At the end of the last chapter I suggested that, in the minds of the authors of the AS, the identity of the Pāñcarātra tradition was “open to revision and reinvention”. In the previous two chapters, I discussed similar processes of adaptation and innovation in the form of the “Vedification” of the Pāñcarātra, and the invention of the Ekāyanaveda. In each case I have focussed on these developments as they occurred in South India in the early centuries of the second millennium, undoubtedly a period of great growth and productivity for these traditions. However, as we have seen, the desire of Pāñcarātrikas to allign themselves with the Veda, and the appeal to the Nārāyaṇīya as a legitimating source for the establishment of a universal Vaiṣṇava religion, are evident already in North Indian literature of the preceding centuries. In each of the cases I have addressed in Part Two, Pāñcarātrika authors have attempted to construct or to reconstruct the identity of their own textual tradition by extending its canonical boundaries. Each of these attempts seeks legitimacy through identification with another textual tradition. Of the different authorities appealed to by Pāñcarātrikas, however, only the Nārāyaṇīya is innately responsive.
It is impossible to speak of the identity of the Pāñcarātra “tradition” without addressing the Nārāyaṇīya. What is the origin of ‘Pāñcarātra’ as a distinct religious identity? I undertake to answer this question in Chapter Seven, by focussing on the
‘Ekāntins’, the Nārāyaṇīya’s protagonists. The construction of a ‘Pañcarātra’ identity in this text is dependent, I will argue, on the appropriation and synthesis of other religious identities. In South India between the 12th and 14th centuries, as I show in Chapter Eight, the Ekāntins came to be identified with one particular Pāñcarātra tradition. As this tradition adapted to a religious environment increasingly dominated 177
by the priestly performance of temple rituals for fee-paying clients, so the identity of these Ekāntins underwent significant changes. These developments bring us back to the theme we left behind in Chapter Three, namely the integration of distinct Pāñcarātrika identities, and the consequent formation of the Pāñcarātra canon. In Chapter Nine, I argue that we are now in a better position to attempt to explain the decline of the sectarian culture which dominated certain South Indian Pāñcarātra contexts, and the merging of identities which succeeded it. [[178]]