´Saivism after the ´Saiva Age: Continuities in the Scriptural Corpus of the V¯ıram¯ahe´svaras

: This article makes the case that V¯ıra´saivism emerged in direct textual continuity with the tantric traditions of the ´Saiva Age. In academic practice up through the present day, the study of ´Saivism, through Sanskrit sources, and bhakti Hinduism, through the vernacular, are generally treated as distinct disciplines and objects of study. As a result, V¯ıra´saivism has yet to be systematically approached through a philological analysis of its precursors from earlier ´Saiva traditions. With this aim in mind, I begin by documenting for the ﬁrst time that a thirteenth-century Sanskrit work of what I have called the V¯ıram¯ahe´svara textual corpus, the Soman¯athabh¯as.ya or V¯ıram¯ahe´svar¯ac¯aras¯aroddh¯arabh¯as.ya , was most likely authored by P¯alkurik˘e Soman¯atha, best known for his vernacular Telugu V¯ıra´saiva literature. Second, I outline the indebtedness of the early Sanskrit and Telugu V¯ıram¯ahe´svara corpus to a popular work of early lay ´Saivism, the ´Sivadharma´s¯astra , with particular attention to the concepts of the ja˙ngama and the is.t.ali˙nga . That the V¯ıram¯ahe´svaras borrowed many of their formative concepts and practices directly from the ´Sivadharma´s¯astra and other works of the ´Saiva Age, I argue, belies the common assumption that V¯ıra´saivism originated as a social and religious revolution.


Vīraśaivism, Tantra, and theŚaiva Age
By the mid-thirteenth century,Śaivism in the Deccan had already been irrevocably transformed by the decline of theŚaiva Age, as Alexis Sanderson has called it, the golden age of what we colloquially describe as "tantricŚaivism" (Sanderson 2009). Perhaps most remarkably, theŚaiva institutions that had previously dominated the region's religious ecology were rapidly disappearing, particularly those of the Kālamukhas. Descending from the Lākula traditions, or what Alexis Sanderson has termed Atimārga II, the Kālamukhas left behind precious few of the scriptures that must have originally distinguished their practice from competitors within the Atimārga and Mantramārga, and none in full recensions. Nevertheless, even before Alexis Sanderson and his students had revolutionized our narrative of medievalŚaivism over the past two to three decades, the Kālamukhas were already known to have vanished abruptly, as their landholdings were systematically replaced by anotherŚaiva tradition rising to prominence in the region, the Vīraśaivas. As a field, we owe our original awareness of this phenomenon to the pathbreaking work of David Lorenzen, who in his monograph, The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two LostŚaivite Sects, compiled a voluminous array of inscriptional evidence to document how Kālamukha mat . has (monasteries) ceased to be patronized precisely as inscriptions increasingly attested to the presence of Vīraśaiva devotional figures at the same sites. 1 Reflecting further on this state of affairs, however, Lorenzen later added an appendix to his work, claiming that Kālamukha mat . has were not merely displaced, but rather were overthrown by a veritable religious revolution. As Lorenzen writes: It can even be said the two [Kālamukha and Vīraśaiva] movements represent antipodes of Indian intellectual and religious tradition [:] the Brahmanic and the anti-Brahmanic, the scholastic and the devotional, Sanskrit learning and vernacular poetic inspiration, pan-Indian culture and regional culture, social and spiritual hierarchy and social and spiritual equality . . . . Vīraśaivism represented not "a reformist schism of the Kālāmukha church" but rather its overthrow. (Lorenzen 1991, p. 242) For Lorenzen, in essence, Vīraśaivism is the quintessential representative of the Bhakti Movement: a fundamentally anti-brahmin, anti-caste "movement", a radical rupture of social protest, and a purely vernacular religion of the people. 2 Lorenzen is not alone, of course, in attributing these features to Vīraśaivism. To the contrary, in the wake of A. K. Ramanujan's celebrated Speaking ofŚiva (Ramanujan 1973), the field of South Asian religions has naturalized his portrayal of Vīraśaivism as a social and religious revolution. Ramanujan, in turn, imported the perspectives of earlier intellectuals writing in Kannada who emplotted Vīraśaivism quite explicitly as an Indian foil for the Protestant Reformation. 3 But does this narrative accurately capture the influences that precipitated the emergence of Vīraśaivism? If we depict Vīraśaivism as essentially a devotional (bhakti) revolution, for instance, we might be inclined to delineate theŚaivism after theŚaiva Age as something radically different from its predecessors, those traditions that fall under the category of "Śaiva tantra". Indeed, most scholarly monographs and articles on Vīraśaivism scarcely mention the word "tantra", and historicize Vīraśaivism only in relation to other communities traditionally categorized as "bhakti", as if an unbridgeable chasm separated the two. 4 Likewise, even leading scholars ofŚaiva philology flag the "movement of the non-brahmin Vīraśaivas" (Sanderson 2012(Sanderson -2013 as of interest to what we might call Tantric Studies only for its occasional borrowings from theŚaiva Siddhānta and the Trika of Kashmir. Yet, if we read this antagonism back into the origins of Vīraśaivism as a moment of rupture, we risk putting forward a thesis that-as I would like to argue as explicitly as possible-is completely in contradiction with our textual evidence. To put matters even more plainly, based on philological evidence, Vīraśaivism did not originate as a revolution or reformation of tantricŚaivism, nor of Kālamukha traditions in particular. Indeed, a large part of the problem facing earlier generations of scholars was that adequate textual evidence had not yet come to our attention. Only a fraction of early Vīraśaiva literature has been studied to date, in part because we have restricted the source languages of our archive to the vernacular, exclusive of Sanskrit, and in part because we lacked sufficient knowledge of what had come before. Of course, print editions of such Vīraśaiva works in Sanskrit did exist, as Vīraśaiva monasteries published a substantial quantity of the tradition's literary history in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For institutional reasons, however, scholars trained in early Kannada and Telugu literature have rarely consulted Sanskrit texts, and when they did so, they previously lacked sufficient knowledge of the pre-Vīraśaiva traditions of theŚaiva Age from the region to draw clear connections between the two. 5 Likewise, and perhaps more crucially for the present audience, whenŚaivism is studied from a philological perspective, vernacular literature is rarely consulted, and in this case, as I will argue, the contemporary Telugu textual context is indispensable for historicizing the early Vīraśaiva works in question. 6 In this article, I will make the case that Vīraśaivism emerged in direct textual continuity with the "tantric" traditions of theŚaiva Age, especially the Atimārga II of the Kālamukhas, although in a number of cases early Vīraśaivism was influenced by Mantramārga traditions as well. As an embryonic version of this article was originally presented at the Society for Tantric Studies Conference in 2019, I present evidence that specifically sheds new light on how we define and periodize what we call tantra, but a similar corrective must be taken in our broader narratives of Hindu and South Asian religious traditions as well. In an earlier article in the journal History of Religions (Fisher 2019), I introduced elements of my claim by delineating the canon of what I have called the Vīramāheśvara textual culture of Srisailam. As I demonstrated in that publication, we have access to a rich body of early Vīraśaiva didactic literature that I date to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, contemporary with our earliest vernacular evidence for Vīraśaivism and heavily indebted to the textual canons of theŚaiva Age, most notably (but by no means limited to) theŚivadharmaśāstra. Whereas in that context I dealt with issues of historiography facing Religious Studies and South Asian Studies, my project here is primarily philological. Naturally, much work remains to be done in critically editing this textual corpus, and tracing parallels in the citations of many of the otherwise rarely attested early recensions of priorŚaiva scriptures. As a result, the evidence presented here will be extended in subsequent publications on the ritual practice and textual canons of the Vīramāheśvaras.
With such an aim in mind, I will reiterate in greater philological detail the case for dating the Vīramāheśvara corpus to around the thirteenth to early-fourteenth centuries, a significantly earlier date than that of the Sanskrit Vīraśaiva works of Vijayanagara. The principle Sanskrit works in question are the Vīramāheśvarācārasāroddhārabhās . ya, otherwise traditionally known as the Somanāthabhās . ya, the authorship of which I will discuss below; theŚaivaratnākara of Jyotirnātha; and the Vīramāheśvarācārasaṅgraha of Nīlakan . t . ha Nāganātha. Each of these Vīramāheśvara texts, in turn, contains citations from earlier (some likely Kālamukha)Śaiva scriptures, which in many cases match quite closely, barring the usual accretion of textual variants. The contemporary Telugu corpus consists primarily of the Telugu works attributed to Pālkurikȇ Somanātha: namely, the Basavapurān . amu, Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu, and Caturvēdasāramu. 7 TheŚivatattvasāramu attributed to Mallikārjuna Pan . d . itārādhya merits consideration here as well, although most likely dates to a slightly earlier period (a twelfth century dating would be plausible).
