establishment of an everlasting land grant, the one who violates the enjoined statute is said to be consigned to roast in hell (nāraka pacyate).

Expanding our perception to take into account the verses that immediately precede this discussion reveals that the rejection of caste consciousness, at least in regard to fellow initiates, and the partial suspension of normative purity codes prescribed by the Bhairavasiddhānta was not some clandestine subaltern practice enacted by people furtively seeking to escape censure, but was instead a site-specific norm that was effectively written into the zoning laws of the medieval world.

The disciple should worship the guru according to proper procedure, with all the available resources. The superintending authority of the country should offer the guru 100 villages and a sāmanta feudal vassal should offer half of that. Someone who has use of 100 villages should offer five villages and someone who has use of 20 should offer one. Someone who has use of a village should offer a field, and someone who has use of a field should offer 20 [units of currency or his shares of his crop]. By whatever thing the guru might become satisfied, he should offer all of that. In this way, the one who is devoid of fraud with regard to [the extent of] his wealth becomes free from debt.⁴⁹ [[P379]]

Assuming we are to take the Svacchanda Tantra’s representation of the social domain in which initiates in the Bhairava Siddhānta were operative as descriptive as opposed to aspirational, the communities such practices engendered and the resources they would have consumed were more closely comparable to that of a regional polity than to a village. Succinctly, we are talking large numbers of people with a “deviant” habitus occupying large tracts of land, who are not only openly recognized by regional and transregional authorities but are actively being supplicated by them.

Our only surviving commentarial work on the Svacchanda Tantra was composed by the eleventh- to twelfth-century Trika Śaiva exegete Kṣemarāja, who quite apart from his own theological agenda is a careful and informed reader of Tantric scripture, and the insights he offers in his reading of these passages⁵⁰ regarding the theology of donorship and their relation to initiation are worth pausing to ponder.⁵¹ Invoking the nyāya of the cake on the stick (daṇḍāpūpikanyāya), medieval India’s equivalent of a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, Kṣemarāja tells us that at the time of his initiation, by his guru, “a student possessing such wealth is perfected to be without greed.” Through surrendering his wealth, the new disciple surrenders his pride, which, from Kṣemarāja’s perspective, is a necessary component in becoming able to generate the embodiment of the supreme reality. At the moment when the flower that the new disciple will cast into the maṇḍala is handed to him by the guru, we are [[P380]] told, the guru internally forms the following intention: “let there not be any command (given) that is devoid of a donation from the student (dakṣiṇā).” In a spirit somewhat akin to progressive taxation, we are told, that “at that time, the student who is devoid of fraud with regard to money, whatever he reaps, let him give that. Thus, by the guru who is completely free from desire, it should be enacted in this way. Then he should be made to listen to the samayas in the Tantra that has come forth from Bhairava.” In short, what is being prescribed is that initiation comes with a deliberately exacting cost and entails the confiscation, for use by the community into which one is entering, of a good portion of the material acquisition that had taken place in one’s former life. Once this surrender has taken place, the new initiate is then introduced into the new community’s specific laws, once again called samaya, that will from here on in govern his existence. In its fifth chapter, the Svacchanda offers a brief glimpse of a few of these regulations.

He should not do violence to the property of the god, which in the siddhānta is administered in a range of ways. He should not eat the guru’s food that is not given to him, O Goddess.

The ones who observe the conduct (sācāra) should not cause those who are without the conduct (nirācāra) and bear the signs to be disgusted by wine, meat, fish and other things. Feeding the caru always [to the sādhakas], he worships the guru and he should never touch the implements for worship with his foot, O Mahādevī. He should be constantly thinking about the saṃhitā and he should make the bhaktas listen the recitation [of the samaya]. One should not omit the daily ritual with the ritual at the junctures, O beautiful faced one. He should not practice the procedure from the śāstra in front of non-initiates. Always intent on meditation and japa he should worship the god at the three junctures always. Out of a desire for the fruits of both aims, he should cause the samayas to be protected.⁵² [[P381]]

Kṣemarāja in his analysis suggests that the samaya regulations outlined in these verses—entailing a mix of what we would think of as property law, ritual actions, and purity codes—are subdivided between four categories of initiates, with the first verse directed at the basic samayin, the middle ones pertaining to various kinds of vīras and sādhakas who engage in specific transgressive sādhanās involving the consumption of impure substances, and the last pertaining to the guru or those authorized by the guru to act in his stead as theo-juridical authorities. On the basis of other texts available to us from related traditions, what is presented here are most likely just some sample examples of the relevant regulations, and not the complete samaya itself.

A much more substantial presentation embodying both the scope and colorful character of Tantric law and the disciplinary procedures it entailed occurs in the long chapter on ritual expiation (prāyaścitta) contained in the Piṅgalāmata, a text largely dedicated to presenting the dharma of artisan (śilpins) initiates, but that in these chapters frequently takes as its subject in more general terms the sort of Śākta ritual initiate adept who is eligible to sport with Yoginīs. As counterintuitive as it might seem, within both normative Brāhmaṇical and “Tantric” law, prāyaścitta, often entailing extended fasts combined with mantra repetition, functioned at once as the premiere disciplinary regime, supplementing monetary fines and corporal punishment, as well as modes of criminal rehabilitation through which those guilty of crimes and transgressions were able to rejoin their community in good standing. As we saw earlier, in Bṛhaspati’s discussion of deśācāra, the delineation of whether a particular action requires prāyaścitta on the part of a particular kind of social agent is precisely how the legal tradition labels a specific action as a crime when it is undertaken by a specific kind of person under particular circumstances. Comprised of the sort of rules that R. Sathyanarayanan and Dominic [[P382]] Goodall have familiarized us with in the former’s edition and translation (2015) of the dualistic Śaiva Siddhānta’s Prāyaścittasamuccaya, as well as some other exceptionally eccentric ordinances, the Piṅgalāmata’s treatment of law, especially when we take into account what spills over into other chapters of the text, is extensive and will have to be treated more comprehensively on another occasion.

For the moment, we will have to make do with a taste of the range of regulations it presents, as well as its unusually detailed account of the due process associated with executing and completing a ritual expiation.

If while reciting [mantras, the initiate] drops his japamālā, he must recite 1,000 [expiatory mantras]. If the sādhaka is overcome by sleep and falls on the ground [in the middle of ritual] he must repeat half a lakh [of expiatory mantras]. [If this lapse is not intentional] he should repeat 1,000. . . . If his foot should touch the god or the guru and likewise the śāstra, then half a lakh is to be recited. If one touches the god, the guru, or the śāstra with one’s foot out of intoxication, one must recite 10,000 but if out of desire a million. . . . If the āgama text is injured or a book in the tradition becomes worn out or is covered in ghee, having offered oblation into the agnikuṇḍa, one should repeat a hundred of the vidyā mantra. . . . In regard to the occurrence of the striking of a four-footed animal, you have to say the mantra a certain number of times. If this results in killing [the animal] you have to say it 100 times.

Having struck a twice born who is not enjoying himself with a mantra that causes desire.⁵³. . . . one should repeat [the expiatory mantra] a thousand times. Having killed the paśu (non-initiate) for the sake of the sacrifice [or a paśu] who is a defiler of the practice of the Tantra; there is always no impurity in regard to those two killings. . . . Ptherwise, having killed men out of delight [in regard to] a Jain, one with an upward liṅga, or people with Vaiṣṇava signifiers, there is no difference. . . . You must recite 10,000 [expiatory mantras]. If you kill someone who is a reviler of Śiva, the fire, or the guru, you do not partake of any fault.

However, from the transgression of the shadow of the one bearing a vow of Śiva, it (the punishment) would be a hundredfold. If you kill one of them unintentionally, you must recite 50,000 mantras. If you intentionally kill [such a person], you must recite a million, or 10,000 if this takes place during because of a quarrel. . . .

However, regarding the vilifying of vīras or the defiling of yoginīs, the beating of [[P383]] human women, or reviling the Śiva gnosis, you must recite 30,000 and if he does not recite it, he partakes of an obstacle. If you revile the substances which are established in a circle of Śākta adepts (vīracakra), if this happens at the time of a quarrel, then with a thousand repetitions one becomes sanctioned as pure (śūci). Otherwise, the food (of the vīras) has to be eaten with the agreement of the vīras.⁵⁴

What to us would seem to be serious crimes as opposed to ritual missteps here in Tantric law are understood to represent effectively the very same kind of offense, to be judged only on the basis of the severity of the infraction. In contrast to this divergent conceptualization to what constitutes a crime, as is the case in much of American criminal law, the most important mitigating factor is the intentionality of the offender and circumstances under which the offense takes place. Consistently, transgressions committed accidentally—in a state of mental or emotional intoxication (pramāda), in the middle of a fight, and also in the service of accomplishing specifically ritual aims—are treated much less harshly than crimes that are deliberately committed. Much as we find today in modern India, albeit perhaps contingent on different historical circumstances, offending the religious sensibilities of specific communities by ridiculing their practices and values amounts to a form of violation judged as severely as many violent offenses.⁵⁵

At once the most horrific and intriguing dimension of the portion of the code of law [[P384]] under examination is the way in which it gives open sanction to many types of murder. Killing certain classes of people, under certain circumstances simply ceases to be a crime. As appalling as this may be to the modern reader, at the same time it is difficult to think of a more vivid and irrefutable representation of radical legal pluralism, in which the very notion of what constitutes an unforgiveable offense that the state must address through banishment or corporal punishment has been reframed in light of a differentiated application of meta rules emerging from the dharma of a specific location and community.

Regardless of the nature of the transgression committed, however, assuming it is the sort of activity one can atone for, the denouement of a period of ritual expiation would have looked the roughly the same. The reformed criminal presents himself before a board comprised of Tantric adepts wielding juridical authority, at the head of which sits the guru. After providing proof that he has performed his expiation, he then attends to and appeases the board. Assuming his plea is accepted, as mark of his re-inclusion in the community, to demonstrate commensality, if he has had the proper Śākta initiations he consumes the vīradravya, a concoction composed of a mixture of liquors, fish, meat and wine, and perhaps inflected with the five products of the human. Apart from the contents of the substances being consumed, which in Dharmaśāstra would be limited to the five products of the cow, the entire process enacted during this review is effectively identical with procedures for the reviewing and restoration of purity, culminating in a communal meal, that a Brāhmaṇical sabhā of Dharmaśāstrins would have enacted on a regular basis well into the twentieth century. This is to say that, though the content of the norms being adhered to and upheld to are radically divergent, the Tantric guru and his “corporate” council settle disputes, offer deliberations over contested matters, issue binding decisions (nirṇaya), and define and enforce in-group-out- [[P385]] group boundaries in precisely the same formal juridical idiom as would any other Indic legal authority.

In a pure place, without people it is to be recited such that it [the expiation mantra set] is fulfilled. Once the japa is finished he should offer the japa to them [the council].⁵⁶ One has to feed them and give to them, the compilation of substances known of as vīra. Otherwise, if there is no bhojana, then he should not be one who feeds them [the council], even if there is a recitation scheduled. On the occasion of the determination of the purification by the guru (and the council) for consumption you have to offer him foot water (prāśana) and flowers, betel nut, and sandalwood paste for wearing and for smearing.

The knowers of mantra, according to their capacity, having made the determination [regarding whether or not the expiation is sufficient] it has to be accepted. When the prāyaścitta has been executed (sucīrṇe), he [the formerly guilty party] should abide without obstruction [from members of the community].⁵⁷

Depending on the nature of the offense in question, another option for atonement is to wait for the yearly festival occasion called the pavitrārohana, as during this time the community is said to experience a sort of karmic debt jubilee as gathering collectivity, they are absolved of their sins. As the Piṅgalāmata reveals, it is during this same occasion that Tantric samayins renew their samaya vows, a process that it seems involves the recitation of “the samaya” before the deity presumably inside the temple. In doing so, as we have begun to see, the Tantric adept at once recommits to chosen mode of religious praxis and reinscribes his or herself as a special type of juridical subject who is governed by norms that fall outside of jurisdiction of varṇāśramadharma and those who administer it.

Becoming situated in front of the deity, the discerning cumbaka, along with his own disciples, their assistants, and the vīras, or [if that is not possible] with pious people, the samaya must be recited by them before the god, in an easeful manner. A sin that [[P386]] persists for eight months or one year, whether it pertains to the body, mind, or inner state, whatever happened before that becomes purified. And that transgression of the conduct of the samaya is not to be done again. . . . one should proceed in accordance with the ācāra from the śāstra and in accordance with the speech of the guru.⁵⁸

Governing Metaphor? Or Just Plain Old Governing?

In the fifteen years since Ronald Davidson published Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement,⁵⁹ despite methodological advances in nearly every other arena, the study of Tantra in the American academy has yet to produce a convincing treatment of the social texture of Tantric life and its place within the larger cultural world of medieval India. In a large part, this state of affairs is but an extension of the sad reality that, apart from the study of the Tamil south, in comparison with the historiography surrounding any other heavily entextualized society in the premodern world, and quite in contrast with the situation regarding the study of early modern Indian religions and culture, the literature on the Indic Medieval languishes in an impoverished state. At the purely documentary level, outside the specialized domains of aesthetics, architecture, and ars erotica, we have not provided informed answers to the most basic questions about the dynamics of social life, nor have we offered textured accounts of specific historical moments. Instead, much our scholarship has retreated into a rarefied fog of sweeping theoretical claims grafted in an ungainly fashion on top of second-hand structuralist social analysis. On the whole, as is the case with Davidson, whose notion of sāmanta feudalism he acquires from B. Chattopadhayaya, these social frameworks are borrowed wholesale from Indian scholars with Marxist commitments. While deeply well [[P387]] read in their canons and capable of considerable insights in regards the documentary record, the training and institutional location of these scholars renders them singularly unsuited for thinking about religion in India in a nuanced manner.

Shorn of more sophisticated and elegant verbiage, offering a Marxist materialism already deemed crude in the 1960’s, in essence these models claim that religion as ideology entails nothing more than the projection of real-world social structures and power dynamics into a realm of fantasy. In that domain of enforced self-deception, at best, social actors can manipulate and attempt to subvert the semiotic framework that keeps them in bondage. When one compares such a working framework with the rich representations that have become commonplace to the study of the social and intellectual history of the western Medieval since the 1980’s, in which sophisticated thinking about the multifaceted work enacted by religious texts and the religious actors who composed and disseminated them have become commonplace, the limitations of our literature are rendered palpable.

At the conclusion of his seminal chapter, “The Victory of Esotericism and the Imperial Metaphor,” Davidson speaks of the adoption of Esoteric Buddhism as stemming from “the palpable sense of institutional duress” produced by “the rise of militant Śaivism and its capacity to appropriate patronage.” It was this dynamic, he suggests that led Institutional Buddhism to contract “into the regions of strength and into edifices mimicking feudally grounded fortresses, which mirrored in legal behavior the activities of the kings they cultivated.” In short, supposedly, it was the defensive position adopted by a tradition in decline that engendered the esoteric tradition emulating “in ritual form and ideological substance the most potent narrative of the period-becoming the Supreme ruler of a circumscribed spiritual state. . . . they imitated the structures and rites of those who were the first Lords of the [[P388]] Maṇḍalas, the petty lords and regional rulers.”⁶⁰ Ironically, shorn of its emotionally charged language and unwarranted judgments, what Davidson offers us here is probably the most accurate account in our literature of the bare facts of a substantial dimension of Tantric social life. As we have seen, the social space in which many communities of Tantric adepts situated themselves under the oversight of an empowered preceptor had for its archetype the establishment of a fortress. The institutional work carried out by these social agents was in fact enacted in the same medium and in the same tropological register that was deployed by imperial powers and their sāmanta vassals, up to and including, as we have documented exhaustively, the same sort of “legal behavior.”

