Shaiva death rites: burning a man who is already free

The officiant is told not to look back. He walks to the water with the dead man’s relatives and waits there, and what he is waiting for is the skull to burst in the fire. Only then does he take his purifying bath.

That instruction is in the Jnanaratnavali, a ritual manual written in the second half of the twelfth century by Jnanasiva, a man from the Chola country who composed it while living in Benares. It is a practical rule about timing, of the kind any funeral tradition accumulates. What makes it strange is the man in the fire.

He was initiated. According to the tradition burning him, that initiation had already destroyed the bonds of his soul and guaranteed his liberation. He was free before he died. The fire is not releasing him, because there is nothing left to release.

So what are they doing.

The question the tradition asked itself

It is not a modern objection. The scriptures raise it, and they raise it early.

In the Kirana, Garuda puts it to Shiva directly. If all the bonds are removed by initiation, how can the body remain? The answer given is that prarabdha karman, the portion of past action that has already begun to bear fruit, is burnt off only by being lived through. The body stays until that store is spent. It is a reasonable answer and it has a hard edge: it covers the living and stops there.

Nina Mirnig, whose Liberating the Liberated is the standing study of these rites, draws the conclusion plainly. That logic “cannot be applied to anything that happens after death”, and in consequence “no sound doctrinal position was fully developed for death rites”.

Count the liberations and the problem sharpens. The soul is liberated when the body falls. It is liberated again by the officiant’s initiation before the pyre is lit. It is liberated again, gradually, through the ancestor rites that follow. Three liberations, one destination. Strictly, Mirnig notes, there would be no need to cremate at all, since the soul has already gone and the corpse means nothing.

And then the ancestor rites feed that liberated soul as though it were a hungry ghost.

What the oldest tantra does not say

The silence at the beginning of the tradition is the first piece of evidence.

The Nisvasa, the earliest surviving scripture of tantric Shaivism, has no account of death rites. It has a half-verse. Its editors treat that near-total absence as one of the signs of its antiquity, and Goodall reads it as telling us something about the community the text addressed: a group recruited from a substrate Brahmanism that already supplied the rites and values of social religion. Death was somebody else’s department.

The Svayambhuvasutrasamgraha gives the first full cremation we have. It is simple. The corpse is burnt in the Shiva fire and that is all; there is no manipulation of the soul, no soteriological claim, no justification offered. It also includes water offerings, which assume the dead man is a ghost in need of feeding. Mirnig’s phrase for this is exact. It is a contradiction that is silently accepted.

Something then happens across the following centuries that turns a disposal into a machine.

The answer they settled on, and why it did not hold

The Sardhatrisatikalottara supplies the first doctrinal justification anywhere in the corpus, and every later text lives off it.

Cremation, it says, is expiation. The antyesti is ordained to remove the sin of those who transgressed their post-initiatory vows, who committed grave offences against Shiva or their teachers, who died with their doubts intact, or who carry some other residual impurity. The Diksottara goes further and files the funeral outright under prayascitta, the standard category for ritual atonement.

It is a serviceable answer. It is also a small one, and it has an uncomfortable implication: that a man who had been raised to a sanctified state could still fall out of it over something minor. Mirnig observes that the explanation is never pressed too far, and then delivers the finding that shapes everything after it. None of the subsequent Saiddhantika sources go beyond the basic premise established here.

Six or seven centuries later the strain is still visible, in a place that does the tradition credit. Nirmalamani, writing a commentary in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, lists everything that initiation, the vows and lifetime expiation have already purified. Then he stops and asks the objection himself. Tatah kim artham antyestih. Then what is the cremation for?

And he answers: satyam. True.

His way out is a narrowing. The fire purifies only what was done abuddhipurvam, unknowingly. That is the best the tradition managed, and it arrives the better part of a millennium after the question was first put.

Who the elaborate rite was for

Here the corpus divides, and the division is worth more than either side of it.

One line of texts makes the elaborate funeral, with its reversed cosmos and its second initiation, a remedy prescribed for failure. The Jnanaratnavali is explicit. Those established in the principles by initiation, faithful to their post-initiatory discipline, dead at a timely death, receive only the simple burning in the Shiva fire with the offerings of rice and water. The full purification of the cosmic path is added in the case of those who deviated from the discipline, and certain others.

Trilocana, commenting on the Somasambhupaddhati, spells out who those others are: an officiant, an adept or an initiate devoid of proper conduct and carrying out forbidden practices, or one who died by disease, by weapons, by water. Mirnig finds it surprising that bad death and ritual lapse should receive the same treatment, and it is surprising. The two have nothing in common except that each leaves something the fire is now asked to fix.

Mirnig reads an implication out of Trilocana’s move that he does not state himself: that on this logic a simple cremation for the spiritually elevated is the more prestigious ending. On that reading the rule inverts what a reader expects. The more machinery a funeral needs, the worse its subject did.

A yogin who left his body deliberately gets the simple rite too, on the ground that through the procedure of utkranti he is held to have enacted union with Shiva at the moment of death.

And then Somasambhu says the opposite. His manual restricts the cremation with the purification of the principles to the three upper grades, the officiant, the adept and the initiated son, and gives everyone below them the rite without it. In his hands the elaborate funeral is a privilege of rank, withheld from the lowest grade of initiate, and he declines to invoke the expiatory rationale at all. The Uttarakamika echoes him, though Mirnig suspects it may have been composed with his manual in mind.

And the division does not run neatly between texts. The Jnanaratnavali itself carries the grade restriction, in scripture it quotes: the purification of the path is for the officiant, the adept and the initiated son, and not for a neophyte, unless that neophyte wanted liberation. The two rationales sit inside the same book.

So the tradition did not settle even this. One account treats the big rite as a repair, the other as a distinction, and a given manual may carry both. Any version of this that reads cleanly is tidier than the evidence.

