Kashmir:Past and Present

In 1320 the valley passed under Muslim rule and remained a Muslim state for five centuries, first under the independent sulṭāns of the Shahmiri dynasty, then under the Chaks (1555–1586), theMughals (1586–1753), and the Afghans of Kabul (1753–1819), before passing to the Sikhs of Lahore (1819–1846), the Hindu Dogras of Jammu (1846–1947), and the secular Republic of India (since 1947). During the long period of Muslim rule, the non-Brahman population of the valley embraced Islam, as did many of the Brahmans themselves, a fact evident from the accounts of the Brahman historians of Islamic Kashmir and from the existence among the present Muslim population of such family names as Bhat (Bhaṭṭa), Pandit, Raina (Rājānaka), and Guru. By 1891, according to the census of that year, Hindus, then numbering about 56,000, formed only 6.9% of the total population of the valley. In 1961 they were down to 5%.

In certain respects this transformation left Brahman culture intact. When the Sanskritist G. Bühler was searching for manuscripts in Kashmir in 1875–1876, he found the Brahmans divided into two endogamous subcastes. One, which he terms the aristocracy, comprised (1) officials and traders, who had left off the study of Sanskrit and taken to Persian, the language of the court, and (2) certain highly respected families that had kept up the study of Sanskrit and lived on allowances (inām) from the mahārājā and on the fees (dakṣiṇā) that they received for officiating as the superintendents of both Brahmanical and Śaiva ceremonies. The other, which he terms the plebs, comprised (1) the domestic priests (kulapurohita, kulaguru) known in Kashmiri as bācabaṭh or gor, then said to number 1,200 families, who gained their livelihood as copyists and as performers of the manual priest work at the various religious ceremonies for one another and the aristocracy, and (2) priests considered to rank much lower than these, who served the pilgrims at sacred sites ( paṇḍā ). This report is accurate in its essentials. One may justly qualify it only by noting that G. Bühler or rather his informants have omitted to mention certain other priestly groups considered inferior, namely, those who received gifts in the name of the deceased on the 11th day after a death (Kash. pāyuch), those who received the offerings to god Yama and the deceased (preta) in certain postfunerary rituals (the yamabrāhmaṇa and thepretabrāhmaṇa; Kash. yembrōhmun and prītabrōhmun), and the priests of vetāla (see asuras) shrines (Kash. vitālbrōhmun).

The structure that he reports, which has survived into the present, does indeed preserve the divisions that had characterized the community of the Brahmans of Kashmir before the advent of Islam: on the one hand, a relatively wealthy class of scholars and officials and, on the other, priests, who (here as elsewhere in the Indic world) were considered inferior by reason of their profession, especially if they were attached to temples rather than to a group of families. Nor did the conversion to Islam of the non-Brahmans profoundly change the surviving Brahmans’ relations with the rest of society by depriving them of the services of the potters, barbers, cremation-ground workers, and others on whom they depended for the maintenance of their way of life. For these same groups continued to serve them after their conversion, and the Brahmans continued to accept no cooked food from members of these or any other converted occupational caste (Kash. zāt), recruiting cooks, if they employed them, from among the non-landowning rural Brahmans. Even the names of the occupational groups were maintained from pre-Islamic times. Thus the term kāwuju, used of Muslim cremation-ground workers, is none other than Kashmiri transformation of the Sanskrit term kāpālika, which in Kashmirian Sanskrit usage denoted those who did this work in pre-Islamic times. The ritual world of the Brahman, then, was still viable even after the conversion of the great mass of the population to Islam.

Nonetheless, profound changes had occurred since the advent of Muslim rule. For, those Brahmans who remained true to their ancestral beliefs were starved of the royal patronage that had stimulated their Sanskrit scholarship and sustained the public institutions of their religion; and there were, moreover, occasional outbreaks of open hostility during which the Brahmans and their temples, religious observances, and libraries suffered greatly. Kashmir’s historians report such experiences under Sikandar Butšikan (“Idol Breaker”; 1389–1413), ʿAlī Šāh (1413–1420), Ḥaydar Šāh (1470–1472), Fatḥ Šāh (1506–1516), Muḥammad Šāh (third reign: 1516–1528), Šāh Jahān (1628–1658), Muḥammad Šāh (1719–1748), Faqīr Allāh Kanth (1767–1768), Amīr Muḥammad Ḫān Jawān Šīr (1770–1776), and Mīr Hazār Ḫān (1793).

There were interludes of greater harmony and better governance during which the Brahman community was able to draw breath, notably the reigns of Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (1420–1470), Ḥasan Šāh (1472–1484), the Mughals Akbar (1586–1599) and Awrangzēb (1658–1707), and, during the Afghan period, Rājā Sukhajīvana (1753–1762). But the overall picture is one of contraction and loss of diversity. Buddhism disappeared altogether, as did the once vibrant tradition of the Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra. This left only Śaivism and a heavily Śaivized Brahmanical substrate; and here too there was impoverishment. Major aspects of Śaivism fell away, notably the Saiddhāntika Śaiva (see Śaiva Siddhānta) tradition and various forms of Śaiva asceticism ( tapas), probably because both of these depended on public institutions, the temple and the monastery, that were either destroyed or declined through the removal of royal patronage. It may be for the same reason that Buddhism vanished during these centuries. For we may speculate that while the Brahmanical and Śaiva traditions were able to survive the decline or destruction of their richly endowed public institutions by reduction to family-based and personal religious observance, including the small-scale public activities of periodic pilgrimage to local sacred sites, Buddhism could not, being largely a monastic tradition.

Other traditions may have been lost simply through the demographic contraction of the learned Brahman community. G. Bühler’s informants told him that those families that had kept up the study of Sanskrit, which included the few from which the Śaiva gurus were drawn, were then no more than 30 or 40 in number, a fragile and inadequate base for the maintenance of the degree of diversity that we see in pre-Islamic times, especially since most of the forms of observance that mark Kashmirian religion at the height of its vitality were supererogatory rather than obligatory.

Loss of diversity may also account for the fact that the domestic rites of all the Kashmirian Brahmans now follow the Kāṭhaka tradition of the Black Yajurveda (see Vedas). It is very unlikely that this has always been the case, especially in the light of the abundant evidence in historical and literary sources that Kashmir absorbed Brahmans from other regions, a fact acknowledged in their own myth of origin as narrated in the Nīlamatapurāṇa, which claims that the valley, once rendered habitable, was settled by men from various lands (nānādeśasamuttha).

In one respect, however, the Brahmans of Kashmir are not as uniform as is believed. They were reported by G. Bühler as claiming that they are all Brahmans of the Sārasvata division, and this claim, which is frequently repeated as the reporting of a fact, has never been questioned. That it is not a fact, which should have been suspected in the light of the abundant evidence of immigrations of Brahmans into the valley, is confirmed by a report in a local Sanskrit source that the Brahmans of Kashmir are of six kinds by origin, of which the Sārasvatas are only one, though the first listed, namely, Sārasvatas, Maithilas, Kānyakubjas, Drāviḍas, Gauḍas, and Gurjaras. The reliability of this witness is guaranteed by the fact that he also reports the gotras (lineage) found within these divisions, information that is independently confirmed in the case of the Maithilas. These, he says, are all of the Dattātreya Gotra. This is the gotra of the Kashmirian families that have the name Kaul, and of those alone. That they are indeed Maithilas is placed beyond doubt by documentary evidence, which also reveals that their original home was in the north of the modern state of Bihar near the border with Nepal under the Brahman kings, that is to say, those of the Oinwar dynasty of Mithilā, which ruled from 1326 to 1526, and, moreover, that they were not followers of the Kāṭhaka tradition at that time but adherents, like the majority of the Brahmans of Bihar, of the Mādhyandina recension of the White Yajurveda following the Kātyāyanasūtra.

There can be no doubt, however, that in spite of the diverse origins of their ancestors, the various divisions of the Brahmans forged a strong sense of identity as Kashmirians (kāśmīrika), all following, in the end, the same vedic school, adopting the same local goddesses as lineage deities (kuladevīs), speaking the same Dardic vernacular, and adopting the same Śaiva soteriology, even when, as is the case with the Kauls, they also maintained certain ritual traditions of their own.

Kashmirian Hinduism, then, limped into the 20th century, much reduced, but still alive. Since then its adherents, known in modern times as the Kashmiri Pandits, have had to face the new challenges posed by modernity and, since 1989, by the recrudescence of communal disharmony that has questioned their very status as Kashmiris and led the great majority to leave their homeland. It remains to be seen how far this community will be able to preserve its cultural and religious identity in this diaspora.

Beginnings

The earliest certain evidence of pre-Islamic religion in Kashmir is Buddhist rather than Hindu. A tradition related in the Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya claims that Kashmir had its first encounter with human civilization a hundred years after the Buddha’s death through the intervention of Mādhyandina, a disciple or companion of the Buddha’s disciple Ānanda. Mādhyandina, we are told, subdued Huluṭa, the venomous serpent-deity that was guarding the land, acquired it from him and introduced Buddhism as its religion along with a human population for whose livelihood he provided by introducing the saffron crocus (bot. Crocus sativus), whose dried stigmata are the world’s most expensive spice by weight, a plant cultivated nowhere in the subcontinent other than Kashmir. The Chinese pilgrim-scholar Xuanzang was told a version of this myth of the claiming of the valley for Buddhism when he was in Kashmir for two years around 630, with the addition of the important detail that before Mādhyandina’s intervention, the valley was one vast lake in which this nāga dwelt, a notion also found in the Brahmanical narrative of the creation of Kashmir given in the local PurāṇaNīlamata, though there the place of the nāga Huluṭa (also Huluṇṭa, Huluṇḍa, or Huluhulu in later Buddhist sources) has been taken by the daitya Jalodbhava – who was raised by nāgas in that lake and killed by Viṣṇu, with the assistance of Saṃkarṣaṇa (Kṛṣṇa’s brother) and Śiva, the first exposing him to view by breaking through the mountain barrier with a blow of his serpentine tail, so draining the lake, and the second banishing the darkness, which Jalodbhava then created to conceal himself by holding aloft the sun and the moon in two of his hands. Xuanzang further reports that the valley had four Buddhist stūpas whose foundation was attributed to the Maurya emperor Aśoka (r. c. 273–232 BCE), a tradition supported by the Kashmirian Brahman historian Kalhaṇa, who reports in his Rājataraṅgiṇī of 1148/1149 CE that Aśoka built several stūpas in the valley.

These claims of association with the Buddhist culture heroes Mādhyandina and Aśoka may well rest on no more than the desire of the Kashmirian Buddhist community to magnify its tradition by pushing it back as far as possible into the past. Kalhaṇa certainly had no reliable sources for so remote a time. We can be sure, however, that the Sarvāstivādin tradition of Śrāvakayānist Buddhism was well established in Kashmir during the early centuries of the Common Era. Here too the Kashmirian Buddhists encountered by Xuanzang asserted more than can be established with certainty, for they told him that a great council had been convened in Kashmir by Kaniṣka, the ruler of the neighboring kingdom of Gandhara, at which vast works were composed explaining the meaning of each of the three scriptural collections of the Buddha’s teachings. Among these was the great Abhidharmavibhāṣā. We cannot be sure that this council occurred or that the exegetical work that it is said to have brought about was indeed sponsored by the great Kushana emperor of that name, which would place it in the second century CE following the most plausible view of the dates of his reign. But there can be no doubt that this account refers to works of scholarship of which some at least existed to sustain this narrative. For, threeVibhāṣā texts on the Jñānaprasthāna or Abhidharmāṣṭaskandhaśāstra, the foundational text of the Sarvāstivādin Abhidharma, survive in Chinese translations: the Vibhāṣāśāstra translated by Saṅghabhadra and others in 383 CE, the Abhidharmavibhāṣāśāstra translated by Buddhavarman between 437 and 439, and the Mahāvibhāṣā translated by Xuanzang himself between 656 and 659, after his return to China. These works, which are more dialectical compendia of divergent opinions than commentaries in the narrow sense, refer repeatedly to the views of the Kashmirian masters, distinguishing these views from those of the Gandharans, westerners (pāścātyas), or foreigners (bahirdeśakas). Moreover, the teaching of these Kashmirian authorities came to be regarded as the standard of orthodoxy in matters of Sarvāstivādin doctrine. It was this tradition that was summarized by the great Vasubandhu in theAbhidharmakośakārikā – he refers to it as that of the Kāśmīravaibhāṣikas (“The Kashmirian Scholars of the Vibhāṣā”) – and defended by his contemporary Saṅghabhadra in hisNyāyānusāra against criticisms raised against it by Vasubandhu himself in his Sautrāntika commentary on this summary, his Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. The dates of these two authors have not been definitively settled, but it is certain they were active during the 4th or 5th century. The biography of Vasubandhu by Paramārtha (499–569 CE), the accounts of his visit to India by Xuanzang (602–664), and the Tibetan history of Buddhism by Bu ston Rin chen grub (1290–1364) all agree that Saṅghabhadra was a Kashmirian, and Xuanzang reports that while he himself was in Kashmir, he visited an old monastery in which, it was said, Saṅghabhadra had composed his classic vindication of the Kāśmīravaibhāṣika doctrine.

It has been claimed, moreover, by P. Demiéville that Kashmir was the home of Saṅgharakṣa, the author of the Yogācārabhūmi, an early manual of Buddhist meditation translated into Chinese first in a fragmentary form at the end of the 2nd century and then completely at the end of the 3rd, and that in the 3rd and 4th centuries Kashmir was much visited by Chinese monks seeking training in this domain. This may well be correct: Kashmir’s reputation as the ideal place for the practice of meditation (vipaśyanā) is recognized in the Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya. However, the country in which Saṅgharakṣa lived and which these Chinese monks are said to have visited is referred to as Jibin in the relevant Chinese sources, and this term seems not to have denotedKashmir in particular at this time, but a wider territory that embraced both Gandhara andKashmir (Enomoto, 1994) or Gandhara alone (Kuwayama, 1990). The same doubt, therefore, must attach to the meditation master Dharmamitra of Jibin (356–442), who is said to have reached China in 424, and Buddhasena of Jibin, whose meditation manual, also calledYogācārabhūmi, was composed around 400 and translated into Chinese by his disciple Buddhabhadra in 413.

Kashmir was dominated successively by the Kushanas from the 2nd century until the second quarter of the 3rd, by the Kushano-Sasanians until the end of the 4th, and by the Kidarites during the first half of the 5th. It was therefore closely connected with the strongly Buddhist traditions of the regions of Kapishi (Kāpiśi), Gandhara (Gandhāra), and Taxila (Takṣaśilā) to its west. This connection is confirmed by the evidence of a surviving statuary, which shows that the Gandharan style was the principal model throughout the northwest, including Kashmir, at this time. Given this openness to the west rather than to the Brahmanical heartlands to the south, it is not entirely surprising to find that there is no firm evidence in Kashmir of activity in the Hindu domain until the close of this period.

