Speaker A
Good evening, everyone. It's my great honor to be introducing the keynote speaker of this year's Jain conference.
Professor Alexis Sanderson explores the Jaina adaptation of Śaiva tantric rituals, focusing on textual and ritual interconnections in medieval India.
Key Takeaways
- Shaivism was a dominant religious tradition in India from 500 to 1300 AD with significant influence on Jainism.
- Jaina ritual texts like Nirvanakalika directly appropriate and adapt Shaiva tantric rituals and mantras.
- Shaiva traditions are divided into Atimarga (ascetic) and Mantramarga (tantric) with distinct ritual and philosophical features.
- Textual and epigraphic evidence reveals deep interconnections and mutual influences among Shaiva, Jain, Buddhist, and Vaishnava traditions.
- Understanding Jainism's ritual literature requires recognizing its historical borrowings and adaptations from Shaiva tantric sources.
What the video covers
- Introduction of Professor Alexis Sanderson and his expertise in Shaiva tantric traditions and Indian religious history.
- Overview of Shaivism's early evidence from 2nd century BC lay involvement to 4th century AD initiatory traditions.
- Distinction between Atimarga (ascetic) and Mantramarga (tantric) Shaiva traditions and their historical development.
- Discussion of the influence of Shaiva traditions on Jainism, especially through ritual borrowings and textual continuities.
- Examination of the Jaina ritual manual Nirvanakalika by Padliptasuri and its borrowing from the 11th-century Shaiva text Siddhantasara Paddhati.
- Insight into the transformation of Shaiva asceticism and the emergence of tantric practices involving transgressive rituals.
- Analysis of how Shaiva tantric rituals and mantras were adapted and translated into the Jain religious context.
- Consideration of the broader impact of Shaiva traditions on other Indian religions such as Buddhism and Vaishnavism.
- Detailed look at ritual procedures including initiation, worship, penances, and image installation in Jainism influenced by Shaiva texts.
- Reflection on the academic challenges and gaps in understanding Jain literature and its relation to Shaiva traditions.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Speaker Background
- 04:40Realization of Jain Literature's Importance
- 08:18Early Shaivism and Lay Involvement
- 12:05Shaiva Initiatory Traditions and Lineages
- 16:07Atimarga and Mantramarga Traditions Explained
- 20:13Shaiva Rituals and Influence on Jainism
- 24:09Adaptation of Shaiva Rituals in Jain Texts
- 30:00Detailed Ritual Procedures and Mantra Adaptations
- 36:48Concluding Reflections and Academic Challenges
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
My academic guru, Professor Alexis Sanderson. Professor Sanderson, he read classics and Sanskrit at Oxford in, I think, it was 1967. Is that correct? He went up. Um, and then after completing his degree, spent seven years in Kashmir studying with, I think,
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the last great scholar of the Shaiva traditions of Kashmir. He then returned to Oxford and from 1977 to 1992 was the lecturer in Sanskrit at the Oriental Institute.
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And then since 1992, he's been the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls College.
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Professor Sanderson's work has concentrated on the Shaiva tantric traditions in particular, but the tantric traditions more broadly.
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And as long ago as 1988, he wrote an article called Shaivism and the Tantric Traditions, which was a masterpiece at the time because it mapped the whole world of tantra and Shaivism in India. And I still, even
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though it's an encyclopedia article, I still regularly refer to it. So dense and rich is it.
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But since then, his work has expanded and built upon that foundation and through examining the whole broad range of these Shaiva and other tantric traditions ranging from the most developed philosophical and exegetical traditions of Kashmir to the
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real nitty-gritty of tantric ritual and also through examining epigraphical, uh, epigraphic records of the tantric traditions in India, he has overturned the sort of received history of Indian religion and shown how from approximately 500 AD to 1300 AD,
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Shaivism was the dominant religion in India. Uh, and in so doing, he's also made it possible to demonstrate his work is not only on epigraphy, but also has focused very closely on textual studies, mainly of texts that are yet to be published, that exist only
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in manuscripts. And by examining these texts and comparing them with the texts of other traditions, he has shown how these Shaiva tantric traditions influenced Buddhism, the Vaishnava religious traditions in India and also Jainism. And I think
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that's what we're going to hear about today in his lecture, which is entitled The Jaina Appropriation and Adaptation of Shaiva Ritual, the Case of Padliptasuri's Nirvanakalika.
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And through reading the handout, which I hope you've all got copies of, it's apparent to me he's going to start by showing us just giving us an overview of these tantric traditions and then will demonstrate how
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this Jaina ritual manual borrowed directly from a Shaiva text probably a century earlier than it, from the 11th century called the Siddhantasara Paddhati.
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So over to you, Alexis. Thank you. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction.
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It's particularly nice to be introduced by a former pupil. Um, I feel very insecure standing here in front of many experts in Jainism, people far more learned in the subject than I am.
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My acquaintance with Jainism is very indirect and shallow and imperfect. I did study Prakrit as an undergraduate, um, but that was largely self-taught, um, unreliable and it didn't involve the reading of very much literature. What did I read? Jaina Sutta, the Kalpa Sutra
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Sutra and a few other works. But I think I must confess right now that I'm guilty, like many Indologists, of underestimating the importance of the Jaina tradition.
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And I think it's only in the last five years or so that I began to realize that while life remains, I really must try to do something about this and take into consideration this enormous literature produced by Jains over the centuries.
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Of course, my concern with it is primarily to see how it relates to developments in the sphere of Shaiva religion.
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And in my work, The Shaiva Age, I did touch on the Jaina side, but not in any great depth.
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And that was largely because I wasn't yet aware of a number of textual continuities which I've subsequently become aware of. And in this lecture, I will try to address those to some extent at least.
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Let me begin by telling you something about Shaivism. I probably know more about Shaivism than most of you, just as you probably know more about Jainism than I do.
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So let me begin by saying something about this religion which, in my view, had such an impact on the early medieval world in India.
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The earliest evidence that we have of Shaivism begins in the 2nd century BC. And it should be pointed out immediately that this is not evidence of any of the systematic initiatory traditions which we know from later times. It's simply
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evidence of lay involvement in Shaivism of some kind or other. That this lay involvement was widespread in India is clear from both Jaina and Buddhist donatory inscriptions. These, of course, are largely made by, these donations are largely made by lay people
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who have, of course, do not have ordination names. And we can see from their name, the names of these ordinary Indians of the time that names, theophoric names incorporating the name of Shiva predominate. So already in this
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early period from the 2nd century BC through to the 4th century AD in this massive small donative inscriptions that we have, Buddhist and Jaina, we can see that Shaivism, faith in Shiva of some kind or other, is very widespread. But we have yet to
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find any evidence of the initiatory traditions which we can see in great abundance in later centuries.
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The first concrete evidence of the Shaiva initiatory traditions comes to us in the 4th century in the form of inscriptions. We have an inscription from Mathura, pillar inscription which refers to what is clearly a Pashupata lineage which also refers to the recipients,
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the donors mentioned in the inscription as part of a lineage which goes back if we assign roughly a period of 20 years to each scholarly generation, might take us back to the 2nd century AD. But the first evidence
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that we have is actually dated in the 4th century of a lineage that's been around for some time.
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Now, I've just called this group the Pashupata. So the Pashupata. So I should begin by distinguishing, I should go on at this point to distinguish between the two great divisions of the Shaiva tradition which the Shaivas themselves in later
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times referred to as the Atimarga and the Mantramarga respectively. The Mantramarga corresponds roughly to most of the territory of what we would, others might call tantric Shaivism.
