06: Śākta Artisan Imaginaries

Chapter 6: Art and Terror in the City of Śiva: Śākta Artisan Imaginaries and the Making of a Material World

A World Made Fit for Images

As we have seen time and time again, as both social space and conceptual object, the Deccan was effectively defined by the translation—into text, praxis, and materiality—of very specific epistemological commitments that imagined the world as founded upon irreducible diversity. As this chapter will make clear, these acts of translation were very specifically the product of the life-world of the medieval artisans who quite literally built the Deccan, and about whom little of substance has been written. Our task in this chapter—through a sympathetic act of the imagination married to precise philological work—is to attend to the self-understanding of these social actors and to the institutional frameworks, especially matters of pedagogy and ritual professionalizations, that made them into the types of people seen as suited for carrying out their assigned social roles. In short, we will need to acclimate ourselves to what is entailed in being not the type of religious intellectual or functional authority who composes entextualized theoretical discourse, but the sort of craftsman or functionary who translates ideas into the building blocks that make up institutions.

Since our intent is to make sense of the self-understanding of premodern social agents who saw no natural antimony operating between ritual and “real work,” simple recourse to Western social scientific models will hardly suffice. It is more productive, in fact, to begin by reflecting on the very difficulty this dichotomy—between worship and craft, between art and object—has repeatedly posed for Indologists and scholars of religion. A particularly constructive point of departure is the perspective on offer in The Aims of Indian Art, composed in 1908 by the great Sri Lankan polymath Ananda Coomaraswamy. In one of the [[P677]] publications of its kind, Coomaraswamy sets out to make the case to the general public within the English-speaking world that the material culture of the Indian subcontinent demands to be read not as mere archeological curiosity but as art in its own right, informed by an emic aesthetic vision:

It is said of a certain famous craftsman that when designing, he seemed not to be making, but merely to be outlining a pattern that he already saw upon the paper before him. The true artist does not think out his picture, but ‘sees’ it; his desire is to represent his vision in the material terms of line and colour. To the great painter, such pictures come continually, often too rapidly and too confusedly to be caught and disentangled. Could he but control his mental vision, define and hold it! But “fickle is the mind, froward, forceful, and stiff; I deem it as hard to check as is the wind”; yet by “constant labour and passionlessness it may be held,” and this concentration of mental vision has been from long ago the very method of Indian religion, and the control of thought its ideal of worship. . . . These mental images are of the same nature as those the artist sees, and the process of visualisation is the same. Here, for example, is a verse from one of the imager’s technical books (the Rūpāvaliya):

“These are marks of Siva: a glorious visage, three eyes, a bow and an arrow, a serpent garland, ear-flowers, a rosary, four hands, a triśūla, a noose, a deer, hands betokening mildness and beneficence, a garment of tiger skin, His vahan a bull of the hue of the chank.” It may be compared with the Dhyāna mantrams used in the daily meditation of a Hindu upon the Gāyatrī visualised as a Goddess.

“In the evening Sarasvatī should be meditated upon as the essence of the Sāma Veda, fair of face, having two arms, holding a triśūla and a drum, old, and as Rudrāṇī, the bull her vāhan.” Almost the whole philosophy of Indian art is contained in the verse of Sukrācārya’s Sukranītisāra which enjoins this method of visualization upon the imager: “In order that the form of an image may be brought fully and clearly before the mind, the image maker should meditate; and his success will be in proportion to his meditation. No other way—not indeed seeing the object itself—will achieve his purpose.

It cannot be too clearly understood that the mere representation of nature is never the aim of Indian art. Probably no truly Indian sculpture has been wrought from a living model, or any religious painting copied from the life. Possibly no Hindu artist of the old schools ever drew from nature at all. His store of memory pictures, his power of visualisation and his imagination were, for his purpose, finer means; for he desired to suggest the Idea behind sensuous appearance, not to give the detail of the seeming reality, that was in truth but māyā, illusion. For in spite of the pantheistic accommodation of infinite truth to the capacity of finite minds, whereby God is conceived as entering into all things, Nature remains to the Hindu a veil, not a [[P678]] revelation; and art is to be something more than a mere imitation of this māyā, it is to manifest what lies behind.¹

Almost everything Coomaraswamy stood for—starting with his style and the cadence of his prose to say nothing of his worldview—is now deeply unfashionable. Indeed, were it not for the color of his skin, as the de facto co-founder of the modern Traditionalist movement in tandem with the avowed fascist René Guénon, with whom he corresponded regularly for more than a decade, Coomaraswamy is exactly the sort of figure whose oeuvre the Western academy would be inclined to consign to the ash heap of history. Instead of such overt condemnation, however, in the more recent literature that aims to recover emic understandings within the domain of premodern Indian art, Coomaraswamy’s arguments are typically treated with condescension—indeed, often ascribed to subsequent authors. Little or no concrete efforts, however, are directed at directly refuting the close readings of primary sources that undergird his position.

Thus, for example, in her monograph The Theory of Citrasutras in Indian Painting, Isabella Nardi approaches the work of the craftsman with a diametrically opposed set of presuppositions. The study of art, she insists, should emphasize the technical and transactional facets of this livelihood, which is self-evidently divorced from the types of high-minded theological concerns and mystic pretensions that have been artificially imposed upon on it by modern scholars with Orientalist leanings. In essence, Nardi has written a full-length refutation of the communis opinion first articulated by Anand Coomaraswamy in seminal works such as The Aims of Indian Art. Curiously however, never once does she mention him by name. In his [[P679]] place, she rapidly disposes of two surrogate straw men, Sivaramamurti and Lal Mani Dubey, who are advocating very similar positions. Nardi writes:

It is quite possible to develop a clear idea about the conceptualization of the painter and his role, therefore, from the texts. He is described in a realistic way that accords to him a certain degree of independence. This point is overlooked by some scholars while attempting to prove that Indian art is transcendental, and in turn add words like meditation, yoga and contemplation in their interpretations of the texts. . . .

A similar approach can be found in Dubey’s comment on the Aparājitapṛcchā. Bhuvanadeva, the writer of the Aparājitapṛcchā, observes that the process of painting presupposes the identification of the painter with the visible animate and inanimate world (ApaPr 224.18). Dubey however argues that: “The act of painter or artist is the act of a seer or a yogi who identifies subjects with the object. This art is contemplative or meditative.” . . .

Sivaramamurti and Dubey therefore take advantage of a textual source to prove their ideas that the painter was a yogi. However, this position is not supported by the aforementioned textual evidence. . . . Textual and practical views on the painter do not reflect the ideas shared by scholars like Sivaramamurti and Dube [sic], who attribute to the painter the status of a yogī. This view appears quite frequently in secondary literature, but it is supported neither by texts nor by practice.²

For Nardi, the very texture of premodern Indic texts on painting—with their painstaking measurements and highly technical artisanal focus—belies an obviously erroneous association with the discourse of yogins, which is assumed to be governed by a numinous transcendentalism ungrounded in any material particularity. Nardi’s analysis, as she readily admits, is informed by the time she has spent working with the professionalized painting communities in the vicinity of Nāthjī at Nathdwara in Rajasthan. These Vallabhite Vaiṣṇava devotees, as far as she has observed,³ eschew the ascription of any esoteric dimensions to their craft. While such a background understandably informs her selection of sources, [[P680]] especially her privileging of the likely late eighth-century⁴ Kashmiri Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa, to which she ascribes an unreasonably early date, it does not excuse her rather disingenuous belittling of Sivaramamurti’s and Dubey’s understandings of the discourse of Indian art. Itself essentially a refinement of Coomaraswamy, their position is dismissed in Nandi’s reading as entailing nothing more than the ad-hoc addition of “words like meditation, yoga and contemplation” to “their interpretations,” with the aim of attributing “to the painter the status of a yogī. . . a view. . . supported neither by texts nor by practice.”

Such a somewhat derogatory, emphatic, and unambiguous characterization, especially in regard to readily available published sources, all but cries out for verification. Quite unlike in the case of the polymath Sivaramamurti, who articulates such a perspective from within a more synthetic curatorial framework, Lal Mani Dubey’s project—reporting on the contents of what is supposedly a twelfth-century treatise on art and architecture entitled the Aparājitapṛcchā, composed in early medieval Gujarat on the edge of the Deccan—is primarily documentary in nature. Thus, contrary to Nardi’s characterization in the passage we have just been reading, when we inquire whether early medieval artisan authors such as the Bhuvanadeva who composed the Āparajitāpṛcchā did or did not equate the “the act of painter or artist” with “a seer or a yogi who identifies subjects with the object,” we are not dealing with matters of argument but assertions of fact that can be readily confirmed or denied on the basis of their presence within or absence from the primary sources. One has only to turn in a [[P681]] cursory fashion to the admittedly enormous and poorly edited text⁵ that informs Dubey’s writings to see that homologization of acts of cosmic creation and artisan sub-creation, of [[P682]] crafting and yoga—though it is not the intellectual focus of what amounts to a compendium of floor plans and iconographic schematics—is indeed a pervasive concern throughout the work. In other words, the technical and transactional facets of this livelihood that Nardi privileges are in actuality fully fused with the types of high-minded theological concerns and mystical pretensions she has dismissed as anachronism.

Thus, in the introduction to his Baroda edition of Aparajitāpṛcchā, the only published version, Popatbhai Ambashankar Menkad, a retired engineer, candidly writes: “I must admit that I am fully conscious of my incompetence to deal with such a technical subject, especially with the help of scanty materials I had to work upon. For nearly one-third of the voluminous work. . . I had to work out my way from one manuscript alone. . . . The manuscripts themselves were full of mutilations, interpolations and glaringly faulty phraseology scattered throughout the text; the continuity of the subject was broken at several places due to the fact that several stanzas either wholly or partially were missing in many सू+s especially where the subject-matter became highly technical. Even portions of the सू+s themselves had bodily got intermingled with other सू+s without any bearing on them.” Popatbhai Ambashankar Mankad, ed., Aparājitapṛcchā of Bhuvananadeva (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1950), 2– 3. Working with only three manuscripts, from which he gives the occasional major variant, with the aim of producing a readable text, Menkad appears to have cleaned up and silently emended good portions of his source material, obscuring the actual readings to which he had access. Such adjustments have not managed to obscure the composite nature of the work, which seems to be written in several distinctive grammatical registers, including one strongly suggestive of either an Aiśa-tinged original or at least borrowings from such a source. Its authorship is variously ascribed to Bhuvanadeva, Bhavadeva, and Bhatrideva in Hindu Vāstuśāstra discourse. As Steve Vose has pointed out in conversation, among the Jains, who may have their own unpublished recensions, it is believed to be composed by Haribhadra. Intriguingly, at several places in his edition, Menkad documents instances where one of his manuscript sources attempt to replace ascriptions to this human author found within the text with attributions of the same phrases to the deity Viśvakarman. See, for example in the tālavāda chapter on page 793, the replacement of the reading in verse 10, tadanukramaṃ pravakṣyāmi bhuvanadevabhāṣitam with “. . . viśvakarmaprakāśitam.”

The content of the work is equally heterogenous. Here again preliminary evidence suggests the work has undergone a redaction process that elevates the figure of Viśvakarman, here associated with the standard array of early modern Brāhmaṇical values, in a manner that conflicts with the doctrinal and ritual portions of the text, where this god has little prominence and such values are scarcely in evidence. The first nine chapters are particularly suspicious, for in them Viśvakarman, seated on Kailāsa, is presented as the source of the revelation

Thus, for example, in offering a definition of the artisan and his social role, the Aparājitapṛcchā teaches us that the artisan, characterized as “a good worker” who “does the work of the master” adheres to the niyamas and is free from desires (niḥspṛha). At the same time, however, we are informed that the work of the artisan is said to be at every point suffused with the attitude that sustained meditations are what make possible acts of crafting. This is of course precisely the position Dubey had ascribed to the Aparājitapṛcchā, that Coomaraswamy had located in the Śukranītisāra, and that Nardi had dismissed as entirely unsupported by textual evidence:

For so long as there remains prārabdha [karma], there is to be embodied meditation [by the artisan] [upon] the praiseworthy ones [i.e., the gods]. He should bring about that kind of a state (bhava) such as exists with regard to the gods. [Abiding] in the state of the gods by means of his own self (svarūpa), he is always established in the full state of being (pūrṇabhāva).⁶

[[P683]] Much to our consternation, like most of the genre of Śilpaśāstra, the Aparājitapṛcchā is hardly a work that has much invested either in theological speculation or in explicating the social world of which it was a product. Like any other prescriptive technical treatise, it presupposes a particular audience already intimately familiar with the life-world of the profession under study and who would have already acquired their religious education from other sources. Now, as our earlier investigations—at Sirshangi for instance—have suggested, and the Aparājitapṛcchā itself will soon confirm, the content of this religious education was unmistakably Śākta in terms of its core outlook. As we will see, however, the mode of expression of this tradition as well as its pantheon align poorly both with the standard historicization of the evolution of Tantric textual discourses as well as with our modelling of the place of the practicing yogin—typically imagined as a renunciate—within the wider purview of Indic society.

With the aim of beginning to remedy this sorry state of affairs, this chapter carves out a place—sociologically, doxographically, cosmologically, intellectually, and perhaps even phenomenologically—for the Deccani artisan as Śākta yogin. We will be especially attentive to what we can recover of the emic understandings current among such communities, as these diverge in interesting ways from our standard perceptions of the Tantric knowledge systems and their modes of knowledge production. We will be led to reassess the connections between particular modes of understanding and questions of livelihood as well as how the patterns of circulation and transmission of text and praxis constitute and circumscribe the types of exchange possible between communities. Perhaps most fundamentally, our inquiry will lead [[P684]] us to question the relationship the secondary literature has envisioned between the traditions of the Atimārga and the Tantric revelations that are viewed as simplistically superseding them. Instead, by the end of this chapter, the two domains will emerge as deeply entangled, not merely with some of the most idolized transmissions in Tantric thought, but with the fundamental institutional structures that ordered the Deccan.

In reconstructing the interrelationship between these domains, we traverse uncommonly byzantine textual terrains—often having access to mere fragments of key primary sources or having to collate together terse allusions to lost corpora—and at the same time, what actually survives is woefully under-documented. Indeed, the task before us is then something like having to reverse engineer the main plot of the Rāmāyaṇa and discern the nature of the genre of mahākāvya while simply possessing the name of Vālmīki, anthologized verses ascribed to a certain Kālidāsa, while relying primarily on a partial commentary on the Raghuvaṃśa that does not incorporate the verses of the root text. Succinctly, what we have here might justly be characterized as a hermeneutical mess. Nonetheless, by oscillating between close readings of particular passages from unstudied Śākta Śilpaśāstras and archaeological excavations of the social and scriptural environs these works presuppose, we will gradually be able to recognize at least the general contours of these important but neglected discourses as well as the bigger picture of how they speak to the social position of “Tantric” knowledge and its institutionalization in the early medieval world.

What our excavation will unearth is not the earliest kāvya, but instead, nearly as archaic, a hitherto unrecognized artisan religious imaginary with its own ethos, specific pantheon, textual canon, and sociology of knowledge. As we will see, some of the key elements of this tradition include an esotericization of technical processes such that the crafting process itself becomes a part of religious praxis, a decidedly attenuated attitude towards questions of purity, as well as the veneration of a fierce chisel or axe wielding deity, often called Caṇḍeśvara, as [[P685]] the supreme lord, who is then paired with a female counterpart, whose surface identity as a form of Sarasvatī conceals hidden chthonic depths. I will present perhaps all too extensive and certainly tediously technical evidence that the very existence of such a tradition was likely deliberately obscured as an integral part of the articulation of the more familiar tradition-specific Tantric canons of the classical Mantramārga. As we will see, as part of the fashioning of community-specific identities like Śaiva Siddhānta, the Bhairavasiddhānta, or the Trika, elements originating in this older proto-Tantric domain were disaggregated and then partially absorbed across a range of more familiar classical Tantric traditions.

Our analysis will thus proceed from a number of angles. First, we will bring the evidence provided by the Aparājitapṛcchā into dialogue with a range of Śaiva and Śākta doxographies, cosmologies, and vernacular textualities in the service of recovering a discursive and social prehistory for the Śākta Śilpaśāstras. This task demands we reassess some of the more fragmentary evidence concerning the internal diversity of perspectives and modes of practice within Atimārga. Essentially, we will have to engage once again with the problem of hidden Lākula inheritances within the Tantric traditions, especially in relation to the Bhairava Siddhānta, en route to making sense of how the Lākulas themselves subordinated and then ultimately absorbed an equally Atimārgic sister tradition that seems to have called itself the Kāruka Siddhānta, and was intimately connected with artisan sociologies.

Our analysis will then turn toward a close reading of the most significant works of the Tantric artisan corpus to survive, especially the largely unstudied and likely late-eighth-century Piṅgalāmata, which will serve as a touchstone to which we will return again and again as the chapter progresses. Having assigned a general context to this mode of textuality, by inquiring into mainstream śāstric discourses on the role of the śilpin, we will next begin to make sense [[P686]] of the types of agents that would have been inculcated into these forms of knowledge, placing them into dialogue with delineations of the role of the śilpin as householder and yogin found within the Śākta sources. In reconstructing the virtually unstudied life-world of the Śākta artisan, we look at how professionalization, philosophical speculation, material culture, and pedagogy are understood to operate within these communities as well as how this mode of textuality responds to and encounters more familiar forms of Sanskritic discourse.

Finally, having oriented ourselves to the life-world of the śilpin, through a close reading of a Śākta Śilpaśāstra’s treatment of pratiṣṭhā, we will examine both the pragmatics and political theology that govern acts of institutionalization within the medieval Deccan, at least from the perspective of some of the people we call Lākula Kālamukhas and their disciples. It is here that the careful and somewhat tedious philological work on Tantric taxonomies will bear fruit, for ultimately it will provide us a much-needed foundation for at last making sense of the shared doctrinal vision—bearing deep connections with the Śivadharmaśāstra and with concrete social implications—articulated across a range of what would otherwise seem to be disparate Śaiva and Śākta sources. Taken as whole, they call for a reappraisal of the social role of the Lākula traditions, as well as the other Atimārgic communities they absorbed, in the constitution of the values of the early medieval Deccan.

Setting such lofty concerns aside for the moment, let us return to the Aparājitapṛcchā, a treatise on construction and design that offers our first window into the life-world of the Śākta artisan and its occluded deep history. Its author, perhaps named Bhuvanadeva, unapologetically held Śākta views, was an initiate into such systems, and prescribed acculturation in Śākta religiosity as a precondition for artisan professionalization. Such commitments explain why, in the Aparājitapṛcchā, wherever the sūtradhāra establishes [[P687]] himself and his team at a new job site, the main pūjā performed entails the veneration not only of Gaṇanātha accompanied by Siddhi and Buddhi and the trimūrti, features we would expect regardless of precise affiliation, but also the propitiation—using “special substances”—of the guardian of the field, the yoginīs, the quintessential Kaula deity Baṭuka Bhairava, the goddess, and a Kumārī.⁷ In fact, the more than eight hundred pages of iconographic and architectural prescriptions frame as their centerpiece directions for building the largest image represented in the Aparajitāpṛcchā, a fifty-armed form of Svacchandabhairava who stands ten and a half feet tall. Once this gargantuan image of Svacchandabhairava as Rudra has been constructed, the text informs us, before the pūjā begins, the artisans must craft the eight Bhairavas. While this list of eight admits some variation, the Svacchanda Tantra, for example, mentions Svacchanda, Caṇḍa, Krodha, Unmatta, Asitāṅga, Mahocchuṣma, and Kapālīśa Bhairava.⁸ Rather tellingly, the last figure in this canon has had his originally independent worship absorbed into the tradition of the Picumata Brahmayāmala.

[[P688]] Pedda Vegi, Eluru, Telangana and Edulabad, Medchal District, Telangana. Multi-armed (though not fifty armed) and headed images of Bhairava of a similar scale to those prescribed by Aparājitapṛcchā.

After the Bhairavas have been installed, the ācārya, here called sūtradhāra, wearing white clothes and observing a vow that restricts his intake of food, performs homa, measures and sprinkles the ground and then invokes a series of mantras⁹ into the tools used for crafting.¹⁰ He should touch the tip of the chisel (ṭaṅka)¹¹ with the mantra. He should install on the tip of the chisel the blazing weapon [mantra] that faces all the directions. He should [[P689]] install Amṛtīśa [Bhairava]¹² in the lotus of the heart, then it [the chisel] blazes with the astramantra.¹³

The master of ceremonies now distributes the dāna. The artisans (śilpins) are given clothing and ornaments and fed and then the same act is repeated, only this time things are bestowed upon Brāhmaṇas.¹⁴ The occasion for this ritual act is said to coincide with the bestowing of land (bhūmidāna), and we are told that “the work” (karma) of crafting images, during which the artisan makes material the image he is contemplating in his heart (yasya devasya yā mūrtiś cintayet tāṃ hṛdambuje), coincides with a fivefold festival (pañcamahotsava).¹⁵ The chapter then concludes with a reflection on the mantra system used by this community, to which we will return momentarily.

[[P690]] In this eight-hundred-page text—which again offers schematics for crafting specific images and structural elements as well as canons of measurement—only several other passages in a similar vein reflect upon the specificities of artisan religious praxis that our text views as inseparable from acts of crafting. Even in its current fragmentary and garbled form, however the most vivid of these is rather tellingly integrated into the chapter dedicated to the worship of the goddess Sarasvatī (sarasvatyarcana). This chapter opens with what it calls the compilation concerning the essence of ritual initiation (dīkṣāsārasamuccaya). Unfortunately, the author of the Aparājitapṛcchā apparently does not believe that identifying the target audience for initiation—are we talking about a general induction into the ranks of practicing artisans or some more specialized category of practitioner?—forms an “essential” part of his message. We are simply told that an ācārya, who observes his community’s ācāra in a disciplined manner (vinayācārasaṃyuktaṃ), who is skilled in all the śāstras, especially those associated with Vāstu (kuśalaṃ sarvaśāstreṣu vāstuvedodbhavādiṣu), who is attached to the worship of the feet of his guru (gurupādārcane ratam), and who worships god, fire, and guru (devāgnigurupūjāsu rataṃ), should initiate “the best of disciples” (śiṣyakottama). After a karmic and physical assessment has been made of the qualities of the student, this initiation takes place on the proper astrological occasion, within a monastery or a house (maṭhe ’thavā gṛhe) where, on the best of ritual grounds (vedikottama), an image of the goddess has been installed.

Though she is called Kāmākhyā,¹⁶ iconographical and visual culture evidence suggest, more specifically, that the goddess in question is understood to represent at once Vāgdevī and Bhairavī. At the level of iconography, seated in a lotus posture with her “japamālā, vīṇā, book and kamaṇḍalu, blue throat, white arms, a white body, and a crescent moon,” she is virtually indistinguishable from the generic representation of the goddess Sarasvatī. Quite possibly tens of thousands of images of this sort survive from the medieval Deccan, and it has often been noted that this was perhaps the one time in the history of India prior to modernity when temples dedicated solely to the goddess Sarasvatī formed a common feature of the landscape. Virtually of these images are found in ritual centers associated with the Kālamukhas.

[[P691]] Hirehadagalli: Door to the shrine that originally housed Sarasvatī. Notice her emblem—the haṃsa—over the door.

[[P692]] Hirehadagalli: Details, right side of door to Sarasvatī temple. Top R: Bhairava and ghoul with club in context Left L: Detail of ghoul. Bottom: The same panel.

[[P693]] Hirehadagalli, Karnataka. Inscribed image of Sarasvatī in situ.

[[P694]] Hottal, Maharashtra. A temple of Sarasvatī. T: Detail on lintel of Sarasvatī. M: door frame: L: A panel representing Bhairavī framed by Bhairava on the wall beside the shrine, demonstrating the identity of Sarasvatī and Bhairavī. The original mūrti is no longer extant.

[[P695]] Further evidence confirming the identity of the goddess in question can be gleaned from the fact that the Aparājitapṛcchā offers us a brief but rare glimpse at a particular ritual practice, including a peek at the mantras involved. In this system, Vāgdevī/Bhairavī resides within the center of an eight petalled lotus within the bhadraka maṇḍala, surrounded it seems by Bhairavīs and kuladevīs. This central image in turn is embedded within a hexagon, known of as the void, and perhaps worshipped by six dutīs, though here the text is particularly unsatisfactory. Dressed in white clothes, the artisan is offered to the goddess, begs for her favor and propitiates her with the otherwise unattested mūla mantra.¹⁷ The śilpin then performs an aṅganyāsa [heart, head, tuft, armor, eyes, and weapon], each of which makes use of the standard Śākta bīja hrīṃ and much more obscure ā/āṃ. While, besides the use of āṃ, the obligatory veneration, found in almost any Kaula text, of Gaṇapati, Baṭuka Bhairava, direction deities, door protectors, and protectors of the field adheres to the standard pattern, the final mantra ¹⁸ which emphasizes the so called haṃsa bīja, is somewhat unusual and will warrant further reflection momentarily. In typically Tantric fashion, these mantras are enjoined to be repeated 100,008 times independent of ritual action, and then 10,008 more times in the context of a homa rite that makes use of materials from the ficus tree.

[[P696]] Once all of this is completed, the disciple inscribes a message—the content is not specified—that corresponds to what must be written down whenever one commences drafting a painting. The guru then places his hand on the head of the disciple and proceeds with initiation. In place of the expected soteriological message—such as something to do with the severing of ontological bondage and the conferring of a new identity, however, in this text the guru simply proclaims in rather convoluted Sansrkit—avāpnuhi svakarmādisāmarthyaṃ tvaṃ—which basically boils down to “you have obtained the capacity to do your own crafting work,” a message akin to what one finds on those ever so cherished printed certificates issued as a matter of course following training courses on the modern subcontinent. To a modern sensibility, it is thus unnerving that what for us seems like a banal exercise in professionalization and credentialing is immediately followed by a paean of effusive devotional fervor. Declarations such as “the guru is mother, the guru is father, the guru is the god of the gods themselves, he is the cause of knowledge in this world and in the next”¹⁹ may be mainstays of Hindu devotion, but they take on very different significance when the context is that you have just completed orientation at work and the guru in question is about to become your boss on the job site. For the author of the Aparājitapṛcchā, however, what to us are divergent dimensions of human experience—call them the spiritual and the transactional—form a seamless unity, for after all this bhakti talk, the parts of the chapter that remain readable conclude by informing us that “the connection of disciple to guru enables the means to the production of craft (karma). From the connection of disciple and guru there is knowledge that is the very foundation of [the art] of painting.”²⁰

[[P697]] As this passage suggests, Tantric initiatory sociologies lay at the very heart of the Aparājitapṛcchā’s emic understanding of the act of making. And yet, lest we be tempted to simply read this sort of thing as a theologization obscuring concrete social relationships, consider sections explaining the origin of painting, where Aparājitapṛcchā continues on to articulates a distinctive, and yoga-inflected conception of the very relationship between the painter and the world. Painting, we learn, is in fact the foundation upon which everything in three worlds is dependent (citramūlodbhavam sarvaṃ trailokyaṃ sacarācaram).²¹ It is the source of the sun, moon, and continents, of entities like plants, humans, and animals, and even of conditions of being like youth, sickness, and old age. By adopting various modal states, the painter sees with the eye of brahman. In this way, he recognizes at once the variegated nature of things in this world, as well as their essential unity as having the nature of the supreme self. For, in just the same way that the union of Śiva and Śakti produces the emanation of various things into their transmigratory existence, without changing their fundamental nature, the work of the painter (citra) each time recapitulates the logic of cosmic creation. Thus, the production of a painting is an act of incarnation (citrāvatāra) and the maker of a painting (citrakṛta) commits to a process that our text explicitly homologizes with kuṇḍalinī yoga. With his brush, [[P698]] he brings about the coming together in a single space of Śiva and Śakti whose nature is moon, sun, and perhaps fire;²² the vital force, arising from the seat of the sun, first becomes attached to the central channel, here called the path of Brahmā, before finally dissolving in the middle of the moon in an act that produces the finished painting. It is for this reason that painting (cītrarūpa), which represents the totality of things in the world, all of which are none other than Śiva and Śakti, must be understood as “as the agent of life in the midst of life itself” (jīvamadhye jīvakaṃ).

[[P699]] In much the same way, moreover, that paintings are said to both contain worlds within themselves and to revitalize the external world, the painter and his craft are said to be animated by the mantra. This mantra, called haṃsa, is said to continually repeat itself silently inside of all living beings in the form of the natural inhalation and exhalation of the breath. This practice becomes a mainstay of early modern yoga, particularly when combined with a particular kind of non-ritualized, absorptive yoga that facilitates the dissolution of mental states into an abiding consciousness beyond conceptual thought, which texts come to refer to as amanaska yoga. Indeed, the Aparājitapṛcchā repeatedly prescribes this deliberate enunciation of the haṃsa mantra by the artisan as forming the necessary precondition for the bringing into being of any new material object—as, for example, when it is defined it as the mūrtiprārambhamantra at the conclusion of the chapter on the worship of the Sarasvatī who is in actuality Bhairavī. Its essential relation to this goddess—who after all is depicted “riding” upon the haṃsa—is suggested by the somewhat gnomic passage with which the Svacchandabhairavāvatāra division of the Aparājitapṛcchā concludes:

The haṃsa is said to be the seed in all mantras. The haṃsa is the god Sadāśiva; haṃsa alone is the lord Hari. Haṃsa is Brahmā, and Yama, and Sūrya, and Fire, and the universal deity. Haṃsa is water, air, space, dharma, Indra, the god of wealth, and the [[P700]] earth. . . . Thus the haṃsa has gone about as the self of all, higher than the highest. Parāśakti is dissolved in the haṃsa. Thus, they relate this meaning. The forty-nine letters go to destruction. At the end of destruction, however, they become known of as the varṇas and they are from Maheśvara. But Śakti goes to her ending when she is absorbed in the forehead. This is called the place of the void, which is worshipped always by the yogins. From the forehead to the heart, it comes—that which is the supreme amanaska state. The sūtradhāra, seated upon the āsana, should recite the mantra with the bīja.²³

The identity of this goddess, Sarasavatī as Bhairavī, will prove quite relevant for our further explorations of the Śākta material and textual cultures of the early medieval Deccan, and their earlier Tantric and Atimārgic antecedents. Thus, it is no accident that she will reappear on multiple occasions throughout the remainder of this chapter. The above passage also hints at an esoteric soteriology related to the directing of unbroken attention at the place of the void “worshipped always by the yogins,” a practice that is a central focus of the religious life of the late medieval Deccan—especially within the domain that now corresponds to Maharashtra and parts of Gujarat. While a careful analysis of such matters will form a major focus of the later portion of the eighth chapter, for our present purposes, what is perhaps most pertinent is what we are beginning to see here is the emergence within artisan circles—out from the realm of formally ritualized Tantric discourse—of something akin to the stripped-down subtle body yoga praxis we find among early modern ascetic traditions such as the Nātha yogins. If, reaching forward in time, the Aparājitapṛcchā’s nascent vision of amanaska yoga prefigures the sort of materials one finds in the work often rather appropriately entitled the Amanaska, especially in its second chapter,²⁴ the same set of ideas also have a prehistory in Tantric thought that is intimately bound up with artisan communities. In fact, as we shall soon see, it is this earlier work that will eventually enable us to make sense of the seemingly disparate dimensions of the Aparājitapṛcchā itself and its strange marriage of the worship of Svacchanda and his Bhairavas with the veneration of Sarasvatī. To do so, we need to first explore our earliest evidence for a crucial but vexing term, Kāruka, intimately bound up with early artisan imaginaries, and what it might mean within the greater Śaiva cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia as well as in more quotidian śāstric literature. Having done so, we can continue to trace the prehistory of the Kāruka traditions through the archive of what Alexis Sanderson and his students have reconstructed of the doxographical landscape of Tantric and Atimārgic communities. Because this subject has been of marginal interest even within the philological study of early Śaivism, our archive of past scholarship largely consists of technical asides in footnotes and running commentaries in critical editions. Even within the primary sources themselves, these exercises in doxography are usually terse and polemical in nature, structured in a matter often designed to sublimate our actual object of study to the more familiar classical Tantric doctrines that claimed to supersede them.

Unmaking the Makers: The Sublimation of the Kārukas as a Creative Force within Tantric Imaginaries

As surprising is it might seem, except in regard to the rarefied world of the Nāṭyaśāstra, comparatively little careful textual scholarship or ethnographic work has been dedicated to making sense of the social realities within which either early medieval artist or more contemporary artisan figure would have operated. Even less attention has been given to recovering something of the sensibility that such a person—and not some elite rasa theorist—would have brought to their work. A rare recent exception to this general trend is a series of articles²⁵ by Andre Acri dedicated to reconstructing the medieval South Asian roots of certain Javanese and Balinese medieval literary tropes and modern performance traditions.

[[P702]] Acri masterfully argues that certain allegorical satires ostensibly depicting the behavior of different types of birds, found in the Old Javanese Kakavins, especially a ninth-century Rāmāyaṇa, present deliberate and highly particularized parodies of specific categories of Atimārga Śaiva ascetics. In doing so, he draws our attention to an emic taxonomy of pre-Tantric “Śaiva” traditions that will prove integral to the main argument of this chapter. In these expanded doxographies, the Atimārga is said to consist not of the usual three divisions of Pāñcārthika Pāśupata, Lākula/Kālamukha, and Somasiddhānta/Kāpālika, but instead incorporates two additional categories, namely, that of the Vaimala and the Kāruka. While Acri’s main interest, motivated by his initial discovery of a range of references to “alepakas” in his source, is in making sense of the stainless (Vaimala) line of the Atimārga, we will focus on the even more neglected Kārukas as these will turn out to be intimately linked to our artisans. Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, Acri offers a compelling case that in the Javanese imagination, quite apart from their allegorical association with specific animals, particular categories of Atimārga ascetics tend to be consistently linked with specific professions, some of which correspond to performance traditions that at least until recently persisted on the ground.²⁶ Extending this line of inquiry, Acri concludes this article by drawing our attention to the continuities between medieval narrative depictions of dances and comedic performances enacted by figures who the texts identify as Śaiva and living performance traditions that persist on the margins of courtly entertainment in Bali and Java.

[[P703]] Thus for example, in the Javanese “bearded buffoon” called the canthang balungs—the name derives from a Javanese word meaning the “rattling of bones”—who assumes dance postures that resemble those of fierce Tantric deities, whose sigil is a liṅga and a yoni, whose office until the colonial encounter entailed management of the dancing girls, and whose ancestors European travel accounts represent as clandestinely consuming the five “m’s” of Śākta worship, Acri detects the persistence of a professionalized form of Kaula Kāpālika inflected performers, noncelibate ascetics seemingly slotted into a consistent albeit low status social role.²⁷ Dialoguing with Ramachandra Chintamani Dhere and Phillip Lutgendorf, Acri suggestively extends his analysis, if but briefly, to attend to unexpected sociological continuities between Javanese and Balinese performance traditions and the typically low caste but ritually significant “folk” performance traditions in central and north India, including the dying art of the kuśīlavins of central Karnataka and the Maharashtrian tradition of gondhal.²⁸ He suggests that all of these disparate lineages seem to share common social and conceptual roots. Following a suggestion by Van Naerssen that the Sanskrit Old Javanese Lexicon, the Amaramālā, explains the Javanese term of art used in general for such performers, pirus, as a transcreation of the Sanskrit kuśīlava, Acri briefly traces these low-caste itinerant performers and singers back to into the Sanskrit Epic and Dharmaśāstra.

[[P704]] In the context of this analysis, Acri notes in passing that, as early as the Manusmṛti (8.65, 8.102) and the Nāṭyaśāstra, the low-caste bards called kuśīlava habitually appear paired in compound with another term of art, the kāruka. As we have already seen, albeit briefly, in the Śaiva sources, the Kāruka is alluded to as a separate category of Atimārga Śaivas. On the basis of the kārukas’ inclusion in passages in the Nāṭyaśāstra which outline the roles included among a troop of actors, Acri ingeniously proposes that the kāruka “in the Sanskrit legal texts and in the Nāṭyaśāstra are not to be interpreted as ‘artisans’ or ‘mechanics’ (√kṛ 1) but as ‘singers’ or ‘bards’ (from kāru one who sings or praises, a poet,” √kṛ 2).”²⁹ The evidence of the Kauṭilya Arthaśāstra,³⁰ from which the Manusmṛti seems to directly derive its definition of the works allotted to a Śūdra as including kārukuśīlavakarma, however, renders such an explanation highly improbable. For here, in numerous passages, the pairing of kāruka and kuśīlava is complicated by the introduction of at least one more additional element, the śilpin, and indeed the designing of buildings (vāstu) is said to be conducted by a community comprised of kāruka and śilpin (as for example in KA 6.02 vāstukaṃ kāruśilpigaṇaḥ).³¹

[[P705]] Kauṭilya’s writings offer us evidence that this social formation is at least as old as most of Sanskrit literature, of the wide range of activities with which the kāruka was associated, as well as of his indispensability in ensuring that a rich of variety of professional domains would continue to operate smoothly. The work of the kāru (kārukarma), for example, is mentioned in the Arthaśāstra’s discussions of the operations of the goldsmith, where it is said to involve, in Olivelle’s translation, the “manufacture of solid and hollow objects, plating [avalepya], overlaying, fastening, and gilding.”³² The kāruka then appears in discussions of the management of the armory, where the director in charge is supposed to recruit and employ, making sure to pay them fair wages, both kārus and śilpins “to manufacture mechanical devices for use in battle.”³³ The master of yarn, we learn, is to make a similar arrangement in regard to employing independent kārukas so that they supply the materials for making cloth as well as armor, and the superintendent of agriculture is said to be dependent on kārukas, smiths (karmāra), carpenters (kuṭṭāka), hunters (medaka), and rope makers (rajju) in ensuring that a plow and other needed tools are supplied to his workers.³⁴ Unlike with regular labor, the rations and wages of artisans, for they are compensated in both gold and food, are paid in proportion to their work output. Within even the rather centralized state oriented social order envisioned by Kauṭilya, those who engage in kārukarma are granted an unusual degree of independence. Kārukas and śilpins, for example, provide lodgings within their own homes and workshops for visiting artisans from abroad and police fraud within the community.

[[P706]] In his efforts to provide a South Asian context to his discoveries, in the service of making sense of his Vimalas, Acri has translated and edited several important unpublished passages drawn from the corpus associated with the circa fifth- to seventh-century scripture, the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā, our earliest surviving work of Margamārga Śaivism, which seems to be incorporating doxographical materials drawn from even older Atimārga textual traditions that are now lost to us.³⁵ Perhaps the most important of these sources is from the twelfth paṭala of the likely seventh-century Niśvāsaguhya. This text offers brief doctrinal sketches of five different Atimārga traditions, presented here in the ascending sequence of Pāñcārthika, Pramāṇa, Vaimala, and finally the Tantric Śaivas. As Acri demonstrates, in regard to its treatment of the Pāñcārthika Pāśupatas, the Guhya’s distillation incorporates numerous textual parallels to our surviving sources. It is thus likely that the same verisimilitude and precision would have applied to its treatment of the other early streams of Śaiva revelation.

Atimārga Pāñcārthika Pāśupatas Kāpālikas Lākulas Vaimala (Pramāṇaśāstra) Kāruka

[[P707]] For those readers who are unfamiliar with the ever-evolving discourses of Sanderson and his students seeking to map the origins of early Tantric communities, the term “Atimārga”—the path beyond—is an emic formulation of self-description as well as a later term used by doxographers to categorize Tantric revelation. While it increasingly seems clear that within the lived realities of communities of the real world, these categories were far more fluid, the strictly textual realm typically envisions these traditions as discrete and even oppositional schools that share a common genealogy. We have already encountered the Pāñcārthika Pāśupatas in chapter 1, where we examined their only extant commentarial work, Kauṇḍinya’s commentary on the Pāśupatasūtras. We are fortunate to have several additional textual sources available for the study of Pāśupatas. When it comes to the rest of these traditions, however, our evidentiary basis for their study is fraught with difficulty. Not a single intact work in its original form has been transmitted down in the present, though as we will see, there is abundant evidence that what we call Tantric revelation has heavily “cannibalized” these older canons in a manner that makes possible some degree of reconstruction.