In the Rājataraṅgiṇī, his poetic history of the kings of Kashmir from the earliest times down to his present, the 12th-century Kashmirian Kalhaṇa makes agrahāras, tax-free settlements established for Brahmans, the earliest of the religious foundations that he reports, attributing them to his kings Lava, Kuśa, Khagendra, Janaka, and Śacīnara: Levāra to Lava, Kuruhāra to Kuśa, Khāgī and Khonamuṣa to Khagendra, Jālora to Janaka, and Śanāra to Śacīnara. But these kings, assigned to an impossibly remote antiquity, are creatures of myth – the first two are the sons of Rāma and Sītā – and were introduced by Kalhaṇa into his history on no better authority than that of an earlier chronicle, now lost, by one Padmamihira, who had lifted them from another lost work of this kind, the *Pārthivāvalī of the mahāvratin (observer of great vows) Śaiva ascetic Helārāja. As for the tradition that connected these agrahāras with those kings, that, one must suspect, was the invention of their inhabitants, who sought by this means to enhance their status through the acquisition of the greatest possible antiquity for their inherited land. The connections certainly seem to be based on the flimsiest of evidence. In general, religious foundations were named after their donors, and with this fact in mind, the inhabitants may have sought kings from mythical antiquity whose names had at least some similarity with those of their ancestral domains.

Śaivism too is pushed back by Kalhaṇa to a time far earlier than any other evidence makes plausible. For, again relying purely on a literary source, in this case the lost history of Chavillākara, he makes the Buddhist culture hero Aśoka, whom he has follow Śacīnara on the throne of Kashmir, not only establish Buddhist stūpas at Śuṣkaletra and Vitastātra and found the city of Srinagar at its first location (Purāṇādhiṣṭhāna [“The Old Capital”]; today Pandrethan), but also construct a stone enclosure for the shrine of Śiva Vijayeśvara, one of the principal Śivas of Kashmir in Kalhaṇa’s time and doubtless for centuries before it, and two new Śivas bearing his name (Aśokeśvara) nearby. How unreliable Kalhaṇa’s testimony is for this early period may readily be seen in the facts that he has Aśoka adorn the capital with over nine million houses – the population of the whole valley is unlikely to have been much greater than one million – and that he locates all these kings with others within the years 2447–1181 BCE. These others include Kaniṣka, Huviṣka, and Juṣka, the first evidently the great Kushana emperor of that name and therefore certainly no earlier than the 1st century CE and probably not earlier than the 2nd.

What these traditions reveal for certain is no more than that Kashmirian Brahman scholars of the early medieval period countered the Buddhists’ long-established claim that it was they who were the first colonizers and civilizers of the valley by insisting on a greater antiquity for their own Kashmirian Brahmanical culture, while recognizing nonetheless that Buddhism too had deep roots in their land, since while Kalhaṇa reports only Brahman settlements for Lava, Kuśa, and Khagendra, he has his (or rather Helārāja’s) next king, Surendra, found the Buddhist vihāra(monastery) Narendrabhavana, and Janaka, the successor of his successor Suvarṇa, both the Jālora agrahāra and the Buddhist Jālora vihāra. As for Śaivism, Kalhaṇa mentions no “first foundation,” since for him as a traditional believer, the most sacred Śivas of the valley were timelessly autochthonous or established by sages (ṛṣis) in remote mythical time. Thus he makes Aśoka establish liṅgas in his own name, having him conform to the standard practice of a Śaiva monarch, but he has him merely embellish the already existent shrine of Vijayeśvara by providing it with a stone enclosure.

Certainly no Brahmanical, Śaiva, or Vaiṣṇava text from Kashmir can reasonably be assigned to the early centuries of the Common Era. Nor are the claims of Kalhaṇa’s history made more plausible by the absence of evidence in early texts of the pan-Indian Brahmanical tradition thatKashmir was already within its territory. Kashmir is mentioned nowhere in vedic literature; and it appears in no Indian source before Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya of circa 150 BCE , where it occurs in a context that reveals only that rice was already being cultivated in the valley at that time. The first references that attest its inclusion in the domain of Brahmanical religion occur in the Mahābhārata . A verse there speaks of the land of Kashmir(Kāśmīramaṇḍala) as holy (puṇya) and as the home of great sages, a remark strengthened in a variant seen in Kashmirian citations to the effect that Kashmir embodies within itself the sanctity of all the sacred places of the Brahmanical religion, a statement that insists thatKashmir is part of the Brahmanical universe while at the same time stressing its separateness, self-sufficiency, and superiority. A few other passages found in some manuscripts of theMahābhārata, and deriving perhaps from Kashmir itself, add that the sacred waters of the Vitastā (Jhelum), the principal river of Kashmir, purify from all sins, and that offerings to the ancestors and gods made on its banks generate merit equal to that of offering a vājapeya somasacrifice ( yajña ). A passage found in the Nepalese recension refers to the sacred sites Kālodaka, Nandikuṇḍa, and Uttaramānasa, and it claims that by seeing the image of Nandīśvara (there), one is exonerated of all one’s sins, a clear reference to the principal pilgrimage sites around the Haramukuṭa (Harmukh) Mountain in Kashmir.

The Brahmans of Kashmir were, as we might expect, acutely conscious of the importance of the mention of their land in the Mahābhārata as support of their claim to be considered part of the ancient Brahmanical oikoumene; and their claim was further promoted by the Kashmirian redactor of the Nīlamata. For, that work – which provided the Kashmirian Brahmans with their own version of the creation of their land, one in which it was drained and settled with a Hindu population through the intervention of the Brahmanical gods – set out the religious rites to be observed by this population, listed and lauded the sacred sites of the region, is embedded in a narrative frame borrowed from the Mahābhārata itself, and claims indeed that it is part of that epic, one that was not included by Vyāsa in the main redaction only because, being concerned with Kashmir alone, it was not of universal relevance and would therefore have added unnecessarily to the work’s already massive size.

These linkages between their local reality and the epic, then, were important to the Kashmirian Brahmans’ sense of identity because they tied them into what they perceived as the deep past of transregional Brahmanical culture. But they carry no weight as evidence that Brahmanism inKashmir is indeed of great antiquity. For, while we know that the epic was in existence in the Kushana period, we also know that it grew greatly in extent after that time; and though the period by which the text common to all the regional recensions had been developed cannot be determined with any precision, the presence of references to the Hephthalites (Hūṇas, Huns) in this shared text prevents us from asserting for any part of it without other evidence that it must be have been composed earlier than the 5th century CE. For, the Hephthalites entered the arena of history only during the first half of that century, surfacing in eastern Tokharistan from an obscure Inner Asian past, going on to control much of Central Asia, and achieving conquests in Gandhara and Northern India during the late 5th and early 6th centuries.

Thus the earliest known textual evidence of Brahmanical Kashmir does not take us back as far as our earliest evidence of Kashmirian Buddhism. Kashmir may well have had a Brahmanical population that is as old or older than the introduction of Buddhism to the region, but no textual evidence known to me establishes this. The same applies to the evidence of archaeology. This may take us a little further back in time, but certainly not before the 4th century. For, the oldest Brahmanical images that have come to light in Kashmir are seven sculptures excavated at Vijbror (Bijbehara), which J.E.C. Siudmak (1994), in his comprehensive analysis of the development of Kashmirian stone sculpture, has tentatively assigned to a period from the 4th to the 5th century, taking them as representing his Formative Period A: three Kārttikeyas, three goddesses in Hellenistic garments, one of them a Lakṣmī and the other two mother goddesses (mātṛs), one probably Māheśvarī, and a head of a male deity who is probably Viṣṇu. These images borrow heavily from Gandharan art and contain a number of Sasanian stylistic features.

It is only during J.E.C. Siudmak’s Formative Period B, which he dates to the 6th and early 7th centuries, that we find evidence of artistic influences coming in from the flourishing Gupta tradition of North India, a development that may be attributed, as he proposes, to the decline of the royal patronage of Buddhist art in the second half of the 5th century with the growth of Hinduism in the northwest and its espousal by kings of Hephthalite origin, who appear to have succeeded the Kidarites as rulers of Kashmir until the advent of the Karkota dynasty in about 626 CE.

The sculptures assigned by J.E.C. Siudmak to this period between the Kidarites and the Karkotas reveal the existence of the three distinct devotional traditions that would characterize Kashmirian Hinduism in later centuries, namely, the Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva, and syncretistic Brahmanical or Smārta, though the first two of these have not yet assumed their classical forms. Representative of the first are (1) six, four-armed, single-faced Viṣṇus, (2) a four-armed Saṃkarṣaṇa, (3) a Narasiṃha seated with its hands placed firmly at chest level on a mace held between its legs, (4) a seated Lakṣmī with two lions and attendants, and two kneeling males lustrating her with vases from above, and (5) a single example of the type of Viṣṇu image that would dominate in Kashmir in later times, the three-headed, four-armed Vaikuṇṭha with lateral theriomorphic heads of Viṣṇu’s Varāha and Narasiṃha incarnations (avatarās). This early realization of the new type, the earliest that has been found in Kashmir, is crude, with the two lateral heads awkwardly facing forwards rather than to the sides. J.E.C. Siudmak assigns it to the early 7th century and notes that it is preceded by a famous Gupta example from Mathura now in Berlin and dateable to the late 6th, in which the two heads sprout incongruously in miniature from the shoulders of the main figure.

From the Śaiva tradition, we have two liṅgas adorned with single Śiva faces (ekamukhaliṅga), and two variants of an addorsed icon of Śiva that would remain popular in Kashmir even after the introduction of the classical iconography of Saiddhāntika Śaivism. In one, found in the Śiva temple at Fattehgarh, a central placid face is flanked by that of a furious Bhairava to its proper right and that of the goddess Umā to its left. The addorsed figure at the rear has a face distorted with anger and its hair flaring upwards like flames. It bares its fangs, holds a trident transversely in its two hands, and wears a filet on its brow with a skull in the center. The other, from the Śailaputrī Temple at Ushkur, shows the same three-faced addorsed image but accompanied by an Umā and Śiva’s bull (vṛṣabha). It was originally six armed, and it carries the sun in one of the hands that survive and probably carried the moon in the corresponding lost hand on the other side of the image, a feature seen in other early Śiva images in the northwest, and no doubt appropriated by the Nīlamata in the myth of the creation of Kashmir mentioned above, in which Śiva enables Viṣṇu to kill the lacustrine demon Jalodbhava by holding up these luminaries to dispel the darkness in which he had enveloped himself to evade his fate.

The addorsed figure is Nandirudra, the commander of Śiva’s gaṇas (troops). His presence at the rear of Śiva images is an archaic feature with antecedents in the iconography of the Kushana period; and it was soon replaced, together with other details of this multifaced image, by the five-faced and ten-armed icon of (Sadā)śiva propagated by the Saiddhāntika system of the Śaiva Mantramārga (“The Path of Mantras”), in which the faces were identified as personifications of the five brahmamantras (see mantra ): Tatpuruṣa as the placid central face, with the furious face of Aghora replacing that of Bhairava to its proper right; the face of Vāmadeva, effeminate but male, in place of the face of the goddess Umā to the left; Sadyojāta behind looking to the rear in place of Nandirudra; and Īśāna above them all, looking upwards. But in Kashmir the old addorsed image survived the introduction of this new, pan-Indian iconography. For we have an example of this image dated by J.E.C. Siudmak to the end of the 8th century, when, as we shall see below, the Saiddhāntika tradition is likely to have entered the valley. Furthermore, theViṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa, a work composed in the sphere of Kashmir’s cultural influence, probably just to its south, gives this archaic iconography in its section on religious icons, a part of the text that is not likely to have been composed before the second half of the 9th century, because it prescribes the four-faced form of Vaikuṇṭha, a variant of the older three-faced form that does not appear in the many surviving images of this deity before that time. It speaks of the faces of Bhairava, Umā, and Nandi – and awkwardly superimposes the new Saiddhāntika scheme upon them as their true identity.

The reason for this surprising persistence is, I propose, that the old image was enshrined as the iconic form of one of two principal Śivas of Kashmir. This was Bhūteśvara at the Nandikṣetra below Mount Haramukuṭa and the Uttaramānasa Lake (Gangabal) at its foot. The Nīlamataspeaks of Nandirudra as having been rewarded for his long austerities in the icy waters of that lake by being incorporated into Bhūteśvara as his “western form” (paścimā mūrti), that is to say, as an addorsed image looking to the rear; and the unpublished *Śarvāvatāra, which has the distinction of being one of the few surviving texts in praise of Kashmir’s sacred sites that appears to predate the advent of Islam, completes the iconography in its account of the Nandikṣetra (the Nandikṣetramāhātmya) by describing Bhūteśvara more fully as a four-faced image with the face of Śiva-Śrīkaṇṭha at the front looking east, that of Mahākāla (bhairava) to its right looking south, that of Devī (Umā) to its left looking north, with Nandirudra at the rear looking west.

The third tradition, the syncretistic Brahmanical or Smārta, is attested by three pieces evidently intended for personal worship in which images of the three deities, Śiva, Viṣṇu, and Brahmā, share a single pedestal with Śiva in the central position in the form of a single-faced liṅga.

The Hephthalites and Śaivism

Unfortunately, the time to which J.E.C. Siudmak assigns these images of his Formative Period B, the 6th century and the early years of the 7th, lies before that for which Kalhaṇa, our main source for the history of Kashmir, is a trustworthy guide. It is only at its end, with the advent of the Karkotas around 626, that his chronicle appears to be based on solid evidence, though data in the annals of the Tang dynasty of China have indicated that his timeline for the Karkota kings needs to be pushed forward by about 25 years. Nonetheless, some features of his account of the period before the Karkotas, though certainly not his ordering of the kings or the durations he assigns to their reigns, have the ring of truth. We find here a number of kings with Hephthalite names, including the famous Mihirakula and Toramāṇa, and with regard to the religious foundations ascribed to these kings and to those among whom their names occur, we find that these are overwhelmingly Śaiva, in the form of Śivas given the name of the founder followed by -īśvara, or the construction of new temples for (or doubles of) established (“autochthonous”) Śivas such as Bhūteśvara and Jyeṣṭheśvara, in addition to, as we approach the time of the Karkotas, evidence of inroads by Vaiṣṇavism into the royal domain. Thus Mihirakula establishes a Mihireśvara, Baka a Bakeśvara, Gopāditya a Jyeṣṭheśvara, Khiṅkhila Narendrāditya shrines for Bhūteśvara, and Tuñjīna I a Tuṅgeśvara. Sandhimat establishes a Sandhīśvara, an Īśeśvara with the name of his Śaiva guru Īś(ān)a, and many other liṅgas, and Tuñjīna Pravarasena I founds a Pravareśvara together with a circle of the mothers. Pravarasena II, represented by Kalhaṇa as a supremely devout Śaiva, intends accordingly to install a Pravareśvara in the capital that he has founded with his name (Pravarapura), but a Viṣṇu miraculously takes its place, which the king names Jayasvāmin after the architect of the temple. He then installs Sadbhāvaśrī and four other (Śaiva) goddesses in the capital. Laḥkhaṇa Narendrāditya establishes Viṣṇu Narendrasvāmin. His brother Tuñjīna Raṇāditya prepares to install two Raṇeśvara Śivas in two new temples but succeeds in establishing only one of them, since a Viṣṇu Raṇasvāmin miraculously takes the place of the other through the supernatural influence of his wife Raṇārambhā, an incarnation of Viṣṇu’s Śakti. The couple establish a Viṣṇu Raṇārambhasvāmin, a Śiva Raṇārambheśvara, and amaṭha for Pāśupata Śaiva ascetics. Amṛtaprabhā, another wife of his, establishes an Amṛteśvara, his son Vikramāditya a Vikrameśvara, and his wife Bimbā a Bimbeśvara.