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The Atimarga refers to a group of highly ascetic traditions which flourished beginning in this, as I had the earliest evidence in the 4th century, perhaps going back to the 2nd century.
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These are radically ascetic groups which in their first form, that testified in the Pashupata Sutra, teaches a form of pure asceticism of a very radical kind involving complete disengagement from the mundane world and with an enormously
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strong emphasis upon non-violence, which I think is one of many evidences in this early tradition of influence, in fact, from the Jaina tradition. This system seems to have developed in Western India and may, and therefore was in a good
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position to be influenced by the long-established traditions of Jaina asceticism. I call this tradition Atimarga one.
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Excuse the numbers, but it's convenient. With Atimarga two, which was in place by about the 5th century, I think we see a profound transformation. The form of asceticism becomes even more radical involving rather shocking transgression of the norms of Brahmanical conduct
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begging with a human skull, carrying as a banner a staff with a human head upon human skull upon it, living in cremation grounds and other practices which indicate an utter indifference to mundane Brahmanical values and an utter indifference to
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laukika dharma, in fact, mundane, mundane religion. By the 5th century also, we have what I call Atimarga three. Now, this really is the first stage of a major move towards what will later be called tantric Shaivism.
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Because here in Atimarga three, which is otherwise known as the Kapal
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goddess Chamunda and the equally ferocious male deity Bhairava. And this really is the eruption into the Shaiva tradition of a Shakta dimension, which is of a very different kind. Uh initiation is accomplished through uh possession um rather than asceticism. Um the whole
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the the the practices are highly antinomian, involve the consumption of meat, alcohol, and so forth. But at this stage, I mean we're dealing with the 5th century. These are earliest references to them in the 5th century.
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At this stage, uh we can't yet speak of Tantric Shaivism exactly. That is to say, we cannot cannot speak of the Mantra Marga.
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What happens in the Mantra Marga is um a rather profound change in some respects.
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The texts of the Mantra Marga begin to emerge in the 5th century again. The earliest text that we have, which we're working with just uh been publishing, um the uh Nishvasa, the earliest level of the Nishvasa corpus, um we date to
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around 450 to 550 AD. So, this is the earliest uh evidence that we have of um Tantric Shaivism. Now, what characterizes this new movement is that it's accessible not only to ascetics, but also to married men.
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So, this is a very um uh major departure. Up to this point, it's been restricted entirely to ascetics.
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No doubt they were supported by uh lay devotees, and we do have a literature of lay devotion as well, which was going along at the same time.
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But now for the first time it became possible for married persons to become initiated into the cult and to uh aspire to the same goal as ascetics, namely liberation from the cycle of rebirth.
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And this was to be accomplished not through ascetic exercises, but through ritual. This was the extraordinary claim made by the Mantra Marga.
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Uh the claim was that Shiva, acting through his consecrated officiants, through his acharyas, could actually destroy the bonds of the soul in advance.
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The destruction of the bonds of the soul would not be immediately manifest. One would continue to be the same difficult and awkward customer one always had been, but at the time of death, the uh uh uh perfect and complete liberation
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would ensue. The idea was that the purification was happening at a subliminal level. Now, this uh this new kind of religion, which obviously was very appealing in many respects, um was not slow to attract the attention of royalty, or rather they were not slow
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to attract the attention of royalty to themselves. And they quickly developed a a form of initiation specifically for kings, which involved offering them the entire benefit of initiation without any of the inconveniences. The inconveniences being post-initiatory ritual duties, which
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would be the downside of of initiation. Um when you become a Tantric initiate, you don't um enter a world of less ritual, you enter a world of more ritual. Tantric rituals are added to your already uh active Brahmanical obligations.
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Kings, however, were promised the benefit of initiation without any of the inconvenience. The idea being that their ritual of their their duties to society precluded their engagement in uh full-time uh religious life.
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The only requirement was that they should continue as they would have done as lay Shaivas to support the religion uh through generous endowment.
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Now, this Mantra Marga tradition um bifurcated quite early into two uh major branches. One, relatively conservative in appearance, relatively congruent with the Brahmanical world, referred to itself uh eventually as the Siddhanta, the the the fixed view, the established
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doctrine, and its followers and practices can therefore be called Saiddhantika. That is the the term that we find in the texts.
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This particular form of Tantric ritual, um offering uh liberation through initiation, um does not depart in any dramatic way from the norms of Brahmanical notions of purity and impurity.
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And it also engages itself much more than the other forms of the Tantric tradition in the public domain. It is this tradition which is uh turned to for the procedures for the initiating, for the consecration of images, of lingas, the
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consecration of shrines, and so forth. So, this form of religion is much more publicly conspicuous, although it is also at the same time a religion of private uh practice.
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Beside this Saiddhantika tradition, we have a range of cults which remind us very strongly of Atimarga 3, since they're focused on Bhairava and various ferocious goddesses of the Chamunda kind, but they have, as it were, this tradition that we see in Atimarga 3 has
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now been upgraded by the introduction of new doctrinal developments, which account which were introduced by the uh the Saiddhantika Mantra Marga.
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In addition to these two, the Atimarga and the Mantra Marga, we have a third Marga, known as the Kula Marga, sometimes simply called Shakta.
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The Kula Marga goes directly back to Atimarga 3. Um it is the Atimarga 3 in a kind of intensified and pure form, and focuses almost entirely upon female uh deities, uh particularly the goddesses Kuleshvari Kubjika uh Kalasankarshini, or Kali,
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and eventually in a later development, and a very successful development, the goddess Tripura or Tripura Sundari.
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Now, I have to keep this very brief, but let me just point out that the big uh fault line there, the big change within that range of goddesses is between uh the earlier deities Kubjika, Kalasankarshini, Kuleshvari, and so
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forth on the one hand, and Tripura Sundari on the other. The cult of Tripura Sundari does not emerge out of the Atimarga 3 environment, although there are elements of that which have been taken in.
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And rather um uh and the reason I say that is that it's a form of Shakta worship which um has freed itself completely of the rather gruesome uh association with the cult of the cremation grounds, which remains very predominant in the other
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forms of the Kula Marga and in the non-Saiddhantika uh Mantra Marga. So, because of this, I think, because the goddess Tripura Sundari is mild, a beautiful deity, uh the cult does not uh require the performances of an extraordinary uh or transgressive
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kind. For this reason, it became extremely popular in India, and indeed survives down to the present, although for the most part it does so in what we might call domesticated variants, in which the properly Tantric elements, namely the mantras and so
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forth, have been played down and more Brahmanical practices uh introduced or overlaying it, so that it can be appropriated by the mainstream Brahmanical tradition without um the challenge to orthodoxy posed by Tantric initiation. Should point out that while Tantric initiation was
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offering a huge benefit, it also had a downside. That is to say, the orthodox were always highly suspicious, and naturally of any claim that the Brahmanical religion was not enough, that something in addition was required.
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Shaivas were saying, "Yes, Brahmanism is fine, but it will not give you liberation. You need to have initiation as well." Once you have it, you must continue to respect the Brahmanical religion. It's the ground floor of a two-floor edifice.
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Uh you must respect its rules, but it does not bestow liberation. So, there there was this uh downside. Um Um and so that that, of course, uh fueled a process of um the constant creation of safe reflexes of these Tantric traditions.
