Prof. Alexis Sanderson - Śāktism outside of Kashmir (part 3)

Welcome to the fourth lecture of the Jacques traditions lecture series. This is the third lecture given by Professor Sanderson, and it will also be the final lecture that he will give this term. The lecture turned out to be a bit longer than expected, so I suggest you break it up into smaller pieces while watching it. Professor Sanderson has also provided a new and wonderful handout for this lecture, and it can be downloaded from the Shakthou region's website. Like the previous handout, I've also put a link to it down in the description of this video. I hope you all enjoy the lecture today. I come to the third of my three lectures on the Shakta traditions. The first two were concerned with Shaivism in general. I tried to map out a picture of the whole of the Shiva religion, concentrating towards the end on the non-scientific traditions within which the Shakta tendencies are found. Then, in the second half of that first lecture, or rather the second lecture effectively, I looked at the situation in Kashmir in greater detail, emphasizing the need to discard the notion of a Kashmir Shaivism, showing the inadequacy of that label, the misleading nature of that label, and also from that leading into the position which I hold quite strongly that these traditions cannot be studied in isolation from other aspects of the Shiva religion. Although they are distinct in many respects, and some traditions within them are more turned their back more firmly on mainstream cyber traditions, we nonetheless need to see them all from the point of view of those engaging with them from the outside, particularly royal patrons. We need to see them as forming a complex interacting system which serves a variety of needs, religious and emotional, for those who invest in them. Now, having given you this outline of the Shakta Shiva traditions in Kashmir towards the end of my second lecture, and having made the point there which I have made in print on other occasions that the assumption that the Tricker is the most important or the emblematic tradition of Kashmir, having shown that that assumption is actually wrong, that there isn't a huge amount of evidence that the Tricker was very widespread in the Shiva community, there's much, and that there's much more evidence that the Kali Kula, the cult of Kali, especially in its Kramer or Maharata manifestations, was actually a much more vigorous and lively tradition in Kashmir. We can see the effect of this reality from Abhinav Gupta's work on the Tricker because in that work he's constantly trying to embed Kramer notions inside Tricker categories in such a way that one, he can as a word apply a filter by virtue which Tricker realities can be read as Kramer realities. I think I also pointed out last week that I've reached the conclusion that Abhinav Gupta was trained first in the Kramer as a young man and then later moved into the study and interpretation of the Tricker. So this fits the same picture that he brought what he referred to as in his early works as this is the esoteric tradition that has Naya. He brought that with him and read it into the materials of the Tricker, particularly the Malni Videotra, which when read on its own contains no connections with the Kali Kula. So there is a kind of hybridization going on there, but I don't want to claim that Abhinav Gupta was the first to take these steps because we have a work called the Devya Yamala, which is part of the scriptural tradition of the Tricker, which already brings about that synthesis by claiming that the three goddesses on the trip, the lotuses on the tips of the trial and trident, are grounded in a fourth goddess worshipped above them, namely Khalasan Karshani, who is, as you know by now, the principal goddess of the Kali Kula. In fact, I've shown in an early work that the Tricker Salbava, another later text of this tradition, has incorporated the Kramer in the very heart of its version of the mandala of the Tricker by worshiping in the very center of the center of the lotus the twelve Kalis, which form the culminating cycle in the meditative worship of the Kramer. So there's a certain amount of syncretism already going on in Kashmir, and syncretism is something which we tend to overlook because the learned authors on the whole try to take our minds away from that, insisting on the fact that like castes, religious traditions may not mingle well, just as castes in reality mingled to a greater and lesser extent. Likewise, religious traditions, and we have plenty of evidence in Jayarata, for example, in his commentary on Tantra, that the Tricker was by no means an unhybridized system. He notes, for example, that there were certain gurus who were teaching a hybrid of text A and text B. For example, we have a number of examples of that. So hybridization is already going on in spite of the tendency of the learned to be purists in the way that one keeps castes apart in orthodox grammatical thinking. Likewise, one should stick to one particular tantric tradition and not mingle it with others. Reality on the ground, as manifest in ritual manuals, etc., shows that in practice things were much more complicated, much more mixed up. Now, having last week dealt with the broad outline with the nature and dynamics of Shakta Shaivism in Kashmir, I want now to look at, in this lecture, what we know about these traditions outside Kashmir. This question, which is a large one, of course, has two aspects. It makes us look in two directions. Firstly, we need to ask ourselves, to what extent are these, is that we'll start with the Tricker here, to what extent is the Tricker a Kashmiri in production, and to what extent is it perhaps not? Does it perhaps have its origins elsewhere and was introduced at some as yet unknown point into the valley of Kashmir? Like so many other things in the Kashmiri and melting pot, it was, of course, a place which relied very much on the importing of Brahmins from other regions. Now, the answer to that question is a difficult one to give, but we can point out certainly that there are some elements in our Tricker evidence that do point to Kashmir. I mentioned the Devyayamala as a text which teaches the embedding of the three goddesses of the Tricker in the fourth goddess of the Kali Kula, Khalasam Karshli. That text very probably was redacted in Kashmir. You may wonder how I come to that conclusion, and scriptures are usually rather adept at concealing their origin. The reason I have here is because it has a peculiar version of the list of eight countries beginning with the letter K, which are said in Shiva tradition, widespread Shaiva tradition, to be places from which it is not a good idea to recruit our chariots. In fact, from which our chariots are excluded. That's to say, if you're looking for an Acharya, do not take one from any of the eight countries beginning with K, the Karashtaka as it's called, the eight Ks. One of these in most lists is Kashmir, and the reasoning behind this is that the early Shaiva tradition is emphasizing the Brahmanical heartland of Arya, the major dish, I should say, rather, or Antar Vedi even more exclusively, the Ganges Yamuna Doab as the ideal place, the place of traditional Brahmanical learning, etc. If you want a good Acharya, look there. Well, of course, the Kashmiris cannot have been very pleased by this tradition, and the same would be applying would be the case in the far south because in this list we sometimes find Kanchi and Kaveri, which of course were great centers of Kala, sorry, great centers of Shiva tradition. So in the case of the Devyayama, the list has been modified to eliminate Kashmir, and I think they introduced Karnataka in its place, if I remember correctly. So I think that's a fairly clear indication that this text was redacted in Kashmir and that Kashmiris, as it were, I would say, cooked the books.

longer than expected so i suggest you break it up in smaller pieces while watching it professor sanderson has also provided a new and wonderful handout for this lecture and it can be downloaded from the shakthou region's website like the previous handout i've also put

a link to it down in the description of this video i hope you all enjoy the lecture today i come to the third of my three lectures on the shakta traditions the first two were concerned with shaibism in general i tried to map

out a picture of the whole of the shiva religion and concentrating towards the end on the non-scientific traditions within which the shakta tendencies are found and then in the second half of that first lecture or rather the second

lecture effectively i looked at the situation in kashmir in greater detail um emphasizing the need to discard the notion of a kashmir shaivism showing the inadequacy of that label misleading nature of that label and also from that leading into the

position which i i hold quite strongly that these traditions cannot be studied in isolation from other aspects of the shiva religion although they are distinct in many respects and some traditions within them are more turn their back more more firmly on

mainstream cyber traditions we nonetheless need to see them all from the point of view of those engaging with them from the outside particularly royal patrons we need to see them as forming a complex interacting system which serves a variety of needs

religious and emotional for those who invest in them now having given you this outline of the shakta shiva traditions in kashmir towards the end of my second lecture and having made the point there which i have made in in print on other

occasions that the assumption that the tricker is the most important or the the emblematic tradition of kashmir having shown that that assumption is actually wrong that there isn't a huge amount of evidence that the tricker was very widespread in the

uh shiva community there's much and that there's much more evidence that the kali kula the cult of kali especially in its kramer or maharata manifestations was actually a much more vigorous and lively tradition in kashmir and we can see the effect of this

reality from abu navar gupta's work on the trigger because in that work he's constantly trying to embed crammer notions inside tricker categories in such a way that one he can as a word apply a filter by virtue which trigger

realities can be read as kramer realities i think i also pointed out last week that i've reached the conclusion that abhinav gupta was trained first in the crammer as a young man and then later moved into the the study and

interpretation of the trigger so this fits the same picture that he brought what he referred to as in his early works as this is the esoteric tradition that has naya he brought that with him and read it uh into the materials of the of the

trigger particularly the malni videotra which when read on its own contains no connections with the um the kali quiller so there is a kind of hybridization going on there but i don't want to claim that never gupta was the first to to take

these steps because we have a work called the devya yamala which is part of the scriptural tradition of the of the trigger which already brings about that synthesis by claiming that the three goddesses on the trip the lotuses on the tips of the

trial and trident are grounded in a fourth goddess worshipped above them namely khalasan karshani who is as you know by now the principle goddess of the kali kula and in fact uh i've shown in an early work that the trigger salbava another

later text of this tradition has incorporated the crammer in the very heart of its version of the mandala of the tricker by worshiping in the very center of the center of the lotus um the twelve kalis which form the

culminating cycle in the meditative worship of the crummer so there's a certain amount of syncretism already going on in kashmir and syncretism is something which we tend to overlook because the learned authors on the whole um try to take our minds away from that