One more Śaiva king should probably be added to these. This is the Jalauka that Kalhaṇa claims to have been the son and successor of Aśoka, obtained by him as a boon from Bhūteśvara. According to Kalhaṇa, Jalauka made a vow to worship both Vijayeśvara and the Jyeṣṭheśvara of the Nandikṣetra every day, expelled all foreigners from Kashmir, conquered Kanyakubja (today Kannauj) and other regions of North India, settled communities of the four castes in Kashmirby bringing them in from these regions (claims of the stocking of Kashmir with Brahmans from beyond its borders are also made by Kalhaṇa for Gopāditya and Mihirakula, though in the latter case the immigrants are said to have been Brahmans from Gandhara who were given agrahāras around Vijayeśvara), upgraded the apparatus of the Brahmanical state by extending the total of state offices from 7 to 18, established several agrahāras for Brahmans, and built a stone temple for Bhūteśvara at the Nandikṣetra and a shrine for that Śiva’s neighbor Jyeṣṭheśvara in the capital itself. His religious preceptor is said to have been the Śaiva siddha Avadhūta, whom Kalhaṇa describes as having vanquished ‘‘the many followers of the teachings of the Buddha, who had the upper hand at that time.” To his queen Īśānadevī he attributes the founding of (protective) circles of mother goddesses (mātṛcakras) at the high passes into the valley from the outside world. Since there is no evidence that Aśoka had a son of this name and since in any case it is extremely implausible that there was a Śaiva king in Kashmir in the generation after Aśoka, it is probable that Kalhaṇa, or rather his lost source Chavillākara, has transferred to this time traditions that belonged properly to another king of this name (in the variant form Jalaukas), whom Kalhaṇa records as the father and predecessor of his Hephthalite king Tuñjīna I. The name Jalauka/Jalaukas, meaning “leech” in Sanskrit, is certainly implausible to my mind, except as a Sanskritization of the Hephthalite name Javūkha via jalauka’s by-form jaūka. The motive for doing so is evident enough: to strengthen the Brahmans’ claim of the antiquity of their local religious culture by pushing back traditions associated with a more recent anti-Buddhist, pro-Śaiva, and pro-Brahman culture hero.

The Karkotas and Pāñcarātra Vaiṣṇavism

The royal Vaiṣṇavism of which we detect the first tentative stirrings in Kalhaṇa’s account of the later Hephthalite kings becomes dominant throughout the period of the Karkota dynasty that followed, from c. 626 to 855, the period of Kashmir’s greatest prosperity and power and that during which Kalhaṇa’s chronicle at last reaches terra firma. This dominance is unmistakable in his records of the Karkotas’ religious foundations. For, while his preceding kings mostly marked their reigns by establishing Śivas with their names, these established Viṣṇus, whose identity is revealed if not otherwise stated by the fact that in accordance with a pan-Indic convention their names end not in -īśvara but in -svāmin or -keśava. Thus we have the Durlabhasvāmin of Durlabhavardhana (r. c. 626–662), the Tribhuvanasvāmin of Candrāpīḍa (r. c. 712–720/721), the Muktasvāmin of Lalitāditya-Muktāpīḍa (r. c. 725–761/762), his silver Parihāsakeśava at his new town Parihāsapura, his golden Muktākeśava, and a Viṣṇu at his new town Darpitapura, the Vipulakeśava of Jayāpīḍa (r. c. 773/774–804/805), and his Caturātmakeśava and Anantaśayana Viṣṇu at his new town Jayapura, the Amṛtakeśava established after his death by his mother Amṛtaprabhā to secure the rescue from hell that the sins of his later life had made his certain destiny, and the Viṣṇus established by each of the five uncles of Cippaṭajayāpīḍa, who ruled the country for 37 years during the reign of the puppet king Ajitāpīḍa (r. c. 813/814–850/851): Utpalasvāmin, Padmasvāmin, Dharmasvāmin, Kalyāṇasvāmin, and Mammasvāmin.

Kalhaṇa reports only one Śaiva foundation by a king of this dynasty, and this is a special case. For it was not the creation of a new Śiva with the king’s name, but merely the building by Lalitāditya of a new stone temple to house the ancient Śiva Jyeṣṭheśvara at the site of Śiva Bhūteśvara in the context of offerings to clear his debt to the latter that he incurred when he had appropriated the wealth of this temple to finance his military campaigns.

Devotion to Viṣṇu was also the preference of Avantivarman (r. 855/856–883), the first king of the next dynasty, and in keeping with his personal faith, he installed an Avantisvāmin before his consecration. But thereafter he showed himself a Śaiva in unison with the faith of his powerful minister Śūra, establishing a Śiva Avantīśvara and making donations to the Śivas of the national Śiva temples, confessing to Śūra his long-hidden devotion to Viṣṇu only at death’s door. Viṣṇus were also founded by his brothers Śūravarman and Samara, the first founding a Śūravarmasvāmin and the second a Samarasvāmin.

The form of Vaiṣṇavism espoused by its Karkota patrons appears to have been that of the Pāñcarātra, whose earliest surviving textual evidence is a number of scriptures, notably theJayākhyasaṃhitā, Jayottarasaṃhitā, and Sātvatasaṃhitā, which set out a system of initiation, post-initiatory observance, and procedures for the installation of images, involving the use of nonvedic mantras, maṇḍalas (sacred geometrical shapes), and the gestures known as mudrāsthat express the enactment of ritual transformations, that is remarkably similar both in its range of rites and the structure of each to that of the Śaiva Mantramārga. It is very probable that these texts were produced in Kashmir, and it is also probable that they were produced after the end of the Karkota dynasty, during the second half of the 9th century, because they teach of the four-faced Vaikuṇṭha, an innovation that appears only then in the stone and bronze sculpture ofKashmir. They cannot be later than the 10th because we have works of that time that betray knowledge of them.

We can be sure, however, that there were earlier texts of this tradition and a cult, no doubt very similar, of the immediately antecedent three-faced Vaikuṇṭha, an icon of which we have numerous examples surviving from the high Karkota period (c. 725–855). It is this icon also that is taught as the standard Viṣṇu in the Śaiva Netratantra, a Kashmirian work composed at some time between circa 700 and circa 850, probably towards the end of that period.

The presence of the Pāñcarātra in Kashmir during the Karkota dynasty is also apparent from the literary epic Haravijaya, composed by the Kashmirian courtier Ratnākara around 830. For, in the hymn to Caṇḍī (Durgā) that forms its 47th canto, in which he runs through the goal-states of all soteriologies as aspects or manifestations of the one Śaiva goddess, he shows that he and therefore his courtly audience are aware of two groups of Vaiṣṇavas, each with its own conception of the nature of the goal of human existence: the Ekāyanas and the followers of the teachings of Saṃkarṣaṇa (sāṃkarṣaṇaṃ śāstram). This is evidently the same division that is attested by the Kashmirian Saiddhāntika Śaiva Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha (fl. c. 950–1000) when he reports in his commentary on the Nareśvaraparīkṣā of Sadyojyotis that there are two kinds of Pāñcarātras: Saṃhitāpāñcarātras and Sāṃkarṣaṇapāñcarātras. The first, who correspond to Ratnākara’s Ekāyanas, are, it would seem from their name, Pāñcarātras who claimed that their doctrine rests on the authority of the saṃhitā or saṃhitās, which we may guess to be referring to the Pāñcarātra scriptures, since -saṃhitā is the standard closing element of the titles of those texts (as in Jayākhyasaṃhitā, Sātvatasaṃhitā, and Pauṣkarasaṃhitā; see Vaiṣṇava Saṃhitās), while the second, it appears from the Haravijaya, were distinguished by primary adherence to another text, which was attributed to Vāsudeva’s Saṃkarṣaṇa emanation. This text may have been the Saṃkarṣaṇasūtra of which we have one short passage cited by the Kashmirian Pāñcarātra Bhāgavatotpala in his Spandapradīpikā, a commentary on the Śākta-ŚaivaSpandakārikā, since that verse and Ratnākara’s characterization of the doctrine of the Sāṃkarṣaṇa school have points in common. In any case both groups are represented as adhering to a view that Vāsudeva is the one, all-pervading, eternal substance of which each individual soul is merely a temporary embodiment, differing in that the Sāṃkarṣaṇapāñcarātras eliminated the category of the individual soul ( puruṣa ) altogether from their taxonomy of the real, saying that each “soul” is no more than a set of internal faculties animated by Vāsudeva, who is himself their substance.

As for the Ekāyanas, we find this title or description given with personal names in our surviving sources. The Kashmirian Arṇasiṃha (fl. c. 1050–1100) tells us in his Śākta Mahānayaprakāśathat he has undertaken the work at the request of one Ekāyana Ojaka; Candradatta, author of a commentary on the Jayākhya that survives in part in a Nepalese manuscript, is described in its colophon as a disciple of Ekāyanācārya Nārāyaṇagarbha; the Kashmirian poet Maṅkha (fl. c. 1100–1150) notes the presence of an Ekāyana Bhāgavatācārya Devadhara in the assembly of learned contemporaries (paṇḍitasabhā) that he describes in his Śrīkaṇṭhacarita; and another Kashmirian Ekāyana, Vāmanadatta, will be mentioned below. Finally we may note that in the 10th century in the far south of India, Yāmunācārya reports at the end of his Āgamaprāmāṇya, his defense of the validity of the Pāñcarātra and the claim of its South Indian adherents to be Brahmans against the attacks of the purist Vaidikas (adherents to the Veda), that he has also written a Kāśmīrāgamaprāmāṇya, a defense of the (Vaiṣṇava) scriptural tradition of Kashmir, sadly lost, in which he demonstrated the validity of the scriptural corpus of the Ekāyanas (Ekāyanaśākhā).

If there was once an extensive Pāñcarātrika literature by Kashmirians, it has mostly been lost, along with the form of Vaiṣṇavism that they espoused. But two gems remain. One is a long philosophical hymn to Viṣṇu by Vāmanadatta, which alludes at several points to doctrines specific to the Sātvatasaṃhitā. It has been referred to as the Saṃvitprakāśa, though that is the title of only the first of a series of named sections contained in the work. No title of the whole appears in the surviving, incomplete manuscripts. But we may fairly refer to it as the Viṣṇustuti. It has been attributed to a Kashmirian Śākta-Śaiva author with the same name. But that Vāmanadatta describes himself as the son of Harṣadatta, a Mīmāṃsaka (follower of Mīmāṃsā) from Ṭākadeśa in the northern Punjab, whereas the author of this Pāñcarātrika work tells us that he is a Kashmirian of the Ekāyana lineage, whose father was Devadatta.

The work is remarkable because it articulates a philosophical position that can barely be distinguished from the dynamic nondualism of consciousness propagated in Kashmir by the Śākta-Śaiva Utpaladeva (fl. c. 925–975) and his followers. It is not at all clear to me, however, that Vāmanadatta’s thought was inspired by Utpaladeva’s. The reverse may well have been the case. It is certainly striking that it is quite different from the monism of a single self-transforming divine substance (parā prakṛtiḥ), a variant of the early vedantic doctrine of real self-transformation (pariṇāmavāda), that Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha and other Śaiva authors ofKashmir have reported as the doctrine of the Pāñcarātras.

The other work has already been mentioned: the commentary of Bhāgavatotpala on the Śākta-Śaiva Spandakārikā of Kallaṭa (fl. c. 850–900). This seeks to demonstrate that theSpandakārikā’s doctrine of inherently dynamic consciousness as the ultimate reality is also that of the Pāñcarātra. It was composed after Utpaladeva’s Iśvarapratyabhijñākārikā since it cites that source, but since Bhāgavatotpala has not been cited in any source known to me, the date before which he must have written remains undetermined. However, I consider it likely that he wrote before Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975–1025), since his citation-rich commentary shows no acquaintance with that towering figure’s works. As for the date of Ekāyana Vāmanadatta, one may say with confidence only that he predates Abhinavagupta and Bhāgavatotpala, both of whom cite him.

This syncretistic Kashmirian Pāñcarātrika tradition seen in the commentary of Bhāgavatotpala did not remain confined to Kashmir. It also took root among the Tamils, surfacing there in the Pāñcarātrika scripture Lakṣmītantra, which draws extensively at its core not only on theViṣṇustuti of Ekāyana Vāmanadatta but also on such Kashmirian Śaiva works as Utpaladeva’sIśvarapratyabhijñākārikā and the Pratyabhijñāhṛdaya of Abhinavagupta’s pupil Kṣemarāja (fl. c. 1000–1050). The Pāñcarātrika scripture Ahirbudhnyasaṃhitā, once thought to be an early Kashmirian creation, though for different reasons, also draws on this tradition and its rhetoric for the expression of its metaphysical position. However, the rise of the Śrīvaiṣṇava movement during the medieval period in South India seems to have swept this current of thought entirely from awareness, as one can see by reading Alaśiṅgabhaṭṭa’s learned Śrīvaiṣṇava commentary on the Sātvatasaṃhitā, written in the 19th century. This cites the Lakṣmītantra frequently and extensively, showing that that text had continued to be revered and therefore preserved through repeated copying; but the commentator shows no awareness at all of the gulf that separates its metaphysical position from his own, the Viśiṣṭādvaita (Vedānta) of Rāmānuja and his successors.

