shaiva

This is the story of Shaivism, shaiva , "belonging to Shiva," the vast family of traditions that took the god you asked to look away and set him at the centre of everything.

The Shaiva, Vaishnava and Shakta traditions prescribe their images differently; a Chola bronze of the south follows conventions a northern stone carving does not; the same deity shifts in detail across region a…

…nd the whole map of Hinduism's four great streams, the Vaishnava, the Shaiva, the Shakta and the Smarta, each lifting a different face of the one reality to the centre of its devotion.

Sanatana Dharma approaches the one reality, *Brahman*, in two ways. *Saguna Brahman* is the divine with qualities and form, the personal Lord (*Ishvara*) who can be…

Om, also written Aum, is the *pranava*, the primordial sound-syllable that the Upanishads treat as the audible form of *Brahman*, the ultimate reality. It is…

An *avatara* (literally 'descent') is the deliberate coming-down of the divine, in classical Hinduism almost always Vishnu, into the world in tangible form to…

… Kapalikas and Kalamukhas , traced the Kāpālikas , the "skull-men," a Shaiva order who took Bhairava's penance as their model, carrying a skull-bowl and a skull-topped staff, dwelling in cremation grounds, deli…

Durga is the great warrior-goddess of Hinduism and, in the Shakta tradition, a supreme form of the one Goddess (Devi). Her defining text, the Devi Mahatmya (c.…