Samaya: the fetter and who was spared it

A rule that counts as a bond

Somewhere in the long fourth chapter of the Svacchandatantra, in the middle of a technical discussion of what two kinds of initiation do and do not accomplish, the text says something odd about its own rules.

It has spent the chapter describing diksha, initiation, as an operation on the soul’s bonds. A pasha, a fetter, is anything that holds the soul in place. Initiation cuts fetters. That is what it is for.

Then comes this.

samayācārapāśaṃ hi dīkṣitaḥ pālayettu yaḥ taṃ pāśaṃ naiva śuddhyeta sā sabījā prakīrtitā samayācārapāśaṃ tu nirbījāyāṃ viśodhayet

“The initiate who must guard the fetter of samaya-observance: that fetter is not purified, and that initiation is called the seeded one. But in the seedless initiation one purifies away the fetter of samaya-observance.”

The rules are a fetter. Not a burden the text complains about, and not a metaphor it reaches for. A pasha, in the same technical vocabulary the next verses use for karma, listed among the things initiation operates on. The discipline that makes a man an initiate is itself something his initiation has to deal with.

The obvious reading is that the discipline is a stage: you take the rules, you keep them, and a later rite releases you. That reading is wrong, and the text says so at 4.87 and 4.88, fifty-eight verses before the fetter passage.

Two kinds of candidate

Here is the verse that settles it.

mumukṣurdvividhaḥ prokto nirbījo bījavānpunaḥ

“The seeker of liberation is declared to be of two kinds, seedless and seeded.”

Two kinds of seeker, not two stages of one. And the same sentence runs straight on into a list of who is which: bāla-bāliśa-vṛddha-strī-bhogabhug-vyādhita, children, the foolish, the aged, women, pleasure-lovers, the sick. Torzsok renders that fifth term as kings, and glosses the exemption as one of time: the king is too busy for the obligations. For these, 4.88 says, the initiation is nirbījikā, seedless, samayādivivarjitā, devoid of the samayas and the rest. For the learned, who endure the pairs of opposites, it is the seeded one. At 4.90 the seeded initiation is placed with the putraka and the acharya, the serious grades.

So sabija and nirbija are a fork at the outset, keyed to who the candidate is judged to be. When 4.148 calls the seedless rite dvitiyaka, it is the second of the two that 4.146 and 4.147 have just set side by side, rather than a second rite following a first. Alexis Sanderson states it plainly on the page of The Shaiva Age that carries his footnote 591: these are two categories of initiate, those who receive initiation with post-initiatory duties and those who receive it without, and the seedless is the less arduous route for those exonerated from them.

Read the fetter verse again with that in place and it says something harder.

The discipline is a bond. The people released from the bond are the people the tradition does not trust to carry it. Being fettered is the privilege. A woman and a child are spared the rules in the same gesture that bars them from the grades where the rules matter, and the text gives no reason for it beyond the contrast it has just drawn with the learned who endure the pairs of opposites.

One scholar reads the same evidence historically rather than psychologically. Judit Torzsok points out that the seedless rite is absent from the earliest surviving Siddhanta and Shakta scriptures and takes it for a later addition, a reading Sanderson’s own note supports when it records the category as absent from the earliest Saiddhantika scriptures. She calls it “quite absurd” that a tradition would perform the samaya rite for everybody and recite the rules to every neophyte, only to declare a large number of them unable to follow those rules, and argues that the samayas were first meant to be observed by every initiate. On that account the fork is not one mind in two minds. It is two strata, and the later one is where the exemptions arrive.

What the word means, three times over

Before going further, a disambiguation, because the open web will give you the wrong sense.

Samaya carries at least three unrelated technical meanings.

In Shaiva tantra, the sense of this article, samaya is the set of binding rules an initiate accepts; samayin is the grade of initiate who carries them; samayachara is the conduct they prescribe. Sanderson renders it as the rules that bind initiates as they engage in post-initiatory conduct. Judit Torzsok calls them community rules, and sometimes pledges.