insisting on the fact that like castes religious traditions may not mingle well just as cars in reality mingled um to a greater and lesser extent um so likewise religious traditions and we have plenty of evidence in jayarata for example in his commentary

on tantra that the trigger was by no means um an unhybridized system that he notes for example that there were certain gurus who were teaching a hybrid of text a and text b for example we have a number of examples of

that so hybridization is already going going on in spite of the tendency of the learned to be purists um in the way that one keeps casts apart in orthodox grammatical thinking likewise one should stick to one particular tantric tradition and not

mingle it with others reality on the ground as manifest in ritual manuals etc shows that in practice things were much more complicated much more mixed up now having um last week dealt with the in broad outline with the the nature and

dynamics of shark to shiversome in kashmir i want now to look at in this in this lecture what we know about these traditions outside kashmir and this question which is a large one of course has two aspects uh makes us look in two

directions um firstly we need to ask ourselves um to what extent are these uh is that we'll start with the trigger here to what extent is the tricker a kashmiri in production and to what extent is it perhaps

not does it perhaps have its origins elsewhere and was introduced at some as yet unknown point into the valley of kashmir uh like so many other things in the kashmiri and melting pot it was of course a place

which relied very much on the importing of brahmins from other regions now the answer to that question is is is a difficult one to give um but we can and we can point out certainly that there are some elements in our trigger

evidence that do point to kashmir i mentioned the devyayamala as a text which teaches the embedding of the three goddesses of the trigger in the fourth goddess of the kali kula khalasam karshli that text very probably was redacted in

kashmir you may wonder how i come to that conclusions and scriptures are usually rather adept at concealing their origin um the the reason i have here is um because it has a peculiar version of the list of eight countries beginning with the

letter k which are said in shiva tradition widespread shaiba tradition to be places from which it is not a good idea to recruit our chariots in fact which from which our chariots are are excluded that's to say if it if uh if you're looking for an

acharya do not take one from any of the eight uh countries beginning with k the karashtaka as it's called the eight k's and one of these in most lists is kashmir um and the reason being reasoning behind this is that

uh the early scheiber tradition is emphasizing the brahmanical heartland uh of aria the rather the major dish i should say rather or antar vedi even more exclusively the the ganges yamuna doab as the ideal place the place of traditional brahmanical

learning etc if you want a good archaria look there well of course the kashmiris cannot have been very pleased by this tradition uh and the same would be applying would be uh the case in the far south because in

this list we sometimes find kanchi and kaveri which of course were great centers of kala uh sorry a great centers of shiva uh tradition um so in the case of the devyayama the list has been modified to eliminate kashmir

and i think they introduced karnataka in its place if i remember correctly so i think that's a fairly clear indication that this text was redacted in kashmir and that kashmiris as it were i would say cooked the books because

that's happening all the time in scriptural production but nonetheless adjusted the tradition in a way that was less inconvenient for kashmiri in our chariots so we do have one example that avia yama which looks as though it may

well be a kashmiri and product and the fact that it hybridizes the tricker and the crammer also points in that direction since we do see that the grammar was so vigorous and so widespread in kashmir during this period but now i want to look

at what other evidence there may be that the the trigger came in to kashmir from the outside and i think there is some it's not abundant but it's i'm gradually uh unearthing this and that which leads to the

conclusion that this tradition if it did not originate in the deccan on the deccan plateau was certainly there at a date which is likely to be earlier than the earliest evidence for the tricker in kashmir so what is this evidence and this is

under your item one on your handout the kaulatrika brackets purvaan naya the eastern tradition in southern india just a comment on paul van nayer you may i should remind you that the kaula traditions were widely classified in accordance with the cardinal

directions east west north and south and the puerto vallarta corresponds to the kaula tricker the pasture money of pasture mamnaya followed it and imitated it to a large extent but also innovated in certain fundamental respects and it differentiated itself as

the passion now everyone at that time could see presumably that the pastry marmalade was a development of the purvamnaya so the pashmobnayan scriptures particularly the kularatna are particularly eager to disguise the chronological relationship and to insist in fact

through prophecy within the scripture that the poor of omni will arise in later times as a mirror image of the passion the historical reality is the other way around the pashmina scriptures were in their production they depended heavily upon the pre-existing scriptures

of the tricker we don't have all those scriptures but what we do have is sufficient to show this that the pashman i was dependent on these texts the very fact that it creates a myth of uh which inverts that relationship

rather points towards the same fact i would say so on your handout you have an exchange from um an earlier publication of mine in which i give the evidence or some of the evidence at least for the conclusion that the pashtun

which was built on the basis of the trigger of the purvam naya that the pashimuna is a product of the deccan and also the konkan region the coastal strip which runs down from south of bombay down to karnataka

that this region of the deccan is the place of origin of this tradition it does seem very likely because the text of the tradition asserted and there are various features for example in the the naming practices for the names of the goddesses

ending in avar which also strongly point in that direction and after that citation on page two of your handout i've also provided some epigraphical evidence evidence in inscriptions in fact one inscription here i've i've cited uh for the presence of the paschamania

in the dhaka and this inscription is dated in a date corresponding to which would have fallen in 1029 a.d and this is clearly uh indicating a pashima maya tradition there i know that there is other epigraphic evidence which has not

been published yet um jason schwartz of santa barbara has been working on this uh for a good long time has gathered quite a lot of information uh which he has communicated to me verbally i've heard him lecture about it um but it certainly

points in the same direction that there's quite a lot of references to the cult of the goddess kubjica in inscriptions in the dakan region so now that so that's the first evidence that this doesn't prove that the trigger

originated in the decan but since the pashmanaya seems to have originated there and is drawing heavily upon the trigger the scriptures of the trigger it's quite likely rather i say necessarily necessary conclusion that the scriptures the tricker were

available to these cowles in that region i might add here the fact that um the founder of the kula system the mythic founder of the color system in the present degenerate age the kali yuga is said in the um

in the karla tricker to be machanda also known as meenanata or matsyendrenata and that his consort is konkanamba a princess of konkan which of course is the coastal strip of the deccan that and many other indications point towards that part of the world i think

for the development of this pre-intellectualized tradition this early tradition is not very sophisticated on an intellectual level um what we see in kashmir is a is a is a huge uh transformation which occurs when these traditions were taken up by

learning brahmins who were existing in a in a pluralistic environment but lots of other traditions and in order to establish themselves they needed to produce a coherent account of themselves to answer such questions as why is ritual necessary what is the

purpose of transgressive ritual and so forth these early texts are not very rich in that kind of thinking their concern with prescription rather than rationalization so now further evidence of the trigger in this region um we have an account of the trigger in a champu

kavya that's a poem in mix verse and and and uh prose um the yasha tilika a wonderful work huge encyclopedic magisterial work uh composed by the china scholar and poet sumadeva suri it was written in the decan near

venulavara in the modern state of telangana in shakka 881 which is ad959 to 960. and this is considerably before evidence of kashmiri in influence on the shakti shaivism of this region and this is what he says i've given the

sanskrit in my handout which will be available to you when you listen to this lecture i believe um and uh perhaps it's not necessary for me to read it out i'll just give you my translation now remember this is by a giant hence the

tone of uh contempt for the kula charis the masters of the kaala tradition he writes the vile kolacharis maintain that liberation comes about from practice in which the mind is free of inhibition in such matters as the distinction

between permitted and forbidden foods and drinks for the trigger doctrine teaches that one should propitiate at night ardhan arishwara is the form of shiva in which he shares his body with the goddess and they're fused uh with the goddess on the left

and his male part on the on the right that one should propitiate arden arisha at night with one's mouth full of the fragrance of alcoholic liquor with one's heart tranquil from the taste of meat adopting the shakti seal the

shakti mudra and the yoga posture with one's consort position beside one to the left assuming thereby the likeness of shiva [Music] as a loving couple in which the goddess is sitting on his left thigh and he has his arm around her

sometimes holding her face as well holding a chin at least in eastern indian representations so this account uh leads to the hypothesis and prompts the hypothesis that the form of the tricker known to somadeva suri is that known in the tantra sat bhava

and i say this i'm rather jumping ahead um those anyone who read that account of the the tripper found in the yashas silica would say ah but there's no evidence in any of our tricker texts and not in tantra loka certainly or

malni that the deity was worshipped in the ardha nareshwara form this distinctive fusion of the two deities into one body so perhaps he's making it up he's heard of the tricker but he doesn't really know what he's talking about

well in fact it doesn't prove that because there is a work for tantra sabbah and this is a scripture that was heavily cannibalized by the pashamamnaya in the production of the kubrick and this does teach the original mode

of worshiping the deity the archetypal version of this in the tantras al baba is the fusion into one body of the two alphabet deities the male shabdarashi bhairava which is the sanskrit alphabet in the normal order beginning with the vowel

and ending with sha after her making 50 elements and the the goddess side is the malini order of the alphabet beginning with na and ending with per but this model is also modified in certain kulpas certain ritual procedures

so if you see on your handout page three you'll see under i've list three three uh instances of this arduino worship uh in the center the very foreground of the of the uh tantrasat baba the first is the worship of by the sun

in the propitiation of a particularly long vidya which invokes rudra and the goddess and the mother goddesses and in this the central deity is ardha nareshwara consisting as i've just said of shaddarashi bhairava and malini of course there are deities

