The Shankaracharya Tradition In The Modern Period

In Allahabad, on September 22, 2017, two judges of the High Court closed a suit that had been running since 1989 and gave an answer that neither party had asked for.

The question before Sudhir Agarwal and K. J. Thaker was which of two men was the Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath, the northern seat at Badrinath that the tradition holds Adi Shankara founded with his own hand. The judges answered that neither was. Swaroopananda Saraswati’s installation of December 1973 failed, the court held, for want of a vacancy to fill. The court upheld the injunction against his rival, and attached to it a proviso that disposed of Swaroopananda too: “[T]his injunction shall not be construed so as to authorize plaintiff to function as Shankaracharya… since he was never validly installed…” They directed the assembled scholars and the other three Shankaracharyas to hold a fresh selection within three months.

It was never held.

In September 2022 the Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad, which speaks for the monastic orders that gather at the Kumbh, refused the man who had stepped into the gap, its president putting it in the plainest available form: “If anyone becomes our guru without asking us, how will we accept him?” The next month the Supreme Court stayed his coronation, the Puri matha having filed an affidavit that it did not endorse him. In January 2026 the Prayagraj Mela Authority, the state body that administers the Kumbh, recorded that he was “not recognised as the Shankaracharya of the Jyotirmath.” Whether that is the state talking or the assembled orders talking through it is a fair question, and the record reached here does not settle it. One of the four seats of the Advaita tradition has no occupant whose standing is settled, either in law or among the houses that would have to recognise him.

This is the modern period of the Shankaracharya tradition. It is a far stranger thing than the word parampara, succession, suggests, and the strangeness is worth following, because these are the houses in which the Sri Vidya of the South is most often said to have been kept.

The charter is early modern

Everything in the previous section depends on a prior claim: that there are four seats at all, founded by one man in the eighth century at the four quarters of the subcontinent.

That claim rests on a text. The Mathamnaya, also circulating as the Mahanushasana and the Mathamnaya-stotra, is the charter document of the four-matha order, a matha being a monastery and the seat of a teaching lineage. It names the seats, assigns each a Veda, a mahavakya or great utterance, and a quarter of the compass, and it is where the authority for the arrangement comes from.

Matthew Clark, who has written the standing study of the Dashanami order, puts the Mathamnaya’s age plainly. The text is “most probably not more than three or four hundred years old,” composed most likely in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century. His conclusion follows: “[I]t is highly improbable that Sankaracarya founded either the sect or the four (or five) main Dasanami monasteries.” No reference to the founding of an order appears anywhere in Shankara’s genuine works. The hagiographies are later than he is and they do not agree with one another. Jonathan Bader, who works through eight of them, finds that only three are explicit that Shankara founded monastic institutions, with a fourth carrying at best an oblique reference; that the Shankara-dig-vijaya, the popular life, offers a temple at Sringeri, which a commentator glossed in 1798 as the founding of a matha, and separately a single hint about ashramas, settled communities of renouncers; and that the first life to set out the establishment of four mathas by name is probably Cidvilasa’s, with the Guruvamsa Kavya of about 1740 repeating it almost word for word and adding Jyotirmath. So the four seats are in the hagiographies. They arrive in them late, and they arrive unevenly.

The force of this is easiest to feel from the other side of the argument. W. R. Antarkar spent a career defending the antiquity of the Kanchi matha, and his Kanchi Kamakoti Mutt: A Myth or Reality? is an advocate’s book. On the charter he concedes everything. No Shankaravijaya mentions a Mathamnaya, or a matha holding an amnaya, one of the four transmissions the scheme assigns. The texts “do not appear to come from Adi San[kara],” and must have come much later, perhaps in the time of Vidyaranya, though he adds that no direct evidence connects them with him either. His own summary is the sharpest sentence in the literature: “the whole of this Amnaya Mutt business is itself of a very late origin.” He notes too that the recensions contradict one another.

William Cenkner, who in 1983 produced what is still the fullest study there is of all five mathas, reached the same place from a third direction. The mathamnayas “date from the post-Sankara period; they are inconclusive and are challenged by some modern historians as gratuitous.” And the archives themselves are not neutral witnesses. Matha records, Cenkner found, show “signs of having been altered,” with evidence “destroyed or tampered with because of rivalries.”