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So, if you look in this vast literature we have, it really is huge, uh you have to make a distinction, though not isn't a very clear dichotomy sometimes, between properly Tantric literature requiring initiation, um and offering access to liberation, which is beyond
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explicitly beyond that offered by the Brahmanical tradition, and a uh a harmonizing tradition which plays down the doctrinal specificity of the Tantric traditions, and just presents different forms of worship focusing on new deities within the broader framework of
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Brahmanical belief and uh orthopraxy. Now, um the rise of Shaivism during this period from mainly from the 5th and approximately the 5th century on, um had, as I've argued many times now, uh a very major impact upon its neighbors.
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Through the securing, perhaps, of extensive royal patronage, the Siddhanta in particular, the Saiddhantika tradition of Shaivism, was able to establish itself in a pan-Indian network of monastic establishments with extraordinary rapidity.
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In fact, I would say that by the 9th century, this was the only organization in India which could reclaim a pan-Indian reach.
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No kingdom could claim that. But the uh the acharyas of the Shaiva Saiddhantika tradition were often in the in the role of raja gurus to a large number of kings, not just one, but several at the same time. They were
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pope-like figures with an authority extending beyond uh individual kingdoms. And with this uh I mean, the what drove this was, of course dakshina.
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The giving of initiation to kings required an appropriate dakshina proportionate to the wealth of the recipient. And although the early uh dikshas were rewarded with rather modest quantities of land or revenue from land, uh once this tradition got underway,
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some quite extraordinarily large donations were made by various pious kings. And the Saiddhantikas were not slow to put this money to use by building branch monasteries, installing their disciples as the acharyas in those branch monasteries, and in this way, in no time
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at all, the tradition spread. So, by the 12th century, it really is a pan-Indian network.
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It also went to Southeast Asia, but it did so uh particularly into the Cambodian uh the area of Cambodia, the Khmer realm.
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Um but that it it reached there rather early, I think in the 9th century.
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Um and there it stayed in a frozen form. The subsequent developments didn't reach Cambodia.
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So, the Cambodian Shaiva tradition, the Saiddhantika tradition is is um uh stunted in a sense. It didn't continue to absorb the new developments that were going on in India. But for that very reason, it's of particular interest to me because it as it were is
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a um sort of frozen in the past, preserving various old Shaiva traditions, uh which in India were um gone beyond.
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Uh through the process of uh largely a process of simplification of ritual. Um certain very uh earlier very elaborate ritual systems did survive in the Khmer kingdom right down to the 14th century AD.
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Now, with this spread, this massive investment by kings in Shaivism, um motivated perhaps not only by their own desire to um be seen as empowered by by Shiva, their own their kingdoms as it were legitimated and empowered, but also
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of course considering the fact that their tax base was largely Shaiva. I think we should take into consideration that the success of Shaivism is not simply to do with uh cunning strategies on the parts of its acharyas to to develop new
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rituals, um to bring in uh royal support. It was also rooted in the fact that it had a very deeply established lay uh following. So, by articulating themselves in Shaiva terms, they were speaking to their to their subjects. Um Of course, they
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tended not to be exclusive in so doing. Their tax base included others, including Jains, Buddhists, and so forth. And so, on the whole, Indian kings were not exclusive in their largess. They were obliged to give back what they received at least to some to
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some extent. There isn't much evidence of really fanatic exclusive Shaivism in this period. There might have been if they'd had the opportunity, but they didn't. The rival traditions were too powerful to be pushed to one side or persecuted.
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So, now, the the the evidence of the the influence is of two kinds. The first thing is that certain traditions which in early times seem to have been largely independent of Shaivism were swallowed by it.
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It colonized them and absorbed them. Um and in so doing, it seems um disempowered the original forms. So, the cult of Skanda, which I didn't touch on in the uh in the Shaiva age, I should have done. I tried to do so in a revised
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version of it. The cult of Skanda, which originally is rather an independent tradition, gets as it were sucked into the Shaiva tradition and leaves little trace outside it.
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The same is true of the cult of the sun. We know from early sources that there was a tantric Saura tradition of worshipers of the sun. Unfortunately, their literature has disappeared. What we have are works um which show the incorporation of this
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tradition within Shaivism. So, Shaivism as it were opened up a slot for the Saura worship by making um it compulsory. This wasn't universal throughout Shaivism, but became quite widely adopted. Uh made it compulsory that there should be a Surya
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puja preceding every Shiva puja. And the uh the ritual system used for that is originally a Saura tradition.
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Um it's quite clear there are various Iranian elements in it because the Saura tradition is originally an Iranian religion.
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Um but it seems not to have survived as an independent tradition, but only as it were embedded in in in the Shaiva tradition.
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There's also of course the the the very rich tradition of the worship of goddesses in India.
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This too, and particularly this, was as it were um incorporated by the Shaivas uh through the production of a really rather extraordinarily large body of texts designed to provide Shaiva methods for the propitiation of these goddesses.
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Now, these goddesses themselves are clearly not Shaiva in origin in all cases. Very often they have a strongly Vaishnava character in their iconography or associations. So, we see that the Shaivas were out there system- systematically bringing in kalpas,
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ritual systems from other traditions, redacting them inside new texts, the most outstanding of which is the Jayadrathayamala, uh an enormous work of some 24,000 verses.
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Um part of it produced in Kashmir, but the original work not, I think. The original core of the text not. Um and here we see a veritable encyclopedia of Kali forms, mainly Kali forms. Um many of which have in fact a Vaishnava
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background. So, we see a gradual incorporation of a Shaktism as well. And this Shakta element gets as it were its slot within the Shaiva canon, within the non-Saiddhantika division, in a collection of texts known as the Vidya Pitha or the Vidya collection, where
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Vidya stands for mantra, but with the implication that these are female mantras as opposed to male mantras.
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The the noun mantra in Sanskrit being masculine, the noun vidya, which is essentially synonymous, being uh feminine in gender.
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So, we see this um as it were incorporation, absorption of the cults of Surya, Skanda, and the Devi.
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Now, what about Vaishnavism? Well, I've I've mentioned that some Vaishnava elements were taken up within in Shaivism, particularly the more antinomian ones. Um But what remained as to the more transgressive elements of the tradition, um particularly associated with uh the cult
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of the god Narasimha. But um in mainstream Vaishnavism, we see also a very major impact in the development of the medieval Pancharatra tradition.
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Now, the Pancharatra is an ancient tradition, at least the name is ancient. It already is found in the Narayaniya of the of the Mahabharata.
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But of course, there's no reason to assume that that Pancharatra is the same as the one that we see in the elaborate treatises that have come down to us uh in such works as the Jayakhya Samhita, the Sattvata Samhita, and the Paushkara
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Samhita. These works, which have often been claimed to be rather old, to be predating the Shaiva uh texts in fact, in my view, were not produced before the middle of the 9th century. There are good iconographic reasons for thinking
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that. Uh and there are also um there's also abundant evidence within these early uh Pancharatrika tantric scriptures that they were processing Shaiva material and were not doing so perfectly.
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The consequence of which is that you see as it were Shaiva fingerprints on the Vaishnava material, but not Vaishnava fingerprints on the Shaiva material. In other words, uh the the the the Vaishnavas were retooling their system, producing a new
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ritual system along the lines as it were using Shaiva software, if you like. Um and in so doing, they occasionally borrowed textual categories or certain ontological categories as well that don't make any sense inside Vaishnavism.