As we have seen, this tradition appears not to have survived down to modern times among the Brahmans of Kashmir as a tradition distinct from the Śaiva. In later times the Jayākhyasaṃhitāwas cited by the Kashmirian Śaivas as though it were just another of their own scriptural authorities, and it was already treated as such by the Kashmirian Saiddhāntikas who produced the late syncretistic Śaiva scripture Bṛhatkālottara around the turn of the millennium, since they incorporated in that work the Jayākhyasaṃhitā’s long and detailed treatment of postmortuary rituals for initiates – and did so with less careful editing than was required to hinder one from seeing that they were lifting it from that source.

Signs of the influence of Vaiṣṇavism in earlier times do survive, however, in the liturgical materials that belong to the basic, Smārta and Gṛhya (domestic), levels of Brahmanical observance maintained by the Kashmirian Brahmans down to modern times. The veneration of the gods (devapūjā) that forms part of their daily duties (nityāhnika) on this level is a typical Smārta “five-shrine worship” (pañcāyatanapūjā) of Viṣṇu, Śiva, Devī, Sūrya, and Gaṇeśa, in which Viṣṇu is worshipped in his Pāñcarātrika four-faced Vaikuṇṭha form; and the text recited to summon him into a material substrate of worship on this occasion, and indeed in others in which Viṣṇu is worshipped, consists of three verses from the Pāñcarātrika Sātvatasaṃhitā(25.119–22) which evoke this icon. Moreover, whenever Viṣṇu is invoked as the recipient of offerings in Kashmirian Smārta rituals, it is generally with datives of the names Vāsuveda, Saṃkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna, Aniruddha, Satya, Puruṣa, and Acyuta, a distinctively Pāñcarātrika series taught in the same scripture, and we see this same sequence in the Kashmirians’ Gṛhya domain in their version of the domestic vaiśvadeva (relating to the viśvedevas, “all gods”; vedic gods) ritual. This, like their other Gṛhya observances, is based on the Kāṭhakagṛhyasūtra, otherwise called Laugākṣigṛhyasūtra, the Kāṭhaka recension of the Black Yajurveda being the only Veda of the Kashmirian Brahmans in recent times and probably that of the great majority for many centuries. The sequence of deities to whom offerings are made in that ritual is accordingly that which is prescribed in the Kāṭhakagṛhyasūtra. But there is one difference. For, these deities of the Pāñcarātrika name series are inserted at the beginning, before the long sequence of vedic and household deities. In this case the authority followed was probably theKāṭhakaViṣṇusmṛti, which teaches the Kāṭhakagṛhyasūtra’s vaiśvadeva sequence with this same difference.

The Nīlamata and the Brahmapurāṇa (Tithikārya) or Ādipurāṇa

But perhaps the most striking evidence of the former strength of Vaiṣṇavism among the Brahmans of Kashmir is provided by

1.: the Nīlamata, the local Purāṇa that, as we have seen, provides a Brahmanical version of the myth of the draining of the primeval lake and the introduction of humanity, sets out the Brahmanical observances required of the immigrants, outlines the sacred sites of the valley, and claims that it is a part of theMahābhārata, one that because of its specialized nature was not included in the common redaction, and
2.: the very closely related section on recurrent duties (Tithikārya) of theBrahmapurāṇa, preserved in its entirety through incorporation in the dharmashastric digests of Lakṣṃīdhara (Kṛtyakalpataru) in the early 12th century and Caṇḍeśvara (Kṛtyaratnākara) in the 14th, in a single, incomplete manuscript inKashmir under the title *Ādipurāṇa, and in a number of excerpts found here and there in Kashmirian codices that bring together various materials pertaining to the rituals that Brahmans must perform or have performed on their behalf by their priests.

This corpus is not narrowly Vaiṣṇava in the sense that it advocates the worship of no gods other than Viṣṇu and his emanations. On the contrary, it details an annual cycle of recurrent, calendrically fixed observances and festivals (utsava) for the specific worship not only of Viṣṇu but also of many other deities and supernaturals, notably Brahmā, Śiva, Skanda, Lakṣṃī/Karīṣiṇī, Gaṇeśa, Bhadrakālī/Durgā, Rukmiṇī, Kāmadeva, the river Gaṅgā, the local rivers Vitastā (Veth, Jhelum) and Viśokā (Veśau), the Buddha, Revatī, Umā/Gaurī, Mahāśani, Sūrya, Vāyu, the viśvedevas, the prajāpati Kaśyapa (venerated as the founder of Kashmir), Kṛṣṇa, the nāga Nīla, Indra and Śacī, Varuṇa, Kubera/Vaiśravaṇa, Pṛthivī (Bhūdevī), Yama/Dharmarāja, the yoginī Aśokā, Agastya (the star Canopus), Nikumbha and the piśāca s, Siddhā/Ekāntavāsinī, Candra, Śyāmādevī (Rādhā), Himālaya, Sītā, Kaśmīrā, Chandodeva, Aryaman, Krṣṇa, Yaśodā, Devakī, Surabhī, Vanaspati, the lokapālas (guardians of the world), Ananta, the grahas (planets; navagrahas), the nakṣatras (asterisms), the elephants of the directions (diggajas), Nandin, Agni, Revanta, the kṛttikās (other than Arundhatī), Khaḍga, Śiśira, Hemanta, Kailāsa, Puṣya, Bṛhaspati, the four Vedas, and the 22prajāpatis (vedic gods). Nonetheless, both the Nīlamata and the Brahmapurāṇa/Ādipurāṇaclaim to be the teachings of Viṣṇu; and there are many more days in their polytheistic calendar on which Viṣṇu’s worship is prescribed, either as the sole deity or as the deity to be worshipped before the rituals specific to that day may be performed; and there are three periods in the year, each of five days, that are dedicated to him exclusively, entailing fasting, vigils, worship, image procession, and festivities, culminating on the full-moon days of the months āṣāḍha (Jun–Jul),kārttika (Oct–Nov), and pauṣa (Dec–Jan). Moreover, during the first two, marking the beginning and end of the period during which Viṣṇu sleeps on the serpent Ananta (sacred animals), our texts prescribe that the festivities should include the feeding of Pāñcarātrikas and that the bathing of one’s image of Viṣṇu required in the second should be done according to the procedure of the Pāñcarātra.

There are also a number of passages in the texts that reveal the Vaiṣṇava adherence of the redactors. Thus, for example, the Brahmapurāṇa/Ādipurāṇa, when speaking of pious suicide by walking up into the snows of the Himalaya (mahāprasthāna), says that the dying man will see a bright fire with flames revolving from left to right and that this is the Saṃkarṣaṇa form of Viṣṇu; and in the same text’s account of the Indra festival (indrotsava) celebrated during the bright half month of bhādrapada (Aug–Sep) in connection with the approaching autumn harvest, we are told that Indra must be worshipped during these days because it is he who causes the crops to ripen and that he does so by tapping them with his thunderbolt (vajra) at the command of Viṣṇu. Another example can been seen in the ritual in spring that marks the beginning of the new year on the first day of the bright fortnight of caitra (Mar–Apr). The text requires the householder to ward off all ills by offering obeisance first to Brahmā and then to the units of time, the planets, the asterisms, the kulanāgas (lineage serpents), the Manus (progenitors; cosmic cycles), the Indras, the dakṣakanyās (daughters of Dakṣa, the ādityas; vedic gods), the various devagaṇas (class of gods), ṛṣis, yakṣas (class of demigods), and the rest, in short to all that is sacred in the world, including its rivers, oceans, continents, mountains, and tīrthas. This is accomplished by means of the bahurūpamantra, a long verse recitation in which one venerates each of these elements in the dative case with nama, the formula of obeisance, followed by a fire sacrifice (homa) using the same datives without nama and followed by svāhāas one pours oblations to each on to the fire. The Vaiṣṇava nature of the ceremony becomes apparent in the culminating unit of the mantra, in which the dative is of ‘‘Viṣṇu as the Supreme Soul who assumes [these] many forms’’ (bahurūpāya viṣṇave paramātmane).

However, it seems that the Vaiṣṇavism of these authorities on the calendrical rites of Kashmirwas propagated in a community in which Śaivism had already put down firm roots. This hypothesis may explain the presence in the texts of certain beliefs that can only have emerged in a Śaiva world, beliefs that no Vaiṣṇava text would be expected to promote if they were not so deep-seated in their intended audience as to be inescapable. We may note, for example, that the land of Kashmir is venerated here as an incarnation of Śiva’s consort, that it is she rather than Viṣṇu’s Lakṣmī who is said to have incarnated herself as the river Vitastā – Lakṣmī is equated with the lesser river Viśokā – and that the kings of Kashmir are said to be partial incarnations of Śiva (harāṃśa). The last feature is particularly striking since Brahmanical tradition offered Vaiṣṇavas the alternative of presenting the monarch as a partial incarnation of Viṣṇu.

When the tradition of these texts was introduced cannot be determined with any precision, but it is probable that the Nīlamata was in existence long before the 12th century, the time of the first known reference to it in a dated source, but perhaps not before the promotion of Vaiṣṇavism during the Karkota period. It may well have been created during the time of those kings (c. 626–855), but there can be no certainty that it was, since Vaiṣṇavism neither began nor ended in Kashmir with that dynasty.

In later times the Vaiṣṇava bias of the program of calendrical festivals of Kashmir seen in these texts disappeared under the influence of Śaivism. Śivarātri, the annual festival of Śiva worship celebrated towards the end of winter – which is a relatively small-scale event in these texts, covering only three days, from the 13th of the dark fort-night of phālguṇa (Feb–Mar) to the day of the new moon – became greatly elaborated, coming to occupy many more days, with the main action shifting from the 14th, the day assigned for this purpose in non-Kashmirian sources and in the Nīlamata and Brahmapuṛāṇa, to the 13th; and this development was accompanied by the emergence of a rich mythology of śivarātri, indeed more than one, peculiar to this region. Textual evidence of this new order can be seen in the chapter devoted to śivarātri in theHaracaritacintāmaṇi of Jayadratha in the 13th century. But the tradition has not remained static since that time, as can be seen from more recent Paddhatis (ritual manuals) and such learned Śaiva works as the Śivarātrirahasya of Śivasvāmin, who was probably active during the reign of Raṇjit Singh (1819–1839). Similarly, the Viṣṇu-oriented new-year festival (navavarṣotsava) mentioned above was replaced at some time by one in which the deity worshipped is Svacchandabhairava (see Bhairava), the principal deity of the Kashmirian Śaivas for many centuries.

There have been other changes in the program of worship that no doubt reflect this same shift towards Śaivism and its Śākta aspects. One of these is the reinterpretation of the goddess called variously Ekāntadevatā, Ekāntavāsinī, Ekāntī, Siddhā, and Gṛhadevī, who in the Brahmapurāṇa/Ādipurāṇa is described as the yoganidrā (yogic sleep) of Viṣṇu, that is to say, his Śakti. In the latter manuals, evidently composed in a Śākta-Śaiva milieu, she is identified as Kālasaṃkarṣiṇī, the Great Goddess of the Kashmirian Śaiva Kālī cult known as the Krama (see KashmirŚaivism), and she is propitiated along with the mother goddesses and yoginīs as her retinue in the ceremony of her worship, termed divagŏn in Kashmiri, which became an integral preliminary of all ceremonies on joyous occasions such as birth, name giving, tonsure (cūḍākarman), upanayana (investiture of the sacred thread), the marriage of a son or daughter, and the entering of a new home or shrine (see saṃskāras).

Another significant change is the development of festivals of the local goddesses who are venerated as the lineage deities (kuladevī) of sections of the Kashmirian Brahmans: Śārikā, whose seat (pīṭha) is on the Pradyumnagiri or Sarikaparvata (Hāraparbuth) that overlooks the capital Srinagar, Jvālā(mukhī) at Khruv, Bālā (Tripurasundarī) under a deodar tree (bot. Cedrus deodara) at Balahom (Bālāśrama), and Rājñī at Tulmul. Of these goddesses only Śārikā can be shown to be ancient, since her mythology is already related in the Kathāsaritsāgara of the Kashmirian poet Somadeva, composed at some time between 1063 and 1082. As for when these local deities were adopted as lineage goddesses, I am aware of no evidence of the practice earlier than the 17th century, and that pertains only to Śārikā: the Śārikāstava, a hymn to that goddess by Sāhib Kaul (1642–1667+) reveals that she was his vaṃśadevī (lineage goddess).

Another sign of the shift is the pervasive presence in the rituals of the Kashmirians of ancillary worship of the kṣetrapālas (guardians of the soil), minor Bhairavas who are propitiated by receiving bali (sacrifice) offerings as the guardians of various localities, principally, to mention only those whose worship is included in the Kṣetrapālapaddhati, Rājarājeśvara/Rāṣṭrādhipati, Vetālabhairava, Bahukhātakeśvara, Pūrṇarājānaka, Viṣvaksena, Tāraka, Hāṭakeśvara, Maṅkharāja/Turuṣkarājānaka, Maṅgaleśvara/Maṅgalarājānaka, Loṣṭarājānaka/Loṣṭeśvara, Ānandarājānaka, Puṇyarājānaka, and Śuṣkeśvara.

Here too I am aware of no firm evidence of worship before the time of Sāhib Kaul, who refers to one of the kṣetrapālas, Maṅkharāja alias Turuṣkarājānaka, in his Kashmiri Janmacarita, telling us that he resides in the Kathul (Kāṣṭhīla) quarter of Srinagar, which was at least for-merly a locality inhabited by Brahmans, not far from the royal palace and a vanished temple of Sadāśiva. The name of this godling is intriguing since it appears to mean that he was considered to be a Turuṣka (i.e. Muslim, as it has only this meaning in the Sanskrit of the Kashmirians of the Islamic period); and this is confirmed by the visualization verses to be recited when offering hisbali according to the Kṣetrapālapaddhati. For there he is described as a follower of Islam (musulavratajuṣ). Nor does his visualization show any of the usual features of a Bhairava other than that he is said to reside at the foot of a tree, or rather, in this case, at the foot of a mādhavī(creeper; bot. Hiptage madablota). He has only one face and two arms, carries a bowl of fruit in his left hand and a multicolored staff in the right, and wears two cotton garments, one white and the other black. Here, it seems, we are at a level of popular religion where the barrier between the two faiths of Kashmir, Islam and Hinduism, was somewhat porous; and this porousness seems on occasion to have worked in both directions. For, concerning another of these kṣetrapālas, Pūrṇarājānaka, who resides at the foot of a mulberry tree (bot. Morinda citrifolia) by a spring in the Rajorikadal area of Srinagar, it is claimed that when for some time in the 1970s his worship was neglected, some local Muslims reported that he had appeared to them in their dreams to ask them to persuade the Hindus of the area to restore the pūjā. A further example of the blurring of religious divisions at the local level is provided by the case of thekṣetrapāla Viṣvaksena. This “Bhairava,” whose shrine was in Srinagar’s Dalal Mohalla, is described in his visualization as a black, two-armed attendant (anucara) of Viṣṇu, wearing the Brahmanical sacred thread. Evidently this is the Viṣvaksena of the Vaiṣṇavas, whose function in the Pāñcarātra, parallel to that of Caṇḍeśvara in the Śaiva system, is as the fierce subordinate to whom the flowers and other substances that have been offered to Viṣṇu are presented so that he may absorb and so neutralize the danger posed by them. A remnant of the Pāñcarātrika past has survived because of a local faith in the efficacy of this particular deity image in spite of the disappearance of its Vaiṣṇava ritual context.

