The Yoga Tradition by Georg Feuerstein

Author:Georg Feuerstein [Feuerstein, Georg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938043048
Publisher: Hohm Pr
Published: 2013-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

The devout Lingâyatas aspire to see Shiva in everyone and everything. As Basava expressed it so beautifully in one of his poems:

The pot is a God. The winnowing

fan is a God. The stone in the

street is a God. The comb is a

God. The bowstring is also a

God. The bushel is a God and the spouted

cup is a God.

Gods, Gods, there are so many

there’s no place left

for a foot.

There is only

one God. He is our Lord

of the Meeting Rivers.8

The popularity of the Lingâyatas was largely due to the fact that they championed greater social equality —favoring, for instance, the removal of caste distinctions, the remarriage of widows, and late marriage. This more moderate sect affords a convenient bridge to gamic Shaivism, another conservative religious movement, which will be discussed next.

III. THE POWER OF LOVE—THE SHIVA WORSHIPERS OF THE NORTH

By no means do all devotees of God Shiva follow the perilous path of the Kâpâlikas and Aghorîs described in the previous section. Indeed, most of them cultivate a far more moderate approach to God-realization, though it may well include such Tantric rites as sexual intercourse with a consecrated partner.

Both mainstream and left-hand Shaiva beliefs and practices are found codified in the vast gama literature of the North and the South. We will look at the northern branch of gamic Shaivism first because it appears to be marginally older. The gamas—the word means simply “tradition”—understand themselves as a restatement of the ancient wisdom of the Vedas and are therefore often called the “Fifth Veda” (as are the Purânas and the Mahâbhârata). They purport to be for the spiritual seeker of the “dark age” (kali-yuga), who lacks the moral fiber and the mental concentration necessary to pursue the path of liberation by the more traditional means. The same intent is expressed in the Tantras, which are gama-like scriptures that have Shakti (the feminine counterpart of Shiva) as their metaphysical and practical focus. However, mainline brahmins, who accept the revelatory authority of the Vedas, reject both the gamas and Tantras as false revelations.

The gamic canon is traditionally said to comprise twenty-eight “root” (mûla) scriptures and 207 secondary scriptures (called Upagamas).9 In his Pratishtha-Lakshana-Sâra-Samuccaya, the Bengali prince Vairocana (early ninth century C.E.) mentions no fewer than 113 works, many of which are Tantras. In his Tiru-Mantiram (63), the great Tamil adept Tirumûlar refers to a group of nine gamas. Since he is generally placed in the seventh century C.E., these must all have been creations of the preceding period. It is thought that the earliest of these works were authored in the sixth century C.E. in the north of India but proliferated rapidly in the subsequent centuries, though they could have been in existence several hundred years before then. These scriptures increasingly incorporated the notion of shakti, and for this reason later on merged imperceptibly with the Tantras.

Linga in a yoni base

According to tradition, Shiva taught four groups of Tantras with four of his faces: Garuda (issuing from the Sadyojata face), Vâma (from the Vâmadeva face), Bhuta (from the Aghora face), and Bhairava (from the Tatpurusha face).

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