Where Davidson’s ideological commitments lead him astray is in viewing these dynamics as mere copies of a fundamentally more real “original.” In fact, what our documentary record seems to suggest is that Tantric social agents frequently spoke and acted in the shared medieval idiom of the powerful precisely because they, or the head of their lineage, wielded, albeit often within more circumscribed spaces, the same type of powers as kings and their networks of vassals. Acting from within this socially prescribed role was a legal and practical necessity for rendering themselves legible to the state and other such institutions. Along similar lines, the many homologies between the contents of scripture and the strictures “imposed” by society demand to be read in terms of the evidentiary role that scriptures played in offering documentation of a community’s values, practices, and privileges in a manner that would be admissible in a court room. And the fact that the very same social processes were playing out among the ascendant “militant Śaivas” renders it implausible that the social life of the Tantric movements can be accounted for as the flailing final efforts at adaptive survival enacted by a [[P389]] community in decline. In this light, the present chapter—with its attempts at a textured and contextual close reading of the documentary record and prescriptive emic accounts, placed into direct dialogue with the Tantric scriptural canon—offers a preliminary effort to dialogue Tantra and law in the Medieval Deccan, documenting the dynamics of social and juridical institutionalization that animated Indic medieval social spaces.

Situating Difference: The Differential Application of the Law and the Śivadharmavivaraṇa

In much the same way that we have a tendency to become more diligent about backing up our hard drives after experiencing catastrophic data loss, are more overt in our efforts at home organization after something significant goes missing, and are more inclined to write down our memoirs when the environments they set out to represent have become mere memory and life is drawing to a close, societies tend to become invested in rendering explicit and entextualizing their institutional memories following experiences of crisis and rupture. It is thus probably not an accident that the period following the decline of the Gupta-Vākāṭaka Empire witnessed a far greater investiture in producing śāstric prescriptive directions codifying transactional realities, the very body of literature we have been exploring over the past two chapters. And yet, the documentary materials generated in this post-imperial moment do not merely reflect an attempt to preserve the social logic of an empire in decline; rather, this new body of discourse seems to have been largely unrelated in its content and form to Gupta-Vākāṭaka governmentality.⁶¹ To extend our earlier metaphor, this new irruption of discourse was not [[P390]] simply an attempt to recover as much as one could recollect of the contents lost to the societal equivalent of a harrowing encounter with the blue screen of death, but rather provided the opportunity for a fundamental assessment enabling something radically different to emerge. And as we will see in the remainder of this section, this moment of rupture, and the discourse that emerged in its wake, is deeply intertwined with the story of the rise of the Śaiva Age.

As Hans Bakker has convincingly argued, the political realignments of fifth and sixth centuries of the Common Era that were to so fundamentally transform the social and religious life of the subcontinent—making possible the early medieval life-worlds that are the focus of this study—stemmed not from cultural stagnation, but from transregional political disruption and invasion.⁶² Within a century, two culturally and politically distinct communities of [[P391]] nomadic warrior clans from the central Asian steppes—the Kidara Huns and the Alkhan Huns—seized control of Indo-Bactria and Greater Gandhāra and with it the western gate into the subcontinent that had formed an integral part of land-based pan-Eurasian trade routes heading west. Instead of simply setting down roots, both newly minted Hun dynastic powers then proceeded to try to conquer the subcontinent for themselves, with lingering repercussions to which we would do well to attend, for they present the core conditions of possibility for the emergence of the early medieval realities we will take as our focus from hereon in.

To be blunt, the Huns mattered because their influence (both directly and indirectly) served as a multidimensional catalyst⁶³ for widescale social and political transformations and created spaces for the widespread establishing of new models of politics and modes of institutional culture that impacted nearly every region of the subcontinent. On the grossest material level, their most obvious impact—felt most acutely throughout northern India— begins with the well attested⁶⁴ tendency of these communities when waging war to lay ruin to the countryside and cities in the regions (in this case Gandhāra, northwest India, the Indo- [[P392]] Gangetic Plain, much of Gujarat and portions of Madhya Pradesh) where they had recently become active. Precisely because they tended to be bound to their rivals by elaborate ties of intermarriage and thus were perhaps due to inherit the estates of their enemies should circumstances align, Indic political actors typically prioritized attacking the armies of their opponents over waging all-out war in a more comprehensive manner. In contrast, much like other related nomadic communities that would ride out from central Asia over the centuries and enter the rest of Eurasia, lacking such incentivization, Hunic tribes targeted the subcontinent’s cities, the agricultural hinterlands on which they were dependent, along with their infrastructure. Strangers in a strange land with no local vested interests, at least upon arrival, they had little compunction about pillaging and burning. For Indic society, such an approach was particularly perilous, given that, virtually every element of a Gupta era city was made of perishable and highly flammable material—including each town and city’s halls of records. Thus, from the perspective of the societies of the subcontinent, even an ultimately “successful” warding off of a Hun incursion would have amounted to a minor catastrophe, for it entailed substantive damage to existing infrastructure as well as widespread loss of documentary records and institutional memory.

Once they were established as rulers of the eastern portion of the Persian Empire and the masters of greater Gandhāra, the first wave—comprised of the Kidara Huns—abandoned such destructive behavior and rapidly assumed the mantle of inheritors of the Kuṣāṇa civilization they had displaced. As our documentary records make plain, the Kidaras worked scrupulously to maintain the preexisting religious and economic landscape of the region, which were highly dependent on patterns of elite patronage and transregional trade. Towards this end, they took pains to ensure that the Silk Road (which at this time had yet to be impacted by the [[P393]] other more infamous Hun incursions of Atila further to the north and west that would prove so pivotal to destabilizing Rome) remained open. Travelers and traders from other regions—such as the Chinese scholar-diplomat Fa-hsien (399–414 CE) who offers our only eyewitness account of the Kidarite rule and was quite impressed by cosmopolitan Kidarite society⁶⁵— could continue to move between the eastern Silk Road into Gandhāra, and the subcontinent and then on to greater Bactria, Persian Iran, and into the Roman Empire unimpeded, assuming they provided the right credentials in the form of the usual seals and letters of introduction issued by powerful people.

In contrast, their successors, the Alkhan Huns (who take Gandhāra sometime around 460 CE), embodied a different ethos and proved much less committed to investing the time and resources necessary for ensuring either social or economic continuity. When another Chinese scholar-pilgrim, Song Yun⁶⁶ arrived at the Gandhāran court of the Alkhan Huns enroute to India in the year 519 CE, he moved through a landscape in which, with the passing of less than a century, the Buddhist institutional cultures that were his primary point of focus had become demographically hollowed out, their former affluence now reflected only in the radiant material culture—such as gems and precious metals—still incorporated into religious centers built by prior generations. As an ambassador of the Chinese emperor, Sung Yun was ultimately granted an audience, around 520 CE, with the Alkhan Hun ruler, Mihirakula. In our only eyewitness account of this formidable figure and his court, Mihirakula is characterized as [[P394]] a war lord, prone to massacres, who lives among his army.⁶⁷ More specifically, in Sung Yun’s representation, the Hun leader is not inclined to recognize the normal transregional rules of diplomacy or the deference due to other sovereigns, including the automatic validity of the letters of introduction and seals of passage that were integral to regulating trans-Asian trade. Though Mihirakula does not harm or directly threaten his guest, he sets out to dissuade him from entering the subcontinent, which he represents as a dangerous and unstable place for travelers. When this effort fails, after belittling his credentials, Mihirakula curtails Sung Yun from heading south into the subcontinent, bringing his travel to an end even before he can enter India. In other words, though our archival evidence is hardly robust—especially when we take [[P395]] into account parallel stories from Armenia and Sogdia, where we also see the same dynamic of the sudden termination of the standing conventions that made transregional commerce possible—there is reason to believe that starting sometime in the 490’s through 530 CE, while the Alkhan Huns maintained control in Gandhāra and the Punjab and much of Gujarat, access to what remained of the western Silk Road was restricted or even closed off.

Contemporary numismatic and material cultural evidence⁶⁸ suggest the Alkhan Huns were not actively advocating a revolution in religious values that sought to supplant Indic worldviews. Still less were they intent upon bringing a multifaceted many-century old civilizational paradigm to an end. Even so, we have some substantive, and much circumstantial, evidence that as the Alkhan Hun armies seized control of Gandhāra the Taxila region, and Punjab and began to make their way through western Indo-Gangetic Plain down into the middle of the subcontinent, they inflected substantial damage (directly and indirectly) upon a network of prominent cities, including Taxila (whose collapse the archeologist John Wheeler⁶⁹ has famously attributed to Mihirakula), Kapiśa, Kauśāmbi (the only place we can [[P396]] verify was deliberately burned to the ground), Mathurā, Pāṭalipūtra (purportedly levelled), and possibly Ujjain. Nearly all these sites had been situated along the multipronged central trade route that had connected India to the Persianate world and the West beyond since the era of the Indo-Greeks. The economic and cultural life of these places had developed in symbiotic dependence on the until recently unbroken flow of people and goods back and forth along these networks.⁷⁰ Most of these locales also played substantive roles in the cosmopolitan and substantively Buddhist imaginaries of prior centuries.

Whether on account of the direct impact of war or simply due to the incipient economic collapse reflected in the transregional termination of substantive patronage at a range of sites, many of these cities would never recover. For while the Alkhan Huns seem mostly likely to have merely aimed at appropriating the central vectors on these trade routes and the wealth that flowed through them to their benefit of their dynasty, the end result of forty years of disruption all along the northwestern route into the subcontinent—following in the wake of the wider political realignment to which we are about to attend—was the permanent atrophying of these particular networks of circulation as the preferred vehicles for the transfer of goods, persons, and cultural practices. In the long run, as we saw in the introduction, this did not result in an overall lasting contraction of transregional trade and travel. In its place, what we see [[P397]] instead is the rerouting of economic and socio-cultural flows into new networks centered in other regions to the benefit of new social agents with their own cultural and political alliances as well as material and ideological interests.

Above and beyond the direct material impact of the invasions themselves, the Alkhan Hun occupation of much of northern India is best understood as the culminating event in the seismic shift in transregional political economy that ensued throughout western Eurasia as the Western Roman Empire first effectively went bankrupt (sometime in the 450’s) and then collapsed (ca. 476 CE). As Kasper Grønlund Evers has masterfully demonstrated in his compelling monograph Worlds Apart Trading Together: The Organisation of Long-Distance Trade between Rome and India in Antiquity (2017), there is ample evidence from both documentary and material cultural sources located on three continents that a robust flow of Indian merchants and Indian trade goods continued to form an integral dimension of the transregional Roman economy throughout most of the fifth century.⁷¹ As Grønlund Evers shows us, from around the first century of the Common Era the most acute demand for Indian luxury goods had in fact been situated in the major capital cities of the western Roman empire, especially Rome itself. Thus, albeit in perhaps exaggerated manner, Pliny the Elder, writing around the commencement of the formation of this cultural and economic compact on which he was himself none too keen famously laments that “in no year does India drain our empire of less than fifty million sesterces, giving back her own wares in exchange, which are sold among us at fully one hundred times their prime cost. . . . At the very lowest computation India, the Seres, and the Arabian Peninsula withdraw from our empire one hundred millions of [[P398]] sesterces every year—so dearly do we pay for our luxury and our women.”⁷² Should we take his claims at face value, and Pliny seems to have had unprecedented access to the keepers of the imperial ledgers, fully half of the Roman demand for luxury goods—particularly ivory, fine silk and cloth, gems and gold—was being met by Indians. This is without taking into account South Asian economic contributions to less elite parts of the imperial economy, such as pepper, which was regularly consumed by Roman citizens. Building on recent scholarship that has rejected older models that treated Roman-Indian trade as a temporary fad that exhausted itself by the third century, Grønlund Evers shows us that not only was such cultural and economic exchange basically coterminous with the history of the western Roman Empire, but indeed, albeit in a diminished form, it seems to persist into the beginning of the sixth century of the Common Era, with the port cities and trade centers located enroute to what were originally final destinations in western Roman territory now being repurposed as the primary markets for Indian luxury goods.

Then, suddenly and abruptly, from Egypt, to Yemen to Palmyra at about the very same moment at the commencement of the sixth century, all of evidence of Indian trade and Indian merchants travelling along the roads—metaphorical and otherwise—that Rome had built suddenly disappear from the archaeological record. Though Grønlund Evers does not draw this connection, focusing instead on the role played by the Visgoths and Vandals in disrupting regions further to the northwest, the timing aligns almost perfectly with the Alkhan Hun appropriation of the eastern portions of the Persian Empire, which was effectively closed to land-based trade, their annexation of greater Gandhāra, and their invasions of the subcontinent, including the seizing of key ports on the northwest Indian coast line. Distilled down to the [[P399]] essentials, over the course of a single century, the political and economic elites of the subcontinent had their primary paradigm for relating to the world outside their domain—which was culturally and aesthetically dialogical with Indo-Greek imaginaries and economically inseparable from a model of production in which highly skilled artisans crafted a high volume of luxury goods that catered to the taste of foreign markets before being transferred through the hands of multiethnic transregionalized mercantile transport networks—rendered obsolete. Throw in, over the course of a few generations, several rounds of semi-nomadic invaders intent upon laying waste, either to the landscape where you live or the most likely destination for the products of your labor now that foreign markets have closed, and wide ranging political and cultural realignment begins to seem virtually inevitable. For every type of cultural and institutional space where some combination of royal patronage and transregional trade was integral to its operation, the transition is catastrophic. The impact is felt acutely not merely among all but the most well-funded Buddhist monastic complexes dedicated to housing many hundreds of monks, but in regard to monument-centric religious cultures in general, whether it is dedicated to Yakṣas, Nāgas, or the early Pañcarātra,⁷³ all of which precipitously decline in the material record at this very moment. Instead, resources were redirected, towards distinctive often more inland geographies increasingly governed by largely [[P400]] unrelated military labor markets and beholden to a demographically distinctive subsets of the population whose fate was not as deeply intertwined with the politics of Eurasia. This newly emergent political and cultural economy fostered the increased circulation of what was to become the dominant religious and cultural paradigm of the early medieval on the subcontinent and in Southeast Asia. This, then, is the world of the Śaiva Age.