In this spirit, the item that is most relevant to our current concerns is the “Pramāṇa” tradition, from which, as you will see, we have surviving only a single verified passage. The manner, in fact, in which the Niśvāsaguhya treats the Pramāṇa system of the Lākulas—as skull bearing meditators, covered in ash, who revere Rudra, dwell outside of the big cities and receive alms from all four castes—seems to correspond quite closely with what we have found in our study of the Kālamukhas. As you can see from the chart which I have extrapolated from his writings above, Acri has mapped the Pramāṇa scriptures onto the category of the Lākulas, from whom, as we know, our familiar Kālamukhas descend. Pivotally for our argument, he also understands the Pramāṇa/Lākulas as the progenitors of the Kārukas. But whereas he understands the Kārukas as an internal development within Lākula discourse, what we will discover is an abundance of evidence that suggests that this tradition had an independent point of origin and conceptual focus before it was ultimately subsumed under the auspices of first the Lākula tradition itself and then of its Tantric antecedents within the Bhairava Siddhānta³⁶

[[P708]] To understand these developments, we need to begin by thinking more broadly about the workmanly dimensions of Tantric doxographies—namely, that they are not merely “maps of” preexisting religious terrains but “maps for” reorganizing lived religious landscapes into doctrinal and social hierarchies. Thus, as reflected in the Niśvāsa corpus, the main conceit of Tantric Śaiva representations of their archaic Atimārga antecedents is to at once incorporate their contents into their own traditions while signaling that they supersede these prior modes of praxis and knowledge. The Niśvāsaguhya accomplishes this through a series of taxonomic schemata that embed polemics. Treating each of the Atimārga traditions as corresponding to one of the quasi-Vedic pañcabrahma mantras, it assigns to the Siddhānta the culminating veneration of sadyojāta. As we shall see, for all of these traditions, though less so for the Tantric Śaivas, the pañcabrahma mantras form an integral part of the mantrin’s tool kit. The second structuring principle deployed in the Niśvāsaguhya is that in sequence, each of the five traditions is said to correspond to the privileging of a specific mode of praxis. For the Pāśūpatas, whose classical texts do not envision initiation, this is caryā; for the Pramāṇa and Kāruka, who are associated in particular with yoga, this is jñāna; the Vaimalas are connected to a special dīkṣā; and finally, of course, the Tantric Śaivas possess the whole array of modalities. As Alexis Sanderson and Acri have dealt rather exhaustively with the matter, for the moment we need only note here in passing that similar supersessionary rhetorical work is happening at the level of cosmology; in Tantric Śaiva enumerations of the tattvas and bhuvanas, the Pramāṇa traditions is assigned to a lower ontic plane in the cosmic hierarchy, where they devote their worship to a slightly humbler emanation of the Supreme deity, usually called Dhruva, while the Vaimalas in turn are associated with the slightly more elevated entity called Tejīśa.³⁷

[[P709]] What is important for us to remember is that these byzantine cosmologies, like the sedimentary layers of the geological record, capture in sequence the emergence of discrete layers in Śaiva religiosity within historical time. Moreover, in a spirit similar to what literary theorists have labelled “the anxiety of influence,” through deliberate attempts to emend and manipulate the representation of the relationship between these communities, specific Śaiva and Śākta-Śaiva communities are engaging in a form of critical reflection about their relationship with their own past. It is thus of critical importance, then, that as Acri has observed, even when they are listed in doxographical catalogs of the Atimārga, the Kārukas are not usually treated as a separate subject worthy of exploration but instead are simply lumped in with the Pramāṇa tradition. In essence, through an archaeology of the earlier relationship between the Pramāṇa tradition, from which our Kālamukhas descend, and Kārukas, we will be in a position to arrive at important insights about the sociology of artisan communities in the medieval Deccan.

As we have begun to see, within the various different sections of the Niśvāsa, the interrelationship between the five branches of Atimārga Śaivas are represented through the medium of a variety of conceptual models. One particularly striking strategy, evident for example in the Guhya, offers a Śaiva version of the “Puruṣasūkta” that homologizes them to the five faces of Śiva and these five faces in turn to parts of the human body. For our purposes, the following detail is of pivotal importance. Within such a framework, while the Pramāṇa Śāstra of the Lākulas is consistently correlated with the center in the heart—corresponding to Aghora—the Kārukas are placed directly beneath them—subject to Vāmadeva— at the level of the genitals. A later work in the Niśvāsa discourse provides us with additional conceptual clarification. In the Niśvāsakārikā, the youngest portion of the Niśvāsa corpus, we are told that, unlike the loftier Vimalas who possess jñāna and the Pramāṇa adepts who teach jñāna, the Kārukas are ones whose travels in the planar realm have been purified by initiation alone (dīkṣādhvānaviśodhitam).³⁸ In other words, the Kārukas do not have full knowledge of the

[[P710]] systems into which they are initiated nor the right to teach them. The texts in question, into which the Kārukas would have received initiation but who were not granted their stewardship, were the eight-fold pramāṇas of the Lākula tradition. It is hardly an accident, then that as we shall soon see the sole surviving passage from the Pramāṇaśāstras is dedicated to an exploration of the aghora mantra, which embodies the face of the god, residing in the heart, to which the Lākulas were doxographically assigned.

(Diagram as given by Andre Acri) (Supplementary chart)

Now curiously, we find a rather telling transposition of this same dependent hierarchical relationship—where the Lākulas assigned to Aghora reside at the level of the heart and have stewardship over their subordinates, aligned with Vāmadeva, at the level of the genitals—within the later classically dualistic work of the Śaiva Siddhānta such as the Mṛgendra Tantra. There, however, in place of the eight-fold Pramāṇas of the Lākula, at the level of the heart aligned with Aghora, we instead find the eight Bhairava Tantras, again associated with Aghora, but also placed in the stream of Dakṣiṇa. At the level of the genitals, the slot where the Kārukas were placed, we now find the Vāma Tantras in the stream of Vāma.

[[P711]] For the benefit of the reader who has not spent a good portion of their life struggling to grasp the convoluted ways long dead Tantric practitioners talked about themselves and drew up their family trees, in the most basic terms, these canons can be organized in sets organized around five, as we saw above, but also in terms of a model where there are three major streams. In the oldest sources, such as the Picumata Brahmayāmala—which assigns itself to the Vāma—these three streams are called Dakṣina, Madhya, and Vāma. Part of why these models become so convoluted in that, in a typically Indian fashion, rather than abandoning one model in favor of another as canons expand over time and complexify, our authors are hell bent on merging all these strategies into a single framework. While to them this might have been an adequate way to salvage the hypothesis of perfected revelation, from our perspective centuries later the result is needlessly redundancies and incoherence.

Archaic threefold model of revelation in Brahmayāmala

Srotras Vāma (Contested) Madhya (Śaiva) Dakṣiṇa (Bhairava Siddhānta) Dakṣiṇa (Bhairava Siddhānta)

[[P712]] Returning to the focus at hand, that the doxographical model evident in the Mṛgendra—where the eight Bhairava Tantras are correlated with the level of the heart and the Vāma is aligned with the genitals—gained wide acceptance is evident from the presence of a similar position, complete with the same implicit subordination, in the Tantrāloka itself. Here, Abhinavagupta seems also to suggest that, while they fall within the context of the circle of the mothers in the doctrine of Bhairava (mātṛmaṇḍale bhairave), the Siddhāntas of Vaimala, the Ārhatas, and the Kārukas and so forth should be treated like mere paśus. In other words, Abhinavagupta seemingly affirms their subordinate inclusion as well as the judgment we find in the Niśvāsakārikā that, to cite Acri, “unlike the more ‘gnostic’ Vaimalas and Mahāvratas/Lākulas, [the Kārukas] adhered to the chiefly practice oriented among the Pramāṇaśāstras.”³⁹ In other words, through practicing the vow of the skull with full knowledge of what that entails, the Lākulas are remembered by the later Siddhānta as ascending to a higher level in the context of the cosmic hierarchies of worlds, in contrast to the Kārukas, “who merely held their observances until their deaths.” For this reason, as Acri demonstrates, in many of these cosmologies, while the Lākulas are placed in the pure realm outside of the material world, in the ancient cosmologies, the Kārukas—also equated with the ṛṣikula—are placed at the very cusp between the world of light and the world of darkness, still within the world of māyā.

[[P713]] In this regard, it is likely that Abhinavagupta is following the teachings of Trika Tantras such as the Siddhayogeśvarīmata, which as we shall soon see preserve evidence of a much closer relationship with the Lākula and Kārukas traditions than has been recognized. In its first chapter, after praising the guru who can give śaktipāta—causing the entrance of goddesses into the body of the disciple—the Siddhayogeśvarīmata also concludes by telling us that “here,” in this system, a practitioner is not considered initiated (dīkṣita) into Trika praxis if he simply practices the samaya of the Kārukas, Pramāṇas and so forth.⁴⁰ This is in some ways a particularly ironic statement, for as Judit Törzsök has effectively demonstrated, without however arriving at explicit understanding of the implications of her discovery, the first two chapters of the Siddhayogeśvarīmata contain extensive textual parallels with the only surviving passage that survives from the original eight-fold Lākula Pramāṇaśāstras.

[[P714]]

(Diagram as given by Alexis Sanderson in the Lākulas)[^714_682

[[P715]] As we will see momentarily, that the foundational work of the Trika should single out for special attention the traditions of the Atimārga is not so unexpected in light of their surprising degrees of hitherto unnoticed affinity. In his groundbreaking article on the Lākula tradition, Alexis Sanderson has recovered the names ascribed to an archaic canon of works called Pramāṇa Śāstras,⁴¹ each of which derives its title from the cosmic agent that revealed it. As he shows us, following Kṣemarāja, the Pramāṇaśāstras were variously said to be eightfold or fourteenfold. The eightfold canon is said to be concerned with jñāna, while the additional members are associated with kriyā. When the scriptural canon is understood as containing fourteen textual fields, the additional six Pramāṇas are said to be contained within or subordinated (Kṣemarāja says tasyāntarbhūtāni) to the fourth of the eight Pramāṇaśāstras, called the Hṛdayapramāṇa. In other words, this scale of texts replicates the logic of inclusive subordination we keep encountering, wherein the Lākula, associated with gnosis, governs the Kārukas, associated with “doing things.” Before we turn to rethinking the Kārukas, it is worth grappling with the single fragmentary passage of Lākula Pramāṇaśāstra, about which Alexis Sanderson writes:

To my knowledge all that remains of this canon of texts is a passage of seven verses attributed to the Pañcārthapramāṇa in Kṣemaràja’s commentary on the Svacchanda (ad 1.41-43). Short though it is, it does serve to confirm that the Pramāṇa system is the basis of the system described by the Niśvāsamukha. It is an analysis of the Aghoramantra, one of the five Brahmamantras which are the mantras of the Pāśupatas. The form of that mantra is the offering of obeisance (namaskāraḥ), or, as the Pāśpatas understand that action, the donation of oneself (ātmasamarpaṇam, parityāgaḥ), to the three classes of Rudras, or ectypes of Rudra: the Benevolent (aghoraḥ), the Terrible (ghoraḥ), and the Utterly Terrible (ghoraghorataraḥ): aghorebhyo ’tha ghorebhyo ghoraghoratarebhyaś ca sarvataḥ śarva sarvebhyaḥ namas te rudra rūpebhyaḥ. The Pañcārthapramāṇa correlates these three groups with the Rudras who govern the levels of its Hierarchy of Worlds. The Aghora Rudras of the Mantra are equated with a series of Rudras beginning with Vāmeśvara which reside above the Net of Bonds. The Ghora Rudras are said to be “those that begin with Gopati and end with Gahana”, while the Ghoraghorataras are identified as the “Mahāmāheśvaras from Vidyeśvara to Ananta” who occupy worlds below them.⁴²

[[P716]] While Sanderson’s summary is unsurprisingly entirely accurate, an examination of the passage he has identified from Pañcārthapramāṇa, especially when read in light of Kṣemarāja’s surrounding commentary, reveals that his analysis overlooks some key dimensions to this discourse that will prove exceptionally relevant to our own inquiry. Therefore, especially since this is all we have from a core Lākula scripture that comes attached to its title, the matter is worth revisiting. Kṣemarāja introduces his readers to the Pañcārthapramāṇa in his commentary on the Svacchanda Tantra, the only one of the eight Bhairava Tantras in the stream of Dakṣiṇa that has come down to us intact.⁴³ He raises the [[P717]] issue at the point where the Svacchanda Tantra has begun to introduce us to its mantra system.⁴⁴ The mantras in question are the praṇava or haṃsa mantra, which in the Svacchanda Tantra is the bīja hūṃ, along with the aghora mantra itself (aghorebhyo ’tha ghorebhyo ghoraghoratarebhyaś ca sarvataḥ śarva sarvebhyaḥ namas te rudra rūpebhyaḥ). The longer mantra is treated as the “sakala”—or extended—form of hūṃ and identified with the god Svacchanda Bhairava himself. From a historical perspective, the Svacchanda Tantra is claiming that is own mantra system is simple a convenient extension of an older Lākula Atimārga methodology that made use of the aghora heart mantra. In other words, the Svacchanda is telling us that it imagines itself, and the other eight Bhairava Tantras, as a distillation or successor to the eight Pramāṇa sources.

[[P718]] This same basic interpretive framework, where something old and pre-Tantric is presented and then analogized with something within a Trika inflected approach to the Bhairava Tantras, is a recurrent strategy throughout Kṣemarāja’s exegesis. For our purposes, recognizing this is important because it makes it possible for us to recover some features from the older Atimārgic systems relevant to our analysis. Now the Svacchanda Tantra appears to teach an abbreviated cosmology where the hierarchy of worlds are seemingly mapped onto the human body. The way this subdivision works is that the world of the light begins at the level of the head or throat and world of the dark corresponds to everything below it. In the usual Tantric fashion, our text teaches that the mantra hūṃ, which condenses the aghora mantra, is to be made to pervade the whole body—and by extension the whole world—through the five-stage intoning of the mantra (mantroccāraṇa). The intoning of the mantra ultimately serves the salvific purpose of “piercing the bindu.” This is located at the boundary between the pure and impure worlds. If we follow Kṣemarāja, this level, governed by the demiurge Ananta, is located within a “knot” (granthi)—either at the level of the upper palate within a person’s head or at the throat. In these sources, the bindu itself is seen to have “the form of the illumination of consciousness” and is “shaped like a kadamba ball.” In keeping with his exegetical project of reading his teacher Abhinavagupta’s philosophy univocally into the older Tantric corpus, Kṣemarāja quotes the lost Trikahṛdaya in a manner that equates the bindu, located at the level of Ananta, within the upward rising (stream) of Bhairava, with the form of the Trika goddess Parāparā. When the two passages are read as expressing the same message, they suggest that when the dissolution or piercing of the bindu is complete, the state of being a finite soul will dissolve. With this in mind, as Kṣemarāja says, “for the purpose of protecting the essence of the words of the mantra,” the Svacchanda Tantra introduces the aghora mantra in a cryptic and encoded fashion so that “the way it conjoins together is not shown.” After quickly uncoding the proper sequence of its components, so that the mantra is treated as having three key core components—corresponding to aghora, ghora, and ghoratara—Kṣemarāja proceeds [[P719]] to teach what he calls “the secret meaning,” which he does through offering a series of esoteric etymologies as well as ascribing hidden doctrinal significance to individual terms within the mantra. Now, as Peter Bisschop has shown with regard to Kauṇḍinya and Sanderson in relation to Abhinavagupta, Tantric scholastics during the classical period engaged in this type of textual practice are very likely to begin their analysis by taking recourse to the oldest portions of their varied and mostly lost canons. First, they faithfully transmit the doctrinally archaic positions of their sources and only once that is done do they reformulate the inherited tradition to match their own theology and idiom. I want to suggest that it is highly probable that here Kṣemarāja is doing something similar, and his initial sources are drawn from other Lākula materials. That this might be the case is suggested by the fact that idiom of this secret teaching diverges sharply from our commentator’s own metalanguage but resonates strongly, as we shall soon see, with the only surviving identified passage of Pramāṇaśāstra as well as the characterizations of Lākula discourse presented by Sanderson and his disciples.⁴⁵

[[P720]] Apart from antiquarian interest, establishing that Kṣemarāja’s sources here are archaic—belonging to neither the Svacchanda’s own system nor to his own preferred canon of the Trika and the Krama, is important because it suggests that the same holds true for the next portion of his analysis, which deals with the “connection” between the three division of the aghora mantra. Kṣemarāja writes: “for the sake of the connection (sambandhibhyaḥ)—this means, to the ones whose nature is the wheel of śaktis (tacchakticakra) belonging to the various Rudras, whose forms are the proliferating instantiations of the three-fold śaktis called Raudrī, Jyeṣṭhā, and Vāma. In another arrangement/system (saṃhitāntare), they are etymologized by the names Parā, Parāparā, and Aparā.” Just as we have seen with the glossing of particular lexemes, Kṣemarāja here is pasting together two layers of discourse, Lākula and Trika. Both of these view the triad of categories of male deities encoded in the aghora mantra as paired complementarily with a triad of female entities. But, whereas in Kṣemarāja’s own system, it is the goddesses who are the dominant forces, in the first half of his gloss, these śaktis (Raudrī, Jyeṣṭhā, Vāma) are subordinated to the rudras. And this is precisely what we find in the only surviving passage of the Lākula scriptures found in the Pañcārthapramāṇa:

The one called ghora is known of as the net of bondage (pāśajāla). It is conjoined with sin (pāpa) and it is terrifying. But the ones of whom that [the net of bondage] does not exist are known as aghora. The rudras who are Vāmeśvara and so forth are situated above the root of the net; those ones are called aghoras. Listen, concisely, concerning the ghora. The ghoras are rudras from Gopati to Gahana, and they live in various worlds. Now the ones residing below who are beginning with Vidyeśvara and end with Ananta are distinct; they are Mahāmaheśvaras, the more terrible than the terrible. Among these ones—aghoras, ghoras, and ghoraghoras—the śaktis that belong to Parameśvara are always differentially established. These śaktis are present as being the impellers of all purposes, in these various forms, in the states of stasis, dissolution, and creation and the activities of bondage and liberation. The bound soul (aṇu) does homage to all these forms. Homage and surrender are defined as the cause and the effect.⁴⁶

[[P722]] In her article on Aghoreśvarī, Judit Törzsök has already indicated that there exist a number of textual interconnections—including a shared triadic cosmology to which we will return momentarily—between this passage, which she has translated with some minor differences, and the oldest work of the Trika, the Siddhayogeśvarīmata.⁴⁷ That work is of course dedicated to the worship of the triad of goddesses Parā, Parāparā, and Aparā, venerated by the Trika exegetes who Kṣemarāja has just admitted represent another system’s take on the older triad of Raudrī, Jyeṣṭhā, and Vāmā. What Törzsök has not discussed explicitly is that these formal connections—such as a shared triadic cosmology—appear also to extend meaningfully into the realm of doctrine. When the Pañcārthapramāṇa and Kṣemarāja’s additional unnamed Lākula sources are read in relation to the earliest Trika scripture, it becomes plain that, at least in a nascent form, a key doctrine of the Trika itself, namely, that volitional activity of all kinds in all domains is the result of the play of the śaktis with their rudras operating within objects and sentient beings—indeed, that the character of phenomena themselves are a product of a similar process—is inherited from the Lākulas along with their cosmology.

[[P723]] Succinctly, when we look at the other passages from the Niśvāsa discussed by Sanderson, where the Lākulas are discussed, it also seems likely that the Trika’s trademark linguistic theology—its equation of the goddess with language and the understanding that it is through the manipulation of the alphabet that a person transcends the world of bondage and transmigration governed by the terrible and extremely terrible force—is also at least in part a Lākula inheritance. In the Lākula cosmology, entities called ghoras, and ghorataras with their consort śaktis are said to dwell in the various subdivisions in the lower universe—this is called the net (jālam) within the realm of the impure.

In these same sources, especially those preserved in the Niśvāsa corpus, the deities affiliated with the Kārukas, here associated with the category of ṛṣikula, are placed right at the juncture between the pure and impure realm. In contrast, the aghoras, namely, “the rudras who are Vāmeśvara and so forth,” “are situated above the root of the net,” which is to say within the pure realm. Rather pointedly, in this system, the boundary between the impure realm of māyā and pure realms is marked, not as it is in classical Śaiva Siddhānta by a male demiurge, such as Ananta, but by a goddess called Vāgeśvarī—the goddess of language.

[[P724]] Now, as the seventh-century Niśvāsaguhya suggests, in discussing this early system, the Aghora or Lākula adept passes into this realm by being reborn from within the Goddess of Language’s womb in the form of the praṇava mantra—though this is likely oṃ instead of the hūṃ of the Bhairavasiddhānta. While later portions of the Niśvāsa corpus, such as the Guhya, associate such a position with the Atimārgic other, in the fifth-century Mūlasūtra of the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā—our oldest work ascribed to Śaiva Siddhānta—the situation is very different.⁴⁸ Especially in its fourth chapter, which covers the ritual that grants liberation, the goddess Vāgeśvarī is repeatedly elevated and paired mysteriously with a god called Vyomavyāpin or Caṇḍeśvara. When the adept undergoes the rites of studentship, symbolically reborn through a sequence of Śaiva saṃskāras, he proclaims that Vāgeśī is his mother. As he passes into adulthood, just as a Śrauta ritualist must take a wife, the initiated Śaiva is symbolically married to Jñānasiddhikumārikā, an extension of the goddess of speech. In concert with the ritual severing of his topknot, this coming-of-age process, identified as his “vidyādīkṣā,” gives the Tantric adept the ability to ascend through the hierarchies of planar world. Once again, nearly all these sequences of realities match Lākula cosmologies more closely than they do those of the later Siddhānta. In the Saiddhāntika system preserved in the Niśvāsa, access to ascent within the impure and mixed realms is accomplished through the invocation and ritual deployment of the three śaktis: Raudrī, Jyeṣṭhā, and Vāma. In contrast, exiting into the pure realm—which is said to be achieved by breaking “the great knot” of the impure realms—once again requires yet another experience of rebirth where the Śaiva initiate

[[P725]] is placed into and passes through the “womb of Vāgīśvarī.” Emitted—one might even say ejaculated— in the form of the praṇava bīja, the Niśvāsa explicitly says, the initiate comes to rest in the realm assigned to the eight Pramāṇas of the Lākulas.

In the introduction to her critical edition and translation of select section of the Siddhayogeśvarīmata, Törzsök has proposed that, in spite of its characterization as in essence triadic, the tradition we call the Trika originates as “the fusion of two opposite streams: one that attempts to subjugate and control impure forces related to the cult of the Eight Mothers, and another that mainly conforms to orthodox Hindu norms of purity adopting in its cult the orthodox goddess, Sarasvatī.”⁴⁹ In support of this position, she directs our attention to the Kāpālika inflected character of the goddesses Parāparā and Aparā as well as the lack of a clear differentiation at the level of iconography as well as ritual function between the two entities, in contradistinction to the “sattvic” Parā—a sort of supped up Sarasvatī—who is so radically differentiated it is almost as if she belongs to a different reality.

[[P726]] Nevertheless, it remains somewhat problematic to attribute the presence of a Sarasvatī-like figure to the distinctive realm of an ahistorical “Brāhmaṇism,” within which at this time, in fact, the evidence for a non-esoteric focus on the worship of Sarasvatī is somewhat meager. Rather, it is more plausible that both this triadic structure as well as the liberatory function of a “sattvic” goddess associated with Sarasvatī are inheritances from the Lākulas, or perhaps more pointedly, the Kārukas. As it may have begun to dawn on the reader, the sort of esoteric initiations we have just surveyed bear a striking resemblance to the initiation of the artisan with which we began to the chapter, although expressed in a much humbler fashion—the Kāruka, representing a liminal figure dwelling on the edge between the world of māyā, where “action” predominates, and the pure realm of the Lākulas. From this perspective, though of course this mere speculation, the sort of discrepancies that Törzsök documents between a formally ideal assignment of functions among the three goddesses of the Trika according to the three guṇas of saṃkhyā and the messier realities found in our source texts is not a reflection of the artificiality of the Siddhayogeśvarīmata’s decidedly archaic triadic system. Instead, it represents the integration of the originally to some degree distinct and ontically superior Lākula and Kāruka goddess of language Vāgeśvarī within the older triad of Vāma, Jyeṣṭhā, and Raudrī, over whom she had previously been presiding from within the pure realm.

[[P727]] Much as was the case with the Aparājitapṛcchā’s representation of the outwardly pacific goddess Kāmākhyā, iconographically identical to Sarasvatī, whose true nature is Bhairavī, down into the present day, the vernacular traditions of the artisans of the Deccan have remained much more in tune to this dual nature of their supreme goddess than are the early Trika scriptures. In fact, as we shall see momentarily, one of the shared features of artisan culture in the Deccan, evident in vernacular sources from at least the fourteenth century, is a consistent claim that their clan goddess is at once the Goddess of Language and Kālī or Bhairavī. Rather than this representing a “subalternization” of a more nuanced Trika theology, given the ubiquity of this dynamic, it seems more plausible that the scriptural foundations for the Trika itself need to be read as a specialized appropriation of older Atimārgic traditions, linked with artisanal and performance communities, which over time effectively colonized and partially replaced their antecedents, much in the same manner as we saw at Kukkunur in chapter 4 where the Mantramārga dominated the mental universe of the ostensibly Atimārgic Lākula Siddha Kaḷēśvara.

If these sources provide us with compelling hints of the general trajectory of the Lākula traditions and their ultimate absorption into the Bhairava Siddhānta, certain texts are even more forthcoming when it comes to the question of the Kārukas and their canons. In one of the longest passages in his Svacchanda Tantra commentary discussing the Lākulas, Kṣemarāja argues that Lakulīśa’s disciple Musulendra, sometimes simply called Mausula, extracted six subsidiary Pramāṇa [Tantra]s from the main canon of eight [Pramāṇas] “and propagated them independently for less advanced practitioners.” In writing about this passage, Alexis Sanderson has interpreted this statement as indicative of a distinction between the “gnostic” Lākula scriptures and another six-fold canon that deal with more mundane matters. These are then assigned to the Mausulas (one’s with clubs), plausibly conflated with the Kārukas.⁵⁰ Rather invaluably for our purposes, in providing confirmation that Kṣemarāja’s doxographical scheme has a scriptural basis, Sanderson has directed our attention to the Jayadrathayāmala. This important and highly transgressive scripture, which offers a hodge-podge of elements drawn from lost archaic sources, also knows the Lākula Pramāṇaśāstras as “divided into eight primary, gnostic texts and six subsidiary texts concerned with ritual.”⁵¹ Building on Sanderson’s analysis, in his discussion of the evidence for the Vimalas found in early tantric doxographies, Acri⁵² concludes his own treatment of this canon by focusing on a different passage on the Lākulas found in Kṣemarāja’s commentary on Svacchanda Tantra (11.73), which Hans Bakker has translated in the following manner:

[[P729]]

“For, he who follows the Pramāṇa Śāstra and the Vaimala, His soul is purified by initiation and knowledge, by (keeping to) the prescribed praxis until death, while abiding by the Kapāla observance—he goes to that station that is his own.” The quarter- verse “His soul is purified by knowledge” indicates the difference here from the afore- mentioned Mausulas and Kārukas, who are devoted only to the observances that are chiefly ritualistic (kriyāpradhānavratamātraniṣṭha).⁵³

While Bakker here translates the term kriyāpradhāna as “chiefly ritualistic,” resulting in considerable conceptual unclarities, there is another possible way of interpreting this phrase suggested by the Tantric sources themselves. Thus, in situating its own place within the canon, the Pratiṣṭhā Tantra known as the Piṅgalāmata, composed perhaps in late eighth to early ninth century, tells us:

The Jayadratha[yāmala] for its part is a sevenfold sūtra. The sūtra, the uttarasūtra and the śaktisūtra, the one known of as kriyā, the one called stainless [vaimala], the gnosis and the sarvasandoha is the seventh. Which is it in the middle of these classes of the seven types of sūtras? That is the kriyāsūtra. The kriyāsūtra also is fivefold, the divisions are arcanā, rakṣa, mantra, dhyāna, and kalpārtha. Kriyā is held to be a fivefold process, conjoined with the practice of craft (kalpārtha).⁵⁴

[[P730]] Pointing to the very same foundation as Sanderson—namely, the Jayadrathayāmala—in the Piṅgalāmata’s doxography, kriyā as a category comprises not only ritual but quite specifically incorporates the fashioning of objects, “kalpārtha,” the very sort of “craft” that the early Dharmaśāstra and Nīti texts describe as “the work of kārus and śilpins.” The Kriyasūtra sits wedged in between the Śaktisūtra and unmistakably the “stainless practice” associated with Acri’s Vimalas. It would seem that, unlike the Lākula who was defined as a religious professional, the Kāruka and the Vaimala abide in the world of māyā precisely because, in addition to the performance of rituals, they are engaged in worldly activities of manufacturing and perhaps, if we follow Acri’s analysis, performance by commission.

While traces of the Kārukas may be found in the Niśvāsa corpus and the early Trika, it is another source that provides us with some of our most compelling indications of the organic and historically rooted nature of this artisan canon. This text is a perhaps ninth-century (or even slightly earlier) doxographical work (at least in terms of its surviving portions) drawn upon by the Trika exegetes, including Abhinavagupta, entitled the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā.⁵⁵ Though the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā has been frequently mined for its extensive catalogs of now mostly lost Tantric canons—a task that will also bear fruit in relation to our own interpretive project—little attention has been given to its own rhetorical agenda and theology, which in essence offers us an unexpurgated vision of the medieval sociology of knowledge as presented from a proudly Kaula perspective, one that has yet to commit to the type of hermeneutical heavy lifting undertaken by the Tantrāloka.⁵⁶

With the even more archaic Kulasāra, the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā seems to participate in a line of Kaula revelation, most of it associated with the western Deccan, where Kula and Kaula are defined in doctrinal philosophical terms. As will be shown in future publications, this same delineation of Kaula knowledge is reflected in the early Marathi sources. This seems to be in contradistinction with a geographically situated eastern tradition, best exemplified by the Kaulajñānanirṇaya or Kulacūḍāmaṇi, where very little if any of this doctrinal dimension is in evidence.

[[P731]] The Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā seems to be committed to the theological project of defining—or redefining—how Tantric knowledge is organized in a manner that ultimately privileges Kaula revelations. In carrying out this task, the text deploys a series of rather confusing correlative strategies with the aim of producing its own wholly synthetic totalizing taxonomy. Yet as part of this process, in eschewing an easy acceptance of the ready at hand oversimplified characterizations found in the “mainstream” literature, the work offers us a wealth of information about what Tantric knowledge looks like in the absence of selective curation. Now in our secondary literature, the focus of virtually all scholarly attention on this text has been the Śrīkaṇṭhīya’s rhetorical commitment to realigning the five streams of Tantric revelation with the five faces of the supreme Parameśvara in a manner that deprivileges the system of the Śaiva Siddhānta in favor of the Kaulas. Jürgen Hanneder, for instance, has been interested in this material because, as he argues, it is integral to Abhinavagupta’s Mālinīślokavārtika I. 1–399. As for Abhinavagupta’s investment with tweaking the five-fold cosmology, the reason why it might matter to him becomes immediately evident if you look at the diagram. What quickly becomes clear is that this classical model not only aligns the Śaiva Siddhānta—and the Śaiva Siddhānta alone—with soteriological concerns, but it at the same time it relegates the predecessors to Abhinavagupta’s preferred body of scriptures, namely, the Dakṣiṇa and the Vāma, to keep the company of traditions dedicated to the magical curing of snake bites and exorcism.

[[P732]]

Īśāna Siddhānta Mokṣa Aghora Bhairava Tantras ? Sadyojāta Bhūta Tantras Exorcism Vāmadeva Vāmatantras ? Tatpuruṣa Garuḍa Tantras Curing snake bite

By positing that the supreme lord in fact has a “secret” sixth lower head that emits a higher order of revelation, aligned with Kaula gnosis, for Abinavagupta, the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā provides a solution to what otherwise might have seemed like an intractable problem.

What has hardly been noticed, however, is that much more of the body of the text of the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā is devoted to a different and decidedly byzantine intellectual project centered around a totally different strategy. This project sets out to fit all the forms of esoteric knowledge within a subsidiary eight-fold organizational structure. Concisely, the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā is heavily invested in associating a range of canons of knowledge, including the Rudrabheda, with the eightfold forms of Bhairava. Thus, once it has treated the lower forms of laukika knowledge, including the Veda, philosophy, and the Śivabheda division, roughly corresponding what we term Śaiva Siddhānta, the text, sometimes in a rather garbled broken fashion, proceeds to lay out its main agenda: “This is the division of the [[P733]] Śivamantra[mārga]. In much the same manner, we will comment upon the eight divisions of Vāma and Dakṣiṇa[mārga], which are secondarily assigned to the place of the body, such as the head and so forth.”⁵⁷ As we can see, our doxography is clearly in dialogue with the same types of organizational schemata, such as the Śaiva Puruṣasūkta we have exploring in this chapter. Sadly, in the only surviving manuscript the next sentence is missing a number of akṣaras. What it appears to say, however, is that it will explain the meaning of the śāstras (śāstrārthadarśaka) whose essential nature is “pūrva”⁵⁸—here alas we find the hole—which is comprised of the streams (srotas) known of as pramāṇa and vaktṛ.⁵⁹ These seem to correspond to the Dakṣiṇa and Vāma mārgas of the previous line. This interpretation will find further support some verses later, where a similar dichotomy will be drawn between the Rudrabheda of the Tantrikas (tantrikāṇām)—the Dakṣiṇa stream containing the eight-fold Bhairava canon—and the place of the mouth (vaktṛsthānāṃ) (i.e., the genitals), whose canon is innumerable (anekaśaḥ), a formulation that our text will assign to the Vāma stream that grandfathers its own Kaulism.⁶⁰

[[P734]]

The key streams of Tantric Knowledge

Vāma Vaktṛ Śākta Countless divisions Dakṣina Pramāṇa Tantrika Eight-fold Division Divided 24-fold

At this point however, before it explores these canons, Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā unexpectedly swerves off in a rather different direction, offering an “explanation” of the term “pramāṇa” that strongly suggests its original equation with a canon of Lākula texts. Instead, playing upon the polyvalence of the term pramāṇa, the text informs us:

Previously [in the discussion of philosophical schools,] the six veridical means of knowledge (pramāṇas), established as perception and so forth, were related. But, self- awareness (svasaṃvedanaṃ) is another, and likewise there is [spiritual] experience (anubhava). [In this way,] in this tradition coming from Śiva, the Pramāṇas are said to be eightfold. . . . What is this srotas?. . . . It has fallen to the earth from that mouth, and in this way there is said to an eightfold descent [of the revelation].⁶¹

[[P735]] In the typical supersessionary fashion we find so often in Tantric discourse, in this second order Kaula formulation, the canon of the eightfold Pramāṇa scriptures of the Lākulas is homologized with the śāstric category of the pramāṇas as methods, like direct perception or inference, that make possible the acquisition of valid knowledge. To make the homology stick, the usual catalogue of six methods for arriving at knowledge accepted in learned discourse are now complemented by two new sources of authority: svasaṃvedanaṃ and anubhava. Each of these are only to be found, broadly speaking, in “Śākta” sources, and their elevation incidentally eerily prefigures the arguments of the Trika exegetes. The Aṣṭapramāṇa system of the Lākulas thus is no longer a term of art referring to the eight-fold division of what might by the time the Śrīkaṇṭhīya was composed have become a mostly lost canon of archaic scriptural authorities. Instead, it has been reinscribed as referring to those scriptures that accept eight veridical means of knowledge, which are comprised of the innumerable revelations that have been transmitted on the Dakṣiṇa and Vāma paths. That such a rhetorical choice represents a deliberate attempt to make sense of a Lākula past becomes more clear when we look—selectively, for the section is long and byzantine in its speciation—at the text’s initial treatment of the Dakṣiṇa stream:

The Dakṣiṇa path is within the Dakṣiṇa stream; it is divided twenty-four-fold. In the midst of this is Mahāghora, Ghora, and Aghora. . . . [There are] Bhīma division, which is the highest, and the one called “Great Vetāla” Asitaṅga, Mahoccuṣma, Krodha, Unmattabhairava, the one called Caṇḍa, known of as the lotus, and Mahābhairava, the great peak. There is the Tantra called Siddhayogeśvarī, which arises from the Yoginījāla.⁶²

[[P736]] Essentially, the Dakṣiṇa stream is now organized around eight major Bhairavas, though the older Lākula logic of a triad of comprised of Aghora, Ghora, and Ghoratara persists in a vestigial form (as Aghora, Ghora, and Mahāghora). At least five of these names (Asitaṅga [sic], Mahoccuṣma, Krodha, Unmatta, and most importantly, Caṇḍa) are perfect matches for the standard list of the Aṣṭabhairavas. The others are eccentric. Such deviations likely represent an archaic inheritance that our text has failed to fully digest or efface, as elsewhere our text knows and makes use of the standard canonical list, which more neatly aligns with its schematic. In any case, more pertinently for our purposes, this preliminary canon is then immediately followed by an invocation of the mūla Tantra of the Trika system, the Siddhayogeśvarī[mata].

Instead of representing a separate doctrinal school, the Siddhayogeśvarī is said to arise from the Yoginījāla, another unpublished work preserved within the Jayadarathayāmala that Alexis Sanderson has identified as incorporating substantial elements from Atimārgic scriptures. In essence, the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā’s commitment to an eightfold arrangement has been uncomfortably grafted onto this even more archaic systematicity, evoking precisely the older imaginary wherein the three divisions of the aghora mantra are used to schematize knowledge.⁶³ Indeed, the Śrīkaṇṭhiyasaṃhitā’s treatment of the most important of these categories, that of Mahāghora, provides us with further evidence that this schematic represents the survival—or at least conscious creative redeployment—of bits and pieces of this older systematicity:

In regard to the Mahāghora, I will tell you of the arising of the Dakṣiṇa stream. It is twenty-four-fold in its divisions and expanded into very many crores.

The first is called Mahāghora. [The second] is the Bhairava Caṇḍa. [The third] is Lākula. [The fourth] [is Andhi?]. There is the Śrīpūrva [five, Mālinīvijayottara] And likewise there is the Vijñānabhairava [6], Aghorīśvarasvacchanda [7], Vidyāsvacchanda [8] and also the one known of as Svacchandasāra [9] and the Rasasvacchanda [10] and that Svacchanda characterized as the son of the king [11], and the independent [12] and likewise there is the Guhyasārasvacchanda, called [[P737]] Ceṭikā-tālakaṃ [13–14?], there is the Bindusvacchanda [15] Nādasvacchanda [16] and also the Rauravasvacchanda [17] Kāḷa-svacchanda 18) the one Daṇḍasvacchanda [19] and also the “Owl-svacchanda” [20], the Kramojjhitasvacchanda [21] the Sātopam Svacchanda [22] the Candragarbhasvacchanda which is worshipped by the gods [23] and called Mṛtyusvacchanda [24].⁶⁴ Thus is proclaimed the Mahāghora, which number twenty-four-fold.⁶⁵

[[P738]]

The key streams of Tantric Knowledge

Vāma Vaktṛ Śākta Countless divisions Ex. Kāruka Canon Mataṅga, Pārameśvara, Piṅgalāmata Śākta (?) Kālī Krama, Trika, Yāmalas Dakṣina Pramāṇa/Lākula Tantrika Eight-fold Division Eight Bhairava Tantras Ex. Bhīma, Caṇḍa, Divided 24-fold Ex. Mahāghora division: Caṇḍa, Lākula, Mālinīvijayottara, Svacchanda canon.