No manuscript of the Mathamnaya has been dated in the sources consulted for this chapter. Antarkar worked from printed editions and a transcript held at Adyar.

The stones say the same thing, and they say it about the richest of the four seats. Hermann Kulke went through the Sringeri inscriptions and found that the grant of 1346 calls the place a tirtha, a crossing-place, and nothing more; the word matha does not appear there until 1356. In 1380 Harihara II issued an inscription listing every prior Vijayanagara grant to the establishment, and the Vijayanagara inscriptions of those years, Kulke writes, “do not contain the slightest reference to any earlier land grants or to an older institution which had some connections with the matha of Sringeri.” Shankara is named in no early Sringeri inscription at all, nor in the fifteenth-century life of Purushottama Bharati held in Sringeri’s own archive. Two further stones come from outside his argument. The earliest inscription on the site is Jain, of 1150, which Kulke notes without letting it carry a theory. And the first stone to call Sringeri a foundation of Shankara, recorded in the Epigraphia Carnatica, is a Keladi restoration deed of 1652.

Kulke will not put it more strongly than the stones allow. The epigraphy, he writes, permits “at least hypothetically, the inference that the matha was established only some time between 1346 and 1356.” He goes further: the kings of Vijayanagara, he argues, established Sringeri with its new Shankara tradition for their own political ends. In his very next sentence he stops himself. “But that is only half the truth.” His other half is that the men who built it “formed a most fascinating group of religious reformers and creators of a new religious institution,” and that their having to share the credit with Shankara is “perhaps the best proof of their success.” None of it, he adds, should be read as a deliberate destruction of a cherished tradition.

Kulke reports Paul Hacker arriving from a different direction at the same place: no reliable succession list exists for any of the four seats before the fourteenth century.

So the honest statement is narrow and worth making exactly: the earliest form in which we can date the four-matha order is an early modern one, and what came before it is not recoverable from the sources that survive.

The tradition holds that Shankara founded four seats in the eighth century. The record establishes that people were saying so by the sixteenth.

What happened to one of those seats afterwards is the next thing to put down.

The seat that stood empty

The Allahabad judgment contains a finding that is easy to read past. “Since Vikram Samvat 1833 to 1998,” the court recorded, which is to say “1776 to 1941 AD,” Jyotirmath “did not have any Shankaracharya.”

A hundred and sixty-five years.

The seat was revived on May 11, 1941, and the manner of the revival is the point. The court found the new Shankaracharya was installed “by selection… and not following Guru-Shishya Parampara,” by a committee: the Bharata Dharma Mahamandala, the Kashi Vidvat Parishad, the Akhila Bharatiya Dharmasangha, endorsed by Puri and Sringeri and by the rulers of Garhwal, Varanasi and Darbhanga. Some records, Cenkner noted, put the vacancy at nearly three centuries. The institution itself admits the hundred and sixty-five years. Two scholars he cites, Sastry and Kumaraswamy, discredit the renaissance altogether.

So the northern seat is a line that stopped. It was restarted by a committee of other people’s institutions, inside living memory, and it has been litigated since 1989.

The Puri record is quieter and not much steadier, carrying a vacancy of its own from 1960 to 1964 and a rival claimant in 1998. And the documentary floor at Puri is late: Kulke, reporting J. Lütt, records that of the Govardhana matha “no genuine historical documents are known” older than the Maratha period. Swaroopananda Saraswati held Dwaraka from 1982, undisputed, and his brother acharyas recognised him at Jyotirmath as well; he signed the joint statement of June 1993 twice, once for each seat. It was the court in 2017, and not the other mathas, that held his 1973 installation at Jyotirmath invalid for want of a vacancy to fill. He died in September 2022, and Sadananda Saraswati was anointed to Dwaraka that same month.

Four, or five

There is a question beneath all of this that the devotional literature does not often raise, and it has to be raised here because the whole of the Sri Vidya story in the South runs through one of the two institutions it concerns.

Is the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham one of the seats Shankara founded?

