What is Shaivism?

A whole hymn of the Rigveda is spoken to a god the singers do not quite want to arrive.

It sits in the second book, the thirty-third hymn. Fifteen verses to Rudra, the wild one, the archer who lives where the settled world runs out. The praise is real. The fear underneath it is just as real. The poet asks for healing medicines, for a hundred autumns of life, for the touch of the god’s kind hand. And then, in verse after verse, he asks the same thing in changed words. Spare us. Turn the arrow aside. A hymn in the sister book puts it most plainly of all:

O Rudra, harm not either great or small of us, harm not the growing boy, harm not the full-grown man. Slay not a sire among us, slay no mother here, and to our own dear bodies, Rudra, do not harm.

That is Rigveda 1.114.7, in Ralph Griffith’s 1896 rendering. It is not how the Vedic poets sang to Indra, who was invited in to feast and fight. This is a god you approach with your hands open and your eyes down. Rudra, “the howler,” the fever and the arrow, the lord of what cannot be tamed.

And here is the strange turn the whole tradition rests on. The word the Veda uses to coax this god, the softening word, the please-be-kind word, is shiva. It means auspicious, gracious, benign. In the oldest layer it is an adjective, an epithet you offer Rudra so that he will hold his fire. The name that a fifth of the Hindu world would one day give to the supreme being begins its life as a nervous compliment.

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. It is one of the great streams of Sanatana Dharma, standing beside Vaishnavism and Shaktism. What follows is how a god of the margins was named, ordered, crowned, and then argued over for a thousand years.

The naming

The turn happens in the Upanishads, and one text carries it further than any other.

The Svetasvatara Upanishad, composed somewhere in the last few centuries before the Common Era, is the first place where Rudra stops being one power among the gods and becomes the power behind them. It does not hedge. It states the claim outright:

For there is one Rudra only, they do not allow a second, who rules all these worlds by his powers.

That is Max Müller’s 1884 translation, in the fifteenth volume of the Sacred Books of the East. The Sanskrit behind it, eko hi rudro na dvitiyaya tasthur, says it in five words: one Rudra, and no room for a second. Radhakrishnan, reading the text in his Indian Philosophy, saw in it the moment a fierce nature-god is drawn up into the highest philosophy and identified with Brahman, the one reality itself. The figure of Shiva that later devotion knows, the great yogi on the mountain, is already forming here.

One caution belongs in this section, because it is often gotten wrong. The most famous litany of Rudra’s names, the Satarudriya, “the hundred names of Rudra,” is not from the Rigveda. It sits in the Yajurveda, at Taittiriya Samhita 4.5, translated into English by Arthur Berriedale Keith in 1914. Inside it stands the phrase namah shivaya cha shivataraya cha, “homage to the auspicious one, and to the more auspicious.” So the words namah shivaya are genuinely Vedic. Their life as a mantra chanted on its own, the thing a Shaiva murmurs walking to the river, comes much later, out of the sectarian tradition. The tradition is old. This particular use of it is not as old as it sometimes claims.

The first order

A god can be praised for centuries before anyone organises around him. With Shaivism, we can name roughly when the organising began.

Tradition traces the first Shaiva order to a teacher called Lakulisha, “the lord with the club,” placed by most reconstructions around the second century of the Common Era. From him descend the Pashupatas, the earliest datable Shaiva ascetic movement, whose name comes straight from a title of the god. Pashupati, lord of animals, lord of the herd. The Pashupata teaching, laid out by R.G. Bhandarkar in his 1913 survey of the sects, works the metaphor hard. The god is pati, the master. Souls are pashu, the tethered cattle. Bondage is the rope. The whole discipline exists to loose the herd from the halter and lead it home.

Older roots than this are argued about, and honesty requires naming the argument without settling it. When the archaeologist John Marshall published the finds from Mohenjo-daro in 1931, he pointed to a seal showing a seated, horned, three-faced figure surrounded by beasts and called it a “proto-Shiva,” a Harappan Pashupati from the third millennium BCE. In a careful iconological study of 1975 and 1976, Doris Meth Srinivasan took the reading apart, arguing that the figure is better understood as a divine bull-man, a horned deity of fertility, with no secure line to Shiva at all. Both scholars are named here. Neither is declared the winner, because the evidence does not allow it. What the record does let us date is the Pashupatas.

The historian David Lorenzen, working from temple inscriptions rather than from hostile later summaries, did the tradition a further service in 1972. He showed that the Kalamukhas, a related Shaiva order Bhandarkar had painted as a lurid skull-wearing cult, were in fact a disciplined, learned, temple-based monastic movement. The correction matters. Much of what outsiders “knew” about the fierce Shaiva ascetics turns out to be rumour that the stones do not support.

The Shaiva age

For a long stretch of the medieval period, Shiva was not one option in the religious market. He was the establishment.