For our purposes, what is most interesting here is the beginning of this list. In sequence, it confirms the interconnected archaic logic we have encountered throughout this chapter, which associates the worship of Caṇḍeśvara, god of the Kārukas, and the category of the Lākula—our Kālamukhas, their ācāryas. If we treat these texts as imagined as emerging in chronological sequence, a frequent feature of this discourse, this Atimārga dyad is then succeeded in rapid sequence by two of the most famous works of Trika scripture, which then preface a huge canon of scriptures associated with Svacchanda Bhairava, the last of which is likely a form of the Netratantra. Intriguingly, unlike in the Svacchanda Tantra itself, where Svacchanda Bhairava represents the ultimate deity and the culmination of the eightfold canon, here Svacchanda is a type of Bhairava who assumes many forms, all of which fall under the Mahāghora category. This dynamic is very much in keeping with the proliferations of forms of deities—all labelled Svacchanda Bhairava but diverging substantively from the iconography outlined in the Svacchanda Tantra—that we keep encountering throughout the Deccan, most recently in the Aparājitapṛcchā itself, where the fifty-armed form of Svacchanda that descends into the world to be worshipped by the artisans and who presides over the eight Bhairavas is much more akin to the cosmic Mahābhairava in his iconography and character.

Though we need not engage with its contents with the same degree of pedantic precision, the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā has equally illuminative things to say about the prehistory of the traditions that it characterizes as the Vāma and their relation to what we know perceive to be a series of discrete textual domains. Thus, after the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā’s discussion of the Atimārgic divisions of the Mausali, [Jājali?], and the Vimala we encountered earlier,⁶⁶ the text presents us with the following verses:

[[P739]]

Durvāsa, Mecaka, and likewise Sārasvatam, Jayadratha, and Phekkāram [conj. Pheṭkāra] are proclaimed to be the five. And within the Brahmayāmala the list is sevenfold, including Raktā and Lampaṭā.⁶⁷

The first of these, which our text alludes to as invoking the goddess Raktā and so forth, is the central pantheon of the Picumata itself. As Csaba Kiss has most recently discussed in his edition and translation of the relevant chapter where the system is introduced, paṭala three presents us with the core ritual system of the Picumata in which the Bhairava in the form of Kapālīśa is surrounded by four Devīs or Guhyakās: Raktā, Karālī, Caṇḍākṣī, Mahoccuṣmā. Csaba Kiss, ed. and trans., Brahmayāmalatantra or Picumata, vol. II: The Religious Observances and Sexual Rituals of the Tantric Practitioner: Chapters 3, 21, and 45 (Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichéry / École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2015). As Kiss notes, somewhat strangely, though she is otherwise integral to the system in most other chapters, in paṭala three, the goddess Caṇḍā Kāpālinī who usually serves as Kapālīśa’s consort is never mentioned explicitly and is quite possibly absent. This would suggest that the division preserves an even more archaic tradition in which the skull-bearing Bhairava had no main partner, but was simply surrounded by the four devīs, indicating just how ancient Raktā and company might well have been. Indeed, so central are these four deities to the ritual life of the Brahmayāmala that elsewhere in the work, the core vidyā mantra of Caṇḍā Kāpālinī, oṃ/hūṃ caṇḍe kāpālini svāhā is accompanied by a visualization in which the syllables of the mantras are correlated with these four goddesses, who despite their names are white, red, yellow, and black in color. While Raktā and so forth are essential features of this system, in contrast Lampaṭā and her associates are decidedly more obscure. Kiss offers a whole series of tables of cataloging the various cycles of yoginīs that over time are integrated into the Brahmayāmala’s pantheon over the course of historical development of this heterogenous text. While Piṅgalā, for example, eventually makes an appearance, apart from one dubious instance that may be a copying error, Lampaṭā plays no meaningful role in this version of the system and is certainly not associated with her own pantheon. Albeit in passing, Abhinavagupta in fact himself refers to two such canons, one beginning with Raktā and the other Lampaṭā. Lampaṭā also seems to have been incorporated, likely from an independent source, into the root text of the Western Transmission, the Kubjikāmata. Though the Kubjikāmata Tantra is dedicated to the worship of the goddess Kubjikā, whose worship is closely associated with the Island of the Moon as well as Srisailam, here, Lampaṭā is assigned to the abode of the island of Sri Lanka (Siṃhala), a rather marginal place suggestive of her origins as lying outside this system. As one name among many, she appears surrounded by Krūrā, Piṅgalā, Khaḍgikā, Damṣṭrālī, Rākṣasī, Dhvāṅkṣī, Lolupā, Lohitāmukhī, Bahavāśī, Virūpā, Āmiṣapriyā, and Satī, and indeed her

[[P740]] Unmistakably, the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā’s initial discussion of the contents of this portion of the Vāma canon corresponds almost perfectly with the Piṅgalāmata’s own discussion of its place within the field of Tantric textuality. This fact is particularly interesting, for in this section the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā itself is just about to identify the Piṅgalāmata as the most recent work within this very stream of revelation. In the Piṅgalāmata, which as we shall see is perhaps our most precious resources in stepping into the world of the Tantric artisan, this self-reflection on the point of origin of Śākta artisanal discourse immediately prefaces the passage we have just be exploring characterizing the nature of kriyā and its relation to the practice of craft (kalpārtha).⁶⁸

Sanderson emends the Piṅgalāmata’s passage to bring it into conformity with the Jayadrathayāmala’s readings. I would suggest however, that while the two descriptions reflect related systemizations, the two canons are presented as not being identical, and that is a deliberate choice on the part of their respective composers. For, as we saw in footnote 43, Abhinavagupta’s disciples and commentators know precisely of this same division into raktādya and lampaṭādya pantheons and use the terms in a manner where they do not merely represent the names of texts. Furthermore, the two texts classify each other using different strategies; the Piṅgalāmata itself occupies an entirely different place in the Jayadrathayāmala’s taxonomy and the Piṅgalāmata in turn places the Jayadratha in a different place within the hierarchy of texts.

[[P741]]

Now this part, falling within the Brahmayāmala, derived from Durvāsa is Paicika [that which is from the Picumata]. It is of the doctrine of the Sārasvatas and it is proclaimed as Jayadratha’s fifth howling [pheṭkāra]. The Brahmayāmala, comprised of [the pantheon of] Raktā and so forth and [the pantheon of the] lustful dog-faced one and so forth [Lampaṭā] is divided sevenfold. Which is it among the middle of these seven divisions of the Brahmayāmala?

This is the Jayadratha; the Jayadratha for its part is a sevenfold sūtra. . . . The Sūtra, the Uttarasūtra and the Śaktisūtra, the one known of as Kriyā, the one called stainless [Vaimala], the gnosis and the Sarvasandoha is the seventh. Which is it in the middle of these classes of the seven types of sūtras? That is the Kriyāsūtra. The Kriyāsūtra also is fivefold, the divisions are arcanā, rakṣa, mantra, dhyāna, and kalpārtha. Kriyā is held to be a fivefold process, conjoined with the practice of craft (kalpārtha).⁶⁹

[[P742]] It would seem that, at least in the ninth century, in contrast with their nebulous perception of the contents of the Lākula canon and rest of the Atimārga, our sources envisioned the above Vāma scriptures as texts with genealogical connections with each other that contained a specific content—and that scriptural content is quite explicitly connected with the artisan profession, or the practice of craft (kalpārtha). With this in mind, let us return the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā’s delineation of what it views as the rest of this interrelated subset of the Vāma canon:

There is the Haṃsapārameśvara, Yakṣiṇī[pārameśvara], Mātaṅga[pārameśvara], Ekavīra[pārmeśvara], Ambu[pārameśvara], and the Puṣkara[pārameśvara]. It was compiled by Vāmadeva as being the sevenfold Pārameśvara canon—this is repeated as per the Haṃsapārameśvara. The Pāṭapārameśvara, Yakṣiṇī[pārameśvara] along with the one called Haṃsa[pārameśvara] are not very long with only a lakh of verses. But the Yakṣiṇīpārameśvara is said to be ninefold [lakhs of verses].

The 1) Kiraṇa, 2) Nandimata, 3 Haṃsinī 4) Brahmamaṇḍala 5) Svāyambhuva 6) Skandamata 7) Pratiṣṭhāpārameśvara, [form the] Liṅgakalpa along with the Gārgīya, which extends nine koṭis.

That Tantra called Mataṅga is said to be threefold. The Kalpaśākhā, Mātaṅga, and the Mṛgendra. The Ekavīra is said to be twofold, it is known to have three and a half lakhs.

And the Paitāmaha [Brahmayāmala?] and the mother Ekavīra; one called Amba, one called the Guhyasūtra and another called the Piṅgalāmata, are said to have five divisions; the ocean of dīkṣā consists of the six pratiṣṭhās. Thus, it is said to be fivefold [in its division]. ⁷⁰

[[P743]] Regarding the texts mentioned in this passage as well, there are considerable indications that we are talking about a real and not an imagined Kāruka or artisan corpus. Unexpectedly, our confirmations in this regard are to be found not in the Kāpālika tinged discourses of the Jayadrathayāmala, but almost exclusively in the relatively staid scholastic tradition surrounding the Śaiva Siddhānta. Thus, for example, in a work whose explicit purpose is demonstrating that the Mataṅgapārameśvara is a Tantra of the Śaiva Siddhānta, the dualistic late ninth-century Kashmiri Śaiva Siddhānta author Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha II begins his commentary by distinguishing the text he is commenting on from the Haṃsapārameśvara, Yakṣiṇī[pārameśvara], and Pauṣkarapārameśvara.⁷¹ While portions of the first and last of these survive in manuscript, we also we have range of distinctive citations drawn from works like the Paitāmaha and Pratiṣṭhāpārameśvara.⁷² Once again, however, these are primarily found—as late as the thirteenth century—in paddhatis associated with the Śaiva Siddhānta. Indeed, one of the most peculiar features of the above list of works is that, with the sole exception of the Piṅgalāmata, all of the above titles to which we have access, purportedly pertaining to kriyā and pratiṣṭhā, the Mataṅgapārameśvara, the Mṛgendra, the Kiraṇa, the Svāyambhuva, the Pauṣkarapārameśvara, and, assuming it corresponds to the text included in the Niśvāsa, the Guhyasūtra, come down to use classified as works of the Śaiva Siddhānta.

[[P744]] Now at first glance, to even consider questioning the canonicity of a text like the Mataṅgapārameśvara might seem akin to accusing the Pope of not being Catholic. After all, it is the Mataṅga’s enormous Vidyāpāda that becomes the key point of reference for the later exegetical and ritual tradition’s codification of what constitutes a Śaiva Siddhānta cosmology. Nevertheless, as we saw in chapter 4, this is also the same text which in its Caryāpāda transmits the most substantial unexpurgated account of the skull-bearing Lākula Mahāvrata that survives in our literature. And yet, the provenance of this discovery has been scantly reflected upon. As we shall soon see, even a cursory examination of our source suggests that the presence within this scripture of Lākula vows is not a fortuitous accident or incidental act of interpolation, but rather indicative of a range of striking continuities, most evident in the sections on ritual, between the Mataṅga’s Kriyā and Caryāpādas and the intertangled worldviews of the Śivadharmaśāstra, the Atimārga, the Bhairava Siddhānta, and the Vāma.⁷³

[[P745]] Indeed, it is worth pausing to survey some of the key chapters in the Mataṅga on ritual that offers us an encapsulated vision of dimensions of the work likely inherited from Atimārga contexts such as the Lākula tradition. Elsewhere, first of all, I have discussed in some detail both the considerable theological commitments to an effusive bhakti worldview integral to the Mātaṅga’s opening narrative as well as how the ninth-century Śaiva Siddhānta commentator Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha II uses exegetical wizardry to denude the work of such connotations.⁷⁴ What has yet to be observed, in contrast, is that this same bhakti sensibility is everywhere in evidence in the ritual portion of the text and that it is repeatedly and explicitly associated with the teachings of the Śivadharmaśāstra, both through the invocation of the authority of the work and through innumerable textual parallels.⁷⁵ In fact, the opening two verses of the first chapter

Mataṅgapārameśvara, Kriyāpāda, pg. 162–65, vs. 8.10–18: prāgdharmanirgamo yo hi śivadharmasamāgamaḥ // sā muktir muniśārdūla nāsadvyaktim upaiti hi / sato ’pi neṣyate nāśo vicārāt paśutā paśoḥ // yāti māyātmikā yadvad gandhād gandhāntaram tathā / anādivāsanāviddhā paśoḥ pāśavaśāt sphuṭam // nimajjaty abhilāṣeṇa cittir yā cādhvani sthitā / sā tasya śaktisaṃsparśāt karmaṇo samatāṃ param // prāpyābhivyaktim āyāti yayā yukto ’ṇur mārgate / guror anugrahaṃ so ’pi niyuktaḥ parameṣṭhinā // gurus taṃ praty anāyāsaṃ śaktyāviṣṭaḥ pravartate /. . . . na karmaṇaḥ kṣayo ’nāder na malasyāśayātmanaḥ / na bhavet kālasāmarthyāt svato vāpi dvijottama // yasmin nirabhilāṣī syāt samaye ‘ṇur vibhor balam / balāc chaktikarādvyaktaṃ kṣaṇād bhogād vijyujyate // sthityarthaṃ yo ’bhilāṣo ’sya mumukṣor bhāvitātmanaḥ / bandhahetur na boddhavyaḥ śivaprītyātmakas tu saḥ // The Caryāpāda makes the claim that the model for the samayin is the Śivabhakta as understood in terms of the theology of the Śivadharma and his or her observances follow those of the Śivadharmaśāstra as meditated through the Lākula cult of Vāgeśvarī. Thus, the Śivabhakta should be seen (draṣṭavya) as being just like Śiva (śivavat) and learned people are not to discriminate regarding them following the standards of the world (na ca tān prati kartavyo vicāro laukiko budhaiḥ). Such people have been purified by the mantras that are Śiva as deployed by the guru whose form is Śiva. And because they have all been reborn from the womb of Vāgīśī (vāgīśīgarbhasaṃbhūtāḥ) they have all obtained the state of being the best of men (prāptavarā narāḥ)—in other words, they as Brāhmaṇas, such that they all possess the common storehouse of qualities recalled from the vidhi, in other words, the Śivadharma. While such communities observe social hierarchies that privilege seniority in practice, the text informs us this is merely for the sake of worldly convention. The sādhaka, putraka and ācāryā all not only observe the same Śivadharmaśāstra (sādhakendraḥ sa śivaśāsanatatparaḥ) but they are entrusted with both enforcing its application among the community and ensuring the protection of the community’s samaya from outside forces (śāsanasyānupālane).

[[P746]] of the Mataṅgapārameśvara’s kriyā division, the chapter on dīkṣā offers from its inception unmistakable paraphrases of the first chapter of the Śivadharmaśāstra, for we are told that its teaching on dīkṣā is offered of out compassion for all (sarvaṃ anukampayā), and that “this represents an easy means (sukhopāyam idaṃ) that takes the form of a procedure instructed by the guru that operates for the benefit of the world.”⁷⁶

Having introduced the importance of this devotional framework, and its distinctiveness from the ways of the world, the Mataṅga next reflects on the importance of the pañcamudrā. Though here the term no longer refers to the five signs of a Kāpālika, the significance assigned to this inherited category is at the very least suggestive of its more macabre antecedents. After this, we are introduced to the navapīṭha-maṇḍala, which is main ritual tool in this system. Once again, this is a formal feature that the Mataṅga shares with the Picumata Brahmayāmala, the Svacchanda, and pratiṣṭhā works of Śākta artisan communities, but that is absent from the mainline Śaiva Siddhānta. The Mataṅga then proceeds to introduce a key part of its eccentric mantra system. Much as we have seen in our Kālamukha sources, to a much greater degree than in normative Siddhānta works, the system heavily privileges the pañcākṣarī mantra, the sāvitrī/gāyatrī, and the pañcabrahma mantras. As in the Lākula derived analysis transmitted by Kṣemarāja, our text also invests enormous significance in the mantra connected with Śarva, which will appear again and again throughout the major rituals of the system. Bhairava’s bīja hūṃ, both in connection with phaṭ and serving as an astramantra and used independently, is similarly ubiquitous.⁷⁷ The chapter ends first by invoking the deity Caṇḍīśa,⁷⁸ equipped with an independent mantra system and maṇḍala, as the supreme god, and by praising Srisailam as the supreme sacred place. Shortly before doing so, however, it extols the virtues of knowing the Pramāṇa and the Āgama, a trace reference to the Lākula canon that somehow escaped the redaction process (pramāṇāgamaṃ buddhvā).⁷⁹ Succinctly, were one to come to this chapter with no preconceived notions, neither its formal nor doctrinal character would in any way suggest an affiliation with the Śaiva Siddhānta.

[[P747]] The other way in which the Mataṅga, and the other texts with which it keeps company, diverges radically in its focus from the early Śaiva Siddhānta is much less self-evident, but perhaps just as important. One of the most striking discoveries of the past several decades that has emerged from the painstaking efforts of Dominic Goodall and his colleagues at Pondicherry is the realization that, quite unlike the later southern tradition, where Śaivāgama as a category is virtually synonymous with temple culture, the oldest portions of Śaiva Siddhānta discourse are entirely devoid of any discussions of temple worship and its surrounding festival life. Not only that, but they also lack any discussions of temple design, or urban layout, treatments of the crafting of mūrtis, or investment in the idea of processional. Succinctly, procedures for manufacturing and installing a śivaliṅga are nowhere to be found in this early stratum, for as Goodall observes,⁸⁰ even in the seventh-century Svāyambhuvasūtrasaṃgraha, the preferred method for acquiring a liṅga among Śaiva Siddhānta adepts is to steal one (liṅgaparigraha) from another community. Goodall has dedicated a recent article to exploring the only exception to this dynamic, which offers a fascinating account of pratiṣṭhā that for perhaps the only time in our literature involves no installation of prāṇa into the image.⁸¹ Here, it is true, the ritual installation is performed by a sthāpaka and śilpins who are all householders, and not by a sādhaka, but the work in question is the Niśvāsaguhya, which is very plausibly the same Guhyasūtra that the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā treats as a part of this shared non-Saiddhāntika canon. Thus, most unlike the world of the Kālamukhas, Śaiva Siddhānta discourse provides either no or little indication that practitioners within its discourse had any sort of substantive social ties or client patron relationships with the various iterations of artisan communities.

[[P748]] In considerable contrast, the Mataṅga exudes a ready familiarity with and access to the world of śilpins and other craftsmen, which it repeatedly mentions are deserving reverence and substantial compensation. Thus, chapter thirteen of the Kriyāpāda, on the installation of liṅgas, begins with an inquiry into such śilpin guild secrets as how to pick a stone and to determine its gender, incorporates the bringing of the liṅga into a temple and the raising of the marks that bring it to life, discusses the design and preparation of pīṭha and piṇḍikā, and enjoins that all of this to be carried out by śivabhaktas working with an ācārya. Though somewhat terse, for example, chapter 14, on the making of images using the pañcabrahma mantras, opens by extolling as especially important “viśeṣa aghora”—a thinly veiled form of Bhairava. It then offers some brief iconographical guidelines for crafting a delimited canon of deities matching the stripped-down ritual system we have seen earlier, which only partially coincides with that of the Siddhānta before moving on to common deities like a four-armed form of Viṣṇu and Sūrya. Even more tellingly, in the caryā division of the text, we are met with a wide variety of options when it comes to material culture within a community of śivabhaktas, and it is tempting to think of the range of prescriptions for different colored clothing, for āsanas made of freshly woven cloth, for ruby, pearl, or gold crests in one’s top knot, and for various types of earrings as speaking to an established social economy associated with specific populations who are able to provide such goods and services. Indeed, offering a social vision very much unlike the one found in the Śivadharmaśāstra, the fourth chapter of the Mataṅga’s Caryāpāda can perhaps be read as alluding to this very state of affairs:

The samayin, with his whole being, should always be dependent upon the guru: this is clear. When this happens, then he will become one whose nature is to be released, and there is no other way to become released. Having taken the initiation that bestows liberation, the samayin resides [there] like a servant (dāsavat). This is his caryā for the sake of liberation; this is his eternal praiseworthy kriyā.⁸²

[[P749]] The domain of kriyā—inclusive of the crafting of things (kalpārtha)—is of course the very same focus that a range of sources have ascribed to the lost canon of the more marginal branches of the Atimārga—exemplified by the Kārukas—comprised of classes of initiates who serve their Lākula masters. You may remember that this six-fold canon of these scriptures, pertaining to “lesser matters,” were said to have been extracted by Mausulendra from the lost Hṛdayapramāṇa of the Lākula Pramāṇaśāstra. Just as was the case with the Pramāṇas themselves, whatever the original contents of these Kāruka scriptures, by the ninth century, they have become identified with the still extant canon on Pratiṣṭhā and Kriyā. This is said to have been comprised of the various iterations of the Pārameśvara corpus, in which the Mataṅga is included, comprised of seven divisions, another seven works that make up “the liṅga kalpa” and, finally another five-fold canon, which concludes with the Guhyasūtra and the Piṅgalāmata. It is all of these works that seem to be the intended referent for what the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā calls “the ocean of dīkṣā comprised of the six [works] on pratiṣṭhā, which is established in five divisions (pratiṣṭhāṣaṭkadīkṣārṇaṃ ity etat pañcadhā sthitam).” Where the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā speaks of the “the six Pratiṣṭhās,” its intended point of reference is in fact the six subsidiary Pramāṇas, In other words, by the ninth century, the texts we have just exploring—to say nothing of the Piṅgalāmata—offer some approximation of the type of “religious education” that a work of artisan ritual such as the Aparājitapṛcchā presupposed would form the common frame of reference for any prospective reader.

[[P750]]

Atimārga Pāñcārthika Pāśupatas Lākula (Ācāryas) Eightfold canon of Pramāṇa scriptures ex. Pañcārthapramāṇa, Hṛdayapramāṇa Teach Śivadharmaśāstra Kāruka (śilpins) Sixfold Canon from the Pramāṇahṛdaya extracted by Mausulendra on Kriyā Pārameśvara divsion: e.g., Mataṅga Pratiṣṭhā divsion: e.g., Brahmayāmala, Guhyasūtra, Piṅgalāmata Observe Śivadharmaśāstra

The Artisan as a Social Agent

Placing the artisan as yogin doxographically has proven a terribly convoluted process, albeit one that has hopefully yielded constructive insights. Once we have this framework in mind, however, placing him sociologically—as someone who is at once a householder and yogin and thus straddles the divide between laukika and lokottara—proves rather straightforward.

Already in the normative Dharmaśāstra, numerous features of how Kārukas and śilpins (for the two terms are increasingly conflated as the centuries progress) are to be treated by the general society are indicative of their liminal status, most unlike the Lākulas/Kālamukhas, as [[P751]] quasi-religious professionals. Thus, for example, while outlining the conditions under which substances need to be purified, the Yājñavalkyasmṛti tells us that in exactly the same manner as the food that is received as alms when one is begging, the hand of kāruka (kāruhastaḥ) is always pure (śūciḥ).⁸³ In doing so it, it seems to be invoking a proof text of considerable antiquity, one older than almost all of classical Sanskrit discourse, for the very same statement is already present, assigned to an unnamed older tradition, in Āpastamba’s third century BCE Dharmasūtra. And much as is the case with non-varṇāśramadharmin religious communities, as we saw in the third chapter, in our study of the differentiational application of dharma (dharmavyavasthā)—even in sources where neither the theological dimensions of their discourse nor the specific relationship of the dependence of artisan scriptures on a higher canon are in evidence—śilpin and Kāruka communities are said to be at once governed by their own rules and subject to the direction of their guiding authorities. Indeed, Bṛhaspati’s discussion of the social place of śilpins provides us with useful further context of sort that will help us fit all the pieces we have been assembling together into a single coherent picture.

That one is called a śilpin by men who is a knower of the arts (kalābhijñaḥ), who fashions things made from gold, base metal, or cord, wood, stone, or hide. Where the gold workers and so forth, having become incorporated, enact śilpa, they would obtain payment according to their work, in accordance with the portion done. Śilpins who possess skill and knowledge in regard to teaching are called ācāryas. According to their rank, they would obtain one, two, three, or four times the normal share of payment. . . . As for the dharma of the actors, by good people, it is said that one who knows the beats obtains half a share, but singers have equal portions.⁸⁴

[[P752]] Writing in the seventh century, the Bṛhaspatismṛti is composed in a world where, as we have seen, both the Pramāṇa scriptures of the Lākulas and their relationship with their disciples would already have been an established feature of the discursive landscape. It is difficult to tell who is influencing whom, but in any case, here Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra specifically introduces an internal social division within artisan communities that the earlier texts merely implied, wherein śilpins and kārukas, however we might construe the changing connection between those two lexemes, are understood as the disciples of special classes of teachers, called ācāryas. The professional responsibilities of these ācāryas include instructing their disciples, overseeing the production process, and providing juridical oversight and censure according to guild rules as needed. In other words, the duties outlined for the ācārya of the śilpin correspond precisely with those of the sthānācārya or pratiṣṭhāpanācārya, a title that in the inscriptional records of the early medieval Deccan is ubiquitously assigned to the leading Kālamukhācārya at any given ritual center, who is also deemed responsible for overseeing the professional lives of dancers, musicians, and gaṇikās. In short, precisely at the moment when, replacing the older Lākulas, the Kālamukhas begin to surface with some consistency in our documentary records, the traditions of Kāruka Śaivas, and perhaps also the Vaimalas, had effectively become a subordinate component within the Lākula tradition and the Lākula Siddhānta in turn had begun to merge with the Kālamukhasamaya. Succinctly, in much of the medieval Deccan, to be an artist or artisan was effectively to be an initiate in the Atimārga who lived under the direction of a skull-bearing ācārya.

[[P753]] Indeed, this conceptual model of an ācārya—unmistakably modelled after the by then long-departed Kālamukhas—and the artisan disciple, as two subdivisions of yogic practitioners linked as much by a logic of initiation into Śākta praxis as by social ties, has played a persistent part in the social imaginary of the Deccan down into recent times. While the subject is so rich as to warrant its own long monograph, for our purposes it is perhaps worthwhile to glimpse briefly some of the evidence from the early Marathi sources, which strongly supports the analysis of the rather dense and fragmentary early medieval Tantric texts we have just completed. An unpublished and untitled perhaps fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Marathi Śilpaśāstra⁸⁵, for example, begins by first introducing us to the path of jñāna (jñānāmārgācā) marked by the rising of the kuṇḍalinī. It then speaks of the ācāryas who carry the pañcabrahma mantras and showed (dekhile) the essence of reality (tattvasāra) taught in the Āgamas. We learn that these five acāryās (pañcācāryas)—a category already found in the Lākula scriptures as well as the Niśvāsa, teach the Śilpaśāstra and govern the five artisanal castes (pañcāḷa). Unmistakably, the kuladevatā of these artisans is at once Kāḷikā and Vāgeśvarī.

We bow to the Goddess of speech in the form of Mother Kāḷikā! [O goddess,] you are the clan deity of the Pāñcālas! Whichever one is crafting things following the Śilpaśāstra is for the [benefit] of the three worlds. The far end/farthest shore of this cave/profound thing that is Śilpaśāstra is not known to the Veda.⁸⁶

[[P754]] After venerating their goddess, who is remarkably similar to the type of deity whose image we saw at Shirshangi as well as the focus of artisan worship in the Aparājitapṛcchā, the “fivefold” gurus of the five artisan castes, and the pañcabrahma mantras, which form the core of its own mantra system, the Śilpaśāstra continues by in fact using a strikingly similar doxographical strategy to one found in the opening of the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā. Whereas in that source, Śiva’s subordinate Ananta and not Śiva himself is said to release the four Vedas, making them a de facto inferior revelation, our Marathi Śilpa text envisions the five-headed Viśvakarman—whose iconography is derived from Svacchanda Bhairava—emitting from his secret fifth head the superior stream of gnostic wisdom. Included within this transmission, we are told, is the artisan dharma that transmits the teachings on gold work, śilpa, bronze casting, and so forth. Once Viśvakarman’s secret fifth head has finished its work, he emits the four Vedas from his subordinate four heads.⁸⁷ For this reason, we learn, the Viśvakarmans, in whose ranks śilpins are included, are therefore better understood as “Pañcālā Viśvabrāhmaṇas.” Worshipping the supreme maker in both his iconic form and as alakṣya nirañjana jyoti, this fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Marathi work understands this community—assigned just as in the Lākula sources to the ṛṣikula—to be the sole observers of a special śivācāra. They call this conduct of conduct the sīvadharmu—indeed, it is closely derived from the Śivadharmaśāstra—and they say that is ontologically a priori to varṇāśramadharma. As such, the status of artisans is said to exceed that of mere varṇāśramadharma observing twice-borns.⁸⁸

[[P755]] Turning back briefly to medieval Karnataka, we have seen in earlier chapters that the old Kannada inscriptions—for example, at the great artisan training center at Shirshangi—often speak of the paññavañnige or pañcavaññige. In inscriptions found at major Kālamukha ritual centers, along similar lines, an underdetermined institution called the Pañcamaṭha surfaces with some frequency. This is often assumed to be referring to five specific maṭhas, sometimes said to be based at the Kālamukha ritual center of the Śaktipariṣad at Balligave in Shimoga district. As we saw in the last chapter, an examination of the neighborhood surrounding one of these supposed monastic centers, the famous Koḍīyamaṭha, now commonly called “pañcamaṭha,” suggests another possibility. The extended grounds of this rather humble structure house the supposed birthplace of the Vīraśaiva śaraṇa Allamaprabhu, who the local people, now mostly Pañcācārya Vīraśaivas born in artisan castes, insist was born in Balligave and belonged to the goldsmith caste. In a similar spirit, regarding the modern Kannadiga tradition of Sanskritic Vīraśaivas, while the tradition of the Pañcācāryas is now organized around a theology of five hypothetical ācāryas whose seats are occupied by human teachers,⁸⁹ an exploration of their key sacred seat of Ujjayini in central Karnataka reveals that their maṭha housing a Cāḷukya period temple is embedded once again in residential neighborhoods housing artisans, especially goldsmiths. Perhaps not accidentally, the communities maintain several shrines to the goddess Kālikā at Shirshangi, whom they worship alongside the living gurus, and indeed images associated with this goddess are actually preserved on the Cāḷukya period lintels. Instead of being comprised of five specific institutional sites, I propose that the medieval pañcamaṭha system refers to the governing monastic authorities, originally Kālamukhas, responsible for the oversight of the five-fold artisan castes, including the śilpins. This system in turn seems to descend in some fashion from the mention of the Pañcācāryas and Pañcapīṭha found in the Lākula cosmologies. It is these offices and institutions that were inherited by the later Vīraśāiva pontiffs.

[[P756]] Having established that the general contours of a Kāruka discourse and some sense of its relation to the worldview of the Lākulas is eminently recoverable and that if one attends to a range of prescriptive and doxographical sources, the canon in question corresponds to the various divisions of the Pārameśvara corpus as well as the Śākta texts on Pratiṣṭhā, we are now ready to turn the majority of our attention for the remainder of this chapter to the largest, most influential, and best preserved representative of this discourse: the Piṅgalāmata. Remembered by the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā as the most recent form of pratiṣṭhā revelation, the Piṅgalāmata offers us an unparalleled window into the life-world of the Śākta śilpins of the Deccan. Unsurprisingly, for it is product of all the various scriptural and social currents we have just been exploring, prefiguring the language of the later devotional sources, the Piṅgalāmata speaks of an identical social arrangement wherein the domain of śilpa is subdivided between the offices of artisan and guru:

Liṅgas are said to be divided twofold: moving and non-moving. As for which one gives mokṣa and which one gives enjoyment in the world, listen according to the way it is in the Āgama taught by Śiva.

The moving liṅga is called the ācārya. He is the agent of protecting the svadharma of the Śaivas. He acts for his own benefit, or he may enact siddhi for someone else’s benefit, or protects someone else’s dharma. . . .

And I will say the definition of those two that consist of the pramāṇa and unmāna in which. . . those two, being obtained, bestow bhoga and mokṣa. . . .

The ācārya who maintains the Śiva observance should not be too tall or too short. According to the Pramāṇa, he should not have a missing limb, and he should not have extra parts. . . . As for the best one, his mind does not err. . . and his skin is light.

He is endowed with definition (lakṣaṇa) and the thing to be defined (lakṣya). He is the knower to the adhvāna⁹⁰ [sic] and the procedure for installation (pratiṣṭhā). He knows the procedure concerning vidyāvāstu. He knows the procedure for the thread for [[P757]] measuring the liṅga. Such a person is practiced in astrology and he is always devoted to the practice of yoga.⁹¹

As we can see the, the text envisions the ācārya himself at once as a sacerdotal authority—in fact as a flesh and blood substitute for a fixed liṅga—and as a juridical agent. It is in this later capacity that the ācārya protects and enforces the svadharma of the Śaivas. Much as we saw in the Mataṅga, the Piṅgalāmata repeatedly demonstrates that its intended referent is none other than the base-line framework provided by the Śivadharmaśāstra, which is then complemented by the select samaya rules related to specific Śākta initiatory statuses. As even this small selection begins to indicate, the type of erudition required for holding the office of ācārya synthesizes what we think of as the quintessential dimensions of any Tantric knowledge system—mantra, mudrā, homa, and the manipulation of specific cosmological frameworks in a ritual setting towards both mundane and soteriological ends—with the technical skill and encrypted guild knowledge necessary for the design and execution of ritual implements, images crafted in a range of media, the construction of temples, as well as more pervasive approaches to medieval urban planning. Though we may be inclined to draw distinctions between the utilitarian and esoteric or the secular and the sacred, from the perspective of the texts themselves, the “secret conventions” for measuring and making a supportive balustrade are just as much an expression of the “esoteric knowledge” found in the Tantras as is the ability to achieve and sustain the āveśa of the deity. Much as we saw in chapter 4, the role played by the ācārya in guiding the artisans in their acquisition of skill and [[P758]] knowledge can thus be understood as entailing a form of professionalization, where the body of knowledge to be mastered happens to be derived from Śākta and Śaiva Tantras. In contrast, here is how the Piṅgalāmata delineates the role of the regular śilpin:

Or, it could be the case that the sādhaka is the common type, possibly a householder, Listen!

The householder, through union with the housewife, has the conduct of yoga and knows the procedure. He is a striver. He is endowed with sattva. He knows the śilpa. He is skilled in intellect. That one is the best in all tasks and in particular in regard to the portion [of scripture] pertaining to mantra. He is devoted to the devotees of Śiva. He is approved by the guru. He is the king of śilpins.

He is not one-eyed. He is not deaf. He is not blind. He does not have a deformed ear. He is not someone with club foot. He does not have severed nose, feet, or fingers. He does not have extra limbs. He is not cruel. He does not have a deficient or excessive body; he eats sparingly and restrains his senses. He would be familiar with the definitions. He is mad for standard and measure. He is insightful with regard to the injunctions of the Vastusūtra. He has steady hands and sees straight.

At the time of death, the śilpin accomplishes the exhaustion of all prārabdha karma, with his life breaths all [going forth] from his throat. The artisans become gods or friends of the gods and they become powerful. All of them are intent on devotion to Rudra. They are endowed with sāhasa.⁹² They are intent on dharma regarding the thing that is obtained by means the self,⁹³ which has the state of all. . . .⁹⁴

[[P759]]

The person whose livelihood is done for the sake of dharma should commence the purposeful action (arthakriyā) [that is sculpting and so forth]. It is a nitya duty from which the state of mokṣa follows.⁹⁵

As this passage makes plain, just as we found explicitly delineated in the Dharmaśāstra and hinted at in the Tantric doxographies, the Piṅgalāmata envisions two different types of people—ācāryas and śilpins—as involved in the design of buildings and the production of images. While, as we have seen, this bifurcation was normative for much of Indian history, in conceptualizing these roles our text is also specifically drawing upon a range of older Tantric sources. Quite specifically, the Piṅgalāmata inherits a tradition already evident in the seventh-century Picumata Brahmayāmala, from which, given its placement in the stream of the Vāma, our text in part descends. The unedited voluminous fourth chapter⁹⁶ of that text begins by telling us it will teach the work of image-making according to injunction (pratimākarma yathāvidhi). The primary form of this practice is directed towards the production of complex images of multi-armed and multi-headed Bhairavas, Bhairavīs, and their retinues situated on lotuses that strongly resemble the materials we have already explored in Aparājitapṛcchā where they are treated as integral to artisan pūjā. Here, a figure called a mantrin—at once a power-seeking professional ascetic and pratiṣṭhācārya—is deemed solely responsible for the crafting of images and construction of structures.

[[P760]] In the Picumata, under the general category of the work of image-making (pratimākarma), mantrin-related handcrafts incorporate such tasks as the crafting of the ḍamaru that is borne by the observer of the Kāpalika vow, his special skull bowl, called a turā, his khaṭvāṅga, as well as the delineation of measurements and iconography associated with crafting both three dimensional and painted images in a range of mediums. However, in the Picumata Brahmayāmala, especially in its subdivision on pratiṣṭhā, the fashioning of such images and “the founding of temples”—if we can even call them that—dedicated to the worship of its pantheon is essentially a clandestine affair. Indeed, addressed to the deity Kapālīśa, whom the Picumata inherits from earlier sources, the whole ritual sequence that forms of the center of the chapter—conducted inside of the brahmasthāna in the center of the sacred space where the deity is to be installed, and involving worshipping things invoked into skull bowls as well as pots of liquor, often using the nectar of the left (vāmamṛta)—seems rather archaic and offers many terminological and schematic parallels with older systematicities in our Tantric doxographies. While, as Shaman Hatley has recently demonstrated with great clarity, the social imaginary of the Brahmayāmala not only incorporates but positively welcomes the inclusion of both householders and women, it does not seem to imagine the role of the householder as in any way associated with pratimākarma itself.⁹⁷ Given that so much of the corpus of texts on śilpa is no longer available to us, it is impossible to determine if in reimagining the role of the artisan as primarily fulfilled by a householder, the Piṅgalāmata is itself innovating. It is, however, certain that our text is deeply invested in this conception of that social role.

[[P761]] Essentially, however, the Piṅgalāmata imagines the ideal social actor—the one who is “king” or best of the śilpins—as a married, indeed sexually active, householder. Invoking the language of the Śivadharma, the śilpin is a rudrabhakta, devoted both to Śiva and his bhaktas, who acts at all times under the direction of a Śaiva guru. At the same time, just like the Cāḷukya kings and their local counterparts among the nāyakas, the artisan is also a sāhāsika. In other words, the śilpin is an initiate into the Śākta-Śaiva rituals with their transgressive socialities that emend the general rules of the Śivadharma with specific supersessionary samaya injunctions.

As we have seen, these include the sort of practices we have already examined in chapter 3, starting with the communal consumption of the vīradravya as a mark of social commensality among initiates from different walks of life and perhaps extending up to consorting with yoginīs. As you may remember from the fourth chapter, when Someśvara III introduced the category of the artisans by characterizing them vis-à-vis their relationship with the king by stating rather baldly that “the king is never without the fifth caste,” the Cāḷukya ruler almost certainly intended to allude to precisely this shared commensality, which places artisans and rulers on a level playing field, at least with the confines of the circumscribed realm of ritual. Just as we found in our study of Tantric doxographies, where the Kārukas, placed at the level of the genitals, are associated with Vāmadeva on the one hand and the Vāma Tantras on the other, within the Picumata Brahmayāmala itself, these practices are defined as the Vāma path. Indeed, though the Piṅgalāmata itself does not explore this matter in any detail, if we take the text as faithfully expanding on certain aspects of the ritual system of the Picumata Brahmayāmala and its successor scriptures, when the text speaks of the householder as [[P762]] “performing yoga” “through union with the house-wife,” it is quite plausible that it is invoking the older scripture’s conception of yoga as a “mahāyoga.” In much the same manner as in some of the early Vajrayāna sources,⁹⁸ mahāyoga—which may simply originate as a textual corruption for an original reading of mahāyāga, here apparently means a form of sexual practice in which the pantheon of the system is ritually invoked onto the moist vagina of a human ritual consort. Worship, involving intercourse, is then performed, culminating in the production and offering of sexual fluids. If this is indeed the intended meaning, what we may be seeing here is an early trace of a development more typically associated with post-Kaula vernacular sources, of the sort we will encounter in chapter 8, wherein the ideal consort of a householder rājayogin becomes his own wife. Just like the Kāruka, the śilpin it seems abides at the level of the genitals.