First, by bringing these two bodies of textuality into dialogue, I present the evidence that the Sanskrit Somanāthabhās . ya has been correctly attributed to the same Pālkurikȇ Somanātha who is responsible for the three Telugu works mentioned above. As a result, as both text-internal citational evidence and the attribution of authorship to Pālkurikȇ Somanātha are consistent with each other, we can assert with relatively strong confidence that the Somanāthabhās . ya was composed in the thirteenth century at Srisailam. The fact that the Sanskrit and Telugu works in question overlap so pervasively in tone and content, moreover, further allows us to reject the hypothesis, entrenched as it is, that early vernacular Vīraśaivism arose in strict opposition to SanskriticŚaivism. Second, I will conclude by outlining the principle points of continuity between the Vīramāheśvara corpus and thé Saivism of theŚaiva Age, demonstrating that on textual grounds early Vīraśaivism was directly indebted to its predecessors in the Deccan, and did not constitute an "overthrow" of its legacy, nor a revolution of any kind. While the Vīramāheśvaras drew on a number of 6 In addition, political controversies concerning the Liṅgāyat and Pañcācārya or Pañcapīt . ha communities has obscured matters further, but that state of affairs cannot be adequately addressed in the present article. In a forthcoming article to be published in the new journal NESAR (New Explorations in South Asia Research), I will further disambiguate the Vīramāheśvara corpus of texts from the origins of the Pañcācārya or Pañcapīt . ha paramparā some centuries later by tracing the roots of the latter to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 7 To clarify, what I refer to here as the Caturvēdasāramu is the first portion of the work printed under this title, up through the subheading in the printed edition, "Śivānubhavasūtravivaramu". As I will discuss, I suspect that the second portion of this work, given its seeming indebtedness to the Anubhavasūtra of Māyīdeva or similar material, along with the Anubhavasāramu, are more likely later accretions to Somanātha's oeuvre. distinct textual currents from theŚaiva Age, I focus here on their substantial inheritance from theŚivadharmaśāstra, with particular attention to the concept of the jaṅgama, the human devotee as movingśivaliṅga.

Somanāthabhās . ya
As I have argued at greater length in other venues (Fisher 2019), the tradition we now define as Vīraśaivism, or Liṅgāyatism, was not a new religious movement founded by the poet-saint Basava in the twelfth century. 8 Our earliest texts that mention Basava and his exploits-the Telugu (and Sanskrit) works of Pālkurikȇ Somanātha, and the Kannada Ragal .ȇ gal . u of Harihara-can only be dated as early as the thirteenth century, and moreover speak to a wider discursive world that pre-existed Basava himself, in which he merely participated as one historical agent among many. 9 Indeed, both Harihara and Somanātha, from opposite sides of the Deccan, speak to a remarkably similar religious worldview, both depicting, for example, the historicalśaran . as or Vīraśaiva saints as incarnations ofŚiva's celestial attendants, the Pramathagan . as. 10 Inscriptional evidence confirms, moreover, that Vīramāheśvara terminology was used prior to and far afield from the city of Kalyān . a where Basava served as dan . d . anāyaka to Bijjala of the Kalachuris. In other words, we have no plausible historical grounds for situating a singular religious revolution in twelfth-century Kalyān . a. Rather, the Vīraśaivas in residence there during Basava's day were already part of a greater trans-Deccan network spanning from southern Maharashtra through coastal Andhra and, if we trust inscriptional evidence, likely penetrating further south into Tamil Nadu as well. 11 Nevertheless, although the Vīramāheśvaras may well have traversed an extensive geographical network by the thirteenth century, our surviving Sanskrit textual evidence from the period stems from one single location: the extended domain of theŚaiva pilgrimage site at Srisailam. While we might hypothesize that these texts circulated beyond their locale of composition, whether or not similar texts were composed elsewhere, we can assert with confidence that Srisailam was something of a discursive epicenter, so to speak, in which the thirteenth-century Vīramāheśvaras codified their doctrine and ritual practice. How, then, do we know that the texts I have identified above are Vīramāheśvara works composed at Srisailam at a relatively early date? First of all, as I have discussed in greater length in (Fisher 2019), the texts generally declare their location of composition and religious affiliation fairly explicitly. In theŚaivaratnākara, Jyotirnātha traces his family lineage's origin to Saurashtra, apparently prior to the demolition of the Somanātha temple by Mahmud of Ghazni. He continues, in the same context, to describe the temple that he and his family had maintained after relocating to Srisailam. In the Vīramāheśvarācārasaṅgraha, Nīlakan . t . ha Nāganātha pays homage to Mallikārjuna, the form ofŚiva at the temple at Srisailam, and proceeds to venerate a number of early Vīraśaiva figures writing in Sanskrit or south Indian vernaculars, none of whom can be dated, based on our evidence, after the thirteenth century. In both of these works, as well as in the Somanāthabhās . ya, the words Vīramāheśvara and Vīraśaiva appear as terms of self-reference to the community in 8 In fact, by no means did all premodern Kannada Vīraśaiva texts view Basava as the central figure of the tradition. One key example is thé Sūnyasampādanȇ, which granted pride of place to Allama Prabhu. Likewise, the figures now known as the Pañcācāryas did appear in early modern Kannada texts as well. Nevertheless, the idea of Basava as the leader of an Indian Protestant Reformation-indeed, the Indian Martin Luther-had gained traction by the mid-twentieth century not only as a scholarly fashion but as itself a point of theological doctrine. This emergent tradition, which I have called Protestant Liṅgāyatism (Fisher 2019), needs to be understood within scholarship as itself a religious phenomenon. It is also crucial to note that the vacanas or poetic utterances attributed to Basava and other early poet saints cannot be taken as reliable documentary evidence concerning the origins of Vīraśaivism. See Chandra Shobhi (2005) for a discussion of the later canonization of the vacana corpus during the Vijayanagara period, connected with the rise of what the author terms "Virakta" Vīraśaiva identity, as well as of the twentieth-century editorial history of the vacanas. 9 On the Ragal .ȇ gal . u of Harihara, see Ben-Herut (2018). 10 Gil Ben-Herut, personal communication. 11 See also Ben-Herut (2015) on the transregional dimensions ofŚaiva bhakti. In my forthcoming monograph, I examine the category of translation as a vehicle for understanding how regional Vīraśaivisms took root across the southern half of the subcontinent, as, for example, was the case in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.
question. All three are structured primarily as nibandhas (compendiums, or anthologies) of Sanskrit scriptural citations, while the Somanāthabhās . ya also elaborates on the verses cited with extended prose commentary. Incidentally, the Telugu works of Pālkurikȇ Somanātha also contain all of these features, incorporating the self-referential term "Vīramāheśvara", extended descriptions of theŚaiva institutions of thirteenth-century Srisailam, and, as we will see, lengthy anthologized passages of Sanskrit citations. Who, then, is Pālkurikȇ Somanātha, and why would his dual authorship of works in Telugu and Sanskrit be so significant for our scholarly portrait of Vīraśaivism? Scholars of bhakti traditions of Hinduism will be intimately acquainted with Pālkurikȇ Somanātha for the hagiographies of the early Vīraśaiva saints orśaran . as he crafts in his vernacular Telugu works. From the perspective of Telugu literary historians, Somanātha's verse style stands in stark contrast to the school of high Telugu literature that more strictly emulated the idiom of Sanskrit kāvya. 12 In short, his writings are marshaled in support of a view that the vernacular in South Asia emerged from the popular religious sentiment of devotion, rather than from the elite courtly world of Sanskrit literature. Based on the portrait of Somanātha's writings as vernacular hagiography, his works-like those of his near contemporary writing in Kannada, Harihara-have been read almost exclusively in dialogue with the lives of the Nāyanārs as recounted in the Tamil Pȇriyapurān . am. Indeed, such parallels do exist. But, as we will see, by reducing Pālkurikȇ Somanātha's discursive context exclusively to the Pȇriyapurān . am, scholars to date have lost sight of the data that allows us to contextualize more precisely theŚaiva worldview from which he wrote.
Among works attributed to him, Somanātha is best known for the Basavapurān . amu, which narrates not only the life story of Basava, as the name would suggest, but also numerous of his purported contemporaries. The Basavapurān . amu has been adopted as a principle source for classroom teaching and scholarship on the Vīraśaiva tradition because it can be accessed easily by English speakers through the translation of Velcheru Narayana Rao and Gene Roghair. This Telugu epic in dvipada meter has often been upheld in scholarship as an example of purely vernacular, devotional narrative-disconnected, in other words, from anything remotely Sanskritic and from tantra as a category. 13 Pālkurikȇ Somanātha is also generally accepted as having composed the Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu, a second Telugu prabandha on the life of Mallikārjuna Pan . d . itārādhya, to whom authorship of the Telugu-languageŚivatattvasāramu is attributed. 14 Indeed, we can be fairly confident that the same author crafted both of these two Telugu works, and in fact, a third as well: Somanātha tells us explicitly at the outset of his Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu that he had previously completed two Telugu works entitled the Basavapurān . amu and the Caturvēdasāramu, or "Essence of the Four Vedas". Speaking about himself in the second person, Pālkurikȇ Somanātha declares the following: You admirably composed the Basavapurān . a; In the Basavapurān . a narrative, you recounted as history (itihāsa) The stories of the Gan . as, those celebrated ancient devotees.