The matha says yes, and counts seventy-one pontiffs, the last of them a junior who has not yet reigned. Its case was argued by Antarkar, and before him by Aiyer and Sastri in 1962, by Venkataraman, and by T. M. P. Mahadevan. In 1916 T. A. Gopinatha Rao argued from copperplate grants that a record of 1291, which he read as the Kumbhakonam matha’s, is older than the oldest Sringeri record of 1346. Rao was careful about it himself, writing that the conclusion “is and can not be final,” and he printed in his own volume the objection of H. Krishna Sastri, the Government Epigraphist, who had pointed out in 1915 that the 1291 plate does not say the matha it names is the one at Kanchipuram. The volume is dedicated to the serving Kanchi pontiff. An advocate who prints the case against himself is worth more than one who does not.

Against that claim stand, first, the other four mathas. In 1964 an assembly of scholars of the four amnaya mathas met at Puri and resolved, in Cenkner’s words, “in rigorous terms that only four seats were established by Adi Sankara.” Cenkner takes it that the three attending acharyas confirmed it. Of “the followers of the other matha-s, even younger students,” who were his informants, Cenkner writes that they “do not accept Kanchi as a foundation directly established by Adi Sankara.” His own decision to include Kanchi in his study, he says in his preface, was a choice of method and not a finding, and the controversy “does not appear near resolution.” Bader, working separately on the hagiographies, puts it without the hedging: “all four amnaya mathas have consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Kanchipuram centre.”

Second, Kanchi has no Mathamnaya of its own and no amnaya assignment at all. It has at times claimed the Dakshinamnaya, which is Sringeri’s, and in its Sushama claimed instead a Mulamnaya, a root transmission with jurisdiction over the other four. Jayendra Saraswati’s signature on the 1993 joint statement carries no amnaya designation at all.

Third, there is an account of a different origin. Vidyasankar Sundaresan traces the heads of a matha at Kumbakonam acquiring the Kamakshi temple and moving to Kanchipuram between 1842 and 1868, and marks that move as the origin of the Kanchi matha. Kanchi’s own history dates its Kumbakonam establishment to 1821, as a branch of Sringeri. Cenkner, who was not party to the quarrel, confirms independently that Kumbakonam “was the seat of the Kanchi Sankaracarya for some decades in the past.”

The colonial paperwork said to lie behind the move, an 1839 petition to the Collector of Chingleput and an 1842 order making the matha head sole trustee of the Kamakshi temple over the protest of its priests, has never been produced. It is worth saying exactly how thin the chain is, because this is the kind of detail that hardens into fact by repetition. An article sometimes cited for that paperwork, by Mattison Mines and Vijayalakshmi Gourishankar, contains no colonial administrative record of any kind in its forty-four references. The trail runs back instead to a magazine piece of 1987 and to two books written by parties to the quarrel. The dates circulate. They are not established.

And the two texts on which the list of sixty-eight names rests, the Punyashlokamanjari and the Gururatnamalika, are themselves disputed. On the matha’s own account the first was compiled in the early sixteenth century by the fifty-sixth acharya, who reigned from 1512 to 1539, and covers the first fifty-five names; whether it is that old is exactly what is at issue. Mahadevan doubted the Gururatnamalika’s ascription altogether. A third Kanchi text, the Sushama, dates itself to 1720 in its own colophon, and Bader puts it after about 1700. No manuscript, printed edition or shelfmark for any of the three could be located here, nor in Antarkar’s book, though he had the matha’s own literature in front of him. Antarkar, arguing for Kanchi, records two further things that an advocate would rather not: that the list was assembled in at least four stages, the last of them by Jayendra Saraswati himself, and that the Paramacharya showed the manuscripts to at least three people and “denied them to me.”

This account does not adjudicate. It reports the positions and names who holds them, which is the only honest posture available, and it matters for what follows only in this way: when a Kanchi pontiff is numbered below, the number is the matha’s own, reported as the matha’s.

The great elder

The figure who dominates the modern memory of Kanchi held the seat for eighty-six years and ten months.