The Oxford scholar Alexis Sanderson gave this period its name. In a major 2009 study he called the years from roughly 500 to 1200 the “Shaiva Age,” the era in which Shaivism became the dominant religion of the ruling classes across the Indian subcontinent and out into Southeast Asia, from Kashmir to the temple-states of Cambodia and Java. Kings took Shaiva initiation. Vast temples rose. A whole revealed literature, the Agamas and the Shaiva Tantras, set out the god’s worship, and it is the same current that runs through Tantra as a whole. Peter Bisschop, writing in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2010, has pushed the picture back further still, showing how deep the Shaiva presence already ran in the Gupta and Vakataka centuries that came before.

This is the hinge of the story. The god the Rigveda asked to stay at the edge of the village had become the god of the throne at its centre.

Same god, opposite cures

Then the tradition split at its philosophical heart. Both sides are fully Shaiva. They worship the same god and prescribe opposite medicines, and no honest account can flatten one into the other.

In the Tamil south, the great school is Shaiva Siddhanta, and its whole system turns on three words: pati-pashu-pasha. Three realities, all of them real, all of them eternal. Pati, the Lord, Shiva. Pashu, the soul, the fettered creature. Pasha, the bonds that hold it. The philosopher Meykandar set the doctrine in its classic Tamil form in the thirteenth-century Sivajnanabodham. Its temper is dualist. Liberation is real and glorious, and it is the soul coming to resemble Shiva and to rest in his presence, as salt resting in water. The soul never becomes the Lord. The distance is the point, and it is kept forever. This is the philosophy that gathered up the devotion of the Nayanars, the sixty-three Tamil poet-saints whose hymns, the Tevaram, sang Shiva into the daily life of the south.

In the far north, in Kashmir, the great school teaches almost the reverse. Its keyword is pratyabhijna, “recognition.” Framed by Utpaladeva in the tenth century, building on his teacher Somananda, and raised to its height by Abhinavagupta around the year 1000, this is a non-dual system, carried into the twentieth century by the teacher Swami Lakshman Joo. Here there are not three eternal things. There is only Shiva, appearing as everything. Bondage is not a rope; it is forgetting. The soul is already Shiva and has merely lost the memory. Liberation is the flash in which it recognises what it always was. The distance the southern school preserves, the northern school says was never there. You can follow that thread into the recognition philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism on its own.

Same god. Opposite cures. One school heals you by teaching you to stand rightly before the Lord. The other heals you by teaching you that you are, and were always, the Lord. Where the lineages diverge, an honest map names the divergence and does not pretend it away.

The linga on the body

In the twelfth century a man tried to cut the whole apparatus loose from the temple and hang it around the worshipper’s neck.

His name was Basava, a minister at the court of Kalyana in what is now Karnataka, living roughly between 1105 and 1167. Out of his movement came the tradition variously called Lingayat or Virashaiva. Its central sign is the ishtalinga, a small emblem of Shiva that the devotee wears on the body, in a little case over the heart, and worships in the hand. No pilgrimage to a distant shrine is needed. The shrine travels with you. Basava and his companions poured their teaching into vachanas, terse free-verse poems in Kannada that any labourer could carry, and gathered in an assembly called the Anubhava Mantapa, the “hall of experience,” open across the lines of caste. One famous vachana makes the poor man’s own limbs the pillars of the temple and his body its sanctum, over against the rich man who can afford to build in stone.

What that movement is, exactly, in law, is a question still open in our own time. Some Lingayat organisations in Karnataka have sought recognition as a religion distinct from Hinduism; others hold that it remains a Shaiva tradition inside the Hindu fold. The dispute has moved through state commissions and courts and is not resolved. We record the fact and take no side.

The ash and the name

Strip the schools away and a set of shared signs remains, the things by which a Shaiva is a Shaiva anywhere.

The ash, first. Bhasma or vibhuti, smeared in three horizontal lines across the brow, the mark called tripundra. It carries a hard teaching quietly: this body will burn to exactly this. It is worth being precise about where the practice is codified. The detailed rules for the ash, the rudraksha bead worn as a rosary, and the three-lined mark come mostly from a group of late sectarian Shaiva Upanishads, not from the old Vedic core. The ash on the forehead is meaningful. It is not, in that codified form, ancient in the way the Rigveda is ancient.

Then the name itself. Om Namah Shivaya, “Om, homage to Shiva,” the five syllables the tradition calls the Panchakshara, the five-lettered mantra, drawn from that verse of the Satarudriya and given a devotional life of its own. It is chanted on the rudraksha, sung through the night of Mahashivaratri, the “great night of Shiva,” and carried by the ascetic orders who keep the fiercest edge of the tradition alive, the Nath yogis with their split ears and the Aghoris of the cremation ground. And the whole of it comes to rest, for the Shaiva, in one city. Kashi, Varanasi, the place where the god is said to whisper this very mantra into the ear of the dying.

The Veda asked Rudra to look away.

His people spent three thousand years asking him to look, and to stay.