In Shrividya, samayachara means something else: internal, right-hand worship of the goddess within the subtle body, set against external kaulachara. The usage is established by the sixteenth-century commentator Lakshmidhara in his commentary on the Saundaryalahari, who brands his own side Vedic and the other side not. Elaine Fisher’s work on early modern South India treats that binary as substantially Lakshmidhara’s own making, barely attested outside his commentary, and later eclipsed by Bhaskararaya’s reformed Kaula. This is a different use of the word, naming a mode of worship and a sectarian camp rather than a list of post-initiatory obligations.

In Vajrayana Buddhism, samaya, Tibetan dam tshig, is the vow taken at abhisheka, the empowerment. This is the only sense English Wikipedia’s article on the word covers, and it carries no pointer to the others. The specialist literature keeps the senses apart, and the scholars drawn on here, Torzsok on the Shaiva rules and Fisher on the Shrividya ones, each say which sense they mean. It is the general-reference web that has one meaning where the sources have several.

There is a fourth use to avoid tripping on. In Tamil Shaivism the Samayacharyas are the four saints, Campantar, Appar, Cuntarar and Manikkavachakar. Same word, in its wider sense of a religion or tradition, doing a different job.

What an initiate actually promised

The Svacchandatantra has the samayas recited to the candidate. At 5.43 the officiant is told, samayān śrāvayet paścāt tantrāmnāyotthitān, afterwards he should have the samayas recited, those arisen from the tantric tradition. What follows is a list, and the list is more interesting than its reputation.

Do not revile Bhairava, and do not revile scripture of other origin. The text names them: Samkhya, Yoga, Pancharatra, and the Vedas. Do not revile smarta dharma, “which shows the path of conduct”. Do not injure Brahma and the gods, the Mothers, the heroes, the sisters, the cows, the hosts of spirits. Do not harm the property of the gods. Do not eat the guru’s food ungiven. Always consume the caru, the ritual offering, and always honour the gurus. Do not touch the implements with your foot. Contemplate the scripture and recite it to devotees. Do not omit the daily rite and the sandhya.

And, at 5.48, a rule that does real work:

madyaṃ māṃsaṃ tathā matsyān anyāni ca varānane sācārāśca nirācārāṃl liṅgino na jugupsayet

Do not despise wine, meat and fish and other such things, nor the bearers of the linga, whether observant or non-observant.

Read that precisely, because it is easy to get wrong in the exciting direction. It instructs nobody to consume anything. It forbids the reaction of disgust. The prohibition is aimed at jugupsa, the recoil that brahmanical purity is built out of, and it sits three verses after an instruction not to revile smarta dharma. The same short list protects orthodox law from insult and forbids the reflex that orthodox law runs on. Torzsok reads the verse the same way, as naming substances one should not be disgusted by.

The earliest layer is sharper. The Nishvasa, in the Nayasutra, makes it a binding offence to take what a menstruating woman has touched, at 1.104, which is an unmodified brahmanical purity rule. A verse later it binds the man who abandons the Shiva-vow for the vow of another scripture. And at 1.106 to 108 it binds the man who sacrifices by Vedic rites. The same short passage imports a purity rule and forbids the ritual system that rule belongs to.

The law that would not let go

To see what the Shaiva texts were doing, you have to know what they were doing it against, and here the received account needs correcting.

It is often said that brahmanical law held the great sins, the mahapatakas, to be beyond expiation. The five are named at Manusmriti 11.55: killing a brahmin, drinking liquor, theft, intercourse with the guru’s wife, and association with those who do these.

Manu does not hold them inexpiable. He says the opposite, in terms, at 11.108:

etair vratair apoheyur mahāpātakino malam

“By these vows those guilty of the great sins may remove their stain.”

He says it again at 11.240, that such men are freed from guilt by well-performed austerity, and at 11.246, that daily recitation of the Veda and the great sacrifices quickly destroy sins, mahāpātakajāny api, even those arising from the great sins.