around them culminating in 24 yoganese and outer circuit of 24 yogunis now as you know by now the trigger involves the propitiation of these three goddesses they may be worshipped collectively in islam or they may they may be worshipped

individually or severally you can do a sadhana for one or other depending on the particular goal you're seeking um now the worship of parappara the intermediate goddess also involves the nareshwara visualization but in this case the place of malni

is ceded to parappara so we have a a fused deity of shabdarashi bhairava and parapara para doesn't come into the picture because she has a non-iconic worship in this particular tantric tradition that of the time as for apparath the third goddess she is

worshipped in a mode a slightly less intimate situation which is sitting on his knee rather than fused into one one body uh then finally on my item three um we have the idea that the malini within the ardha narishura the female

half of the nadishwara is the proto-yogini the original yogany or the source of all yoginis now what you need to know as a very great generalization about the kala tradition is that while the mainstream shamanism has a cosmic hierarchy of rudras for the

most part male deities the kaula tradition has as it were a pantheon or indeed a cosmology of joganis so the yogunis are manifested as individual goddesses secondary goddesses in retinues and ultimately manifesting in sacred places in the persons of humans and others

yoganese can appear all over the place in this in this particular view particularly in low-cost women according to these traditions some of them are malevolent and dangerous some of the benevolent some are in between and there are elaborate

classifications of yoganese to be found in the tantrashiva particularly in the timeshare so this is the idea that marlon is as it were the archetype of all yoganese within this unified body so i've given some translations there so

audition and translations the supreme yogany although she is one alone becomes infinitely multiple being present throughout the universe in many diverse transformations such as these in giving these pastures i have not annotated the oddities in the sanskrit for example the use of yogi meaning

yogini you will just have to excuse the language of scripture if you are the scoop in a sanskrit just you will vince had that usage um the one supreme yogi meaning yogini yeah so in that passage we read in

reality there is just one supreme yogini this is malini the exalted goddess who embodies all the speech sounds as the alphabet from na to per she is the ultimate power within the body of maheshwara occupying half of bhairava's person it

is from her that there arise within the heart of lord bireva those yoganies that reside on the trident and engage in cosmic play causing all the emissions and retractions that constitute the cosmic process there are other yoginis who are present

everywhere as office holders pervading the universe with their peers for with their peaceful fierce and intermediate actions now this issue of the art narishra still i've given you a passage here from another part of the text which interestingly correlates the mode of

intimacy of the male and female deities with the level of revelational practice and we have an ascending hierarchy which culminates in our israel and here's the evidence my devoted wife this is of course shiva speaking to the goddess

my devoted wife it has been declared that on the level of instruction by yoganese which is termed upper dasha or oral instruction the deity should be visualized as a young girl on bhairava's lap on the level of instruction by yoganese

termed sampradaya or transmission the deity should be visualized copulating and on the color path that is to say on the kawlika level one should visualize them as ardhanarishwara and that's a rather striking passage and it prompts me to comment on one

major difference between the shark to shrive tradition in general and the uh very similar buddhist yogini tantra tradition anyone who is familiar with the mainly tibetan iconography that survives from this uh buddhist yogini tantra tradition is struck by the fact that the deities

are generally represented male and female in the act of copulation yet this seems not to be um not to be seen in iconographic descriptions of the very similar deities which we have in the esoteric non said antigua uh

in fact the reason is that um it would seem to me to be that there's been a certain explanation going on and that in this passage here we see an earlier tradition which corresponds very closely to what we see in the buddhist

tradition where indeed there is a hierarchy according to the learned whereby the deities express greater and greater intimacy as you climb up the hierarchy of different levels of tantric initiation so they start off with a smile and a glance and then move to

copulation and that's the highest level nothing nothing like arduino is mentioned in that context but the idea of a progression in tantric worship from um relatively anodyne representations of sizages through to uh ishra ever through to copulation is is emphasized now moving on

what other evidence do we have um that might point to the deccan as a still flourishing area of shock tradition in the time of abu never gupta in the generations immediately before him well there is a verse which is quoted without attribution by

jayarata in his commentary on the tantraloka in which he reports that shambhunata that was abhinav gupta's principal guru when he composed when he composed the tantra loka so he reports that shanbunata was the disciple of a certain sumati nata

and that sumatinata or sumati was a pupil of an unnamed guru who lived in the shakhtar seat of the deccan dakshinabhumi vasati and i've given you the verse there so the verse said and there arose among mankind an extraordinary illustrious

all-powerful bhairava that is to say a person would become equal to a bireba through enlightenment dwelling in the sacred site that is the seat of the goddess in the decca an authority on shaivism of the five streams together with the majestic atti

muraga that means the khaola tradition here he was succeeded by summati summati's principal disciple the illustrious shambhunata achieved exceptional spiritual attainment from the peter jalandhara not far from kashmir so here we have inside the kashmiri tradition a clear reference to the guru parampara

for this particular form of the trigger at least deriving not from kashmir but from the deccan via jalandra now one more piece of evidence which i think is uh contestable but um nonetheless i i want to mention it i

think this one can make a reasonable hypothesis which is worth checking at greater length considering in the light of any new evidence that may come to light and this concerns the cult of the goddess kamakshi in the temple city the ancient temple

city of kanchi in south india um now the goddess kamakshi has a temple in the what is now known as the kamakoti in it's also a seat of one of the shankaracharyas this goddess uh kamakshi is identified in widespread tradition with the goddess

tripura sundari and that cult of the goddess tripura sundari that flourished in kanchi produced its own literature as we'll see presently and to some extent that is a syncretic or syncretistic tradition because it includes subpaddities subordinate uh ritual procedures for the empowerment

by certain deities other than triple sundry and one of those is the goddess para and she survived as a separate object of worship within this tradition until she was eventually ousted by the substitution of bala another form a very similar form in fact

of tripara sundari but at least well into the late middle ages the cult of para was uh alive and well and we'll we will within the context of the country uh cult of kamakshi but um in the lalito parkhyana props perhaps a

rather late work which glorifies the cult of kamakshi in her identification with tripura sundari otherwise known as lalita hence the name the story of lalitha this is a puranic text so in the 35th chapter of that text which is known as

the kanchi mahatma the glorification or the greatness of kanshi attract praising the importance of the site motivating devotees to visit it and so forth the mahatma is a well-known genre of promotional literature in sanskrit so we have this passage which perhaps

you can read at your leisure but the important thing is that kanchi is embedded in the pantheon of the trickers of kamakshi excuse me is embedded here in the pantheon of the tricker um answering the question well let me

read the passage it is interesting enough i think to justify this um so the sage agastya who's a kind of tamil culture hero thought to have brought the culture of the north into tamil nadu the sage agastya asks hayagriva the

deity hayagriva about the nature of kamakshi at the very beginning of this kamakshi and he receives the following reply i'll just give you the translation who is this illustrious goddess whom we call kamachi who shines forth in this holy city of

kanchi that beautifies the whole world two armed a slender creeper-like body shining like lightning with a beauty never seen before embodying the highest radiance of consciousness supreme thus addressed by augustia the all-knowing hayagriva meditated upon that radiance of triparasundri

his eyes closed in deepest joy having done so he bowed before it in obeisance he then answered agastya and said i shall now impart to you a secret teaching hear me o husband of little of lopa mudra the first goddess she then whom nothing

is higher is para as consciousness as pure consciousness the first cause the cause of all manifestation those who contemplate the nature of the self also refer to her as the nameless one anakin a term more proper in the

in the crammer than the tricker but here we go although it's the trishiro bhairava also refers to uh the goddess as an anamika or the nameless one so it may not be a reference to the trigger from her this first goddess

arose the second power pure para pure unmingled with others so there's there are two paras and this is exactly as in the trauma we see as in in the trigger that we see in tantra two armed she's so she shows with her

right hand the gesture of meditative absorption placing at the level of her heart with the tips of the thumb and index finger joined to form a circle and holds a manuscript in the left hand her body shines white

as snow jasmine the moon and pearls third is para para red with the radiance of a myriad of rising suns she is decked out with every variety of adornment holding a lotus in her right hand and placing her left hand on her left thigh

she wears a crown and the new moon upon it after her came up this is the red four-armed tripura sundry she carries a noose a goad a sugarcane bowl and a set of five arrows it is the same

goddess lalita who has come fame become famous in kanchi as kamakshi now what is surprising about that is that all of other evidence of the the cult of lolita in country accommodates the tricker as a in a kind of uh

subset of itself it has a particular para parity or para krama which it includes in the cycle of worship but it's a secondary definitely ancillary cult whereas here at the very beginning of this country mahatma the goddess is fitted into a tricker

pantheon kamakshi is identified with tripura who actually has a quite different iconography she's forearmed she's whereas come out she's two armed and this tripura is identified with the tricker's upper the lowest of the three goddesses that emanate from the fourth

now in the trick of proper the goddess is a fearsome black or dark red carpallic a goddess here she's become a rather mild and benevolent figure so there's been some alteration to the iconography or else this is a separate tradition

which we only see here it's hard to impossible from the evidence i think is present in to to settle that question but the point i want to make is that um this is rather unique in the literature i've seen for this cult