[[P763]] Apart from its integration of basic Vāma-style pūjā into the domain of the household, in the Piṅgalāmata’s vision, the śilpin’s primarily religious duty is not the performance of specific tantric sādhanās nor the transmission of Śaiva gnosis; this again is why unlike the Lākula he is not defined by his access to gnosis and scriptural knowledge. Instead, for the Śilpin, sādhana is comprised of the successful execution of his quotidian duties as builder, painter, sculptor, and so forth. If he successfully completes these tasks, or, as the Niśvāsa had said, “keeps his observances until death,” we are told, when he expires, the śilpin experiences the same kind of death as the most accomplished of yogins. Instead of having his prāṇas descend out of his body and become scattered, resulting in transmigration, his vital breaths will exit through his head. This ensures first, a period of enjoyment of his merit in a heavenly realm, just like any other sādhaka, and then, once the storehouse of positive merits is exhausted, a final and lasting liberation. As our text clarifies elsewhere, unlike an ācārya or putraka, the śilpin is initiated only into a third of the system of knowledge transmitted within the Piṅgalāmata and the Śākta Tantric systems to which it is related. Rather significantly, the portion of the tradition that is transmitted is inclusive of the mantra system in its entirety. In other words, for him it is not caryā, but kriyā that predominates (kriyāpradhāna). The capacities that are imbued into him by his guru through initiation into the Śākta Tantras are key to fulfilling his obligatory ritual duties, which will ensure his own liberation. As the passages we have read have shown, however, success in such endeavors is only possible when esoteric attainments are married to quotidian practical skills and technical expertise. In other words, just like an ācārya, even if he is a siddha, has to manage the monastic bureaucracies, train and pay his workers, accept deposits in the treasury, and provide ritual services to kings and other notables if they request them, a śilpin has to be both a sattvic being capable of embodying ecstatic bhāvas, while having steady hands to hold his tools and the ability to see straight. As for what sort of things a śilpin might see, that is the subject of our next section.

And That is Why He Created It This Way: Nondualism and the Culture of Material Images on the Path of Bhairava

Towards the end of the Mānasollāsa’s discussion of the iṣṭāpūrta—the canon of sacrifices and philanthropic projects as integral to the office of kingship as they are to being twice-born or serving as a patron—in addressing the future sovereigns and those who serve in their cabinets that make up his intended readers, the Cāḷukya King Someśvara III instructs:

The king, out of devotion, should commission (kārayet) temples for deities as well as monasteries. This is to be accomplished following the doctrine of Viśvakarman, in accordance with the Mayaśāstra, following procedures related in the Matsya[purāṇa] and in accordance with the standards in the Piṅgalāmata. By means of the proven [[P764]] authorities, he should establish the four human aims. The wise [king] should commission images founded upon the procedure that follows the authoritative measures pertaining to proportionality (navatāla). The images should be complete, with all their limbs. They should be pleasing to the eyes, and somewhat plump. They are to be endowed with the proper weapons and accoutrements as stated in the authoritative texts.⁹⁹

In the other contexts where he presents lists of relevant authorities or a catalog of sacred places—as is often the case within the śāstras—Someśvara III’s explicit intention is to introduce a scale of texts organized in terms of their relevant significance. There is little reason to suspect the current passage of diverging from this rhetorical model.¹⁰⁰ At the top of this hierarchy of authorities, we find the Piṅgalāmata itself.

[[P765]] In her seminal work The Hindu Temple, Stella Kramrisch refers to the Piṅgalāmata twice, in both cases invoking its definition of the aṅgula. As she tells us on the first occasion, “According to the ‘Piṅgalāmata’, however. . . . aṅgula is the breadth measurement of the upper phalange of one’s own thumb.”¹⁰¹ In short, Kramrisch approaches the work as a source for a particular form of otherwise unavailable specialized technical knowledge as opposed to a document with a particular social and theological vision. That Kramrisch is aware of the work in any capacity is due to a peculiar set of circumstances. After he inquired about what sort of traditional resources might be available for studying the precolonial self-understandings of Indian craftsmen, the Bengali poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature Rabindranath Tagore was given a gift of two manuscripts by the king of Nepal with the intention that they would be housed at the library at Shantiniketan and eventually taken up for study.

[[P766]] As it so happens, the texts in question proved to be selections from the Picumata Brahmayāmala and chapter 4 of the Piṅgalāmata. Tagore entrusted these to the great Sinologist and Sanskritist Prabodha Chandra Bagchi, who, just before his untimely death, produced a small article analyzing its chapter on iconography as well as a posthumously published translation. Bagchi’s project was subsequently taken up by S. N. Ghosal Sastri, who integrated it into a wider study of Indian handicrafts.¹⁰² Ironically, as we are about to see, though the chapters available at Shantiniketan were not sufficient to the task, Tagore’s prescient interest in recovering the self-understandings of Indic artisans would have found an ideal match in the other chapters of the Piṅgalāmata, which in fact provides us with probably the richest surviving sources for recovering the life-worlds of the sorts of people who produced what survives of the material culture of the Deccan. For while the other sources in the genre of the Śilpaśāstras seem mostly to be addressing the caste gurus of the artisans, the Piṅgalāmata is distinctive in the unprecedented interest it displays regarding the self-understanding of the artisans themselves.

[[P766]] As was mentioned in passing in our exploration of its passages outlining samaya codes, the Piṅgalāmata is composed in a highly irregular register of Sanskrit. Depending on your predilections, it is either abounding in grammatical and syntactical abominations or offering a taste of the pure vernacular. Regardless, this is a mode of textuality clearly produced by people who do not emerge from the same interpretive communities that are responsible for most of Sanskrit literature and scholarship. For this reason alone, if our aim is to understand the multiplicity of emic perspectives that the medieval world accommodated, the Piṅgalāmata is invaluable. Perhaps because it offers an outsider’s attempt at adopting much of the idiom of the śāstras, our Pratiṣṭhā Tantra approaches questions of the interrelationship between the stylistic features native to systematic forms of thought in South Asia and the intention and message a work aims at conveying from a fresh and unusually self-reflexive perspective. One of the most spectacular passages in this vein is found towards the very end of the text, right before the sections on prāyaścitta and the pavitrārohana. We have just spent several hundred pages painstakingly taxonomizing different types of images, buildings, and liṅgas, according to the materials used to produce them as well as their functions. In other words, a śāstra dedicated to pratiṣṭhā and its various features has been written in the typical manner of a śāstra. It offered us definitions delineating the defining features of the endless speciation of types and sub-types.

[[P767]] There is nothing so unusual about any of this—whether we are talking logical fallacies, types of gems, or archetypes of women. This is just what śāstras do in sorting knowledge: they create hierarchies and sort things out accordingly. It is thus rather amazing that, once it has offered all of its categorized systematicities, the Piṅgalāmata pauses and at some length reflects on the intellectual incongruity inherent in marrying the classification of the universe with a non-dualist or pantheist theology in which God is in everything and all pervasive. The goddess Piṅgalā asks:

The śivaliṅga is not joined with the principles of lowest, middle, and highest, for, if it were related [to such notions], then there would be a fault, as in the case of any human constructed thing. Pervasion is known to be one with the pervader: this was previously stated by you.

Because it has the power to produce results—you could say it is threefold—or thousand-fold, but [if you do], there is a great fault, because it is always of one sort, unwavering.

How can Śiva who is one be twofold as the peaceful and the ferocious? Please tell all that in some detail, by your grace!¹⁰³

[[P768]] In setting out to reconcile its values with a typical Purāṇic rhetoric that ranks the relative value and sacredness of sites of worship, such that performing pūjā at one place is the same as performing eight horse sacrifices while at another its only worth one, our text asks some very basic questions which are otherwise utterly absent from the discourse. If Śiva is in everything, how can we grade his iconic and aniconic manifestations? If the Śiva nature is everywhere the same, on what basis can we speak about different types of liṅgas that are not only superior or inferior, but are energetically distinctive in such a manner that they are suited for different types of worship. Perhaps most fundamentally, the Piṅgalāmata inquires, if Śiva is one, how can he be both peaceful and ferocious? In other words, where should we place Bhairava? To this inquiry, Bhairava replies:

As for this being higher, middle, and lower, that is just the result of intentionality [on the part of the ritual agent]. It [the pervading power of the Lord] does not disappear as the result of one measurement of hand more or less; it comes in accordance with the will of the agent. . . .

Even though they are set down with the same fruit in view, in the discourse of the world, [if they proclaim] they are for the purpose that is grounded in the common dharma, there is said to be “difference” according to the expenditure of wealth by the founder, or in accordance with the differing size of the main sanctum, and so on and so forth—we can still say that there is difference. . . . As we have said above, there are three siddhis and they are determined by the desire of the sādhaka [or] of Śiva.¹⁰⁴

[[P769]] Here Bhairava sets out to reconcile two different dimensions of this system: its theology and its pragmatics. On the one hand, if it were the case that when an artisan screws up or the project runs over budget and the proportions of building or deity had to be reduced in scale, the power of the pervasive deity were actually to be diminished, well, then he would not be much of a deity at all. The same would be true if the relative power of an image or structure were mechanistically the product of adhering to certain systems of proportionality. Bhairava’s solution is to propose that different scholastic conventions labelling buildings, liṅgas, and images as higher, middle, and lower correspond to different intentionalities on the part of the sponsoring patron as well as the craftsmen carrying out his vision. While God is everywhere and in all things, within the transactional realm that governs the lives of worldly people, things like how much money a project costs and how big and fancy a garbhagṛha you can afford really do make a difference and doing the right job—and hiring the right crew and project managers—can palpably affect the results you will get. Nevertheless, it is still Śiva himself who is the causal agent that implements the distribution of the appropriate results to the worshippers.

Having known the domain of them [where the desire is based], wherever he [the worshipper] is situated, He [Śiva] should give [as is appropriate to that domain]. . . . You cannot say [a liṅga] is [intrinsically] of lower quality because it gives siddhi of a lower kind of fruit, but can you then say that it is superior because it gives superior gifts? It is never deficient.

A liṅga may be good for those who perform the requisite ritual actions. It is not vitiated simply in the faults of bad people that have faults. Just as, when a king gives fruits, and the wages depend on the work done, [under such circumstances] the king, on account of the greatness [or smallness] of shares [given], is not diminished even though he gives every kind of thing, in just the same way, the Lord of all things is not diminished on account of the measure of the small and medium things he distributes.¹⁰⁵

[[P770]] Waxing Shakespearean, Bhairava here argues that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. It is the way individual human beings or other kinds of entities relate to the world that determines how the world and the objects it contains respond. Regardless of whether the results prove extravagant or meager, this is no reflection on the intrinsic value of the liṅga nor on the Lord of whom it is an expression. In just the same way that we do not say that a billionaire becomes a poor man when he leaves the waitress a five-dollar bill instead of a million dollars under his empty coffee cup, God granting quotidian favors to petty people does not make God petty. As we will see momentarily, Bhairava offers his intended audience this reflection on the working mechanics of transactional worship in the service of making a much more profound point about the interrelationship of the nature of universe and the vocation of craftsmen.

Just like the nature of being a soul is one thing, even though, in the aggregate of the tattvas, it appears subdivided according to the divisions of states of being, just so is Śiva [differentiated] by the differences in form/the mūrti. Just as the sun with its rays [[P771]] may be in a particular place, so too the raudra quality is situated in the saumya images of Bhairava and others. It is intentionality (vivakṣitā) that is the universal accomplisher, it arises from the will of him [the agent].

Thus, for one who desires to perform raudrakarma, there would be a raudra form; for the one who desires to perform saumya rites, there is a saumya form. If you are one who is characterized as desiring liberation, then, provided your sins have ripened, you get an awareness of that (tanmatiḥ). Just as the variety of grace is to be understood to be achieved by śaktipāta, which is of various degrees of intensity, likewise, Śiva has a division of forms.

In the same way that the attainment is manifest in the part of those who desire a particular fruit [in alignment with their intention], so it is with their focus of visualization (matiḥ). If you direct your operation of knowing with respect to the mode of omniscience, then one may become a lord of such a nature. “Let him be reborn in the world of beings with the same form!”

The Lord does nothing more than cause to make manifest the action engaged in. If it were not like that, sādhanā would be pointless, and that is why he created it this way.¹⁰⁶

[[P772]] Here Bhairava offers what is essentially a phenomenological explanation of how we experience apparent difference in a world that in actuality is founded on ontological non-duality and then distills this theological message into a practical justification of the indispensable role of the craftsman. Just as the human soul, when mediated through the different ontic substrates that make up the many levels of existence, manifests different behaviors and propensities, in just the same way, when Śiva becomes evident, he necessarily takes on different forms that must be made manifest as distinctive mūrtis. God’s true nature, which is in fact that of the terrifying lord Bhairava, is all pervasive. Thus, it is equally present in all the sorts of common mundane images claimed by other traditions as it is in images that specifically represent “Bhairava.” Far from representing some specialized inferior register, “raudra” modalities and intentionalities, like the sun shining in the sky, directly express the supreme reality. Rather than God’s nature actually changing depending on how he is depicted, it is the intentionality of the agent, and the craftsman, that determines which aspects of god’s infinite plentitude become perceptible in a given vessel representing his glory. It is in the service of the aligning of intention with action for the benefit for the ritual actor, for example, that ferocious rituals demand a ferocious form of the deity. In other words, the nature of how God manifests before you is determined by the nature of your own consciousness. That consciousness, in turn, is conditioned by your preexisting balance of karmas and how they have been impacted by the types of initiations and ritual activities in which you have engaged. Succinctly, God takes on whatever qualities are present in the one who is seeking him out. Just as importantly, he manifests in the form that is appropriate to the intentionality of the seeker, and, once the seeker has successfully carried out the prescribed program of praxis, he ensures that appropriate result is conferred. Succinctly, the secret that Bhairava teaches his consort is not really terribly different from The Secret as promoted by Oprah Winfrey, albeit in lieu of an overly rosy vision obsessively focused on positive thinking, a good deal more rākṣasas and vetālas have been thrown into the fray. Or as Kauṇḍinya had put it, in pronouncing “Whatever you think, you become. This is the eternal secret,” the teachers of the Atimārga and their successors were as much offering their disciples a cautionary warning as they were aiming to impart motivation.

[[P772]] Accordingly, Parameśvara takes the form of rākṣasas, piśācas, bhūtas, and vetālas along with pālakas and the gaṇas and vidyādharas and so forth. Because he is one whose nature is the supreme state and he pervades at all times [in all states of being], having assumed the nature of gods and yakṣas, he should convey the intended fruit. [Parameśvara is defined as] being omniscient, having his own will, having his own agency, as all compassionate. He is the lord, who is merciful and eternal.

And thus, he is the generator of fruits that come into existence in accordance with the [particular] way he exists for [different] Śiva souls. Thus, the liṅga has characteristics, just as the sādhaka has characteristics.¹⁰⁷

[[P773]] Implicit in this vision is that in reality, whenever an artisan sculpts an image, regardless of its iconography, he is really representing Bhairava. Though equally present in all things, Bhairava comes down into the world and takes on a myriad of shapes, behaving in that context in alignment with the forms he has assumed. People and other entities relate to him in accordance with their expectations, conditioned by the contents of their own minds. These in turn provoke certain types of reactions to the particular shape assumed which necessarily result in specific types of outcomes. Throughout all this play of mental elaborations and shapes, Bhairava’s power is imminent and at work at all times, operating as the causal engine that connects intention, actions, and results. From a scholarly perspective, animating this whole discourse are the fundamental epistemic assumptions we have encountered again and again throughout our medieval sources, namely, that immersion in a mimetic system of praxis irrevocably changes a person, that higher order metaphysical reflection or scholastic articulation has to be brought into accommodation with the quotidian transactional realities that govern lived experience, and that the world at every level is differentiated into different domains, each of which is governed by site- and agent-specific rules that are often incommensurable.

If it is the tendency of our own academic discourse to view such conceptual theologizing abstractions as second order formulations reflecting the real dynamics that organize the actual social order, as we have by now seen repeatedly, the text instead directs us [[P774]] to think in terms of a more complex dynamic of mutual imbrication. While worldly metaphors are used to illustrate divine architectonics, at the same time, the fundamental categories that form the building blocks of emic conceptualizations of the political and social are organized around subtle theological frames Western scholars of Indian religions and society are just beginning to understand. Indeed, as we can see, the passage concludes by turning its doctrinal conclusions upon the very categories and textual strategies that are productive of Indic knowledge itself, such that we arrive at last at what is essentially a just so story about where definitions (lakṣaṇa) come from and how the analytical model they presuppose can be rendered justifiable within a non-dualist framework.

The sort of argumentation we have been just exploring can justifiably be read as an entextualization of the “folk understanding” of how “quotidian religion works,” retooled to suit the needs of the specific expectations of a community of artisans. In contrast, the Piṅgalāmata’s very first chapter demands to be read as a meditation on the relationship between knowledge and practice offered from the perspective of the Tantric-scholastic ritualists who serve at once as the gurus of the artisans and the sthānācāryas who govern and construct temple complexes. As we might anticipate, though it too diverges rather substantively from the norms of classical śāstra, it offers a very different mode reasoning and is fixated in different types of concerns than the popular philosophy of the Śākta inflected job site we have just been exploring.

How to Learn the Āgama and How Not to Tell a Story: The Piṅgalāmata and the Sociology of Knowledge in Medieval India

It is unexpected serendipity that a text largely devoted to imparting the procedures guiding the construction of physical objects also offers us what is perhaps the most detailed account of [[P774]] pedagogy thus far located in a Tantric source. Here, then, intertwined with a telling account of the social and ritual conditions that make effective teaching possible, are the rules for teaching and learning the Bhairava Āgamas:

Therefore, the Āgama should be listened to and recited [to such a person]. O one with good observances, this illustrates the rule for the teaching of the Bhairava Āgama. In a charming, even, pure maṇḍapa to the east of the yāgaśāla or on a portion of the ground smeared with plaster, there, one should cause to have done an exposition [of the Tantra].

Facing east or north, a person should be pure, with their mind attending to the subject at hand. Having made the three beat sounds [tapping with the heel], with the astra mantra, the directions should be protected.

[Next,] one installs that which has the nature of one’s own practice, inside and outside [one’s own body]. Then, [the teacher] meditates on the attainment of omniscience: that oneself alone is Śiva, one who is steadfast in regard to mercy toward all, who is the agent of compassion towards all beings, who is the cause of grace for all, the foremost [source of] gnosis, who is the uplifter. One should surrender [to him or he should offer] before the guru.

If the [specialized] vidyā is to be given to an elder, a brother or the paternal relative who has the common vidyā, out of affection, he can do it only when he has received approval [from his guru].

Listen to how the Tantra is to be listened to according to the rule. The recitation turban must be made, and the yogapīṭha must be made for the sake of the purpose at hand.¹⁰⁸

[[P775]] The Piṅgalāmata’s account of a teaching prep session begins with the series of steps that precede any generic Tantric ritual. First, the material environment has to be prepared. One must check to see that the ground is clean and level and the pavilion where the teaching and homa sacrifices will take place have to be constructed. Once the space is arranged in a preliminary fashion, the direction guardians must be appeased and energetic protections have to be put in place to prevent intrusions by unwanted supernatural outsiders who might disrupt or distort the ritual. Next, like any ritualist, the teacher must purify his own inner being, first by cleansing away his own imperfections and subjectivity and then by identifying with the deity and its pantheon. In this case, internal practice appears to be coordinated with an external invocation of the same pantheon in exactly the same fashion into a designated ritual space within the outside world. Having aligned himself with the currents of his tradition in general terms, the teacher next sets out more specifically to attain identification with Śiva and conscious embodied realization that Śiva alone exists. Then, he attunes himself quite specifically to the aspect of the lord that is characterized by limitless grace and compassion.

As the guests who will be attending the lecture arrive, exclusive attention to the performance of esoteric practices has to be balanced with the guru and his community playing host. The eligibility of the potential attendees has to be discerned, and if there are any ambiguities, the ācārya giving his talk has to consult with his guru to make certain that the offering of the teaching is appropriate to this audience. As the text rather bluntly informs us, the successful transmission of an esoteric Tantra is equally dependent on two discrete forms of preparation. Unsurprisingly, the first dimension involves performance of rituals anchored in acts of ascesis and mimesis that instantiate specific modes of consciousness in the transmitting agent. What we probably would not anticipate, however, is that equal weight and in fact far more attention is given to proper preparation of the prerequisite material culture, which is understood as essential to the task of teaching. First, before performing the vyākhyāna, the teacher needs the proper sort of turban or a hat. While this matter is dealt with in a cursory fashion, most likely because the fashioning of such an item fell under the purview of a different [[P776]] caste community, the fashioning of just the right kind of yogapīṭha, in this case, a kind of stool that the listener is to sit on during the discourse, is not only treated in excruciating detail but the highly specific cultural cache of distinctive types of seats is fetishized every bit as much as a lululemon yoga mat in a modern yoga studio.

This should be made with various types of wood starting with śrīparṇika, without wounds in the wood, possessing auspicious characteristics. It is two hands long with one aṅgula. It should be broad with an extra hand [measure in length]. The above is the case if it is the seat of the ācārya; it is the main type. However, if it is for a listener, the stool is 40 aṅgulas in height and in length. In breadth, it is nine aṅgulas total.

The two feet are extended a hands distance, as previously, O beloved. The two feet are fashioned like elephant feet with toenails that have faces in the middle. At the juncture of that [the feet], there should be a pair of conches—one should fashion that facing forward. One should ornament the middle of the pīṭha with decorative leaves and vines. Above that you should adorn it with some flowers with a lotus in the middle. Just like that, on the sides there are to be depicted lotuses with auspicious characteristics. At the edges of those two it is to be weighed down with by a garland consisting of sugarcane leaves. This should be done for the guru by one who has the aim of listening to the guru.

The yogapīṭha is to be made by the sādhaka [for himself] as previously. In height, the stool is thirty-six fingers in length with a breadth of six [measures]. When the listener is the putraka, just as for the main figure [the ācārya], O pretty colored one, then, the yogapīṭha is to be made with a length of thirty aṅgulas [smallest]; by the measure of four aṅgulas, that is to be extended, as previously. In regard to one who previously bore another religious signifier but now is with God [i.e., a convert], the yogapīṭha is as previously with regard to the main figure, but measuring twenty-four aṅgulas. The rest is as previously. The extended dimension is also to be two aṅgulas; it is characterized by good qualities.¹⁰⁹

[[P777]] As we have seen again and again, like with so many other texts written on the margins of scholastic knowledge production, the Piṅgalāmata all but assails us with the rich intricacies of an ephemeral material culture, most of which we can only access through the heavily fogged up window of the technical instructions guiding its assemblage. When working in wood to produce the furniture used for a Śākta-Śaiva dharma talk—and this as we shall was by no means an everyday occurrence—artisans did not merely churn out simple utilitarian handicrafts, but worked the wood with care and skill, adorning its surfaces with representations of flowers, leaves, and animals faces, yielding the sort of end results that today we would reimagine as a work of art. The focused deployment of specific motifs and the care invested in different approaches to engineering distinctive types of stools executed at a range of scales, however, served important semiotic functions.

Indeed, every aspect of the material culture in such a lecture hall was designed to communicate and enact specific social hierarchies among the devotees in a manner that instantly spatially conveyed who belonged where. As Dominic Goodall conveyed to me as we were reading through this passage, if one gets down into the nitty gritty details of visualizing the relative scale and dimensions of the different categories of yogapīṭha assigned to an ācārya, the invited listener, the sādhaka, the regular putraka and the intended successor of the guru, all the way down to the convert from another tradition, another rather important aspect of this arrangement comes into sharp relief. An aṅgula, after all as we have seen, is a rather small unit of measurement. Succinctly, the people higher up in the hierarchy not only get more elevated stools, as befits their prestige, they also get more comfortable ones. In fact, by the time you get [[P778]] down to the sādhaka, ranked unusually low in this system, to say nothing of the convert, the yogapīṭha becomes less of a working piece of furniture and more an assigned encumbrance, for its seat is too small to fit the average sized human bottom, and its height is so low that all one can manage is a precarious squatting position likely much less comfortable than merely sitting on the ground.

Before everyone sits down in their perhaps very uncomfortable seats, the guru who will give the discourse must first be welcomed and appeased. When this concludes, in turn, the guru guides the assembled disciples in the welcoming and the appeasement of the deities of the Śākta pantheon.

In this fashion, with a mind well concentrated, having accomplished his daily tasks, he places the well-worshipped book seated on an āsana with the palm leaves threaded together in front of the yogapīṭha, accompanied by writing chalk and a cloth āsana, along with [offerings of] fragrances, unopened forest flowers, and the like.

Having set this down before the yogapīṭha, the disciple appeases the guru: “[Take this, and] by your grace, He Nātha! Cause this little foolish mind [of mine] to become expanded.”

Thus, the guru, who bears auspicious sovereign authority [śrīmān], is pleased, and his mind is rendered ready for performing the auspicious commentary. In the middle of the lotus, the imperishable should be written. He praises the root text and the commentary [or mūlavyākhyānaṃ, commentary on the root text]. There, the Śaiva ācārya should sacrifice to Bhairava or the śaktis. In the lotus previously fashioned, on the left-hand side, he should sacrifice to the line of the gurus.

On the right side in the lotus, he should worship the jñānasūtra [mūla of the text] and the chalk (khaṭikā). The worship should be done with fragrance and flowers or, if it is special worship, with special substances. Having praised Śiva and the goddess of language, and likewise the king of obstacles, having praised the guru and the gnosis guru, he should proclaim the connection (anubandhacatuṣṭaya).¹¹⁰

[[P779]] As Florinda De Simini has explored with great care and insight, albeit in regard to much more pacific ritual systems, just as in the act of vidyādāna where books are copied and then offered as gifts, the teaching of a Tantra commences with the ritual worship of the book.¹¹¹ The implement that will be used either by the teacher to sketch out diagrams, to record key points, or perhaps even one of his chief disciples to take their lecture notes is also offered the appropriate acts of reverence. As the guests go before their guru to present these items, he is addressed in effusive devotional terms. Although short, this passage and many others like it in our text pose serious problems for our historiography. Two possibilities pose themselves. We could have here what was then a rare instance of the idiom we think of as late Śākta or post-Tantric guru devotion, prefiguring a register that will become ubiquitous in religious communities during the early modern period. Otherwise, given its production and circulation outside the normal networks that in apparent absence of other evidence we have conflated with the totality of discourse on the ground in South Asia, it suggests that such a mode of expression and its accompanying values had been integral to life-world of religious communities on the subcontinent for far longer than we have recognized but perhaps was simply not considered a proper object of systematic scholastic knowledge and thus is missing from most of our sources.

[[P780]] Just how much the boundaries of what constitutes esoteric and devotional knowledge has shifted over the centuries is made plain by another facet of this same passage. As we have just seen, in effusive devotional terms, before he beings his discourse, in a language instantly recognizable to anyone who has encountered the Trika and its Kashmiri sūtric and śāstric revelations, the guru is entreated to cause the small and ignorant (manda) mind of his disciple to become quite literally “expanded” (vikāsa) through the reception of the teaching. As we shall see, the Piṅgalāmata is indeed an “esoteric” text rooted in Śākta traditions of revelation that partakes of a theology of divine grace, gnosis achieved through ecstatic possession, and non-dualist or pantheist epistemology. Such dimensions of the work, while essential to its worldview, form only a small part of its contents. The majority of the Piṅgalāmata’s esotericism is of another sort entirely—instantiated in its secret transmission of guild-specific highly technical instruction in artisanal craft, modes of calculation and measurement, specific iconographical programs, and marvels of engineering and design. In violation of our own expectations of how we tend to imagine “Indic spirituality,” when the disciple asks his mind to become expanded so that he can receive the teaching, the majority of what is about to be taught are litanies pertaining to the proportionality of the various components that make up a building as well as the codes of conduct to be observed when one is on the job site.

[[P780]] More specifically, from the perspective of the history of yogic traditions, it is of the utmost importance that within a scripted dialogue that both entextualizes and formalizes actual social practice, the guru is addressed as “he nātha.” In other words, already by the ninth century, to be a Śākta ācārya dedicated to the worship of Bhairava and the yoginīs and holding the office of sthānācārya or pratiṣṭhāpanācārya is virtually by definition to be the kind of social agent who disciples address as nātha. As we have seen in chapter 4 in the case of Kaḷēśvara or Kaḷanātha, engaged in ritual worship of pantheons connected to the Trika, the Brahmayāmala, the Western Transmission of the goddess Kubjikā, and likely the Krama, the inscriptional records of medieval Deccan abound in accounts of ācāryas who bear initiatory names ending in –īśvara, who are in a literal sense both “nāthas” and “yogins.”¹¹² This somewhat obvious observation holds substantial consequences for historicizing the emergence

[[P781]] of the so-called Nātha Sampradāya. Instead of a specific search for institutional origins, we are left with “nātha” as simply a longstanding generic title for the Śākta ācārya par excellence. In this way, while attending to the deep history of the social and theological milieu remains important, the analytical focus of such an intellectual endeavor shifts it to telling a different kind of conceptual history, much of it in the spirit John Stratton Hawley has been exploring for some years, about the articulation of the concept of saṃpradāya as a form of community self-fashioning native to a specific early modern and very frequently Mughal milieu, wherein certain legal and social processes began to necessitate much more specific and evident articulations of community identity and belonging.¹¹³

[[P781]] For the next several dozen verses, the Piṅgalāmata offers what is essentially a medieval guide to professional development for the working educator who has already professionalized himself by becoming a Bhairava-worshipping Śākta yogin and acting building project manager, and in this capacity has been enlisted in the task of providing continuing education to his work force. At the point in pedagogical process where the modern academic might introduce the texts her students will be studying by guiding them through the syllabus, explicating the course objectives, and then offering an introduction to how the current course of study related to the rest of subjects a student has explored during their time in the university system, before it turns to presenting “best-practices” for the beginning lecturer, the Piṅgalāmata offers its own crash course in the outlining of learning objectives.

That which is well known in all the Tantras is said to be general [knowledge]. As for that which is established in this Tantra, they know that to be the uncommon [knowledge].

Now I will tell you what is the subject matter of this Tantra, which is the connection [outlining teaching objectives] here [in this system]: subject matter, the facilitating cause, the agent, the extent of the text, and the purpose. In the beginning, the lecturer should proclaim these [five] things and after that the speaker should describe [further things].¹¹⁴

[[P782]] In much the same manner as the special teachers’ edition of a textbook, in its first chapter, the Piṅgalāmata here alternates between two kinds of discourse. In most passages, we are presented with the actual contents that the ācārya is supposed to integrate into his discourse when teaching the text—right down to exact phrases. Intermittently, as the final sentence in the above passage, we also are privy to helpful instructions intended for the teacher’s own benefit which presumably originally were not to be shared with an audience. In the first collection of verses, the content under discussion amounts to a brief outline of the sociology of knowledge followed by an introduction to discipline specific technical jargon and its approach to thinking with texts. The Piṅgalāmata presents itself as offering particularized or specialized (viśeṣaṇa) knowledge that builds upon an assumed repertoire of general Tantric knowledge. In addition to the canons of normal analytical categories used to evaluate works of śāstras in general, the famous anubandhacatuṣṭaya, our text prepares the audience for the eventual reception of a new set of discourse specific theoretical categories for making sense of how the different chapters in a work connect together to make a cohesive whole. First, however, as it has promised, it analyzes the work in terms of its name, subject matter, the source of its authority, the length and version of the work that will be studied, as well as the efficient cause and agent responsible for its production.

What is the name of this Tantra? It is called the Piṅgalāmata. [What is the subject?] It is a procedure for ritual installation. Deriving its authority from the Jayadrathayāmala, it falls within the Brahmayāmala. [The goddess] Piṅgalā Bhaṭṭārikā is the efficient cause. Who is the author? Bhagavān Śrīkaṇṭhanātha. How long is it supposed to be? Three and a half thousand verses. And it is divided twofold. There is the Kāmarūpī form and Uḍḍiyānī form. This one is the Kāmarūpī.¹¹⁵

[[P783]]

What is the purpose? The purpose is for providing knowledge concerning the definition of the installation of manifest and unmanifest liṅgas. Although the liṅga can be either manifest or unmanifest, the base form of the liṅga is unmanifest.

The manifest one is the one conjoined with the characteristics of all the parts that are manifest [i.e., this is the mūrti]. But, the both manifest and unmanifest is characterized as having both forms [it is a liṅga with faces]. As for that, it is an image that has a god who is only the face above the heart [i.e., a bust]. It is manifest in the upper part of the Brahmā, Viṣṇu, or Rudra [quadrant of the liṅga].

Having first set down [this pentad], after that, the teacher should explain. According to the speech, he should repeat it.¹¹⁶

[[P783]] Distilled down to its fundamentals, this passage executes two functions. First, it begins to delineate the Piṅgalāmata’s place within the canon of revealed scriptures in a manner that makes evident why it is an authoritative source. Second, it outlines the core purpose of the text, which is to provide the definitions of different varieties of focuses for worship and instructions for making them. Let us begin by addressing the more transparent second dimension of the Tantra. In the typical manner of a technical treatise on ritual installation and building construction, the Piṅgalāmata speaks of the liṅga as signifying any focus of worship and divides it into the categories of unmanifest, manifest, and both manifest and unmanifest. In the case of the unmanifest (avyakta) type, the lexeme liṅga refers to the aniconic either vaguely or quite evidently phallic shaped form that we commonly identify as a śivaliṅga, though, as our text will explain, in practice a whole host of other deities can be made to abide in such a form. In contrast, when a liṅga is said to be at once both unmanifest and unmanifest (vyaktāvyakta), the intended point of referent is an aniconic image onto which have been carved or engraved iconic representations of one or more faces of the deity. Finally, like virtually every other work on pratiṣṭhā, our texts labels as a manifest (vyakta) liṅga any fully representational figure representing a deity. In other words, it treats figure we might label as mūrti, icon, or “idol” as just another kind of liṅga.

[[P784]] When it comes to placing the Piṅgalāmata itself in context, as has so often proven to be the case throughout the last chapter, images speak much more vividly and transparently than words. To your left is a series of life size images preserved in situ on a fortified stone gate from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century at a place called Dabhoi in Gujarat, less than an hour from the capitol at Baroda. The figure on the top represents one of the few surviving images in India of a Tantric Śākta god and goddess in yāmala. As Jim Mallinson is in the process of documenting, the figure on the bottom is one of a series of identifiable Nātha yogins, who seem to appear as labelled images for the first time in the historical record at Dabhoi.

Dabhoi, Gujarat. Close up of the goddess Piṅgalā on the Dabhoi gate.

The figure on the top represents one of the few surviving images in India of a Tantric Śākta god and goddess in yāmala. As Jim Mallinson is in the process of documenting, the figure on the bottom is one of a series of identifiable Nātha yogins, who seem to appear as labelled images for the first time in the historical record at Dabhoi.

[[P785]]

Dabhoi, Gujarat. Close up of the goddess Piṅgalā on the Dabhoi gate.

Long before the term referred to the leftmost channel in the subtle body, as the sixth-century treatise of Varāhamihira informs us, the lexeme Piṅgalā designated a nocturnal bird, resembling some sort of crane but of a species yet to be determined. Possibly, it is some sort of nocturnal parrot. The defining feature of the animals was its terrible piercing cry, and it was typically grouped alongside the jackal and the owl as a harbinger of bad omens.

In the virutādhyāyaḥ of the Bṛhatsaṃhitā, Varāhamihira discusses the creature in the section on augury.¹¹⁷ There, before we learn how to make decisions under the direction of a monitor [[P786]] lizard, we are told that a person who has bathed either in the evening or at midnight who wishes to know his fortune should go at midnight to the tree where the piṅgalā bird has perched. Worshipping the tree with new cloth and sandalwood paste, without naming the usual gods, the practitioner is supposed to address the tree and the bird in which it resides with the following mantra: “O bestower of good fortune, I entreat you to divine my thoughts, for you are praised as knowing all languages. . . . O bestower of good fortune, I call upon you to indicate the signs concerning the success or failure of the matter under consideration.”¹¹⁸ At this point, the petitioner is to insist that he will keep the night vigil with the bird and only leave in the morning when it has answered in his inquiry. The piṅgalā bird provides guidance through the texture of its cries and its movements in the tree. If the bird says “ciril-viril,” or just stays silent all evening, this is a sign that the endeavor will succeed, while if it says “dis” or “kuca-kuca,” this a sign that there will be much mental suffering. Alternatively, one can also determine the probability that the intended activity will be a failure, a partial, or a complete success based on where the bird choses to perch in the tree. If it remains on the top, things are looking up. If it resides in the middle, the prognosis is middling. If it descends to the bottom, one should change one’s course or prepare for total failure.

’rthasiddhiḥ / atyākulatvaṃ diśikāraśabde kucākucety evam udāhṛte vā // avāk pradāne ’pi hitārthasiddhiḥ pūrvouktadikcakraphalair ato ‘nyat / vācyaṃ phalaṃ cottamamadhyanīcaśākhāsthitāyāṃ varamadhyanīcam //

[[P787]] In relating this archaic passage to the matters with which we are most concerned, we would do well to attend to a keen observation offered by David White towards the very end of Kiss of the Yoginī: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Context. The passage is worth quoting in full.

The flight of the Yoginī—or at least the airborne (khecara) division of Yoginīs—is altogether natural once one recalls the origins of their cults. Like a great number of female deities (or demonesses) before them, the Yoginīs were often identified in mythology, sculpture, and ritual as winged figures, or indeed as birds. These are in fact the living creatures most frequently encountered at their favorite terrestrial haunt, the cremation ground, where human “witches,” jackals (śivās), and carrion-eating birds are all identified as Yoginīs, whence their description, in the twelfth-century Dvāśraya, as “the filthy birds of night.” It is altogether natural, then, that so many of the medieval Yoginī images portray them as zoocephalic or avicephalic figures, possessed of human bodies and limbs, but the heads of animals or birds. Like their Kushan-era forerunners, the Yoginīs are quite frequently portrayed as bird-headed in temple sculptures from ninth- to tenth century Madhya Pradesh: these include the Yoginī Piṅgalā at the Bherghat Yoginī temple, Jabalpuri; Jaūti, from Rewa, now housed in the Dhubela Archaeological Museum, Dhubela; and the Yoginī Umā from the Naresar Yoginī temple, now housed in the Gwalior Archaeological Museum.¹¹⁹

[[P788]] The passages we have just been exploring not only provides powerful confirmation of White’s hypothesis that the figure of the yoginī itself in many cases descends directly from birds, but points to the tantalizing possibility that key conceptual associations and elements of the medieval rituals associated with their invocation and appeasement also have a genetic connection to pre-Tantric traditions of ritual augury involving interaction with actual birds. Despite the fact that he even mentions in passing the goddess Piṅgalā in her Madhyadeśī incarnation at the very end of this passage, perhaps because his rhetorical focus is on the facet of the worship of yoginīs associated with their role as procurers and consumers of transgressive substances, White does not seem to have noticed this discussion in Varāhamihira. Clearly however, in the sixth century, Varāhamihira is already aware of a form of ritual performed starting at midnight that is marked as conceptually distinct from normal religion. It involves seeking esoteric knowledge, in the sense that it is non-public and extra sensory, from a special kind of being. The being in question is viewed as bearing vidyā and knowing all languages, one of the less sanguinary aspects of later traditions of yoginī worship. Much as in many Tantric yogas, the success or failure of the practice is even marked by the hearing the right kind of special sound at the completion of the ritual. Indeed, practically the only thing that marks this proto-sādhanā as distinct from the sort of rites we find in the later Śākta Tantras is that there are not any specific preparatory practices outlined, we are not yet in the cremation ground, and that the creature whose favor is being beseeched is an actual bird.