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But the redactors of the texts were not careful enough, not rigorous enough to bother to remove all these traces. So, uh troublemakers like me can come along later and see what's been going on.
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Traces of the process are left in the finished texts. It's almost as though the texts were produced to order at high speed, and the redactors did not have sufficient time to remove the traces of what they were actually up to, which was they were
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adopting materials from another tradition and passing them off as their own. Now, um Buddhism.
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The impact of Buddhism is is really profound. Buddhism completely redesigned itself from the 7th century onwards along tantric lines. And in doing so, it used it began in the early phase using Shaiva ideas, and then in the later
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phase, from the 10th century onwards, by actually incorporating Shaiva textual material and um taking in uh Shaiva yoga and various other practices which were completely alien to the early uh uh Buddhist tradition.
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And this I have demonstrated at some length in in in my work that the Shaiva age. And there's more to be said on that. Um when I first started working on that subject, I restricted myself carefully to a corpus of texts known as
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the Yogini tantras, which represent the latest and very Shakta-oriented phase in the development of uh Buddhist tantrism.
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Um and so, when I gave lectures on this subject in Japan, and there were Shingon Buddhists in the room, I felt I wasn't going to be treading on any banyans, as it were, because they also considered these later tantras to be
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heretical and not pure tantric Buddhism. But I'm afraid as my research progressed, I became progressively aware became more and more I became more and more aware of the fact that this Shaiva influence goes back to precisely the sources which are the sources of the
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Shingon tradition in Japan. That is to say, the tantras known as the Charya tantra and the Yoga tantra, which although they do not involve the absorption and rewriting of uh Shaiva material, are nonetheless inspired by Shaiva religious practice,
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particularly through the practice of initiation into mandalas. The practice of recruiting people by um creating powder mandalas on the ground, in which the deities are summoned and installed, then bringing initiates initiands before these mandalas blindfolded, removing the blindfold, and exposing them to the
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power of the deities. Uh the Sha- the the Buddhists adopted this Shaiva practice on a grand scale.
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Whereas the Shaivas said, "You may initiate three up to three at a time." The Buddhists really opened the floodgates and allowed mass initiations.
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In fact, the earliest text to expound uh tantric initiation in detail in the Buddhist tradition says, "There should be no pariksha." There are no tests No test needs to be applied for initiation. Anyone who wants to come can come.
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Particularly the followers of other religions. Clearly, it's a powerful conversion uh tool, and it was used not only in India, but of course also in inner Asia and the Far East as a way of recruiting people into the faith.
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So, the impact on on Tantric Buddhism or Mantranaya, as one should perhaps call it, was really profound.
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Now, when I wrote the Shaiva Age, I did actually have a small section on Jainism, but I'm afraid I hadn't done anything like sufficient research on that topic. Since then, I've done a little bit more, and I hope in future
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years to do it a bit more deeply. But let me tell you briefly what I have discovered so far.
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So, in your item five of the introduction, you have the heading Jainism, and under that, I have put I think four items numbered A through to D.
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Now, this is not exhaustive. Um it's more exemplary, and I've chosen these because they exhibit they they demonstrate different aspects of the the way that Jains in the early medieval period took in and transformed and utilized for their own spiritual purpose
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practices which were developed originally outside the Jain world. Now, the first work that I want to draw attention to is the the great Yoga Shastra of Hemachandra, the great uh Kaliyuga Sarvajna, Kalikala Sarvajna, the omniscient one of our present
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degenerate age, who died in 1172 AD. Now, this work, which he says was composed for the Chalukya king of the region of Gujarat, Kumarapala, is profoundly influenced by Shaivism um in many respects.
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The first thing is that it teaches a Tantric yoga for liberation. Now, I can't go into this in any detail here, but if people are interested to see the the data or some of the data, at least it can be presented to this
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effect. Um a handout that I produced for a lecture on this topic in in Hamburg in 2011 is available online, and I think I've given the reference to it. In fact, you can get it by going to my page on
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academia.edu, and you can see that I've put forward quite a lot of material there from the um the Yoga Shastra to show how a new system of Tantric yoga involving visualization um of the form of the deity and also the
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the letter forms, the mantras of the deity, for the attainment not of supernatural powers, but of liberation itself. It's often said that Jainism utilized Tantric methods, adopted Tantric practices, but for mundane purposes, not for the final goal of liberation.
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That was exclusively uh accessible through the the the ancient tradition of purification through the Jain ascetic discipline. But here in the Yoga Shastra, we see a very different mentality coming through, and it's one that to me is entirely familiar
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because it permeates Shaiva literature as well. So, you have this well-known classification of meditation practices following the Kaula or Kulama of the classification into Pindastha, Padasta, Rupastha, and Rupatita.
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And if you look I've put some of the passages on the earlier handout. Um I have actually a few of them with me if anyone would like to ask me for one afterwards, cuz I can I can give the few
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I have out. Uh you will see that this is really Those who understand the Shaiva meditation traditions will see that this is the source of it. This is has no antecedent inside Jainism.
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Furthermore, um he culminates his account of the the Jain path to liberation, the Jain discipline, the Jain yoga, with a text which is quite clearly, as the the great Jambuvijaya Muni pointed out, um a paraphrase or a rewrite of a well-known Shaiva
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meditation text known as the Amanaska Yoga. An authority on that text is sitting in the second row. So, this is um again um the idea that one can attain liberation by emptying the mind and plunging into a state free of discursive elaboration. Um
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this is familiar to the to to the world of Shaivas, but I think rather not what the early promulgators of Jainism had in mind. So, in this respect, the um the Yoga Shastra uh shows us a world that is
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radically transformed not on the level of ritual, we'll come to that later, but on the level of inner spiritual discipline.
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The goal aspired to is a Jain goal, but the methods that have been used to to reach this goal are very different.
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So, the purpose is the same, but the methods are now different. Now, the second item I've put down on my list there is Shakt, and I've used inverted commas there. Uh Shaktakalpa, that is to say Shakta ritual systems.
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Um and two famous works are there, the Jvalani Malini the the Jvalamalini Kalpa and the Padmavati Kalpa or Bhairava Padmavati Kalpa.
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Um these are extremely important texts, and their textual source is quite easy to to to locate.
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The it's not that these texts have simply taken chunks of Shakta Shaiva literature and passed them off as Jain by changing the names. It's not like that. Um but the repertoire of mantras and practices is drawn from the Shakta
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cult of Tripurasundari. If you look at the earlier handout, you'll see the rather concrete evidence of that. The mantras come from the cult of Tripurasundari, and they've been creatively re- re- reorganized and slightly modified to individualize them to serve a Jain purpose. Now, in these
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texts, the purpose is not liberation. The purpose is the accomplishment of various Laukika or mundane goals. So, here in this domain of Shakta worship, uh drawing on the non-Siddhantika Shaiva tradition and its Kaula extension, we are not dealing with liberationist
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practice, but with practice for the accomplishment of Siddhi or supernatural effects, the full repertoire of supernatural effects offered by the Shaivas in their own ritual system, but with a much stronger emphasis on non-violence. As you know, the Shaivas
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are not too fussy about non-violence, especially non-sacrificial violence. Um there's no trace of that here. There are hostile mantras, there are uh martial mantras, mantras for use in war, cuz after all, there were Jain kingdoms in abundance in Karnataka.