Again, it helps to take in the bigger picture. Through drawing on archaeological and material cultural evidence, well as texts in a range of languages, Grønlund Evers presents us with a series of good and network specific micro-studies—focusing respectively on carved furniture and ivory, gems, pepper, and cloth on the one hand and the nautical labor pools and guild structures that organized both Roman and Indian production and distribution on the other. Perhaps most saliently for our purposes, in each case he seeks to spatialize the many sites of production and reception of these trade goods along with the routes by which they traveled to their intended destinations. Beyond the vastness of the scale of economy that is reflected in these archives, what is immediately apparent is the close alignment between the names of the main centers of production for luxury goods originally destined for western markets—sites like (in Maharashtra) Ter, Nevasa, Kolhapur, and Nasik, (in Madhya Pradesh) Ujjain and Vidiśa, (in Andhra) Amaravat and Nagarjunakonda, (on the Indo-Gangetic Plain) Kauśāmbī and Mathurā, (in Gujarat) Hathab and Barygaza, (in Kerala and Tamil Nadu) Pattanam/Muziris, Vellarai, and Arikamedu—and the canon of renowned cosmopolitan Indian cities of the classical era that faded into irrelevance (or at least for a time became diminished) during the early medieval period.

Indeed, without recognizing the historical conditions of possibility that made the dynamics we were exploring possible, we have already told one such story. Recall if you will [[P401]] in the opening chapter our exploration of the collectivity (śreṇī) of śilpin weavers of Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh, who dwelt in their own city and were honored by kings as if they were his own sons. In chapter one, we were primarily interested in this community as offering concrete examples of collective action taken by a “corporate unit,” which in this case involved the construction and renovation of a temple to the god of the Sun, as well as the counterintuitive representation of a community of what are ostensibly “Śūdras” who nonetheless are unproblematically embodying professional identities spanning the full spectrum of varṇa and jāti associations, including the learned and sacerdotal roles we have typically presumed are a Brāhmaṇical prerogative. But, when we attend to the wider cultural and political arena in which these figures and their successors were active, a more cohesive narrative begins to emerge.

The ancestors of these highly skilled and politically savvy śilpins had been inhabitants of the port city that the Romans and Greeks had called Barygaza (lit., “the deep treasure”), which the classical Sanskrit sources called Lāṭa, and which contemporary scholarship has identified as the Gujarati city now called Broach, which is situated at the place where the Narmada River merges with the gulf of Khambiat which runs out into the Arabian Sea. As the Roman demand for the high-end cloth and silk these artisans produced declines in the fifth century, sometime around 440 CE these śreṇīs travelled north and inland into Madhya Pradesh seeking to resituate themselves as part of a political and economic environment that was not so heavily dependent on translocalized circumstances outside of their control.⁷⁴ At that time, the guild seems to have built a temple dedicated to the sun god. For reasons unknown, but quite [[P402]] plausibly having something to do with the political disruptions in the region, this structure became so heavily damaged that thirty years later, their descendants, who are responsible for the inscription of 476 CE to which we have been attending, find themselves compelled to rebuild this structure from the ground up. The interesting thing is that though that is the end of this inscription it is hardly the end of our story. As Dániel Balogh has conjectured and Elizabeth Cecil and Peter Bisschop have effectively established, the children and grandchildren of the merchant’s collective at Mandsaur and Daśāpurī reinvent themselves as a clan of erudite courtly advisors and administrative managers allied with the descendants of the king who had treated them “as if” they were his own sons.⁷⁵ Rebranded as the “naigama” or mercantile lineage, this very same community, working hand in hand with the Aulikara ruler Prakāśavarman, plays a pivotal role in organizing the political and military coalition that expels the Alkhan Huns from the Indian subcontinent after bringing a much humbled Mihirakula to his knees in 530 CE, an event commemorated at Rīsthal a mere fifteen miles from the site of the śreṇī collective’s temple. As Cecil has demonstrated in a series of insightful studies of regional material culture grounded in careful fieldwork conducted in and around Mandsaur, an integral dimension of this reshuffling of identities and institutional affiliations, in which the naigamas seemed to have been major players, is that a cultural milieu that in the fifth century had largely embraced an Indo-Greek visual idiom and abounded in a range of discrete traditions, such as sun worshippers of various undefinable sorts, recasts itself as instantiating in stone—which is our only point of access for this particular life-world—an eclectic but unmistakably Śaiva worldview. [[P403]]

This moment of reorganization of trade relations was by no means a local phenomenon, in which the subcontinent condemned itself to insularity, but rather held far-reaching implications for trans-Asian interreligious relations. And yet, we have reason to reevaluate what the documentary records of this moment of rupture suggest regarding substantive shifts in the religious landscape of the South Asian subcontinent. Among the many discursive shifts inadvertently reflected in the accounts of Chinese and Korean travelers to the Indian subcontinent produced between the fourth and eighth century, which scholarship have tended to treat as offering more “objective” representations of Indic political and social realities, one often overlooked feature is the unmistakable awareness reflected in these documents of the growing ubiquity from the sixth century onward of “non-Buddhist” social agents whose bodies are entirely smeared with ash. Indeed, the evidence for such developments emerges from the accounts of Chinese and other East Asian pilgrims travelling within India in a far more coherent and well substantiated fashion than does the more familiar metanarrative we have tended to attribute to this archive—mostly on the basis of privileging Hsuan-tsang’s Great Tang Records of the Western Regions while disregarding other sources⁷⁶—that they primarily document inexorable Buddhist decline.⁷⁷ [[P404]]

To the contrary, as Tansen Sen has demonstrated, Hsuan-tsang’s self-appointed embassy to the court of Harṣavardhana represents not the end but the beginning of a new era in which there is a radical expansion of Indian trade and cultural exchange with China that continues into the twelfth century.⁷⁸ As Sen shows, on the basis of extensive records and reports preserved in Chinese, what replaced the westward oriented Indo-Greek aligned Indian social and political model was not economic provincialization but effectively what amounted to a pluralization of Indian trade and political relations. Instead of everything traveling across shared Roman infrastructure aligned with Roman “best practices,” distinctive regions of the world were now connected to the subcontinent by their own discrete and regionally inflected networks of circulation, focused, for example, on the Arabian ocean, on Southeast Asia, or on China and its neighbors. Taken in aggregate, this new economy either equaled or surpassed in its volume of trade and rate of exchange the older-Roman centric economic model. What it lacked was the former’s distinctive orientation toward privileging the production and consumption of specialized luxury goods aesthetically and materially attuned to foreign tastes produced by expert artisans. Indeed, within the new paradigm, even a single region—such as China—sought out and consumed different sorts of “made in India” goods and services from distinctive networks, such that its exchanges with emphatically Buddhist social agents, especially from the northeastern portion of the subcontinent, were heavily inflected by shared investments in Buddhist literary imaginaries and values while contemporary involvement with non-Buddhist social networks, such as those of the Pallavas or the largely Śaiva Cōḻa kings of Tamil Nadu, entailed a different portfolio of trade goods and different terms of social engagement. [[P405]]

Śaivas, it should be emphasized, were not themselves “new.” Traces of their existence abound in material culture from the turn of the millennium, to say nothing of the suspiciously Śaiva sounding names of a myriad otherwise underspecified social agents preserved in the documentary records. Indeed, our evidence for the institutionalization of Śaiva spaces predates the Gupta Empire itself, and in fact is featured prominently in our earliest documentary record where that dynasty emerges. But whereas in earlier eras we had may have seen the participation of some elite Śaiva social agents, especially within the Madhyadeśa and the Deccan within broader paradigms of courtly culture, what is new and different is that in a staggering sea- change in values, by 530 CE virtually all of the political agents involved in the second Hunic wars had adopted Śaiva commitments, including, (at least on paper) just before his defeat, the Alkhan Hun Mihirakula himself. By the next century, as Alexis Sanderson has exhaustively documented, nearly every important dynastic power on the subcontinent will have at least nominally adopted some Śaiva commitments. Just as significantly such developments in the political sphere emerge hand in hand with the sudden proliferation of material culture and built spaces executed in more durable media—such as stone and metal—that are the product of an emergent class of skilled artisans now displaying Śaiva sensibilities. Thus, for the first time in our historical record, we possess the interpretive resources for engaging in a substantive reconstruction, informed by emic modes of understanding, of the world that soon emerges.

In this regard, it is worth emphasizing that we know almost nothing about the institutional cultures, modes of self-understanding, and social norms that had animated early Śaiva communities. Indeed, it is seldom recognized that this is in fact true when it comes to most of the lived realities of the subcontinent in the early first millennium that are neither śramaṇa, Śrauta, or slices of life drawn from elite courtly culture. Whereas the Jains and [[P406]] Buddhists left us not only with multilingual works of philosophy and theology but also highly detailed and internally diversified entextualized presentations of the prescriptions governing lay and monastic life as well as the procedures for worship, when it comes to the myriad of other traditions that would come to retroactively redescribed either as belonging to Hinduism or as “folk” traditions in subsequent centuries, we neither have access to their primary traditions of revelation, nor their internal discourses reflecting on various modes of ritual and social decorum as they pertained to different gradations of social agents within and adjacent to the tradition. Apart from a handful of orphan works, such as the Pāśupata Sūtra and its single commentary⁷⁹—probably unrepresentative survivors of much broader conversations whose contours we can only glean—we are left to reconstruct these pre-Gupta (c. 100–300 CE) and Gupta era (c. 300–500 CE) religious life-worlds, as best as we can, on the basis of the second order representations typically found in other people’s narrative literature, as well as through inferences drawn from isolated portions of material culture, usually preserved divorced from a wider context. It is almost certainly no accident that an immense multidimensional corpus emerging from other types of communities enters into our view at almost precisely the same moment that there comes into existence a robust cultural technology for the non-oral preservation of institutionalization memory that arrived joined at the hip to a juridical political framework ensuring the protection and preservation of other people’s institutions on their own terms. It is also probably not a coincidence that out of all of the varieties of community- specific “difference” whose textual traditions might have survived as more than mere [[P407]] fragments, what would endure through the next nearly two-thousand years, was the “different” mode of normativity whose value system best aligned with zeitgeist of the age, a collection of traditions reflecting on distinctly “Śaiva” visions of dharma.

Likely a product of the later portion of the sixth century, which is to say of the historical moment that immediately follows the Hun invasion, the Śivadharmaśāstra offers at once the oldest and the most influential comprehensive articulation of a “non-Brāhmaṇa” mode of juridical difference unabashedly informed by its own community-specific values and norms. Serendipitously, it is also the only work of non-Brāhmaṇa dharma literature that comes down to us accompanied by a learned premodern commentary executed in the idiom of śāstra.⁸⁰ Not founded on Tantric knowledge, but in fact constituting a key part of the interpretive context that most of the Tantras presume, the Śivadharmaśāstra effectively underwrote the life of the subcontinents lay Śaivas down into the colonial period in ways we are just beginning to understand.⁸¹ As the only surviving commentary on a work in this corpus, the value of our [[P408]] anonymous Vivaraṇa as providing exempla for the ongoing work to edit and historicize this corpus is self-evident, though as we shall see, such concerns are rather far from the intellectual purview of our commentator.⁸² Even more significantly, however, as we are about to see for [[P409]] ourselves, the Vivaraṇa also demands to be read in its own right as offering a distinctive and interesting theological vision, expanding upon and even diverging from that of the root text, that offers a range of at times rather surprising insights into some of the lived realities of early medieval India. With the recognition that it would have represented but one voice among many, given that the alternatives to our vivaraṇakāra have not survived the centuries, we will take his voice as our guide in reconstructing one robust and persistent approach to “being Śaiva.” Though the root text upon which it comments is invested in codifying a range of early Śaiva ritual practices, the commentator of our Vivaraṇa is most interested in identifying the Śivadharma as a body of law, identifying the type of juridical agent who falls under its jurisdiction, demonstrating the basis for its authoritativeness and efficacy, and theorizing its impact on the communities that operate under its direction, including its practical real-world implications. Bearing in mind that in several places the manuscript is damaged beyond all hope of reconstruction, here is how the author of the Vivaraṇa begins his treatise.

The vivaraṇa of which the subject is concerning the Śivadharmaśāstra commences. What is this thing called the Śivadharmaśāstra? It is the teaching of the dharmas that are enjoined by śivabhakti, just as the śāstra of Manu and so forth are the śāsana of the dharmas enjoined (prayukta) in regard to varṇāśramadharma. And this is why we can consider there is an inclusion of this śāstra within Dharmaśāstra [as a category] among the vidyāsthānas.

Then who are the eligible ones in regard to the sovereign right (prabhāva) for studying the Śivadharmaśāstra? They are those in whom the knowledge of the supremacy of [[P410]] Śiva has arisen (śivādhikya), those very ones, because of the weight of the merit that is accumulated through various births. Being his devotees, they are the ones who are eligible with regard to the study and the practice of the Śivadharmaśāstra.⁸³

With his characteristic terse precision, in just a few lines, our commentator has effectively forced us to rethink the sociology of knowledge in early medieval India. The śivadharma is not imagined as a system of knowledge and rules that complements or supplements Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra. Rather, it offers a complete and systematic substitute for what we think of as normative Hindu law. Indeed, what our commentator baldly proposes is that the canonical category of Dharmaśāstra is in fact far more capacious than has hitherto been supposed. The canon of texts and norms with which modern scholarship is most familiar, from his perspective, merely forms one subdivision within this broader knowledge system. Thus, in precisely the same way that the Mānavadharmaśāstra prescribes adherence to varṇāsramadharma as the foundational guiding behavior of everyone who is subject to the codes of law it inculcates, our author asserts that the śivadharma prescribes its own self- contained binding normativity. The cultivation of the familiar mode of “being Brāhmaṇa”— anchored upon caste identity (varṇa), and the enacting of a sequential graduated life path (āśrama) that is reserved for a subset of twice-born males and then maintained through the scrupulous observation of ritual purity through restraint in eating and social exchanges—has been replaced by a new governing juridical norm labelled, as will soon be explained, śivabhakti. In other words, for the Vivaraṇa’s commentator, varṇāśramadharma and [[P411]] śivabhakti—Śaiva normativity—are not complementary value systems, but offer two different paradigms for being in the world.

To recast our commentator’s interpretive project in the language of the transactional dharma literature with which we began this chapter—which, incidentally, is exactly what our commentator himself will soon set out to do—the Śivadharmaśāstra equates its dharma with the very type of “difference” (bheda) that kings and other political authorities have sworn to preserve and protect. As we are about to see, it does so by asserting that its proposed normativity pertains to a new kind of archetypal juridical agent, namely, the śivabhakta. This agent is then presented as fundamentally “different” from the Brāhmaṇa householder who is the presumed subject of the “other” dharma literature. In a language akin to legal positivism, our text will even proclaim that this irreducible difference is grounded in the distinctive origins of the Śaiva community. In this manner, both the Śivadharmaśāstra itself and the commentary make a selective instrumentalist use of conceptual frameworks already present within the “Brāhmaṇical” dharma literature itself, such as the differentiation of domains, the category of “samaya” as designating a kind of legal alterity, and the rights of social groupings situated in delimited social and institutional spaces that fall outside of the sovereignty of the state to be overseen by their own representative elites and to be judged in accordance with their own entextualized norms. But whereas the Dharmaśāstrins and kings responsible for the articulation and enforcement of these frameworks in all likelihood seem to have viewed their general commitment to an admittedly acute form of “legal pluralism” as an expedient means for managing a multiethnic society with multiple power bases and diverging value systems in a manner that minimizes internal conflict, the promoters and interpreters of the Śivadharmaśāstra understood their assertion of “difference” (bheda) in a markedly different [[P412]] manner. Śivabhaktas, it is asserted, should not merely be treated “as if” they are a qualitatively different kind of social agent—such as a war band on campaign or a merchant caravan on the road— that as a collectivity possess their own ethos and are subject to discrete sets of legal strictures. The ascription of difference, especially for our commentator, is an epistemological and ontological description of the variegated nature of lived reality, of the bare fact that the life-world of the śivabhakta has precious few points of overlap with the experiences of other human beings. As the argument of our commentator is multifaceted and subtle, and in important ways represents a departure from the root text, it behooves us to proceed in our investigation step by step rather than rushing to his rather provocative conclusions.