You composed the Caturvēdasāramu with the 12 According to the canonical portrait of Telugu literary history, early Telugu literature was divided into a more elite and Sanskritized (mārga) register on one hand, and a more popular and accessible (dēśi) current on the other. See for instance (Rao and Roghair 1990, p. 5) for further detail. Pālkurikȇ Somanātha's works, andŚaiva bhakti literature more broadly, are generally associated with the dēśi current, and are thus viewed as intrinsically anti-Sanskritic and as intended for popular audiences. Nevertheless, an important corrective has recently been raised by Jones (2018), who complicates this division by showing that Pālkurikȇ Somanātha was deeply acquainted with formal Telugu literary conventions and makes use of such literary devices in his Telugu works. As this article also hopes to make clear, Somanātha's Telugu works, as well as other TeluguŚaiva works such as theŚivatattvasāramu, are anything but anti-Sanskritic. 13 See Rao and Roghair (1990). For instance, "Somanātha's rejection of Sanskritic, brahminic, literary conventions was complete" (p. 6); "Somanātha emphasized his opposition to the brahminic tradition by explicitly stating that he never associated with bhavis, non-Vīraśaivas" (p. 7). On the second point, based on our combined intertextual evidence, such statements are not evidence of "opposition to the brahminic tradition". Rather, Vīramāheśvaras strictly avoided contact with non-Śaivas, considering them to be virtually untouchable. Caste, Sanskrit, and the Vedas are not at all under contention in such a statement. 14 Although Pan . d . itārādhya is also accepted by the Pañcācārya or Pañcapīt . ha paramparā as one of the original five teachers (ācāryas), that later hagiographical portrait of Pan . d . itārādhya is beyond the scope of this article.
best of heroic devotion (vīrabhakti) in accordance with the Vedas. 15 Although Somanātha has professed his own authorship here of the Caturvēdasāramu, its title might give some readers pause: the "Essence of the Four Vedas", some might suspect, is the polar opposite, at least according to conventional wisdom, of what motivated Vīraśaivism as a religious "movement". Yet, not only can we infer, pending further examination, that Pālkurikȇ Somanātha did author the Caturvēdasāramu, but we must acknowledge his self-professed motive in doing so: Somanātha authored this vernacular work ofŚaiva doctrine, he tells us, to establish the orthodox Vaidika status of what he understands as vīrabhakti. Indeed, this sentiment accords precisely with the view articulated in the Basavapurān . amu, where we read that devotion toŚiva is inculcated in the Vedas themselves: "O Basava, proclaim the devotion that has been derived from the essence of the Vedas andśāstras". 16 Moreover, we have little reason to suspect that Somanātha's genuflection to the Vedas was intended disingenuously, or as a means of coopting a textual authority he viewed as foreign toŚaivism. To the contrary, by the thirteenth century in the Andhra country, it would have been quite normative amongŚaivas to interpret the Vedas as a quintessentiallyŚaiva scriptural corpus, in no way contradictory with thē Agamic and Atimārgic literature of theŚaiva Age. For instance, the name of Somanātha's "Caturvēdasāramu" was by no means unprecedented. Rather, it was likely intended to evoke the earlier Caturvedatātparyasaṅgraha of Haradatta, a garland of Sanskrit verses in the vasantatilaka meter intended to illustrate thatŚiva is the essential meaning (tātparya) of the four Vedas, cited frequently in the Somanāthabhās . ya. 17 Evidently, we cannot casually presume that the Vīraśaivism of Pālkurikȇ Somanātha intends in any manner to upend the authority of the Vedas as scripture.
Further, we would be remiss in presuming that for Somanātha the vernacular Telugu was in any way divorced from Sanskrit. Contrary to popular perception, his linguistic register is highly Sanskritized, even preserving the sort of lengthy Sanskrit compounds generally taken to be the purview of courtly Telugu literature. For example, to indicate his distaste for interacting with non-Śaivas, Somanātha describes himself in the Basavapurān . amu with extended Sanskrit compounding as "avoiding contact such as dialogue with and respect for non-Śaivas" (bhavijanasamādaran . asam . bhās . an .ā disam . sargadūraguṁd . a), and encapsulates his reverence for Vedic canons of textuality in phrases such as "in accordance with all the Vedas and Purān . as, and the established doctrine of the secret of the stainless liṅga" (akalam . kalim . garahasyasiddhām . tasakalavēdapurān . asammatam . baina) (Basavapurān . amu p. 7). Moreover, all of Somanātha's vernacular works are interlaced with direct Sanskrit quotations from Vedic andŚaiva source material. Both the Pan . d . itārādhaycaritramu and Caturvēdasāramu are heavily inflected with long doctrinal digests of Sanskrit source material, as will be discussed below, but Sanskrit citations appear in the Basavapurān . amu as well. Unfortunately, these quotations are not necessarily apparent to those reading Rao and Roghair's translation, as the English rendering and footnotes may obscure the shift in language. 18 15 Pālkurikȇ Somanātha, Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu, p. 3: basavapurān . a mȏppaṁga racim . citivi, basavapurān . a prabam . dham . bunam . du prathita purātana bhaktagan .ā nukathanam . bul itihāsaghat . anaṁ gūrcitivi, vara vīrabhakti savaidikam . buganu viracim . citivi saturvēdasāramana. 16 (Rao and Roghair 1990, p. 62). Similar examples are abundant, and do not need to be cited here. 17 Haradatta's work has often been (either erroneously or synonymously) titled by its editor and as a result, by subsequent scholarship, as thé Srutisūktimālā, with the title Catuvedatātparyacandrikā attributed to a later commentary byŚivaliṅgabhūpāla. Somanātha, however, is consistent in referring to this text by the shorthand Tātparyasaṅgraha. The print edition of this work by P. A. Ramasamy with commentary is incomplete. See also IFP transcript no. 1059 for the root text. Somanātha's lack of antipathy toward the Vedas also raises the question, of course, of his caste status prior toŚaiva initiation and his attitude toward non-Śaiva brahmin communities. While I will discuss this matter further in my forthcoming monograph, it is worth remarking for the moment that throughout the Somanāthabhās . ya, Somanātha refers to matters of ritual practice that he believes to be current in variousśākhās. 18 See, for example, Basavapurān . amu p. 10: mr . d . umahattvamuṁ gānamini bȏm . ku lanaṁgaṁ bad . uṁ "kavayah . kim . na paśyanti" yanut . a yanucuṁ gukavula gīt . unam . bucci pērci vinutim . tuṁ datkathāvidha mȇt . t . u lanina. Rao and Roghair (1990) translate, p. 45, without indicating the direct quotation in the footnotes: "It is said that a poet can see everything. But that does not hold true if one is ignorant of Mr . d . a's greatness. Thus I ignore all the bad poets and praise Basava with vigor. This is how the story goes". The Sanskrit quotation kavayah . kim . na paśyanti is found in the Mahāsubhās . itasaṅgraha. On p. 57, although indicating the quotation in a footnote, they translate: "Śruti has commended it as all seeing", leaving the casual reader unaware of the Sanskrit citation viśvataś caks . ur uta.