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Um but they the the the emphasis is upon um somehow weakening the will of the opponent rather than actually killing him outright. So, there's a Jain emphasis upon non-violence is preserved in in these traditions, even though um they include hostile magic.
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The third element I've uh given, which I haven't explored in sufficient detail, um is the is the presence of Tantric elements in Jain Samskaras. That is to say, in the Jains' development of rituals for the life cycle rights of uh
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of Jain laypeople. Now, I'm sure one could do a great deal of research on this, much more than I have done. What I've done is read the Achara Dinakara of Vardhamana Suri, a work composed in the early 15th century
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in the north of India around Jalandhar. And uh here it's very clear that um these rituals are permeated by um a mantra pantheon drawn from Tantric sources.
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Now, finally, we come to the element which is the main part of this talk, uh and that is the impact of Siddhantika ritual on Jainism. Now, so far, we've been talking about Shaiva yoga influencing the Yoga Shastra and
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Shakta supernaturalist practice influencing the development of Jain Kalpas in the 10th century and afterwards.
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Um now, we're looking at a very different phenomenon. That is the development of a Jain equivalent to the rituals for the installation of deities in temples which had been developed by the Siddhantikas.
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Now, I think I'm I know it was in fact Paul Dundas, who is in this room, who um I think in the article on the Paramesvara uh tradition, um pointed out that the Nirvana Kalika looks like um teaches a system of ritual which is
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highly reminiscent of what we find in such Shaiva ritual Paddhatis as the Soma Shambu Paddhati.
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He was absolutely right. It it is exactly as he says, but what I'm going to do here is to actually say which Shaiva Paddhati it was and to show you um how uh I'll show you some textual evidence to that to that effect.
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Um The Nirvana Kalika um was the work of uh a Jain Suri called Padalipta, Padalipta Suri. His name actually is in various forms, Padalipta, Palitta, Palibda. It occurs in many different variants.
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Um and what it does is set out in simple prose Tantric procedures to be followed by Jains in regular worship, daily worship, worship of initiates.
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Uh daily worship by initiates, I do not mean mendicants, not Jain Diksha in that sense, but Tantric Diksha.
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So, procedures for regular worship, Nitya Karma, initiation, Diksha, and the consecration of Acharyas, Acharya Abhisheka, the penances prescribed for initiates who infringe the rules of their discipline Prayashchittam and in great detail, the ceremonies for the installation of images, pratishtha,
Speaker A
and the consecration of temples. Now, I've put on that handout on page two, just after the paragraph I've just read to you, a citation from the the hagiography of the Ācārya Pādalipṭa, found in the Prabhāvakacarita of Prabhācandra Ācārya,
Speaker A
composed in the 13th century. Um and I went Yeah, here it is. Śrāvakāṇām Yatīnām ca Pratiṣṭhā Dīkṣayā saha Utthāpanā Pratiṣṭhārhabimbānām Jo Sadām api Yadukta Viditvā Vidiyeta atra Sūribhiḥ Nirvāṇakalikā Prabhuścakre Kṛpāvaśāt.
Speaker A
Out of compassion, Kṛpāvaśāt, the master, Pādalipṭa, composed the śāstra Nirvāṇakalikā, following whose injunctions Sūris can understand and perform in this world installation, pratiṣṭhā, together with the initiation, dīkṣā, of lay persons and Yatis.
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Installation, that is to say, the setting up of images of the Arhats and gods.
Speaker A
Now, this text is based on indeed it's a creative reduction of a surviving Śaiddhāntika Śaiva ritual manual, as Jim Mallinson has already pointed out, the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati of Mahārājādhirāja Bhojadeva.
Speaker A
I'm sorry, there's a typo on your page. He's said to have lived from 000 to 1050, to have ruled rather from 000 to 1055. Read 1,000 to 1,055.
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And this text, which is not published, although I and other people working in this field have been looking at it for some time, has reached us through two early palm leaf manuscripts, which are preserved in the Kathmandu Valley,
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and at the top of page three you see the details of those two texts.
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And you can see that they really are very old. The earliest of them was completed in 1066 to 1067 AD, and the other is only slightly later, 1111 to 12 AD.
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And you'll see that I I give there the final colophon, and in the first under A, the last verse as well, which explicitly attributes this work to Bhojadeva, King Bhojadeva, and the colophon, which of course is not evidential in itself, cuz colophons can
Speaker A
be easily modified and added, likewise attributes it as in other works attributed to Bhojadeva, attributes it to Mahārājādhirāja Śrī Bhojaviracitāyām Siddhāntasārapaddhatau, and so forth. This is a formula we find at the end of all his works in fact, all
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the works attributed to him as far as I can recall. He's always given the title Mahārājādhirāja, which also appears in his inscriptions.
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Now, the Nirvāṇakalikā is essentially the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati, modified by rewording and omission to remove intractably Śaiva elements.
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Sometimes it's very superficial. Śivājñayā, by command of Śiva, becomes Jinājñayā, by the command of the Jina. Sometimes very superficial doctoring of the text, but the redactor was no fool. He occasionally realizes that there's material which is completely intractable. He simply deletes it,
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reorganizes, and sometimes adds original material of his own, but nonetheless the text follows wherever it can the exact words of the Śaiva original.
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So, the Śaiva text is the matrix, which has simply been re-edited to produce a Jain work.
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Um Nonetheless, in spite of its Śaiva matrix, its author is not going to declare that fact, of course. He declares in his opening verse, rather disingenuously, I think, that the work has been extracted from the Jināgama.
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Well, I don't know what to make of that, but it doesn't seem to be quite accurate.
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Yeah. So, now, what date is this text? How old is it? Now, the earliest attributed citation of the Nirvāṇakalikā is in, to my knowledge, 1191, cuz my knowledge is not very profound in these areas, and I if someone can come up with an earlier
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citation, I'd be very happy to hear it. It is in the in Siddhasena Sūri's commentary on the Pravacanasāroddhāra of Nema Nemicandra Sūri.
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He in fact refers to the last section of the Nirvāṇakalikā, mentioning the text by name, for its account of the Yakṣa Devis, the iconography of the Yakṣa Devis, which occurs as an appendix to this Nirvāṇakalikā.
Speaker A
Um Having said that, it simply follows the Śaiva text, I should add, I have Well, I mentioned briefly, but I'll elaborate slightly, it is also creative. It does add new Jain material. Particularly, of course, it has a different pantheon of
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of worship. It doesn't just take over the Śaiva pantheon of worship. Worship, it takes over a five-faced It introduces a central deity, a four-faced Parameṣṭhin, surrounded by the Dik Kumārīs, and so forth.
Speaker A
Um And so, inevitably, its treatment of regular ritual, although it uses the Śaiva text wherever it can, has to depart from it when it actually sets out the details of which mantras to be used with which deities in the order of
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of procedure. But as soon as it can, it gets back to its source. So, there's a principle of inertia here.
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He never writes where he does where he never He never composes where he doesn't have to.
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Wherever he can, he stays with his Śaiva prototype. Um and when you do as I have done, prepare when you prepare an edition of the text in the two texts side by side, um let us say, the way I did it, you
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I have my my own in my computer my edition of the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati, you take a chunk of that and put it in your in in on one side of the page, and then modify that to produce the Jain version by looking
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at the printed edition. So, you then have the two side by side. So, by doing that, each time one makes a change, one is going through exactly the mental process that the redactor himself went through as he produced his Jain text
Speaker A
from the Śaiva. And sometimes one thinks, "Oh, that was clever." Sometimes one thinks, "That was rather superficial, a little bit too facile." You know, one actually sees his mind at work. It's not often that in studying remote periods like this one can get
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right into the shoes, as it were, the slippers of the of of the redactor, but on this occasion it really is possible. And one sees a mind that is sometimes intelligent, sometimes rather not in not not so intelligent.