Chandrashekharendra Saraswati, known across the Tamil country simply as Mahaperiyava, the great elder, was born Swaminathan at Villupuram on May 20, 1894. He was installed as the sixty-eighth Shankaracharya, by the matha’s own reckoning, on February 13, 1907, at the age of twelve. He died on January 8, 1994, at ninety-nine.

What he was to the devotional world of twentieth-century South India is not a matter this record can settle, and it should not be dressed as one. The tradition holds that he was an avatara purusha, a realised seer, the goddess present in a human frame. That is a claim of a different order from the ones in this chapter, and it is set down here as the tradition’s own.

He matters to the argument for a narrower reason. Almost everything that can be shown about Sri Vidya inside these houses comes from the men who sat on the seats rather than from the houses they ran, and he is the clearest instance of that. Of everything from either house that was examined for this chapter, his collected discourses are the one place where Sri Vidya is expounded at any length. Those discourses are read below.

First, what happened to his successors.

He designated his successor on March 22, 1954. Jayendra Saraswati, born Subramaniyam on July 18, 1935, took the seat on Mahaperiyava’s death in 1994 and held it until his own, on February 28, 2018.

The mediation

A chapter about the modern period has to say what these men were doing in the public life of the country, because for about two years one of them was doing a great deal.

The question was Ayodhya. In the 1990s the prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, floated a trust to hold the disputed site and proposed that Bharati Tirtha of Sringeri head it. Swaroopananda withdrew from the arrangement, demanding that the government keep out of it, and the plan collapsed.

Jayendra Saraswati took it up again a decade later and took it further. In March 2002, working through the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the central government, he put forward a formula. In June 2003 he made a four-point proposal directly to the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. On July 6 the Board rejected it, in terms that left nothing to interpret: the proposal was “against the dignity, honour and self-respect of Indian Muslims.”

That was the high point. For something close to two years the senior pontiff of Kanchi was the figure both the central government and the Vishva Hindu Parishad were routing a national quarrel through, and the one the other side was willing to receive and then refuse.

Sixteen months after the Board’s rejection he was arrested for conspiracy to murder. He was acquitted, with twenty-two others, nine years after that.

Whether these two facts have anything to do with each other is not a question the record answers, and this chapter will not pretend otherwise. What the record does establish is the sequence, and a reader who meets the arrest without the mediation in front of them is reading a scandal where there was also the end of a bid for national authority.

What that authority is worth is itself contested, and the quarrel surfaced again in January 2024, over the consecration at Ayodhya. The houses did not speak with one voice. Avimukteshwaranand, the contested claimant at Jyotirmath whose coronation the Supreme Court had stayed fifteen months earlier, objected that “[t]he scriptures are being undermined by carrying out consecration before the construction of the temple is complete,” adding that there was “no reason for this rush.” Nischalananda of Puri declined in his own register: “What will I do there?” And: “I don’t want a position. I already have the biggest one.” The Sringeri matha, for its part, posted on its own website that reports of its displeasure were “false propaganda by ill-wishers of our Dharma,” and urged believers to take part. Two commentators weighed what the refusals amounted to, and appeared to answer in opposite directions. Rasheed Kidwai: “Politically speaking, Shankaracharyas have zero influencing power as the BJP holds sway over the Hindi heartland.” Heramb Chaturvedi: “Any consecration done without their blessings is incomplete.”

They are not in fact contradicting each other. One is measuring political weight and the other ritual validity, and nothing in the record says which of the two a Shankaracharya is for.

September, and then November

On September 3, 2004, at about a quarter to six in the evening, A. Sankararaman was killed in his office on the premises of the Varadarajaperumal temple at Kancheepuram. He was the administrative manager in charge of the Devarajaswamy Devasthanam. The first information report was registered at seven.

On November 11, 2004, which was Deepavali, Jayendra Saraswati was arrested at Mahabubnagar in Andhra Pradesh by the Tamil Nadu police, under sections 302 and 120-B of the Penal Code, murder and criminal conspiracy. A sitting Shankaracharya of one of the great southern seats was remanded the following day and refused bail twice.

The Supreme Court granted him bail on January 10, 2005. Within a day of that order, the junior pontiff was arrested on the matha premises. He was accused number two in the case. His name was Vijayendra Saraswati, he was acquitted in 2013 with every other surviving accused, and he is the Shankaracharya of Kanchi today.