After dispensing with the usual paeans to the virtues of the text under study and relating the circumstances of its initial transmission, the Śivadharmaśāstra sets right in to drawing a distinction between the inclusivism and accessibility of its own socio-political program by highlighting its contrast with Brāhmaṇical normativity. Vedic rituals, such as the agniṣṭoma, it tells us, involve a whole lot of different types of ritual activities.⁸⁴ Even worse, they are very expensive, they do not readily yield a whole lot of results, and they demand a great deal of effort. Even if you are the right kind of Brāhmaṇa to undertake such an endeavor, if you’re a person with very little resources (alpavitta), your substantive participation in religious life becomes effectively impossible. What you really want, our text proposes, is an “easeful means” (sukhopāyaṃ) that will readily enable you to achieve whatever aims you may desire (sarvakāmārthasādhaka) which is to the benefit of all living beings (hityāya sarvamartyānām). Naturally, this other approach is nothing other than the eternal śivadharma (śivadharmaṃ sanātanaṃ). [[P413]]

As an integral part of his interpretive project, our commentator in the Vivaraṇa amplifies the message of the root text, drawing even sharper distinctions between the domain of Brāhmaṇical normativity and the Śivadharma’s inclusivist ethical imagination. As commentators often do, he accomplishes this task through presenting expansive exegetical glosses on key terms and phrases present in his source material. For instance, after first calling into question whether or not Vedic ritual is even capable of yielding real soteriological benefit, our commentator clarifies that where the root text proclaims that a person “with very little resources” (alpavitta) will find themselves excluded from participation in a Vedic ritual imaginary, in actuality what is intended is something more. “Thus, when the text says ‘alpavittaiḥ’ what is also meant is people of lowly family (alpajana) and lowly capacity (alpayogyatā), since being of small wealth is used with the purpose of indicating a further [canon of traits].”⁸⁵ Suddenly, instead of simply lamenting the exclusion of a specific subset of underfunded Brāhmaṇas, what’s really at stake is the broader problem of the social exclusion from ritual life of those with the wrong kind of birth, whether twice-born or other, or wrong set of skills and capacities. In contrast, our commentator clarifies when the text says the study and practice of the śivadharma is “for the benefit of all people” (hitārthāya sarveṣāṃ), this is no mere rhetorical filler. “All of them (sarveṣāṃ) means the ones of whom there is great wealth, many [illustrious] kin, and great capacity, as well as the ones who have little wealth, come from a little people, and have slight capacity.”⁸⁶ In other words, the vivaraṇakāra envisions the śivadharma as taking the form of a mass social movement incorporative of people from across the social spectrum. [[P414]]

Much as we saw with the much later Svacchanda Tantra, which has explicitly incorporated its teachings as the base line for articulating Tantric community values, the Śivadharmaśāstra’s inclusivist vision presents a different model of social normativity that— particularly in the vivaraṇakāra’s interpretation— demands complete commensality between śivabhaktas regardless of their prior caste identities. Indeed, it goes so far as to define such commensality as itself a key constitutive element of the comportment that makes participation within its system of values possible. Thus, we are told that if he embodies the defining features of the Śaiva juridical imaginary, even a mleccha (such as the descendant of a Hun), regardless of his knowledge of scripture, becomes an esteemed lord of pandits,⁸⁷ while a master of knower of all three Vedas, lacking such comportment, is of no value whatsoever.⁸⁸ As our commentator helpfully clarifies, when the text, prefiguring the Bhāgavata, tells us that a dog cooker is dear to Śiva—that he is just like Śiva—we are talking about a person that really cooks dogs and what is being enjoined is actual commensality.⁸⁹ You must give him offerings, both money and material goods, and you must receive the things he offers without prejudice. The message is unambiguous: like any other Śivabhakta, by virtue of his internalization of Śaiva norms, a dog cooker bhakta is a person to be honored (saṃpūjya) a term that for our commentator means that he should be publicly praised and showed the deference due to a high- status figure, or a god.

But, if our commentator is uncommonly keenly attuned to the notion that ideas have [[P415]] social implications and seems to be offering a capaciously inclusivist social vision that sets aside both notions of caste and what we would think of as class, the theological and intellectual commitments that animate his vision of the world jarringly diverge from our normative assumptions. Nowhere is this more clearly represented than in the utterly peculiar way our author goes about thinking through question of the justification behind Śaiva juridical difference. In this effort, our commentator begins by resorting to a curiously selective reading of the Bhāṣya on the Yogasūtras of Patañjali.⁹⁰ In situ, the passage he makes use of simply offers an expanded presentation of the secret teaching Yājñavalkya offers to Ārtabhāga that “A man turns into something good by good action and something bad by bad action.⁹¹” In a similar spirit, the Yogasūtrabhāṣya tells us “Just as, Nandīśvara, having abandoned transformation into a human prince (kumāra), was thus transformed (pariṇāma) into being a god (devatva), in the very same way, even Nahuṣa, the lord of the gods, abandoned transmutation into his own form, by being transformed into an animal.”⁹² By shaving off the second half of the sentence relating the sad fate of Nahuṣa, our commentator transforms this citation from one concerned with questions of consequences into a story about the origins of god-hood (devatva), thereby laying the foundation for his peculiar theology of non-human [[P416]] rights. Although difficult, as it is couched in the idiom of śāstric commentary, the passage is worth examining in full and at some length:

With the following [statement] he says, that the śivadharma must definitely be taught because it is by performing the śivadharma that even the various categories of [beings we call] gods (devajāti) from the upper stream (urdhvaśrotas), have attained their right to be gods (lit., “enjoyments” bhoga) or [the state of] liberation.

Thus, [when the text says], by which they [the gods] are “perfected,” what it means is “they shall obtain” [the capacity of being gods].

[The “they” intended in this passage includes] Śiva’s retinue (gaṇa)—in other words the illustrious bhūtagaṇas, and various other sorts of ghouls (piśāca) and so forth— along with the principal gods [Indra, Viṣṇu, and so forth] within the class of the gods.⁹³

In the pre-classical cosmologies of Saṃkhyā that relate the origins of different sorts of sentient beings, the upper stream (urdhvaśrotas) is a taxonomic category comprising the types of entities we associate with the concept of the “supernatural.” As we can see, “devajāti” as a category incorporates the gaṇas, the circle of divine devotees that attend to Śiva directly, predatory beings such as ghouls and demons, and even the rest of the typical Hindu pantheon. Human beings, in contrast, are said to arise from the lower stream (adaḥśrotas). What the Śivadharmavivaraṇa is in fact insisting is that the supernatural nature of sentient non-human beings are the inevitable by-products of practicing the teachings of the Śivadharma. All of these entities obtained their identities (indeed, we learn elsewhere in the Śivadharmaśāstra, so too did the Buddha and Mahāvīra), with all of their incumbent privileges, through scrupulously adhering to Śaiva normativity. What this entails in practical terms becomes clearer when we reframe the claims in our text in the language of “rights.” For instance, the term “bhoga/bhukti” is often simply glossed as “enjoyments” and treated as entailing a kind of quasi-frivolous self- [[P417]] indulgence.⁹⁴ As a technical term of art, however, its main connotation is not that one “enjoys,” in the sense of having affective personal experience, but rather that one “enjoys the rights” to hold dominion over a property, to make use of an object, or to participate in an otherwise restricted activity.⁹⁵ Often these bundles of rights are vested not in the individual, but in a particular office or status. In other words, the Cāḷukya emperor Vikramāditya VI possessed extensive rights to “enjoy” a vast array of domains and experience, not because of any specific feature of his particularized identity, but simply by virtue of belonging to the generic status of being an “emperor.” This right to “enjoy” can also be usefully conceived of as an expansion of agency—a reduction of the types of activities and spaces an agent cannot access, an elimination of restraints on their personal behavior, along with the number of other agents to whose will they are subject. From such a perspective the soteriological aim of [[P418]] “liberation from bondage” becomes a hypertrophic expression of expanded agency and limitless rights. Our commentator continues:

“His bhaktas” means the ones who follows the śivadharma, in other words, the ones who practice the śivadharma. All those various divisions of the class of the gods (devajāti) all are perfected (siddha). “The ones who have obtained the state of being a god (devatva)” means the juridical difference (bheda) that pertains to [belonging to] the class of the gods (devajāti).

Through the practice of the śivadharma, they have become ones who are to be honored by others (saṃpūjya). For, when the śivadharma is performed, they (śivabhaktas) obtain the right to enjoyment and liberation. “They obtain” means they acquire [that]. Tell me that śivadharma (by which one obtains the class of the gods).⁹⁶

In other words, śivabhaktas are not subject to human authority or normativities, especially varṇāśramadharma—for the simple reason that they are not human beings, but instead are akin to supernatural creatures—ghouls, gaṇas, and the gods themselves. From such a perspective, the recognition of juridical difference (bheda) as it pertains to the Śaiva community is thus not merely a matter of social expediency, but a common-sense reflection of taxonomic, even ontological difference. The twist here is that the origin of all supernatural entities within the upward stream (urdhvaśrotas) has been reframed so that it is no longer simply a matter of “birth” and inheritance but an acquired status, the conferral of which automatically confers rights and privileges. Śivabhaktas are thus subject to juridical difference—transmuted into agents that must be honored and granted rights to enjoyment and special access to liberation—for the same reason that we should propitiate and honor any other supernatural being, namely, they have internalized the Śaiva normativity as taught in the Śivadharmaśāstra. To ensure that this ontological and juridical difference is duly [[P419]] acknowledged within the transactional human realm, however, the Śivadharmaśāstra conveys that every Śaiva bhakta has assumed the status of being established in the samaya (samayasthā or samayam āsthitaḥ).⁹⁷ As our commentator clarifies “‘adopting the samaya’ means having had recourse to a particular kind of saṃskāra characterized by suitability for doing the worship [of Śiva].⁹⁸” As the text proceeds, our commentator is eager to elucidate the true nature of Śaiva identity as well as the precise circumstances under which it can be acquired. As the Śivadharmaśāstra teaches:

Those ones who always worship Rudra are not natural men (prākṛtamānuṣāḥ). They have obtained the rudraloka and so forth, they are rudras, there is no doubt. . . . One who does not recall Rudra, he is not a rudra. One who does not worship Rudra is not a rudra. One who does not praise Rudra is not a rudra. One who is not a rudra does not obtain Rudra.⁹⁹

In the hands of the vivaraṇakāra, this relatively banal set of statements is transmuted into something truly extraordinary:

Where it says, “the ones who worship and so forth,” they are not “natural men” (prākṛtimānuṣa). They are fallen from the Rudra world and they have descended from the Rudra world for the purpose of practicing the śivadharma. They must be thought of as rudras. . . . What does rudra mean? Here, it is one onto whom the mantra [Oṃ namaḥ śivāya] has been imposed. . . .

We say [such a one is a rudra] because he is similar to Rudra. Just as in the Liṅgapurāṇa and so forth it said: “O auspicious one, he who has placed the mantra [on his body] becomes a replica of Śaṅkara.” Therefore, a rudra is the one on whom the mantra has been placed. The one who is devoid of the mantra installation is a non-rudra.[^421] [[P420]]

Our commentator is emphatic: the bare fact that a person has the good fortune to able to practice Śiva’s dharma is proof that he or she is already a supernatural being. Reversing the standard origin story of gandharvas and gaṇas who fall from grace by violating Śiva’s precepts in the heavens and are thus condemned to a human birth, our commentator recasts what was an ignominious fall as a deliberate descent. Succinctly, śivabhaktas have consciously decided to come down into the world for the purpose of practicing and transmitting the śivadharma. It is for this reason we must understand that, whatever their appearance, all of the seemingly human practitioners of the śivadharma are in fact already rudras on earth by mere virtue of their practice, which necessarily entails the ritual imposition (nyāsa) of the mantra.[^422] Being “a rudra” is not some aspirational status achieved by a choice few. It is the ever-present birthright of all śivabhaktas. Notice that “participation” in ritual worship of any sort is being invested with a clear juridical significance: it is the signs of their participation in Śaiva modes of worship that enables external agents outside the community to identify a samayin and therefore interact with him or her according to the appropriate mode of legal alterity. Long before they acquire deeper levels of understanding or even mastery of the ritual system, all śivabhaktas already have a certain sort of inherent devatva simply by virtue of being initiated into the repetition of Śiva’s mantra: oṃ namaḥ śivāya—literally I honor, bow, or subordinate myself to Śiva. As our commentator explains, the semantics of the dative case (śivāya) is that [[P421]] it expresses the surrender or offering of the self (ātmanivedana) by taking refuge (śaraṇa) in Śiva, who becomes one’s protector (rakṣaka).[^423] Succinctly, when a man or woman ritually imposes the mantra “oṃ namaḥ śivāya” onto the body they are transformed into “a rudra on earth.” So long as they persist with keeping the mantra on the tip of the tongue, as sovereign beings, they remained protected from “worldly and non-worldly forces.”[^424] We are used to thinking of such claims as purely a matter of personal theology, but from the perspective of our source, the recognition of Śiva as sovereign is tantamount to no longer accepting the claims of other domains and agents as having sovereignty over one’s self. Indeed, not only within the world of our commentary, but as we shall see in coming chapters, in the world at large, such assertions have very concrete real-world implications. As our commentator explains in the context of making sense of what it means for the bhakta to attain sovereignty, “by sovereignty (rājyaṃ) what intended is a result. And because [sovereignty] is not being subject to Śrauta and Smārta dharma, in particular [this state of affairs] is said to be refuge in the state of Śiva [[P422]] (śivabhāvaśaraṇam).[^425]” In taking refuge with Śiva, the bhakta becomes a new kind of agent, subject to different rules, and quite literally steps into a different reality. As our vivaraṇakāra rather beautifully expresses this perspective:

For a person involved in saṃsāra, Śiva does not exist, because he sees no special manifestation of Śiva’s grace (anugraha). But when Śiva does bestow special grace upon him, he exists. And that person does not perish as far as I am concerned. For, a transmigrating being (saṃsārin) who is not performing the attendance upon or ritual worship (upacāra) of Śiva does not exist for Śiva. A devotee, however, who does worship of Śiva, that one exists indeed for Śiva.[^426]

In essence, our text takes as pre-given a vision akin to legal positivism, in which law is seen as emerging historically and organically from the codes of conduct operative within specific communities as opposed to being founded on higher order moral principles. Such a framework entails that the implementation of law is not a matter of evaluating conduct in terms of objective standards but simply of enforcing context- and community-specific norms. Whereas, as we have seen, in, in the medieval Deccan such widely adhered to attitudes stemmed from a sort of managerial pragmatism on the part of the state and other governing bodies, from our commentator’s perspective, this framework reflects a fundamental ontological truth. Quite simply, a transmigrating being is now anyone who, because he abstains from either participating in the Śaiva world directly or contributing to it financially, does not experience the special grace Śiva bestows on his bhaktas. Saṃsāra, in other words, is not just an abstract concept. It is also the lived world of experience on the ground in early medieval India in domains where other sets of norms and rules, such as varṇāśramadharma, apply. For [[P423]] people who dwell in that domain, because he has no meaningful impact on their lives, Śiva is not real. Strangely enough, because they make no meaningful attempt at engaging with him or attending upon him, so far as Śiva himself is concerned, such people are also not real.