Stylistically, in other words, all of Pālkurikȇ Somanātha's works give every indication of an authorial imagination well versed in the Sanskrit language. Yet, we can find even more conclusive evidence of shared authorship by directly comparing key passages from the Caturvēdasāramu, Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu, and the Sanskrit Somanāthabhās . ya that contain direct and unmistakable parallels. In fact, despite linguistic differences, the texts harmonize to a remarkable degree, such that the overlap in content is far too significant to be explained by coincidence. To begin with a particularly striking example, let us examine the maṅgala verse of the Somanāthabhās . ya, which invokes Basava simultaneously as a human incarnation ofŚiva's bull, and leader of the Pramathagan . as, Vr . s . abha or Nandikeśvara: May Lord (rājah . ) Basava surpass all, venerable (pūjah . ) for his fortitude and In both halves of this benedictory verse, Somanātha employs a four-part rhyme scheme of a sort that is rarely encountered in Sanskrit literature but is not at all unexpected in Telugu dvipada verse. In fact, not only do Pālkurikȇ Somanātha's Telugu works make ample use of this device throughout, but Somanātha is particularly fond of the second rhyming pattern, often making use of the very same rhyming words. To name a single example, the Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu also opens with an invocation of Basava, incarnation of Vr . s . abha, as the one "who had accumulated fame (kīrti) and merit through the form (mūrti) of the auspicious guru, dwelling (varti) in bliss, pulsating (sphūrti) with the end of scripture". The content of the verses may differ, but the rhymes are unambiguous parallels. Moreover, the precise same rhyming words appear on multiple occasions in the Basavapurān . amu as well. 20 With the evidence presented thus far, it may remain plausible to suggest that the Somanāthabhās . ya was simply invoking the literary fashions of the day, imitating either Pālkurikȇ Somanātha directly or the broader conventions of early Telugu prosody. Nevertheless, the overlapping content is far more pervasive, including some particularly striking doctrinal passages reproduced in both the Sanskrit Somanāthabhās . ya and the Telugu Caturvēdasāramu. For instance, both texts include an enumeration of a closely matched set of Upanis . adic scriptures, which both texts refer to as "Śākhā Upanis . ads", the property of distinct lineages (śākhā) of Vedic transmission. 21 It is worth noting that the termśākhopanis . ad itself is not especially common. By employing this term, Somanātha might be taken as revealing that for him, Vedic scripture was not an abstract canon but was embedded within a living sociology of distinct Vedic brahminical communities. Furthermore, both works supply identical proof texts for the incarnation of Vr . s . abha as Basava: "I will become your son, by the name of Nandin, not born from a human womb". 22 Perhaps the most remarkable of these convergences is that the Somanāthabhās . ya and Caturvēdasāramu provide a precisely identical Prakrit etymology of the name of Basava, which makes use of identical grammatical rules and examples from vernacular Telugu usage. Drawing on the Prakrit grammar of Vararuci, 23 Somanātha makes the case that the name Basava can be derived systematically from the Sanskrit Vr . s . abha ("bull"), as rules of substitution render the letters b and v interchangeable (vr . kārasya bakārādeśo bhavati, vabayor abheda iti; pavargatr . tīyāks . aramu bakāramu pakāram . buvalanam . ), and the sibilants of various classes are notoriously collapsed into "sa" in Prakrit and several vernaculars (śas . oh . sa iti sūtrāt s . akārasya sakārādeśo bhavati;śas . oh . sa yanu vyākaran . asūtramunam . ). Hence, "vr . " can become "ba", "s . a" can become "sa", and "bha" can become "va", transforming the Sanskrit Vr . s . abha into Basava. Similarly, one may demonstrate Basava's ontological connection with Siva, by deriving in a similar manner the name Basava from the first three syllables of Siva's name as Paśupati, "lord of beasts" (paśupa). Both texts proceed, then, to illustrate this phonetic transformation with identical examples, such as the Sanskrit word kut . hāra, meaning an axe, and the Telugu equivalent, guddali, (kut . hārakuddālatāmarasādipades . u . . . ; guddālatāmarasakut . hāramul' varusa guddaliyuṁ dāmarayu gȏd . ali). 24 It is undeniable, at this point, that the Somanāthabhās . ya and Caturvēdasāramu share some direct relation of dependence, but could one text have been written in direct imitation of the other? For multiple reasons, forgery seems implausible. For instance, the Somanāthabhās . ya makes no effort to stake out a reputation for itself through attribution to Pālkurikȇ Somanātha. In fact, the author's name is mentioned nowhere in the text. Despite their substantial intertextuality, moreover, the two texts are not precise matches: that is, neither the Somanāthabhās . ya nor the Caturvēdasāramu seems intended as a translation of the other. While concerned with several identical themes-for example, both deal with the obligatory Vīramāheśvara topics of sacred ash (vibhūti), rudrāks . a beads, and the bearing of the personal liṅga-the structure of the texts is not identical. Moreover, while a substantial number of the Sanskrit citations in the Caturvēdasāramu also appear in the Somanāthabhās . ya, an equally substantial number do not, and vice versa. As a result, neither text would have been sufficient to provide the source material for the other.
If anything, Somanātha's Pan . d . itārādhaycaritramu overlaps even more pervasively with the contents of the Somanāthabhās . ya, even if the overlapping content is not so readily memorable. Structured as a garland of narratives of the lives of Mallikārjuna Pan . d . itārādhya and other saints, the Pan . d . itārādhycaritramu has, like the Basavapurān . amu, been represented as a strictly vernacular and prototypically devotional bhakti literary work. While very little work has been done on the text within the Western academy, it is best known for its occasional polyglossic use of multiple vernaculars (Kannada, Marathi, and Tamil), and secondarily for the chapter in which Pan . d . itārādhya journeys to meet Basava, only to find that the latter has fled Kalyān . a after the assassination of Bijjala. Anything more than a surface level perusal of the text, however, makes clear that the author aimed to convey Vīraśaiva doctrine as much as narrative, and was as thoroughly acquainted with Sanskrit as with Telugu. For instance, in the first prakaran . a, we find several extended doctrinal discussions, structured as garlands of Sanskrit citations within a Telugu grammatical medium.
Many of these discussions, moreover, are structurally parallel to sections of the Somanāthabhās . ya, and the verse quotations often run in almost the same sequence in both texts. It is the "almost" here, again, that is key: in most cases, we find just enough variation between the two-a verse missing or an extra citation supplied here or there in either text, or different attributions of sources for the same citation-to be confident that one text could not have been simply copied from the other. The doctrinal digests in the Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu concern the "greatness" (Telugu: mahima, Sanskrit: māhātmya) of sacred ash (vibhūti), rudrāks . a beads, pādodaka, the worship of the liṅga (liṅgārcana), the bearing of the liṅga, and prasāda, all of which are discussed in the Somanāthabhās . ya as well. The sum total of the evidence is abundant, and only a fraction can be published here for want of space. I have, however, exemplified this citational pattern below in Appendix A, with the original Telugu and Sanskrit of a parallel section from the Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu and the Somanāthabhās . ya.
What, then, do we make of these pervasive textual parallels in multiple languages? By far the most parsimonious solution-which I believe to be the strongest argument, based on the evidence-is quite simply that all of these works were composed by the same author. In order to confirm the plausibility of dating the Somanāthabhās . ya to the thirteenth century, however, we must further clarify that no textual material contained within the work precludes such a dating. The same, incidentally, must be ascertained for theŚaivaratnākara of Jyotirnātha and the Vīramāheśvarācārasaṅgraha of Nīlakan . t . ha Nāganātha, the other two works I associate with the early Vīramāheśvara corpus. In short, none of the Sanskrit Vīramāheśvara works cite any source texts that would prohibit dating the Somanāthabhās . ya andŚaivaratnākara to the thirteenth century, and the Vīramāheśvarācārasaṅgraha to the early fourteenth century. 25 Among readily datable Sanskrit sources in the Somanāthabhās . ya, we find citations from the Somaśambhupaddhati of 1048/9 CE, the ca. eleventh-century Vāyavīyasam . hitā, and the mid twelfth-century Sūtasam . hitā. 26 In theŚaivaratnākara, we further find an intriguing mention of the fourfold typology of yoga, which Jason Birch has recently historicized to this time period. 27 It is worth noting that none of the Vīramāheśvara authors cite the SanskritŚrīśailakhan . d . a, which Reddy (2014) has proposed to date to the thirteenth century on stylistic grounds. 28 Also worthy of note is that while these works are intimately familiar with theŚaiva religious landscape at Srisailam, none makes mention of Mallikārjuna's consort as Bhramarāmbā, who seems to make her debut on the stage of Telugu literature around the turn of the fifteenth century. 29 25 We can state conclusively that theŚaivaratnākara postdates the Somanāthabhās . ya, because it incorporates its commentarial prose along with shared verse citations. 26 On the Somaśambhupaddhati or Kriyākān . d . akramāvalī, authored by Somaśambhu, pontiff of the Golagī Mat . ha, of present day Gurgi, located in Rewa District in Madhya Pradesh, see for instance Sanderson (2012Sanderson ( -2013, p. 21. On the Vāyavīyasam . hitā, see Barois (2013 (2019) has argued that the Amaraughaprabodha, which was a foundational source text for the fifteenth-century Hat . hapradīpikā, should be understood as one of the earliest texts to teach a fourfold system of yoga. Drawing on the eleventh-to twelfth-century exchange of yogic ideas betweenŚaivism and Buddhism, exemplified by the Amr . tasiddhi, the short recension of the Amaraugaprabodha likely predates the thirteenth-century Dattātreyayogaśāstra. Other texts that mention the fourfold typology of yoga include the Marathi Vivekadarpan . a (Birch 2020) and Vivekasindhu, which are generally dated to the thirteenth century, and the fourteenth-centuryŚārṅgadharapaddhati (Jason Birch, personal communication). 28 See Reddy (2014), p. 103. Somanātha does however cite a certainŚrīparvatamāhātmya. 29 One excellent example is Gaurana, author of the Navanāthacaritramu, whose floruit Jamal Jones dates to the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries (Jones 2018). Gaurana's mention of Bhramarāmbā (Jones 2020) is quite in keeping with the rise to power of the Bhiks .ā vr . tti Mat . ha, whose lineage never receives mention during the earlier Vīramāheśvara period but is famously invoked by Srīnātha (Rao and Shulman 2012, p. 15).