and may well go back to the uh to an early stratum of the cult although the laito parkiana is a late text um the tradition of the worship of kamakshi and her resident shiva that is is already attested in very early

sources i think the earliest of which i'm aware is the the shakta shiva nishi samchara tantra which survives in a single nepalese palm leaf manuscript which mentions these as the deities presiding in kanji so it's an old tradition and um

because we don't have here in reference to the the one form of the trigger that we will see here in in kanchi and later times i'm tempted to the conclusion that this is a tradition which goes right back to

the origin of glorifying this tradition at a time before the emergence of some of the later kaula forms the matter is not proved but i think it's a at least a hypothesis worth entertaining that uh this trigger presence in country is

quite an ancient one now let me turn to the form of the trigger which is attested widely in this south indian context and that is the system which is known as the anutra literally the unsurpassed also known as the para krama the

procedure for the propitiation of the goddess para or the ekavira the procedure for the propitiation of the goddess without consort of ira means solitary hero or in this case heroin now this system of course is present in kashmir we

saw it before we have a wonderful and extremely difficult commentary by abhinav gupta long prose commentary on its very short scripture the work which he refers to as the trishika meaning the goddess of the three who transcends the three so this is para in

a higher aspect that transcends the triadic structure and the feature of this cult is that it's an extremely simplified liturgy based upon the worship of para alone she doesn't even get worshipped with her angers with her with her ancillaries

it's a pure cult of of devi now this seems to enjoy considerable popularity in the south perhaps precisely because of its very simple straightforward uh if you might you might say pure nature it's not if you like if you if i can say this

it's not full of distraction by elaborate detail it's a very simple straightforward cult and this opens it to the possibility of systematic encoding with metaphysical meaning if you have too complicated ritual system you're going to leave far too much

unencoded it's just too much to to work out but if you can simplify your religious your your your tantric culture down to a very small core of deities then it's possible to read in to transform it into a kind of

meditative worship in which each stage of worship is endowed with is seen as a reiteration of the fundamental doctrines elaborated in the kashmiri and shakta shiva philosophical tradition um so what we find in these initially anutra texts in south india

is a new kind of uh worship um which we don't see uh in in kashmir exactly except perhaps in the crammer that perhaps we can say that what was originally um a rough-edged ritual system with all kinds of unassimilable elements

has been polished and refined so that it becomes an inculcation of the nature of reality in the or through the order of worship the same thing we find here being developed in the south for this anutra subsystem of the trigger and we have a

number of texts which do this uh the basis of the tradition seems to be a work known as the lagu vritti or the short commentary on the trishika or para trimsika as it's often called and this work has been published and

edited and translated has been edited and translated as a work by abner gupta i think this is not correct i don't think the work is by never good but i think it's a south indian work there are many reasons for

that um which i don't need to go into here i think um but the the simplest of them is perhaps that the work simply isn't on the same intellectual level as the works of abner gupta so short of claiming that he underwent

he wrote this in his dotage i think um it's rather unlikely it is from the pen of abner to himself in any case the uh the text as uh commented upon in the log with litty is not the same in

all respects as the text commented on in the para krimshika or trishika vivarna the work that is genuinely by abner gupta rather unlikely that he would be having two different redactions of the text and writing commentaries on each of

those reductions without pointing to that fact at least so we have this work the trishika lagu vritti also known as a work which is of uncertain antiquity but it is attributed to abhinav gupta already by the south indian scholar maheshwar

ananda in his maharata krama work maharata bhanjari parimala we also have a work that trishikal lagu vritti vimarshani which is a commentary on the trishika lagoviti which i'm afraid i have not yet had access to i look forward to

filling in that gap at some point before too long then we do have a world called the trishikar tarparia deepika by an unnamed author and this is a particularly fascinating work and it's extremely frustrating that the one manuscript in which it has

reached us have reached the editors rather because it has been published it's extremely corrupted it's a very sophisticated work but the degree of textual corruption is really baffling on occasions it's been quite difficult to to contemplate doing a rendition of the

whole text but the passage i've given you here i think has been resolved um through my imaginations um and let me just read it to you because i think it is rather interesting it begins with veneration of ganesha

nothing surprising there he's the remover of obstacles and then in the second verse he venerates the goddess para giving a brief visualization verse which occurs often in the ritual manuals for the worship of para in south india may the highest

shakti protect you white as the moon's desk without its marks three-eyed her hair adorned with a sickle moon her two arms beautiful with the gesture of knowledge and the manuscript of her scripture shown by her hands so gnosis gesture in

one hand manuscript in the other i praise the god now he turns to bhai river or shiva i praise the god adorned with a new moon who as the revealer of the tricker's teachings is present on mount kailasa in kashmir

benares and chidambaram which he refers to here as viagra puri a common name for that that city so there is a very clear uh claim that this tradition of the trigger is present outside kashmir we can pass on kailasa i don't think anyone

would be studying on the top of mount kailasa but in banares and chilombaram of course we have as well as kashmir we have this we have the statement here that these are three centers for the propagation and study of the of

the trigger and chidambaram the temple city of nataraja the dancing shiva which everyone has seen who knows india perhaps the iconic image of shaivism the dancing shiva of chidambaram and at the end of the work the verses we've

i've just read are from the very beginning of the work introducing the work he ends as follows an unfortunately corrupted verse but a series of verses but i think i've reached at least 90 percent of the truth here

behold here in chidambaram the town of the lord who is the source of the subtle pulse of manifestation the spunder the town of the lord of the hall of consciousness that chit parishat which is a synonym of chitsaba

which is the well-known center of the temple where nataraja is installed so here in the city of chidambaram i sing the praise of yang shodashi here is the the goddess para the shakti of the shakti of highest shiva the trishika

has already been explained by abner gupta in his analytic commentary the trishikavi varana but nataraja himself the creator of the dramatic dance that is the five cosmic acts by choosing to enter a remarkable man rich in piety has in this way manifested

from his own lips as it were this new explanation of that scripture shiva's own most intimate revelation the mirror of his radiance he has named it illuminator of the gist because it does not offer a verse by verse commentary but clarifies only the

text's core teachings yet it contains the trishaka's intention in its entirety omitting nothing may this commentary shine far and wide having attained a permanent place in the presence of him who with his consort is eternally engaged in the task of his

cosmic dance in the heart of the space within the hall of consciousness the chitsaba of chidambaram if only the texts were better transmitted one can live in a hope of encountering a less corrupted manuscript this should not be interpreted as a

slanderer against the accuracy of tamil scribes not at all the the problem for us here in the 21st century or in my case 20th and 21st century is that the techs have reached us after many many recopyings because of the uh climatic

conditions of southern india palm leaf does not have a very long life so manusc get worn out quite quickly and devoured by insects and the like and need to be recopied much more frequently than in the kathmandu valley where we have intact

manuscripts surviving from the 9th century and many from the 10th this is not the case in south india so the simple climatic fact that the the the humid and hot climate of south india the tropical climate uh devours all organic matter with great

speed has led to a progressive accumulation of errors which makes sometimes it very difficult to see through the error as to what was behind to get back to the text that we have yeah now i've listed after that a number

of other texts which are in this tradition of the paragraph i don't want to go through them all one by one you've got some names there um i want to point out though that what we do have which we do not have from

from the north from kashmir or from uh cadmium or from the kathmandu valley our two main resources for manuscripts in these non-sedantic traditions what we do not have from there are paddities for the worship of para and we've

we do have those from south india and i've listed them there the one with the asterisk is one that i've given a name this material survives in miscellaneous ritual materials which have been preserved in in grantor manuscripts of which there are now devanagari

transcripts in the uh institute of indology and pondicherry from where i've been able to study them easily thanks to the the gracious help of the those who run that august institution so um some of these are just rather

humble materials which are floating around in bundles of such materials often without a beginning or an end there's sometimes rather messy collections of incomplete ritual materials but we have a complete number of complete texts the first one the another samvida

archana character which survives in trivandrum um gives us a complete account of the ritual it's a perfect example of what we can i think referred to as vasana krama a text which sets up the mental ritual as it were the the ideations that should

accompany the ritual actions what should you see sitting down in the seat as how should you understand the ritual bath all these are become metaphors for internal transformations of various kinds culminating in enlightenment so this is a strong characteristic of these

anutar palliatives we also have a complete text which is actually called para krama vasana the the inner men ideation that animates the parakrama the vasana the mental impressions that underlie by a certain shambhavananda shambhavananda rather in his in the

massive work of his called the paramashiva dwight to which i shall return and then we have two partities for the propitiation of para found inside the parasurama kalpasutra which is produced in kanchi for this it's a peculiar syncretistic

version of sundry worship i told you there is a subcult of para within its system so we have two parities from there one from umananda's nithyatsova which is based upon the parish and another within the commentary of rameshwara

composed on the whole panisharama kalpasutra notice the dates the first is dated in 1745 than than the the second in 1831. this tradition of tripara sundari worship based upon the parish ramakulpur sutra has been vigorous almost down to modern

times and perhaps it'd be fair to say it still is vigorous at least in the in the in the tamil world so there is this rich tradition of the of the tricker in its reform which has been going on in south

india for centuries but i think in the wake of the kashmiri tradition not before it everything we have indicates complete permeation by the metaphysical notions elaborated by the kashmiri and archaeas in the 10th and 11th centuries now is this an ultra system found only