Just as saṃsāra is at once both abstract principle and concrete social reality, the same it seems is true when it comes to Śiva’s special anugraha (viśeṣānugraha). In a theological context, the word anugraha is most often, for good reason, translated as grace. In the socio- political realm, however, the same lexeme often invokes the special privileges or favors granted by a king to the favorite of the moment in his court. Instead of reducing one notion to being a mere ideological reflection of the other, it is important that we attend simultaneously to both of these valences. As our commentator explains at some length, at the level of consciousness of the individual devotee, Śiva’s anugraha manifests as the growing experience of palpably feeling his presence first in one’s heart and then eventually as pervading all things and living beings in every moment. At the same time, Śiva’s “special favor,” in more concrete terms, is precisely the privilege of participation in the śivadharma itself, which permanently and palpably transforms a person’s social status and thus their lived experience of encounters with social reality. When a person accepts Śaiva normativity in place of varṇāśramadharma, quite literally, in this sense, they “cross over saṃsāra.”

We have spent quite a bit of time making sense of the political theology associated with the śivadharma as it is taught within the Śivadharmaśāstra and its commentary, especially attending how it makes strategic use of conceptual frames drawn from the dharma literature in the service of articulating the sovereign status of Śaiva difference. Very little, in contrast, has been said about the actual content that is constitutive of Śaiva identity, or what exactly is entailed in the practice of the śivadharma (śivadharmānuṣṭhāna) that purportedly yields so [[P424]] many exceptionally desirable benefits both in this world and the next. Close readers will have noticed that while thus far I have mostly spoken somewhat vaguely of the internalization of a distinctive “Śaiva normativity” that substitutes from the norms and values usually entailed in “being Brāhmaṇa” the source text from our commentary with which we began our discussion more specifically contrasted varṇāśramadharma with the term śivabhakti. In fact, in what both the text itself and our commentary treat as the single most important passage of the whole Śivadharmaśāstra—representing the direct teaching—called the vacana—expressed by Śiva himself, śivabhakti is said to be the essence of the śivadharma (śivadharmasya sāro ’yaṃ śivabhaktiḥ suniścalā).[^427] In the words of our commentator—“when we say it is the essence (sāra)—we mean it is the very life-breath (prāṇabhūta) of the system.”[^428] In other words, our text has just reinscribed the domain which the modern academy has represented as pertaining to “devotional religion” as the defining feature of Śaiva legal alterity. As such, adherence to these norms, in place of varṇāśramadharma, is what defines one as the type of subject—the samayin—having commensality with Śaivas and who is subject to a different juridical and moral order. Within such an imaginary, in other words, the domains we label “religion” and that of “law” are thoroughly interpenetrated.

Succinctly, recovery of the Śivadharmaśāstra its exegetical tradition, and wider reception history is not merely significant for scholars of Śaivism and the Tantric traditions, but has profound implications for broader historiography. In fact, it is integral to telling a broader story about bhakti in South Asia. As a century of scholarship has made plain, monocausal models for finding the point of origin of “devotional” discourse in Indic religion [[P425]] consistently run afoul of the presence of the trappings of devotion—even the occurrence of the lexeme bhakti—seemingly scattered across disparate sources. Bhakti finds a place among Jain and Buddhist monks, in Prakrit Gāthās, in the later Upaniṣads, in the songs of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, and, of course, in the rājavidyā chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā. Where the Śivadharmaśāstra diverges from its predecessors, and indeed departs from most of its pre- Bhāgavata Purāṇa successors, is that it presents a richly articulated theological framework within which bhakti is not merely represented as one path among many—even a privileged one—that offers soteriological fulfillment. Perhaps for the first time in our surviving Sanskrit sources—independent of the exegesis of a clever commentator—without any ambiguity— bhakti is quite simply the path to salvation. And while even in the scholastic theology of later figures like Rāmānuja—arguably following in the footsteps of the Gītā, “devotion” remains a royal road reserved for special people, the Śivadharma is emphatic that bhakti—the most efficacious means to liberation—is not merely for everyone, including women and outcastes— it is itself constitutive of a new kind of social contract. Within the transactional world of human experience, it is the devotional observance that is Śiva’s dharma which concretely confers upon the bhakta rights and dignity, just as, from a higher ontological perspective, it is bhakti and bhakti alone that makes an agent into a god or other kind of supernatural creature.

Incidentally, this conceptual move represents a stark departure from the discursive function that bhakti had played in the earlier Pāśupata discourse we explored at some length at the end of chapter one. As you may remember, for Kauṇḍinya, bhakti, understood in the sense “svasvāmisambandha” and entailing an exclusivity of focus on the lord Rudra represented a [[P426]] delimited relationship between adept and deity to the exclusion of all other agents and concerns. Indeed, the more deeply that the adept entered into a bhakti relation, the more completely he was stripped of social ties and socialized norms. But while from a Pāśupata perspective, the very idea of a bhakti community is oxymoronic, within the system of the Śivadharma, the generation of community forms an integral component of the social imaginary that finds its expression in the eight components of devotion:

Now Nandīśvara recalls seven statements taught directly by Śiva on the subject of bhakti:

1. Tenderness towards my devotees, 2) delight in [watching others] do pūjā, and in 3) one’s own worship, 4) arcanā with bhakti for one’s own sake, and the work of the body [for the sake of devotion,] 5) bhakti when listening to my stories, 6) transformations of the limbs, of the eyes, and [the production of] sounds [as a consequence of bhakti,] 7) always recollecting me, and 8) subsisting [through a livelihood] dependent upon me.

In whichever person, even a non-Indian (mleccha), this eight-component bhakti is to be found, he is a lord of twice-borns, he is a sage, he is socially esteemed person, he is an ascetic, and he is a scholar.[^429]

As we can see, in the Śivadharmaśāstra, śivabhakti is said to have eight subsidiary components. Their observance by the śivabhakta is considered a nitya—or obligatory—duty, and its breach is to be punished through expiation or by physical force if necessary.[^430] If we follow the commentator, these run as follow 1) tenderness towards my devotees (madbhaktajanavātsalyaṃ) 2) delight in the worship done by others (anumodanami) 3) ritual worship (for others) (abhyarcanaṃ) 4) and ritual worship for oneself (svayaṃ) 5) Listening to [[P427]] my stories (matkathāśravaṇe)—our commentator insists regarding both the deeds of Śiva and of his bhaktas 6) transformations regarding the body, eyes, and voice (svaranetrāṅgavikriyā) these are things like shaking, weeping tears of joy and so forth—essentially the Sāttvikabhāvas—(our commentator says this should happen in response to the stories). 7) Recollecting me always (mamānusmaraṇaṃ nityaṃ) 8) and finally, depending on the manuscript reading, either anyone whose livelihood depends on me or one who makes a living through kīrtana (yasya ca mām upajīvati / kīrtanenopajīvati). Just in case his audience has failed to recognize that what is being prescribed here is effusive and embodied devotion as a way of life the commentator concludes his analysis of the vacana with a rather pointed and poignant statement: “Bhakti is sevā which has a nature involving the participation of the heart.”[^431] Quite apart from the fact that the passage we have just encountered quite plausibly represents the first occurrence of an unambiguously “affective emotional bhakti” within Indic discourse, of the sort that Friedhelm Hardy has asserted finds its point of origin only in the Tamil sources, several unexpected features of this discourse should immediately be apparent.[^432] The first has do with the very specific nature of what it means to “practice” or participate in the system. Now in the commentarial literature on the Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra, under the inspiration of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, rote proceduralist adherence to ritual praxis is frequently enough to mark one as a proper participant. Subjective attitudes, “belief,” affective experiences, and intensity of commitment are basically irrelevant. In contrast, from the Śivadharma’s perspective, complete participation in a Śaiva juridical imaginary cannot be [[P428]] merely a matter of going through the motions. Instead, it equally entails: 1) a specific set of external observances and ritual practices (worship for others and oneself, listening to stories), 2) the adoption of specific social practices (social solidarity with one’s fellow śivabhaktas and engaging in devotional singing or living off the proceeds of working for a Śaiva temple institution), and 3) a transformation of individual subjectivity, affect, and comportment (delight in worship done by others, shaking, weeping tears of joy and so forth in response to encounters with expressions of Śiva’s nature, and continual recollection of Śiva’s name and nature). Secondly, and perhaps most fundamentally from the perspective of the arguments put forth in the rest of this thesis, within this system, instead of just being about the individual cultivating an exclusive focus and connection with the deity, Śaiva devotion has been entirely socialized. Essentially, it is treated as inseparable from the making of Śaiva communities. Notice that śivabhakti—treated as the essence of Śiva’s dharma—does not commence by prescribing affection or attention be directed to Śiva. Instead, what our text emphasizes first is that one should show affection or concern for the people (jana) who are śivabhaktas. Then we are told we should experience enthusiasm or delight (anumodana, glossed by our commentator as harṣa) when we watch other people engaged in Śaiva worship and that we ourselves should offer worship on behalf of other Śaiva bhaktas.[^433] It is only when we reach the fourth element in the catalog that “personal devotion” has anything to do with the individual and his own ritual commitments.[^434] [[P429]]

In essence, what we have here is a premodern vision of social solidarity. Not only is heightened emotion constantly being reinforced through shared social practices designed to produce intense affect experiences, but the very fact that this is the express purpose of these activities is being directly acknowledged, even celebrated, by the discourse. Śaiva dharma as it is presented here is fundamentally about the cultivation of strong social ties and emotional connections with one’s fellow devotees, bonds that supersede any other identity that originates outside of the system, or even outside the subcontinent. Inherent to this juridical mode, as we saw earlier, is that Śaivas should share in—even celebrate—each other’s experiences and triumphs, even to the extent of collectively listening with rapt attention to tales about the deeds of other Śaiva devotees. More concretely, the Śaiva dharma entails offering assistance to their fellows and engaging in acts of reciprocity, privileging Śaiva ties over other networked connections. Transpose these attitudes from a liturgical context into the transactional realm of wider lived reality and it is easy to see a case being made that its legally incumbent on the Śaiva bhakta to assist in enriching, empowering, and patronizing the works of their fellow Śaivas, across the boundaries of caste, be they kings, shock troops out on the military labor market, accountants, or stone masons, provided their activities be understood as somehow dedicated to Śiva. Such attitudes, as we will soon see, were perceived as having very concrete material consequences.

To be subject to Śiva’s dharma thus entails a transformation of lived experience and a reorientation of priorities, such that, as our commentator explains the dharma is to take “Śiva as one’s focal point.” But as we are beginning to see, within this domain of blurred boundaries—between inside and outside, juridical and religious, sociological and esoteric— the exclusivity of focus that defines yogic praxis finds its concomitant equivalent in a social [[P430]] transformation that—without effacing a variegated transactional world in favor of becoming an isolated monad with a view from nowhere—places Śiva and his representations (iconic and aniconic) and representatives (the community of the bhaktas and also the exemplary śivayogin) at the center of every system of valuation and exchange. We might even speak of two-fold transvaluation, one that liturgizes labor—prefiguring the later Vīraśaiva notion that work is worship—while at the same time economizing ritual. The first of these interpretive moves requires reimagining the very nature of service activity as intrinsically dignified and important, while second entails vastly expanding the previously marginal resource economies associated with pūjā and its related paraphernalia so that they become increasingly central to the operation of Indian political economy.

To say, as our commentator does, that 1) Śaiva identity is defined by bhakti, 2) possessing Śaiva identity automatically confers concrete privilege and dignity, and that 3) “bhakti is service work (sevā),” demands that “service work” can no longer be viewed as an intrinsically ritually impure, morally suspect, and self-degrading form of low-status activity. This of course represents a radical departure from the norms inculcated by the Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra, for there, to be engaged in upacāra or śuśrūṣā, in the service of another who is one’s superior, is precisely the defining feature that distinguishes the social role of a Śūdra or Dalit. From the perspective of our commentator, what complicates such a dynamic, in which one class of people are always servants while another are always masters is the pervasive nature (vyāpin) of Śiva himself. Śaivabhaktas, by virtue of being rudras, already have the power (bala) of Śiva’s nature invested inside and manifest (at least partially) within themselves and this is a power that intrinsically demands respect (saṃpūjya). Indeed, this initial investment forms the necessary precondition for engaging in any act of Śaiva worship. Thus, the [[P431]] śivabhakta places themselves within an economy of service and care in which they act as a servant or attendant of the Lord and his interests as manifest in other signs of Śiva’s grace (whether manifest as aniconic focal points of worship, physical spaces, or people). At the same time, because Śiva is present “in him,” that very same śivabhakta, when he is being related to be other people, at least in theory, is also partially the beneficiary of an economy of service and care that honors and rewards the presence of Śiva in him. Each person is thus in turn— depending on the context— both potential servant and master, object and subject, both the bestower and recipient of favor and material expenditure.

This brings us to the Śivadharmaśāstra’s next monumental set of interventions. Having articulated a framework of juridical alterity that distinguishes Śaiva personhood from “being Brāhmaṇa” it then—for the first time in our archive—carves out a justification and articulates a comprehensive set of norms for constructing and managing Śaiva institutional spaces. This is the first text, at least to which we have access, that presents us with the seminal charter myth for the origin of the śivaliṅga, the first source to offer instructions for making Śiva liṅgas in a variety of media, the first source that offers concrete procedures for worshipping Śiva liṅgas, and the first source that envisions their utter social centrality in an institutional context— complete with its own seasonal festival calendar—entirely dedicated to the many facets of installing, honoring, and maintaining śivaliṅgas, their built environment, and the service workers who feed and care for them, in the high status manner they so richly deserve. As our material cultural record attests more indirectly, most of these social and ritual practices taken individually are themselves hardly new to the sixth century. People had been building some sort of Śaiva spaces, often incorporating liṅgas, since at least the beginning of the first millennium and the worship of aniconic objects vaguely or unmistakably phallic in shape, [[P432]] whether carried out within a nominally Śaiva or entirely other framework clearly had deep and ancient roots on the subcontinent. What seems to be radically innovative is the presentation of this set of concomitant elements as themselves constitutive of Śaiva identity.