Speaker A
One sees in fact a human being at work. Um So, we can say that the Nirvāṇakalikā must have been composed before the commentary of Siddhasena Sūri, composed in 1191 AD, and after the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati, which it is clearly utilizing.
Speaker A
Um As I've said, the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati says in its closing verse and in its colophons that it is the work of Mahārājādhirāja Bhojadeva, the emperor of Malwa.
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His rule occupies most of the first half of the 11th century. We have a footnote finessing that slightly, but it doesn't really matter after the matter.
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A terminus ante quem is provided by the date of the Kriyākāṇḍakramāvalī of Somaśambhu, because the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati was the model for that better known work.
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That being in large part, as I've shown elsewhere, a versification of the prose of the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati.
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Now, the Nepalese, Indian, South Indian, and Kashmiri manuscripts of this popular text, the Kriyākāṇḍakramāvalī, differ, unfortunately, on the date of its composition. They have a verse at towards the end of the work in which they state the date, but there
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are different versions of this verse. But one of them I find much more trustworthy than the others for reasons I can't elaborate on now.
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Put it this way, that it this seems to have been uh this version seems to have come directly from the place where the text was produced at the time of the production of the text. The region was the region
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of Gurjara in Rewa in Central India under the Kalachuri kings. Now, this date, which is earlier than any of the others that have been found, gives a completion date of 1048 to 49.
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So, we can say that the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati was composed at some time before AD 1048 to 49, no doubt during the reign of Bhojadeva, even if we are suspicious of the claim that the work was by the king himself. I
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mean, so many works are attributed to Bhojadeva, one wonders whether they're not really the products of his court and his obedient pandits who produced them, rather than actually from his pen. We can't be sure. At least there's room for
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doubt. But I think the attribution to the reign is is plausible, even if it wasn't his pen that uh put words to palm leaf.
Speaker A
Um now, is there any evidence within the Jain literature itself to support this rather late dating of the text? As no doubt many of you know, Jain hagiography um treats Pādalipṭa as a very ancient figure, associating him with a king Murunda who
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is sometimes associated by Western scholars with the Kushana period. He's also said to get into magic context with with Nagarjuna, and I think with Kaputacharya. So, he's presented as a very ancient figure. That's what we see in the Prabhāvakacarita.
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But, as we've already seen, he also knows that this Prabha- this this author was the author of the Nirvāṇakalikā.
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Well, um, we do have uh the closing praśasti of the Nirvāṇakalikā, and there we are told that the author was the disciple of the Vācanācārya Mandana Gaṇi, who was himself a disciple of Sangamasimha, who is described as leader
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of the Śvetāmbaras and ornament of the Vidyādhara Vidyādhara Kula, or if you like, Vidyādhara Vaṃśa.
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Now, according to Dakki, in an a Gujarati article of 2000 of the year 2000, the Sangamasimha, who was the teacher of this Padalipta's teacher, is the Sangamasiddha of the Vidyādhara Kula who died through Sallekhanā on Mount Śatruñjaya in
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1008 AD. According to the Puṇḍarīka Svāmin pedestal pedestal inscription of that year, this date is consistent with the requirement that his pupil's pupil, the author of the Nirvāṇakalikā, postdate the composition of the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati.
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So, I think it's very clear on many grounds that we're looking at um a 11th-century work here.
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Now, in the rest of your handout, what I've put in front of you is a parallel edition of parts of this text with the prototype the from the Siddhāntasāra the Siddhāntasāra Paddhati on the left, and the Jain rewritten version on the right.
Speaker A
The Śaiva version, the Siddhāntasāra, is based upon two manuscripts which I've called A and B, and the numbers following the the letters are the folio numbers in question.
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Now, it's obviously not possible to go through this in any detail, but I'll try to pick up some points.
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Before doing that, I should point out that the earlier handout, which is available online, gives much more text covering completely the the sections on regular worship and initiation. So, that bit I'm not touching today. I'm moving on to Pratiṣṭhā. And before I do that, I
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should say that this doesn't cover the whole of Pratiṣṭhā by any means. That's the main subject matter of the text.
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And in fact, it does not cover the main part of Pratiṣṭhā in the text, which is called the Bimba Pratiṣṭhā Vidhi, and there the text departs from the Śaiva prototype, following um Padalipta's pantheon is entirely different, of course, but also uh citing
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Prakrit verses, many of which are found in the Pañcāśikāprakaraṇa attributed to A. Haribhadra. Um, so here the the core initiation the core ritual of installation deviates in the larger section of the text, but the frame around it, the rituals, for
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example, for uh examining the site, adopting the site for the construction of a temple, uh for laying down the initial um uh the first stones that act as it were as the base, the so-called pādas, the feet of the temple,
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um and then uh I've also included uh the ritual of um uh Dvārapratiṣṭhā, the installation of deities in the doors, and uh finally, um I've included the Hṛtpratiṣṭhā, the installation of the heart, which is in fact a kind of animation
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ritual in which life is given to the temple. So, I've I've given you sections from those, not the complete text in all cases, but enough there to make the point, I think.
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Um, you'll see on the first page page five that the texts are virtually identical.
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This is the beginning in which the ācārya is supposed to examine the ground to see whether it's suitable for the for the yajamāna who wishes to found the found the temple according to his caste and so forth.
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Now, I've marked in bold characters the the the the significant deviations in the the Jain version, and you'll see that there are only two on that page.
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In the first case, about 2/3 of the way down, you'll see on the Śaiva side Tatpuruṣādimaṇtrasampūjitam āstīhantaṃ prajvalatyādīpaśyet. This is a a prognosticatory rite um to work out whether the earth is suitable for a person of a certain caste by lighting
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lamps a number of lamps and seeing how many of them go out. Um the important thing is that in the Śaiva case, the uh lamp is worshipped with the mantras of Tatpuruṣa, et cetera. These are the five Brahma mantras of the Śaiva
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tradition, corresponding to the five faces of Sadāśiva, Tatpuruṣa Aghora Vāmadeva Sadyojāta and Īśāna. Now, that of course was immediately recognized by the Jain redactor as inappropriate for a a Jain text. So, he in said instead substitutes the Aṅga
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mantras, also as a as a concept adopted from the Śaiva mantra śāstra. Each mūla mantra has Aṅga mantras. Each root mantra has auxiliary or ancillary mantras. So, likewise, the Jain tradition adopted the system of Aṅgas, six Aṅgas with the mūla mantra. So, he
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says Hṛdayādi, the mantras beginning with Hṛdaya, the heart Aṅga is the first of those Aṅgas.
Speaker A
So, he's uh diffused the Śaiva element there by substituting something neutral. A bit further down the text, you will see on the Śaiva side in bold characters Aghorāstreṇa.