There are many other minor Bhairavas in the Kashmirian landscape that have not been included in the Kṣetrapālapaddhati but are mentioned in texts in praise of local sacred sites (Tīrthamāhātmyas) and in what survives in manuscripts of the Kāśmīratīrthasaṃgraha, a collection of abstracts of materials gathered by the local Sanskrit scholar Sahib Ram (d. 1872) with the help of a staff of paṇḍits for an extensive descriptive survey of the sacred sites ofKashmir commissioned by Maharaja Ranbir Singh (r. 1868–1885). Examples are Kurubhairava of Nonar, Kṣemarājabhairava of Khemar, Nandikeśvarabhairava of Sopore, Puṣpadantarājabhairava at the foot of a tree in Pushkar near Rampur, Bhākīrājabhairava in Āvor, Yogarājabhairava in a tree at Suṭokpur, and Svacchandabhairava at Bīru (today Qasba Biru) and at Saptatīrtha near Kicahōm. Not one Bhairava, it should be noted, is mentioned in the extensive survey of Kashmirian sacred sites of all kinds given in the Nīlamata.

The centrality of Bhairava in the religion of the Kashmirian Brahmans in later times is apparent not only from their devotions, in which he appears both as high initiation deity and in this plethora of minor protectors: it is also evident from their historical traditions. According to Sāhib Rām’s unpublished Sanskrit history of the reign of Raṇjit Singh, Brahmans spent three days and nights in the summer of 1824 invoking Bhairava and Caṇḍī at the shrine of Ānandeśvarabhairava. On the third night, a powerful earthquake struck, causing the king to restore to them certain confiscated lands. The shocks, he tells us, continued until the new-moon day and were followed by an outbreak of cholera, the two disasters reducing the population by two-thirds.

The Bhṛṅgīśasaṃhitā

The decline of Vaiṣṇavism and the rise of Śaivism among the Brahmans did not merely lead to the kind of changes outlined above, but it also required the production of new scriptural texts to authorize the innovations. The Nīlamata and the Brahmapurāṇa/Ādipurāṇa, now partly outmoded, were supplemented in their domain of prescription by new verse compositions devoted to this or that rite or pilgrimage that claimed in their colophons to be parts of various Purāṇa texts, most commonly the Bhṛṅgīśasaṃhitā, sometimes called simply Śrīsaṃhitā. To my knowledge no manuscript has come to light that claims to contain the whole of this work, and it is therefore unlikely that the text ever existed other than as a conventional locus of colophonic attribution for these new creations. Most are rather short compositions bearing on a single ceremony, such as the new-year rites mentioned above, in which Svacchandabhairava has taken the place of Viṣṇu; but there are two that are in effect large-scale, independent works, both unpublished. One is the Vitastāmāhātmya, which covers the many sacred sites that lie along the course of the river Vitastā from its source in the southeast of the valley to its exit from the valley in the northwest. The other is the Mṛtitattvānusmaraṇa, which covers all the procedures concerned with dying, cremation, and the many rites for the dead that follow, and it was recited in the homes of the bereaved during the ten days of impurity that follow the death of an affine. Although these materials, in keeping with ascendancy of Bhairava, are in the form of teachings given by Bhairava in response to questions put to him by the goddess, a convention borrowed from the Svacchandatantra and other Tantras of Bhairava that were the authorities governing the Śaiva rituals of the Kashmirian Brahmans, the level of practice on which these materials bear is that of periodic Brahmanical observance rather than that required in addition from initiated Śaivas. Nonetheless, the pervasive influence of the Śaiva superstructure is apparent in not-infrequent references to properly Śaiva doctrines and in the fact that the Vitastāmāhātmyacontains a hymn to Svacchandabhairava, the Vālakhilyastava, that is written in the tantric Śaiva register. Indeed, it is also transmitted independently in composite manuscripts in which individuals have copied various short tantric Śaiva works for their personal devotional study.

The date of these anonymous, scriptural works is unclear, but the Mṛtitattvānusmaraṇa is unlikely to date, at least in its present form, much before the 15th century, since it includes among those who should not be invited to be fed in a śrāddha ceremony for the ancestors “one who reads the writing of the Muslims” (yavanākṣarapāṭhaka), that is to say, any Brahman who has taken up Persian. The learning of Persian by Kashmirian Brahmans, so that it might be employed in Kashmir’s administration, did not occur, of course, before the advent of Muslim rule in the 14th century, and the Brahmans themselves claim that they began the practice only during the reign of Zain-ul-ʾĀbidīn (1420–1470).

**The Kāṭhakagṛhyasūtra, Its Commentaries, and the Kāśmīrikakarmakāṇḍapaddhatis or Ṛcakas**

The religious identity of Brahmans is determined in part by the vedic school that governs the rituals that they or priests acting on their behalf perform in the sacrificial fire or fires. As mentioned above, this school in the case of all Kashmirian Brahmans in recent times and perhaps of the great majority from earliest times is that of the Kāṭhaka recension of the BlackYajurveda. The procedures for these sacrifices were set out in the Kāṭhakayajñasūtra in two parts. The first, comprising 39 chapters, covered the Śrauta rituals, also called Vaitānika. After becoming the head of his household (gṛhapati, parameṣṭhin), and therefore establishing the domestic fire (gṛhyāgni), and performing the simple recurrent sacrifices required in it, a man might go on in a later stage of his life to establish the three sacrificial fires needed for these more elaborate and prestigious rituals, for which he needed to engage the services of officiants (ṛtvij), only one in the case of the daily agnihotra, but otherwise more, belonging to schools of each of the four Vedas, from four in the new moon and full moon sacrifices to sixteen in somasacrifices (see yajña ).

This first part of the text has not survived, no doubt because the tradition of these Śrauta rituals, which were always supererogatory, has long been obsolete in Kashmir. The works of the Kashmirian scholars Jayantabhaṭṭa in the reign of Śaṅkaravarman (883–902), Bilhaṇa, who was at the court of the Kalacuri king Karṇa from 1070 to 1075 CE, and Maṅkha (c. 1100–1150) reveal that Śrauta rituals, including the soma sacrifice, were still being performed in their time inKashmir among the Brahmans, though we do not know whether these Brahmans were adherents of the Kāṭhaka tradition. But there is no evidence of the survival of Śrauta ritual thereafter. What has survived is the Kāṭhaka tradition that is taught in the remaining part of their Yajñasūtra, which deals with the sacrifices in the domestic fire (gṛhyāgni) and otherdomestic rituals, which, unlike the Śrauta, were obligatory for every head of a household. This part, which is known as the Kāṭhakagṛhyasūtra or Laugākṣigṛhyasūtra, has come down to us with three learned commentaries, by Ādityadarśana, Brāhmaṇabala, and Devapāla, of which only the third has been published in its entirety. All three commentators show knowledge ofKashmir and may well have been Kashmirians. Their dates have not been established, but they are likely to be authors of the early medieval period before the advent of Islam. They show no inclination towards Śaivism. Indeed, Devapāla is strongly Vaiṣṇava in devotional orientation and vedantic in metaphysics, though he avoids committing himself on either side of the debate between the realists and the illusionists, preferring to say whenever he refers to sets of non-absolute phenomena in his interpretation of the Kāṭhakamantra verses that they are either the transformation (pariṇāma) or the apparent transformation (vivarta) of the one brahman .

The sacrifices to be offered are as follows. In the morning and evening the householder must make the vaiśvadeva offerings in connection with his daily meals. Of the food prepared to feed the household, part must first be offered to vedic deities in the domestic fire, then in the form ofbali offerings in vessels or on strews of darbha grass (bot. Poa cynosuroides) to the deities of the household around the fire, in the kitchen equipment, in the divisions of the house, and finally on the floor. The householder and his family may eat only when he has made these offerings, offered balls of rice (piṇḍas) into the fire to his three male ancestors and their wives, and fed any uninvited guests (atithi). At dusk and dawn every day, he must precede the vaiśvadeva with the brief agnihotra sacrifice. No priest is required to assist the householder in these simple rites.

It is normal for the wife (gṛhiṇī) alone to offer the evening vaiśvadeva. In the pan-Indian tradition, she does so silently, because the mantras are part of the Veda, to which, as a woman, she can have no access. The Brahmanical tradition of Kashmir concurs that she cannot use the vedic mantras for this or any other purpose, but, no doubt under Śaiva influence, it provides her with a set of nonvedic food mantras (strīṇāṃ naivedyamantrāḥ) in which she offers obeisance to each of 40 yoginīs, called the sthānayoginīs (site yoginīs), in the directions of the house and various domestic utensils, beginning with the mothers Mahālakṣmī,Vajrahastā (Indrāṇī), Daṇḍahastā (Yāmyā), Sūkarā (Vārāhī), Vāyavī, and Nārasiṃhī, and then offers the prepared food to ‘‘Mahābhairava accompanied by all the yoginīs’’ in the center of the house (sarvayoginīsahitāya mahābhairavāya namo naivedyaṃ nivedayāmi namaḥ).

On the days of the full and new moon, the householder should make oblations in his wife’s presence of a porridge of grain (barley or rice) cooked in milk (sthālīpāka). This sacrifice, which in Kashmir is generally termed the pakṣayāga, is the model for all the other Gṛhya fire sacrifices, being modified only in the “insertion” (āvāpa), the core of the ritual which is adjusted to the deities particular to each sacrifice between the kindling (upasamādhāna), which culminates in the offering of the two portions of clarified butter (ājyabhāga), and the concluding offerings to Agni Sviṣṭakṛt (“Fire Properly Worshipped”) preceded by the minor oblations (upahoma).

The further fire sacrifices are the twice-yearly harvest sacrifices with oblations of newly harvested grain, the seasonal blessing sacrifices (svastyayana) on four full-moon days during the year, and the three aṣṭakās (eight days), to be performed in winter on the eighth days of the dark half months of the three winter months of pauṣa (Dec–Jan), māgha (Jan–Feb), andphālguṇa (Feb–Mar), followed by the śrāddha ceremony for the summoned ancestors, and, on the following morning, the anvaṣṭakya śrāddha sacrifice, the śrāddhas between a death and the integration of the deceased among the ancestors (sapiṇḍīkaraṇa), the annual śrāddhas thereafter, and the nāndīmukha śrāddhas that, like the pūjā of Ekāntavāsinī (the divagon), must be performed as a preliminary of all ceremonies on joyous occasions. In addition there are sacrifices to be performed for success in farming at various times in the agricultural cycle, for the consecration of wells and reservoirs, to obtain sons, to consecrate a new home (veśmapratiṣṭhā) and the like, and to avert danger and counteract ill omens (śāntikarman).

There is also an animal sacrifice (paśuyajña), to be offered in connection with the marriage ceremony, the second aṣṭakā (in which meat is offered), various of the rituals of deity worship, and, optionally, in the ritual of the installation of the domestic fire (agnyādhāna) when a man becomes the head of his household. It may be noted in this connection that the Kashmirian Brahmans are not vegetarians, except when individuals choose to renounce meat as a personal observance, and in their rituals, both vedic and Śaiva, while some families adopted the option of substituting a victim made from flour (piṣṭapaśu) and a porridge of grain (sthālīpāka) for the offering of meat (paśupuroḍāśa), and oblations of clarified butter in place of the offering of the fatty omentum (vapāhoma), traditionalists did not.

For the detailed study of these vedic procedures – that is to say, these rituals animated bymantras drawn from the Vedas, for the most part from the Kāṭhaka corpus – much assistance can be derived from several surviving manuscript compendia of variable content that contain more or less detailed information for guidance on these matters for the use, one may presume, of the Brahmans’ domestic priests. The contents of these manuscripts, sometimes called Ṛcakas and more accurately described as (Kāśmīrika)karmakāṇḍapaddhatis (Kashmirian ritual manuals), build on the commentary of Brāhmaṇabala, the Gṛhyapaddhati (Domestic Ritual Manual), which, as its title suggests, is primarily practical in its intention, incorporating many parts of it, adding Paddhatis for many rituals not covered in detail or at all in theKāṭhakagṛhyasūtra and its exegesis, such as the wife’s recitation of the nonvedic food mantras mentioned above, and, in the manner of digests, incorporating passages of a puranic character from known and unknown sources, and some learned discussions. Here we find, for example, the Paddhatis for numerous forms of rituals to avert dangers of various sorts (the vināyakaśānti, gāyatrīśānti, aindrī, yāmī, vāruṇī, bhūtaśānti invoking Vaiśravaṇa, āgneyī, saumī, vāyavī, vaiṣṇavī, raudrī, mārutī, and so forth), for the various ceremonies of donation (dāna), and the rituals for the consecration of houses (veśmapratiṣṭhā), wells (kūpapratiṣṭhā), reservoirs (taḍākapratiṣṭhā), bunds (setupratiṣṭhā), and the like.

The Kashmirian rites for the consecration of irrigation facilities exemplify the character of these materials: a schematic outline is cited from a puranic source, in this case the Matsya (“Fish”; one of Viṣṇu’s embodiments), and a full Paddhati is created within the parameters set by that authority using the Kāṭhakamantras and deity groupings of the local tradition. We see a similar procedure in the case of the vināyakaśānti, the ritual for the averting of danger through the worship of Vināyaka (Gaṇapati) and the grahas. The authority in this case in theYājñavalkyasmṛti as expounded in the commentary of Aparāditya, the Shilahara king who ruled Konkan from about 1110 to 1140. That this commentary was the redactor’s guide is evident from his choice of citations from the Purāṇas, which closely correspond to those in that commentary on this section of the text.

The basic structure of these vedic rituals (yajña, Kash. jag) is the setting up of jars for the worship of the primary and ancillary deities of the ritual (kalaśasthāpana, Kash.kalushwahārun), their worship there (kalaśapūjā), followed by a fire sacrifice in which oblations of fuel sticks (samiddhoma), cooked food (annahoma), butter (ājyahoma), and barley and sesame (yavatilahoma) are empowered by the recitation of a series of vedic mantra texts, including three sets of five hymns (sūkta) assigned to Viṣṇu, Rudra, and the goddesses, respectively (the Viṣṇupañcaka, Rudrapañcaka, and Devīpañcaka). The goddesses, whose visualization verses are recited before the recitation of their respective hymns according to the current form of these rituals, are Durgā, Tripurasundarī, Śārikā, Rājñī, and Jvālā(mukhī), which is to say, Durgā and the four (principal) lineage goddesses of the Kashmirian Brahmans. The ceremony closes with the feeding of Brahmans.