Especially novel is the centering of the making and caring for of liṅgas as the defining component of what it means to be a Śaiva. While earlier Śaiva spaces—such as the Gupta cave temple at Udayagiri in Madhyapradesh, which included several liṅgas installed by the Candragupta’s minister of war[^435]—had indeed housed liṅgas, as you may recall, their veneration is entirely absent from both the Epic representations of Śaiva worship and from the prescriptions found in the Pāśupata Sūtra and its commentary. Even in the earliest Śaiva Āgamas, such as the plausibly fifth-century Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā’s mūlasūtra, liṅga veneration seems to be an incidental secondary practice, observed by a special class of adepts in one specific context.[^436] Indeed, the liṅga is so non-integral to this earlier Śaiva paradigm that as late as the seventh-century Svāyambhūvāgama, adepts in the early Śaiva Siddhānta are directed to procure liṅgas for their own worship by stealing them from other communities.[^437] In contrast, the entirety of the second chapter of Śivadharmaśāstra is dedicated to presenting [[P433]] “the procedure for the worship of the liṅga” (liṅgārcanavidhi) (in its material form), which our commentator, in an idiom borrowed from Mīmāṃsā, represents as the obligatory duty (itikartavyatā) of anyone established in a community that observes the samaya. Such worship must be conducted at least three times a day, in alignment with the three periods (sandhyā) during which Brāhmaṇas offer their water-based ablutions.

As envisioned here, the worship of the liṅga in its material iconic form is a multistep and resource intensive project.[^438] It necessarily entails the preliminary smearing of the icon with substances, the waving of lights and the burning of incense and other good smelling things (here referred to as nīrājana), the bathing of the image, the offering of flowers, and its immersion in a five-part sequence in the five products of the cow, beginning with yogurt, the offering of bilva leaves and the lighting of lamps during the opening up of the image to the community (darśana).[^439] During the latter part of the ritual,[^440] the liṅga is adorned with [[P434]] garments and garlands and there is an offering of food. Following this, the devotees, after bowing before it, circumambulate the liṅga. Once they complete their circle, after bowing again, there is to be communal singing. As resources permit, this baseline template can then be complemented by more resource intensive celebrations (elaborated upon elsewhere in the text) some of which might involve the presentation before the god of painted cloths, banners, and parasols, the sounding of conches and bells, the performance of ritual fire offerings accompanied by bali, instrumental song and dance offered by women, and even the offering of food and other assistance in the context of a monastery to ascetics and underspecified others. In short—assembled here for the first time—we have the standard program for Śaiva worship—sans any Tantra specific inflections—that is observed across the subcontinent to this very day. And yet, this set of practices, the text tells us, exist not simply to please Śiva but to benefit the Śaiva community, out of compassion for all living beings.[^441] Śaiva worship, in other words, is not for the sake of appeasing a deity but rather it is about creating circumstances that generate merit and benefit for the individual and community. As the text will make plain later, the honoring (saṃpūjyet) of liṅgas, in whatever form, is for the sake of bestowing grace or favor (anugraha) on the world and its people.

This central message is reinforced by the terse recounting of the story of the primordial arising of the liṅga (liṅgodbhava) with which the third chapter of our text opens. In the Śivadharmaśāstra’s version of the narrative, when Brahmā and Viṣṇu, who stand among the primordial waters, began to bicker over who is the actual agent of creation (ahaṃ kartā tv ahaṃ [[P435]] kartā na madanyo jagatpatiḥ), a liṅga blazed forth made up of radiant energy (tejas).[^442] Unlike in other versions of the story where much ado is made about the failed attempts by the two gods to locate the limitless pillar’s beginning and end, here they rapidly realize it is without point of origin and terminus, and decide the prudent thing to do is to honor this strange phenomenon.[^443] In violation of our Purāṇic expectations, however, in the Śivadharmaśāstra, Śiva himself never appears and his glory is not directly proclaimed. Instead of an iconic and embodied form, we are told that in the middle of the originary liṅga there manifests another subtle liṅga: “It was made neither of gold, silver, copper, crystal, or pearl. It was peaceful, merely a thing to be targeted (lakṣyamātra) and that alone had the nature of Śiva.”[^444] Then, instead of offering the usual obligatory paean, once they have acknowledged that this presence is the source of creation, Brahmā and Viṣṇu do something entirely unexpected. They make liṅgas, in imitation (anukṛta, anukaraṇa) of the theophany they have just encountered.[^445] Having installed them (pratiṣṭhāpya), for the first time in the history of creation they offer the liṅgas worship, Brahmā commencing the ritual by intoning the syllable oṃ. Here, for the first time in surviving Sanskrit sources, the Śivadharmaśāstra interjects with a series of [[P436]] pedagogically useful pseudo-etymologies (nirukti) of the word liṅga that memorably convey different facets of the theology associated with these objects. When the story resumes, the other gods have joined in and the message is reinforced that it is through the veneration of the liṅga— a practice that continues in the heavenly realms even today—that beings such as Indra not merely attained devatva in some general sense, but became the very particularized individuated deity corresponding to a specific domain of experience that we know so well today.[^446] In what amounts to a crash course in all the media from which liṅgas might be made (such as gold, pearls, crystal, mud, grains of rice, cow dung, brass, rare ores and so forth), the defining character traits of each god or type of supernatural entity are then correlated with the specific [[P437]] material substance out which their chosen liṅga was composed, each of which conferred special abilities and inclinations. In all cases, however, the worship of the liṅga at the very least brings benefit and bears the capacity to raise up one’s ancestors going back many generations, because anything that is designated a liṅga is nothing other Śiva’s nature on earth made manifest directly in a differentially applied (vyavasthitaḥ) form. En route to delineating a long catalogue of the respective benefits accrued from each of these kinds of worship as they pertain to śivabhaktas on earth, the chapter then helpfully reminds us that even though the Śiva bhakta appears as if he is imprisoned by his human skin (mānuṣyacarmaṇābaddha) he or she is really a rudra.[^447] Without first becoming a rudra through the practice of the śivadharma, we are told, liṅga worship bears little benefit. Should one be so foolish as to professionalize oneself in a manner that incorporates Śaiva worship—by, for example, becoming a non- sectarian overseer of a variety of religious practices or a kīrtanakāra—without living according to the Śivadharma, such an “aliṅgin” who lives off the liṅga is condemned to roast in hell.[^448] As our commentator makes plain, just as a person who is without śivabhakti but engages in Śaiva worship can be called “lacking a liṅga,” the śivabhakta—by virtue of the power his connection with Śiva— should also be understood as someone who “possesses” or is defined by having a liṅga. The important thing for our purposes is that the text is preparing to introduce the idea that the category of “liṅga” does not merely encompass stationary material objects such as an installed icon in a temple or even portable objects, like perishable or personal liṅgas. People can be liṅgas, too. And just as there is a procedure for venerating the liṅga as object, [[P438]] there is a procedure for honoring the liṅga as embodied subjects, by way of bestowing upon them concrete material goods.

We are almost ready to take a step back from the text to think more rigorously about how we might understand the material it has presented us with through the lens of a revision to existing models of political economy. Before we can do so however, one last piece of the puzzle—which prove absolutely integral to the larger thesis of the work you are exploring— has to be thrown into the mix. This is the question of philanthropy (dāna) and the philosophy of patronage, which, in its Śaiva reformulation, posed a substantive challenge to the applied political economy of the worlds of Śrauta ritualists, Brāhmaṇa householders, and the Dharmaśāstrins who sometimes serve as their champions and enablers. In the simplest of terms, especially in a post-Vedic and post classical moment when such activities are no longer directly championed by those in power, Śrauta rituals and even the five-fold sacrifices and stringent daily observances incumbent on a householder adhering to the Mānavadharma are time, resource, and labor-intensive activities that are hardly self-sufficient. In fact, from an uncommitted outsider’s perspective, commitment to these practices—even when carried out alongside another occupation—represents a substantive economic inefficiency that minimizes the engagement of the observant with other social practices that more directly benefit the household and community. In the absence of a generous long-term stipend, the maintenance of these traditions depends on regular reinfusions of resources and financial capital supplied by a patron who believes in their merit and who is incentivized by the merit that will supposedly accrue to him on account of his generosity. It is in this spirit that we must take in the almost impudent frame provided by our text. [[P439]]

Some people, we are told, think Vedic things should be the beneficiary of philanthropy, while others deem to the same to true when it comes to various forms of austerity.[^449] But in fact, the Veda itself is nothing other than Śiva. Therefore, any person who is intent on Śiva is engaged in the study or practice of the Veda (vedādhyāyin). Thus, it follows that anything you might bestow upon a twice-born who knows the Veda can and should also be bestowed upon a śivabhakta. In the technical language of the Dharmaśāstra deployed by our text, just like any learned twice-born, a śivabhakta is pātra, a fit recipient for philanthropic donations.

The Śivadharmaśāstra, however is not merely content to disrupt the world of elite philanthropy by proposing this equivalence. In actuality, it says, among all the possible categories of philanthropic recipients (sarveṣāṃ pātrāṇām) there is one type of beneficiary that exceeds all others, and the conferral of benefits upon such a person is the best approach to maximizing donor merit.[^450] These beneficiaries are called maheśvaras. Now, just what specific social role this term of art was originally intended to signify in the Śivadharmaśāstra itself is rather ambiguous. In almost all of its other occurrences in situ, the lexeme “maheśvara” is simply referring to Śiva in the context of liturgy or cosmology.[^451] At no point does the [[P440]] Śivadharmaśāstra clarify, for example, how the Maheśvara might be distinguished from the śivabhakta or relate to the ācārya that teaches the śivadharma (śivadharmapravākṭr), a figure that makes almost a cameo appearance towards the end of the text.[^452] From the perspective of our commentator, however—whose much advertised full treatment of the subject is sadly lost to us as it was integral to the missing commentary on the last chapter of the text— the word maheśvara is to be treated as synonymous with two other terms. First, it is to be equated with the śivayogin, defined by his practice of a six-limbed yoga (ṣaḍaṅgayoga).[^453] The śivayogin [[P441]] in turn is fused with the śivāśramin (who in the root text, in contrast, occasionally seems to be equated with anyone who dwells in a śivāśrama).[^454] At least as envisioned by our commentator, then—though even here just how much this category is discrete or even segregated from that of the śivabhakta is very unclear. Śaiva sociology entails a bifurcation of the Śaiva community into a majority, made up of devotees established in the samaya on the one hand, and a much more delimited circle comprised of elite śivayogins on the other. It is this latter category of social agents that are to be treated as the “best” vessels for acts of philanthropy. While again the root text is kind of ambiguous, it is suggested that the “best kind” of philanthropy is to be referred as “that which is imperishable” (akṣaya).[^455] Whether or [[P442]] not such an equation with this lexeme is being made explicitly by the root the text (a very real possibility as the remainder of this chapter takes as its focus the endowing of Śaiva institutions at a range of scales of implementation), in its wider reception history, these verses come to be seen as an allusion to the institution of the “undying” or imperishable land grant (akṣayavṛtti) complete with a self-sustaining stipend that covers operational costs over the longue durée, which emerges out of the discourse on sovereign land grants with which we began our chapter.

Underneath all the arcane details, then, the model on offer is very simple. If you are a patron, the best thing you can do is provide philanthropic support to the best kind of śivabhakta, the śivayogin. The very best thing you can do for Śiva and his bhaktas—regardless of whether you are one yourself—is to bestow upon them essentially irrevocable political and social sovereignty or to supplement the material conditions of their already existing sovereign spaces so that they might thrive. If you happen to be a śivabhakta, you are invited to actively participate in worship at this new space, thereby fulfilling the legal obligations intrinsic to your identity, which are to be punished in the breach. If you are not, and merely give nice things to Śaivas out of curiosity, or greed, or fear of punishment, the best course is to make the endowment creating a Śaiva space, and then leave the Śaivas alone to practice and govern their community as they see fit. [[P443]]

In later chapters we will return with some frequency to examining the various different facets of these emergent Śaiva institutional cultures as they are reflected in documentary sources, prescriptive literature, and material culture, many of which find their initial articulation here within the Śivadharmaśāstra. For the moment though, let us limit our investigation to considering the pragmatic and transactional dimensions of this discourse. First of all, what we have here, especially when you delve more into the details, is an incentivization structure for the proliferation of Śaiva spaces in a world where powerful people are genuinely invested in the generation of merit on behalf of themselves, their families, and their communities. If you are well-off and Śaiva yourself, endowing a Śaiva space with which you and yours have a special connection in perpetuity is an easy way to expand your social network. You have just created a space where you experience solidarity on a regular basis with a diversified range of social agents (some of them quite skilled builders of infrastructure or warriors) outside your family, courtly, and caste networks to whom you had no previous affiliation. All this is happening in a context where there is a tacit belief that Śaiva bhaktas should provide for each other, especially if it benefits the wider community. On the other hand, if you are not a Śaiva, by endowing an undying land grant, for a comparatively small cost you take a group of people who are increasingly displaying a heightened—perhaps to an almost frightening degree—shared communal identity in which neither you and your family nor many of your other subject are included and sequester them away from everyone else. The Śaivas get to manage their own affairs on their own terms without getting into conflicts with their neighbors, while at the same time, despite your out-group affiliation, they develop a favorable view of you and yours as the insurers of their well-being down through the centuries. As we will see momentarily, there are also spillover economic benefits for the wider region when such sites are encouraged to thrive. These attitudes, incidentally, are probably not terribly different from how in prior centuries many patrons—up and down the social spectrum— [[P444]] possessing zero personal investment in Buddhist philosophy and theology would have perceived the act of endowing monasteries. Supporting such institutions generated merit, it kept the peace, it was good for business, it often led to the construction of new infrastructure such as irrigation systems and tanks, while at the same time it took a high-solidarity community full of missionaries intent on disseminating their values out of other people’s spaces while providing them with a whole other set of responsibilities on which to focus their attention.

