The Oxford History of Hinduism by Flood Gavin;

Author:Flood, Gavin; [Flood, Gavin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

1. Daily Ritual (Nitya-Karma)

Tantric Śaiva religion is a religion of ritual par excellence. After initiation the Śaiva Siddhāntin was required to undergo a daily regime of ritual, worshipping Śiva at the junctures of the day in the belief that this ritual would help to erase the effects of past action and that, at death, with Śiva’s grace, the adept would attain liberation. As in Jainism, rather than knowledge it is action that creates the conditions for liberation. This was a religion of the householder who maintained general adherence to Vedic Brahmanical values (varṇāśrama-dharma) but believed his tantric revelation went far beyond the Veda. The ritual system of the Śaiva Siddhānta became normative and spread throughout the sub-continent from Kashmir to the South where it absorbed Tamil devotionalism.3 Technically there are twenty-eight Śaiva Siddhānta Tantras along with other texts, although there are actually more, particularly ritual manuals or paddhatis that were used as the practical basis for ritual procedure. These paddhatis were distillations of ritual from the Tantras, containing details of actions to be performed along with the mantras to be uttered and the hand gestures (mudrā) to be used. The most famous is the paddhati of Somaśambhu, carefully edited and translated by Hélène Brunner, and also the paddhati of Īśānaśivagurudeva composed in Kerala. Both of these texts are probably eleventh century, although the latter quotes the former and so is later. The Īśānaśivagurudeva-paddhati is still used by some Nambudri Brahman families of the Taranallur clan in the Alwaye region of Kerala (Unni 1988) and is distinctive in the Śaiva Siddhānta corpus for containing chapters on possession and exorcism.

The daily ritual life of the Śaiva Siddhāntin involved making vegetarian offerings to the Śiva lin͘ga, the icon of Śiva, in a standard way, first having identified himself with his God, for one of the distinctive features of tantric worship is that only a god can worship a god. The divinization of the person is therefore an important part of the ritual process. In the Somaśambhupaddhati this process takes the form of purificatory bathing (snāna), the purification of the elements within the body (the bhūtaśuddhi), the divinization of the body through imposing mantras upon it (nyāsa), and the internal worship of the deity within the imagination (antara-/mānasa-yāga), followed by external worship (bahya-yāga) to an icon of the god (Sanderson 1995: 27–9). Following external worship, a Vedic homa rite was added on to the tantric worship. In this process the vertical structure of the cosmos is mapped onto the vertical structure of the body. The Śaiva Siddhānta codified this cosmology in the ‘six ways’ (ṣaḍadhvan) that divided the hierarchy into three paths of sound and three of space, each of which in itself is a complete hierarchical structure.4 This is pervasive in tantric ritual and might even be considered to be a distinctive feature of it, although there are Vedic precedents before the emergence of Tantra (Einoo 2005: 7–49).

A particularly interesting text from the Śaiva Mantra Mārga is the Netra-tantra, the ‘eye’ tantra, also called the ‘Lord of Immortality’ (Amṛteśvara-tantra).

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