Ranod inscription
Sixty-nine verses on a stone slab in Madhya Pradesh, carrying the charter myth of the Mattamayura Shaiva lineage, which its first editor declined to translate.
A stone slab in northern Madhya Pradesh carrying sixty-four lines and sixty-nine verses, and one of the most important documents surviving for the history of the Shaiva monastic lineages. It has never been fully translated into English.
What it is
A prashasti, a eulogy, recording the lineage of Shaiva teachers associated with the Mattamayura line and the foundation of their establishments. Franz Kielhorn edited it for the first volume of Epigraphia Indica in 1892, at pages 351 to 361. The inscribed surface is six feet eleven inches high and two feet ten and a half inches broad. The stone names its own makers: written on the stone by Rudra, engraved by Jejjaka.
Verse six is the charter myth of the whole lineage, and it names the place where the line begins. Verses eight to ten give the descent of teachers.
The translation that does not exist
Kielhorn published an abstract and no translation, and explained why in a sentence that has not aged well: the language being generally plain and easy to understand, and the inscription offering very little of value to the historian.
The consequence is that the abstract is what almost every subsequent reader of this inscription has actually met. Kielhorn’s summary passes over the place-name in verse six in silence. V. V. Mirashi found it because he read the text rather than the summary.
What the sixth verse actually says, and what gets added to it
The verse gives a correctly performed yajna, a devotee approaching in devotion, and a god who responds with favour, anujagraha. Out of that favour comes a line of teachers. There is no curse in it and no nakedness: the lurid version of the origin story belongs elsewhere.
Two things are regularly read into it that are not there. The first is initiation. Mirashi writes that Shiva initiated Brahma into this faith, which construes anujagraha through the categories of the dualist Shaiva Siddhanta rather than through the word itself. The second is a grant of property. The Ranod inscription grants no villages, no wells, no gardens and no rampart. Those belong to a different record, the Gwalior Museum inscription of Patangasambhu, which Mirashi edited separately and which secondary accounts routinely merge with this one.
What remains unknown
Where Mattamayura was. Kielhorn said in 1892 that he was unable to identify it, and it has not been identified since. Whether the Vyomashiva eulogised here is the same man as the author of the Vyomavati, the Nyaya-Vaisheshika commentary, is a proposal of Dasharatha Sharma’s that Mirashi endorsed and that remains a proposal.
What is not in it
The rule of the house, in full, and much else a historian would want. What the inscription does carry, including the prohibition on any woman passing the night inside the matha, sits oddly beside other records of the same tradition, and the tension is real rather than apparent. Reading this stone against Chandrehe, Bilhari and Malkapuram is where the history actually is.
Appears in
- The Golagi matha: the monastery that survives only in its own praise Lineages
The Ranod inscription, in northern Madhya Pradesh, was edited by Franz Kielhorn in the first volume of Epigraphia Indica in 1892.
- The two seats: how the tantric canon was actually organised Lineages
The Bhairava Tantras are usually described as divided into two seats or pithas: the Mantrapitha of the male mantra-deities and the Vidyapitha of the goddesses. The…