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So um Dvārapālapūjādimaṇtratarpanaṃtaṃ karmakṛtvā Aghorāstreṇa sahasraṃ hutvā kumbapañcakaṃ saptadhānyānāmupari and so forth. Having um having first completed the ritual ending with the gratification of the mantras, uh and the uh beginning with the pūjā of the uh door guardians and uh ending with the
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gratification of the mantras, um he should then make 1,000 oblations into fire reciting the Aghorāstra, the weapon mantra of Aghora. This is a specific Śaiva mantra that of course won't work in the Jain context. So, the Jain redactor simply translates uh
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substitutes Mūlamantreṇa with the root mantra, thereby diffusing the Śaiva content. On the next page, as this ritual proceeds, we come to a point in which a pot covered with two cloths is to be placed on the on the
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shoulder of uh a Brahmin. This has to do with making the boundary. In the in the Vaiṣṇava case, the word Sorry, excuse me. In the Jain case, the word Brāhmaṇasya skandhe vidhāya uh nidhāya, sorry, having placed it on
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the sho- on the shoulder of a Brahmin, in- instead of that, we have Indrasya skandhe nidhāya, having placed it on the shoulder of the Indra. The Indra Indra, as everyone in Jainism knows, is not the god Indra here, but the yajamāna, the
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patron of the of the sacrifice of this Pratiṣṭhā. So, that's adapted. Um, a bit further down, uh there was a rather interesting um piece of mumbo jumbo, which was I try not to waste too much of my life
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on mum- mumbo jumbo, but it is difficult sometimes. Um you see on the Śaiva case, Vakacata eh śa pay yair navabīravarnaiḥ praśnaga dairvāśalyaiḥ jānīyāt. This is a prog- prognosticatory procedure for detecting the presence of invisible śalyas, um impure or dangerous things buried in
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the soil which should be removed before the uh the building of the temple proceeds.
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And this involves making a grid uh and putting these letters in in in in in the boxes within the grid as a prog- prognosticatory procedure based upon that. And these are indeed the letters in the Śaiva case. Um, I think the way
Speaker A
it works, there is a brief account of this in Ellen Bruner's uh uh detailed commentary on the Somaśambhupaddhati, citing relevant sources from South India, it's to do with um what words the jo- jyotiṣa, the astronomer, uses when he
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interrogates you. So, if it if it starts with one of these letters, that indicates a śalya in this direction, and so forth.
Speaker A
So, it's kind of prognostication from the praśna, the interrogations. Notice on the on the Vaiṣṇa- on the Jain side, the redactor was puzzled by this, as I was indeed when I saw this. When I saw Vakacata eh śa pay yair, I thought, "Mm,
Speaker A
this looks like gibberish. Uh the Śaiva manuscripts have corrupted it." And I looked over to the Jain case, and I saw a nice neat kacatata pay ya śa saha. You know, these are letters that do have some kind of order to them, the
Speaker A
classes of the sounds. But in fact, I think what happened is that we know from other Śaiva sources that the mumbo jumbo is real. Those are indeed the letters to be put in the grid.
Speaker A
And that the Jain redactor, unfamiliar with that, substitutes a more rational arrangement. No doubt it worked just as well.
Speaker A
Um Yeah. Anyway, apart from that, you'll see the texts are essentially identical. On page seven, in the Pāda Pratiṣṭhā, this ritual for the installation of the uh the the stones, the original um śilā, uh bricks or or stones that form the
Speaker A
temple, which are ritually put in holes at the beginning of the whole procedure. Um if you look at the top of page seven, on the Śaiva side, tataḥ prāyaścittahomaṃ vidhāya śilākumbhaṃ śādayet prāsādaṃ gatvā gartāsvādhāraśaktiṃ datvā oṃ manantāya nama iti
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kumbhaṃ vinyasya and so forth. Then, having performed a um reparate- fire sacrifice to eliminate any mistakes, the consequence of any mistakes in the ritual up to this point.
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So prayaschitta homam vidhaya Shila kumbham shilaya taking up the stones and the pots, you need both for this ritual.
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And having proceeded to the temple prasadam gatva and having installed that what the adhara shakti the power of the cosmic support adhara shaktim inside the holes which have been prepared for these stones.
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He should then place the kumbha in the central hole, the pot in the central hole with the mantra om anantaya namah over basins to ananta. Ananta is the typical shiva throne deity in the construction of the throne. Ananta
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bhattaraka is installed here. Now of course that won't work in the jain case. It's too obviously shiva. So we have a slightly condensed version tadashila kumbham shilaya then having taken up the stones and the pots and having proceeded to the
Speaker A
place of the temple prasada sthanam agachya. Why did he change prasadam to prasada sthanam? I think there was no reason for doing so. It may well be that he saw this variant in his manuscript of the text and that our two manuscripts
Speaker A
are the deviant ones here. of the shiva prototype. Um and then having placed the kumbha kumbham vinyasya madhyam agartayam in the central hole with the mantra om arham jinaya namah nice standard jain mantra.
Speaker A
And what about this adhara shakti? That's not jaina. So we have siddha shakti the power of the siddhas is installed in the place of that. But you can see that the mind is doing the it's hard to know how creative this is.
Speaker A
Is he inventing these things as he goes on or is he drawing on tradition which is now lost to view?
Speaker A
It's possible. But I have a feeling that um either he or his predecessor was looking at the parallels as it were and substituting siddha shakti as the nearest thing he could think of for adhara shakti. We want the shakti but a
Speaker A
shakti of what? We can't have the adhara shakti. How about siddhanam shaktim the power of the siddhas?
Speaker A
Um so having done that um lagnakale budhyanta padavyapti samchintya having visualized it as pervading the entire universe up to the level of buddhi I beginning with earth up to buddhi the sankhya tattvas up to buddhi.
Speaker A
Lagnakale at the appropriate moment for proceeding astronomically determined astrologically determined appropriate moment for proceeding.
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Um uh and having pronounced ucharya the mantra om hum shivaya svaha. This is classic saidantika root mantra. This is the mula mantra of the the saidantika tradition with the substitution of svaha for namah because this is treated as it
Speaker A
were as a homa. Um so having uttered that he should then namaskarena shilam vinyaset. He should then place the stone on it using the namaskara the namaskara mantra.
Speaker A
So in the jain case we have slight variation lagnakale siddha shaktim vinyasya samchintya om hram jinaya svaha iti mantram ucharya namaskarena shilam niveshayet.
Speaker A
What are the chances of these two texts being written in exactly the same form by form by coincidence? I think it's impossible.
Speaker A
Yeah. And then we have the mantras of the the directions the lords of the directions the lokapalas or the dikpalas the same in both the shiva and the shiva and the jaina case.
Speaker A
No need to change those. We have om lrum indraya on both sides of the of the text and so forth.
Speaker A
But one difference the jains the the jain system uses 10 lokapalas. It must have brahman for above and daranendra for below naga.
Speaker A
So here we hit the redactor adds om nagaya namah om brahmane namah to conclude the list of 10 lokishas or lokapalas.
Speaker A
So iti lokisha mantrais tamramaya kumbhan and so forth goes on exactly the same. And then at the end um we have some additional shiva material which he doesn't want to use. So he draws it to a premature close if you
Speaker A
like. Um so having installed going down a bit to the words um dharmadichatushkam adharmadichatushkam chashilanam adhishtaikatvena vinyasya having installed the five beginning with dharma dharma jnana vairagya and aishwarya and the four sorry the four excuse me the four beginning with dharma dharma
Speaker A
jnana vairagya and aishwarya and the four beginning with their opposites adharma um adharma ajnana and aishwarya and avairagya as the forces that preside over those stones shilanam adhishtaikatvena vinyasya he should then perform a elaborate puja visheshata pujam vidhaya that normally
Speaker A
means in the shiva case doubling all the offerings. A more elaborate more lavish puja.