The chargesheet of January 21, 2005 named twenty-four accused. In February the Madras High Court set aside the freezing of some hundred and eighty-three of the matha’s bank accounts as “ultra vires… illegal.” In October the Supreme Court moved the trial out of Tamil Nadu altogether, to Puducherry, holding that the accused had “a reasonable apprehension that they will not get justice in the State of Tamil Nadu.” Charges were framed in March 2006. The trial opened in April 2009. In January 2010 the single approver turned hostile.

On November 27, 2013, Principal District and Sessions Judge C. S. Murugan acquitted twenty-three men at Puducherry. Twenty-four had been charged. The twenty-fourth, M. Kathiravan, was murdered in Chennai in March of that year, before the verdict came. The prosecution had examined a hundred and eighty-nine witnesses between 2009 and 2013, and eighty-three of them turned hostile, on the contemporaneous reports, which do not hold steady: one of them gives eighty-three in one paragraph and eighty-one in another. The witnesses who had identified the accused at an identification parade did not identify them in court, the dead man’s daughter among them. The judge found that a fair and proper investigation had not been conducted, and tied that finding to the intervention of the then Superintendent of Police at Kanchipuram in the chief investigating officer’s work.

The prosecution advanced a theory of motive. It had been that the dead man was writing letters of complaint against the senior pontiff, directed, in the Supreme Court’s summary of it, both against his personal character and against his style of functioning, the last of them dated August 30, 2004. The Supreme Court, at the bail stage, had already held that the recovery of the letters was no proof that they were ever actually received. The Supreme Court also recorded that the dead man “was not an employee of the Mutt,” and that he had had no connection with the matha since 1998.

No appeal was filed. The Madras High Court noted as much in August 2019: “No appeal against the order of acquittal in SC.No.94 of 2005 has been preferred.” No later filing has been located.

Two men who hold, and held, the first and second offices of the Kanchi matha were charged with conspiracy to murder and acquitted in 2013, nine years after the arrest, by a court sitting outside Tamil Nadu. That is what the record establishes, and the record establishes nothing beyond it.

The line at Sringeri

Sringeri’s modern century has been the uneventful one, which in this company is a distinction.

Four men have held the seat since 1879: Sacchidananda Shivabhinava Nrisimha Bharati, thirty-third in the matha’s own reckoning, until his death in March 1912; Chandrashekhara Bharati III, born in October 1892, from April 1912 until his death in September 1954; Abhinava Vidyatirtha from 1954 until 1989; and Bharati Tirtha, the thirty-sixth, a sannyasi or renunciate since 1974, from 1989 to the present. Four lives, three successions, a hundred and forty-seven years.

Which is worth holding against the ordinal. Bharati Tirtha is the thirty-sixth, and the matha publishes the list he is thirty-sixth in. Take it at its word and the second through eleventh acharyas cover the years 820 to 1380: five hundred and sixty years, ten men, an average pontificate of fifty-six years, and one, Vidya Tirtha, of a hundred and four. Set that against the four lives just counted, which is what a documented century and a half of this office actually looks like. The arithmetic is the matha’s own. Nobody has to be called a liar for it to fail.

On January 23, 2015, Bharati Tirtha anointed a successor-designate, Vidhushekhara Bharati, who first came to Sringeri in 2009 as a boy and studied the shastras, the formal disciplines of learning, under him. Sringeri gives his birth as July 24, 1993 at Tirupati. He is styled the thirty-seventh Jagadguru and he has not succeeded; the senior acharya is living and in office. He travels now on his own account. In May 2026 he was in Kerala from the seventh to the eleventh, received at the border with the honours of a State Guest, and in Nepal from the twenty-second to the thirtieth.

A word on what is absent from those sentences. Sringeri publishes the year of its senior acharya’s birth and not the day. The reader will find a date and a village on the open web; the matha does not give them, and the sources that do contradict each other on both. The same holds for the Kanchi acharyas, where even less is published. This chapter prints what each matha prints about its own living men and stops there, and the gap between how much Sringeri says and how little Kanchi says is itself a true thing about the two houses.