It is perhaps possible that further studies, especially of unpublished corpuses, will enable a more meticulous documentation of this progression from bird to yoginī, but regardless, by the time the forty-fourth chapter of the Picumata Brahmayāmala is composed, perhaps in the middle or late seventh century, the lines between these categories have become quite blurred.¹²⁰ For here we find enjoined that the mantrin is to worship the yoginīs, commencing with entity called pūtanā, in a cremation ground or by an ant hill. As the Piṅgalāmata itself makes plain, this mantrin is in fact the direct antecedent of our own ācārya, the very class of person responsible for teaching our text, a task that, as we have seen, begins with a cursory pūjā dedicated to Bhairava or the yoginīs. Before commencing his worship, in contrast, the Picumata tells us the mantrin is to bow to the owl, to the piṅgalā, and likewise to all the other creatures that go about in the night. Because of the manner in which the text is written, perhaps rather intentionally, it does not make clear whether we are talking about supernatural yoginīs or animals that are revered as signifying their possible presence.

[[P789]] As we have seen in the first division of the present chapter, our Piṅgalāmata describes itself as the falling within the scope of the tradition of the Brahmayāmala and deriving its authority from the canon of the Jayadrathayāmala, and thus is quite self-conscious of at least certain aspects of the sort of genealogies we are in the process of reconstructing. As with most Tantras, the work takes the form of a dialogue. Here, it is the goddess Piṅgalā, standing in for the novice artisan, who asks most of the questions. Her lover Bhairava, occasionally identified as Śrīkaṇṭhanātha, offers the instructions. Indeed, as the meta-analysis in the first chapter of Tantric textuality makes plain, the goddess Piṅgalā can be called the nimitta or the facilitating cause of the revelation of the Tantra precisely because she asks all the questions. In turn, the God is deemed the agent because he provides the answers that contain the technical and doctrinal materials that must be imparted to the students. In fact, the second chapter of the Piṅgalāmata presents a tableau that informs the reader that the context in which the whole of its discourse is taking place is somewhere quite like the cremation grounds.

The great yoga (mahāyoga) [the yāmala of Śiva and Śakti] is encircled by the great mothers. It is established on the periphery of the womb of Mahāmāya. It is the state that confers great delight.

Accompanied by vetālas, with ear ornaments, having legs as long as palm trees, by dwarves, by nāyakas, by siddha yogins, and other ones such as [the sage] Bhṛṅgi and [the demon] Dāruka, Bhairava, the god of the gods, Lord of the mad, dances, praised by the sound of cries of victory and music, and prose and poetry of countless sorts.¹²¹

Having seen him, the pleased lord, [the goddess] Piṅgalā, following the injunction, spoke the text to everyone assembled. Piṅgalā said:

O Lord of the Sādhakas! To those who have taken refuge with the religious signifier that brings accomplishment, the focus of study and the definition, which have the form of the standard and the measurement, were previously imparted.

O lord, I do not know what the liṅga is and what sort of folks know about that sort of thing. Who is the guru? Who are the śilpins? Who is the agent, and what it is the activity that must be done?¹²²

[[P790]] As we can see, when the work begins, we are in middle of a raucous celebration involving a motley crew of denizens of the cremation grounds, presented perhaps quite intentionally at a range of scales, from towering vetālas to dwarves. All of these beings are dancing, to the accompaniment of celebratory ejaculations and music and literary performances. A range of suggestive language, from the invocation of the womb of mahāmāyā and the practice of Mahāyoga, hints that another sort of ejaculation may have just taken place as the god and the goddess finish their love-making that confers the state of great delight. Thus, perhaps post-coitus, everyone settles down and the goddess Piṅgalā begins to address the assembled throng.¹²³

[[P791]] All at once, we descend from the rarefied rhetorical heights of orgiastic union to an extremely mundane—even rudimentary register—reminiscent of preprofessional training. Standing in for the new convert to the traditions of the artisans, the goddess Piṅgalā begins asking extremely basic questions. What is a liṅga? Who knows about such things? What is the guru? Who is an artisan and, most fundamentally, how do we do our jobs? At the heart of this discipline, the text informs us again and again, is the “standard and measures” (pramāṇa and māna) imparted to the just inducted artisan. Bhairava, we are told is not merely mad (unmatta), but he is mad for measure (māna), and so too must be his acolytes. In its three and half thousand verses, the recension of the Piṅgalāmata available to us, which is the one associated with Kāmarūpa as opposed to Uḍḍiyāna, sets out to transmit this highly esoteric knowledge, comprised in a good part of portions of different types of parts of buildings and images, first to the assembled throng of supernatural beings and then by extension to their human analogs among the śivabhaktas.

[[P792]] Dabhoi gate: Here, perhaps for the only times in surviving corpus from India, Bhairava and the goddess are depicted in yāmala in the style of the Tibetan yab-yum. One of several images from the top of the interior arches.

[[P793]] In contrast to the vast majority of the work, which seems at least to the modern scholar not versed in the genre thoroughly disorganized, the first chapter aims at a synthetic conceptualization of the relationship between part and whole so sophisticated that it is perhaps indicative of originating as an interpolation. Resuming where we had left off before, having just completed its analysis of how the form of the text relates to its function in the terms of the standard category, the Piṅgalāmata now introduces its own unique theory of exegesis: the discipline-specific connection (abhisambandha).

At the beginning, the abhisambandha is to be spoken. And it is said to be threefold. 1) So, there is the thing to be descended and the descent, and the relationship between those two. 2) There is the thing to be suggested, the suggester, and the relationship between those two. 3) There is the thing to be revealed, the revealer, and the connection. Among those, the ācārya and the śāstra, the thing to be descended is the śāstra and the agent of its descending is the ācārya.

Now the definition of the relationship between the thing to be suggested and the suggesting agent is stated. That which is defined by defining a thing is the thing that causes it to manifest.

The definition of the thing to be described is the suggester. The definition of the revealer and thing to be revealed is stated. The meaning of the word is the thing to be illuminated and the word denotating that meaning is the illuminator.¹²⁴

[[P794]] Much as if one were to jump into the middle of a major treatise on post-structuralism without any knowledge of who even Lévi-Strauss might have been, though a passage such as this is clearly the product of sophisticated thinking that is appropriating and reimagining śāstric scholastic categories in subversive ways to new ends, it is often rather difficult to figure what these folks are talking about. What seems to be at stake here is a certain kind of phenomenology, a notion of authorship, and associated theory of language. When the ācārya speaks, he does not make up his discourse, but in so much as he transmits the Tantra, he is but the agent of its descent and incarnation upon the earth. In a similar manner—a vital ontic process seems to be implicit in the very act of giving a definition, such that when we define a thing, it is not a mere intellectual exercise. Actually, through delineating its defining features, the thing as such becomes manifest. Finally, our text seems to conceive the relationship between word and meaning, if not as wholly constructed, as by no means cognitively transparent. Shoving aside a whole bunch of linguistic philosophy, words apparently appear first as lexemes, whose true nature is revealed through the process of recovering its specific denotative significance.

That we are almost thoroughly left adrift at sea by this (depending on your perspective) all too brief or interminable outbreak of critical philosophizing is hardly surprising. As the text now proceeds to make plain, drawing upon the same passages we explored in earlier in our doxographical reflections, the sources available to the scholarly community currently engaged in the academic study of the Śākta Tantras represent but an infinitesimal drop of dew in comparison to the vast ocean of textuality to which, our text presumes, its intended audience would have had some access.

Now this part, falling within the Brahmayāmala, derived from Durvāsa is Paicika [that which is from the Picumata]. It is of the doctrine of the Sārasvatas and it is proclaimed as Jayadratha’s fifth howling [pheṭkāra]. The Brahmayāmala, comprised of [the pantheon of] Raktā and so forth and [the pantheon of the] lustful dog faced one and so forth [Lampaṭā] is divided sevenfold.

Which is it among the middle of these seven divisions of the Brahmayāmala?

This is the Jayadratha; the Jayadratha for its part is a sevenfold sūtra. . . . The Sūtra, the Uttarasūtra and the Śaktisūtra, the one known of as Kriyā, the one called stainless, the gnosis and the Sarvasandoha is the seventh. Which is it in the middle of these classes of the seven types of sūtras? That is the Kriyāsūtra. The Kriyāsūtra also is [[P795]] fivefold: the divisions are arcanā, rakṣa, mantra, dhyāna, and kalpārtha. Kriyā is held to be a fivefold process, conjoined with the practice of craft. Which of these is it among the five sorts of Kriyasūtras? It is the sūtra conjoined with the purpose of crafting things.¹²⁵

[[P795]] Proceeding down the scale of texts, the Piṅgalāmata now proceeds to specify that it emerges from the stream associated with the Jayadrathayāmala. In contradistinction to the unrelated organizational schema presented in the Śiraśccheda division of that massive work, our scripture further subdivides the Jayadratha’s corpus into seven sūtras, linking itself to a sūtra on kriyā, which in turn is said to encompass five additional sub-divisions. Only that last of these is dedicated to the procedures for fashioning (kalpārtha). Having presented this exhaustive survey of the literature, the Piṅgalāmata regains its train of thought, and introduces its intended audience the qualifications for the study or the text and the purpose it serves.

Otherwise, purified by mantradīkṣā, he is endowed with the state of his own eligibility. Having done the taking refuge of the liṅga, the mantrin knows the liṅga with its characteristics. The liṅga too is a mantra, since by resorting to a liṅga, a multitude [of beings] were able to obtain the state of being gods.¹²⁶

[[P796]] Now that we know what we are studying and why, the text resumes exposition of the learning process, offering what is one of the few surviving discussions in a revealed scripture of the pedagogy involved in both the learning and the teaching of the Tantras.¹²⁷ We begin once again with some helpful guidelines directed at the ācārya in training, followed by an explanation of appropriate classroom behavior.

[[P796]]

When the connection in the manner just seen [is presented], then after that, there is the commentary by [commenting on] the words and so forth. [The style of exposition] it is of three types, six types, two, or thirty. Or, in whatever way it seems will awaken the listener, in that way, one should start the exposition. [The discourse should be conducted] with repetitions, with lines made of chalk or the like [drawing a diagram], or through the telling of stories.

The student, having faced the same way, venerates the guru, āgama and gods. Having gone onto the ground, he bows again and again on his knees. After that, with his mind singularly intent on Śiva, he is to listen to the discourse in sequence [line by line]. When a doubt arises, one should ask a question and should say what he understands.

He should not disrupt the talk, nor should he formulate a cogent argument that is fabricated by his intellect. He should act, O goddess of gods, in accordance with his teacher. If he is not in accordance with the ācārya’s position, there is a great fault, even if he has a greater intellect. When [the talk] is finished, then worship is to be done like previously in sequence.¹²⁸

[[P797]] While the educator is granted considerable freedom to use a range of skillful means to ensure that the message and content of the scripture he is teaching, and not just the rote letter of the text, is transmitted to his students, the same is not true for his disciples. In a world where to be a student is to be adhīna, under the dominion of one’s teacher, there is little space for progressive approaches to education, and cleverness and innovation are not really rewarded, at least within the confines of the classroom. It is only when the teaching session has ended, in the context of continued self-study and assimilation, that not only diligence but versatility is encouraged on the part of students and accommodations are made for different ability levels.

Having dismissed the yogapīṭha, having performed the removal of the nirmālya and so forth, one should make the teacher such that one has rested the head at the limit of his [[P798]] feet. Having performed the greeting and the pūjā, one should cause to guru to be forgiving. The invitation and the departure are to be performed with the Bhairava nectar and so forth. Having eaten that, along with the caruka, if he should be become full (sambhṛtaḥ), at the time when the edibles come forth, various types of cooked and boiled things, the listeners should give tāmbūla and karpūra and so forth. The clothes, the gold, gems and everything that they have on hand at the time of the exposition, all that is obtained by the guru, or in accordance with what he approves. . . .

[After the lecture, depending on the time of the day,] he either should rest, or he can listen, if the guru provides an occasion. Or he could meditate according to his own ability, or, if he is stupid, he can recite. [If a pause in the lecture happens,] having known his own cognitive abilities, he should undertake one of those activities. This is the way one should study the Āgama, right up to the end. . . .

[Regarding the copying of the text, the guru] should write or have someone write on the full moon or certain days: the first, fourth, ninth or fourteenth day. [On other occasions,] he should recite Purāṇa or Dharmaśāstra or the Śāntyadhyāya [of the Śivadharma]. Otherwise, [on all other occasions] as a habitual duty, one should practice craft (śilpa) and the auspicious fashioning of lines.¹²⁹

[[P798]] If the Śivadharmavivaraṇa we have explored in chapter 3 plausibly presents itself as an approximation of the sort of discourse one of these ācāryas would be likely to have given when speaking on the Dharmaśāstra, assuming he proceeded by commenting directly upon the text as opposed to telling stories, the chapter on image construction in the Piṅgalāmata’s iconography chapter offers us a tantalizing taste of how Purāṇic knowledge was received within Śākta communities and then transmitted among the artisanal and working classes. Such Purāṇic narrative extracts are included in the context of discussions of the crafting of images of these deities in a range of media, and are thus specifically directed at artisans. One such long discussion, for instance, is a long delineation of the iconography of the ten avatāras of Viṣṇu. This particular extract is fascinating in that it unsettles our assumptions about how thoroughly [[P799]] the “universal” cultural permeation of Purāṇic narrative as universal hegemonic “Brāhmaṇical” knowledge might have been integrated into artisan communities.¹³⁰

[[P799]] For instance, the goddess Piṅgalā—breaking a litany of dhyānas designed to aid in the crafting of images of various different deities, supernatural beings, and narrative scenes, standing in as she so often does for the novice artisan just beginning to wrap his mind around the technical dimensions inherent in his professional responsibilities—suddenly turns to Bhairava and makes a simple request. Admitting she does not know much of anything about Vaiṣṇava tradition, she asks her lord to offer a crash course in its mythology. “Piṅgalā said: For what purpose is Viṣṇu tenfold, and tell me how [the incarnations] are ranked?”¹³¹ In response, Bhairava presents us with a rambling series of shaggy dog stories that offer rather unexpected insights into the medieval sociology of knowledge. Here, for example is how our text represents Viṣṇu when he incarnates as the last two avatāras: the Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama and Kalkī, as well as the mysterious figure of Mādhava.

[[P800]]

The Buddha is to be made seated in a lotus posture, in a samādhi posture such that his hands stretch downward. He has long ears. He is peaceful. He has a loin cloth and wears the robe of a Buddhist monk. His heart is joined with a gem, and his eyes are absorbed in [the tip of] his nose. His hand and his feet are marked with lotuses and his face has the glimmer of a smile. His true nature (svarūpa) is the essence of consciousness (citsvabhāva). His mind is singularly fixed on compassion. His face is very beautiful. He resembles a fresh blooming lotus.

Kalkī has a ferocious nature, of the sort that is evident in the body of a foreigner. He has a quiver yoked on his back and in his hand is a bow with arrows. Mādhava has the form of a Brāhmaṇa because he is born from a Brāhmaṇa family. One should fashion supreme Viṣṇu on top of his head and he should be made having a peaceful form.¹³²

[[P801]] Typically, of course, the Vaiṣṇava treatment of the Buddha entails recasting him as duplicitous figure who comes down into the world to delude men with false teachings, whereas our text proposes a thoroughly positive vision of the Buddha. But perhaps even more strikingly, the theology this extract invokes is decidedly eccentric. Outside of the “other-emptiness” discourse of the thirteenth century Tibetan polymath Dölpopa Shérap Gyeltsen, Buddhists simply do not talk about the Buddha as having an essential nature (svarūpa) let alone being made of consciousness (citsvabhāva) in a manner that is conceptually commensurate with Śākta Śaiva non-dual theology. If the Buddha is at once reimagined as benign and Bhairava Siddhānta curious, Kalkī, who is supposed to come at end the age, retains his martial nature but loses his horse and his iconic sword. In each of these cases, even just in articulating how to craft these figures, something essential about their nature and purpose has been misconstrued. As for the insertion of Mādhava, born in a Brāhmaṇa body, a detail usually assigned to Kalkī, at the very end of the list, one would almost be inclined to think that something has gone wrong with the textual transmission. The passages that follow, however, demonstrate clearly that the problem here is not primarily philological in nature.

Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Rudra are the three gods. The Lord having resorted to Meru, they abide there, at the end of cosmic egg. On the part of both of them, Īśvara is their maker. But, for the sake of establishing the age, Brahmā indeed is the lord of the terrestrial world. Viṣṇu is the protector of the world.

When [the world] was submerged all about in a single terrible ocean, then, having taken on the form of a fish for the sake of play, he went there, for, the great sage Mārkaṇḍa had fallen in—within the oscillating play of the waves [where] there was no refuge.

The two of their gazes came together and they had mutual knowledge of each other. Then, for the sake of the earth, the great god was spoken to by Mārkaṇḍa. He was then informed that Viṣṇu had come in the form of a turtle. Quickly the turtle descended to where the earth itself was. Having abandoned her own form, the Earth, along with Śrī, took on the form of a woman. They went to where the overlord of the Kusmāṇḍas was established along with the instruments of the sacrifice. Having seen them, then the turtle assumed the form of Vārāha. . . . Then, the goddess Śriyā became thrilled and became established on his chest. Then, the earth bowed down to the feet and took refuge. . . . Having made the seven continents, the oceans with mountains, forests, and groves and Meru and the pole star, the worlds were established [by you] in a differentiated way. . . . In the beginning of the kṛta age, at the juncture of the age, on the surface of the earth along with the lord, the king was Hiraṇyakaśipu, the great demon. Having seen he was not killable, he [Viṣṇu] created a lion form. And his grandson was named Bali who was a renunciate who was skilled in dharma. For the sake of binding him, Viṣṇu assumed the state of being a dwarf.¹³³

[[P803]] It is difficult to decide what dimension of this discussion is more surprising. Is it that it provides inconvertible evidence that, as late as the eighth-ninth century, artisan communities would otherwise have so little exposure to the systems of meaning that lie behind a good portion of the images that they sculpt that it was decided that the relevant materials needed to be integrated into the curriculum? Or, is it more fitting that we are taken aback by the subpar quality of the lesson that ensues, which conveys in no uncertain terms that this interpretative community was as thoroughly confused about “Hindu” mythology as any early modern Jesuit? Bhairava may be the mad lord of the universe, but, if this small sampling is any indication, he is an abysmal storyteller. Not only is he thoroughly ignorant of the material, but more fundamentally, he is at an utter loss at handling such basic dimensions of a narrative as emphasizing plot points, presenting a beginning, middle, and end, and generally, avoiding the sloppy omission of key details. A single example, focusing mostly on how badly Bhairava bungles his presentation of the iconic narrative of Viṣṇu as the man lion, will prove most instructive.

In the passage we have been exploring, Bhairava has just finished relating the end of the story of the churning of the ocean and emergence of the goddess Śrī. While, in typical Purāṇic mythology, Śrī emerges along with the kālakūṭa poison, the nectar of immortality, and an indeterminate number of magical animals, when the ocean is being churned, a process that requires the support of the turtle avatāra, here we find she is just there, floating under the ocean. When Viṣṇu sees fortune floating there in human form, our protagonist behaves like any red-blooded male: he turns into a pig. Śrī is absorbed into his chest, and then, the boar incarnation creates the continents and gives shape to the present arrangement of our material world. An indeterminate amount of time passes. Next thing we know, post-boar installation, the demon Hiraṇyakaśipu has conquered the newly emergent earth.

[[P804]] Though you would know nothing of this from our text, in virtually every other version of the story this savvy demon operator performed tremendous austerities with such single minded and ferocious focus that the force of his tapas threatened to incinerate the earth. To prevent this from happening, Brahmā descends and offers the demon a boon, in response to which Hiraṇyakaśipu wishes that he may not be killed—or so the simple version of the tale usually goes: “by neither man nor beast, at day or night, neither inside the house nor outside the house, nor upon the earth or in the sky.” Thinking himself invincible, Hiraṇyakaśipu conquers the earth, and so the gods beseech Viṣṇu to descend from the heavens and rescue them. Instead of intervening directly, however, Viṣṇu first arranges things so that Hiraṇyakaśipu sires a son, Prahlāda, who is a staunch adherent believer in the worship of Viṣṇu. Depending on just how pointedly an effusive bhakti theology is a part of the tradition doing the telling, for, as we will see in chapter 9 in some early Vaiṣṇava sources Hiraṇyakaśipu’s son is depicted not as an open-hearted devotee but rather as the meticulous executor of the ritual injunctions that Viṣṇu teaches, Hiraṇyakaśipu responds to having such a traitor in his family with varying degrees of violence and rage. The basic denouement of the story, however, is both consistent and exceptionally memorable. When Hiraṇyakaśipu reviles Viṣṇu at twilight, a terrible creature that is half man and half lion emerges from a pillar in his palace. Snatching up the demon in its paws, it carries him to the threshold of the palace. Placing the demon on its lap, it proceeds to eviscerate him. And so Hiraṇyakaśipu—who thought himself unkillable—is slain by something that is neither man nor beast, neither inside the house or outside of the house, at the juncture between day and night, while raised up in the air so he touches neither the earth nor the sky. Succinctly, the whole point of the story of the man-lion (Nṛsiṃha) incarnation is precisely the clever loophole through which god subverts our expectations and saves the world.

In the Piṅgalāmata, not only is the audience provided none of this essential context for making sense of the story, but Bhairava blows the punch line. In this story, Viṣṇu notices that Hiraṇyakaśipu, the great demon (mahāsura) is unkillable (avadhyaka) and in response he emanates (sṛṣṭavān) in the form not of a man-lion, but just a plain old lion (siṃharūpa). The story then ends abruptly, as we are told that Hiraṇyakaśipu’s grandson was named Bali. Nothing else happens. In isolation, the story does not just violate the logic of the source material, but it presents no systematicities of its own, just a stray collection of observations bearing no obvious logical connection even to each other, What happens to the unkillable demon? Since the next detail on offer is about his grandson, presumably—he lives a long and happy life? Furthermore, why exactly did Viṣṇu become a lion? What did he do as a lion? Did demon and lion ever even interact? Why, quite frankly, was this story even told in the first place?

[[P804]] To be fair to Bhairava, elsewhere in the same chapter, in the context of the Piṅgalāmata’s presentation of Nṛsiṃha’s iconography, it is made evident that he has in his possession additional information about how the tale ends. Thus, the text prepares the sculptor for the task of making mūrtis of Narasiṃha, in the following manner:

His whole body has the form of Bhairava. It should be fashioned as if it were well fed. His two hands are round and bear a club and a cakra. Hiraṇyakaśipu is on his chest and he is being eviscerated by the two nails. A stream of blood flows to the ground and the cages that are his arms hang down. His hands like knives hang down, in a similar manner, with the head [of the asura] hanging at his foot; at his knees there are demons as if dead. He is called Narasiṃha.¹³⁴

[[P805]] What Bhairava is lacking is not information, then, but knowledge. It seems he, or at least the interpretive community to which he has transmitted his text, have no means of accessing an “insider’s” perspective about what we imagine to represent the standard “Hindu” mythological currents that are seen as forming a cultural lingua franca. For this reason, they lack the tools to differentiate between what “matters” in the realm of Purāṇic thought and what are merely incidental surface features in the stories. In light of the terms of Hiraṇyakaśipu’s boon being that he cannot be slain by man nor beast, emplotting a version of the Narasiṃha myth in which god descends in the form of a lion—a beast if ever there was one—offers a clear demonstration that our text does not know what this story is “about.” That, with the exception of the accounts of Rāma of the Rāghavas and Rāma of the axe, all the rest of these stories display not the slightest awareness that it is the conquest of the world by otherwise unstoppable demons or other evil forces that typically serves as the catalyst for Viṣṇu’s descent into the world and that this incarnation process entails the slaying of said demons—a system of values already evident in the third to fourth century CE Harivaṃśa—makes it plain that our artisans and their gurus do not have even a cursory grasp of a typical Vaiṣṇava worldview.

To be crystal clear, it is not that we are taking Bhairava to task for not knowing the “right” versions of what we now think of as canonical myths, for, of course, the transmutation of mythological narrative into a myriad of permutations is as integral a feature of “Hindu” mythology as the cherished stories themselves. To draw out just a few examples, the Vāyu Purāṇa, one of the oldest of our sources and an emphatically Śaiva one at that, treats Viṣṇu as Śiva’s errand boy, offers no canon of incarnations, and only invests itself in retelling the stories of how the boar rescued the world, on the one hand, and how Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva descended to end the line of the Vṛṣṇīs on the other. As spoken by the fish to Manu, the initial most pressing matter for the Matsya Purāṇa is to explain, in sequence, how Bhāgavan Viṣṇu assumed the form of a fish, and why did the bull bannered lord take on the guise of a skull carrier?¹³⁵ If, to banalize Lévi-Strauss, “myths are good to think with,” the Piṅgalāmata transgresses not in failing to get these stories “correct” but because it does almost nothing of substance with them. It does not even attempt a radical reinvention of the materials to reconcile them with its own expressed values. Instead, poor Piṅgalā’s sincere simple question is answered with a presentation of scattered and shattered second-hand impressions of other people’s stories.

[[P806]] What does this tell us about the nature of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge in medieval India? We have just examined in some detail two case studies—drawn from the exact same text—that discuss how the ācārya is to teach his community. In the first account, the Bhairavācārya is introduced as a person of great erudition who has digested an enormous canon of textual resources, most of which are no longer available to us, which he then skillfully transmits to his community using a variety of teaching strategies. As we have seen, what the text prescribes is not a rote transmission through memorization, but rather a mode of teaching that begins by imparting to the students a meta-reflexivity about how texts work that is offered, at least to the most promising pupils, as tools for thinking with. These emic hermeneutics not only incorporate scholastic concepts, such as the anubandhacatuṣṭaya, that are mainstays of high Sanskrit learning, but through appropriating and reinventing technical terms of art like vyañjana and vyañjaka. Notwithstanding that our text is written in an abominably nonstandard Sanskrit, it displays the type of significant conversance in scholastic modes of reading and reasoning that would be necessary for coherent innovative adaptation. The Piṅgalāmata, in other words, envisions the ācārya who will teach it to be the sort of the person who, when confronted with the passing allusion in its opening verses to one of the speakers of the text being the one who made well-known the definitions of the meters (chandālakṣaṇa), will recognize the subtle play on words being suggested between the bird-headed Piṅgalā of the cremation grounds and Piṅgala, the founding father of the tradition of Sanskrit metrics (chandaḥśāstra), offering perhaps in response an amused chuckle. In other words, these are hardly ignorant people. How is it, then, that they seem utterly at sea when confronted by some simple stories, of the sort that would prominently feature in most introductions to Indian religions addressed to the vaguely curious undergraduate?

[[P807]] Perhaps the most compelling explanation is not only that such stories do not yet form a part of the canon of common knowledge across the lines of geography, religious commitment, varṇa, and caste, but more fundamentally, they are not even possible objects of knowledge. A Bhairavācārya may well have been learned in “secular” śāstra and intellectually and professionally ambitious, but it is not like he could just go a bookstore and purchase a collection of Purāṇas in manuscript. Just as we saw in regard to the Bhairavāgama, where, before anything at all could be taught, the makeup of the audience had to be scrutinized in order to determine that everyone had adhikāra, for if they did, not the lesson would be cancelled, the imparting of Vaiṣṇava Purāṇa would have been mediated through particular bodies embedded in specific social settings. As the Viṣṇudharma, the Śivadharmaśāstra’s perhaps slightly younger twin, would have it, socialization into its codes of conducts was predicated not on bhakti but adopting and maintaining śuddha social and dietary habits, including observing caste norms. As we saw in chapter 3, commensality among those who belong to the jāti of Bhairava is defined by the sharing the vīradravya, which contains, at the very least, animal meat, liquor, and fish. The two modes of commensality thus represent intrinsically non-overlapping magesteria. As we will see, down into the early thirteenth century, śilpins and ācāryas hailing from the Bhairava Siddhānta are frequently contracted to build the temples, maṭhas, palaces, and residences occupied by Vaiṣṇavas—even Śrīvaiṣṇavas, a detail which explains the otherwise peculiar recurrence of the sixty-four Bhairavas and, surreptitiously, their yoginīs, even at the Hoysala temple at Belur. In other words, quotidian professional exchanges between communities are part and parcel of the social order. The exchange of community-specific knowledge, on the other hand, appears to be verboten. One might indeed say that the worldview of our artisans and that of other communities shared little common ground—for not only metaphorically, but quite literally, these people inhabited different worlds.

Charity Starts at Homa: Radical Nondualism, Philanthropy, and the Making of a Śākta World

Jan Brouwer’s Makers of the World: Caste, Craft and Mind of South Indian Artisans is not only unquestionably the single most important work yet written on the artisan castes of the Deccan, in all likelihood it will remain in perpetuity the definitive work on the subject.¹³⁶ Brouwer’s work is the product of three years of intensive fieldwork—during which its author crossed the length and breadth of Karnataka on his trusty motorcycle—complemented by the study of rare and unpublished Kannada language sources as well as its author’s considerable command over the technicalities of design and engineering that inform the actual process of artisanal craft. In part, the indispensable nature of this remarkable but neglected work of scholarship stems from the fact that in the time that has passed since its composition, the life-worlds of the various communities of Karnataka’s otherwise unstudied artisan castes have largely been absorbed into a more general milieu of middle class twenty-first-century Hindu identity, and within a generation, most of the knowledge Brouwer’s text preserves may well have vanished on the ground. At the same time, however, Makers of the World is also the rare work of anthropology that reads out from its archive observations and hypothesis about the values and historical circumstances that form the conditions of possibility for what it has found in situ, highlighting key elements and proposing hypotheses that are then subsequently confirmed by the discovery of unpublished sources of which it could not possibly be aware. In [[P809]] short, though very much a work of structural anthropology of the sort that prevailed in the 1980s, it is a careful and exemplary piece of scholarship.

[[P809]] In its ninth chapter, “The Magnetic fort,” Brouwer documents and analyzes an “oral tradition of the Visvakarmas. . . distinguished by the fact that it is known to their bards as well as laymen”¹³⁷ that exists in many iterations among all of the different subcastes. Among these discrepancies, however, the tale sets out to convey a unified message, for it speaks of a golden age where the Viśvakarmans lived in “a well-protected place” in “a fort” which they built themselves. In the version told by the Konnurpanta sub-caste, for example:

There were automatic gates to the fort, which opened at sunrise and closed at sunset. All the Visvakarmas in the fort were very religious and lived a pure life. It was a happy kingdom of only Visvakarmas. These were a devoted people who began their work only after their morning prayer and meditation. These prosperous Visvakarmas were engaged in five crafts: blacksmithy, carpentry, coppersmithy, sculpture, and goldsmithy. In the daytime, when the gates were open, they went out to deliver their products and returned before sunset. Nobody else was allowed inside the fort. The Visvakarmans had not only a great scientific, but also religious knowledge. . . . Thus they enjoyed high esteem.¹³⁸

[[P809]] In his analysis of the many related variants on this story, whose telling and tragic denouement we will return to as the chapter comes to a close, Brouwer draws out a number of themes that will prove prescient for our analysis.

Thus, all the Visvakarmas lived inside the well-protected fort, isolated from the world. With their Vedic [sic] knowledge, they were engaged in prayer and meditation. They had thus more or less renounced the world. Their independence of the world can also be deduced from the statement that the fort was a ‘happy kingdom. . .’ By placing themselves inside the fort, the Visvakarmas withdrew from the world ‘of rights and shares.’ This, and the emphasis on learning and teaching the Vedas, strengthen their claim to the Brahman status. . . .

At the beginning of the story, we are informed that the delivery of the products took place in the daytime. This suggests they were manufactured at night behind the closed doors of the fort. This secrecy could have a deeper meaning, as it is a form of isolation and perhaps served the purpose of isolating the source of magic. In fact, the secrecy and the manufacturing process are clearly linked here. From interviews with smiths, I learnt that the smelting of iron-ore took place formerly at night. . . . In the blacksmiths’ view, the furnace [in which this smelting takes place] is a manifestation of the goddess Kali. The goldsmiths even call the furnace the womb of Kali. . . .

The story outlines the elements of the ideal state in which the Visvakarmas were at once the kings (‘kingdom of only Visvakarmas’) and the Brahmans. . . while the fortress itself indicates a manifestation of the goddess.¹³⁹

[[P810]] As close reading of the chapters of the Piṅgalāmata on the construction of cities and the designing of houses will soon make plain, the Viśvakarman mythology documented by Brouwer seems to preserve a rather acute historical memory pertaining to the actual social circumstances of the Deccan’s artisan communities during the early medieval period. The secondary literature on Śilpaśāstra has typically taken the terse lack of specificity about the real-world application pratiṣṭhā discourse, obsessively devoted to context-free systems of measurements, as evidence that this is simply an imagined scholastic exercise only tangentially connected to lived artisanal realities. For this reason, it is essential to note that the Piṅgalāmata overflows with hyper-particularized detail for adapting its structures to align with a variety of real-world situations as well as extensive considerations of the phenomenological experiences of different social agents of participating in the social functions that coincide with acts of installation. Succinctly, the Piṅgalāmata makes vividly present for us how at places like Ramling Mudgal, entire communities of pañcakārukas came of age and carried out their craft in their own separate cities, living out their lives under the direction of their Śākta caste gurus and interacting with other social communities only in the context of receiving or delivering commissions. As the Piṅgalāmata states:

I will explain the city of the cumbakas¹⁴⁰, which should be made in the same manner as for a king, O Surasundarī, and the measurement and the floor plan of a palace. It should be known that in the same way you make the walls for a prākāra, you should fashion walls for a city (pura). . . . And again, just like that, there is the fashioning of a whole lot of wall all around it. . . .

This is called the city of Śiva. It adheres to the conventions of the nandikāvarta [template]. O one with a beautiful lap, it belongs to the cumbaka and the ones seeking bhoga and mokṣa. It is auspicious and has a radiant state. It is eternal, delights the mind, and is auspicious. It is a permanent establishment that is completely equipped with all resources, of which particular procedures are enjoined [to be carried out according to its bylaws]. It is the city of Śiva, without fault, proceeded from the guru. . . .

A discerning person does this [establishes a śivapura] according to his wealth and according to the conventions of time and place. The second type of nandikāvarta, known to pertain to the cumbaka, is said to be a divine, radiant city. It is said to belong, O one with a beautiful lap, to the one who had been authorized by the king and is ornamented by sovereignty.¹⁴¹

[[P811]] The cumbaka in this passage is the Śākta ācārya who oversees the śilpins.[^811_785] His walled city (pura), a place dedicated to the pursuit of both liberation and enjoyment, has a layout, which adjusted to scale and population, is directly analogous to that of the capital of a king. In accordance with the norms of Vāstuśāstra, in medieval India, urban planning is not merely a matter of convenience but is largely determined by geomantic and astrological concerns, as there is a strong belief that the success of failure of specific human activities are determined by spatial arrangement. For this reason, before construction even begins, the city is plotted onto a prastāra grid and institutions are distributed into their proper quadrants. Just to survey a few examples of what sort of functions are being accommodated, wealth is to be stored in the domain of īśa, musical instruments in the parjanaya domain, the office that issues confirmations of who has won a legal decision is appropriately placed in the region of victory, while the university (ghaṭikāśraya), and the house of dance (nṛtyaśāla) are to either be placed in the ūrdhva direction or directly adjacent to the central temple at the end of the maṇḍapa. Bathrooms for people visiting the pura are to be found in the realm of the ancestors, not far from the bathing house and the dormitories for women. There is a public hospital, separate travelers’ houses and dining halls for lay people and ascetics, and an auditorium set aside for debates and performances of kāvya and nāṭaka. Our text even discusses the spatial arrangement where the different centers of power within the pura were to have been located. Thus, while the councils of the mahājanapadas are always to be housed in the north, and the dharmādhikaraṇas, who produce legal decisions (vyavahāranirūpaṇa) and sarvādhikaraṇas who issue orders on behalf of the ācārya are to stay in the domain of the sun, there is considerably more flexibility in the placement of the maṭha. This, our text [[P812]] tells us, is the ritual center of the śivapura. It is not only where the ācārya himself sleeps but also the space where iṣṭi, āhnika, japa, meditation and yoga are to be practiced and where the vīras are to gather for the eating of the things to be eaten and drunk by vīras. In the direction of the moon, rather enigmatically, we are told, in a lovely courtyard, concealed behind own exterior wall, the “secret thing”—allegedly the most important element of the city—is to be installed. While this is the general template for creating a śivapura with a diverse internal population, the Piṅgalāmata in passing seems to suggest that one could craft a number of variations on this basic template. For example, while ideally the secret space in the place of the moon should have a structure made of pure stone, if that is not possible, wood, clay, or even brambles and thatched grass can serve as substitute building materials.¹⁴²

[[P812]] Apart from managing institutional space, our Śākta śilpa texts also engage in a bit of biopolitics. In a large-scale śivapura, the śilpins, who as lay Tantric practitioners are classified among those who seek bhoga and mokṣa, are assigned their own region, not far from the space set aside for the performance of rites of pacification, in an area that, if any are present in the community, shares a neighborhood boundary with Brāhmaṇas. The śilpin subset called kārukas, in contrast, abide in the direction of fire, where they are grouped alongside wood workers and iron smiths. Wage laborers and plowmen are consigned to the inauspicious regions of yama and nairṛtya. A similar sort of hierarchy among the disciples also governs the allotment of personal space and privilege. In the “common kind” of nandikāvarta where the cumbaka and so forth reside, residents are assigned a śālā or home on the basis of their status, in which they are to reside as well as perform their sādhana (sādhanahetukaṃ). The śālā of the ācārya has four rooms; that of a sādhaka¹⁴³, in whose ranks some artisans seem to have been included, has three; the putraka disciple has a two-room home, and the samayin initiate has a single room house. Though the text is somewhat obscure, either metaphorically or quite literally, the differentiated function of both residences and buildings for the carrying out of professional activities is said to be marked by banners and sigils; for instance, the working space of the mantra-knowers and their assistants, the senior disciples of the ācārya, are to be marked by the sigil śrī while the putraka’s space bears an image of a lion and a bull.

[[P813]] Succinctly, a śivapura is not only a sovereign place set apart from the normal rhythms of life of a regular village, wherein crafting in effect became an act of worship, but it is also a space that continues to be organized according to the juridico-theological vision of the radical differentiation of domains where disparate orders of values are accommodated in adjacent but distinctive spaces. As we have seen throughout our study, while such a framework can indeed accommodate caste norms, it is not itself reducible to caste as a conceptual frame. In other words, the institution our text calls the śivapura is identical with that the types of akṣaya or sarvamānya grants bestowed on Śaiva and Śākta-Śaiva ācāryas by kings and other political actors that formed the social foundation of the medieval Deccan, one variation of which primarily housed ślipins.

In our inscriptional records, the founding of this sort of an institution is reduced to a stock formula. The issuing of the grant by the secular authority to the ācārya, who receives the rights on behalf of his community to sovereign oversight over the space in perpetuity, including the right to levy taxes and freedom from the military and financial power of the kingdom, is memorialized by the ritualized washing of the teacher’s feet. In contradistinction, in its chapter on pratiṣṭhā, in representing the originary moments of a sacred site, the Piṅgalāmata parochializes what we have hitherto perceived as the self-evident focus of such an event. As our perspective shifts away from the juridical act and its implications for the evidentiary record, the transfer of the deed marked by the washing of the feet is treated as a mere denouement to the festival, addressed in a handful of verses. Instead, we are offered an unusually detailed and multifaceted presentation of the festivities providing the ritual framework within which the transfer of power would have taken place.