in south india well i don't have a complete answer to that but i can say that it's not only found there it's also found in orissa um in eastern india i've published two short tracts the para pavi and para mantra vidi

which have been preserved in the angira sakalpa of the paipalada atarvavedins in that part of india in india and this form of the anutra agrees precisely with that which we see in the south indian sources the same reduction of the text the same

ritual moves the same ritual vasanas everything is is the same and i said i think it's most reasonable to assume that this orisan tradition entered not from kashmir but from the south which it adjoins of course the orissa stretches down into

kalinga which is contiguous with the the tamil telugu and talent and tamil universe now what about the tricker elsewhere is there any evidence of it having flourished elsewhere than in the deccan well yes um we have uh evidence that it was known

in eastern india including nepal now i include nepal within the category of eastern india because my impression is that culturally speaking the kathmandu valley is open to the east not to the north and west there's very little evidence of any

kashmiri and shiva influence coming into the cabinet kathmandu valley there's not no evidence but the evidence is very peripheral very minor and on the other hand it's very clear that there was a continuity uh shared tradition between the the

world of the palace and cena monarchs in magadha and gowda eastern india and the kathmandu valley so i i think it's reasonable to say that the culture of the kathmandu valley looks east and what is preserved in it

is a very conservative and sheltered region what is preserved there are traditions that were once much more widespread in east india so as for trickle scriptures we have some surviving in the kathmandu valley we have uh a short reduction of the

siliyogeshirimata when i say surviving in the kathmandu valley i should say surviving in it or from it because some of these manuscripts have left the valley so we have a short recession of the sidio geshorimata um on the fundamental text of the

trigger we have two very old manuscripts on palm leaf of the tantra sad baba which i mentioned earlier earlier and we have a small fragment frustratingly small fragment fragment of the trickersara a later and more esoteric text of the of

the tricker which i've never got to sites quite often now we also uh have evidence of eastern scholars uh being aware of these traditions so trigger and related texts are cited in the vimalavity this is a a cydantica paddity uh ritual

compendium compiled or composed rather in verse by a scholar called vimala shiva who was the raja guru of the king of magadha who was known as malaya and he was a disciple of dharmashiva who was the raja guru of the king of

dandabukti which is basically the midnapore district of west bengal and in this text a very interesting text we see that he's fully familiar with the kashmiri tradition you can see this from his citations of non-sidantica works he cites the nature

tantra the swachanda and the switchando yota of chemeraja then he cites the malnutra of the of the trigger which in his time had become perhaps the principle basis of tricho exegesis as a result of the work of abner gupta

um he also cites the sidhu geshwarimata and the tantra lurker itself though he doesn't name it but he does reproduce the passage from it and finally the kubji karma the text of the pashmanai which i mentioned several times now

finally vimala shiva tells us that he went to kashmir to study the the tantric traditions and also that he is now resident in banaras rather than eastern india but it's quite common feature i found that raja gurus of east indian kings are

resident in banaras they don't have to be as it were at the beck and call of their monarch that may be the true true of raja parojitas royal chaplains it's not true of deksha gurus who is who were preside in

their in their mutters in places such as banaras and might travel on occasion to perform rituals elsewhere for their devotees and often royal devotees um or of course the alternative is that benares was within the realm of these

kings and that the kings themselves more likely travelled to the the mata or ashram of the of the the raja guru for this purpose so there at least we have some evidence of familiarity with tricker texts in eastern india

and we also by the way have evidence of such knowledge on the part of guyana shiva another saidantic author in the saidantakapaniti gyanaratnavali now gyanishiva was from chuladesha in the south but like vimala shiva he was residing in

banaras and he shows this by declaring himself to be an arden devotee both of the lord of the little hall that means nataraja and nataraja of chidambaram in the tamil country and also of vishweshwara or vishwanatha the principal shivra varanasi by this

period and this author ganesha was active around the middle of the 12th century so i've given a list of the text that he has cited and again you see so chanda bhairava no natra mentioned yes which under my river malni vijaya

sirugesh then two paschimamnaya texts the near guru gyan arnava and the kulaalikamnaya are both texts of the pashimamnaya and finally the mahakala gyana nirnaya which is the same as the work which was published by bhagji as an early

scripture now what about western india let's say the region of malwa gujarat etc well we have trigger scriptures which have been accepted by shiva of malwa in the west in his digest of scriptural passages on penances taken from

a wide range of shiva scripture not just said although shiva he in fact gives us citations from three texts which he says are in the tradition of the sidio geshorimata which is says only that that trigger works the trika sarotra the bija

the last i think an alias of the trisha or bhairava for reasons i can't go into here and he was active probably during the 11th century we have limits on the day which i've stated in that paragraph underneath the

titles now leaving the trigger behind we've seen that it's actually quite widely attested elsewhere um and i i think in the case of western india there's no necessary there's no strong reason to think that it was there as a result

or or influenced by the kashmiri representations of the trigger that we see in the works of abner gupta and others it seems to me in the light of other evidence that we have that the trigger was present in other parts of india that we

shouldn't jump to that conclusion just because we see the trigger in a region that's not kashmir we don't need to conclude that it's come from kashmir directly or at all now i want to move on to the the fate of

the kali kula or maharata otherwise known as mahanaya or krama in southern india now there we have uh a number of uh very important works some of them quite brilliant um the first the one that is best known

i think is the maharata manjuri which is a work of about 70 verses written in maharashtri prakrit with an elaborate sanskrit prose commentary by the author known as the parimala and he was active around 1300 a.d in the region of

chidambaram he also wrote a couple of other works that pertain to the maharata system the paducordia and the maharatoria which survive only in citations which is given from them in his maharata mantri parimala a number of other works of the kramer are

mentioned are cited by the maharata mantri parimala which we do not have access to from other sources i've given one there the kramodiya after that i've listed the which has been published at least twice unfortunately there too the state of the

manuscripts has led to a very corrupted text and since the text is a very sophisticated one written in high carvier style on a very esoteric subject fighting one's way through the corruptions is not an easy task i've been doing it on and off for

decades wondering whether i'd ever reach a degree of competence that would enable me to to sweep away all the debris that's accumulated over the centuries not quite there yet i'm afraid so the chid gagger chundrakar seems to me to be

a south indian work although it is strongly dependent on a kashmiri and work of the crammer which i listed last time the mahanaya prakasha of the kashmiri and kolacharya arna singha who was active in the second half of the 11th century

and this work has been cited in the maharata mandri and i've given reasons for saying for concluding that although the province is uncertain it's pretty clear that it must be south india the work is not known in the north until

very late after works from the east which knew that were in touch with the south had come into the the the the cashmere valley um so it's not one of the works known to the kashmiri and scholarship until very

late and the author also says that he what he composed the work in the purnapita and purnapita is a well-known or at least common abbreviation of purna giripita in the sacred throne of sacred seat of the goddess in purna giri

now sadly we have yet to identify poor nagiri beyond doubt what we do know is that it was in the deccan and so everything points towards the south indian origin for that text and i've listed under six under under

the maharata mahalia kramer in southern india on page nine at the bottom sub entry six reads kramer scriptures quoted by mahesh randa and you have four there of which only one survives one and that has reached us in the kathmandu valley

the chromosome baba that's an abbreviated reference to the kali kula krama of which we have one incomplete uh paper manuscript in in the nawari script um i've listed under seven various other kramer works quoted by mahesh ramananda including the two mahanaya prakashas

that of the kashmiri and ernest singer already mentioned and that published from trivandrum unfortunately without its author the very last failure of the manuscript has been lost and that of course is where we get the statement of authorship so we

just don't know it was claimed by the editor that local tradition said it was by abner gupta i can see why they might come to that conclusion it is a very brilliant work uh written within the uh conceptual

framework of the prachubigyar tradition but i it is for various reasons not by abhinav gupta himself now let me turn to maharata texts that have reached recent times in south indian [Music] manuscripts we have the maharata mantri parimala the mahanaya prakasha of

unknown authorship that's trivandrum one and the chit gagana chandrika those works we have all in south indian manuscripts then we have listed on the d a work which we do not have sadly it's listed in a list of the manuscripts

of the disha mongol and varya the varya family home in desha mongalam uh which is in the malapuram district of kerala this was an extensive family part of an extensive family collection of manuscripts by this learned family of various which

was swept away in the floods of august 1907 uh enormous loss there are a number of unique works listed there and one of them is this maharata which from its title looks like a ritual manual for the worship

of the maharata from the worship of this krama system so it's a sad loss um no no many other works were considered more sad to have been lost but from my point of view the loss of maharata kalpa

is a great pity now i've written quite a lot about there about that particular text mainly because i was fascinated to see that the owners were not brahmin scholars they were sanskrit scholars of the non-brahmin varyar caste and the varyas refer to themselves when

they're writing sanskrit as parashavas and the parashavas theoretically the subcars mixed cast descended according to dharmashastra statements from the marriage of a or the union i should say of a brahmana male and a shudra woman but the idea that uh well the parashavas

are well uh uh well attested uh outside kerala also um with regard to the cult of the mother goddesses the the matrika um that we see in the um the yamala literature of south india which deals with the propitiation of