In this regard, it is worth emphasizing in passing that within the Śivadharmaśāstra— indeed throughout all of early Śaiva literature—a very deliberate choice has been in regard to how one should relate to different sorts of “religious others.” Quite simply, as we have seen, these Śaiva discourses frequently articulate their identities in opposition with or as an alternative to a certain mode of “being Brāhmaṇa”—often associated with Pūrva Mīmāṃsā inflected Vedic ritual and the discourse of the Mānavadharmaśāstra—which they seek to selectively supplant. Rather unexpectedly, in contrast they contain no comparable antagonistic discourse directed at the various śramaṇa traditions contained within the big tents of Buddhism and Jainism, with which they in fact shared many rhetorical, institutional, inter-textual, and conceptual commonalities. In other words, very much unlike in the case of parallel nascent Vaiṣṇava traditions, a Śaiva “us” is not constituted as the foil of a nāstika or pāṣaṇḍa/pākhaṇḍa “them.”[^456] Though a more comprehensive presentation of the evidence will have to wait another occasion, our documentary and material cultural evidence is generally indicative of a model in which the Śaiva eclipse of Buddhist monastic and economic imaginaries so central to the emergence of the early medieval—which really starts to take off during the Hun invasions—cannot be accounted for primarily through the lens of conquest.[^457] Thus, for [[P445]] example, landscape archaeological studies conducted at Sāñcī and Vidiśa, right within the heart of the Gupta Imperium—studying both “Brāhmaṇical” and Buddhist institutions in the region as they develop over the longue durée, identify a moment of stylistic rupture in the late-fifth and early-sixth centuries within the material culture of Buddhist institutions. But instead of the expected sudden collapse, Julia Shaw demonstrates that at this moment Buddhist institutions cease importing such things, as images of Bodhisattvas, from Greater Gandhāra and Mathurā that had been executed in an Indo-Greek visual idiom. For the first time, in and around Sāñcī, artisans start making their own Buddhist material culture in a regional style no longer indebted to someone else’s preferences. The result, also reflected in the architecture, is the deliberate decoupling of Buddhist spaces from the influences of the Silk Road. At this very same moment, but in physically distinctive proximate spaces, the landscape of greater Sāñcī and Vidiśa also sees a steep increase in the proliferation of Śaiva inflected visual culture and institutions, a dynamic that by the eighth century finds its complement in a newly prominent goddess-aligned material culture. In other words, once one steps out of the direct path of the damage inflected by the Hun raids, in the greater Sāñcī region we see no evidence for the abandoning of Buddhist institutions until the ninth century. Instead, what seems to happen is that the Buddhist institutional cultures became parochial and stop growing, at the same moment their Śaiva neighbors became part of new transregional networks and expand exponentially. [[P447]]

For our purposes it suffices it say that in ways we are just beginning to understand, the Śivadharmaśāstra interceded into already flourishing social reality into which emergent classes of new political and economic elites, exemplified by the post-Gupta era political coalition that defeated the Huns, were inclined to align themselves with newly ascendent “Śaiva” inflected imaginaries. By all indications, at this historical moment what it meant to be “Śaiva” was diffuse and underdefined and much of what we see in the material record bears a minimal affiliation with the textual cultures we take as our usual focus of study. From the sixth century onward then, to sponsor something labelled “Śaiva” as opposed to Buddhist was to invest one’s social and economic capital in an institution that, unlike its Buddhist analogues, was not tarnished by its links to a suddenly irrelevant “old Silk Road economy,” nor, in more pragmatic terms, was it in the process of recalibrating longstanding dependencies on intake from trading networks that had dried up or been redistributed. Quite simply, because Śaivas had never been the dominant community moving back and forth on land across the Silk Road, the fading away of Indo-Greek imaginaries and infrastructure was actually to their advantage, as it ensured that the circulation of people, goods, ideas, and services would have to depend primarily on the very subcontinental networks where yogīs were already wandering and that the ships would depart from the same coastal cities where Śaiva ritual centers already flourished. In a certain sense then, a work such as the mid-sixth-century Śivadharmaśāstra reads as an exercise in the harnessing of a still underarticulated and socially influential sense of “being Śaiva,” pregnant with many potentialities, in the service of recasting this identity as inseparable from a concrete socio-political vision founded in a new model of political economy, one where all human transactions were mediated through the liṅga. [[P448]]

Here it is important that we emphasize one of the key points of differentiation between sponsoring a Śaiva domain as opposed to a Buddhist one. Śaiva imaginaries do not incorporate—let alone center—the idea of a saṅgha. When making an endowment to a Buddhist institution, in practice, what the sponsor was doing with a good portion of their resources was subsiding in perpetuity the room and board for several hundred or more monks from the perhaps relatively young age at which they take their vows to their demise. While [[P449]] Buddhist monasteries, often indirectly, performed a range of other functions of some wider benefit to surrounding communities, such serving as safety deposit boxes, operating as circulatory nodes in trade networks, or irrigating and developing the surrounding land through establishing and maintaining infrastructure—they are fundamentally spaces that were optimized to house, and benefit, a demographically substantive “non-productive” professional religious class.

In this regard, too little attention has been paid to the provocative intervention with which the learned Buddhologist Jonathan Silk commences his magisterial multilingual study of South Asian Buddhist administrative practice. There, he seeks to disabuse the reader of the common perception that the lofty Bodhisattva ethos of the early Mahāyāna traditions in seeking to act for the benefit and welfare of beings was reflected in institutional policies and social practices that provided for the general welfare of real people in the here and now.[^458] Indeed, Silk seeks to demonstrate that both revealed Buddhist literature and the lineage specific vinaya codes display an almost uniform hostility to the idea of using the resources of the saṅgha to provide social services to the general public, whether lay Buddhist or otherwise. While debates about the value of service and care do form a significant discussion within these discourses, they are exclusively restricted to adjudicating the value and scope of acts of service for which monks, Buddha reliquaries, and monastic institutions are the beneficiaries. Thus, for example, the Adhyāśayasaṃcodanasūtra proclaims:

The Tathāgata’s instructions is rich in meditative concentration and strong effort, perfected in wisdom, concentrated in wisdom, rich in energetic exertion. It is not rich in the employment and service [suitable to] householders [gṛhikarmāntavaiyāpṛtya]. For this action—namely, service fixed on worldly tasks—belongs to those whose yoga [[P450]] is misapplied, who delight in transmigration. It is not towards this that a bodhisattva must generate his desires.[^459]

Such a sentiment expressed in highly rhetorical didactic terms finds its prescriptive correlate in a work like the Ratnarāśisūtra, whose fourth chapter is dedicated to discussing the role of the monk administrator. There we find a vivid representation of the proprietary nature of Buddhist monastic holdings, where even the redistribution of wealth and resources to the community in a time of crisis that had been offered to the stūpa around which a localized and ailing saṅgha is embedded is considered highly problematic. Thus, while procedures exist for reallocating community monastic resources to refurbish a decaying stūpa, the text insists that the resources offered to a stūpa should never be redirected towards quotidian human ends, even to the direct benefit of local monks.

No matter, Kāśyapa, how vast the possessions of the stūpa, the administrative monk shall not give them to the local community or the universal community. Why? If even so little as a single thread given to the stūpa by those faithful and full of devotion is a shrine for the world together with its gods, what need is there to mention jewels and highly valued objects? Whatever clothing is given to a stūpa had best be destroyed by wind, sun, and rain; clothes given to a stūpa shall not be exchanged for gold or valuables. Why? Because what belongs to the stūpa is wholly without price, and because the stūpa is itself without any want. . . .

If any administrative monk, Kāśyapa, were to jumble together what belongs to the local community, or the universal community, or the stūpa, the [karmic] maturation of that could not be expressed in words, even if I were to reckon for aeons.[^460]

Let us compare this with the type of institution and community building that is being prescribed by the Śivadharmaśāstra. Instead of philanthropic investment providing a sinecure that supported a monastic community, the main focus of a Śaiva complex becomes the economy of care directed towards the liṅga itself. Unlike with the stūpa in the Ratnarāśisūtra, where every material offering is taken out of economic circulation and can [[P451]] serve no further mundane human purpose, all Śaiva spaces are at least somewhat redistributive. Even the most stringent purity conscious forms of Śaiva tradition, for instance, permit the regifting of cloth, clothing, and ornaments that have been offered to the god, the very items that the Ratnarāśisūtra insists must be left to the mercies of the wind, sun, and rain. Indeed, as we shall see laid out in considerable detail in chapter 6, Śākta-Śaiva institutions tended towards sanctioning a maximal redistributionism, with everything that is offered to the god being then passed along to the wider public, even to the extent of providing concrete material benefit to people with no Śaiva affiliations.

In contrast to the Buddhist emphasis on monastic residentialism, the Śaiva maṭha— which in the early sources is simply understood as a pratyāśraya—a place for taking rest—is virtually a tertiary feature of early Śaiva spaces. Except during special festival occasions, only a few śivayogins might be in residence. Most Śaiva religious activity is instead the responsibility of the extended community of non-professional śivabhaktas, both residing within and outside of explicitly Śaiva spaces. Drawn from across the spectrum of caste—and also something like class—unlike with Buddhist monks, most samayins would have had a profession—be it as oil presser, or rope maker, farmer, artisan, builder of infrastructure, or a participant in the military labor market—that substantively interfaced with wider, not Śaiva- specific economies. At a historical juncture where, as we have seen, the parameters of trade were being reformulated, and social and economic utility of artisanal communities was very much in doubt, every Śaiva space, heavily integrated into the surrounding landscape, was at once a locus for production and a site of intensive dependable regular consumption. [[P452]]

In order to fulfill the terms of the legally binding Śaiva dharma, whose breach demanded expiation or expulsion in precisely the same manner as if someone had broken purity codes in a Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra imaginary, every liṅga, no matter how humble, had to be the recipient three times daily of the five products of the cow, each time rinsed with fresh water or ash, an array of flowers and incenses, the oil that lit the lamps, camphor, and perfumes, cloth garments such as scarves and saris, and allotments of food. All of these were to be offered to the god a single time; from the Śivadharmaśāstra’s perspective, none of them could be reused in worship. In practical terms, wherever a Śaiva space emerged, there had to be relationships forged with communities of cowherders, with the gardeners and makers of garlands, with oil pressers and oil merchants, well diggers, the makers of guggul and other scented products, and weavers and providers of fine cloth, to say nothing of artisans who crafted liṅgas in a range of media and the builders who constructed the structures in which their worship was to take place. All of these people now had a built-in recipient for the products of their labor. Jump up a level in terms of the type of care and adornment, and the range of skilled professionals required for a Śaiva space to operate daily became even more involved. In short, wherever a Śaiva space emerged, there also grows up a new resource intensive economy where there is high demand for the capital, goods, and services produced by a whole range of social and caste identities. Instead of largely being “outsiders” to narrow networks of circulation reserved for the religious professionals who were the primary beneficiaries of the setup, everyone who was a Śaiva bhakta became a direct participant in these networks of exchange. Within this social form, caste-driven social segmentation—even segregation—is replaced with an equally acute form of social and economic interdependency. Even more significantly, unlike in prior systems where the role of the laity was somewhat underdefined and ambiguous, mostly giving stuff so merit might be generated, this entire complex of [[P453]] activities had been reframed as at once providing a livelihood and as a mode of devotional worship. Something of the perceived versatility of these early Śaiva spaces as well as the somewhat inchoate range of values that may have animated them comes across in another work that reflects upon the diversified emergence of Śaiva social-political imaginaries in the immediate aftermath of the Hun invasions. Composed about a generation after the Śivadharmaśāstra, and reflecting at times some similar concepts and commitments, the Harṣacaritra of the poet Bāṇa offers a celebration of Harṣavardhana, the son of one of the main rulers within the political coalition that defeated the Alkhan Huns.[^461] Though in the accounts of the Chinese traveler Xuang Zhung Harṣa comes across not merely as a great patron of Buddhist institutions but as a committed Buddhist ruler himself, in the exactly contemporary Sanskrit biography composed by Harṣa’s court poet, we are offered a multigenerational story of Harṣa and his line harboring strong Śaiva commitments. That some elements of these stories are not Bāṇa’s own invention is strongly suggested by discomfort displayed by our poet when he recounts how the right to rule of the lineage he serves is founded not on the usual kṣatriya’s claims, but on Harṣa’s grandfather’s participation in a Śākta Tantric ritual for raising a vetāla that was conducted by a Bhairavācārya imported from the Deccan. This is not the sort of rebranding you’d expect if one was aiming to appropriate a Buddhist ruler into the Śaiva fold.

In any case, the narrative frame of his prose kāvya really begins when Bāṇa returns from court to visit his family. Echoing the very imagery we have just explored in the Śivadharmaśāstra, for Bāṇa, coming home entails entering a śivapura adorned by a diversified [[P454]] array of Śaiva practitioners, beginning with whose bodies are entirely smeared with ash and who have become identified with the pramatha gaṇas of Śiva (pramathanāthoddhūlana- bhasmadhūsaraiḥ śivapurasyeva praveśaiḥ pradeśair upaśobhitaḥ).[^462] It is while embedded within this distinctively Śaiva lived landscape that, at the request of his family, Bāṇa begins to the tell the story of Harṣa and his line. He commences by introducing us to Harṣa’s grandfather and his milieu, whose rule outside the world of the text would have substantively overlapped with two Hun invasions. Long before he was recognized as a real king, this pious man, we learn, lived in the janapada called Śrīkaṇṭha.[^463] The place derived its name from the fact that in an act of philanthropic generosity conducted while he was still a member of the landed gentry, Harṣa’s grandfather had offered his humble domain as a philanthropic bequest (mahādāna) to Śiva and his followers. The result was the comprehensive transformation of landscape into space that has something for everyone. As Bāṇa describes this śivapura of yesteryear:

For ascetics, it was an abode of austerity (tapovanam iti munibhiḥ), for prostitutes a temple to the god of love (kāmāyatanam iti veśyābhiḥ), for performers a venue for musical performances (saṃgītaśāleti lāsakaiḥ). . . . For those seeking fortune, the land was a wish-fulfilling gem, for those who made their living by weapon-craft it was a field for heroes, (vīrakṣetram iti śastropajīvibhiḥ), for students, it was the house of the guru (gurukulam iti vidyārthibhiḥ), for singers the city of the gandharvas (gandharvanagaram iti gāyanaiḥ), for artisans, a temple to Viśvakarman (viśvakarmamandiram iti vijñānibhiḥ), for merchants, a place for obtaining profit (lābhabhūmir iti vaidehakaiḥ) for panegyrists, a place for gambling (dyūtasthānam iti vandibhiḥ), for pure people, a community of sadhus, for those seeking refuge, an adamantine armory (vajrapañjaram iti śaraṇāgataiḥ), for cosmopolitan bon-vivants, a council of the pimps (viṭagoṣṭhīti vidagdhaiḥ), and for those seeking peace, it was a Buddhist retreat (śākyāśrama iti śamibhiḥ).[^464] [[P455]]

While such poetic tropology lends itself to a certain degree of hyperbole, one is struck by the diversity of perceptions and range of imagined clientele as well as the permissiveness that is being assigned to Śaiva spaces, especially vis-à-vis their Buddhist analogues. Except in a farce, Buddhist monasteries and Buddhist monastics tend not to be defined by their inclusiveness towards prostitutes or gamblers or cultivated seekers of pleasure. In a similar spirit, due to the restrictions of the vinaya codes, Buddhist monasteries are not proudly serving as venues for the performance arts. Compare such a position with the Śivadharma’s blatant assertion within its sixth chapter that its institutions will help someone desiring women, to obtain women (kanyārthī labhate kanyāṃ), someone desiring victory, to obtain victory (jayakāmo jayaṃ labhet), a person seeking wealth, to reap material reward (arthakāmo labhed arthaṃ), a person seeking children, to acquire sons (putrakāmo labhet sutān), someone seeking learning, to become learned (vidyārthī labhate vidyāṃ) and those intent on yoga, to acquire yoga (yogārthī yogam āpnuyāt).[^465] All of this is to be accomplished within a hyper- aestheticized and even sensuous venue where beautiful young women dedicated to Rudra keep the company of “the great bulls,” while, concealed within their human skins, gaṇas and apsarases in this very world sound their instruments and sing and dance. Indeed, among the many forms of philanthropic practice the text will advocate, a surprising amount of recurrent attention is directed to the “donation of a young woman” (kanyādāna), a beautiful slender girl (taruṇīṃ) done up to the nines with all the requisite jewelry (guṇasaṃyutāṃ, alaṃkṛtān) who is to be bestowed upon a twice-born, or śivabhakta for his enjoyment.[^466] The only thing missing [[P456]] from such explicit prescriptions is the advocacy for gambling. Clearly these not-so human Rudras on earth were surprisingly eager to accommodate all too human foibles, Whereas earlier Pāśupatas like Kauṇḍinya had seen in bhakti a path for extracting oneself from the world of transactionality in all of its forms, the Śaivas who set out to remake the early medieval world in their own image effectively provide sanction to the diverse intentions that define a transactional world—even to the extent of enabling its partial sacralization—so long as place of pride can continue to be carved out for the minority position of practicing yogic austerity within a social reality where śivayogins are to be venerated.