What the tradition actually preserves is narrower, in four ways at once. It attaches to three of the sins rather than five: Gautama at 21.7 reports the strict doctrine as Manu’s own and points back to the first three items of his own list, brahmin-killing, liquor and the guru’s bed, leaving theft out, though theft stands fifth in that list six sutras earlier. It attaches only to the deliberate act: Manu 11.90 withholds expiation for kāmato brāhmaṇavadhe, intentional brahmin-killing, closing a long block of alternatives that began with the twelve-year forest vow at 11.73. It is often narrowed further by the victim’s qualifications, to a teacher or a brahmin who had studied the Veda and completed a soma sacrifice. And “inexpiable” is a term of art. Apastamba at 1.9.24.24 to 25 says, in Buhler’s rendering, that such a man cannot be purified in this life but that his sin is removed after death; the Sanskrit withholds pratyāpatti, restoration. The twelve-year observance simply becomes a lifelong one, and Gautama at 20.15 to 16 orders his funeral rites anyway.

Even that was contested inside the tradition. Medhatithi declines to read the verse strictly, saying only that it indicates the expiation should be very heavy. Ganganatha Jha’s apparatus to the verse records the Prayashchittaviveka taking the opposite line, that the implication is that there is no expiation for it. And the Mitakshara, commenting on Yajnavalkya 3.226, quotes the inexpiability verse as the purvapaksha, the position to be refuted, and rules that it does not deny all expiation, since several texts prescribe expiation by death in such cases.

That expiation is death. Drinking liquor red-hot until the body is consumed. Embracing a heated iron image. Going to the king and asking to be struck with his club, after which, Manu says at 11.101, vadhena śudhyati steno, by his death the thief becomes pure, though the same verse exempts the brahmin, who is purified by austerity alone. Georg Buhler, annotating Gautama 21.7, put it without ornament: “The ‘penances’ prescribed are equal to a sentence of death.”

So the honest contrast is not procedure against silence. The jurists publish an exhaustive procedure. What they withhold, for the worst deliberate cases, is restoration to the living community. R. Sathyanarayanan, who edited the Shaiva expiation literature, puts the mechanism the same way, that the smriti prescriptions exist and nobody survives them, though he himself concludes from it that the great sins are not expiable within smriti.

What the tariff is really measuring

Set the two systems side by side and the difference is not severity. It is what each one thinks it is weighing.

The Dharmashastra indexes the penance to the varna of the victim. Manu 11.127 is explicit: a quarter of the brahmin-killing penance for killing a kshatriya, an eighth for a vaishya, a sixteenth for a virtuous shudra. The sin is measured by the social weight of the person destroyed.

The Shaiva texts drop that index, and they say why. The Kiranatantra at 6.3 states the principle:

na jāter na śarīrasya saṃskāraḥ prāṇino mataḥ yadi jātes tad ekasmin dīkṣite ‘khiladīkṣaṇam

“The consecration of a living being is held to be neither of the caste nor of the body; for were it of the caste, then when one person were initiated, all would be initiated.”

Initiation attaches to the soul. Caste is therefore the wrong variable, and something else takes its place. In the Mrgendra’s chapter on samaya conduct the penance scales by grade of initiation, running from the teacher down through the sadhaka and the putraka to the samayin, who pays half the putraka’s. The same chapter scales by intention and by whether the act was known. In Trilocanashiva’s twelfth-century Prayashchittasamuccaya those two axes are tabulated: one lakh of mantra recitations for the unintended and unobserved act, two for the intended and unobserved, four for the unintended and public, eight for the intended and public.

Neither column is the merciful one. A tariff in lakhs of repetitions is not lenience. The point is narrower: one system prices an act by whom it was done to, and the other by what the doer had become.

And the tariff does not always record anything. It is tempting to read every expiation as the fossil of a specific failure, and some of them are exactly that. But the Mrgendra also prescribes a krichchhra every six months, or yearly, and the commentary gives the purpose as cutting off sin that was never noticed to have occurred. An expiation for offences nobody observed cannot be a fossil. It is maintenance.