Some confusion may be generated by the fact that theŚaivaratnākara and Vīramāheśvarācārasaṅgraha cite a text by the name of Kriyāsāra ("Essence of Rituals"), a title that is most famously associated with a Vijayanagara-period (perhaps fifteenth-or sixteenth-century) ritual compendium hybridized with aŚaktiviśis . t .ā dvaita commentary on the Brahmasūtras. 30 Not only does the Kriyāsāra as cited by the Vīramāheśvaras, in contrast, contain no discernibly Vīraśaiva or Vedāntic content, but citations attributed to that name fail to match the Vijayanagara text. 31 Succinctly, the Kriyāsāra in question is an entirely different work. In fact, none of the Vīramāheśvara texts in question containŚaktiviśis . t .ā dvaita content, and generally invoke the term Vedānta exclusively as a reference to the Upanis . ads. That these three works-the Somanāthabhās . ya,Śaivaratnākara, and Vīramāheśvarācārasaṅgraha-are an interconnected corpus of textuality, moreover, is underscored by the fact that they share a common repertoire of citational texts, a number of which are rarely cited under the same names in other domains of Sanskrit intellectual history, some to my knowledge never otherwise identified in any source to date.
Among the shared scriptural canon of the Vīramāheśvaras, the most foundational and frequently cited source texts include theŚivadharmaśāstra, Vātulatantra,Śivarahasya, Liṅga Purān . a, and, in theŚaivaratnākara and Vīramāheśvarācārasaṅgraha, the Vīratantra. It must be noted carefully that the recensions of the Vātula and Vīratantra cited are distinct fromĀgamic works commonly cited in the Vijayanagara period. Text names that are never mentioned within the Vīramāheśvara corpus, but that are ubiquitous in Vijayanagar period compositions, include the Vātulottara, Vātulaśuddhākhya, and Vīrāgamottara. 32 In addition to these theologically significant works, Vīramāheśvara authors share a pattern of citing a number of less widely circulating works, including: theĪśānasam . hitā; the non-Vijayanagara Kriyāsāra; the Kriyātilaka; the Kālikākhan . d . a (presumably of the Skanda Purān . a); the Brahmagītā; the Bhīmāgama; the Mānava Purān . a; and the Liṅgasāra. 33 Outside of the Vīramāheśvara corpus, one of the texts' closest discursive neighbors seems to be theŚāradātilaka, sharing a number of these sources. 34 Although I cannot possibly document all of the voluminous points of textual overlap in this article, including numerous shared citations, suffice it to say that the intertextuality between the Sanskrit Vīramāheśvara works is so strong as to be patently obvious when the works are subjected to a close comparative analysis.
I would caution, however, that there are a number of works attributed to Pālkurikȇ Somanātha that I have not included in this study, and in some cases, I currently harbor significant doubts that Somanātha could have composed them. 35 Two of the latter are worth discussing more explicitly, because their content deviates significantly from the discursive norms across languages of the "Vīramāheśvara moment". Most notable among 30 The termŚaktiviśis . t .ā dvaita, or "nondualism ofŚiva as qualified byŚakti", contrasts conceptually with theŚrīvais . n . ava use of the term Viśis . t .ā dvaita as the former intends a non-monistic brand of nondualism influenced by the TrikaŚaivism of Kashmir. 31 As of yet, I have only identified one citation attributed to a Kriyāsāra in theŚaivaratnākara that corresponds to what we understand as the Vijayanagara period text by that name: vibhūtir bhasitam . bhasma ks .ā ram . raks . eti bhasmanah . | bhavanti pañca nāmāni hetubhih . pañcabhir bhr .ś am || aiśvaryakāran .ā d bhūtih . bhasma sarvāghabhartsanāt | bhāsanād bhasitam . bhasma ks .ā ran .ā t paramāpadām | (Kriyāsāra, vol. 2, p. 14; Saivaratnākara 7. 79-80). As bhasma is a ubiquitous topic acrossŚaiva lineages, this parallel is not especially surprising. And in fact, this is a rather common citation, also appearing in the Br . hajjābalopanis . ad and the Siddhāntaśikhāman . i. Both the Somanāthabhās . ya and the Kriyāsāra attribute it to the Jābalopanis . ad or Br . hajjābalopanis . ad, which thus appears to be the source through which it entered Vīramāheśvara discourse. While several other citations are attributed by theŚaivaratnākara to a Kriyāsāra, these do not appear in the published edition. 32 Further textual work on the available manuscripts of these texts will be needed to determine if the early recensions survive in any form outside of the quotations in the Vīramāheśvara corpus. While these works have been redacted significantly over the centuries, we know little as of yet about how and when these transformations took place. 33 The Bhīmāgama may potentially be related to the Bhīmasam . hitā, although I know of no other citations under the name Bhīmāgama itself. The Somanāthabhās . ya does not cite the Liṅgasāra. The Somanāthabhās . ya is also distinctive in its citation of a Bās . kalasam . hitā and Bhr . gusam . hitā. I have been able to confirm so far that the Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu also shares citations of the Bhīmāgama, Mānava Purān . a, and the Vātulatantra. References to what ought to be the Kālikākhan . d . a also appear, but the Telugu editor or manuscript tradition has emended this to Kāśikākhan . d . a, due to the similarity of the lettersśa and l . a in Telugu script 34 TheŚāradātilaka is likely fairly close to the Vīramāheśvara corpus in date and region, as Alexis Sanderson has suggested that it was likely composed in Orissa (Sanderson 2007) around the twelfth century (Sanderson 2009 these is the Anubhavasāramu, a fourth major Telugu work often attributed to Pālkurikȇ Somanātha. The category of anubhava (experience) is already heavily thematized in Vīraśaiva circles by this time in the western Deccan, but is more typically invoked in early Marathi literature than in Telugu. Anubhava does not appear as a technical doctrinal term in the Somanāthabhās . ya,Śaivaratnākara, or Vīramāheśvarācārasaṅgraha. The work currently printed as the Caturvēdasāramu, likewise, requires further explication. While I believe the beginning of this print edition to be the work by that name of Pālkurikȇ Somanātha, as I have argued above, the second half of this publication consists of a Telugu work structured as an elaboration of Māyīdeva's Anubhavasūtra. 36 We find numerous instances of terminology here, as in the Anubhavasūtra, that is highly atypical of Vīramāheśvara thought: for example, caitanya, unmes . a, terminology from Māyīdeva's ontology, such as paramātmaliṅga, bhāvaliṅga, and so forth. Both works rely heavily on the s . at . sthala system, which only begins to make a brief appearance by the time of the Vīramāheśvarācārasaṅgraha.
This conclusion, then-that Pālkurikȇ Somanātha is the author of the Sanskrit Somanāthabhās . ya-bears significant ramifications for how we as scholars ought to historicize the genres of South Asian religious discourse and practice that we call bhakti and tantra. Indeed, beyond the scope of what can be covered in the present article, the Vīramāheśvaras shared with theŚaiva Age distinctive elements of its ritual culture, which are generally not comprised within our academic definitions of bhakti traditions. Such is the case, for instance, with formal tantric rituals of initiation; while this evidence will be discussed elsewhere, it is worth noting for the moment that in both the Basavapurān . amu and Caturvēdasāramu, Somanātha refers to Vīramāheśvara initiation asśāmbhavadīks .ā . 37 In this light, to accept the Somanāthabhās . ya as composed by the very same Pālkurikȇ Somanātha who authored the Telugu Basavapurān . amu is to cast fundamental doubt on whether the vernacular of Telugu devotional literature ever existed in isolation from contemporary Sanskrit discourse. In turn, we need to acknowledge that, in the eastern Deccan especially, the tantricŚaivism of theŚaiva Age was not overthrown byŚaiva devotional movements. Rather, it exerted a formative influence on the emergence of theŚaiva communities we classify as bhakti traditions. While these points of continuity are too abundant to enumerate in the present article, I would like to continue by looking closely at one key element that the Vīramāheśvaras had inherited from their predecessors of theŚaiva Age: the role of the liṅga, both the personal is . t . aliṅga and the jaṅgama, the moving liṅga, as livingŚaiva devotee.

Before the Vīramāheśvaras: Antecedents from theŚivadharmaśāstra
Centuries before the coalescence of the Vīramāheśvara tradition around the thirteenth century, numerousŚaiva lineages had already carved out an institutional domain at Srisailam. These religious networks spanned not only the central mountain peak, on which the Mallikārjuna Temple is located, but also the wilderness terrain in which it is embedded. Indeed, well before the rise of the Vīramāheśvaras, numerous religious communities,Śaiva and otherwise, had established monasteries throughout the extended sacred geography of the "auspicious mountain". In the thirteenth century, for instance, Srisailam was home to the regional branch of the Golaki Mat . ha of theŚaiva Siddhāntins, 38 who held a dominant share in the transregional pilgrimage site, negotiating periodic alliances with the Kalachuri, Cōla, and Kākatīya kingdoms (Inden et al. 2000). The eastern Deccan, especially around Srisailam, was also well known for housing Kālamukha lineages of the Simha Paris . ad, who 36 Although insufficient work has as of yet been done on Māyīdeva, he appears to be the author both of the Anubhavasūtra and Viśes .ā rthaprakāśikā, based on similar identificatory information at the outset of both works. While he may indeed have lived fairly early in Vīraśaiva history (ca. thirteenth/fourteenth century?), his writings are highly characteristic of a western Deccani Vīraśaiva context rather than of the Srisailam Vīramāheśvaras. 37 See Rao and Roghair (1990), p. 271, and Caturvēdasāramu, p. 3. What precisely Somanātha might mean byśāmbhavadīks .ā is not entirely clear. In the Caturvēdasāramu, Somanātha glosses the practice with the citation "vratam etac chāmbhavam". This passage, drawn from the Kālāgnirudropanis . ad, is also cited by the Somanāthabhās . ya, and is usually interpreted as referring to the practice of bearing the tripun . d . ra. 38 For more information about the earlier transregional Golaki Mat . has of theŚaiva Siddhānta, see Sanderson (2012Sanderson ( -2013 and Sears (2014). On the Golaki Mat . ha in Andhra, see Talbot (1987).