It is also here that we find, for example, the Paddhati of rituals otherwise lacking clear textual authority, such as that of the worship of Indra by women (strīṇām indrapūjā), the postmortuary rites that women performed at Kapālamocana (kapālamocanaśrāddhavidhi), a tīrtha near Supiyan, for offspring who had died in early childhood, on the 12th day of the light half ofśrāvaṇa (Jul–Aug), and the worship of the yakṣa king Vaiśravaṇa (yakṣeśvarapūjā) on the new-moon day of pauṣa (in mid-Dec). In this last we have the priest’s ritual on the occasion of the festival known in Kashmiri as kheċimāwas (kedgeree new moon), otherwise known only from contemporary accounts. According to this modern testimony, a pestle, or any stone in case that is not available, is washed and anointed with sandalwood paste and vermilion and worshipped as an image of Kubera. Kedgeree is offered to him and a portion of it kept by the worshipper on the outer wall of his house in the belief that the yakṣa will come to eat it (Toshkhani). These details are confirmed for the most part by the Sanskrit Paddhati. But the latter makes no reference to the keeping of a portion of the kedgeree (kṛsarānna) on the outer wall of the house, reminding us that the Paddhatis tend to tell us only what the priest does. If other actions, such as this, are not mentioned in the Paddhati, this may be because they are matters done by members of the household rather than the priest. A full appreciation of the character and significance of these festivals requires one to know more than any of the strictly liturgical sources can convey, since they will tend to involve agents, such as the women of the household, whose role is largely passed over in the texts as local custom.

Fortunately we are not reliant entirely on the testimony of the living in recent times, since that information, precious though it is, cannot be assumed to describe what was the case in the distant past. For we also have puranic materials that sometimes show us these rituals in a broader, less priest-tied perspective. Thus, for example, the Nīlamata and Brahmapurāṇa/Ādipurāṇa prescribe a number of rituals to be done by women. They are to worship Rukmiṇī on the 11th of the bright half of caitra (Mar–Apr) and wash the images of Kṛṣṇa on the day after the festival of his birthday (kṛṣṇajanmāṣṭamī). They are to worship Umā on the fourth of the bright half of jyeṣṭha (May–Jun; umācaturthī). On Gaurī’s third (gaurītṛtiyā), the third day of the bright half of māgha (Jan–Feb), women should fast, and on the fourth (umācaturthī), both men and women but particularly women should worship the goddess. During the four days from the fifth to the eighth of the dark half of caitra, the goddess Kaśmīrā – that is to say, Pārvatī incarnate asKashmir – is considered to be menstruating. Women are to make a stone representation of her and for three days worship it with unguents, clothes, and food, avoiding flowers, jewelry, incense, and milk. On the fourth day, the stones are to be bathed in every house first by unwidowed wives and then by Brahmans with herb-infused water. The land of Kashmir is now pure after her menstruation and can conceive. So, plowing begins the next day. On the 11th, the mysterious Chandodeva – formerly the offspring of a Brahman woman and a Śūdra and now reincarnated as the offspring of a female piśāca and a yakṣa – should be worshipped by women painted on a roundish stone or piece of pottery with flowers, incenses, saffron, wool, fish, and other foods. On the 12th at midday, he should be thrown out of the house through the door and then be brought back in through the window. On the first day of the bright half of śrāvaṇa (Jul–Aug), they should worship the three heads of the sacrifice of Dakṣa cut off by Śiva. They are to make the three heads of clay, bathe them with milk, and present offerings to them. Alternatively they may make a liṅga of clay and worship that. This is to be followed by a meal accompanied by music made with brass vessels. In the bright half of kārttika (Oct–Nov), they are to worship the goddess Ekāntavāsinī. They should worship the goddess outside their house at a solitary fruit tree with water, flowers, incense, and food, and put out a ball of rice to be eaten by a kite, saying, “Please take this and feed it to the goddess.”

A list of pūjās to be done by women is also given in the Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa, composed just to the south of Kashmir, and these partly coincide with those prescribed by these Kashmirian sources. However, the strongly Vaiṣṇava character of that Purāṇa prompts it to prescribe a monotheistic alternative in which women worship no god but Viṣṇu or his consort Lakṣmī, provided they have their husband’s permission to do so. As we shall see, a similar alternative was offered to women in the Saiddhāntika Śaiva tradition of Kashmir, with the same proviso, though in this case it is clear, as it is not in the case of the Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa, that this higher life of exclusive devotion for married women required a special form of Śaiva initiation ceremony.

Śaivism

If the earliest Śaiva system known to us, that of the Pāñcārthika Pāśupatas, was active inKashmir, it has left little evidence. Kalhaṇa reports, as we have seen, that Raṇāditya and his queen Raṇārambhā founded a maṭha for Pāśupata ascetics; and three Kashmirian images of Lakulīśa and his four disciples, who came to be adopted as the founder of the order and its four primary lineages, have been identified, one assigned to the 7th century (Siudmak, 1994). As for the later Pāśupata divisions, those of the Lākulas (Kālamukhas), and Somasiddhāntins (seeKāpālikas), we have no Kashmirian evidence at all. In his topical humorous playĀgamaḍambara (Much Ado About Religion), written by the Kashmirian philosopher Jayantabhaṭṭa around the turn of the 9th/10th centuries, an orthodox vedic Brahman appointed to the Department for the Protection of Religion is given the task of reassuring Dharmaśivācārya, a Saiddhāntika Bhaṭṭāraka or senior ascetic who evidently has the official position of spokesman for all the Śaivas in the country, that adherents of all the Śaiva traditions – the Pāñcārthika, the Kālamukha, the Kāpālika, and (his own), the Śaiva proper – may continue their religious disciplines without fear of interference by the authorities. It is not unlikely, of course, that all these orders of Śaiva ascetics did indeed have maṭhas for their members in the valley at that time; but Jayantabhaṭṭa’s formulation may well have been no more than a way of saying that the state extended its protection to all Śaivas regardless of variety, the division into these four being conventional – we see it frequently in the non-Śaiva learned literature – rather than a listing of the traditions known by his department to have local adherents.

By the 6th century at the latest, the Śaivism that in this fourfold schema is called simply Śaiva had emerged in India and marked its radical difference from the preceding traditions of the Pāñcārthikas and Lākulas by defining those as the two divisions of the Atimārga (“The Path Outside [the Order of Castes and Disciplines]”) and itself as the Mantramārga (“The Path of Mantras”). Later the Somasiddhāntin Kāpālikas, being closely related in the theology to the Lākulas, would be added as a third division. This Mantramārga Śaivism, which quickly showed a number of closely related variants enshrined in an extensive scriptural literature of Tantras, is marked off from the Atimārga by a number of differences, of which the most consequential are the following. It developed a much more elaborate ritual system, most notably:

1.: a ceremony of initiation (dīkṣā) that claimed to destroy the soul’s imperfections, guaranteeing liberation at death;
2.: a wide repertoire of rites that promised its patrons worldly benefits; and
3.: an ancillary ritual system that enabled it to move into the established domain of the installation (pratiṣṭhā) of liṅgas and other permanent substrates of Śaiva worship and the consecration of temples to enshrine them, developing an ancillary scriptural literature of Pratiṣṭhātantras devoted entirely to these specialized rituals and the related matters of iconography, iconometrics, and temple design.

Further, it abandoned the Atimārga’s restriction of recruitment to Brahmans, opening all its ranks to all twice-born castes and Śūdras, at least to those who had adopted Brahmanical mores; and it recruited householders or future householders as well as ascetics as initiates, developing accordingly a body of rituals to provide for their cremation and other postmortuary rites. Finally, while to attain liberation at death by going through Śaiva initiation generally entailed ritual obligations of regular worship during the rest of one’s life, the Mantramārga also developed a form of initiation for the monarch, one that offered the same result but, in consideration of his duties of governance, exonerated him of all post-initiatory obligations other than that of supporting the religion and its officiants and institutions. It was taken up by a good many kings during the early medieval period throughout the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with predictable results for the growth and prosperity of the Śaivas’ institutions and the rājagurus (spiritual counselors of the king) who presided over them.

The core tradition, which embraced all the aspects outlined, came to be known as the Siddhānta and its adherents as Saiddhāntikas. Beside this there were other traditions in the Mantramārga, which tended to be less involved in the more public and civic domains of religion into which the Siddhānta had extended itself, both developing a more impressive array of ritual systems for the attainment of the worldly goals of royal clients and requiring a greater degree of disengagement from Brahmanical norms, typically in the requirement that the deities be worshipped with liquor, meat, and other substances that the Brahmanical system considers impure; and where these non-Saiddhāntika systems were taken up by social elites, as happened in Kashmir, they tended also to develop a style of spiritual discipline that accorded with the refined aestheticism of courtly life and to see themselves as transcending, through immersion in their more ecstatic practices, not only the Brahmanical level but also that of the Siddhānta.

Whereas the Saiddhāntikas’ rites were centered on the deity Sadāśiva, who presides in ascetic isolation at the center of a retinue of almost exclusively male, consortless secondary deities (thevidyeśvaras, gaṇeśvaras, and the lokapālas), non-Saiddhāntika ritual systems propitiated either the ferocious deity Bhairava together with his consort or various forms of the Goddess with predominantly or exclusively female retinues – and just as the Bhairava cult saw itself as transcending Sadāśiva, visualizing the latter as a prostrate corpse beneath his feet – so the Śākta-Śaiva worshippers of the goddess represented her as enthroned on Bhairava. The principal non-Saiddhāntika systems were:

1.: the cult of Svacchandabhairava and his consort Aghoreśvarī taught in theSvacchandatantra;
2.: that of Caṇḍā Kāpālinī (and Kapālīśabhairava) taught in the *Brahmayāmala (also known as *Picumata);
3.: that of the sisters Jayā, Vijayā, Jayantī, and Aparājitā (and their brother Tumburu) taught in the Vīṇāśikha;
4.: that of the goddesses Parā, Parāparā, and Aparā taught in the Siddhayogeśvarīmata,Mālinīvijayottara, and other texts – this is the system that would come to be known as the Trika in Kashmir (see Kashmir Śaivism);
5.: the Kālīkula, embracing the cult of Kālasaṃkarṣiṇī Kālī and her many forms taught in the Jayadrathayāmala and the scriptures of the tradition that would be called the Krama in Kashmir;
6.: the cult of the goddess Kubjikā taught in the Kubjikāmata;
7.: the cult of the goddess Tripurasundarī taught in the Vāmakeśvarīmata (seeŚrīvidyā);
8.: the cult of the nityā goddesses (see Śrīvidyā) that was the antecedent of the last and is taught in the Nityākaula; and
9.: the cult of Amṛteśvara and his consort Amṛtalakṣmī taught in the Netratantra.

These non-Saiddhāntika systems or rather their scriptures are variously classified in both scriptural and exegetical sources. The most informative of these classifications, which I shall employ here, distinguishes between the Mantrapīṭha (Mantra Corpus) and the Vidyāpīṭha (Vidyā Corpus), which is to say, between less Śākta texts that focus on the masculine deity Bhairava and more Śākta texts that focus on goddesses. Thus in the first category we have the cult of Svacchandabhairava and in the second we have the cult of Caṇḍā Kāpālinī, the Trika, the Kālīkula, and the cult of the four sisters. The cults of Kubjikā, the nityās, and Tripurasundarī may be grouped with the second because of their Śākta character, although their scriptures do not generally refer to themselves as belonging to the Vidyāpīṭha. The cult of Amṛteśvara stands apart. Though rooted in the tradition of the Mantrapīṭha, it sees itself as universal, offering a range of inflections of its basic cult that enable it to function in all these contexts, from the Saiddhāntika to the Śākta.

All these systems from the Siddhānta to the cult of Amṛteśvara were known in Kashmir, and some – namely, the Siddhānta, the cults of Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara, the Trika, the Kālīkula, and later, the cult of Tripurasundarī – were very well established there, some of their scriptures attracting sophisticated exegesis from Kashmirian scholars that was to become the standard of Śaiva and Śākta orthodoxy for their followers in other regions, notably in the far south.

The earliest firmly dateable evidence of mantramargic Śaivism in Kashmir is found circa 830 in two hymns in high poetic style, one to Śiva and the other to the goddess Caṇḍī, that form two chapters of the Haravijaya of Ratnākara, a Rājānaka, the second of which was mentioned above for its reference to the two schools of Pāñcarātrikas. The first hymn, the Śivastotra, shows knowledge of the literature of the Siddhānta, and though it does not name its sources, it is possible to recognize within its high-flown poetic periphrases the wording both of three of its early scriptures (the Mataṅgaparameśvara, Rauravasūtrasaṃgraha, andSvāyambhuvasūtrasaṃgraha), and of the work of the earliest known Saiddhāntika exegetes Sadyojyotis and Bṛhaspati. The second hymn reveals knowledge of the technicalities of the Trika. We may fairly conclude that the presence of these materials in a work of Kashmirian literary art indicates that these two traditions were well known by this time in the refined circle of the court, or at least that they were well enough established to be considered worthy of mention.

There is nothing in these hymns that reveals awareness of the cults of Svacchandabhairava, Amṛteśvara, or the Kālīkula. In the case of the first two, this absence has no weight as evidence, since they may have been passed over in silence simply because they could not be accommodated comfortably in either hymn, falling as they do within a domain that lies between the Śaiva and the Śākta. But this will not explain the absence of the goddess of the Kālīkula from the hymn to Caṇḍī. We may surmise, therefore, especially when we consider the comprehensive knowledge of the varieties of contemporary religion exhibited in these hymns, that the Kālīkula and its Krama refinement had not yet come to the fore of the Kashmirian Śākta domain in the knowledge of the court, whereas the Trika was already well established there. This hypothesis receives support from evidence of the chronology of the Krama, which indicates that Jñānanetranātha, whom the Kashmirian lineage of that system claims as its source, flourished somewhat later, from around the mid-9th century.

As for the cults of Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara, we can be sure that the latter was already established in Kashmir by the 9th century. This is because the Netratantra, its scripture, is a Kashmirian work and written between approx. 700 and 850, more probably towards the end of that period (Sanderson, 2005). We can also infer from the contents of that work that by the time of that work’s composition, Kashmirians were engaging in the Siddhānta, the cult of the four sisters and Tumburu, and that of Svacchandabhairava. For it teaches variants of its icon of Amṛteśvara for use in the territories of each of these traditions. That these traditions were not merely known to the learned in Kashmir at this time but were also established in practice there cannot be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the practical nature of the Netratantramakes it extremely unlikely that they were not.