One caste, and the verses that take it back

The most quotable passages in this literature are the egalitarian ones, and they are real.

Svacchandatantra 4.540 puts brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas, shudras “and others besides” under one dharma in the Shaiva religion. At 4.541 all wear the matted locks and the ash, and all the samayins eat ekapaṅktibhujaḥ, in a single row, which in that period is not a small statement. At 4.543 there is one caste only, bhairavīyā, Bhairava’s. And at 4.544, uttering another initiate’s former caste makes a man liable to expiation, with a stretch in hell spelled out in the next verse.

A tradition that makes mentioning caste a punishable offence has done something.

It would be comfortable to set that against some other, stricter school, and it would be false. The restriction is in the same text, in the same chapter. Four hundred and fifty-three verses before the single-row commensality, at 4.87 and 4.88, the Svacchandatantra has already assigned women, children, the aged and the sick to the seedless initiation that carries no samayas at all. They are inside the religion and outside its discipline. The Kiranatantra at 6.11 does the same thing and gives the reason without softening it, aśaktatvāt, on account of incapacity, and Ramakantha’s commentary glosses their initiation with the Svacchanda’s own phrase.

The Mrgendra, in its chapter on samaya conduct, then withholds the insignia: jaṭā na śūdro vibhṛyān, a shudra must not wear the matted locks, nor the ignorant, nor the careless, nor a woman, nor the aged, nor the sick, nor the disabled.

So the corpus says both things, and sometimes one text says both. The caste a man was born into is abolished among initiates, and mentioning it is an offence. The categories of person held incapable of the discipline are fixed before anyone is initiated at all. The second rule does the work the first one renounced.

The guru pays

Among the offences, one has a shape worth pausing on.

The Nishvasa binds the initiate who abandons the Shiva-vow and takes up the vow of another scripture. A rule against defection, in the oldest surviving layer, which tells you that defection happened often enough to legislate.

The Mrgendra handles a neighbouring case, and the result is not what you would guess. The vyabhicharin is the candidate whose detachment and devotion are feigned or unripe. If such a man is initiated, the text makes the initiating teacher liable to the expiation, performs a reviving rite, and says in terms that the penance is the guru’s. A few verses on, converts from other doctrines are a separate matter: they are initiated vilomataḥ, in reverse order, and barred from becoming mantra-practitioners.

The institution protected itself by making the gatekeeper pay. That is a recognisable piece of administrative thinking, and it sits in a scripture.

The rules that changed their contents

The best recent reading of this material belongs to Judit Torzsok, in an open-access chapter of 2019 whose title asks the right question: whose dharma?

Her argument is that the samaya lists are a diagnostic. What each current’s rules are made of shows how far it stood from mainstream brahmanism, and she ranks four of them in order of increasing distance. Lay, non-initiatory Shaivism prescribes no samaya-type rules of its own, offering instead distinctly Shaiva solutions to problems the Dharmashastra also addressed, infertility among them. The Shaiva Siddhanta has a canonical set clustering around four things: prohibitions on reviling, on the nirmalya, on food from women held impure, and on the shadow of the linga. Brahmanical purity in Shaiva dress. The early Shakta tantras mix Dharmashastric rules with rules enjoining their violation, and extend protection to women, to those considered unmanly, to the handicapped and to the outcast.

Then the fourth. It is easy to say that the later Kaula and Krama dropped samaya lists, and it is wrong. Torzsok quotes three of them at length, from the Yoginisamchara, which she treats as transitional, and from the Devipanchashatika and the Urmikaularnava. What she says is that their samayas are exclusively nondual, with no Dharmashastric or Saiddhantika influence discernible. The lists go on being written. What disappears from them is the brahmanical component.

On why, she offers two explanations and commits to neither. One, which she states more firmly, is that these currents simply defined themselves more categorically as left-hand and antinomian. The other, which she marks as also possible, is that by then it was no longer felt necessary to borrow the authority of the Dharmashastras, because Shaivism had itself become dominant; and for that she points to Sanderson’s thesis rather than her own. The second is the more quotable, which is a reason to be careful with it.