appear often in the inscriptional record.Śākta transmissions of the Kālī Krama and the Paścimāmnāya were also in evidence. 39 Beyond theŚaiva andŚākta-Śaiva fold, Srisailam also fostered a shared Buddhist-Śaiva transmission of yogic practices; indeed, some of our richest understudied textual resources for the early development of Hat . ha Yoga are in the vernacular languages of the Deccan, especially Marathi and Telugu. 40 Given the intense interest it generated acrossŚaiva communities, it is no surprise that Srisailam was the site at which the surviving Sanskrit Vīramāheśvara canon was first articulated. To the contrary, it is precisely the legacy of theŚaiva Age that made Vīraśaivism as we know it possible. In the preceding discussion, space has only permitted us to scratch the surface of the textual canons that Pālkurikȇ Somanātha adapted in composing his Sanskrit and Telugu oeuvre. For example, he evidently felt no qualms about supplying material from theŚaiva Siddhānta where convenient. 41 Other texts cited by Somanātha, as we have seen, seem to have circulated within a more limited domain, possibly only within the extended coastal region of Andhra and through Orissa. Yet, Somanātha also inherits a far deeper legacy than his more temporally proximateŚaiva sources, such as the Somaśambhupaddhati or Sūtasam . hitā. Most notably, we find a number of citations in the Somanāthabhās . ya from thé Sivadharmaśāstra, perhaps the single most authoritative source for layŚaiva samaya conduct dating back to the sixth or early seventh century (see for example Bisschop (2018) on the dating of theŚivadharmaśāstra). Indeed, many of those features of Vīraśaivism that scholars have viewed as "revolutionary" and "vernacular", including caste blindness among initiates, emotional or affective bhakti, reciting the stories ofŚaiva saints, and the worship of the jaṅgama, or Vīraśaiva saint, as a moving liṅga, were not at all new to the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, but can be directly traced back to theŚivadharmaśāstra itself. 42 Other features of theŚivadharma, although less well known within the academic study of bhakti traditions, were equally foundational to the Vīramāheśvaras, including the belief thatŚaiva saints were not at all natural or material (prākr . ta) human beings but were rather incarnations of Siva's gan . as on earth. 43 The originalŚivadharma was couched in the form of a conversation between the sage Sanatkumāra and Nandikeśvara, the latter of whom, equated with the bull gan . a Vr . s . abha, was later understood to be incarnated as Basava himself. We also find, throughout theŚivadharma, frequent usage of the termśivayogin (Kan.śivayogi) as a religious identity marker, which as Gil Ben-Herut has shown was employed abundantly within early Vīraśaiva literature in Kannada.
Succinctly, theŚivadharma was no minor influence on the Vīramāheśvaras. By now, thatŚivadharmaśāstra citations appear within the Vīramāheśvara corpus is somewhat of an established fact rather than a new finding; I have already discussed this myself, for example, in Fisher (2019). Concerning the history of theŚivadharma, research has been well underway for some years aimed at producing a critical edition of the text itself and tracing the outsized influence of the scripture on the history of popularŚaivism. One particularly noteworthy example, in the present context, is the ongoing work of Florinda De Simini on the transmission of theŚivadharma andŚivadharmottara within vernacular currents of south Indian discourse. It may well be the case that the abundantŚivadharma citations preserved in the Somanāthabhās . ya can be of use in reconstructing the earlier history of what has often proved to be an unruly and heterogenous textual transmission. As this work is being conducted elsewhere, my project is not primarily to address the textual history of theŚivadharma itself. My project is, however, both in the present article and within my 39 See, for instance, Dyczkowski (2009), p. 108. 40 See, for instance, Jones (2018) on Gaurana's Telugu Navanāthacaritramu, and Mallinson (2019) on early vernacular texts that dialogue with Sanskrit sources on Hat . ha Yoga. 41 While this matter will have to be discussed in future publications, a crucial example is the fact that Vīramāheśvaras drew on initiation rituals outside of theŚaiva Siddhānta tradition, despite the fact that a Saiddhāntika model was available to them in the Somaśambhupaddhati. 42 See below for some further discussion. These issues are also discussed in greater detail in my forthcoming book manuscript. 43 The goal of becoming a gan . a in earlyŚaivism, specifically in the Nepalese recension of the Skanda Purān . a, was discussed, for instance, by Yuko Yokochi (Yokochi 2018) in her talk at the 17th World Sanskrit Conference (7/11/18), "Mahaganapatir bhavet: Gana-hood as a religious goal in early Shaivism". Aside from the features mentioned in this paragraph, we also find some evidence that the practice of the ritual worship (pūjā) of scriptural texts (śāsana), explicitly discussed within theŚivadharma, may have continued under the Vīramāheśvaras (see De Simini (2016) for further discussion) larger book project, to clarify something that has to date escaped scholarship on the history of Vīraśaivism. Specifically, on historical and philological grounds, we can demonstrate conclusively that early Vīraśaivism-including the Somanāthabhās . ya in particular-was constituted directly from the scriptural and cultural heritage of theŚaiva Age, not least among which is theŚivadharma. To make this case requires that I document, as I have begun to do in this article and in Fisher (2019), the distinctive religious sensibilities that early Vīraśaivas directly inherited from theŚivadharma and other earlierŚaiva sources. In all likelihood, the Vīramāheśvara exegetes, and their predecessors, possessed far more than a casual acquaintance with the text of theŚivadharmaśāstra. Indeed, the Somanāthabhās . ya incorporates textual extracts from theŚivadharma significantly in excess of the verses attributed by name to that text in our available manuscripts. For instance, in one passage variously described as "Vīramāheśvaramāhātmya" or "Vīraśaivācāra", a significant portion of the anus . t . ubh passage consists of silent borrowings from theŚivadharma. This was not, then, simply a matter of searching for an authoritative proof-text readily at hand. Moreover, the fact that the Vīramāheśvaras were thinking systematically with thé Sivadharma is illustrated by the fact that we can observe what seems to be textual drift, possibly deliberate, in the verses of theŚivadharma themselves. While further manuscript work is needed to confirm this point, we meet with some intriguingŚivadharma citations in both the Somanāthabhās . ya and theŚaivaratnākara that speak either to deliberate redaction of the text or spurious attributions. These verses, moreover, do not appear in the most widely attested recensions of theŚivadharma. 44 One should always bear the nirmālya out of devotion; one should not bear it out of greed. It is called nirmālya because it is stainless (nirmala). One with an impure body should not bear it. One should bear the nirmālya on the head, and one should also consume the naivedya. Having drunk the prasāda water, one obtains gan . a-hood. 45 Both of these two verses concern the subject of nirmālya, the leftover offerings of food, flower garlands, etc. from the worship ofŚiva. By the thirteenth century, nirmālya had become a topic of contention withinŚaiva discourse across lineages, with theŚaiva Siddhānta even taking deliberate pains to declareŚiva's nirmālya as impure, requiring the ritual intervention of shrines to Can . d . eśvara to purify its contamination. 46 Nevertheless, following in the spirit of the earlier precedent set by the Pāśupatas, the Vīramāheśvaras took a strong stance on the matter by not only declaring nirmālya as inherently pure, but requiring that initiates offer all food to their personalśivaliṅgas before consumption such that it would become nirmālya. In contrast, the text we now associate with the most common recension of theŚivadharma does not provide any scriptural support for this practice. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the redactors of the Vīramāheśvara canon would wish thé Sivadharma to speak more forcefully in support of their position on the matter-and this is precisely what we find in the texts. In a similar vein, it is worth noting one additional verse attributed to theŚivadharma by both the Somanāthabhās . ya and theŚaivaratnākara, but this time with one crucial variant. The Somanāthabhās . ya reads: "One must not go to a place in whichŚiva is not, where there are none ofŚiva's people (nāsti māheśvaro janah . )". 47 The 44 Further manuscript work on theŚaivaratnākara will be necessary here, as well as on theŚivadharma itself. While I do not have access to all of the variants compiled by TheŚivadharma Project, these verses do not appear in the published recension, Paśupatimatam of Naranarinatha, or in IFP transcript no. 72, copied from Adyar ms. no. 75425. I have not located these first two verses cited in any texts besides the Somanāthabhās . ya and thé Saivaratnākara. 45 The Somanāthabhās . ya preserves these two verses, not contiguously, which I have translated above: nirmālyam . dhārayen nityam . bhaktyā lobhān na dhārayet | nirmalatvāc ca nirmālyam . maladehī na dhārayet || nirmālyam . dhārayen mūrdhni naivedyam . cāpi bhaks . ayet | tatprasādodakam . pītvā gān . apatyam avāpnuyāt || TheŚaivaratnākara also preserves both of these verses, the first as vs. 16.91 with the following variations: nirmalatvāc ca nirmālyam . maladehī na dhārayet | dhārayec chivanirmālyam . bhaktyā lobhān na dhārayet || and the second as vs. 16.124, with the following variations: nirmalatvāc ca nirmālyam . maladehī na dhārayet| dhārayec chivanirmālyam . bhaktyā lobhān na dhārayet || 46 For further detail, see for example Goodall (2009). 47 The Somanāthabhās . ya reads: yasmin ks . etreśivo nāsti nāsti māheśvaro janah . | tac ca sthānam . na gam . tavyam . . Saivaratnākara, on the other hand, preserves this variant: "One must not go to a place in whichŚiva is not, where there are no Vīramāheśvaras" (vīramāheśvaro janah . ). 48 The fact that the phrase "nāsti māheśvarah . " appears to have been replaced in theŚaivaratnākara by "vīramāheśvarah . ", a less desirable reading, suggests that the verse was modified either intentionally, or through textual drift within the community, to employ the community's term of self-reference, Vīramāheśvara. We do not, to clarify, have any evidence that the term Vīramāheśvara was employed in the originalŚivadharma. 49 It is abundantly clear, then, that the Somanāthabhās . ya and the Vīramāheśvara corpus were substantially indebted to theŚivadharma, and that they invoked-and possibly redacted-theŚivadharma to underpin the authority of their fledglingŚaiva community. What may be less well established, by this point, is the fact that Somanātha was no pioneer in his invocation of theŚivadharmaśāstra within the thirteenth-century Vīramāheśvara community. Rather, theŚivadharmaśāstra was already foundational to the incipient ethos of the Vīraśaivas, or Vīramāheśvaras, even before the community was known by either of those names. Rather, we can illustrate the continuous influence of theŚivadharmaśāstra on the emergent Vīraśaiva community by looking more closely at a predecessor to Pālkurikȇ Somanātha's works, namely, the TeluguŚivatattvasāramu of Mallikārjuna Pan . d . itārādhya.
