कल्पान्तरे विश्वासटिप्पन्यः

The below was presented by {MT}

Data

We may infer from shaiva exegetical texts that the whole of the shaiva-shAstra was held as authoritative at a general level: starting from the old pAshupata material down to the latest srotAMsi and their evolutes.
We know that abhinavagupta and Bhatta rAmakaNTha-II were approximately coeval and abhinavagupta quotes rk quite positively providing evidence that the totality of the general validity shaiva-shAstra was held by a leading kaula teacher of the time. 3. Now we know that successors of the same Kashmirian schools of kaula and siddhAnta were there in Nepal and TN where the hand of mohammedanism was less effective and coexisted for a long time without displacing each other. In fact there is strong evidence for symbiosis even if the purists on either camp disagreed with that.
E.g. we have tirumUlar of kashmirian origin synthesizing siddhAnta and kaula. The south indian successors of abhinavagupta were associated with saiddhAntika administered shrines like Chidambaram. In fact we have the south Indian kaula maheshvarAnandanAtha with clearly kashmirian links in terms of tradition being initiated by his female teacher in the vulgar mahArAShTrI prAkR^ita in a major saiddhAntika temple in the dravidian country.

Summary

the kaula and saiddhAntika traditions were strong across the country in pan-Indospheric networks. kaula teachers like kShemarAja who succeeded abhinava saw it as a rather valid practice to comment other shaiva traditions as valid scriptures like the netra-tantra or citing from the kriyAkAlaguNottara. This indicates the vitality of those other traditions down the line to jayaratha.

It is not that siddhAnta ended in Kashmirian circles with bhaTTa1 rAmakaNTha-II; in fact it continued vigorously with his successors like bhaTTa1 vidyAkaNTha and shrIkaNTha.

The decline of siddhAnta and pAshupata was seen nearly coevally even in Gujarat and Rajasthan though kaula survived quite vigorously there too. That can’t be attribute to kaula teachers of Kashmir. Even in south India siddhAnta was ghost of its former past with kaula traditions being more vigorous over time. Why did we not have a bhAskararAya like figure among saiddhAntika-s. The last great scholars like nirmalamaNi were not exactly in the same league or like those from the heydays in south India like aghorashiva-deshika of towering scholarship. The decline and end of siddhAnta in Kashmir starts with when we start seeing Kashmirian pAshupata-s in south India. But eventually both pAshupata& siddhAnta met with catastrophic collapse over most of India.

Conclusion

The answer is: Mohammad stands accused. But the specific issue is the very centralized organization of pAshupata and siddhAnta traditions among shaiva-s and pA~NcharAtrika-s among vaiShNava-s.

As opposed to this the kaula-s had a distributed structure quite like vaidika-s with small groups of spread out teachers adopting flexibly other traditions: shrI+trika-kula and kAlI-kula coopted advaita-vedAnta and dattAtreya tradition extensively; kubjikA-kula coopted AV; vaidika-s coopted kaula & siddhAnta along with all manner of tAntrika traditions. Thus, these traditions were able to survive in most parts of India where Islam could not completely wipe them out.

My studies on biological networks have shown that networks with hubs like siddhAnta or pAshupta collapse as soon as the hubs are removed though they are resistant to random attack. However, small distributed networks while not transmitting information on the scale of the hub-centered networks survive the attacks the former succumb to and eventually in selective regime where the former are constantly purged only the latter remain. This I think was the eventual reason why kaula and (vaidika) traditions survived the assault of marUnmAda.