these mother goddesses largely for the protection of the state and i've discussed that to some extent in my in my study atari vegans in tantric territory um now these uh variars um are useful to look at because they are non-brahmins and we tend to

assume that brahmanical scholarship that's to say sanskrit learned scholarship is pretty much the monopoly of brahmins well here's a very good exception to that case very striking exception these are not brahmins the the various traditionally are assistants in the shiva temple worship

to the nambudari brahmins uh who are the tantries or supervisors of the guides of the ritual life of of temples in in in in kerala uh they're also known as rudra dasas slaves of rudra and kailasavasins those who dwell on

kailasa presumably an allusion to their rudra nature um and the interesting thing is that we have these lists of the manuscripts that were once in this precious collection and we can see from these lists that the library actually had a number of texts in this

tradition it had a manuscript of the maharata mantri parimala more than one manuscript of the chit gagana chandraka and then a list you'll see there following that on this page 10 a list of the principal works of the

shaiva nondualis philosophical tradition beginning with the shivadrishi of somalinda and passing on to the israel pratibhayan karika and it's vimarshni by abner gupta and then also note the trishika lagu varity this foundational text for the parakrama which we saw earlier and some other

works which we needn't go into here then i want to move on to paddities of southern indian origin of south indian origin surviving in the kathmandu valley and this may make something come as something of a surprise we have

a work called the kali kolakramarchana an elaborate blow-by-blow account of the ritual of worshipping the goddess kuchikali hikali was one of the esoteric goddesses of the muller kings and there's a lot of ritual material dealing with her propitiation

surviving in the kathmandu valley and of course the cult survives to this day now this kali kula kramarchana was written by vimela praboda um an ascetic dandy sannyasi in fact who was the guru of the nepalese king arimula who ruled in kathmandu between

ad 1200 and 1216 and attached to that though surviving very far away in the cambridge university library is the maharata mantrapadati which simply gives in in in order all the mantras which have to be used in this worship of gokhikali

so it gives us what we have from these two texts is well the the mahatma maharaja mantra palliative doesn't add anything but it does act as a check on the reading of the mantras found in our manuscripts of the kali kula krama

of which there are several by the way now what is striking about this this work is that in this kali kula kramarchana we see a distinct variant of the maharata distinct from that which was practiced in kashmir which exactly matches that which we see

in the maharata manjuri parimala of the tamil maheshwarananda and not just there we find the same variant of the maharata in two related south indian syncretistic kalapadas the ananda kalpalatika of the the splendidly named maheshwara tejan and anata

and also in the padiavahani of shankara now this system this variant of the maharata is put to work by vimla praboda as a paddity for the worship of the nepalese goddess guccikali who with kubjica and siddhi lakshmi that's how they mispronounce siddha

lakshmi she should be sita lakshmi but in captain diwali she's become siddhi lakshmi um so she is this is a party for the worship of gohekali who with kubjica and siddi lakshmi plays a major role in the royal sharkism of

the muller period the kali kukula kramachna and the ancillary maharata mantrapadati provide all the details of mantras deity names visualizations and the like that are mostly lacking in the more theoretically orientated maharata manjari paribala indeed the author of that work quotes

the chromosome baba to the effect of one must not disclose the names of the deities that form the various cycles of worship and contemplation in the crummer so it justifies its silence so it does occasionally um refer to a list of such deities by

mentioning the first of them i seem to remember he talks about um those beginning with hamsa mati which is the first of a series of deities in one of these cycles and no visualizations are given no mantras except one or two of the crucial seeds

which are endowed with mystical significance but the actual mantras to be recited in the course of worship are left to the oral trans oral tradition so this is the great benefit of the kali kula commercial is that it fills in all

that detail for us and this detail is uh confirmed by those two other syncretistic texts i mentioned the ananda anandakapalatika and the padiavahini both unpublished unfortunately the ananda kalpalatika and the padiavani are appallingly transmitted they're just riddled with errors

and this becomes particularly acute when it comes to the mantras because when a scribe copies mantras he's not looking at things that have a that have a meaning in the dictionary so to speak and so it's they're very liable to corruption but

fortunately we do have the much better transmitted kali kula kramachana so if one wish to resuscitate this tradition uh we have the means of doing so now i this heading this section comes under the heading penalties of south indian origin

surviving in the kathmandu valley so what is the evidence that this is a southern tradition well i pointed to the fact that the system of propitiation here agrees exactly with what we see in three uh three south indian sources the maharata

mantri parimala the ananda kalpanathika and and the padiavahani but there are also features within the kali kula kramachana which point in that direction and the most striking of these i think is the fact that um there are what are called

variously chumma choma or chomakas which are uh secret expressions which have to be used by santa claus by practitioners male and female when they meet together for collective or gestatic worship and these chomakani as they're called um in

the case of the kali kula kramatina have to be uttered at the beginning of each of the sequences of worship and these are these sequences of those of srishti samhara anakiya in the pentatic system of this variant of the crammer

the or the order of emission the order of status the order of resultion the order of the nameless which remains after the resorption of absorption and then final questions referred to as the pure light the pure light representing final queer

essence now the words to be uttered according to this text are not sanskritic and i'm not a dravidianist at all i don't know any dravidian language but i can use the dravidian etymological dictionary that wonderful work by emino and by

my revered former teacher professor thomas burrow and you can see there from the handout on page 11 why i conclude that these expostulations to be uttered these fake during the the phases of these these phases of ritual are dravidian in origin um haha

to come into existence from hidy which means to hold to grass to hold on to to cling to from tamil karai to dissolve to become gradually attenuated from uh compare time r to become full to be satisfied and the same word in kannada meaning to

abound to be filled which is exactly what's happening in the nameless phase and then finally corresponding which has to be uttered during the basal crammer the phase of pure light representing final questions consider time of to feel cool get numbed as in death to

be satisfied to sit to rest canada to be cool or cold and malayalam coldness cool refreshing and you notice that these are reduplicated ha ha hitihiti etc these expressions have the appearance of second person singular imperatives consisting as in tamil of the simple

basis of the verb each is repeated once this is known as an a stacked construction that is common in tamil as a means of expressing intensity certainty urgency or repetition of the action of the verb now one of the uh there are many

fascinating things about this um kali kula kramachla and one of them is that he cites quite a large number of scriptural sources as the source of his uh particular accounts of his of his accounts of this or that

ritual in the course of this compendium of the rituals of the maharata for the propitiation of gujarat and i've given you there a list i think a complete list of the ten works on which he draws which he cites

um beginning with the chromosome and an ending with the jayadratiyamala only the first and last the krama baba and the rata yamala have reached us down to modern times the others are completely unknown i've seen no other references

to these and they're very they're very number um points to a very rich and vigorous south indian tradition which has simply been lost to sight and i've added there under that heading palliatives of south indian origin surviving in the kathmandu valley

um and so on i've added that there is a reference in the south of india also to the jayadrathiyamala it appears in the the great commentary on the nichar shodashikaran the early tripara sundari text uh by vid the commentary by vidyananda nata

the art of ratnavali where it's been disguised by a mistake in the edition following what is clearly a corrupt reading where the a long passage from the first shakka of the jai drati yamala is cited as from the mantra rajia this should be

tantra rajia following the reading of one of his manuscripts which he helpfully records in his apparatus and that has to be right because tantra raja is the way the text refers to itself and is always referred to in this way by

jayarata in his commentary on the tantra loka he calls it the tantra raja or with the honorific chantra raja bhattaraka one more piece of evidence of the presence of the kali kula tradition the kram oriented maharaja oriented worship

of kali we have the orami kowler never manuscripts of the urmikaularnova surviving in the kathmandu valley and at the end of that work it clearly states that it was first revealed in kamarupa in the modern state of assam

around the area of gohati and subsequently was transported of course miraculously through the air to kaologiri in the far south in the deccan and kalagari is kalapara not the far south i should say rather the borders between modern near the

border of the southern border of maharashtra close to the border with karnataka the the city which is uh the site of the great temple of the goddess mahal lakshmi which i think to be the dakshinabumi peter by the way

which is specified as the the seat of the guru of the guru of uh shambhu nata the guru of abhinav gupta now what about the kali kula and maharata in eastern india and nepal well we've already covered a certain amount of that

incidentally but i've listed these things separately we have a manuscript of the kali kulapancha chattaka one of the principal scriptures of the kramer uh written in the margada script with a date in the lakshman senate in the lakshmin hassan and some of it

in the era of lakshmana the senate king of eastern india this manuscript by the way was in the property of that guru vimela praboda who introduced the south indian system and indeed it's thanks to him that we have a number of these kramer works

surviving in nepal they were studied and copied we have several manuscripts of the kali kulapancha shataka only one unfortunately of the kali kula krama sambaba one i think of the david varanashatika to my knowledge one of the yonigah a couple

perhaps yes i think two of the kali some carla sanchez mata uh and if other works have been listed there you you can see um and of course we have um manuscripts in the kathmandu valley i've mentioned that already

and the most the most precious of these surviving materials is is the jayadrathiyamala we have complete manuscripts of all four of the sections they're called shatkas of the jayadrathiyamala because they're supposed to consist of 6000 verses each making a total of 24 000 stanzas for the

whole work in fact the total is slightly less than that it's not a precise numeration we also have a large number of anonymous nepalese or should we say rather nara ritual manuals often with uh added instructions in the