As of yet remarkably understudied for its contributions to Vīraśaiva thought, theŚivatattvasāramu is, like Somanātha's Telugu works, internally bilingual, even preserving direct citations from theŚivadharmaśāstra embedded in its Telugu verses. These citations, as well as paraphrased content, allow us to isolate certain elements of theŚivadharma's worldview that were already prominent in the proto-Vīramāheśvara community before the time of Pālkurikȇ Somanātha.
TheŚivatattvasāramu is a TeluguŚaiva verse work of which only 489 verses are currently thought to survive. What do we know, first of all, about Pan . d . itārādhya, purported author of theŚivatattvasāramu? Aside from being the subject about whom Pālkurikȇ Somanātha wrote the Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu, the name Pan . d . itārādhya appears rather prolifically in the inscriptional record from the twelfth century onward. All things considered, Pan . d . itārādhya can be presumed, to the best of our evidence, to have been a historical personage and perhaps a late contemporary of Basava. Remembered as a native of Draksharama near Guntur in East Godavari District, Pan . d . itārādhya appears based on inscriptions to have been active in the Srisailam region in the late twelfth century. 50 We know little for sure about what Pan . d . itārādhya's doctrinal affiliation may have been, although Somanātha describes him as having studied under a certain Kōt . ipalliĀrādhyadēva. As for his authorship of theŚivatattvasāramu, although we have no other substantial works attributed to him to compare, the author of theŚivatattvasāramu names himself as "Mallikārjuna Pan . d . ita" within the text itself. 51 As scholars of Telugu literature have noted for some time, we also find a few direct citations of theŚivatattvasāramu within the Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu, making it plausible to believe that the person Somanātha revered in this text was indeed the author of theŚivatattvasāramu (Lalitamba 1975, p. 40, ftn. 25 the names Vīraśaiva, Vīramāheśvara, or Liṅgāyat. Unfortunately, most of these debates have fixated on the question of whether or not theŚivatattvasāramu prescribes the bearing of the is . t . aliṅga, as the term itself, and the related prān . aliṅga, are also nowhere mentioned. 52 Although these two later concerns did become integral to Pālkurikȇ Somanātha's theology, the fixation on these two points within Telugu language scholarship has obscured the substantial doctrinal homologies between theŚivatattvasāramu and Pālkurikȇ Somanātha's works. TheŚivatattvasāramu contains, for instance, a lengthy section in praise ofŚiva's Pramathagan . as, associating them as later Vīramāheśvara authors do with the narrative of the destruction of Daks . a's sacrifice. 53 Bhakti as a religious value is celebrated at great length; indeed, we even find references to a number of theŚaiva saints whose stories Somanātha would later narrate in the Basavapurān . amu and Pan . d . itārādhyacaritramu. Thé Sivatattvasāramu is equally insistent that caste distinctions must be totally prohibited amonǵ Saiva initiates. Moreover, we even find noticeably proto-Vīraśaiva language, such as an invocation of the term jaṅgama. In short, the substantial points of overlap all have roots in the popular lay theology of theŚivadharma. In the surviving portion of theŚivatattvasāramu, there are seven verses with directalthough deliberately fragmentary-quotations from theŚivadharmaśāstra, making it the most frequently cited Sanskrit work within the Telugu text. I have reproduced below in Appendix B all seven of these citations. Indeed, in some cases, knowledge of the original Sanskrit from theŚivadharma allows us to emend textual corruptions in the Telugu that the editors appear not to have noted. OneŚivadharma verse, for instance, that appears to loom particularly large in Mallikārjuna Pan . d . itārādhya's imagination is the famous comparison between a dog cooker (śvapacah . ) and a caturvedī brahmin, which asserts that commensality must be respected betweenŚaiva devotees, regardless of their caste origin: "Neither a Caturvedī nor a dog cooker who is my devotee is more dear to me. He may be given to, and taken from, and is to be worshipped as I am myself". 54 ThisŚivadharma verse apparently warrants enough attention that Pan . d . itārādhya weaves portions of this Sanskrit citation through a series of three verses in Telugu. In the process, Pan . d . itārādhya reveals that he is well aware of the lengthy history of anti-caste rhetoric within theŚaiva corpus; the necessity of erasing caste distinction amongŚaiva initiates, for him, is clearly no "revolution", but rather an established point of doctrine.
To the best of our knowledge, then, it appears thatŚivadharma vs. 1.36 conveys a fairly unambiguous literal meaning that was greeted favorably, and not undermined, by its interpretive communities. In other cases, what certain terms may have meant to an ideal reader of theŚivadharma in the sixth century is far less clear, and we would be wise to pause before reading back their Vīraśaiva meaning, iconic as it may be today, into the original scripture itself. For instance, Pan . d . itārādhya dwells over an extended series of Telugu verses on the concept of the jaṅgama, or "moving"śivaliṅga, which by the time of the nascent Vīraśaiva traditions unambiguously refers to a human devotee ofŚiva, orŚaiva saint. One such Telugu verse in this passage, however, cites directly from theŚivadharma, while simultaneously paraphrasing the textual context of the citation. As Pan . d . itārādhya writes: The sentence "liṅgas are said to be twofold" States that if one does not worship the jaṅgama liṅga As prescribed, having undertaken ritual, Pūjās and good deeds become fruitless. 55 TheŚivadharma verse cited reads as follows: 52 For a review of the Telugu literature discussing Pan . d . itārādhya's religious identity, see Lalitamba (1975), Chp. 4. 53 The discussion of the Pramathagan . as and the destruction of Daks . a's sacrifice by Vīrabhadra spans the verses of theŚivatattvasāramu between vs. 300 and 388. 54 IFP Transcript 72, vs. 1.36: na me priyaś caturvedī madbhaktah .ś vapaco 'pi vā | tasmai deyam . tato grāhyam . sa sam . pūjyo yathā hy aham || 55Ś ivatattvasāramu vs. 156: kriyagȏna jam . gamalim . gamu | niyatim . būjim . paṁd .ē ni nis . phalamulu sa | tkriyalunuṁ būjalu "lim . ga | dvayam .
samākhyātam" anina vākyamu mrōyun. I have emended "samakhyātam" in the Telugu to "samākhyātam" as is expected by Sanskrit grammar and metrics.