The cult of the acharyas

Now the question this volume actually came to ask. What is the relation between these two houses and Sri Vidya?

Elaine Fisher gives the most exact answer in the literature, and it is narrower than the one usually repeated. Sri Vidya, she writes, “remains the personal cult of the Sankaracaryas of Sringeri and Kanchipuram to this day.”

The personal cult of the acharyas. The practice of the men who sit on the seats, rather than something the houses pass outward to the people who come to them.

Two things sit behind that sentence, and they are of unequal weight. Fisher records, in a footnote resting on a 1990 study this chapter has not seen, that a personal attendant reported one instance of it: that Chandrashekhara Bharati was initiated into Sri Vidya by a figure named Satyanandanatha on the day before his ascension in 1912. And in 2011 Fisher watched Bharati Tirtha’s public worship and saw two of three images that had belonged to Nilakantha Dikshita, the seventeenth-century Tamil poet and Srividya adept. The third was Nilakantha’s own Sri Chakra. It was not on the table.

Nilakantha’s descendants are still at Palamadai. In the late 1990s the residents of Palamadai set aside land in the village for a branch matha of the Sringeri lineage, inaugurated with Bharati Tirtha present, and Fisher found the poet’s family accepting him as their guru, with many of them reciting the Lalita Sahasranama daily. That is as close to the question as the record gets: the family of a known Srividya adept, in a formal relationship with the house, performing the tradition’s most public text, and nobody in the account initiated into anything.

Douglas Brooks, whose Auspicious Wisdom is the major academic study of Srividya in the South, reads the same institutions differently and more coolly. His index entry for matha gives six page references. His argument, where he makes it, is that the Shankara mathas “use devotion to the goddess’s sthularupa,” her gross or public form, “to extend their influence.” It is the public worship of the goddess by members of the modern Shankara tradition, he writes, that adds “a social dimension to Sankarite influence that would otherwise be absent.” The Shakta works ascribed to Shankara, he suggests, “might well be a form of apologia”; of the Saundarya Lahari in particular he allows that it may have been composed in the Sringeri or Kanchipuram matha itself.

His informants go further than he does. One class of living adepts told him why they keep their distance: “we do not align ourselves with the Sankara tradition because they are not actually Srividya upasakas but advaita Vedantins.”

And then there is Cenkner, who spent a book among all five mathas. A full-text search of it does not turn up the word Sri Vidya. Not once. Saundarya Lahari does not occur. Navavarana does not occur. The word Tantric does not occur. Sri Chakra occurs a single time, on page 116, reported as something believed at Sringeri.

Four witnesses, and no two of them agree: Fisher says a living personal practice, Brooks says an appropriation that buys influence, Cenkner’s ethnography is silent, and the adepts say these are Vedantins. That disagreement is the actual state of the question, and anyone who tells you otherwise has picked one witness.

In words, and in ritual

There is a way to test this that does not depend on choosing between scholars. Ask what the two houses themselves put into the world.

Kanchi puts it into words. The great elder’s discourses were collected in Tamil as Deivathin Kural and in English as Voice of God, and the first volume contains real exposition. Kamakshi is named there as the Sri Vidya adhishthana devata, the presiding deity of Sri Vidya. “[H]er mantra is Sri Vidya; the yantra is Sri Chakra.” The nine avaranas, the enclosures of the diagram, are explained. The bindu, the point at its centre, is identified with Parashakti, the supreme power. Shankara is described establishing the Sri Chakra at Kanchi to pacify the goddess. His discourses on the Saundarya Lahari fill another volume, published in English by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in 2001. This chapter has read its front matter and not its body.

That is public teaching about Sri Vidya, and there is a good deal of it. Read the first volume for the thing that would make it a transmission and it is not there. Diksha, the initiation that makes a person a member of a tradition rather than an admirer of it, is a word that does not occur in it.

Sringeri puts it into ritual, which took longer to see and matters more.