[[P814]] As we shall see, these festivals structure space and experience so as to perpetuate both the institution of the five day festival itself as well all the instantiation of a specifically Śākta esoteric sensibility. Lasting a minimum of five day, the occurrences that would have surrounded the transfer of deed are addressed in both esoteric and pragmatic terms. In doing so, our text incorporates the diverse perspectives and limited horizons of a range of ritual actors as well as observers who would have had greater and lesser and degrees of knowledge about the range of activities constitutive of the proceedings. It is well worth our time to offer a particularly close reading of this chapter of the Piṅgalāmata, for not only are the discussions contained therein particularly rich in their own right, but having a strong command over this material will prove vital to our investigations in chapter 9 of how the reimagining of pratiṣṭhā and acts of philanthropy promulgated by the Seuṇa Yādava court and entextualized in the Caturvargacintāmaṇi of its chief minister, the Brāhmaṇa polymath Hemādri, deliberately subverts and dismantles nearly every practical and theological dimension of this longstanding social institution. Given the length and technical nature of the Piṅgalāmata’s discussion of pratiṣṭhā, it is perhaps preferrable that we begin by with a distillation of some of its key aspects prior to turning to the text.

The Piṅgalāmata demonstrates that the founding of an akṣayavṛtti that contains a ritual center is marked by a special kind of public festival. This involves the participation of ritual specialists from within the community, with the ācārya, his key disciples, and the various classes of artisans in particular playing a featured role, including the sponsor and his extended family and social network, Vedic ritualists working on spec, musicians from outside the community, and last, but not least, a public who are the primary beneficiaries of staged reveries and acts of mass philanthropy. As we will soon see in some detail, each of these types of agents, even as they share space, have very different understandings of what is going on in any given moment. From the perspective of the artisans and their guru, the primary focus of the festival is the production, preparation, and ritual installation of the iconic and aniconic focuses of worship that will take residence in the new sacred city.¹⁴⁴ It is only when the deities have moved into their new homes and become settled that sovereignty can be transferred from political actors to religious authorities. For the artisans, their festival obligations entail at once the skillful execution of a series of highly precise and technical stages in the artisanal process and the performance of a series of ritual duties—many of them involving fire oblations—as intricate as any Śrauta sacrifice.¹⁴⁵ As the Piṅgalāmata demonstrates quite candidly, what makes possible all of these procedures is nothing other than practical training in the mechanics of Śākta Tantric meditative praxis and the internalization of the quintessentially Śākta worldview, namely, that everything in existence is equally pervaded by divine presence in the form the [[P816]] power that is the goddess and for this reason no thing or person can be considered intrinsically impure. Counterintuitively, at the same time that this doctrinal position justifies clandestine nocturnal practices on the part of artisans, guru, and any other initiates present, the consumption of the vīradravya as a mark of commensality, and the concealed performance during public events of genuinely transgressive Śākta rites, about which the general public remains blissfully ignorant, it is these very same values that form the conditions of possibility for acts of mass charity directed especially at the most humble and afflicted within society at large, without any concern for the maintenance of ritual purity.

[[P816]] For ordinary participants, besides some general sense of encountering embodied instantiations of sacred power that might convey favor or blessings, the central point of interest in the installation of a sacred icon and the establishment of a new ritual complex is that such institutions, particularly those of a Śākta-Śaiva persuasion, amounted to a concrete and sustained program of providing for the social welfare down through the generations. During the foundational festivities, people are fed en masse, and pots, pans, clothing, and other concrete material goods are distributed within the crowd. Far from being a one-time occasion, marked by acts of mass ritual and a processional, the founding of a sacred center is to be celebrated on a yearly basis in perpetuity. Each such yearly festival marks a time when the poor, the sick, and the desperate, independent of their bearing aligned religious commitments, will be fed and material goods will be donated to them. Finally, as part of its ordinary operations, such institutions kept on staff certain śivayogins who dedicated their lives to providing medical care to the sick and desperate, about whom we know precious little, although they are already mentioned in the Śivadhamaśāstra.¹⁴⁶

[[P817]] The most dramatic part of the festival is surely the chariot procession. This occurs on the penultimate day of the festival and also coincides with a major moment of philanthropy. Here, on enroute to its new home, the mūrti or liṅga that will be installed in the sacred center first takes a joy ride in the company of the main patron.

To the accompaniment of auspicious songs [sung by] non-widowed women who have living children [and] to the accompaniment of songs by young girl, with the auspicious declarations and [the crying out of] the word “victory!” accompanied by the playing of the conch and sounding of the bards, having finished the complete procedure, in accordance with available resource, [artisan and guru] should again offer water for ritual sipping, and do arcanā once again using the heart mantra. All that one should do with the heart [mantra]. Otherwise, [do this ritual] using the praṇava [mantra], O one with good observances.

In a chariot, which is very well restrained, which has been led there [to that place], uttering the heart mantra, he should cause it [the mūrti] to be lifted up [into the chariot.] Then, [it is to be placed within] a bed. All things which are needed for the purpose of the ritual bath: a stylus and a vessel full of “honey,” a pair of garments, pots and so forth: all that he should give to the śilpin, and at that time he should worship him (the śilpin).

Having well restrained the mūrti on the chariot, one should circumambulate the city in yātrā. One should offer bali offerings to the directions and one should deposit the set of gems.

One should pass out golden garlands and the garlands of pearls everywhere. One should pass out the golden vessels and vessels fashioned from copper and silver. And one should pass out various kinds of bell metal vessels with gadgets and so forth. One should pass out garments and cowrie shells and various forms of wealth. One should pass out parched grains, along with flowers, and all matter of crops. One should pass out such things [at a pavilion] endowed with yak tail fans. It should be crowded with flags and canopies shining with mirrors and so forth, hung with garlands of pearls, accompanied by flowers and dhūpa and a collection of lamps and sconces.

Thus he [the patron] should circumambulate up to the edge of the city, or to the edge of an agricultural village, or [to the edge] of a village. In that place, all the temples of Śiva and so forth which were previously constructed are to be worshipped with effort, [[P818]] with the gems from the earth, with [offerings comprised of] herds of cows, horses, and elephants.

He should offer [to the] twice-borns, and to the blind, the poor, and the afflicted in accordance with his wealth. In particular, he should give special dakṣiṇā to the ones who bear the Śiva liṅga (liṅgadhāraṇa). Thus, according to apportionment the king should make pradakṣiṇā around the city. And by the others [other classes of patrons], otherwise, it is to be done according to their own wealth.

However many feet the chariot should travel in its acting capacity of assistance to Śiva, the agent of this ritual obtains the fruit for that many koṭis of aśvamedhas. At the time after installing, on that day, every year, [a celebration is to be enacted]. So long as the liṅga remains established, one must do a processional performance [on a yearly basis]. [And] he, the king, obtains that very fruit, there is no doubt.

Whoever has the land, at whatever time, of him is the result. If out of delusion it is not protected, he [the patron and his successors] gets cooked in the Raurava hell and so forth. The protection of the unending grant is renowned as aligned with the capacity/power of Śiva. One should have the well restrained chariot process in such a way that God can be prostrated to.

Having made an auspicious journey, they arrive at the yāga ground. One should take the image situated on the chariot and cause it to descend onto the bhadrapīṭha accompanied by the praṇava mantra.¹⁴⁷

[[P819]] We begin with spectacle paired with ritual. Murmuring mantras under their breath, the artisan and ācārya wrap up the last of the ritual procedures that will enable the image to travel, their activities entirely drowned out by formalized cheering and music. With the assistance of the artisans and their guru, the sthāpanācārya, the image is lifted up into its seat in the processional chariot. As it prepares to depart, the artisans are formally honored, while also receiving the ritual paraphernalia that will be required when the image is installed in its new permanent home. This deliberate division of human attention continues to punctuate the whole affair.

While the artisans and the guru go and make blood offerings to the directional deities and also ritually install in the ground a container full of precious gems, philanthropic activities directed at a wider public are being carried out by distinctive agents at two discrete locations. On the one hand, near the spot from which the chariot departs, a large tented pavilion is established, bedecked in gems, pearls, and mirrors. Here the sthāpanācārya’s own community distributes “golden, copper, and silver vessels,” “bell metal vessels,” and “gadgets (yāntrikas),” “clothing, cowry shells” “various forms of wealth,” and all “matter of crops.” Concurrently, as the chariot commences its own circumambulation of the borders of the new city, the patron makes a point of visiting each of the already established temples in the vicinity of his route. While he pauses to pay his respect, their residents and managers receive a bounty of “gems from the earth, herds of cows, horses, and elephants.” The patron is enjoined to offer gifts to all the people who cross his path, “in accordance with his wealth” or who follow along after the processional. While “twice-borns, the blind, the poor and afflicted” are certainly taken care of, the Piṅgalāmata reserves the best donations to the ones who bear the Śiva liṅga (liṅgadhāraṇa), which is to say, to śivabhaktas, though it is unclear whether such people were defined by wearing the mark of the tripuṇḍra or, prefiguring the early modern iṣṭaliṅgas of the Vīraśaivas, by virtue of bearing on their bodies a miniature portable liṅga. Setting aside such [[P820]] specificities, this singling out of special dakṣiṇā reserved for Śaivas confirms that we are not talking about the mere redistribution of resources within a community that shares common values, but rather wide-ranging acts of mass philanthropy.

It is worth pausing for moment to reflect on some the larger social implications of linking the originary moment of institution building of a Śākta-Śaiva center with the generation and redistribution of property on the one hand and the persistence of such an institution with regularly reoccurring charitable work. Despite its thriving mercantile culture, the medieval Deccan was not a consumer-based economy. This was a world where most people were much more likely to have inherited the property and tools they used in everyday life—such as a metal cooking pot—than they were to have purchased the things themselves. As we have seen throughout our study, this is also a world that holds generosity and philanthropy in the highest esteem. Much like in modern India, the power and prestige of the local big man is less a matter of how much he property he owns than it is of how much he gives away and what sort of benefits will accrue from securing his favor.¹⁴⁸ In the Piṅgalāmata’s representation of the processional chariot as a veritable charity van on wheels, which as it passes through the countryside is constantly passing out food, wealth, and gadgets, we see perhaps a distant ancestor of the sorts of schemes that practically define south Indian politics today—one might think for example of the many tales from Tamil Nadu of when Jayalalitha’s people rolled into town and handed out televisions and sacks of grain off the back of trucks while asking for villagers’ votes.¹⁴⁹ In a nondemocratic society prior to the age of mechanical reproduction, if

[[P822]] it is anachronistic to speak of public opinion per se, perhaps we can speak of the cultivation of favor and public affection. By providing quotidian and lasting benefits to ordinary people, in a world of seemingly benevolent big men, our Śākta-Śaivas establish themselves and their undying institutions as perfect exemplars of charitable virtue. In a world of relative scarcity where people just do not expect to have very many things, the metal cooking pot you inherit from your grandmother becomes particularly precious, not only for its sentimental value, or because you cannot afford a new one, but precisely because it is a gift. From time to time, when the family looks at grandma’s fancy metal cooking pot, it is only natural that many people would experience a certain sense of gratitude, directed it not only towards ancestors who provided so well for the family, but also to the strange powerful people who dwell by the hillside who bestowed upon the household such a special gift.

For our Kālamukhas, on the other hand, as will become clear when we turn to the Piṅgalāmata’s self-reflections of how the rituals surrounding image installation are informed by Śākta doctrine, providing the pot where a family cooks its meals is a concrete enactment of their core theological commitment that all of things in the world are intrinsically pure and suffused with god’s power. This precisely why our text will prescribe that every implement used in the ritual itself must be given away. When a pot or a spoon or some gadget leaves the śivapura and crosses out into the wider world of saṃsāra, it becomes the agent for making real the pervasive character of god’s power, concrete signs that Bhairava’s favor enters into and persists in a world defined by apparent disparity and diversity. In the very same manner as the [[P823]] god they aim to embody, overbrimming like an ocean of compassion, through nurturing, healing, and enriching human beings, our Śākta-Śaivas pontiffs and their disciples present themselves in palpable ways as travelling through the world indiscriminately showering people with favor and grace.

Śākta-Śaiva spaces, in other words, come replete with their own mass distributive mode of political economy. Even more so than its purely Śaiva predecessors, it reaches down and across the entire spectrum of Indian society to deliver concrete material benefits. As we shall see, such an approach to who receives the benefit from the regular mode of operation of religious institutions finds its antithesis in the minimally distributive Smārta model that succeeds it, which we will explore in chapter 9. Indeed, a key part of the rationale for explicating the Piṅgalāmata’s grammar of ritual installation through the type of thick descriptive approach the present section has immersed you in is that familiarizing ourselves with these nitty gritty details will make their systematic subversion and inversion as it manifests in the mid-thirteenth-century Smārta sources all the more jarring.

Before we address in more detail the esoteric dimensions of our Tantra’s discussion of what is involved in the installation of an image, for that is where our text most emphatically expresses the “insider” theology that animates this festival, our study of the exoteric dimensions of pratiṣṭhā, primarily as a site for social service, will benefit from an examination of the concluding ceremonies held on the very last day. After many days of free concerts and dramatic performances, the image has circumambulated the future śivapura and just been fixed and place and ritually installed in its new home inside the temple, a procedure that entailed a range of secretive and rather transgressive Śākta rituals, including the production and offering of vīradravya by the artisans and ācārya. As the artisans and their teacher emerge from inside [[P824]] the private or even secret spaces of the garbhagṛha and the place of the moon, they assemble in a slightly more accessible domain on the grounds to offer a series of seven fire oblations dedicated to Bhairava. To ward off any gaps in the procedure, the mahāpāśupatāstra is recited one hundred times. The space secured, they rejoin the patron who sponsored the construction of the site. He comes forward, proclaiming, as if from a script (paṭhec chrāvanakaṃ padaṃ), the following words: “He nātha,” he says, addressing at once the god and the ācārya, “now at this time of the ritual, whatever ritual acts have been done or not done, you should now make it complete, O supreme Lord, by means of your Śakti.”¹⁵⁰ Clandestinely, the Śākta pantheon of the Brahmayāmala is now venerated. Accompanied by his cohort, comprised of close friends and family, the patron is bathed in a series of unctions suffused with pacificatory mantras. This results in the conferral of the benefits of initiation, if it has not already been granted on some other occasion, as well as ensuring the party’s eventual liberation.

[[P824]]

Having had him bathed, many times, a gold auspicious bracelet is to be given on the right hand. A darbha grass one is used if that is not possible. Therefore, by this act the fruit that is called pratiṣṭhā is formally handed over to him. According to the determination in the śāstra, it is bestowed upon the patron himself. He has his own śānta pot as well. And he should first install Śiva in that. He makes it into a śivatīrtha. He should sprinkle one hundred clothes on the ground. For the sake of nirvāṇa on the part of those who belong to his group, there is the fashioning of the tīrtha for the purpose of liberation. The śivatīrtha is all around, a measure of one hundred cubits in length. And in that place, whatever creatures die by “renunciation,” they become similar to the three-eyed Śiva and obtain the realm of Śiva.

Therefore, having first gone to worship Śiva, having bowed down with the eight limbs like a stick, with the knees gone to the earth, the patron should honor the guru with praise. Having done three pradakṣinas, the agent, having bowed again and again, a whole lot, accompanied by ācārya and so forth, should go indeed to the yāgamaṇḍapa.¹⁵¹

[[P825]] Passing from semi-private space where soteriological benefits were conferred on select people, patron, guru, and artisans reenter into multifunctional public space. Ascending onto a platform, the patron is seated on a special seat crafted just for this purpose as the guru retakes his throne for a now public display of performative devotion.

Having grasped the feet of the guru, having with effort made him gracious, having made him repose on an easeful seat, from the top of the head to the bottom of his feet, having gone with the knees to the ground, having bowed to the guru, then [the patron], having smeared [his guru’s body] with candana and so forth, should worship him by offering divyapuṣpa. [To him is offered] the pair of divine garments, and one should dhūpa him with divine dhūpa placed upon a cloth. [To the guru is to be offered] ornaments of gold and gems, cloths, horses and calves, elephants, territories, villages, and grounds, [equipped] with paid labor, virgins, and vehicles with collections of crops such as grains and so forth, with female water buffalos and mahouts.

Having satisfied with great effort the guru with a large number of divine gifts, [having relinquished] the debt of wealth to the guru. . . on the occasion when the procession is moving, he should give jewels and land and at the end he should venerate, worship, and pay the mūrtidharas. The dakṣiṇā is renowned to be equal in amount to half of half of what you give the sthāpaka. For all the mūrtipas, the same dāna is offered.

O beautiful faced one, one should give a portion less than half of that to the sādhakas. For the putrakas, there is half of the [dakṣiṇā bestowed on sādhakas], and half of that again for the samayins. Less than a quarter of [what was given to samayins] is given to the Brāhmaṇas, and then for the ritual attendants, less than half of that again [which was given to the Brāhmaṇas.] Less by a quarter of that to the Brāhmaṇas, and then, for ritual assistants, half of that again. Half of that again for the troops of musicians, and half of that in turn for theater folks.

According to capacity, there is to be given dāna to the poor, blind, and afflicted. He should honor the relatives and dependents of the women and unmarried women of his own gotra. He should release those situated in bondage, and he should not harm living beings.¹⁵²

[[P826]] As the festivities draw to a close and the guru and his ritual retinue are compensated for the duties they have just executed, there is a rather public and altogether jarring demonstration of the relative value of the contributions of the various different types of social agents that made the preceding events possible. Next to the ācārya in his role as sthāpaka, it is the different classes of artisans, the mūrtidhāras and mūrtipas, who receive the largest salaries. As we can see, in sequence, sādhakas, putrakas, the potential successors to the office of ācārya, and samayin initiates into ritual systems that underlie the Piṅgalāmata, many of which descend from the Picumata, receive the lion share of rewards. In contrast, Brāhmaṇas, who in normative Dharmaśāstra would be esteemed as the best recipients of dāna, receive comparatively little. To put this in perspective, if, for example, the guru received $100,000, the mūrtidharas and mūrtipas would have received $25,000 each, the sādhakas would receive approximately¹⁵³ $12,000, the putrakas $6,000 and the samayins $3,000. Each Brāhmaṇa could expect around $700 dollars. Succinctly, the Piṅgalāmata values Brāhmaṇa ritualists at a market rate slightly above that of unskilled labor and the performing artists whose role in the proceedings were occasional and perfunctory. Now that everybody has been paid, while another bali “that bestows all desires,” quite possibly a human sacrifice, is offered, under the [[P827]] noses of the assembled public, the patron feeds the vīradravya to any initiates who are present. Then, at long last, the guru convenes the closing ceremonies, calling on everyone assembled to share in the experience that has been made possible by his grace.

[[P827]]

In order that there should a spreading of sympathetic joy (anumodana) [among everyone] at the obtaining of the result, he announces “O dear one, it is because of your grace, O lord, all of this is made manifest.” Having invited him [the patron] to share the joy then, once again, the guru invites all the others to share in bountiful joy. [He proclaims], “from my grace, the result of this ceremony has become characterized as having the nature of a completed liṅga.” Whatever the particular the aim that was desired [by each assembled person], that he should invite the others to enjoy that sort of result.¹⁵⁴

[In the manner of] motes that are seen when the sun comes in shafts through a netted window, just as many are the pieces of wood, bricks, and stone as to be found in the platform where there is installed the liṅga, the ceremonial flag, and so forth. By such a standard, he remains in the world and moves about from place to place again and again. At the end of the body, first, the patron goes to the world of brahman. For such amount of time, he enjoys pleasures, at the end, he goes to the niṣkala realm. The patron draws up his family, on both sides, below and above [seven generations before and after him into heaven]. Together with his wife and sons, he should give plentiful wealth [to support the endowment of the śivapura]. One should offer oneself and one’s merit to the guru.

In this manner, the illustrious guru is satisfied. Recollecting the Śiva-state, the guru makes [the ritual] complete and even. With his left hand, the ācārya should worship with sweet smelling things and flowers, and he should offer an argha to the top of the liṅga. And after this, the one who’s self is doing bhāvanā, having bowed again and again [before the god], he [the ācārya] lives in accordance with the will of him [the god]¹⁵⁵ for so long as he lives.¹⁵⁶

[[P828]] Despite the fact that they have been holding space together for five days, it is only in the last moments of the ritual where guru invites everyone to taste the same joy that the assembled public and initiates alike are directed to share a common affective experience. This affect in turn is paired with the possibility that each of the discrete human aims of all the people assembled will come to fruition by means of the guru’s grace, in much the same manner that the patron and his lineage are ensured liberation as well as the worldly enjoyments of a sādhaka. While such affect is incidental to the wider public’s perception of the five-day pratiṣṭhā festival, which to them seems to be comprised of spectacle, entertainment, free food, blessings, and concrete material benefits, for initiates, the cultivation and deployment of affective modalities that produce altered states of consciousness is the inner life that animates every moment of the ritual process.

Just as the guru only becomes capable of making the ritual even and complete when he “recollects” Śiva’s state, and, therefore, using embodied meditation is granted the privilege of living alongside the image of his lord under the direction of the god’s will until the end of his days, so too the artisans’ and disciples’ ability to perform their ritual responsibilities is entirely dependent on their capacity to channel and embody the different facets of the god’s power. At every stage in the Pratiṣṭhāpaṭala, the technical instructions addressed to śilpins for the production and preparation of images as well as the rituals that punctuate these processes are paired with second order theological reflections on the connections between artisanal praxis and theology. Here, for example, in the passages immediately preceding the Piṅgalāmata’s account of the chariot processional, is how our text explores the hidden linkages between the final stages in the installation of an image, when the lines are drawn upon an aniconic liṅga or [[P829]] the eyes of a figurative image are opened, and the ontological and epistemological premises that render this act efficacious.

The best thickness for the lines [marking lakṣaṇa] is half of a half of a grain of barley. Knowing this he should draw the lines correctly. By means of the drawing the lakṣaṇas in various ways, according to the distinctions in the operation of bhāva, everything is obtained. From the conjunction with these operations, in the absence of a bhava, all that is obtained are frustrated results. [A question is raised:] If a result could be obtained from a liṅga regardless of whether it is conjoined with bhāva or abhāva, then, I tell you verily, what is the purpose of the lakṣaṇas? [Answer:] If you have a liṅga with these lakṣaṇas, then it is called “with the appropriate signs.” If it is without lakṣaṇas, then it is deficient. Therefore, with great effort, you should perform the raising of the lakṣaṇas. When the liṅga is conjoined with characteristics that are according to one’s own desire, then the liṅga assumes that nature.

If you want an example, I will tell you. O beloved, this is the liṅga resorted to by one’s own self. The great self is [what is called] Śaiva. When one’s self is conjoined with [Śiva’s] tejas, that is the definition [in this case of having the proper characteristic marks]; in much the same manner, later will be taught the characteristics of the raising of the marks [on an image] as understood by learned people.

Now, if there is some cause for great frustration, as when there is heat despite there being shade from the clouds, O goddess, since śivatva is not directly perceivable, one has to discern it by causing to make it manifest through pacification rites then, by means of the lakṣaṇa, a special presence of Śambhu is discerned. . . .

[In contrast, liṅgas made of certain materials do not require the raising of lakṣaṇas.] For, such liṅgas as already possess of their own accord their own tejas; the lakṣaṇas are already present. This also pertains to the bāṇaliṅga—for them, they have a mark (aṅka) that is their own defining quality, and for them ritual such as bathing and so forth should be performed. On the part of them, and also for images (arcā) that are vyakta and so forth [fully sculpted or liṅgas with faces,] the opening of the eyes is stated to be what gives them their defining characteristics as objects of worship.

The guru should trace out the lines on that [image] with a stylus made of gold. Following the path outlined by the guru, the śilpin should then gouge out the outline, with a weapon that is very sharp, [making a line] without dot-like breaks with great skill, he should complete [this task] without breaking the image. The line is not discontinuous, it is not too fat, and it never is too thin. By those desiring the fruit of bhoga and mokṣa, it is well filled out. However, for certain kinds of sādhana, you make the lines beginning with dots and with break marks. In the case of an ugly deed, a beautiful image is an obstacle, and in the case of a beautiful deed, the absence of beauty is an obstacle.¹⁵⁷

[[P830]] In an important unpublished talk, entitled “Secrecy and Obscurity,” given at SOAS as part of the Haṭha Yoga Project in 2016, Alexis Sanderson has argued that one of the defining features of the Bhairava and Śākta Tantras is that, in contrast to the Śaiva Siddhānta, they habitually represent the mechanical performance of external ritual actions, yogic praxis, or postures as inefficacious when they are not executed in tandem with concrete forms of mental cultivation.¹⁵⁸ In this corpus, such mental cultivation often is linked with the key terms bhāva and bhāvanā. To paraphrase Sanderson’s oral presentation, bhāva, he tells us, means something like when the mind—not just attention—is directed by insight, resulting in a clear cognitive orientation towards a given goal. Insight, in this context, has a concrete content incorporating both specific semantics and emotional states. In other words, it is the integration of content suffused affective states into praxis by means of yoga. While in the later gnosological worldview of the post-scriptural Kālī Krama, whose views are largely adopted by Abhinavagupta, the internal cultivation of affective cognitive states such as bhāva can be said to at times to effectively replace modes of doing, in the Śākta Tantras themselves, it functions as a necessary but not sufficient condition rendering practice efficacious.

[[P831]] A quite similar logic seems to define the passage above, which argues that while the presence or absence of bhāva is what makes an installation function, the inscribing on images of the proper sorts of markings, either the lines evoking a glans on a liṅga or the pupil of the eye on an iconic image, remain absolutely necessary. This seems to be the case for two reasons. Somewhat straightforwardly, since the presence of divine energy is often difficult to perceive directly, providing physical indication that the śilpin and ācārya have followed the proper procedure enables us to infer the “special presence of Śambhu.” In other words, since all the other visible steps are present, we can assume that the installation of the proper sorts of energies in the icon was enacted by an artisan who had himself aligned cognitively and somatically with these selfsame energies while carrying out his task. In essence, putting the proper finishing touches on an object so that we can infer its hidden inner nature does the same cultural work in regard to the material world that the visceral manifestation of physical signs such as horripilation, shaking, and passing out accomplishes in the ecstatic realm of Śākta initiations, gesturing palpably towards subtle presences.

Somewhat more curiously, our text also seems to be suggesting that the logic we are exploring has a much broader explanatory power. Succinctly, in its rather colloquial somewhat anti-scholastic roundabout way, the Piṅgalāmata asserts the production of particularized identity here within this world is always an emergent phenomenon. Things becoming what they are is in essence the product of the synergy between specific types of material substrates and particular energetic resonances mediated through the intentionality of the agent performing the act of creation, whether a man or a god. For this reason, when the goddess asks Bhairava for an example of how the interfacing of lakṣaṇa and bhāva works, he unexpectedly responds with an example that suggests that, in human beings, the raising of lakṣaṇas that awakens a [[P832]] substance into its full potential is the product having performed the forced conjoining of the inner fire (tejas), which has the nature of Śiva, with one’s own body and nature. In other words, it is either the achievement of liberation itself or the experience of an initiation that ultimately results in liberation. Succinctly, human awareness and the soul abide in the body in exactly the same way that presence suffuses an awakened icon. Just as in familiar yogas, which necessarily entails the preparation and purification of the vessel that is the human body so that śaktis will abide in it in proper places, because pratiṣṭhā is itself but another form of yoga, installing an image with the proper śaktis demands highly specific material preparations. Just as eating the wrong kinds of foods or performing prāṇāyāma in a manner that directs vital breaths into the wrong channels can deform the practice of a yogin, deviations in the artisan’s external procedures, such as the drawing of a dotted line, change the nature of the image and what sort of results one can expect to procure from its worship. Purpose, energetic focus, and material shape must be made to coincide. In this spirit, in a series of passages we will not be examining in detail, our text proceeds to offer an extensive catalog taxonomizing the impacts of different types of liṅgas as determined by their shape, the bhāva, such as an expression of wrath or a desire for fecundity, with which they have been infused, and the material substance of which they are composed. Just how seriously the Piṅgalāmata takes the theory that image making is homologized with the production of a human being becomes evident in a remarkable passage the text presents when discussing the moment when a liṅga or mūrti is to be installed in its base inside of a temple.

Having purified that directly once again a whole lot, he should cause the śakti to enter in a secure fashion. When it is purified, the triad [of energies] should be installed in a liṅgavedī made of stone. Having done the oblation, which has the purpose of fulfilling the injunction, after that, one should install the three śaktis. One should install the jñānaśakti in the liṅga, and the kriyāśakti in the base. One should cause the dhāraṇī śakti to be placed in the stone which consists of Brahmā. By means of the pūrṇāhuti [[P833]] procedure, having meditated on the union in conjunction with [atha?], having done pūjā with scents and flowers. . . .

Having meditated on the śakti, differentially arranged, [and on] the one who possesses the śakti [i.e., Bhairava], having done the thing that goes beyond meditation, you should cause it [the śakti] to enter with the emanation sequence [of mantras]. Having installed it so that it becomes steady, O god, in the mouth of the stone portion of Brahmā by means of one’s own mantra, having meditated on the supreme abode, which is caused by the thing beyond causation, having conjoined, by means of meditation, each property with the property bearer, one should cause consciousness to be installed in the non-sentient [object]. By means of the yogas of the equinox, the cumbaka has a focused mind.¹⁵⁹

[[P833]] Placing an aniconic liṅga into its stone base involves both the mechanical act of fixing it in a secure fashion so it does not wobble and move about as well as the infusion of the top of the liṅga, the so called brahmā bhāga, with the power of jñānaśakti, and the piṇḍikā, the base, or colloquially, the “yoni” in which the liṅga rests with kriyāśakti. The artisan and ācārya first must identify themselves with Bhairava, the one who possesses the śakti, and then align themselves with energetic state of the different flavors of śakti by means of esoteric yogic practices. Just as one joins together spatially and logically related physical objects, the artisan must also visualize the conjunction of properties and property bearer as they are distributed throughout the hierarchy of the planes of reality, each of which has its own ontological nature and propensities and all of which are superimposed energetically onto the image as part of the production process. Once the universe in all its variegation has been mapped onto the sacred site through directed meditative attention informed by insight, in precisely the same manner a [[P834]] yogin would superimpose the planes on his own body, the image can be conjoined with its base.

Having made a praṇāli in the northern quadrant, he should begin the installation of kriyāśakti. Having known her to consist of the sūkṣmakalā, you should inquire into the time of fertility. Just as the possessor of the body is joined within the body, in that very same way, one must install kriyāśakti in jñānaśakti. In just the same way that one who enjoys is joined with enjoyment, the kriyā is in jñāna. Having installed the bodha and kriyā [śakti], the thing that is being set down is understood in just the same manner as the object of knowledge is [said to be] emitted from knowledge. Just as in the case of the reflections of the sun and the moon, the kalā of them has become one. Even so, having recollected in that very same way, one should cause dṛk and kriyā to enter.

The piṇḍikā is to be understood as being like the body and the liṅga is to be known of as the embodied one. The piṇḍikā is to be known of as the [experience of] enjoyment, and the liṅga is the one who enjoys. The piṇḍikā is like gnosis, O Bhadrā, liṅga is said to be like the thing to be known. O honored one, the piṇḍikā is like the moon and the liṅga is said to be the sun. Having conceived of kriyā śakti in the body, one should conceive of gnosis as being the embodied one. . . . Having known kriyā to be like the moon, gnosis is like the sun. Kriyāśakti should be known in the manner of a fertile woman, O beautiful faced one. Jñānaśakti is the thing to be known, like a man possessed of passion, and the installation of dṛk and kriyā is to be known like the union of a man and young girl.

What is the point of speaking more confusing examples? You and I were conjoined like this previously—that was the cause of the sustaining of the world. In a similar manner, the union of dṛk and kriyā is the union of the property bearer [and its properties], which is the cause of actions. And you are a direct manifestation of kriyāśakti, which is situated in the form of the base. And I have the form of knowledge, O auspicious one, which is established in the form of the liṅga. And this is said to be installation in the temple, O goddess.¹⁶⁰

[[P835]] In this passage, both the relationships between the two śaktis as well the interfacing of icon and its base are characterized as being governed by four seemingly distinctive cognitive metaphors. In the first frame, they are connected in the same manner that the soul, understood as both a witnessing agent and agent of enjoyment, abides within and governs the material body deploying it as a vehicle to have perceptual and sensual experiences. In the second epistemological frame, dṛk and kriyā śakti and liṅga and yoni are said to be related to each other in the very same manner that jñāna, understood as both gnosis and mental activity, both produces and participates in the perception of specific objects of knowledge and cognitive acts. In the third, perhaps the least developed, which likely also gestures towards the inner physiology of the yogic subtle body, the two elements are homologized to the sun and the moon.

Finally, and most fundamentally, our text returns again and again to images of sexuality and reproduction as the dominant organizing frame. Thus, marked by the moment when the homa fire crackles in a certain manner, the right time for fixing the liṅga in its base is introduced as akin to the peak moment of human fertility. Having infused into the stone base, kriyāśakti is to be “known” by the liṅga as if it were a fertile woman being penetrated by a man possessed of passion (rāgānvita). When the two śaktis installed in their respective material substrates come together, “it is like the union of a man and a young girl.” Our text makes a point of evoking quite deliberately that this relationship is one of subordination and dependence; the witnessing and enjoying agent manipulates its material substrate, which is but a pale reflection of its own nature, towards its own ends. The object of knowledge, a byproduct of cognitive processes, is grabbed hold of by knowledge itself, just as a powerful man experiences pleasure when he takes and impregnates a young girl.

[[P836]] All of these interrelationships, as the end of the passage makes plain, are in fact acts of mimesis, replicating the yāmala of Bhairava and Piṅgalā, where the one who owns the śakti takes ownership of her in ecstatic sexual union. It is the repetition of this logic, at all different subtle and gross registers, our text tells us, that sustains the world. When we install an image in a temple, artisan and ācārya recreate the primordial yāmala, which continues without interruption from that moment onward in the heart of the temple. It is secretly this logic of yāmala, of all conjunctions as sexual unions, that not only govern the five-day festival, where huge, varied publics obliviously gather outside the divine boudoir awaiting the commencement of the love making of the god and goddess—but that also organize and holds together all of lived experience. The whole world is suffused with the power of the god and the goddess because iterations of their union form the cognitive and atomic building blocks that make up all of existence, out of which everything gross and subtle arises. Theologically speaking, the political sovereignty of the akṣayavṛtti is predicated on the permanent installation of a gross material instantiation of this union. In a sense, it arises spontaneously if inevitably from the establishing in lived space and human time of the causal vortex that is the source from which all forms of agency and power allegedly emerged. In this way as well, our text asserts, the whole world is Śākta whether it assents to such an understanding or not. The logic of the yāmala amounts to an emic political theology. Like any disciplinary system, it structures space and constrains human behavior.

Revealing the Secret: Purity, Generosity, and the Worship of Caṇḍeśvara

If the five-day pratiṣṭhā festival is designed as a performative reenactment of these core theological frames—an exercise, if you will, in making them real—we should scarcely be surprised that our festival also consciously plays out another of these core commitments: the hiding of transgressive forms of Śākta performativity in the quotidian flows of normal life. The message being communicated—to those equipped to perceive it—is that such apparent [[P837]] transgressions must be understood as the real engines that make possible and sustainable ordinary existence. Towards this end, the largely public rituals we have explored in some detail are complemented by other types of procedures that occur concurrently with the major ritual events. The most striking instantiation of this dynamic is the integration into the festivities of another outwardly much humbler processional.

At the very same moments that the ratha begins to circumambulate the territory dispensing charity all along the way and that the tent for the dispensing of charity adjacent to the maṇḍapa is carrying out its own philanthropic mission, the ācārya and his assistants surreptitiously prepare a small vessel (pātra), which will be placed upon a veiled palanquin and escorted by Brāhmaṇas chanting the Vedas on commission. This pātra, often simply referred to as “the secret,” will be used during the installation process inside the garbhagṛha and then will eventually take residence in the secret place in the domain of the moon, which contains an āgāra or private ritual space with its own courtyard. In esoteric terms, the vessel is in fact the goddess herself, and as the text will tell us, she abides in the body that is the territory of the akṣayavṛtti in the same way that the kuṇḍalinī śakti is present in a human being. As we might anticipate, our text is maddeningly enigmatic in its representation of this dimension of the ritual, and so, much of the reconstruction that follows is a matter of conjecture. The first place the pātra is mentioned is in our text’s discussion of the preparation of the sleeping chamber and bed, where the deity, either in the form of a liṅga or mūrti, spends the first night of the festival getting acclimated to his new home before being permanently installed in the piṇḍikā. This is a standard phase present in all of the literature on ritual installations, which frequently divides the preparation of an image into the crafting process, the incubation where mantras seep into the image while it is submerged in water suffused with [[P838]] mantras, the bedding down for the night in its new home, the insertion of śaktis, and the final installation. As the image prepares to “rest,” once it has been swaddled in cloth and wrapped with mantras like a child tucked into its bed with its head facing east, a sleep pot (nidrākumbha) made of gold is placed near the head of the “bed.” While our text begins with this standard procedure, it rather jarringly wanders off in a rather different direction.

There should be a pot of gold in the region of the head. It is said to be a sleep pot. The bed with the head facing the eastern direction is the best. Thus, the common procedure is proclaimed. [The pot is] full of the five jewels, adorned with cloths and so forth accompanied by scents and dhūpa, containing mango sprouts. Well hidden by a garland of flowers, one should place “auspicious gems.”

Having given it the naivedya of various sorts, with liquids, and so forth, the pot is to be prepared in the following manner: with carrion and so forth, with liquor and so forth, ornamented with cloth and so forth, with perfume, flowers, dhūpa and the like—with all these things. One should then make argha [ritually offering these substances] using the heart mantra. One should practice with the heart mantra as if for the purpose of rubbing ointments on the feet.

O goddess of gods, if you are offering human flesh (phalguṣa)¹⁶¹ and other such things, you do not do this with the praṇava mantra. If you are doing this with human flesh, you form an intention for the rite by cultivating a nondual mental state because [under such circumstances] the human meat is effectively nectar.¹⁶²

[[P839]] This pot next seems to surface on the following day, during which the ācārya and śilpins install images of the various deities that make up the retinue of the god and the goddess in various quadrants of the area surrounding the temple. These include the eight forms of Śiva (mūrtyaṣṭakaṃ), inherited from an earlier Pāśupata tradition, each which has its own śakti. They are followed by the Vidyeśvaras of the Saiddhāntika cosmology, including Ananta, the demiurge who rules our world, all of whom again are paired with śaktis. The Śākta goddesses Vāma, Jyeṣṭhā, Raudrī, with the unusual addition of Kālī are then given homes, followed by the eight Bhairavas. These later rituals use special Śākta Tantric mantras paired with acts of yogic visualization. As the text tells us:” Having known by means of dhāraṇā and one’s own meditation, [the images] to be pervaded [by their respective śaktis], one should properly install all of them, visualizing them to be yellow, red, black, blue, cloud color, and smoky in color.” Now that the retinue are in place, having ascended only as far in the hierarchy of planes as the level of vidyātattva, the agent that pervades everything, known of as Śiva, “must be meditated on in the middle.” For this part of the ritual, the ācārya and his śilpins enlist the aid of paid Brāhmaṇas.