Liṅgas are said to be twofold (liṅgadvayam . samākhyātam): the moving and non-moving. The moving is known as "conviction" (pratīti). The non-moving is in the case of [liṅgas] made of earth and so forth. 56 In this Telugu verse, Pan . d . itārādhya's point seems to revolve not much around the verse that is actually cited as much as around another slightly subsequentŚivadharma verse, which states that the fixed (sthāvara) liṅga is useless without the moving (jaṅgama) liṅga: "Through disrespect of the jaṅgama, the sthāvara becomes fruitless. Therefore, the wise one should never disrespect the pair of liṅgas". 57 We may assume, then, that Pan . d . itārādhya intends to invoke for his readers not simply the verse cited, but the wider discursive context of the twofold typology of liṅgas as discussed in theŚivadharma. As with all of his partial citations, the meaning of theŚivadharma verses cannot be coherently read without background knowledge simply from the elliptical Sanskrit provided. In this respect, Pan . d . itārādhya's multilingual idiom appears to have been a foundational influence on Somanātha's Telugu works, which also weave partial Sanskrit quotations directly into the Telugu grammar of his dvipadas. Thus, succinctly, theŚivatattvasāramu reveals a discursive world in which theŚivadharma was quite well known to his intended audience. He intends, evidently, not to teach something his audience has never encountered before, but to evoke a scriptural canon they can instantly recall even from the mention of a few key words. If theŚivadharma was, then, not new for Pālkurikȇ Somanātha's audience, it was likely not a novel source of inspiration in Pan . d . itārādhya's generation either. Now, the fact that the term jaṅgama predates the advent of Vīraśaivism proper is, in and of itself, not a new finding. In fact, David Lorenzen has already discussed this in his landmark study of the Kālamukhas, noting where the term jaṅgama appears in our inscriptional record as associated with Kālamukha institutions. TheŚivadharma verses that mention this term, however, are ambiguous: is a "moving" liṅga a human saint, or a portable miniatureśivaliṅga? Within the Vīramāheśvara context, for instance, the related word, caraliṅga ("moving liṅga") retained the separate meaning of a portablé sivaliṅga, since we are provided with detailed measurements of its allowable dimensions (Fisher 2019, pp. 32-33.). As of yet, we know relatively little about which interpretation of the term jaṅgama or jaṅgamaliṅga would have been most current in distinct pre-Vīraśaiva historical and discursive contexts. Indeed, the originalŚivadharma verse itself does not precisely inspire confidence that jaṅgama was originally, in all cases, intended to mean a moving saint, as "pratīti", the term used in the definition of the "moving liṅga" (caram . pratītivikhyātam), does not conventionally have that meaning. Nevertheless, in the spirit of Lorenzen's inscriptional evidence, the testimony of theŚivadharmavivaran . a, a rare commentarial voice from the tradition, also suggests that the concept of the jaṅgama was a decidedly pre-Vīraśaiva development: "Intending to articulate that the Māheśvaras also are to be respected likeŚiva himself, [the text] points out that they, also, are considered liṅgas". 58 But what, then, does the term jaṅgama mean for Pan . d . itārādhya? While he does not definitively state his position in theŚivatattvasāramu, the nearby context of the Telugu verse cited above suggests that the term jaṅgama did refer to aŚaiva devotee, as the verse appears immediately after a discussion of the pūjā of theŚivabhaktas themselves: Thus, theŚivatattvasāramu provides us with evidence that the jaṅgama had already acquired its conventional meaning as a human saint, and moreover, the text understood this meaning to be associated with the interpretive traditions of theŚivadharma. A further intriguing example occurs in a citation preserved in Jyotirnātha'sŚaivaratnākara, where we meet with a variant reading for this very sameŚivadharma verse. As Jyotirnātha cites: "There are said to be two types of liṅgas: the moving and non-moving. The non-moving is made of earth and so forth. The moving is known as the guest (atithi)". Although we cannot as of yet be certain if the verse was already modified in Jyotirnātha's text at the time of composition, this seemingly minor variant is doing significant interpretive work: while the original verse may also refer to a portableśivaliṅga, theŚaivaratnākara restricts possible interpretations with the word "guest" (atithi) to provide an impeccable scriptural precedent for the worship of the human jaṅgama. 60 Whether further manuscript research locates this shift at the text's inception or in later textual drift, thisŚivadharma verse provides an intriguing snapshot of textual redaction in process. It does suggest, in either case, that early Vīraśaiva exegetes were uncomfortable with the ambiguity in the originalŚivadharma, and saw that text as the ideal authenticator of Vīraśaivism's new approaches toŚaiva praxis.
According to our textual evidence, then, the jaṅgama as moving liṅga was one of many concepts the Vīramāheśvara tradition shares with theŚaiva Age interpretive tradition of thé Sivadharma. Should we conclude, then, that theŚivadharma was the sole proximate source for the entrée of these doctrinal elements into Vīraśaivism? As it turns out, textual evidence from further south in the Tamil country complicates matters a bit further. An epigraph preserved from the reign of Kulōttuṅga Cōla explicitly mentions the patronage of a group known as Vīramāheśvaras. 61 This reference, however, contains little contextual information as to what sort of religious practice these "Vīramāheśvas" may have advocated. We do, however, possess an external source for this evidence, brief as it is, from aŚaiva doxography that seems likely to date back to the Cōla period in question. A circa seventeenth-century Tamil work, a commentary on the Ñānāvaran . avil . akkam by Vȇl . l . iyampalavān . ar, preserves an extensive Sanskrit citation from a work entitled the Sarvasiddhāntaviveka, 62 in which we meet with a description of a group of Mahāvratins who espouse a form of practice reminiscent of early Vīraśaivism. According to the Sarvasiddhāntaviveka, these Mahāvratins appear to advocate the bearing of the personal liṅga (liṅgadhāran .ā ) as a central religious practice, and insist that the liṅga must be borne on the body only above the navel. 63 The Srisailam Vīramāheśvaras attribute just such a restriction to the Vātulatantra, a text that the Tamil commentator Vȇl . l . iyampalavān . ar describes as a "Mahāvratatantra". 64 But moreover, and crucially for the present instance, the Sarvasiddhāntaviveka also links the practice of liṅgadhāran .ā explicitly with devotion to jaṅgamas. As the verses in question pair the term jaṅgama directly with the term guru, clearly a human figure, it appears that the "moving liṅga" quite clearly depicted the humanŚaiva devotee for this audience: He always bears the liṅga on his own head, or his shoulders, Or on other places above the navel, such as the heart, etc., according to theśāstra.
Liberation [derives] from bearing the liṅga; how much more so from the worship of men?
As with devotion toŚiva, so with devotion to the guru and the jaṅgamas.
Even so, devotion to the jaṅgama is called the "particular" (viśes . a).
Those who are intent on the daily rituals and so forth stated in theśāstra known as the Great Vow (mahāvrata) Set forth for liberation in a single lifetime. Thus, here [on earth], they are "those of the Great Vow". 65 In other words, given this contextualizing information, it would appear overly facile simply to conclude that the theology of the jaṅgama was inherited by early Vīraśaivas directly from the raw text of theŚivadharmaśāstra without any textual or institutional intermediaries. As we have seen, the early interpretive context for theseŚivadharma verses does attest to the fact that the jaṅgama was previously understood in the Vīraśaiva sense as a human saint. Moreover, while at this time the evidence available to us is fragmentary, the Vīraśaiva understanding of the term jaṅgama can also be traced through at least one intermediary discursive context in circa twelfth-century Tamil region, in which other practices favored by the Srisailam Vīramāheśvaras, such as liṅgadhāran .ā , seem to already be associated with each other. Yet the term liṅgadhāran .ā , central as it had become even to early Vīraśaivism, is not attested in theŚivadharma itself as a component of layŚaiva practice, nor are the names later attributed to the miniature liṅga borne on the body.
The is . t . aliṅga, or personal aniconic image ofŚiva, is today quite renowned as a definitive marker of Vīraśaiva religiosity: initiates are generally obligated to wear around their necks a miniatureśivaliṅga imparted to them upon initiation, and for which they traditionally perform daily pūjā, enshrined in the base that is the palm of the hand (karābjapīt . ha). The Srisailam Vīramāheśvaras frequently invoke the concept of the is . t . aliṅga, most frequently referred to as the prān . aliṅga or sves . t . aliṅga. While the Vīramāheśvara terms for such a personal liṅga do not appear in theŚivadharma nor its successors, they do appear in other sources that were directly known to the Somanāthabhās . ya, including the Somaśambhupaddhati. Likewise, preserved within Vīramāheśvara texts, these terms appear in non-Saiddhāntika ritual procedures, such as initiation (dīks .ā ), which may originally derive from a Kālamukha, or perhaps a similar Mahāvratin lineage of transmission. This discrepancy underscores the fact that other foundational Vīraśaiva ritual elements cannot be traced to theŚivadharma, and must be excavated elsewhere within the sources cited by Somanātha and his successors.
These and other related issues will be discussed at greater length in other contexts, but suffice it to say for the present moment, an excavation of theŚaiva Age precurrents of Vīraśaivism cannot be limited to theŚivadharma. While I hope to expand upon these findings in future publications, the following points should, I hope, be clear from the present article: (1) early Vīramāheśvara texts such as the Somanāthabhās . ya drew substantially upon the textual resources of theŚaiva Age and their religious systems of value, including, but not limited to, theŚivadharmaśāstra, and (2) the recovery of the history of this inheritance is best approached by bringing both Sanskrit and vernacular textual evidence into dialogue.
In the thirteenth century, after all,Śaivism was not exclusively entextualized in Sanskrit, and bhakti was not exclusively expressed in the vernacular.