The second half of the 9th century saw the composition of the Śivasūtra and Spandakārikā and, especially in the latter, the first attempt from the Śākta-Śaiva domain to present a nondualistic metaphysics and gnostic soteriology in opposition to the dualistic and ritualistic exegesis of the Saiddhāntika Śaiva scriptures. This movement was presented in its early phase as coming not from Śiva as the teaching of certain scriptures but rather as the contemporary irruption into the world of the gnosis of enlightened siddhas and yoginīs. The same perspective was propagated in the tradition of the Krama that emerged around this time. It is not without good reason, then, that the historian Kalhaṇa speaks of the reign of Avantivarman (c. 855/856–883) as one that was marked by the descent of siddhas among men for the benefit of the world. That this development had a major impact on Kashmirian society is evident in the fact that Kalhaṇa records it – for he is generally silent about the recent history of religion in the valley beyond recording the religious affiliations of certain kings and the temples and other religious foundations that they established. Such figures as Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha, Abhinavagupta, and Kṣemarāja, who loom so large in the learned literature of the Śaivas of Kashmir and beyond, receive not even a passing mention.

This pivotal period was followed in the 10th century by a remarkable efflorescence of learned exegesis and philosophical argument in all areas of the religion. On the Śākta-Śaiva side, we have the development within the Trika of the philosophical tradition of the Pratyabhijñā; and the last quarter of the century and the first half of the 11th saw with Abhinavagupta the production of Krama-influenced, Pratyabhijñā-based exegesis of scripture in the Trika itself and, with his successor Kṣemarāja, the extension of this exegesis to the Tantras of the cults of Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara and beyond that domain to the interpretation of texts both esoteric and devotional that unlike those Tantras were open to a much wider audience than that of initiated specialists. The inclusivist aspirations of this tradition are also expressed in the formulation of the view that the Vidyāpīṭha-based system of the Trika does not merely transcend the Siddhānta and the Bhairava systems but also includes them within a higher synthesis that validates practice on all these levels.

This was also the golden age of Kashmirian Saiddhāntika exegesis, which now developed a rigorously dualistic and ritualistic interpretation of the Siddhānta’s scriptures, with an exclusivist perspective that seems designed to bar the gates, as it were, against the intuitionist and charismatic influences that had come to the fore with the rise of the Śākta-Śaivas since the mid-9th century. Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha presents his exegesis in a fundamentalist spirit as a return to the original position set out in an earlier time by the founding fathers of his tradition with the purpose of rescuing it from the contamination it had suffered from attempts to assimilate its scriptures to alien perspectives, at one extreme to that of orthodox Brahmanism and at the other to that of these Śāktas.

Concern to counter contamination is also seen in the Śākta-Śaiva camp at this time. For Kṣemarāja makes it clear that the principal purpose of his commentaries on theSvacchandatantra and Netratantra was to reverse inroads from the Saiddhāntika perspective into the interpretation of these Tantras and the enactment of their prescriptions. Nor does it seem that his concern was primarily with theological theory. He consistently imposed the nondualistic ontology of the Pratyabhijñā on these texts, as Abhinavagupta had done on the Trika’s Mālinīvijayottara, but we sense greater urgency when he addresses what he saw as unwarranted diluting of the nondualistic practice (advaitācāra) of the Svacchandatantra – practice, that is, which transcends Brahmanical values of purity, presenting these departures from prescribed observance as the baleful effect of the dominance of the Siddhānta in the Śaivism of his community. Indeed, he sees the rise of nondualism in Kashmir from its beginnings in the 9th century as a mission directed against this dominance, saying in the introduction to his commentary on the Śivasūtra that Śiva appeared to Vasugupta in a dream to direct him to the discovery of this text out of his concern that the esoteric tradition, evidently that of the Śākta-Śaivas, was on the verge of extinction in a society that was then almost completely under the sway of dualism. He does not state explicitly that the dualism to which he refers is that of the Siddhānta, but that it is the most natural interpretation of his words, especially in the light of the fact that he interprets the first sūtra as a refutation of the Saiddhāntika doctrine that god, other souls, and the material universe are irreducibly distinct.

The two facts that Kṣemarāja extended Śākta-Śaiva exegesis into this domain and that when he did so it had long been under the influence of the more conventional, Veda-congruent Siddhānta suggest that the cults of Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara were far from being fringe phenomena in the Kashmir of his time. Moreover, the detailed ritual manuals that have come down to us in Kashmir for the ceremonies of Śaiva initiation, the fire sacrifice, and the various postmortuary rituals are all centered on these two deities. It is tempting to conclude, therefore, that it was this form of Śaivism, that of the middle ground between the Siddhānta and the Śākta-Śaiva systems, that was the mainstream tradition in Kashmir throughout the period accessible to us, and that the Siddhānta, like the Śākta-Śaivism of the Trika and Krama, had little impact on the core practice of the majority but merely influenced it for some time on a theoretical level and provided a view of the proper relationship between Śaiva practice and Brahmanical norms that encouraged or justified a drift away from the more challenging aspects of non-Saiddhāntika observance that would probably have occurred even without its influence, simply as the consequence of the routinization that we would expect in any tradition that achieved widespread acceptance within Brahmanical society. It is possible, then, that when Kṣemarāja tells us that the Siddhānta was dominant in the Śaiva community of his time he is referring to its influence rather than reporting that those following the Saiddhāntika system of worship were in the majority.

However, the very manuals whose existence shows the dominance of the worship of the two deities in Kashmir in later times also contain evidence that must make us hesitate to conclude that this state of affairs goes back all the way to the golden age of Śaiva exegesis. For while the Tantras and their learned commentators present the varieties of Śaiva practice entirely within the boundaries of this or that system, these manuals exhibit eclecticism within theirSvacchandatantra- and Netratantra-based matrix, and since they record the actual practice of the local Śaiva officiants, we may read this incorporation of elements from other ritual systems as evidence that these were influential in the valley. Now, the Siddhānta figures very strongly in this respect. To cite but one example, the set of seven circuits of ancillary deities, used as the retinue of central deities in all Kashmirian Śaivas Paddhatis, is essentially the Saiddhāntika norm – the eight vidyeśvaras from Ananta to Śikhaṇḍin, the eight gaṇeśvaras from Nandin to Caṇḍeśvara, and the eight (or ten) lokapālas and their personified weapons, elaborated by inserting between the last two of these circuits the eight mothers of the vāmasrotas (“left current,” i.e. vāmācara, see Tantras), the eight celestial grahas from Sūrya to Ketu, and the eightnāgas from Ananta to Kulika. Indeed, according to the literature of the Kashmirian manuals, the scriptural authority for this arrangement is an otherwise unknown nine thousand-verse redaction of the Saiddhāntika Niḥśvāsa known as the Nandīśvarāvatāra.

We have other evidence of the vigor of the Siddhānta in this region. There developed a distinct Kashmirian variant of the image of the five-faced, ten-armed Sadāśiva, which is attested in theNetratantra, Śarvāvatāra, Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa, and Haracaritacintāmaṇi. The last gives this image as the iconic form of the principal Śiva of the valley floor, that established in the form of a liṅga at Vijayeśvara, which suggests that even in the 13th century, when theHaracaritacintāmaṇi was composed, the Saiddhāntika tradition was in control at this major Śaiva temple site. We may note also that there was a temple of Sadāśiva founded by queen Sūryamatī, the mother of King Kalaśa (r. c. 1063–1089) near the royal palace in the Kathul quarter of Srinagar, which Bilhaṇa describes in the 12th century as a stronghold of observant Brahmans. The historian Kalhaṇa refers to this temple as a major landmark on several occasions. He also mentions two other Sadāśiva temples, that is to say, Saiddhāntika liṅgatemples, one established by the noblewoman Kāvyadevī at Sureśvarī (Iś abar) with her name (Kāvyadevīśvara) during the reign of Avantivarman (855/856–883), the other established with his name by Ratnavardhana, minister of Śaṅkaravarman (r. 883–902). The instance of the Kashmirian form of the Saiddhāntika Sadāśiva found in the Śarvāvatāra is taught in connection with Tripureśvara (at Triphar), another major Kashmirian Śiva.

As for the strength of Saiddhāntika ascetic institutions in the valley, the maṭha as opposed to the temple, the evidence is sparse, the great mass of the Kashmirian Śaiva literature having been written by and/or for householder initiates. However, in the reign of Śaṅkaravarman (r. 883–902), Jayantabhaṭṭa’s Śaiva ascetic Dharmaśiva – whom he depicts as presiding in a hermitage and as the fit person to receive an official proclamation concerning the state’s view of all the Śaiva sects – can only have been a Saiddhāntika, as his name reveals; and in the 11th century, the Kashmirian satirist Kṣemendra mocks three Saiddhāntika ascetics for their licentious conduct in his Deśopadeśa.

Further evidence of the vitality of the Kashmirian Saiddhāntikas is provided by theBṛhatkālottara. This eclectic Saiddhāntika scripture of great extent, composed at some time after the 9th century and before the 12th, is evidently the work of a Kashmirian redactor or redactors. Among its striking features are:

1.: the detailed attention it gives to rites of installation and temple consecration, confirming the involvement of the Saiddhāntikas of Kashmir in this domain, an involvement further attested by the existence of an unpublished commentary on the Mayasaṃgraha, one of the Saiddhāntika Pratiṣṭhātantras, by the Kashmirian Saiddhāntika Vidyākaṇṭha;
2.: its detailing many periodic observances (vratas) of the type normally found in literature prescribing the religious activities of the uninitiated laity, which suggests that the Saiddhāntikas whose activities are reflected in this text were breaking down the barrier between their own proper territory and that of the generality of Śiva devotees; and
3.: its prescribing a distinct cult of Gaurī for women, with its own, slightly inferior, initiation ritual. In general the Saiddhāntikas had opened Śaiva initiation to women, but only the kind that frees the initiate of post-initiatory obligations, notably that of regular Śaiva worship of the initiation deity. Here officiants are allowed to make women active initiates, but in consideration of their family duties, they are permitted a great deal of flexibility, completely absent from other Saiddhāntika sources, in the frequency of worship that they will impose on these women. It is also careful to rule that where there is a conflict between an initiated woman’s duty of worship and her duties to her husband, the latter must take precedence.

In later times the Siddhānta died out in Kashmir as an independent tradition. Some works of Saiddhāntika learning continued to be copied down to recent times, but I have encountered no manuscript of any Kashmirian Paddhati that sets out the procedure and mantras of Śaiva ritual on Saiddhāntika lines for practical use, nor do we see any trace of Saiddhāntika literary activity in the valley after Vidyākaṇṭha (fl. c. 975–1025). This has further encouraged the tendency to minimalize the importance of the Siddhānta in the overall picture of the Śaivism of the valley, even to negate it altogether, as in the widespread use of the term “Kashmir Śaivism” in modern scholarship to refer the Śākta-Śaiva elements of Kashmirian Śaivism that had the good fortune to survive in some form down to Kashmir’s encounter with the modern world. However, the demise of the Kashmirian Siddhānta cannot be explained simply by appealing to the picture of a Śaivism dominated by the cults of the Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara, the Trika, and the Krama, since that dominance may be more an effect of the Siddhānta’s demise than its cause; and the weight of the Saiddhāntika elements within the Paddhatis that outlived the Siddhānta should be sufficient to inhibit the facile conclusion that it had always been a marginal phenomenon in Kashmir. I consider it more probable, as I have indicated above, that the primary cause of its disappearance here was the advent of Muslim rule in the 14th century and the consequent withdrawal of royal patronage from the public sphere that was the Saiddhāntikas’ special territory, together with the widespread destruction of Śaiva temples andmaṭhas that occurred during the darker periods of Islamic rule.

As for the practice well attested in other parts of the Indic world of monarchs’ receiving Śaiva initiation followed by a modification of the Śaivas’ rite of consecration to the rank of officiant as an empowerment to rule in addition to that bestowed by the traditional Brahmanical royal consecration (rājyābhiṣeka; Sanderson, 2009), there is no evidence for Kashmir that this was ever done by officiants of the Siddhānta. But we do have evidence of its being done in later times, when the Siddhānta had lost ground or disappeared, in the Svacchandatantra-based initiation tradition of the Kalādīkṣāpaddhati. Moreover, that Śaiva initiation was the norm for kings of Kashmir in the 14th century is strongly suggested by the Kashmirian Brahman historian Jonarāja (d. 1459), who tells us in his Rājataraṅgiṇī that the Ladakhi refugee, Prince Riñcana (Tib. Lha chen rgyal bu rin chen), who during the anarchy that followed the Mongol invasion ofKashmir in 1320 managed to seize and hold on to the throne until 1323, when he applied to theguru Devasvāmin for Śaiva initiation but was refused because of his being a Tibetan (bhauṭṭa). This suggests that the interloper, who was presumably a Buddhist by birth and upbringing, sought Śaiva initiation because it was the established means of legitimating sovereignty in the eyes of his Kashmirian subjects. Jonarāja does not tell us how he reacted to his rejection. But he calls him Sulṭān Riñcana (Riñcanasuratrāṇa) and refers to his son as Ḥaydar. Since both the title and the name indicate that their bearers were Muslims, we may suspect that when Riñcana had been refused initiation on racial grounds, he embraced Islam as the alternative means of legitimation.

As for the Śākta-Śaiva systems, the Trika gives the impression of having been less deeply established in Kashmir than the Krama. Abhinavagupta tells us that his monumentalTantrāloka was the first attempt to write a Paddhati on this system. There are no works of substance on the Trika by any other author, and no later manuals for practical use in ritual survive to show that it had succeeded in integrating itself into the ordi-nary religious life of the community. We might cite the existence of Jayaratha’s 13th-century commentary on theTantrāloka as evidence that the tradition did flourish long after Abhinavagupta’s passing; but the inference would be inconclusive. The intellectual brilliance of the Tantrāloka, its relevance as a key to the Śaiva religion as a whole, and its undeniable influence on the thinking of the Kashmirian Śaivas concerning broader soteriological and philosophical fundamentals might well have been sufficient reasons to attract this secondary exegesis even if the Trika in the narrow sense of a system of rituals had few followers in Jayaratha’s day.