Speaker A
Tada sangadikam pujayet then he should worship the sangha etc. And we find a number of places in the in the in this uh in this parallel where shiva elements are skipped over and instead there's a sangha bhojana or a sangha pujana
Speaker A
introduced making offerings to monks and so forth. Um sometimes it seems to take the place of homa.
Speaker A
One could say as a general observation that um this uh jaina version of the ritual procedure more or less completely excludes homa but actually not completely. It excludes homa from the regular worship and that's very different from the shiva case.
Speaker A
Shiva case consists of puja japa and homa. Three things are required. Making offerings to the deity uh visualized first internally and then in its external substrate uh gratifying the deity by reciting the mantra the root the root mantra a
Speaker A
certain number of times followed by the ancillary mantras recited for a certain number of times and then finally gratification tarpanam of those mantras by offerings into fire.
Speaker A
The shivas allow you to skimp on that. You don't have to do it every time you do puja.
Speaker A
But you can't eliminate it all together. The the jaina version excludes it. So at first sight I thought ah this is interesting. Here we have the jain anxiety about kindling fire that's not appropriate in the religious case because it destroys living creatures and
Speaker A
so here we have as it were a purified This is one thing that's been sacrificed in the production of the of the jaina version. But in fact homa does appear here and there and it does also appear appears for example in the bhupariksha
Speaker A
vidhi. It also appears in the shakta material the jaina shakta material. So there isn't actually a a nice clean division there.
Speaker A
Um there's a kind of overlap but nonetheless we see a desire to push it out as much as possible or to marginalize it.
Speaker A
Now we're running out of time. I think I'm being expected to speak for 1 hour now.
Speaker A
Approximately? Yeah. So we're coming to the end and so I'm going to jump ahead to a rather fascinating passage. Um which is on page nine.
Speaker A
Uh in the middle prishtha pratishtha. And I put beneath that the words prasada chaitanya sambandha connecting the temple with consciousness. The temple has been built.
Speaker A
The deity has been installed but the temple itself is inanimate. It needs to be animated.
Speaker A
And the shivas developed a rather extraordinary ritual to this end. A small model of a of a purusha a person a homunculus made of gold was prepared.
Speaker A
It was animated by the installation of mantras. All the mantras you need to be an incarnate being all the sorry all the tattvas all the levels of reality which you need in order to be an experience in samsara are
Speaker A
installed in this uh uh golden purusha. It is then placed in a pot which is also ritually prepared and then it's placed above the shukanasa. What's I don't know what the correct term in English for that architectural feature
Speaker A
is the the uh the parrot's beak which is above the entrance to the temple. So middle of the middle height of the temple. There's a niche where this is installed and this is supposed to as it were once that's been
Speaker A
done um that as it were makes the temple conscious. So this is why I've called it following in fact somashambu prasada chaitanya sambandha.
Speaker A
Well the jains were happy with that adopted it word for word. Of course they can't talk about shivagya the command of shiva they talk about jinagya instead as you will see halfway down the page.
Speaker A
But everything else is exactly the same including the installation of all the tattvas. Now the tattvas installed in this person this personification in the temple is not all the shiva tattvas not all the way up to shiva. This is an
Speaker A
intermediate being known as a pralayakala in the shiva case. A subject on the pralayakala level it has all the tattvas up to kala up to maya in fact but no further.
Speaker A
It's not enlightened being. It's somehow a transmigrator. So the temple in this model is seen as a kind of transmigratory being rather than shiva himself which is perhaps surprising.
Speaker A
Um but you will see that beginning uh yeah it's actually referred to as um an ativahaka deha. He's installing in this golden purusha an ativahikam deham ativahikam deham samsthapya having installed a transmigratory body the body by which the soul can move from
Speaker A
incarnation to incarnation. To do that according to the shiva theory it needs to have this raft of tattvas from kala all the way down to earth. So the intermediate tattvas kala vidya raga etc. and then the tattvas known to the sankhya tradition
Speaker A
all the way down to earth. So the the jains simply adopt that. Although there's no uh tradition of these tattvas in jainism they're simply taken over seen as non-problematic uh filling up quite a lot of the text, in fact.
Speaker A
Uh and then after one has installed all these tattvas, you'll see on page 11, uh at the end of the first column on the left, "Evam tattva vratam vinyasya, having thus installed the collection of tattvas, nadi dashakam vayu dashakam
Speaker A
vinyaset, he should install the 10 channels and the 10 vital energies." These two come from the Shaiva um yogic world. They too are adopted, ida, pingala, sushumna, savitri, and so forth.
Speaker A
Um Yeah. And then finally, the the homunculus, this little golden person, is addressed. In the Shaiva case, um he's commanded, "Agyam shravayet." He should recite a command to him and say, "Kaladipa, lord of kala, because his domain reaches up to kala, svatattvena
Speaker A
sah shivagya prasadat sthitiparyantam sthatavyam." You must stay with your tattva here at the command of Shiva as long as this temple endures.
Speaker A
Exactly the same on the on the Jaina case, except that instead of shivagya, we have arhadagya, at the command of the arhat.
Speaker A
Now, having shown you those parallels, I'd just like to briefly to say um words that ignorant that reveal what I don't know rather than what I do.
Speaker A
As you know, um it might it would seem that this text and the tradition it represents um is not well represented in later times. I've counted 12 manuscripts of the text, but I haven't been able to locate, perhaps through not looking hard
Speaker A
enough, um texts in the lineage of this text which repeat it or paraphrase it.
Speaker A
If you look at the Shaiva case, we have maybe up to a nearly 50 palities surviving, all of which are reprocessing and modifying the same material, indicating a very lively tradition.
Speaker A
But, there's nothing as far as I can see that really reproduces uh uh clones, as it were, with some small modification of what we see in the Nirvana Kalika.
Speaker A
Now, you might therefore say that this is a kind of aberration, a fringe text which had no importance in the Jaina tradition. I think this is um to jump the gun. Because what we do know is that Jainism underwent a very radical
Speaker A
reformation from the 11th century onwards, in which various purist groups pushed away this kind of uh temple-based ritualism, going back to the uh of the the the ancient tradition of asceticism, and the emphasizing on the the importance of the discipline of the of
Speaker A
the celibate monastic of the celibate mendicant, um beginning with the activities of the Kharatara Gaccha, but as we know, there are so many other movements which have, as it were, cleaned the board, wiped the the slate clean of these developments.
Speaker A
Um and we see in our early sources in the 11th and 12th century um a very strong sense of hostility towards what are referred to as caityavasins, caityavasina, those who live in temples and in mathas attached to temples,
Speaker A
who enjoy regal attributes, who live like kings in their monasteries, performing tantric rituals, and so forth. This text, it seems to me, to belong should be seen as belonging to that tradition, as a record of the ritualism of that tradition.
Speaker A
And if we don't have more surviving, that may not be because the tradition was irrelevant in its time, but because the Jaina tradition has undergone a profound Protestant Reformation, if you like, in which this ritualism has been marginalized. But, I'm talking off the
Speaker A
top of my head, it's pure speculation. There are people in this room who will be able to comment on that and set me right, I hope.
Speaker A
Thank you very much.
Topics:ShaivismJainismTantric ritualsPadliptasuriNirvanakalikaSiddhantasara PaddhatiIndian religionsTantraReligious adaptationMedieval India