Having established twice-borns in the directions and the lord(s) and initiates, the Ṛgvedin is in the east and the Yājurvedin is in the domain of water. Likewise, the Sāmavedin is in the yama direction, and they know the Atharvan to be in the saumya direction. All should recite their own sūkta preceded by the Rudram in all cases. The yajamāna and likewise the others are all reciting what is commanded by the cumbakas. . . conjoined with the insight that has the nature of the pañcabrahma mantras directly and accompanied by cries of “victory!!”¹⁶³

[[P840]] Applying a veneer of Vedic ritual complemented by the ritual deployment of the pañcabrahma mantras so essential to Lākula and Kālamukha communities, the ācārya and artisans offer homa into eight fire pits, first installing the mantras of Rudra on their own bodies. While the chanting continues, the ācāryas take the image and its base and prepare the ceremonial bath. Euphemistically, the piṇḍa is said to “take refuge with water,” but clearly something different is really going on for here the text becomes incredibly gnomic.

The nyāsa is to be done to the mūrti, which has the nature of the mantra. Likewise, the action is to be done with the mark of kriyā śakti. . . and at the end of the ritual, there is she who is known of as Kuṇḍalinī. The injunction involving bathing and so forth [is to be done] as with the liṅga in the soma quadrant.

And here one should cause to have enacted the raising up of the defining marks for the object that has the form of a vagina (bhagākāraṃ). . . . So long as it is not seen by worldly people, it is made of śakti and designated for the secret [place?]. It is the best, the essence, and the chief thing, therefore, its characteristics are secret. Just like the liṅga is to be raised up, it is the same way with the secret thing, and it is to be installed with the golden stylus up from the Brahmā portion of the stone and at the root position in the liṅga. . . .

The injunction for bathing and so forth is available but it is devoid of specifics. . . . She is said to be Anantaśakti known of as dhāriṇī and she is the mistress of causing stability and the agent of the cessation of everything. She alone is the material embodiment underlying the soul of everything.

Having meditated on her as conjoined, she should be caused to enter. The teacher worships her, according to a desired vidhi, three times as before.¹⁶⁴

[[P841]] During the course of the five-day festival, this “secret thing,” which on the surface is a vessel identified with the goddess that contains various kinds of liquor, carrion, and lumps of human meat, is conveyed back and forth between its new residence in the somasthāna and the various chambers inside the temple. Though it seems he was spared the horror of recognizing how much more loathsome things than mere liquor were mixed into the brew, in accusing the Kālamukhas of “installing a pot containing alcoholic liquor and worshipping their deity in it,” Rāmānuja in his Śrībhāṣya offers description and not mere polemic.¹⁶⁵ Travelling from the place the moon to the garbhagrḥa of the main temple, their special vessel in hand, the ācārya and artisans enact different stages of the ritual by suffusing different śaktis into the liṅga and its base. Each time the text specifies that there is to be a homa, a bath, some sort of exchange of energies, and a concluding śānti rite to pacify the powerful goddess. Our most detailed description of this procedure is presented in the context of outlining the installation of the kriyāśakti in the base of the plinth.

[[P841]]

O one with good vows, the culminating inner bath [is to be done] using the heart mantra. Having done the bath [using first the pañcagavya and then the pañcāmṛta], one must install the mantras, as you would in your own body, well arranged.

As per the common procedure, one should install in the seat beginning with Ananta and ending with śakti; otherwise, in the particular, up to the end of the preta as is propounded in one’s own śāstra. He should install the mūlamantra along with the aṅga mantra and vaktra mantra and the mūrti mantra. The discriminating person should install jñānaśakti in the top [liṅga portion] as if it were a mūrti [mantra]. O Sureśvarī, or, as serving that same function, he should place the mūla mantra. One should install the kriyāśakti in the pīṭha, and she is said to have the form of a preta.

Having installed a collection of mantras, one should give the eight puṣpikās.¹⁶⁶

In order that the god should remain present, one should perform various snānas. Then one should smear with candana and gandha, and kuṃkuṃ. Having done the pūjā, one should adorn the one abundant in radiance with colorful clothes. It is to be adorned with golden ornaments and one should dhūpa it with guggula and so forth.

Having made it shine with lamps, one should give various types of naivedya. One should give all the various types of things for food and enjoyment or to be licked or even sucked and things to be drunk in giving the common, O Sundarī; otherwise, the [[P842]] particular should be given, various sorts of naivedya along with the eighteen types of fish and sixteen types of meat. Liquors born from flowers and fruits, with liquors born from sugar cane and liquor born from flowers should be given. . . . And in the general case, one should sip always and one should wash the hands and feet.

In regard to the particular, [in contrast] the mantrin should not sip and should not do the washing the feet and so forth.¹⁶⁷

[[P842]] Throughout this whole procedure, our text outlines two ritual tracks. In the first, the image is bathed in the five products of the cow in the ordinary fashion, is smeared with good smelling unguents, is offered perfume and dhūpa and then given nice things to eat. In the second, which is reserved for the most important classes of installations, the image is bathed in the nasty concoction contained in the hidden vessel, is smeared with five products of the human, and is then fed a fetid mixture of various types of liquors of different origins intermixed with eighteen types of fish and sixteen types of meat, including bits of human beings. Just like the initiated vīra both becomes an initiate and renews his commensality in the community by periodically consuming the vīradravya, the god is fed a similar if even more putrid form of caru, which is preserved within the secret pot. All of this must be done, the text tells us, “in order that the god should remain present.” Then, we learn that the throne upon which the god sits, whatever its external appearance, is in fact a preta, or animated corpse, of the sort that esoteric deities are often visualized as riding. It is this corpse, in fact, which is infused with power of kriyāśakti, the agentive power that makes the liṅga function. This agentive power is in fact being transferred out of the secret pot, which resides in the place of the moon, and put into the central focus of worship, an action that, for unspecified reasons, is repeated a number of times over the course of the first four days of the festival.

In just the same way that our text outlines two different registers of ritual procedures through which the ācārya and his artisans relate to the image in the ritual space, the Piṅgalāmata also presents us with two distinctive registers of festival “entertainments” that are connected to each other conceptually on the basis of hidden commonalities. It is certainly no accident that our text introduces these two us immediately following the discussion of ritual registers we have just been wrestling with:

One should let four days pass with festivals of song and dance and with the sounding of bells and ḍamarus. Offering flowers, dhūpa, naivedya, betel, and so forth, [the event continues] with celestial festivals day and night. . . .

At night, there is bestowing of the awakening performance [jāgran] with dance and song and instrumental music. In regard to the general [i.e., the non-transgressive procedure], one should only do those festivals during the day. By day, the sattra is to not to be stopped. One should donate to the poor and orphans.

Then, in the particular, [at night,] [the giving of feasts] it is carried out among the vīras and the yoginīs and the kārukas. And at nighttime and at the end of the day, one should make use of the food and drink to be enjoyed by the vīras and so forth. The festival with the song and dance along with instruments is during the daytime.¹⁶⁸

[[P843]] Our passage is pointing out another hidden homology, one which invites us to re-engage with the philanthropic dimensions of the pratiṣṭhā festival from a new perspective. Just as the casual instrumental and musical performances that occur during the day are matched by jāgran rituals, where vigil is kept and songs are sung compelling the goddess to awaken, the ceaseless feeding of the poor and desperate that goes on during the day has its counterpart in the distribution and ritual consumption of the vīradravya, for these two acts are in fact the very same kind of experience instantiated in different material substrates according to their native propensities. The quotidian celebrations during the daytime are in turn in some fundamental sense non-different from the krīḍā, comprised of sexual rites and the consumption of transgressive substances by an assembly of human vīras, artisans, and yoginīs, as well as their non-human counterparts, which takes the form of a raucous feast conducted by very intoxicated people dancing, singing, and displaying their bodies to the beat of the ḍamaru. The poor and desperate in some sense are simply the yoginīs and gods in disguise and the charity they are given, in a surreptitious fashion, obeys the same logic as the empowering nectar of the clan.

It is in its discussion of the rituals for the fourth day, which outline one last secret ritual, that the Piṅgalāmata finally shows the discerning reader how all the pieces fit together. Here, the focus is what is to be done with the ritual leftovers, called the nirmālya, that have been offered to the god. Usually, when we talk about nirmālya—or, what do you do with god’s leftovers—scholarly conversations fixate on the question of purity to the exclusion of pretty much anything else. But much as is the case when it comes to our thinking about caste, which also tends to be framed as a discourse about purity at the expense of all other considerations, what should we do with nirmālya is at the same time very much a sociological question. It is inextricably tied to issues of social agency, spatialized hierarchy, power, and questions of inclusion and exclusion—even fundamental issues of human well-being. Quite literally, the question of “what do we do with leftovers” translates into who gets to eat. Should the resources that have been invested in the day-to-day operations of the ritual life of a temple complex be [[P844]] taken out of circulation, or will they get redistributed, to the benefit of wider publics? As we are beginning to recognize, the question of nirmālya is of crucial relevance to the political economy of Śaiva communities. What we are about to discover is that these very same political economies are fundamentally shaped by the precise contours of different Śaiva religious imaginaries and their pantheons. At the heart of this question is the contested role of the god Caṇḍeśvara, to whom the nirmālya is offered. As we have encountered before in our excavation of Kāruka doxographies and their misplaced scriptural canons, Caṇḍeśvara has a persistent affiliation with śilpins and Kāruka religious imaginaries.

Thus, while in classical Śaiva literature, nirmālya, having been touched and tasted by god, is considered radically impure and must be disposed of, the śilpin aligned Piṅgalāmata approaches this issue from a vastly different perspective:

On the arriving of the fourth day, the cumbaka is well prepared. Having determined the strength and weaknesses of the substances [to be offered], the discriminating one, along with the mūrtipas and the help, should offer the homa on the fourth day.

It is one hundred or otherwise one thousand oblations; [the substances consist of] those that are lickable, suckable and other food offerings. Having taken away everything, and likewise taken away the pūjā [implements], the naivedya is to be given to virgins who are children of sons and brothers [of the sponsor] and to young ladies, both those who are orphaned and in trouble. For the sake of the support of the learned, divyapuṣpa should be given for the sake of eating.¹⁶⁹

[[P845]] In other words, any normal food that has been offered to the god is fed to human girls, while the caru concoction is given to the initiates to be consumed as vīradravya. What we have here, in essence, is a maximally redistributive economy. Like the stereotypical—and at least a little bit racist—floating trope about how the first people of the North American plains made use of the buffalo, every little bit of nirmālya is used and nothing is wasted. We can begin to get a sense of just how unusual such an arrangement might be vis-à-vis other Śaiva systems by juxtaposing the Piṅgalāmata’s discussion of the nirmālya disposal process with an extensive passage on the same topic drawn from the Jñānaratnāvali, a Siddhāntika paddhati composed in Varanasi in the thirteenth century. As Dominic Goodall has shown in a wide-ranging study of the god Caṇḍeśvara that incorporates the following translation, here, the Śaiva Siddhānta theologian Jñānaśambhu builds upon the Somaśambhupaddhati and a range of other medieval sources with uncommon clarity.¹⁷⁰

[[P845]]

Whatever fierce and terrible evil may have been generated by transgressing the rules by those who venerate Śiva, the one who is responsible for removing that is taught to be Caṇḍeśvara. Outside, in the North-Eastern direction, in a maṇḍala of cow-dung that is half-moon-shaped he should build a lotus-throne with [the base] Ananta, [the four throne-legs of] Dharma, Jñāna, Vairāgya and Aiśvarya, [and the seat that is an open] lotus, using the praṇava [as a mantra]. He should venerate this throne with [the mantra] OṂ CAṆḌĀSANĀYA HUṂPHAṆṆAMAḤ.

Above that, with [the mūrtimantra, namely] OṂ CAṆḌAMŪRTAYE HUṂPHAṆṆAMAḤ, he should visualise the form [of the deity] as having the colour of black collyrium, four-faced, twelve-eyed, with snakes for his sacred thread and for his upper armbands, with flames of fierce fire emerging from his mouth, bright with a fiery-flamed crescent moon, very terrible, four-armed, with trident and water-pot on the left and with axe and rosary on the right, arisen from the fire of Rudra[’s anger], and he should then (param) invite [Caṇḍeśa] using his root mantra. . . .

With the ‘cow-mudrā’, he should effect the transformation into nectar, and with the [above-given] heart-mantra he should offer foot-water, water for sipping, etc. He should venerate [Caṇḍeśa] together with his aṅgamantras arrayed around him (bhogāṅgopetam) with fragrances and such like [offerings], perform as much recitation as he is able, and then, with [recitation of] the syllable OM. he should announce:

Apart from cattle, land, gold, cloths and such, ornaments of jewels and gold and such, all else that has been offered and enjoyed [by Śiva] (śeṣaṃ nirmālyam) one should give to Caṇḍeśa. Whatever can be licked, sucked, chewed or drunk, betel, garlands, unguents—all such things that have been offered and enjoyed [by Śiva] are given to you by Śiva’s command.

[[P846]]

After reciting this, he should offer what has been offered and enjoyed by Śiva, saying OṂ O Caṇḍa, all this ritual, if, because of ignorance, I have performed it deficiently or adding something, then let it be rendered perfect by your command. . . .

Thus [the teaching to be found] in the Sarvajñānottara: One should know that those scents, flowers and food-offerings made to the God who has [since] been invited to depart are nirmālya. [In other words, everything offered to the God is nirmālya] excepting clothing and ornaments. After giving him guest-water, one should once again offer [those offerings] to Caṇḍeśa.”

Surely[,] in the case of a bāṇaliṅga, a portable one, ones that have risen [from rivers], one established by a Siddha, a spontaneously arisen one and in the case of all [representational] images, Caṇḍa has no authority. [So too] in the case of one in which there is visualisation of a non-dual [deity such as Bhairava or Tumburu]. And also in the case of rites for the Lord [installed] on the ground. Others, however, [opine:] No worship of Caṇḍa [is to be performed] when the [image of] the Lord has been crafted either.

How can [such a view as] that [be maintained]? True. [But] this is [in fact] a prohibition of the installation of Caṇḍa and not a prohibition of his worship. This is advanced as somebody else’s doctrine. In the Saiva Siddhānta, however, the rule is that he should always and in every case be worshipped.

And this is expressed in the Kālottara: Whether the liṅga is stable or portable, or made of precious stone, clay, wood, rock, iron, or is represented in a picture, or is a bāṇaliṅga, [the worship of] Caṇḍa remains determined by rule (niyāmakaḥ) in the Siddhānta, but not in other tantric traditions: neither in the Vāmasrotas nor in the Dakṣiṇasrotas. Those who enjoy what belongs to Caṇḍa, what belongs to the guru or what belong to the God, [even] in thought, are cooked in [the hell called] Raurava.¹⁷¹

[[P847]] When the Jñānaratnāvali speaks polemically of “someone else’s” doctrine allowing certain conditions, such as a liṅga where the lakṣaṇas do not have to be raised, the worship of a non-dual deity, or even in regard to crafted images of the lord, that nirmālya can be consumed or that it can offered in the absence of Caṇḍa, the “other” of which he speaks is almost certainly the tradition represented by our Piṅgalāmata. For a Siddhāntika, its teachings at every level must have seemed appalling. Just as the Śaiva Siddhānta sources speak of transmutation of the products of the cow into nectar, our text speaks of the human meat and the substances with which it travels becoming nectar when they are offered to the god. While our text presents offerings that are “lickable, suckable, and other food offerings” as an auspicious meal for young girls, in the Siddhānta sources, “whatever can be licked, sucked, chewed” and so forth are included in the catalog of things forbidden to humans. Caṇḍeśvara plays a key but delimited role in each Siddhānta ritual, consuming the nirmālya and punishing transgressors. Except for “clothing and ornaments,” for the Siddhānta, everything used in ritual becomes nirmālya. This effectively renders ritual an expensive potlatch in which almost everything in the rite is made useless. In contrast, our text proffers a diametrically opposed understanding.

There is nothing designated as nirmālya, for the rite is without Caṇḍeśvara. Therefore, with regard to either the consumption or even the wearing of nirmālya, this practice is without fault. With regard to the giving and or receiving it, this is how things work in the case of the general ritual, O One with Good Observances. If, however, you are in the presence of the special ritual elements, therefore those elements are more dear; exceptionally pure. Since she [the śakti] is present within the caru for [certain] souls, there is the bestowal of siddhi and mukti according to the doctrine. [Therefore,] having wiped it [with] that, having bathed the god as is suitable with various sorts of fragrant water, following the injunctions previously indicated and as suitable, with one’s own substances, the one who is well prepared should do pūjā.¹⁷²

[[P848]] Here, the Piṅgalāmata presents in sequence a series of rather audacious, almost lawyerly, assertions. First, it tells us, because at this point, Caṇḍeśvara is not present on the ritual grounds, (though, as we will see, he will be arriving rather soon), there can by definition be no nirmālya—everything used in the general ritual can therefore be used and distributed as the ritualists see fit. When it comes to the things we would consider even more charged with transgressive power and thus by almost any standard ritually impure, our Śākta Tantra proclaims that these too can be used by and distributed among suitable recipients. Since the caru is suffused with the śakti who bestows liberation on vīras who are consumers of the vīradravya, it too must be considered intrinsically pure. It is only on the last day of the ritual, before the installing of the image or mūrti in its piṇḍikā, that Caṇḍeśvara is integrated into the ritual field. Suddenly, the Piṅgalāṃata cannot simply deploy logical loopholes to exploit a technicality that treats ritual offerings under special circumstances as not really a kind of nirmālya and therefore fit for use. Instead, it has to make a more pointed argument that the very idea of nirmālya—that human beings are not fit recipients for god’s leftovers—is itself illegitimate. In order to arrive at that destination, the text first has to introduce us to the god Caṇḍeśvara.

In the liṅga, or in the mūrti, one should set down Caṇḍa. Caṇḍa is famous for being the anger of god. Having meditated on him as arising from that, his jñānamūrti, [installed] inside oneself, is as follows. He has fangs and a fierce face. He is horrific to behold with flames for matted locks. He is pure white like the autumn moon. This is the Krodhacaṇḍa who has come forth. . . . Maheśa himself, although he has no form, has come to a form.

Having contemplated Caṇḍarudra, who is the anger that has emerged from god, having unfastened him, from out of the liṅga, conjoined with the samḥāramudrā, he inserts him through the medium of a flower, O Deveśa. He should take him again from the pīṭha and installs him in the īśāna domain [eastern direction].

She is that śakti called Endless (Ananta) whose form is moving and unmoving. She is to be seen in the form of a vessel (pātra). She has the form of the seat of Caṇḍa. Having fashioned his seat in the beginning one should invite the Caṇḍamūrti.

[His mantra is as follows]: oṃ at the beginning and namaḥ at the end and a mantra called kṣa along with the visarga [in the middle.] The mūrti mantra [kṣauṃ] has been taught; the āsana mantra would be the same. [oṃ kṣaḥ namaḥ / kṣāṃ hṛdaya / kṣīṃ / kṣaṃ / The mūrti mantra is kṣauṃ]. With that itself [the same mantra] with the long vowels, one should fashion the six component-mantra. Conjoined with short vowels, one should fashion the five faces. The mūla mantra is kṣaum; that itself is the supreme Caṇḍeśvara

And in that place, with a black form, very radiant with four hands, [the physical image is to be installed]. However, he is to be meditated on, O god of gods, as previously [according to the jñānadhyāna] that which is constructed emerging out of Śiva. Having [[P849]] worshipped with scents and flowers, one should fix him there with the kavaca and weapon mantra.¹⁷³

[[P849]] The Piṅgalāmata’s own concluding discussion of the use of Caṇḍeśvara and his mantras in ritual provides us with some insights that cannot be gleaned from our other sources. Succinctly, what the text adds to our inquiry is a throughgoing ritualization and spatialization of the general ethos we been exploring earlier in our study of dual understandings, such as when secular festival fun and acts of charity were secretly encoding the feeding of the yoginīs. In this case however, what is being hidden in plain sight is that the apparent main focus of worship—the temple being consecrated—is in actuality itself merely a placeholder for its secret counterpart. The “real temple” is in fact a second hidden space where Caṇḍeśvara himself is to be installed that directly replicates the dimensions of the main site of worship. As for the space in question, it is none other than the secret chamber of the moon. In much the same spirit, at the level of ritual procedure, all of the other ritual actions during the five day festival are in actuality secretly being empowered by the mantra system of the caṇḍabrahmamantras.¹⁷⁴ In short, the Piṅgalāmata teaches that the real sacred heart of a Kālamukha ritual center is the exclusive place where the artisans and their guru perform their own worship—in the secret space of the moon—where Caṇḍeśvara, the lord of the universe,

[[P850]] is placed in union with his beloved consort, who has assumed the form of the very vessel in which the vīradravya is contained.

Having done the homa then, then after there is the fashioning of Caṇḍeśvara. One should look in his direction, repeatedly again in the vicinity of the end of the prākāra. [At the place of the moon,] one should fashion the room/receptacle (āgāra), which is made of bricks or otherwise from stone or made of dāru wood or made of clay. It should be kept secret. But that śakti mentioned previously who is ādhāra (the base), one should conceive of her as being fixed [in that space].

Having first fashioned his seat, one should install Caṇḍa, well established, on top of that. Having installed Caṇḍa, having sipped, one should do the homa for expiation. Having had the deity bathed, again, one should sacrifice the common offering to the liṅga.¹⁷⁵

When it is done for that purpose, then there is separation from him. For one’s own sake or in regard to the particular form of the rite, Caṇḍeśvara is not there. And one should not at all do craft fashioning that is [not] arising for him or separated from him. For Bhairava is said to be the liṅga itself—he is installed because of him being Bhairava/causing fear. However, a place is fashioned because of it being the place for nirmālya.

Indeed, in regard to one’s own yāga, there is no [presence of] Caṇḍeśvara. You should not avoid [the use of Caṇḍeśvaras] in the case of special rites or the fourth homa [at night]. For this reason, the fault born of nirmālya does not exist in that context, O One with Good Observances. Naivedya, bhakṣya, and bhojyānna, gandha, puṣpa, and so forth, all those things without remainder—there is not ever any nirmālya that arises. In such cases, from giving [offerings to the god] away or stepping on it, there is no fault accruing to you from Caṇḍeśvara [so far as he is concerned].¹⁷⁶

[[P851]] In a similar spirit, all appearances to the contrary, here the text reveals that whatever their external nature, all the liṅgas—iconic or aniconic—installed following the procedures outlined in the Piṅgalāmata are actually forms of Bhairava, for they are animated by his mantras. Already in the late eighth century when it was composed, the Piṅgalāmata, having internalized some of the rhetoric of the Śaiva Siddhānta sources, feels the need to respond to the accusation that the consumption or mishandling of the nirmālya, be it in the form of objects, garlands of flowers, or food, does not constitute a violation of the samaya of the Tantric adept or bear negative karmic consequences and that the worship of Caṇḍeśvara as more than just a glorified garbage disposal is a legitimate activity. Under this veneer, however, persists a much more archaic logic—associated quite specifically with the part of the Piṅgalāmata’s portmanteau, a patrimony that it received from the Vāma Tantras, evocative of a time in formative antecedents of the tradition when Śākta worship was conducted in much less rarefied venues. The skeleton key to unlocking antecedents of our text within an older cremation ground culture is the Piṅgalāmata’s choice of the rather uncommon word “āgāra,” which our text uses in referring to the separate structure in the domain of the moon where Caṇḍeśvara and his śakti reside in the form of black image and pot. Though our text is never explicit, it is the āgāra and not the garbhagṛha that is the real locus and source of ontic power within the ritual complex, for indeed everything that makes the public deity ritually and juridically empowered is dependent upon the hidden god Caṇḍa and his consort the all-pervasive goddess. Now, in the Picumata Brahmayāmala, from which as we have seen the Piṅgalāmata descends, albeit through a number of mostly lost intermediaries, “the term devāgāra seems to refer to a [[P852]] temporary yāgasthāna or maṇḍala rather than a temple or shrine.”¹⁷⁷ This space, usually situated in a cremation ground, is where most Kāpālika style worship was conducted.

[[P852]] As has been discussed at some length by Csaba Kiss in his study and translation of the Picumata Brahmayāmala’s third, twenty-first, and forty-fifth chapter, the elaborate maṇḍala of the Picumata is to be drawn and venerated within the space called the āgāra during rites of initiation (dīkṣā) and at the time of mahāyāga, but also, though the subject has yet to receive a detailed treatment, “at the time of image-installation (pratiṣṭhā).”¹⁷⁸ During this pantheon worship, as is outlined in chapter 3 of the Brahmayāmala,¹⁷⁹ after measuring out and plotting an elaborate geometric figure using a thread and then chalk, the mantrin draws upon the ground the nine cremation grounds (Vārāṇasī, Virajā, Kollagiri, Prabhāsa, Ujjainī, Bhūteśvara, Ekāmraka, Koṭivarṣa, and Prayāga in the center), invoking into them their respective deities with their retinues, followed by the protectors of the directions and the one hundred rudras. Each of this last class of beings is drawn on the ground, presumably using powder or chalk, mounted of corpses, bearing khaṭvāṅgas, and wearing garlands of human heads. The four goddesses (Raktā, Karālī, Caṇḍākṣī, Mahocchuṣmā) who surround the central Kapālīśa Bhairava at Prayāga are then to be worshipped. This is done by feeding them “cow’s blood and

[[P853]] flesh (palala) with wine and some fermenting agent (surākiṇva),” after which there is “food offering (nivedayet),” according to the rule (yathānyāyaṃ).¹⁸⁰ Under normal circumstances, here the naivedya is comprised of “wine (surā), rum (śīdhu), liquor. . . [meat], raw and cooked. . . of goats and buffaloes, the flesh of fish. . . and well-cooked mung beans.”¹⁸¹ Much as we find in Vajrayāna rituals, especially those associated with the Yoga Tantras, the maṇḍala is then illuminated by eight lamps made of “human skulls and filled with human fat” arranged in the cardinal and intermediate directions.

[[P853]] At this point in the Brahmayāmala’s ritual system point, the practitioner, his body empowered by the avadhūtā mantras, steps into the center of the field. Becoming Bhairava, he makes a bali offering—it is entirely unclear whether the victim should always be an animal or is sometimes human—to the four goddesses. Entering into the victim’s body by means of parakāyapraveśa, the Kāpālika snatches up the five elements (pañcabhūta) and extracts them from the victim. Returning to his own body, these he now feeds to the goddesses, with Raktā receiving the blood, Karālī the meat, Caṇḍākṣī the skin, and Mahocchuṣmā the marrow, and Bhairava himself the fat. The ritualist then ventures out from the āgāra and goes to worship the fire. Though in this case the blood offering belongs to a surrogate, elsewhere in the related ritual corpus, for example the Siddhayogeśvarīmata, it is the sādhaka himself who cuts the left side of his body—especially the left arm—making ārgha to the goddess using his own blood. In the case of the great yāga (mahāyāga), however, following the general ritual, another step is added that is of much interest for our analysis. Here, once the pantheon has been fed, a noxious mix called caru, made up of all the nasty things used in the rite, is now prepared to be offered as naivedya to all the gods and goddesses. Whatever is not offered to other beings is [[P854]] brought out of the āgāra and into the area where fire is prepared where it is immolated as food for the yoginīs. During this time, “the teacher (ācārya), together with the pupils, should eat the supreme Caru, mixed with urine. . . . He should eat the divine Caru if he strives for powers (siddhi) for himself. . . . Then he should perform fire-offerings and make the Caru. . . Meditating on [the state of] freedom from conventional practices. . . the Sādhaka should join with Him [i.e. Bhairava]. When he has been united [with Him], he should eat the Caru.”¹⁸² The modification of this ritual ectype prescribed for the generic sādhaka contributes further pertinent details. For here, twice a day as part of regular ritual, the adept is supposed to worship a vessel full of wine, contained within a skull or conch shell.

[[P854]] When the underlying symbolism of ritual installation as sexual union about which the Piṅgalāmata is so emphatic is taken into account, an even closer match is to be found in the rites of the sādhaka called the tālaka.

The Master of Rituals should proceed to the sanctuary (devāgāra). He should worship the two door-keepers, the two rivers and the bull, Vighneśa. . . Kṣetrapāla, and the Cremation Grounds, the Kula-vidyā, the Yoginīs, the Pūtanās etc. Then the Mantra Master should worship the Heroes (vīra), and Śivā, and Mārjāri (śivamārjāri), the Ulūka-owl and Piṅgalā. . . one by one. He should praise the Rudras and the lineage of gurus properly. . . .

[In the case of the procedure for those seeking supreme power,] he should enter the sanctuary (devāgāra) by the aforementioned method. Naked, his hair dishevelled, his mantric installation rituals (nyāsa) definitively performed, he should sit down on the Praṇava-throne after [the performance of the worship] of the pantheon in his heart. . . .

Facing south, he should install a small seat. He should construct a throne (āsana) there with mantras as the next step. The Mantra Master should make the Śakti [his human consort] sit down on the throne, O Mahādevī. The excellent Sādhaka should purify her Pīṭha [i.e. her genitalia]. . . . He should install his own pantheon there [i.e. on her genitalia] after the throne etc. [has been visualized there]. He should kiss and embrace her, even [kiss her] Pīṭha. . . .

He should insert his penis after the throne etc. [has been constructed for her]. He should then unite the all-pervading with flowers, perfumes etc. He should then stimulate (kṣobhayitvā) the Śakti, collecting the fluids arising from her. He should consume [some of] the fluids (dravya) turning them into the guest offering (argha). He should offer it. . . . Then the Mantrin should besprinkle the materials. . . with water purified by the [sexual] fluids (dravya). He should construct a small maṇḍala, O Goddess, with sandal-powder etc. [and] wine [and] distilled spirits mixed with cow-dung or menstrual blood that has been discharged previously. Śiva’s vase [should be] filled with wine properly, or with water purified by fluids, my dear. . . . Then, he should worship the pantheon on lotuses (padmayāga) following the rules.

The Mantrin should then go to the fire site (agnyāgāra) [and] present libations. . . show mudrās, give guest-offerings. . . and present the food offerings (naivedya). . . Laḍḍukā cakes. . . and [other kinds of] foods made in a saucepan, as well as fragrant meat and fermented spirituous liquors. He should then show mudrās after the [worship of] the pantheon in his heart. . . . The Mantra Master. . . should present guest offerings. . . .

Then he should prostrate himself, holding the conch[/skull] as he likes, and after he has received permission [from the guru]. he should move [the beads on] his rosary. The Mantra Master should move [the beads of the rosary], perform [the worship of the pantheon] in his heart, and then go in front of the Pīṭha [throne/genitalia] of the Śakti who is abiding with him. . . .

The Sādhaka should kiss and embrace her, and insert his penis there [in her vagina]. He should cleanse that place as his next step, [and perform] pantheon-worship in the heart. The excellent Sādhaka, the Mantrin, should then place it in his heart by method of samādhi, [then place it] in the centre of bindu constructed with the pantheon etc. Beholding the whole pantheon, his heart offered to Bhairava, he should do recitation.¹⁸³

[[P856]] Though the Piṅgalāmata’s sources are likely later scriptures within the tradition that offer their own refinements, it would seem that much of what is most inexplicable about the logic of our text’s pratiṣṭhā rituals can be accounted for when we recognize that their structure is indebted to this more archaic register of praxis. Before there were wider publics sharing space with the ritualists, the sādhakas simply fed their retinue, the gods, and the yoginīs. Before there were two shrines, the garbhagṛha and the āgāra, between which the ritualist and his retinue ran back and forth inexplicably each time having to manage the clandestine transport of vessel full of liquor and meat, there was only the agnyāgāra and the temporary devāgāra. Positioned in close proximity to each other, the sādhaka would complete his rituals within the sanctuary and then deposit whatever remained of transgressive substances into the awaiting fire. When liṅga and yoni were not made of inexhaustible stone penetrating inexhaustible stone and the transfer of energies and fluids between the spaces sometimes incorporated human discharges, ritual had to be a multiday affair to accommodate the human refractory period and the biological reality of a limited daily production of the sacred substances. It is this persistent homology that also explains the otherwise rather bizarre, repeated insistence in our text on the extraction of energies and stuff out of the liṅga, out of the pātra, and their repeated insertion into the pīṭha and the top liṅga within the garbhagṛha. As for the Piṅgalāmata’s discourse on nirmālya, in part this may well be a carryover from the Brahmayāmala’s chapter on uchuṣma vrata—also called the dirty observance (maline vrate), where the wearing and use of elements offered to the god in ritual forms part of a delimited vow and is justified, much in the same spirit we saw in the Śivadharma, by the claim that adepts belonging to the caste of the gods (devajāti) should not reject the nirmālya when it is offered to them.

[[P857]] Our Piṅgalāmata’s indebtedness to even older strains within the Atimārga mediated through the cult of the goddess Vāgeśvarī and the lord called Caṇḍeśvara become ever more readily apparent as one begins to look under surface. Since the mid 1990s, we have seen a series of lively exchanges within the philological study of the Śaiva Tantras exploring the curious place which the god Caṇḍeśvara occupies within Śaiva discourse.¹⁸⁴ Over the course of this conversation, what began as essentially a study of iconography aimed at securing precise identifications of particular early images has evolved into a consideration of the heterogeneity of early Śaiva communities and their doctrine, particularly lost sub-branches within the Atimārga. Initially, scholarship had assumed that Caṇḍeśvara was solely a somewhat minor south Indian Saiddhāntika deity. Confined to a small shrine to the northeast of the temple where he resided in a dwarf liṅga, his ritual role was simply to receive and consume the nirmālya at the end of festivals or pūjā. It was only once serious textual work on early Pāśupata traditions resulted in the discomforting discovery that Lakulīśa/Lāguḍa, typically imagined as the iconic instantiation of Pāśūpata values, is actually absent from most of our sources and that in reality many of the early images scholars had been labelling Lakulīśa in fact depict Caṇḍa, whose iconography the Pāśupata teacher would later appropriate, that the importance of reassessing Caṇḍeśvara’s changing role in this religious imaginary began to become clear. Diwakar Acharya appears to have been the first to propose that Caṇḍeśvara’s humble status in south Indian circles occludes a more illustrious past. He writes:

[[P858]]

“Caṇḍa was a pre-Lakulīśa deity accepted in all schools of the Pāśupatas. Afterwards he was downgraded to a minor deity but remained in Śaiva temples as one of Śiva’s gaṇas. According to the Śivopaniṣad and Pratiṣṭhālakṣaṇasārasamuccaya, it is necessary to erect shrine of Caṇḍeśvara of the same size as the inner sanctum of the main temple and install an image of the deity alongside almost each and every public temple of Śiva. This phenomenon can be taken as an attempt of Saiddhāntikas to subjugate the supreme deity of the Pāśupatas in the subsequent phase of Śaivism.¹⁸⁵

[[P858]] In a piece where he reevaluates a famous image identified as Lakulīśa and his disciples now housed at the British Museum as in fact representing Caṇḍeśvara, Peter Bisschop draws our attention to additional textual and material cultural evidence related to the early roots of the deity. Significantly, these include two images in Bādāmi Caḷukya ritual sites at Mahakuta and Pattadakal. Bisschop suggests that prior to the composition of the Śivadharma, in which Caṇḍeśvara begins to be transmuted not into the eater of nirmālya but rather into the punisher of transgressions of the samaya of Śaivas, “Caṇḍeśa is in fact Śiva, or, as some Śaiva Siddhānta texts have it, the wrathful form of the lord.”¹⁸⁶ In both the image at the British Museum and the one on the side of the main temple of Bādami Caḷukyas¹⁸⁷ at Pattadakal, Caṇḍeśvara is in fact standing on a large preta. Though the arms of the another image at Mahakuta, another early Bādāmi Caḷukya site, have been broken in a manner that limits our analysis of iconography, in the image from the British Museum, Bisschop identifies the remains of what he suggests is either an axe (paraśu) or chisel (ṭaṅka), the latter being serviceable as a weapon but primarily serving as the main implement used by śilpins working with stone.[^859_832] Rather compellingly, Diwakar Acharya has identified images of Caṇḍeśa identified preserved in the Paśupatinātha complex in Nepal—some of which can sadly be neither photographed nor viewed directly by Westerners—in which Caṇḍeśvara’s ṭaṅka is unambiguously represented as an artisan’s chisel. In the case of the most important of these images, the Chatracaṇḍeśvara, though the extant image is a later replica, the back of the column preserves a seventh-century inscription in which Pāśupata teachers praise Caṇḍeśvara as “the supreme deity of the universe (jagad idaṃ akhilaṃ yo ’sṛjat).”¹⁸⁸ While remaining somewhat skeptical of Acharya’s interpretation of the Nepalese Chatracaṇḍeśvara in particular as providing the canonical model for later representations of the god, Goodall himself directs us to a number of additional

[[P860]] examples in Śaiva literature of Caṇḍeśa being addressed as the supreme deity. In particular, Goodall’s translation of the pertinent passages in the Kriyā section of the Mataṅgapārameśvara as well as his insightful analysis, is worth quoting in full:

“Mataṅga spoke: At the end of the worship of Śakti, is there or is there not another worship? What were the mantras of Caṇḍīśa raised for, o Lord? The Lord spoke: Not only have the mantras of Caṇḍīśa been raised earlier, o sage, but his maṇḍala, which has the form of a full (!) moon, has also been described. After inserting Caṇḍīśa who holds the axe [chisel], into that [maṇḍala], together with his body-part-mantras, one should invariably worship him at the end of the [other] worship using all white offerings. He should be adorned as far as one is able, in accordance with his power. The supreme Lord Caṇḍīśa, when pleased, and when attracted by this [following] hymn in such a way as to become physically present, grants all results that may be in his heart to the sādhaka of infinite radiance who is full of devotion: “Veneration to you, Lord of past and future! Veneration to you who are Śiva’s embodiment, to you whose form is great and fierce, to you who are Lord of the Universe, Supreme, Rudra, to you whose strength is unmeasurable, to you who are the son of Pārvatī, to you who contain power, to you who are fierce (caṇḍāya), griefless, great, to you who hold an axe [ṭaṅka] in your hand, to you who hold a staff, to you who have beautifully braided hair (sukapardine)! Veneration to you have are [sic] the universe! Veneration to you who are have [sic] a body of fire! Veneration to you Śarvaśarva, who are the cause of the universe!” Having praised the boon-giving, fierce-formed Lord Caṇḍīśa in this way, after a prostration with eight parts [of the body touching the ground], one should satiate [him by making offerings] in the fire and cause him to forgive [shortcomings].”

The above passage is somewhat anomalous in several respects—the stipulation of a round maṇḍala (rather than a crescent one), the emphasis on white offerings (cf. Mataṅga kriyāpāda 1:57–8), the absence of any mention of nirmālya, his bearing both axe and staff (52cd), his being Śiva in form (50d), creator of the universe (53cd) and yet at the same time son of Pārvatī (51d), his being mentioned explicitly only at the end of the initiation involving the yāga of Śakti (which refers in fact to the worship of the VYOMAVYĀPIMANTRA in the navanābhamaṇḍala) and not at the end of the other varieties of initiation—but I have cited it here not for its anomalies concerning ritual context, iconography and mythology, but rather for the implications that it contains that Caṇḍeśa is Śiva, even if the implications are at once contradicted.¹⁸⁹

[[P861]] Though he makes no mention of this fact, the nature of the sources upon which Goodall is drawing, namely, the Mataṅgapārameśvara, a decontextualized fragment from our own Piṅgalāmata, a passage from the Mayasaṃgraha, and the Pauṣkarapārameśvara rather tellingly replicate the same discursive pattern we reconstructed at the beginning of this chapter, wherein the texts in question originated as part of a shared Kāruka canon with an interrelated worldview.