newari language for the propitiation of gujakali and siddha lakshmi or if you like siddi lakshmi in the nepalese style either worshipped independently or together with kubricka and tripoli sundry what developed among the karmarcharies of the kathmandu valley was a syncretistic liturgy

which venerates in turn uh siddha lakshmi gushikali not necessarily in this order siddhalakshmi kubjika and then tagged on i think at a later date and this matrix is used in a wide variety of rituals for the worship of other deities it became as

where the standard karmacharya liturgical format incorporating the accumulated royal deities over time and my my hypothesis is that we have this accumulation because the royal shrines to the tantra goddesses had accumulated a number of deities over time and so their officiants

developed paddities manuals which duly acknowledge all of them and we also have a later literature for inspired by the crammer although the kramer details begin to get somewhat etiolated they fade a bit we have works like the haha rava tantra the

gohya tantra and the sapta mundra krama kramogra beta and then finally we have this vast work the mahakala samhita which seems to have been compiled in mitila in the later medieval period which has a large section devoted to the

propitiation of gohyakali and this represents a later baroque elaboration of the cult of gohikali which also shows certain signs of explanation of the more challenging aspects of kaola practice so for example the use of wine is permitted but not to brahmins you know

there are various restrictions introduced indicating that this text has been produced in a tradition of shock to brahmins who are nonetheless subject feel strongly the need to conform to mainstream brahmanical uh restrictions now as for the pashimam naya

the pastor marmaya in in eastern india first of all the tradition of kojica worship here it does seem to have flourished and perhaps even originated and were not originated but certainly have taken taken root and flourished so we have a palm leaf manuscript of the

short recession of the kubrick armata known as the lagweek naya in the old newari script which was completed in ad 1037 we have a manuscript of the kubrick armata produced likewise in the 11th century written in the parliament script with

corrections and additions in the mightila or early bengali script in in the margins and between the lines clearly this was a text in use in eastern india not in the kathmandu valley it reached the kathmandu valley later we have another palm leaf manuscript

puja karma in the bengali script which was not used at all in in nepal um another one item four there a palm leaf manuscript of the kojic armata in early maitilla or gauda script again east indian we have numerous nepalese manuscripts of

the kobrikomata the shatsa hasra samitar which is a more elaborate treatment of the same material and we have in fact have a simple gloss a tipana on this work the shatsa samhita then we have the katika of jaya an early

paddity which reaches us in nepalese and east indian manuscripts and the earliest of these is dated in the 13th century we have the nichia prakasha of veera chandra a ritual manual for the propitiation of kobjikai and her concert

of consort navartman which was composed in ad 1072-3 and this author was an east indian this is preserved again in nepalese manuscripts we have a commentary on that text uh the nichir prakash of ivara napanjika also called nitya comedy written by the

chief disciple of virachandra one gangadra and we learn from the manuscript that this work was produced at the request of gangadhara's pupil shambudatta who we are told was the personal physician of the parlor monarch ramapana who ruled from about

772 to 1126 and we have nepalese manuscripts of this text finally we have the sri mata padditi also called siddha santana so by yasuo raja or rather jaso raja slightly modernized form of the name in sanskrit it is strictly speaking yashoraja

of which we have an incomplete copy in a composite nepalese codex of the 12th century its discovery in this composite codex alerted me well i knew it already but one should never forget this that even though a title may not appear in a

catalog it may well be in the library because very often you have these composite manuscripts of which only the last item has been recorded the cataloguer has opened the the bundle turned to the end seen the color font and the title and

recorded that but not noticed that there are earlier works other works contained in the bundle always worth looking at this it keeps keeps hope alive that new materials may turn up then of course in in the kathmandu valley we have very numerous

narwhal manuals for the propitiation of kuchika and her consort navadmi so it became very well established in the kathmandu valley and this reflected there was a consequence perhaps of the popularity of this cult in royal circles in eastern india not in

provincial nepal but in eastern india but now it survives only in this isolated pocket of tantric culture which is due to the isolation of nepal has been preserved almost done to modern times of course it's under threat now

under stress but nonetheless these traditions continue now i want to introduce under my item nine a variant of the pastry marmaya which is found in the south which goes under the name shadanvaya shambhava we have a scripture of this tradition

the shambhu nirnaer which survives to my knowledge in a single manuscript in madras along with a commentary on it called the deepika the shambo near near deepika by the south indian shivananda muni author of the ridgeview martial commentary on the nithya shodashi

karnava this man was the guru of the guru of maheshwaran and anata the author of our mahatmanjari parimala and he was active around 1225 to 12 75 now apart from these two texts both of them preserved in codex unicos a single manuscript in

madra in madras to my knowledge at least let's hope there are other manuscripts floating around somewhere we have uh in addition to that we have a paddity the shadow of a crammer which claims to be by a certain umar khanta disciple of

umritanen nanata perhaps the amritanandanatha who produced the commentary on the yoganitri in the sundry tradition but the name is perhaps not so unusual and this is interesting because it sets out in very simple form the ritual procedures and the mantras

for the propitiation of this variant of the the cult of kochika and navartman um this this text also cites a few works in because it's made in a mixture of verse and prose uh it refers to another kubrickometer

and this work is also quoted by maheshwar ananda it's not the kubja kamita we have but another work of the same title and that should alert us to a common problem here that titles are recycled we have a number of words under the same

title people use them again because the title is a is proof of venerability um and two other works have been mentioned there by me under five and six the charon sutra and the rasam rasa here stands for the

number six because there are six flavors so rasam is the synonym of shadanvir and this system is known as the shadow shambhava the charm of the system based upon the six six lines or uh streams the shutdown there and these are

correspondent put into correlation with the five gross elements and a transcendent sixth and uh this tradition became very well known in in in south india and was incorporated into the explicated versions of these traditions which we find propagated

through the muts of the shankaracharyas of south india particularly that of kanchi and we find it in the famous san daria larry that great hymn to the goddess tripura sundari which has attracted very many commentaries over the centuries

and represents a kind of purified kala tradition uh with the same deities the same mantras the same mudras mandalas etc but without the kaala transgressive elements so now the worship of tripura sunday in south india this is too large

the subject to be gone into in any detail and it's perhaps already quite well known that there is a large literature from south india for the propitiation of the the goddess tripoli and most of it at least certainly the

earlier works from the 13th century onwards are thoroughly permeated by the perspective and terminology conceptual categories of the kashmiri and non-dualist shaktishiva tradition these authors have studied the the seminal works of the kashmiri tradition very closely they've learned to speak

that language as it were and unless you're very alert you might well think you're in kashmir reading the work of a kashmiri and when you when you read these texts they have learnt the language so to speak the terminology the conceptual map of

the tradition later on elements come in from advaita vedanta this is somewhat hybridized and finally we get ritual manuals which rather push that specifically shiver metaphysical non-dualism into the background in favor of the advaita vedanta system associated with the name of shankara

bhagavat and as you well know propagated and taught by the shankaracharyas of both sringeri and kanchi um so there uh on page 14 you have a large number of works mentioned up to from four down to on on this page at

least from four down to nine and after that i've listed a number of works referring to the which teach the cult of lolita or kamakshi in kanchipuram and this is also a kind of hybridized system as i think i've already mentioned

because we find in there um that lolita or sundry is a central deity but there are also procedures for the propitiation of associated goddesses who are as it were part of her retinue namely matangi and there are a large number of works

many of them unpublished some of them quite vast one of them which i have of which i have a a printout from a copy that was in the hands of a dealer in oriental antiquities for a while the tripartite from the montreal

mantri enormously heavy thing which is now sitting in the united states i'll get it back at some point um yeah so there are and these works go right up to almost modern times um the latest work i've listed there

was completed in 1843 um by uh um brahmin brahmin working in the court one of the courts of gujarat now um turning to the topic of color syncretism in the south uh taking that up separately i've listed three main elements there

the first is that's parasharama kalpasutra which i've already spoken about which incorporates these sub-partitions then we have a hybridized tradition which brings together the cult of tripura sundry and the shadow shambhava system we see this in an early work of the

the nad sampradaya that doesn't call itself that yet the tradition that looks back to goraksha and this is the mercendra salmita and this work shows already around the 12th century around the around 1200 in fact this combination of liturgy for the propitiation of

triple sundry and also this pashimonaya rooted shadow shambhava variant and it's precisely that combination which appears in the hugely popular text hugely popular among smarter devotees of the goddess triple sundry the soundarya lahari which contains within it the arnanda lahari which represents this

shambhava visualization in which series of goddesses are visualized in the six chakras um then we have a further degree of uh hybridization in which we have the combination of the cult of chipper sundari the shadow shambhava system and the krama o maharta all three things

are brought together uh there's an additional mantra cycle introduced that of the goddess but we needn't consider that further the main thing here is that these three main streams of uh the khala tradition the worship of tripura sundari

the worship of kogjika and the worship of khalasan karshni the maharata are brought together we have this padiavahani of shankara the anandakarpalatika of maheshwara and then a short but rather brilliantly elegant hymn there are probably other works there

waiting to be identified in the south indian manuscript libraries or in private collections so this is a distinctive feature of the later south in the literature this attempt to produce a syncretistic system which brings together all these uh caula armenias the main