As we have seen, in the immediate aftermath of the Hun invasions, the Śaiva imaginary of the Indo-Gangetic Plain as represented in the literary imagination of one particularly talented Śaiva Brāhmaṇa reflects a surprising degree of rhetorical and conceptual overlap with the prescriptions of the Śivadharmaśāstra. With all due candor, however, these northern śivapuras, at least as Bāṇa represents them, maintain the aspirations of Śaiva spaces to sovereignty and independence without eschewing the ideology of caste. In other words, while the core interpretive lens of our commentator, which advocates for the centrality of a certain model of political theology to Śaiva lived realities, represents a coherent and compelling and deeply influential “reading” of what it means to be Śaiva that is rooted in close readings of a core canonical text, its perspective was by no means constitutive of some canon of interpretive practice regarding how these text “must” be read. In a world where each appropriately designated space was sovereign and a community was to be judged according to its own norms and self-understanding, diversity in interpretation would have proliferated, even in cases where textual canons were shared. In this regard, it is better to think about Indic law, especially legal alterity, not in terms of a fixed “definitive” interpretation being applied programmatically to [[P457]] each source text, but as something akin to the exploration of affordances we encountered in the previous chapter while thinking about the production of quotidian textualities. A text like the Śivadharmaśāstra gets recognized by external authorities as a legitimate locus for arriving at an understanding of a particular community’s legal traditions. In other words, the root text is viewed not as providing a univocal argument, but as a collection of conceptual resources and precedents. So long as they maintained reference to such a common standard, through acts of exegesis and interpretation, each individuated community would then be in a position to make its own modifications. They were free to emphasize or deemphasize specific dimensions of the work—such as how seriously and prescriptively one is to take its claims about caste— to bring it in alignment with localized and diversified extra-textual site- and community- specific values. Much as we see today, where different communities within a single society all lay claim to what on the surface would seem to be the same cherished body of statutes and constitutional framework, while in practice adhering to radically different readings of the very same sources, only in close congregation and proximity would śivabhaktas hailing from different place, yet tied together by bonds of mutual dependency and solidarity, gradually come to recognize the internal divergences between their mutual visions of what constitutes the proper implementation of Śiva’s dharma.

Let us close our discussion of the substantive shadow the Śivadharmaśāstra would come to cast upon the early medieval landscape by stepping outside of the prescriptive and literary imaginaries we have been exploring to examine a case study of how this kind of legal alterity might play out in the real world. We must begin by narrowing our expectations about the sort of evidence we will encounter. The conventions and limitations of genre render it highly unlikely, for example, that copper plates (as we will see next chapter, a stone stelae [[P458]] fixed in situ within a Śaiva space is another matter entirely) designed in part to ensure the normalization—even banalization—of Śaiva communities into preexisting landscapes harboring a range of traditions will offer us intimate glimpses of the alterity of values operative within many Śaiva spaces. Indeed, a conceptual choice to emphasize in detail precisely those non-evident features of community and site-specific discourses that diverge from Dharmaśāstra norms would have been utterly counterproductive to the aim of ensuring the multigenerational protection of these institutions.

With that caveat in mind, however, it is possible to discern other facets of the discourse inspired by the Śivadharma reflected in these archives. Within a single set of documents, which happen to be important sources for reconstructing the institutional history of one particular form of Śaiva tradition, we will witness the text acting as a form of positive law while also providing the larger ethos animating a newly forming Śaiva institution. Here we rely on the off-chance preservation of two bilingual orphan copper plates from eastern Karnataka, issued respectively under the Rāṣṭrakūṭa and Gaṅga king in 806 CE and 810 CE.[^467] Read in tandem, these documents serendipitously capture different facets of a shared religious and institutional reality, even representing, from different perspectives, the actions of the exact same social agents. Though the first copper plate is presented in the name of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa emperor Govinda III, to whom the merit from the grant is said accrue, in the Nandi copper plates from 806 CE, the actual acting agent is a fact one of the Bāṇa kings, a regional feudatory power that first appears in the inscriptional record during the reign of the Pallavas. From the moment of [[P459]] their emergence in our documentary records, in the spirit of the Śivadharmaśāstra, this line of kings distinguished themselves by the fact that—in lieu of the usual assertion of right to rule being founded on a genealogical connection with the solar or lunar dynasties—the Bāṇas invoke their blood descent from the demon Mahābāli.

In the narrative traditions upon which they draw, apparently, after his defeat by Śiva, Mahābāli and his brothers were incorporated into the Śaiva pantheon as gaṇas. This is to say, much like successor powers such as the Nolambas, who will represent themselves as heirs to the Īśvaravaṃśa, the Bāṇas stake their very claim to political sovereignty on their Śaiva identity and the privileges due to them as gaṇas, incarnations of Rudra in human skin walking about on the earth. Indeed, they even crafted their capital cities, starting with Avani, so that they would amount to mimetic representations of the metropolises of their demonic forebearers. Thus, in the Chikaballapur plate of 806 CE the Bāṇa ruler (mahābalikulodbhava-śrīmahābali bāṇarāje) claims that, like his mythical forebearers, he continues to act as the door guard defending the supreme lord (parameśvarapratihārīkṛta). Drawing on authority now delegated to him by a distant Rāṣṭrakūṭa ruler, our text bluntly states that the issuer’s grant must be recognized as legitimate and honored throughout a carefully delineated chain of command of vassals and subvassals. In other words, despite the fact that it is being articulated in a language indebted to Śaiva political theology, we are confronted here with a concrete assertion of real- world authority framed in a manner that is intended to be defensible within a court of law that is not necessarily aligned with such values.

Indeed, the main purpose of the grant is to record that the entire inheritance of this Bāṇa ruler, without remainder, from hence forth is to be considered to have been transferred. The lucky recipient in question is none other than the local presiding authority (stānādhipati [sic]) [[P460]] who has overlordship (adhipati) regarding the forest of austerity (tapovana) on top of Nandi Hill (nandigiri)—a site where the Bāṇas had recently helped establish a Śaiva temple complex. The donee is Īśvaradāsa—the servant of the Lord or the servant who is a Lord—whose wealth is his austerity (tapodhana). This same figure will appear in another copper plate[^468] issued by the same Bāṇa ruler in 809 CE, where we will learn more about his compassionate disposition towards all beings (parasarabhūtadayan), his upstanding conduct and observances of and fasts, ritual restraints, as well as his discipleship under a certain Kālaśakti, labelled by the text as the “Kālamukhyaguru,” a title that has been silently corrected in secondary literature to Kālamukha. It is this feature, especially combined with a somewhat specious misreading of the admittedly ambiguous Kannada that can be seen as suggesting Kālaśakti was the “first Kālamukhya guru,” that has warranted Īśvaradāsa’s inclusion in Western historiography as one of the earliest self-identifying Śaiva practitioners of the Kālamukha traditions to appear in our documentary records.[^469] In broader terms, however, Īśvaradāsa can be read as a śivayogin whose very name conveys the peculiar mix of autonomous authority and service work that is the defining feature of an imagined Śaiva political economy.

The document then informs us more precisely of the terms of the grant Īśvaradāsa is receiving, which includes quite explicitly the conferral of both land and gold, but also of perpetual sovereignty, so long as the sun and the moon and so forth shall endure. Perhaps most importantly, the grant is transferred with the persistent promise that it must be protected by all legitimate political authorities. The space is not to be entered by chāṭas and bhāṭas, it cannot [[P461]] be seized by a king, either now or in the future, and it is perpetually to be utilized generation after generation (kramopabhogya) within the same lineage transmission (anvaya) by those whose wealth is their austerity (tapodhāna)—in other words, by ascetics.[^470] It is also not subject to the usual rules of partition inheritance (dāya) as outlined in the Dharmaśāstra.

In a manner that would appall the typical Sanskrit pandit, as we are beginning to see, the text of this śāsana is highly formalized and repetitive, repeatedly making use of the same designatory terms (such as adhipati) with the same intended meaning. While poor practice when it comes to poetry, as we saw in the prior chapter, this type of discursive production— intent on the minimization of ambiguity—is essential when it comes to the crafting of a conceptually legible legal document that clearly seeks to delineate who has the authority to do what, where, and under which circumstances, in a manner that ensures that specific claims to rights will be readily recognized down through the centuries. A key tactic for maximizing the potential that claims will be honored is to recycle stock terms and phrases that are part of a longstanding discourse surrounding land rights and legal personhood. It is vital, then, that we recognize that it is this palimpsest of discrete formulas that forms the immediate context for the types passages we use in the writing of “documentary” religious history. In other words, just as it has gradually dawned on scholars of epigraphy that kings did not always fight all the battles to which they are given credit in their long list of titles, often simply inheriting frozen monikers relating to the deeds of their predecessors, there is cause to read at least some of the hyper-formalized representations of authority figures like Īśvaradāsa and the types of traits which he (and presumably his successors) display, as providing identificatory criteria for future [[P462]] juridical purposes instead of offering nuanced documentary representations of lived realities. Succinctly, in a text such as this, the gleanings of doxographical and prosopographical information we extract and treat as evidence of “what was really happening” are frequently in actuality providing routinized criteria for continuing to recognize the successors who have a legitimate right to this land and its institutions, and they do so in a manner that seeks to repurpose old and even no longer pertinent formulas in the service of their communities own interests. It is probably for this reason that the sadly very garbled initial presentation of the daily religious activities observed by Īśvaradāsa’s transmission commences with a list of activities (sudhūpadīpagandhabalicharu [emd. chattra to sattra] nityaṃ) that is almost identical to what we find already in the Gupta-era Bhulunda plates, which offered our earliest representation of a comparable sort of Śaiva social agent with sovereign authority over a sacred place.

This general designation of the type “sacerdotal temple-adjacent authority,” is then complemented by an outlining of several slightly more specific practices, allegedly adhered to by our community. Apart from the cultivation of a fixed devotional focus on Śiva, these include such practices as the waving of lights, bathing before making offerings in the context either of a fast observance or ritual, as well as an intriguing allusion on the part of those who are performing timed observances (vratānāṃ) (notice the plural!) to the practice of yogas that make use of the tattvas (vrātānāṃ pratiminavidit [emd. pratidinaṃ] tatvādiyogair). Again, when we think about our text as a legal document, what is at stake here is not a particularized representation of the self-understanding of the community concerning what it values, but simply highlighting some features that will enable authority figures to recognize future inheritors of the claim as belonging to the same anvaya. This is particularly significant for our [[P463]] purposes because our text is just about to invoke the Śivadharmaśāstra itself in a similar vein, treating it as an instantly recognizable and authoritative referent whose real-world relevance and social import is virtually self-evident.

Having introduced us to the donee and his community, the text then seemingly associates the Bāṇa donor’s decision to offer everything he had as dāna to Īśvaradāsa with a personal existential crisis, which caused him to recognize the transience of life and fruitless nature of quotidian striving, beautifully expressed in evocative language.[^471] But this too is not autobiography but a transposable and oft repeated formula. Usually attributed to Vyāsa, but here ascribed somewhat more problematically to the Bhagavad Gītā (where it does not appear), these very same words are placed in the mouths of a range of dynastic powers throughout the early medieval Deccan. What they offer is not a glimpse in the mind of a world-weary ruler, but a fixed tropology set down in writing ensuring that the decision to confer some part of one’s birthright on another community was made in sound mind and not under duress. Much like we saw in the representation of Īśvaradāsa’s anvaya, it is only after the standard boilerplate language has been incorporated, ensuring the document is legible to external authorities, that departures from an inherited generalized scribal template expressing more specific or local intentions tend to be incorporated. In this case, after outlining the horrific consequences of a breach of the sovereignty of this space, the author of the Sanskrit portion of the śāsana appends—treated as yet another piece of highly routinized positive law—a truncated extract from chapter eight of the Śivadharmaśāstra. The passage, which is slightly compressed and contains some variants from the vulgate, reads: [[P464]]

Listen to the great fruit of merit that belongs to that king who gives the land [to a Śaiva community] that is endowed with water and that causes the grain to grow. For however many measures of a stick the ground may extend, being measured all around, for that many of eons he reigns in Rudraloka. By this gift of earth (bhūmidāna), he is endowed along with twenty-one generations of his family with crores of divine women and vehicles, as brilliant as a crore of suns, and they extend for hundreds of crores of yugas, and they are endowed with all desires. As he desires, he rules in the world of sovereign power for an unlimited amount of time.[^472]

Succinctly, from the inception of our documentary records associated with a community that will bear the label Kālamukha, the Śivadharmaśāstra is already in evidence serving as a community-specific juridical framework. Its purpose here is to augment and emend the standard discourse on property rights, by providing incentivization for protecting the grant that would be sure to be at once appealing to and understandable by any ruler, or potential usurper, who was also a Śaiva devotee. Perhaps most importantly, the placement of this extract coincides exactly with the space in which, in other Gaṅga and Rāṣṭrakūṭa-era copper plates from this same general region where the recipients are Vedic Brāhmaṇas one would find a passage ascribed to, but hardly in evidence, in the writings or “songs” of Manu offering ideologically divergent set of incentives.[^473] Though the precise sociality of the life- [[P465]] world at Nandi Hill cannot be accessed from the scant evidence in our sources, what we have here is direct application of the principle of the differential application of the law, where “being Śaiva” is to be treated as form of legal alterity that directly substitutes for and takes the place of the contrary canon associated with “being Brāhmaṇa.”

The terse final portion of the grant, composed in an irregular register of old Kannada, is clearly addressed to a distinct and local audience, seemingly uninvested in transregional Sanskrit imaginaries. Indeed, were we to have encountered this source in isolation from the preceding framing, we would be presuming a rather different interpretive context out of which the present document was emerging. Once the switch is made into pure Kannada, all of the nested hierarchies of non-Bāṇa political authority systems alluded to earlier in the text completely disappear. So too do all efforts to justify and document rights and personhood in the idiom of transregional cosmopolitan Sanskrit bureaucratic conventions. Here, there are only two authorities, the Bāṇa royal family, who derive their authority from their devotion to Śiva, and Ācārya Īśvaradāsa, who governs on behalf of Śiva. In place of wider sacred and political geographies, the only territory in evidence is strictly local, offering specific delineations of the subdivision of property and its attended rights, such as the bestowing of plow fields upon the council of kārukas within the newly reorganized land grant. It is also exclusively a Śaiva space where Īśvaradāsa’s duties blend together the realm of ritual observance and quotidian law. Even the right of the Bāṇas to fully participate in this space comes not from their bearing the title of king, but from their long standing Śaiva devotion exemplified in the fact that the wife of the Bāṇa ruler, Māṇikkābbĕ (who elsewhere will be called Ratnāvalī) has already endowed a Śaiva temple on Nandi Hill sometime prior to our first grant (māṇikkaběya dēgulakkě kŏṭṭŏd) and will repeatedly recommit herself to enriching and [[P466]] protecting the Śaiva community of which she seems to be a part. In turn, the administration of all these complex social relations is said to be entirely under the direction of Īśvaradāsa, now named the recipient of the subtype of grant labelled a datti entrusted to Parameśvara, (idam paḍedor īśvaradāsar parameśvaradatti). In other words, just as the Śivadharmaśāstra has proposed, we have stepped into a world outside of the conventions of transactional saṃsāra and its power games. Here, only Śiva and his people are real. [[P467]]

---