In this range of early textual sources where Caṇḍeśa is positioned, even if only temporarily, as the supreme deity, his veneration tends to travel in tandem with the vyomavyāpin mantra, a relationship between the supreme god and the goddess Vāgeśī or Vāgeśvarī, as well as a thematic concern with the eradicating or transcending of ritual impurity. It is thus scarcely a coincidence that in all but the oldest of sources, Caṇḍeśvara bears the chisel (ṭaṅka) of a stone mason or śilpin. In fact, it seems quite plausible that this iconographic feature directly reflects his adoption, or his point of origin, at some point in remote antiquity, as the central deity of the artisans—the Kārukas, who, at least by the time we encounter them in the textual record, act under the direction of their Lākula masters. In the medieval Deccan, this social and conceptual formulation would be translated into the relation between the pañcavarṇika householder sādhaka and his Pañcācārya Kālamukha guru. It is for this reason, as we have seen time and again—most extensively in the Piṅgalāmata itself—that in texts which bear traces of the Prāmaṇa śāstras, such agents are instructed to infuse the otherwise inert images of an emerging temple culture with vitality through the installation of Caṇḍeśvara [[P862]] and his śakti’s powers into the liṅga or image, a task enacted through the use of the caṇḍabrahmamantras as well as the vyomavyāpin.¹⁹⁰

[[P862]] Indeed, apart from the specifics of the practice of the śilpin, many of the elements we have just discussed are already present in what is the perhaps the earliest extended discussion of Caṇḍeśa as a deity. Rather surprisingly, the passages in question are found in the earliest surviving work ascribed to the Śaiva Siddhānta, where they integrated into the fifth-century Niśvāsamūlasūtra’s account of the procedure that grants liberation.¹⁹¹ Some of the direct context for these passages we have already seen before while recovering and then historicizing the discursive space once occupied by the Lākulas and Kārukas in the first division of the present chapter. There we explored, briefly, how the adept uses the five brahmamantras and the ritual deployment of the triad of śaktis (5.3–4) to yoke himself to different planar realities and ascend upward within the impure realms. Through the use of the hūṃkāra conjoined with phaṭ, passing through the cosmic egg of Brahmā, in Purāṇic cosmology, the outermost boundary of existence, the adept travels into the realms aligned with the Kārukas, here called the ṛṣikulas (5.8–5.13).¹⁹² Finally, aligned with the ṛṣikula, which is conjoined with the madamoha¹⁹³, he reaches the boundary between the pure and impure worlds. At this point, reborn in the womb

[[P863]] of the goddess Vāgeśvarī, he is emitted in the form of the praṇava mantra into the realm of the eight Pramāṇas of the Lākulas.¹⁹⁴

[[P863]] When he rises the next day, having been granted the capacity to achieve liberation, the adept, under the guidance of his guru, directs his worship directly to Caṇḍīśa, who again is venerated using the full set of five mantras usually reserved for a supreme deity.¹⁹⁵ In this context, the best of maṇḍalas (maṇḍalottama) is created for the god and then eight-hundred homa oblations are offered into the fire. The ācārya then addresses the deity, “Please forgive, O lord (vibho), (5.24),” and it is proclaimed that the sādhaka will never be “smeared” by the eight flaws pertaining to the samaya (5.24). At the ritual’s end, we learn that the homa that has been performed is for the purpose of purifying the adept’s existing flaws (doṣaviśuddhārthaṃ) and more importantly, a disspensationalist logic is invoked suggesting that “he who worships Caṇḍīśa will be forgiven preemptively (pūrvaṃ) [for what would otherwise be transgressions]” (5.25).” With the words “once [the body] is burnt by initiation, they [doṣas or pāśas] do not rise again; once the body has fallen away, he [the adept] goes to Śiva” (5.26), the chapter then abruptly concludes.

[[P864]] Chapter 6 of the Niśvāsa Mūlasūtra, which immediately follows this section, introduces us for the first time to key components in the core pantheon and mantra system of the Śaiva Siddhānta. This has been taken by its editors and translators as indicative of treating the closing portion of chapter 5—despite the exclusive association our text has made between Caṇḍīśa and the rite for liberation, which eliminates all past and future sin—as largely legible in terms of a final expiatory offering to Caṇḍīśa as the guardian of the cult who enforces its norms. The text itself, however, nowhere makes such an understanding explicit and it is doubtful that one would have arrived at it free from the influence of later forms of Siddhānta. In fact, even in chapter 6, Caṇḍanātha continues to be consistently identified quite simply as the Lord (caṇḍanātha devadevasya kīrtitam, 6.23). Furthermore, the deity who is paired with Vāgeśvarī rather strangely is juxtaposed not with his usual functions in later Śaiva Siddhānta discourse—such as receiving nirmālya—but rather with the office of supreme ruler of the universe.¹⁹⁶ In fact, the idiom in which he is characterized represents a kind of non-Mīmāṃsā inflected Vedānta, for the Niśvāsa imagines the deity as “the supreme reality, the unutterable supreme Śiva, the supreme Brahman, the supreme imperishable.” And very much unlike in Siddhānta sources, we are told that “the one who knows [this principle],” which is the true nature of the Lord, “is not stained by stealing gold or other things, by eating the flesh of the cow or by slaying a thousand brahmans,”¹⁹⁷ and the text goes on to celebrate (7.11–14) the

[[P865]] supernatural powers, many of them rather aggressive and both inclusive of and extending beyond the classical eight siddhis, that the adept is sure to obtain. Once again, this sensibility at work is much closer to that of the Jayadarathayāmala than it is the sort of ethos we would expect in the Siddhānta. This is a value system entirely alignment with an older ontology that questions the very idea of ritual purity.

In providing us with further examples where Caṇḍeśa is treated as a central deity Goodall concludes his analysis by turning to the Pauṣkarapārameśvara. In this fragmentary and unedited work, the second oldest Śaiva scripture after the Niśvāsa, in keeping with the discursive pattern with which we are now so familiar, as Goodall informs us, Caṇḍa is again assigned his own set of pañcabrahma mantras, here called the caṇḍabrahma mantras. Here also, much as we find in the Piṅgalāmata, the ritual ends with the installation of Caṇḍa’s version of the īśāna mantra into the head of the liṅga. The Pauṣkārapārameśvara has been neither published nor edited—and it is likely that once this task has been completed many further connections will emerge enriching our knowledge. In light of this rather limited reception history, it is astounding that the only other two passages in the text to which I have access are both pertinent to our analysis. The first of these, which seems to be evident from the beginning of the text, is the Pauṣkara’s use of the vyomavyāpin mantra, which it equates with the supreme deity as well as its invocation of the supreme reality as Dhruva, for as Alexis Sanderson has demonstrated, this is precisely the name of god that later Tantric doxographies assign to the supreme god of the Lākulas.¹⁹⁸ The other is a passage preserved in the Śākta

[[P866]] paddhati of the Kashmiri Takṣakavarta, the Nityādisaṅgraha, the very same source that transmits the Śrīkaṇṭhīyasaṃhitā discovered by Alexis Sanderson. In Alexis Sanderson’s translation, presented in passing in his incomparable the Śaiva Age, this reads as follows:

‘There is only one caste, that of human beings’.‘No caste has been enjoined with respect to them, nor colour such as white. All are born from sexual union and the souls [of all] are equal. With the eye of knowledge Śiva is seen pervading all of them. If [they declare that] caste is relevant then this is the prattling of men whose understanding is destroyed by ignorance, who are under the sway of false teachings.¹⁹⁹

[[P866]] Succinctly, preserved across the apparent taxonomic divide of Śaiva Siddhānta Āgama on the one hand and Bhairava Tantras descending from the Picumata on the other, we have here a corpus of texts that not only share the sort of cosmological features we explored in the beginning of this chapter, but which are also bound together by uncanny doctrinal commonalities. And it is surely no accident that virtually all of this canon—even the Jayadarathayāmala itself—explicitly and repeatedly grounds itself in the social vision of the Śivadharmaśāstra. Within such a framework, the Bhairava Siddhānta and Śāktas are elevated and it is the Brāhmaṇas themselves who are the real “impure” paśus. All of these details in turn align rather closely with the Lākula/Kālamukha cultural milieu that from around the ninth to middle of the thirteenth century dominated the entire Deccan. Often, but not always, this ethos was animated by either a passive or pointed setting aside of Brāhmaṇical normativity, which seems to have been viewed as part and parcel of a parallel world that was itself akin to saṃsāra.

[[P867]] Such a dynamic is most vividly realized—perhaps unsurprisingly—in the Caryāpāda of the Mataṅgapārameśvara’s fifth chapter, which prefaces the Lākula’s Rudra vow with which the text all but concludes.²⁰⁰ It is here that this tradition—which as we have seen is deeply aligned with the cult of Caṇḍeśvara, who oversees one of its three forms of initiation with Vāgeśvarī superintending over one of the others—speaks of the bifurcation of reality not only in cosmic but in social terms. There, we learn that in this world, action is divided into the dark (asita), the light (sita), and the mixed (sitāsita), and that each modality pertains to a

[[P867]] particular level of reality.²⁰¹ Uncontroversially, the realm of darkness is defined by the actions of actors who steal and inflict harm (hiṃsācauryādikaṃ), and in between the polar extremes, we find none other than the ritual acts contained within the Veda (vedādyantargaṃ), which are said to be a mixture of the dark and the light (sitāsitam). It is in regard to what our text labels as the defining characteristics of the realm of the light that the work deviates most from our expectations, for when the Mataṅgapārameśvara reaches for what defines the realm of the light (sita)—emblematic of goodness—is none other than the making of wells and step wells, dance and the singing of songs (vāpīkūpataḍāgādyaṃ)—in other words, the very activities associated with the social niche occupied by śilpins and Kārukas. Such light action, in turn, is identified with the spiritual (sitaṃ ādhyātmikam). While actions of dark or mixed nature, carried out by agents called paśus, can at best connect one to the planar realms of the gods ruled by Indra, in contrast, “that which is the Supreme brahman” is achieved by one who bears the liṅga through the use of the brahmavidyās extracted from the Vedāntadarśana.²⁰² Such people who bear the liṅga, we are told, master the three modes of knowing—the knowledge of Vedic sentences, proper reasoning (yukti), and statements empowered by the Lord’s command—each of which is animated by its own discrete logic. However, it is through the force of God’s command—the most powerful source of knowledge—the Mataṅga teaches, that not only a Śūdra but even a mleccha is brought to dwell in the pure realm and engage in

[[P868]] pure action. Tossed into the wombs of Vāgeśvarī, such as person is reborn. Reinscribed with Śaiva saṃskāras, he has come to bear the perfected body of Śiva.

Given its many valorizations of the ethos of crafting and its associated pantheon, the Mataṅgapārameśvara’s specific invocation here of the Śūdra, and not the rhetorically more evocative outcaste, is likely no accident. This is indeed the usual social location to which orthoprax discourse would assign the śilpins and their gurus, which pointedly falls outside of the scope of possible access to Vaidika knowledge. In contrast, the Mataṅga—at least one layer of the text—seems to be not so subtly intent on reframing those who do the deeds of light as the proper custodians of Vedāntic knowledge, belonging to a hyper learned class that is also engaged in the execution of public works projects. And indeed, such a sensibility is entirely aligned not only with the general currents of the Lākula inscriptional corpus in the Deccan—which paint a consistent picture of the Kālamukhācārya as a polymath savant who has mastered all the known fields of Brāhmaṇical knowledge without ever alluding to these teacher’s caste and gotra identities, but also with the vernacular memory of such traditions.

[[P869]] Indeed, in his masterful study of the thirteenth-century Ragaḷĕgaḷu of the Kannadiga śivabhakta poet Harihara, Gil Ben-Herut offers us a glimpse at a tale that right down to the name of its antagonist, Kallayya—a clear evocation of a Kālamukha name like Kaḷēśvara—and his profession—that of artisan goldsmith—offers a perfect narrativization of the conceptual and social dynamics we have just uncovered. Kallayya, we learn, was born in city where he never encountered non-Śaivas—in other words, in a śivapura—and hated being in their company, a state of affairs that continued until he decided that it was up to him to go challenge rival communities on their own terms. Eventually, however, as Ben Herut’s summarizes:

Kallayya, a non-Brahmin artisan, masters Brahmanical scripture and wins theological debates, not only against the paradigmatic, traditional, non-Brahmin “others”—atheists (Lōkāyatas), Buddhists (Bauddhas), and materialists (Cārvākas)—but also against Brahmins. In this offhanded manner, Harihara redefines Brahminical knowledge: not only is its learning open to artisans, traditionally placed at the bottom of the Brahminical social scheme, but, in addition, the theological superiority provided by this kind of knowledge is used by the non-Brahmin Śaivas to outperform non-Śaiva Brahmins, right in their own scripture-based territory.²⁰³

[[P870]] While in Ben Herut’s representation of Harihara’s story, much of this is ascribed to the poetic imagination of the author, or at least as some Kannadiga cultural innovation, the major episode which he provides us with, which ends the Ragaḷĕ—in which the artisan community challenge the ritual purity of Brāhmaṇas—is instead suggestive that what we are dealing with is a narrativization of a much older social normativity rooted in the logic of radical differentiation of domains, which as we have seen effectively ordered the medieval Deccan in general and the Kuntaladēśa in particular.²⁰⁴ Indeed when Harihara from thirteenth century Hampi tells the tales of the śivabhaktas of prior days, one of the figures in whom he is deeply invested, Kŏṇḍaguḷi Kēśirāja, is represented as the chief minister of a Kalyāṇa Cāḷukya king who seems to be identified with Vikrāmaditya.²⁰⁵ It is thus no accident that when the present work has identified additions to Goodall’s catalog of representations of places in Śaiva sources

[[P871]] where Caṇḍeśvara is represented as the supreme deity, apart from the Piṅgalāmata, the sources in question belong to the eleventh or twelfth centuries and are situated firmly within the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukya world.

Our first example is found in Bilhaṇa’s Mahākāvya, the Vikramāṅkadevacarita and in fact concerns the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukya king Āvahamalla himself, Vikramāditya VI’s father.²⁰⁶ As we discover in the fourth sarga of this poem, while his son Vikramāditya VI is off performing his digijaya by defeating the armies of enemy kings and raiding their treasuries, the Cāḷukya emperor suddenly falls ill. Declaring himself one whose task have been completed (kṛtakṛtya), the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukya decides to celebrate a samārohaṇa utsāva in the city of Śiva (girijānāthanagare). For the sake of benefiting others (upakārāya) in service to the lord Śrīkaṇṭha, the king declares he will abandon his body (kāya). He gives away his possessions (tyāgavrata) and then descends into the Tuṅgabhadrā river, an activity that apparently took place in the town of Kuruvatti. Entering the water up to his neck, before disappearing into the depths, the poem tells us that having bathed (snātvā), the king becomes one who is entirely intent on the pair of feet of the lord Caṇḍīśa (caṇḍīśacaraṇadvandvacintāparo ’bhavat).

[[P872]] Kuruvatti, Āvahamalla funerary portrait, with queens or attendants (near life-size image).

[[P873]] Indeed, we actually have proof in the form of material culture that the worship of Caṇḍeśa/Caṇḍīśa among the Kalyāṇi Cāḷukyas bore a family resemblance to the sort of procedures outlined in the Piṅgalāmata. Much as our text prescribes the installation of “a black form, very radiant with four hands,” the Kalyāṇi capital city now called Narayanpur preserves a shrine in the vicinity of the main temple that would have been frequented by the Cāḷukya kings on a daily basis. Though the building itself is a modern reconstruction, it contains within it just such a visual representation. On the top of the image sits the pātra containing the goddess. Below it carved out of black stone and wearing a sacred thread made of a snake sits a peaceful one headed form of Caṇḍeśvara.

[[P874]] Narayanpur, Kalyana, Karnataka. Image of Caṇḍeśvara and the goddess as vessel.

[[P874]] As for the second textual source, we find it in a by now rather familiar place, for in fact the veneration of Caṇḍeśvara as the supreme lord of the universe is the main focus of the initial Sanskrit maṅgala verses that prefaces the long inscription at Kukkunur that we explored in chapter 4. As you will remember, this is a text that praises the goddess, Jyēṣṭhā, who is secretly the Trika’s Siddhayogeśvarī. And yet, it is addressed to the Kālamukha pratiṣṭhāpanācārya Kaḷēśvara, an Atimārga Lākula who is nevertheless primarily making using of Śākta Tantras and venerating Mantramārga deities.²⁰⁷ In short, the inscription instantiates the fusion of old and new canons that we have been exploring throughout this chapter. The presence of this invocation at the outset of such an important document, dedicated to a Kālamukha guru who began his career overseeing the temple of the goldsmiths, provides us with virtually unambiguous evidence that figures like Kaḷēśvara and his disciples would have practiced as part of their highly hybridized devotional and ritual systems a cult of worship centered on the veneration of Caṇḍeśvara, incorporative of the sort of materials we have found in the Piṅgalāmata but also plausibly rooted in other lost Kāruka scriptures. It is thus highly likely that other figures within this same extended associational-patronage network—where sociality is defined by the special relationship of Kālamukha and śilpin—would have held similar Caṇḍeśvara related commitments. And while Kukkunur, for reasons we will explore in the

[[P875]] ninth chapter, is the place where such traditions have been jarringly interrupted, Shirshangi, which as we have seen was rhetorically and institutionally participating in a similar network, is still an active artisan center of worship. And at Shirshangi—as well as the sacred landscape in which it is now embedded—the multifaceted Śākta past of the Deccan’s artisans, including their clandestine association with a supreme god who bears an axe or chisel and repudiates social normativity, remains very much a living tradition.

Poster: Left to right, Sirshangi Kālikā, the goddess Gāyatrī, and the Viśvakarman sage Munīśvara.

[[P875]] Though her public worship is now mediated through a layer of Śrīvidyā style upāsanā, at Shirshangi the goddess—abiding in her original mūrti—is openly revered as at once Kālikā and as Vāgeśvarī. The local story runs that in the early modern period, this originally ferocious deity who fed upon human offerings was in fact tamed by a Viśvakarman siddha yogin sometimes called [[P876]] Munīśvara, popular images of whom are scattered about the town and who is instantly recognizable on account of his iconic axe and unusual pot which is certainly not a water vessel.

Popular image of Munīśvara showing Islamic and Śaiva features on album cover.

[[P876]] As will soon become clear, Munīśvara represents a fusion of a likely quasi-historical early modern Viśvakarman siddha who plausibly also held Sufi commitments with traces of an archaic Caṇḍeśvara cult. Liturgically, however, it is transparent that in practice this Viśvakarman siddha, in his identity as Caṇḍeśvara, relates to the goddess as her consort, and that their relationship is suffused with ritual traces of the older Śākta sensibilities we have spent this chapter exploring. For in fact, as the pūjāri at Tintani worships the samādhi, the name and the mantras he intones belong to the worship of Caṇḍeśvara.

[[P877]] As Jan Brouwer, whose preliminary study of the site’s festival traditions is the only work carried out to date, has documented,²⁰⁸ at Shirshangi, the main festival associated with the goddess falls on the new moon in the month of Phalguna. During this day, a kalaśa is prepared, which after the processional is presented before the goddess. This vessel, presumably full of some unknown liquid, has been infused with the mantras of the axe/chisel bearing Viśvakarman siddha Munīśvara. As the sun rises, the pūjāri prepares nine balls of rice (piṇḍa), obvious ritual substitutes for clumps of meat. As we shall see, these correspond to nine ritual agents—called puruvants. In a prior ritual, this hereditary class of low caste adepts were dedicated to Caṇḍeśvara at his shrine at Tintani, where, as we will see, they perform a range of ritual functions during festivals. Around the new moon of Phalguna, however, the puruvants travel to Shirshangi from Caṇḍeśvara’s samādhi. Especially for the occasion, the puruvants collect nine swords, which are then presented to the goddess. While the adepts stand on the bali pīṭha, the nine piṇḍas are thrown into the air. As Brouwer tells us, as late as the 1980s, the Viśvakarmans still said, “It was believed that, formerly, the nine bachelors chopped off their own heads. One of them used to fall on the bhuta-pitha [bali pīṭha] here while the remaining eight heads rejoined their bodies after being sprinkled with sacred water [tīrtha].”²⁰⁹ For Brouwer’s informants, however such practices were a distant memory, for in the lived experience of the members of the community, what actually takes place is that “the nine. . . join the priest. . . in Kāli’s shrine for worship, which is followed by the cooking of the new rice and wheat. The day ends with mass feeding (prashta) of rice (anna) and sweetened wheat ²¹⁰[paishya].” On the fifth day of the festival, most likely echoing distantly the liturgy of the Picumata Brahmayāmala itself, on the floor inside of the goddess’s own shrine, nine more rice balls are placed in a circle corresponding to the eight directions—and the eight cremation grounds—with the one holding the deity itself being installed in the center.

[[P878]] While further fieldwork at Shirshangi during the festival season would surely shed more light on the particular parallels as they persist in modern discourse, virtually all of the discursive production surrounding this tradition—most of which is focused not on the goddess herself but rather on the Viśvakarman siddha, gestures in similar directions. Though the intricate heavily entextualized narrative traditions connected with Munīśvara will have to await further study, for the moment, several episodes in the popular digests of his Purāṇa deserve to be highlighted, for these suggest places where the Viśvakarman siddha carries forward Caṇḍeśvara’s patrimony. Thus, when he visits Benares, supposedly his hometown, just like Caṇḍeśvara, Munīśvara consumes all of the food during a ritual offering. In this case, the king has just offered a community of Vaiṣṇava Brāhmaṇas food, but before they can begin eating, everything is consumed by Munīśvara. Munīśvara then proceeds to show his dominance by invoking the god Viṣṇu and directing him to clean up the dirty remnants of the Brāhmaṇa’s temple. Journeying to Kalyana, Munīśvara then teaches the Liṅgāyats how to control the ferocious Vīrabhadra, whom previously they could not control, in the process teaching them about the dharma of the Viśvakarmans. Finally, in the last stage of his life, after an aborted trial where his body begins to merge into a black rock, the very substance out of which Caṇḍeśvara images were made, Munīśvara arrives at the place where he will take samādhi, gives away his axe, designating that it is to be worshipped alongside the tools of the [[P879]] Viśvakarmans—especially the chisel—and then disappears into a cave where he is said to merge with the gods.

As the extraordinary Mohit Kaycee has been documenting, under the more vernacular identity of Mōnappa,²¹¹ this same Viśvakarman siddha also participates in a shared religious ecology comprised of early-modern Deccani Dalit saints largely unknown to the Western academy. Each of these figures is practically defined by their antinomian consumption of meat, wine, and marijuana on the one hand and an ambiguous embrace of Sufi identity and idiom on the other. Mōnappa in particular, remembered as both poet and miracle worker, maintains an enormous following among what are essentially a range of low-caste Dalit Śākta communities found throughout the Deccan. As Kaycee has shown, prior to the “rediscovery” of what is now the core canon of Liṅgayāt vacanas, it was in fact the verses ascribed to Mōnappa and his disciples that represented the first exemplars of vacana to enter into print and circulate within the colonial sphere. Apart from their linguistic texture, which often experiments with a creole blending of Farsi and Kannada verbal forms, on a thematic level, Mōnappa’s vacanas offer a vituperative condemnation of religious hypocrisy as well as caste and purity norms, as when he declaims, “for those that fall from the cunt, where is their clan—the whole world is born from the womb, no one came out from the asshole.” Often rather unexpectedly, Mōnappa directs his ire not only at Brāhmaṇas, but to the Vīraśaiva followers aligned with Basava, as well as orthodox Muslims—the Sultan of Bijapur is said to have had the saint eviscerated and dismembered only to discover to his horror when he went to examine the body that Mōnappa was still sitting in the corner smoking his hookah.

[[P880]] In fact, it is also within the context of this same five-day festival that the puruvants perform their main ritual duties, which again are vividly linked to the episteme of the Bhairava Siddhānta and its fellow travelers. Brouwer describes the puruvants, whose role entails falling into ecstatic trances during festivals, in the following manner:

The puruvanta is a man with long, often unkempt, hair hanging loose onto his shoulders. The only decoration on his face is a thick nama. . . of vermillion powder. . . applied with the thumb. He wears many rudrakshi (Guazuma tomentosa) necklaces and a colorful shirt. There is a copper buckle with the image Virabhadra on the front of his waist belt. His trousers are loose and colorful. In his right hand he holds a big sword. . . and in his left a bundle of long needles (trisula). Each time the procession halts, he dances and, at the climax of the dance, he pierces his underlip, tongue, cheeks, arms, fingers, stomach, etc. first with small and later in the night with big needles.²¹²

[[P880]]

Puruvants at Tintani, courtesy of Mohit Kaycee.

[[P881]]

Puruvants at Tintani, Courtesy of Mohit Kaycee.

[[P881]] As we can see, much about this comportment gestures towards that of the older sādhaka. Though further study—which is made quite feasible by the hundreds of hours of footage Kaycee has collected, including interviews with ritual actors onsite from across the caste spectrum—is needed to pin down the particulars during the festival at Tintani, it seems it is the puruvants who escort the processional image of Munīśvara. Perhaps most tellingly, on the last days of the festival, it is the puruvants who, while wielding their swords and dancing in circles, gesturing repeatedly to their left side, ritually “stab” themselves again and again as an offering to the goddess and her consort. Though nowadays the actual offering of one’s own blood seems to be confined to a controlled cutting of the tongue which is daubed onto cloth, like the nine sacrificial victims who ultimately are served at—and not for dinner—under the surface lurks a distant homage to the older tradition of Kāpālika argha.

[[P882]]

Puruvants cutting their tongues to make blood offerings. Courtesy of Mohit Kaycee.

[[P882]] Before the chapter draws to a close, it is fitting for us to return to the story with which this section began, what Brouwer calls the tale of the magnetic fort, which earlier we used to introduce the concept of the śivapura through recourse to persistent social imaginary. In labelling this chapter Art and Terror in Śiva’s City, part of what we have been preparing the reader for is the sad denouement of Brouwer’s story. In telling the tale of the magnetic fort where the Viśvakarmans lived in peace, performing their craft and governing themselves, the Viśvakarmans of the twentieth century transmit the memory of a tragedy. In most of the tellings, the Viśvakarman fort is brought down by an act of treason. The Brāhmaṇa Vyāsa, jealous of the wealth, learning, and independence of the artisans, convinced his daughter to seduce the guards to the city, and extract from him the secret strategies that would bring down the city’s defenses. Vyāsa’s daughter brings this information back to her daughter, the defenses of the invincible city of Viśvakarmans are negated, and the “Brāhmaṇical world” emerges victorious. Expelled from their homes, the Viśvakarmans are forced to adopt the guises and livelihoods associated with various different castes—the distinction of right- and left-hand caste communities unknown to the medieval Deccan is born—and so, in many tellings, the story ends. Among certain communities in southern Karnataka, however, the story continues, reaching a very different sort of conclusion. As summarized by Brouwer from a written source, which was actually entered into the evidentiary record in the context of trial in 1818 where Viśvakarmans and Brāhmaṇas contested over justifying their respective rights and privileges, the end of this tale makes it a fitting coda to our own investigation and is thus worth quoting at some length.

[[P883]]

The Viśvakarman Vamsa-sthas, however, changed their natural form, began to follow the customs and manners of the different places in a different guise, just as the Pandavas had disguised themselves when they were in exile, suppressing their false dignity and their real self, adapting the language, customs, and practices of the fifty-six kingdoms and other islands, and have contributed towards the protection of the world.

When the Visvabrahman Vamsa-sthas in the disguise of Desai-settis were selling their goods (made of the panchakrityas) to the kings of the fifty-six kingdoms, it was Vyasa who persuaded the Dharani Maharaj to levy a tax on the Visvabrahmans, and thus brought about dissension between them. They refused to pay the taxes to the kings of the fifty-six kingdoms. The king asked them why they were not paying. They replied that all the kings of the fifty-six kingdoms were carrying on their kingship, because the Visva-brahmans were fulfilling their duties through the panchakrityas. It was immoral to levy tax on them, as the kings were not ruling according to kalajnana or the knowledge of past, present, and future. It was against the Code of Manu to make them pay tax.

Then Vyasa managed to win over the peasants to his side and declared that all those who supported the king were those of the Right Hand (balankey) and all the Visvakarmas those of the Left Hand (edankey). Thereafter, the Dharani Maharaj imprisoned the Visvabrahmans and confiscated their tools.²¹³

[[P884]] Our story has one last act—in fact this where most of the action takes places—but before we let that play out to its dramatic conclusion, it is worthwhile to pause and reflect how this story reads from the perspective of the peculiar intellectual commitments that animate the present work. If for the modern Viśvakarman, this is the tale about the origin of the right- and left-hand caste divisions, the core categories that now order caste relations throughout the Deccan, from our perspective the tale is a testament to a historical memory, confirmed by the historical record, that before the thirteenth or fourteenth century such division did not exist. Again, though it ascribes such prescriptions erroneously to the Laws of Manu where they are not to be found, Viśvakarman historical memory also recollects the logic of the non-Brāhmaṇa—indeed of the Kālamukha—akṣayavṛtti, where the state laid no claim to taxes and was divorced from the profits of craftsmen traditions. The imagined Vyāsa, perhaps a distant echo of another, very real historical Brāhmaṇa who commanded the ear of the king, intervenes and upsets a preexisting social contract understood as upholding dharma. When the artisans refuse to abandon strictures of the old order and resist the authority of the state, they are stripped of their profession and cast out from polite society. As we shall see in the final chapters, all of these details have their counterparts in actual historical circumstances.

The final part of the story, in contrast, though indicative of the persistence of Kāpālika influenced elements at least on the margins of these communities well into the colonial period, seems mostly aspirational.

When Desai Peddanna Arasu heard that Dharani Maharaja had imprisoned the Visvabrahmans and had confiscated their tools with which they performed the panchakrityas, he came along with his chariots, elephants, cavalry and infantry and confronted the army of Dharani Maharaj which immediately took to it heels and ran away into the forest.

This enraged Dharani Maharaja who went to Tvashtrachari—who had been imprisoned by him—and told him that if he did not give his judgement he would behead [[P885]] Tvashtrachari. The latter replied that if he was beheaded, Dharani Maharaja’s head would meet with the worst fate. The king severed the head of Tvashtrachari with the sword he held in his hand. That head prayed in surrender at the Kamakshamma. Kamakshamma took the form of Kali, got enraged and dug the intestines out of the king and garlanded Desai-setti with them who was devoted to her. Then she peeled off the skin of the king and gave it as a blanket to him and blessed the Visvabrahman Vamsa-sthas that their desires would be fulfilled if they prayed to her. Those intestines shine as a garland on the neck of the Desai-settis. The skin of the king became the blanket which was the skin of the enemy. Desai-settis always lift it up from the ground with the help of the toe of their left foot and not by the toe of their right foot or by their hands. This is known to one and all.²¹⁴

[[P885]] Setting aside the rather strange just-so story dimension of the above tale’s denouement, which bizarrely attempts to shoehorn a griping narrative bearing a myriad of implications into a straightforward explanation for why Desai Settis walk with a specific gait, the early modern legacy of the Viśvakarmans was to remain one of defiant resistance to assimilation to Brāhmaṇical norms that the artisans themselves were convinced had never previously governed their forebears in a manner that had concrete real-world implications well into the colonial period.

Preserved in the archives of the British Library, which abound with the discourse of the successors our Śākta-Śaiva artisans, one finds a hand-written copy of a Marathi work entitled the Sacchāstramaṇḍana [sic], which forms but one part of a series of polemical exchanges going back into the nineteenth century between the śilpins and Brāhmaṇas. This work in particular is an exceptionally clever treatise composed by horrified Brāhmaṇas in the service of rebutting upstart artisan claims to twice-born status that contains a long appendix entitled “a condemnation of the Twice-bornness of the Goldsmiths (svarṇakāradvijatvakhaṇḍana).” While the voluminous Saccāstramaṇḍana for the most part offers a rich bricolage of Sanskrit and Marathi, the two brief passages with which we will [[P886]] conclude are in fact in English (ingliśa-itihāsāṃta bahut pramāṇeṃ). Here, reproduced in situ in a fine colonial era Western hand, we are presented with extracts summarizing testimony offered in court (1821) by a Viśvakarman guru named Jugunnath Sunkurset, as well as the dismissive but rather telling comments of the British authority responsible for evaluating the case. In asserting the right of “the ruthakar Sonar caste. . . to the vedoktakaram,” Sunkurset proclaimed:

The Sivagam states that from the five mouths of Siva produced five brahmans called Panchals, viz, Munoo, Maya, Twasta, Shilpee, and Dywadnya. According to the Rudraimul and Skand pooran, Bruhma was the father of petamaha Munoo who was the father of Prajapatee—the latter had eight sons known by the designation of wusoo—one of these named wishwakarma to whom were born five sons having the same names, occupations and rights as those mentioned above Viz, Munoo, Maya, Twasta, Shilpee and Dywadnya .

Agreeably to the order of the Vishwakarma, Brahma assumed the form of Virat and from his mouth was produced Swayambhu Manoo, from which six brahmans and four oop brahmans had their origin. The eldest of the latter, Silpayan, had five sons, the first Manoo, the second Maya, the third Twasta, the fourth Shilpee, and the fifth Dywadnya These five learned the five veds from the five which were produced from Siv’s mouth and their names professions and rights and qualities were the same as those of their teachers. From the deity five were produced a man and a woman who were termed dywadnya goldsmiths. The above four had a pure origin and were authorized to perform the Vedoktakarams and also the six rites called Shatkaram.²¹⁵

[[P887]] While what has been uncovered thus far of Jugunnath Sunkurset’s testimony—which apparently survives intact and in toto in the office of the Bombay Presidency—points to him asserting in court, on the basis of range of sources, a much attenuated claim that Viśvakarmans should merely be allotted the same rights as other twice-borns to perform “Vedic ritual,” some comments from several years later by one of the colonial judges suggests that in practice, Sunkurset laid claim to a much more ambitious position for his community that effectively represented a direct continuation of the Kālamukha-Kāruka compact that made the medieval Deccan. The Sonars or goldsmiths rank is next to the purbhoos in respect to caste. They however assert that they are superior to them, and some even go so far as to arrogate to themselves a position equal to the Brahmans. It is, however, notorious that they are a crafty and an unscrupulopus race, but persevering and patient. The Sonar is as indispensable in the village as the bhut [sic bhaṭṭa] and consequently, no large village is seen without its goldsmith who generally has the best house in the village. . . .

It is said that the Sonars in Bombay under their distinguished leader Jugganath Sunkersett, have upset the old order of things, by declaring they are of a superior caste to the Brahmans and consequently pronounce it defilement to eat with a Brahman. They also have bhuts [sic bhaṭṭas] of their own caste to officiate ceremonies.²¹⁶

[[P887]] Through painstaking textual work with often incorrigible sources, in this chapter, we have begun to recover something of the institutional worlds and professionalization processes that shaped the Śākta-Śaiva artisans who built the medieval Deccan. As we have seen, this was a world governed by very different sorts of dichotomies than the ones our own disciplines assume and all but naturalize. What we would be inclined to think of as quite distinctive discourses, one domain focused on esoterica and ritual, to be pursued within the academic study of religion, and another set of “secular” technical disciplines whose proper venue would be some combination of art history, historical sociology, architecture, economics or the history of engineering, were instead perceived as forming an indivisible unity. They belonged to the realm of arcane knowledge mostly to be mastered by non-Brāhmaṇas. In much the same way, when we reassessed the scriptural resources seemingly eclectically drawn upon by our artisans and their Kālamukha teachers, the discrete categories we use to organize Tantric revelation seemingly on doctrinal grounds as forming schools of thought was revealed to obscure a more [[P888]] archaic form of cohesion that has as its focus common intended audiences largely defined in sociological terms. With this in mind, it is worth revisiting one last time a slightly different—and likely more archaic— version of the five faces of Śiva that takes as its focus, not the five-fold revelation of different schools of thought, but the somewhat mysterious notion of the “five kalās,” which in mantra form are to be intoned as the adept is initiated into the systems.

Īśāna Śāntyatīta (?) Aghora Sadyojāta Vidyā Nivṛtti (Funerary ?) Vāmadeva Tatpuruṣa Pratiṣṭhā Śānti

[[P889]] Approached not as ontic modalities, but in sociological terms, it is probably no accident that three of these five categories can be readily associated with a “professional” identity of the sort that over time tends to mutate into a caste community. As we have seen, Aghora aligns with the class of professional teachers and administrators responsible for the mastery, preservation, and transfer of Tantric or Atimārgic knowledge, while Vāmadeva—our Kārukas—encompasses the skilled artisan communities that Brouwer calls “the makers of the world.” Tatpuruṣa correlates comfortably with professionals who specialize in what are ultimately Atharvan derived pacification and royal consecration rites, a ritual technology that is also used in some forms of exorcism. Our doxographers have privileged Īśāna, effectively effacing traces of older traditions such that whatever might have come before is elusive. Slightly less problematically, the function allotted to Sadyojāta is a matter of informed speculation. Based on the use of the mantra in cremation ground contexts in sources like the Pāśupatasūtra and the transmissions later association with the “Bhūta” Tantras—which by the early seventh century from the perspective of a Dharmaśāstrin like Bhāruci are already associated with raising zombies and by the eighth century in our surviving fragments from the Bhūta corpus entails caring for the insane and terminally ill—this grouping may well have had something to do with working with the hopelessly sick or dying, caring for the dead, forms of necromancy, and the making of apotropaic objects like amulets. This is precisely the “pre-Tantric” social role still performed by specialized cremation ground dwelling monks in northern Thailand whose own practices seemingly derive from a Abhidhamma inflected pre-Tantric yoga akin to the discursive world of Atimārga meditation systems.

[[P890]] Like all synthetic mappings, such a five-fold typology offers a mixture of prescription and description that simplifies on-the-ground realities. Nonetheless, even as a heuristic, this reorientation of perspective—privileging function and intended audience in place of doctrine and philosophy as ordering principles—brings us closer to the spirit of the style in which elements we might call doctrinal or philosophical are being presented in our sources. As we have seen in our encounters with the Piṅgalāmata, it is a mischaracterization of this discourse to say it is pre-conceptual, for in fact the text abounds with doctrinal tenets as well as imagery of the sort we associate readily with the sort of elite Tantric speculation epitomized by the Anuttara Trika of Abhinavagupta. What is markedly different is that in our scriptural sources, philosophy does not take on a life of its own, but illustrates or informs the inculcation of concrete and particular social practices to be carried out by artisans and not by intellectuals. When the work of theology is not to make you a better and more brilliant debater and teacher, or a more powerful and effective overlord, but instead to help you make better buildings or dig deeper wells that will nourish more people, if you believe god can assume any form, it is better to envision your deity not as an exquisite living disquisition on the philosophy of language, or as the super king of kings enthroned within his all-pervading maṇḍala, but as the effective and intimidating master wielder of a chisel.

[[P891]] To look at things another way, can we not see the production—almost exclusively conducted by Brāhmaṇas—of a second order learned intellectual discourse about the Tantras that does not jettison their key tenets, not as simple appropriation but in fact as another form of professionalization? Such a discourse, dare we call it “Tantrism”—brings the precepts of an initiatory system into proper alignment with the modes of social practice deemed socially appropriate for a certain class of people—namely, hyper-literate Brāhmaṇas—for whom the production of intricate and argumentative philosophical discourse and apologetics and the perpetuation of certain forms of pedagogy were in fact quotidian concrete and particular social practices? Such a framework does a better job of accounting for the fact that while theologically, works like the Piṅgalāmata and Tantrāloka share in common both core values and textual canons, in their form and their function there is precious little overlap between the two domains. Our mistake is then that we have misconstrued the relationship between the periphery of a discourse —the use of Bhairavasiddhānta, Trika, and Krama texts in the service of hyper-self-reflective gnostic exegesis presented for dialogical purposes in the Pramāṇa theory idiom of Yogācāra Buddhists—for its center. That we have erred in this way reflects both our own professionalization and orientation—as academics we read books and teach students instead of measuring and then banging away at stone—as well as certain historical realities. To be blunt, the sort of community for whom the Tantrāloka was intended survived, if but barely, into the twentieth century. In contrast, except in faint traces within “subaltern” cultures, the vastly more influential— demographically as well as territorially—life-worlds that a work like the Piṅgalāmata was designed to perpetuate and engender, did not. For in fact, by the end of the thirteenth century, its presence in the Deccan was already much diminished. In the final chapters, we will begin exploring some of the conditions of possibility behind this epistemic rupture. Before we can get there, however, first we must journey to Maharashtra.

[[P892]]