elements at least of the kala tradition at that time now i've pointed out that much of this literature the great majority of it in fact is pervaded by the metaphysical nondualism of the kashmiri non-dualists beginning with somanada then going on

through utpaladeba through to abhinav gupta and so the pro the study of the practice was also of course cultivated in the far south and as proof of this we have a number of texts uh one of them the most impressive is a

large-scale commentary on the ishwara practice of abner gupta the ishwara pretty big it comes to us in a manuscript which does not indicate the author unfortunately it's anonymous but we can see that it's a south indian work from its citations

then we have uh a work called the paramashiva advaita kalpilatika which is essentially teaching the kashmiri and version of nondualism the dynamic non-duality of consciousness the samvidad and it also incorporates a uh liturgical tradition namely the parakrama again going back to that

anutra cult so it's a pretty big art text setting our practical doctrine but also incorporating in its large extent a a partity for the propitiation of the goddess para following the anutara subsystem of the trigger what characterizes it is uh an attempt

to reconcile this tradition with um the mainstream smarter shiver tradition as as you know the the smarter shivers are the dominant uh brahmana community in south india and they are adhere to the doctrines of the shankar advaita tradition the

advaita vedanta of shankara and so there's a we see here in this text the desire to reconcile this kashmiri tradition which from the point of view of the orthodox is not rooted in the veda it's veda bayer and

attempt to show that it is congruent with shruti and smithi so the work is very rich in citations of both those categories of text particularly citations of the puranas which fall within the category of smriti and as i've said it also introduced his

after demonstrating its doctrine against all opponents it elaborates a program of internalized worship based upon the system of the parakrama and it actually ends the detailed exposition of the universal shaiva mantra namashivaya or namashivaya also the mantra of tripura the mantra of

para and the vedic dietary that should be sufficient to show its ecumenical aspirations it is bringing together the mantra of tripura and the mantra of para with the universal shiva mansion which you don't even need to be initiated to use

and finally the vedic gayatri which every upanita brahmin or every opanita twice born knows so all of these are encoded to embody the truth of this doctrine and the sources used in this large word are very similar to those

of maheshwarananda in his maharata mantri parimala and there's clear evidence that he has drawn extensively on maheshwaran maheshwar islander's magisterial work we also have a commentary on the prathibiga at least on the gyanadikara of the pratibha gyaakarika by a certain sadhananda who also wrote a

commentary on the trishika on this parakrama tradition then leaping up to almost modern times we have srinivasa butter's commentary the tarparia deepika on the gyanakanda of the tripara rahasya this is a word composed in the context of the cult of kamakshi

or lalita of kanchi their commentary follows the kashmiri non-dualism which is also very manifest in the text itself the tripura um which is a work of the tamil region and the commentary supports the the doctrine with quotations from the works

of vasugupta somalia and and it's very has a very keen sense of the opposition between its own shiva non-dualist doctrine and that of the alpani shadows by which it means the advaita the work was composed in 1832 the author actually tells us his address

he tells us he was living in the maha puskara one of the five grammars of madurai the city of madurai in the far south in the pandya what was the pandya kingdom and it's a matter of great frustration

to me that although he clearly has access to the tantra okra and a number of other works in manuscript form at this early date 1832 long before the availability of uh an edition of this text um and therefore frustrating to me to know

that and not to be able to find any grant a manuscript any south indian manuscript other than one in in kerala any grunter based tamil region manuscript of the tantra loka perhaps one is still out there floating around somewhere

but i haven't seen any notice of it it would be wonderful to have such a manuscript to act as a control uh possibly as a transmitter for superior readings uh in my attempt to edit the tantra loca now i've come to the end of my survey

but i want to end um with telling you what this survey does not cover you know i'm not pretending to have covered all aspects of the shakta tradition there are others which i have not covered here um and which perhaps i'm

not fully competent to cover yet because i haven't devoted sufficient attention to them um the first is the very popular cult based upon the kullarn of a tantra this work is very much cited in in later medieval times

and it's a variant of the of the um it's a carla system which is built upon the trigger with a variant of its mantra known as the para prasada mantra and this work is really very interesting it contains a lot of useful material

and it does seem to have been a ritual system that was widely practiced eventually in kashmir itself because east indians moved into the valley in the late medieval period bringing with them their own religious traditions and so we find

manuscripts of their texts as well in the light in the manuscript collections of uh of kashmir um but perhaps the biggest omission is the late shakhtar khala system later perhaps the later shakhtar color system of the 10 mahavidyas

that seems to have emerged in eastern india before spreading throughout the subcontinent in this triple sundry retains a central position but she's joined by such new deities as dakshin akali there's no doubt at all that these have come from

these are survivals of the once very vibrant buddhist tradition of the tantric propitiation of these two goddesses tara and chinamaster we can tell that because we can actually see the buddhist manuals behind the surface of the of the the shakta ones

um then we have a large body of literature and tradition which could be referred to as smart eyes tantrism that is to say tantrism expected uh to be consistent to be in conformity with smarter smoothly based notions of what

is proper conduct so in other words highly explicated versions of sharktism and related tantric systems and the two preeminent works of this tradition are the silica and the propancha sara and i've spoken at some length about those two texts

in my study atar vervedin's in tantric what these later systems have in common both the east indian mahavidyan system this uh para prasada kala tradition and the shahrukh khan tilika and prabang tradition with this heavily explicated character what they all have in common

is that they lack the distinctive shiva doctrinal fame framework of the early literature scientific and non-scientific so for example the distinctive system of 36 tatwas disappears altogether and rather crudely sharada rather crudely the the sankhya model of property and purusha is superimposed

upon the two deities male and female so the system is transgressive in the case of the east indian mahavidya tradition and the para prasada tradition but the distinctive doctrines that we see in the earlier works both in the

scriptures and in their more sophisticated laboration by authors such as abner gupta those doctrines are not to be seen here at all now one of the great problems with the study of indian religion is that we have many texts which give us

a great deal of detail on how things should be done but we have very little means of doing how widely these prescriptions were followed how popular were these cards how influential were they were they perhaps freakish fringe phenomena

um adopted by a tiny minority of people um but simply graced by particularly intelligent spokespersons who produced this vast literature or were they in fact really an influential force in indian religion in these centuries well i end here with evidence of the

impact of these shaktikallah cults why we have no demographic evidence that would enable us to say oh let's just say 30 percent of uh people declaring themselves hindu at this period if they were using that term would claim to be shaktis would sign up

to the shakta tradition um why we can't get anywhere near numbers we can i think refute the uh skeptical hypothesis that these were fringe traditions and there are three reasons i've assumed i've cited here at the end of my

lecture the first is the existence of a vast buddhist literature which is modeled on the shiva the shakta shiva traditions we've been looking at texts such as the vajra and the chakra sambhara or known as lagushambra or hiroka bhitana

and others of a similar kind are not conceivable within buddhism except as an attempt to utilize the the models of worship developed by these shakhtar shivers and as it were to put them to buddhist work in their relations with the the laity of

east india so i don't think um that buddhism would have gone to the extent of developing kind of parallel literature um where it not if it were not the case that these uh shakta cults were a major force in

the religion of the time that would certainly apply for east india and i think also for kashmir where these traditions also flourish strongly then the second item that i would like to draw your attention to is that the giants develop their own

mantra shastra their own science of mantras and we have works such as the bhairava padmavati kalpa and the jawala malni and in these works we see a very strong impact of the cult of tripara sundari these works are modeled on certainly the

bhairava but mahmuti kappa particularly have taken the tradition of the cult of tripura sundari and the verb their own vagina versions of these culpas these ritual procedures and this i think is a clear indication of the great popularity of this

tradition that the giants actually as they were incorporated it and revised it for their own purposes and finally and perhaps this is the could claim to be the strongest evidence of all of the the popularity of these traditions in

this medieval period and that is the fact that the smarter tradition assimilated these cults in an expedited form these carlo cults especially the cult of tripara sundri and the shadow shambhava although not only those we also see elements of

maharata coming in as well if you look at the large ritual compendia produced by that tradition and perhaps so not only is there a kind of parallel literature um which preserves everything of these traditions in a smarter context

or in a context approved by the smarters and that is to say with explanation of the references to meat wine and sexual intercourse so a kind of explicated cowalism uh became um was strongly propagated by the shankaracharyas who are indeed

worshippers of tripura sundry and it's not just that certain pontiffs um in positions of authority in in south india follow this cult um the devotion devotion to triple sundry is extremely widespread and deep deeply rooted in the smarter community

of south india and this can easily be seen by the prominent position of devotion to tripura sundry in the sanskrit and telugu lyrics of the great composers of the classical carnatic musical repertoire in the late 18th and early 19th

centuries with the compositions of muchoswami dikshitar chiagaraja and shyama shastri and you can verify this by going online and typing in mutaswami digicitar or garage and you'll see a very strong continuing tradition of devotional singing which invokes triple sundry

but particularly her kamakshi manifestation her manifestation as lalita or kamakshi in kanchi i think there can be little doubt that this explicated devotion to the goddess triple sundry is very close to the heart of pious devout smarter brahmins men and women

well i'll draw my exposition to a close here thank you for your patience it's been a rather long lecture bye-bye