One caution belongs with all of this. These are scriptures, and a list of rules tells you what a tradition wished to be seen promising. It does not tell you what anyone did.

The same word in another religion

Vajrayana Buddhism has samaya too, and the relationship is the most interesting unresolved question in this material.

Sanderson’s earlier work had established a dense overlap between the Chakrasamvara corpus and the Shaiva Vidyapitha in the material on samayachara, the discipline of initiates in their post-initiatory conduct. In The Shaiva Age he treats that as the starting point rather than the conclusion: what was still lacking, he writes, was evidence of textual dependence in the parts dealing with that discipline’s ritual core, and he then spends a long section of the paper closing that gap. The vow material is where the case began, and his 2009 argument is that it does not end there.

He also prints a Tibetan phrase, dam tshig spyod pa’i mtshan nyid, and reconstructs behind it a Sanskrit samayacharalakshanam. The reconstruction is his, from the Tibetan, and the Sanskrit parallels he sets beside it read differently, so it shows the shape of the borrowing rather than a word-for-word match.

David Gray, who edited and translated the Chakrasamvara Tantra, finds Sanderson’s demonstration of its dependence on a closely related set of Shaiva scriptures particularly compelling, and attributes those to the Kapalikas. Ronald Davidson accounts for the same evidence differently, arguing that tantric Buddhism derives from no single source and drawing on local, tribal and outcaste groups rather than on a rival Shaiva tradition.

The safe formulation is narrow. Sanderson’s claim is corpus-specific, about the Laghushamvara and the Vidyapitha. Saying that the Buddhist samaya derives from the Shaiva samaya goes further than the evidence, unless you say which corpus you mean.

What a reader can actually consult

The usual constraint applies, and it is worth naming.

The Nishvasa, the Kiranatantra with Ramakantha, the Mrgendra with Narayanakantha, and Trilocanashiva’s Prayashchittasamuccaya all have critical editions, nearly all from the Institut Francais de Pondichery and the Ecole francaise d’Extreme-Orient. The Indian scholars of that school, R. Sathyanarayanan, T. Ganesan, S. A. S. Sarma, working in the programme Pandit N. R. Bhatt established, are the people who made this subject legible at all.

The Svacchandatantra has no modern critical edition. The passages quoted above come from the electronic text of the Kashmir Series edition of 1921 to 1935 with Kshemaraja’s commentary, and that file is itself composite: its fourth chapter was entered from the Kashmir Series text, its fifth from a different edition. A reader should know that, since the fifth chapter carries the list of rules.

The expiation literature’s standard edition runs past six hundred pages and is not digitised. Torzsok’s chapter and Sathyanarayanan’s article are both free. That is the practical shape of the field.

And on whether any of this is still administered anywhere, in a named lineage, by someone alive: we could not find it documented. There are living Shaiva priesthoods, and there is fieldwork on Kerala tantric lineages and on the Adishaiva temple priests of Tamil Nadu. A study of how initiatory discipline and its expiations are handled now, if they are handled, does not appear in the scholarship we could reach. That is a gap in the record rather than a finding about the practice.

The fetter and who carried it

Return to the verse the article opened with, because by now it reads differently.

A tradition hands a man a list of rules. The rules bind him to a community, mark him off from the uninitiated, and carry a tariff of expiations precise enough to be administered. He is told to guard them. And the same scripture, in the same chapter, calls the guarding a fetter.

The temptation is to hear that as a promise, and to suppose that the fetter comes off later for everyone who keeps it well enough. The text does not say that. It says there are two kinds of candidate, and that the fetter is never fastened on the second kind at all, because children, the aged, the sick and women are held unable to carry it.

So the fetter is real, and it is also a credential. The men who were bound were the men who were trusted. The people the scripture released were released downward.

A bond is anything that holds the soul in position. On the tradition’s own account, those who were given nothing to hold them were not thereby closer to freedom.