The matha’s published discourses are not the place to look. Across a hundred and forty-one pages of listings, the Anugraha Bhashanams are given over to festival addresses, the recitation of the Rama mantra, the consecration at Ayodhya. But the matha also publishes a price list, and the price list is the document that answers the question. The Sri Chakra at Sringeri is a shrine, with its own entry in a forty-nine-page tariff of services. The image of Sharadamba, in the matha’s own words, is “installed over the Sri Chakra that Sri Adi Shankara carved on a rock.” And a layman with no initiation of any kind may book a navavarana puja, the worship of the nine enclosures, as a single observance at a printed price of five hundred rupees, and the tariff also offers it yearly and on a lifetime-monthly footing. Through Navaratri it is performed daily, to the Sri Chakra “which is called as the abode of Jaganmaata,” the mother of the world.

Which is stranger than silence would have been. Sringeri does not hide the Sri Chakra. It sells the rite. The catalogue carries a recording of the Lalita Sahasranama too, chanted by three named Sringeri scholars.

What is absent is narrower and more exact. Across sixty-seven items in the matha’s catalogue, the forty-nine pages of the tariff, the nineteen shrines it lists and the temple and festival pages, Sri Vidya as a named tradition does not appear, and neither does diksha. The ritual is available to anyone with the fee. The thing that would make a person an initiate is not on the list, and neither house is on record conferring Sri Vidya diksha on a lay disciple.

Yoshitsugu Sawai wrote a book-length study of religious life at Sringeri, and this chapter has not read it; what follows comes from two of its reviewers. Andrew Fort reports that Sawai found at the Sharada temple what he called Tantric Advaita, devotees seeking Sri Vidya by worshipping Sharada on the Sri Chakra. Andre Padoux, reviewing the same book, described an old Shakta tantric tradition that had been de-tantricised and taken up by the Shankaracharyas, who then ascribed it backwards to Shankara. Padoux added two observations that close the circle: lay people are not the master’s disciples, and the initiatic line is the succession itself.

The rite is for sale. The succession is not.

Which raises the question of who, in principle, it was ever for.

Who may be initiated

On caste and on gender, the sources permit less than either side of the argument would like, and the honest report is mostly a report of absence.

Brooks sets the general principle and its practice in a single breath. Those outside the twice-born castes, of both sexes, “may theoretically receive Tantric initiation.” And: “[I]n practice many conservative Tantric traditions do not admit women, especially women still in childbearing years, as full initiates.” He warns elsewhere against the comfortable reading in which Tantra dissolves such questions, noting that caste and gender “are, in fact, essential features of any Tantric evaluation for discipleship.” On the permissive side he is equally firm that Lakshmidhara does not exclude the non-twice-born, and that while the content of a practice may be restricted by birth, “access to some form of initiation cannot.”

Inside the mathas, the one direct observation is Cenkner’s, and it is a description rather than a rule. At Sringeri, he found, “all teachers, attendants of the guru and students are Smarta Brahmanas; the same is generally true in the Kamakoti Pitha.” He adds that the Shankaracharyas “sustain caste and implicitly propagate its exclusiveness,” and then a sentence that bears on everything above: “There is little instruction on the subject in their recorded discourses.” Of the Danda Sannyasis, the staff-bearing renunciates, Cenkner counts over a thousand, and calls them Brahmins.

And there the sources stop. No written rule of eligibility for Sri Vidya initiation in either matha has been found, and no challenge to any such rule either. Nor was any instance found of a lay or female initiation conferred by either house.

That is a thin finding and it is the true one. A reader who wants this tradition to have been more open than it was, and a reader who wants it convicted of being closed, will both have to go elsewhere for their evidence, because none was found here.

The cabinet

Return to Fisher at Sringeri in 2011, in front of the senior acharya’s public worship, looking for a Sri Chakra that is not on the table.

It was Nilakantha Dikshita’s. Fisher is flat about whose it is: all three images are in Bharati Tirtha’s possession. Only her sighting of them was partial. Her caption to the photograph is where the scholarship gathered here stops, and this chapter can do no better than set it down: “the Jagadguru’s attendants deny any knowledge of the sricakra’s location.”

That is what a secret looks like from outside. A locked cabinet, and people in the corridor who will not say what is in it.

The next chapter leaves the mathas for Devipuram, outside Visakhapatnam, and the man who built it.

He made the opposite choice.