In comparison with the Trika, the Krama’s cult of Kālī/Kālasaṃkarṣiṇī appears to have been much more widely developed in Kashmir. While we have only the works of a single if famous author for the Trika, here we have a plethora of writers from the mid-9th century onwards, producing works in both Sanskrit and Old Kashmiri, and exercising throughout the most creative period of Kashmirian Śaivism a profound influence not only on the Trika but also, through the works of Kṣemarāja, on the understanding of the Svacchandatantra, theNetratantra, and a broad range of Śaiva texts aimed at a wider audience. Influence in the reverse direction of the Trika on the Krama is far less evident. Indeed, of all the major works of the Krama discussed here, only the anonymous Mahānayaprakāśa has absorbed the doctrines of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta to an appreciable extent. Other works – such as theMahānayaprakāśa of Arṇasiṃha, the Old Kashmiri Mahānayaprakāśa of Śitikaṇṭha, its commentary, and the literature on the higher Krama of the oral instructions, to which I have drawn attention in this study – show an autonomous tradition largely untouched by the thought and distinctive terminology of those better-known authors. The persistent term “KashmirŚaivism” or “Kashmiri Śaivism” is therefore doubly misleading. Its current use is mistaken because it excludes the Siddhānta, but it also confuses by fostering the illusion that non-Saiddhāntika Śaivism was a single, doctrinally unified whole.

The distinctness of the Krama is evident not only in the independence of its discourse but also in the character of its position in relation to the “lower” Śaiva traditions. For there is nothing here of the ambition that drives the works of Abhinavagupta and Kṣemarāja to embrace and subordinate the many-layered diversity of the systems of the Śaiva Mantramārga within a higher unity. The Krama tradition remained aloof from this inclusivist tendency, and this independent stance is reflected in its observances. For while Abhinavagupta’s Trika rejected the tradition of radical Śaiva asceticism with its cremation-ground practices, making the rejection of such socially distinctive externals a fundamental principle of its universalism, the Krama continued to maintain its distance from mundane society. For, as we have seen, some of its gurus were ascetics who had adopted the Kāpālika observance, decking themselves with ornaments of human bone, carrying a human skull as a begging bowl, and living in the cremation ground.

Related to the Krama is the extraordinarily diverse tradition of the propitiation of Kālasaṃkarṣiṇī/Kālī taught in the Jayadrathayāmala of the Vidyāpīṭha, of which the last three quarters, comprising some 18 thousand stanzas, were added in Kashmir and no doubt expose to view the rich hinterland of Kashmirian Kāpālika Śāktism out of which the Krama mysticism emerged. To the Kashmirians this was simply the Tantrarājabhaṭṭāraka, an honorific title that reveals the special esteem in which they held it. Its first quarter is quoted by Kṣemarāja (fl. c. 1000–1050) under this title, and the Mādhavakula, which is part of its fourth quarter, is used by Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975–1025) in his Tantrāloka. But since the first quarter was originally a self-contained whole and since we cannot exclude the possibility that Abhinavagupta knew hisMādhavakula as a freestanding composition, we cannot be sure that this vast work in all its four quarters of 6,000 verses was already in existence in their time. The first author who cites the whole extensively is Jayaratha in the 13th century.

The traditions recorded in this text have mostly disappeared in the loss of diversity through contraction that has occurred during the centuries from Jayaratha to the present. However, unlike the Trika, which has left few traces of itself in the Śaiva manuals of initiation, the fire sacrifice, and the postmortuary rituals whose practice continued through those centuries down to recent times, the worship of a number of the Kālīs of the Jayadrathayāmala has survived by incorporation in these materials, a fact that is further testimony to the local character and relative vitality of this tradition. Thus though no manuscripts of the whole Jayadrathayāmala or of any of its quarters have survived in Kashmir, we do have through this incorporation in the manuals of the Śaiva officiants the procedures for the worship of the Kālīs Bhuvanamālinī/Dīkṣādevī, Pāpāntakāriṇī, Vidyāvidyeśvarī, Vāgbhaveśvarī, Vāgīśī, Bhāgyādhirohiṇī, Nityākālī, Siddhalakṣmī, Mantramātṛkā, Mantraḍāmarikā, and Saptakoṭīśvarī. The rites of the first also survived because they had been permitted as a highly abbreviated, one-day alternative to the normal initiation procedure taught in the Kalādīkṣāpaddhati, which took five or six days and was no doubt a major expense for a family. This convenient alternative was available in cases of poverty or times of national emergency – hence the goddess’ alternative name Dīkṣādevī. The cult of Vāgīśī Kālī also survived as a preliminary of all major Śaiva rituals. For it was required that before the commencement of the main worship a manuscript of the scripture of Bhairava be installed and that Vāgīśvarī be worshipped on it as the goddess of learning. The Jayadrathayāmala’s Vāgīśī Kālī was one of the Tantric forms of that goddess maintained for this purpose. The last four goddesses, from Siddhilakṣmī to Saptakoṭīśvarī, seem to have been aided in their survival by the fact that they were in continued demand aspratyaṅgirās, goddesses whose propitiation can turn back any hostile magic that an enemy may have deployed, so that it harms him rather than oneself.

In the course of the 11th century, the Śākta-Śaiva cult of Tripurasundarī was introduced into the valley and integrated into the exegetical tradition of the Trika. How quickly and widely it was adopted is unclear, since we have so little evidence from the three centuries after Jayaratha, who composed a learned commentary on its scripture Vāmakeśvarīmata, a commentary whose technical concerns suggest that he was an initiate in this cult rather than in that of the Trika proper. But many of our later writers in the tradition derived from the Trika are devotees of this goddess, as are the members of the Tiku clan (Skt. trikajāti), who are said to be the inheritors of the Trika, further venerating her as their lineage goddess Bālā under her deodar tree in Bālahōm. Moreover, Tripurasundarī is prominent among the goddesses whose worship is included in the Svacchandatantra-based Paddhatis; her cult provides the framework for the conceptualization of the cults of the local goddesses seen in the Kashmirian Tīrthamāhātmya texts; and the later literature of her cult, comprising Paddhatis and Stotras, much of it non-Kashmiran, is very well represented in the body of surviving Kashmirian manuscripts.

Just as the cults of Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara came to monopolize the domain of non-Śākta-Śaiva ritual in Kashmir, so this tradition of the worship of Tripurasundarī, which has enjoyed great popularity throughout the subcontinent down to modern times, came to dominate the Śākta, with the Trika and the Krama surviving as textual resources of exegetical and spiritual inspiration, in the manner of the Pratyabhijñā, rather than as living traditions of ritual practice.

To this picture the Kauls added their own tradition of east Indian Śāktism, when they settled inKashmir after migrating from their home in northern Bihar. Among the works attributed to Sāhib Kaul (1642–1667+), the Kauls’ most outstanding and influential author, are three unpublished Paddhatis that show this tradition in its pure form, untouched by the influence of Kashmirian Śaiva thought and language. These are the Śrīvidyāpaddhati, Śyāmāpaddhati, andHṛllekhāpaddhati, which set out the rituals of the worship of the goddesses Tripurasundarī, Dakṣiṇākālī, and Bhuvaneśvarī, respectively. Other works by him show, nonetheless, the determination of these immigrants to be assimilated into the culture they had entered. Sāhib Kaul, though faithful to his east Indian heritage in his Paddhatis, venerated, as we have seen, the Kashmirian goddess Śārikā as his lineage deity and wrote a number of devotional works in which the Śākta-Śaiva tradition of his adopted homeland rooted in the nondualistic doctrines of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta is fully integrated. We see this, for example, in hisDevīnāmavilāsa, a poetic work in elaborate mahākāvya style that interprets the meaning of each of the thousand names of the goddess given in the non-KashmirianBhavānīsahasranāmastotra, but embeds this in an exposition of the doctrines of Kashmirian Śaiva nondualism. It is probably to this same east Indian tradition in late medieval Kashmirthat we should attribute a number of other Śākta works – such as the Devīrahasya, also calledParārahasya, and the Uddhārakośa – that are found in Kashmirian manuscripts. For these show a Śākta pantheon that combines that of east India with the local goddesses of Kashmir. As systematized in the second of these works, it comprises 23 Mantra goddesses in three groups. These are the ten vidyās Tripurasundarī, Śrī (Kamalā), Vāgdevī, Tārā, Bhuvaneśvarī, Mātaṅgī, Śārikā, Rājñī, Bheḍā, and Jvālāmukhī, their six companions (sakhī) Bhadrakālī, Turī, Chinnamastā, Dakṣiṇākālī, Śyāmā, and Kālarātrī, and seven additional vidyās Vajrayoginī, Vārāhī, Śāradā, Kāmeśvarī, Gaurī, Annapūrṇā, and Kulavāgīśvarī. The local Kashmirian goddesses here are Śārikā, Rājñī, Bheḍā, Jvālāmukhī, Bhadrakālī, and Śāradā. The others include all but three of the goddesses that make up the well known east Indian set of the tenmahāvidyās (Kālī): Dakṣiṇākālī, Tārā, Bhuvaneśvarī, (Tripura)bhairavī, Chinnamastā, Dhūmavatī, Bagalāmukhī, Mātaṅgī, Tripurasundarī, and Kamalā. In a Kashmirian ritual manual, we find a further expansion of this hybrid pantheon through the addition of the threebhuvanadevatās Bhavānī, Bagalāmukhī, and Indrākṣī, the four pratyaṅgirās Siddhalakṣmī, Mantramātṛkā, Mantraḍāmarikā, and Saptakoṭīśvarī, and the seven mothers Dīkṣādevī, Khecarī, Vaikharī, Vitastā, Nidrā, Parāśakti, and Sureśī (Ānandabhairavī). Through all these, it says, Tripurabhairavī carries out her five cosmic functions of creation, preservation, withdrawal, punishment, and favor. In this arrangement the mahāvidyā Bagalāmukhī has been added along with those of the goddesses deriving from the Kashmirian Jayadrathayāmala that had retained their separate identities: Dīkṣādevī (Bhuvanamālinī) and the four pratyaṅgirās. A related hybrid set of ten vidyās appears in one version of the ritual of the Kashmirian Śaiva Agnikāryapaddhati: Durgā, Śārikā, Śāradā, Rājñī, Mahātripurasundarī, Jvālāmukhī, Bhīḍā, Lakṣmī, Bhadrakālī, and Dakṣiṇakālī. Paddhatis for the worship of the local lineage goddesses Śārikā, Jvālāmukhī, Rājñī, and Bālā following the model of the Paddhatis of Sāhib Kaul have been published as an appendix to the Kashmirian edition of the first of these works.

The Kauls, then, maintained their own Śākta tradition; but they also integrated themselves into the religious world of their adopted homeland. We have seen two aspects of this above: their adoption of the metaphysical and soteriological theory of the Kashmirian Śākta tradition and their inclusion of the local goddesses in a new, hybrid pantheon. But there is indirect evidence that they also integrated themselves into the purely Kashmirian ritual tradition by adopting the practice of Śaiva initiation and the like based on the tradition of the Svacchandatantra and seen in such detailed manuals as the Kalādīkṣāpaddhati and Agnikāryapaddhati. The manuscripts of these manuals transmit texts that are constant only in their essentials. One of the areas in which we find variation is in the number and identity of the goddesses who receive oblations in the fire sacrifice (agnikārya), and these variants can be reduced to two: a version that lacks the new east Indian goddesses and one that includes a greater or lesser number of them. The most plausible explanation of this division is that the manuscripts that include these goddesses represent these rituals as they had developed among Śaiva gurus who officiated for the Kauls.

What seems to have been present, then, as the Kashmirians approached the modern era was:

1.: a Kashmirian tradition of the worship of Tripurasundarī that drew its inspiration and metaphysics from the older Śākta tradition of the Trika;
2.: the new Śāktism of eastern India;
3.: the Brahmanical tradition in the hands of the Kashmirians’ domestic priests; and
4.: the ritual tradition of the cults of Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara.

In the early 19th century, Paṇḍita Śivarāma of the Upādhyāya sept confirms this analysis by presenting the Brahmans of his time as comprising divisions that map exactly on to these four constituents. This appears in his Śrīvidyāmantravivṛti in verses that he attributes to the venerable Saṃhitā, presumably some tract assigned to the Bhṛṅgīśasaṃhitā. These distinguish:

1.: the Trikajātīyas, members of the Trika clan, who study the doctrine of the Trika;
2.: the Śākta Kaulas, who are devoted to Kaula worship;
3.: the Mahābrāhmaṇas, also known as Bhaṭṭas; and
4.: the Rājānakas, who are experts in the (Śaiva) Mantra rituals.

In addition the passage mentions the Upādhyāya clan, to whom the author himself belonged. This last, it says, provides the learned preceptors of the Trikajātīyas, the Kaulas, and others. The ‘‘others’’ in this enumeration are, we may presume, the Rājānakas. Śivarāma adds that the Trikajātīyas are the Tikus in Kashmiri, the Upādhyāyas the Pādeys (pādiyī), and the Rājānakas the Rainas, and, he might have added, the Rāzdāns. The fact that the members of the remaining division are called both Mahābrāhmaṇa (a mildly pejorative term) and Bhaṭṭa is a clear indication that the text intends the subcaste formed by the Kashmirians’ domestic priests, called bācabaṭh in Kashmiri, literally, “Brahmans who live from the gifts they receive [from their patrons].” That the Trikajātīyas had become devotees of Tripurasundarī is established by other evidence, their claim to the Trika consisting of their adherence of its doctrines rather than its rituals. That the Upādhyāyas were the (hereditary) gurus of both the Trikajātīyas and the Kaulas, the latter evidently the descendants of the Maithila Kauls, is in keeping with the fact that the Kauls were also Śākta and indeed, like the Upādhyāyas and Trikajātīyas, devotees of Tripurasundarī who had adopted the Trika’s doctrines. That the remaining tradition, that of the Śaiva rituals of Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara, is particularly associated with the Rājānakas (Raina/Rāzdān) finds some confirmation in the tradition of the Rājānaka patriline of Pampor, several of whose members were dīkṣāgurus in this tradition. It will also perhaps explain why the Rājānaka Lakshmirama’s 19th-century commentary on the Trika’s Parātrīśikā explains it entirely in terms of the Svacchandabhairava cult.

By the 1920s further contraction had occurred. By that time the practice of the elaborate rituals of Śaiva initiation, still alive when G. Bühler was in Kashmir in the 1870s, had died out, as had the associated practice of the Śaiva postmortuary rituals. Researching the Śaivism of Kashmir in the valley during much of the 1970s, the present author found no remaining trace of knowledge of the rituals of the cults of Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara, nor of those of the Trika and Krama. As for the tantric worship of Tripurasundarī and other Śākta goddesses, as opposed to ritual expressions of devotion to these deities in other registers, that may perhaps have survived until that time. I have no evidence that leads me to affirm or deny this. What certainly had survived was the purely gnostic Trika of Śaivas whose ritual life was confined to the Smārta level. This, however, was not a 20th-century development, for we find it already in the model of the religious life advocated by the Mṛtitattvānusmaraṇa, a work probably written at some time between the 15th and the 19th century, which is likely to reflect common practice in the Kashmirian Brahman community of its time.

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