How the fire was built

Everything in the rite runs backwards.

The sacred thread goes over the right shoulder rather than the left. The circumambulation is anticlockwise. The five great mantras of Shiva are recited in reverse order. The throne of the god is assembled from its purest level downward, and the cosmic purification runs the same way, unwinding what initiation once wound up.

The site has three parts: a fire pit, an earthen platform for the worship of Shiva, and the pyre pit itself, four cubits by two and eight finger-widths deep. The Jnanaratnavali alone adds a pavilion for the dead, nine cubits square or seven, with a single exit on the southern side.

Two details carry more than their weight. In the Jnanaratnavali the fire is not struck fresh; it is fetched as coals from the dead man’s own house and carried anticlockwise around the site into the pit, where other manuals simply have the officiant produce it. And the installation at the site is incomplete on purpose. There is no jar for Shiva and none for the guardians of the directions. Only the weapons are installed.

On the floor of the pyre a diagram of twenty-five squares is drawn, called the vetala, with Brahma and earth at the centre in yellow, Vishnu and water in the southwest in white, Rudra and fire in the southeast in red. Over it goes a yellow square inside a red triangle, then four pegs with a red cord strung round them, then the firewood and a cloth. The corpse is not on the pyre yet. It is prepared beside it, washed with mud and the five products of the cow and smeared with ash, which Mirnig takes to suggest that a householder initiate’s body is being treated as an ascetic’s. He is lifted onto the pyre only after he has been initiated, and his own sacrificial ladles are laid on the burning wood with him.

Catching the soul

Then the officiant goes and gets him.

The soul is taken with what the Somasambhupaddhati calls the mahajalaprayoga, the great net method, and the mantra names its target: om hum haum ham ham hum, veneration to the soul of so-and-so. The dead man’s name goes into the ritual formula. The soul is netted, brought back and installed in the heart of the body it has left.

That string of seed-syllables is worth one honest footnote. Mirnig prints it three different ways, in her discussion, in the Sanskrit she sets beneath it, and in her translation of the parallel passage in another manual. The form given above is the one in her running text. Even here, at the hinge of the whole rite, the manuscripts are not steady.

Only now is it initiated. And this second initiation does what the first could not. In the living rite the prarabdha karman has to be endured; here it is destroyed outright.

The Kirana describes the dismantling in a way that is hard to forget. The cosmos is present in the soul as the alphabet, arranged in eight classes of sound. Each class is lifted out, installed in the fire and expiated there, one after another, until nothing structured is left. The bonds are cut with the mantra of the sword. At the end the officiant fuses the soul with his own, and then with the mantra of Shiva.

The pyre is lit. The final oblation is poured onto the head with a verse that says what the fire is: you are the south, you are death, accept this great oblation of the corpse, product of time alone, purified by mantras.

And they walk to the water to wait for the skull.

Initiating a corpse, and then a doll

If a soul can be caught and initiated after death, the corpse starts to look optional.

The Sarvajnanottara has a whole chapter on initiating the dead, and where it sits is the argument. It falls between the chapters on initiation and the chapter on the funeral. The redactors classified it as an initiation, not as a rite of disposal.

What it prescribes is an effigy. A small figure of darbha grass, or of cow dung, bathed in Shiva water, with the whole apparatus of principles and deities installed on it. The dead man’s name is placed at its heart. Then the soul is drawn in, the initiation is performed, and the figure is offered into the fire with milk, ghee and curd.

Brahmasambhu, writing the earliest Saiddhantika ritual manual we have, allows the figure to be made of kusa grass, flour paste or cow dung. The Jnanaratnavali permits it for a man dead out of reach, or in battle, and refuses it absolutely to one who broke his vow. Aghorasiva’s manual has a version for bad deaths, with a written token tied around the doll’s neck.

The mechanism is the same in each case, and it is worth stating flatly, because the logic is unusual. Make a body. Give it the name. Catch the soul and put it in. The effigy’s heart then works exactly as a corpse’s heart works. Run the initiation. Burn the figure.

The Sarvajnanottara adds a line that shows how far this had travelled from a funeral. The rite is taught for the dead, it says, or also for someone still alive.

Whether the dead can be chosen

Not everyone accepted it, and the objection came from one of the school’s most formidable commentators.

Bhatta Ramakantha, working in Kashmir around the end of the tenth century, restricted the funeral to three narrow cases, officiants who transgressed through negligence, initiated sons who performed the rites but carried doubt, and adepts whose impurity of office was not yet destroyed, and then ruled out the whole idea of initiating the uninitiated dead. It is not right, he writes, to explain that the rite is performed for those in whom impurities still reside because they never received initiation at all.

His grounds are precise and they are doctrinal rather than squeamish. The descent of grace, saktipata, has to be visibly displayed, and only a living man can display it. And the dualism of the school means the signs cannot be read off any other medium. The dead man cannot show you he was chosen, and nobody can show it on his behalf.

Abhinavagupta answered him, and the answer is the most humane sentence in this material. The grace may be recognised, he says, through the vehement requests of the dead man’s relatives, his wife, his friends or his son, or through the strength of the teacher’s own compassion.

The grief of the family is admitted as evidence that the dead man was elected.

Who prevailed is not in doubt. The satires of Ksemendra show the rite being performed in eleventh-century Kashmir whatever the theologians held. Mirnig adds a conjecture, and marks it as one, in a footnote: that the scruples of Ramakantha’s school may have handed this particular source of income to its rivals.

Who it was for

Two facts sit beside each other here and the honest thing is to leave them there.

The Somasambhupaddhati directs that the corpse be given the sacred thread purvavarnanapeksaya, without regard to his former caste. Mirnig calls that radical against the boundaries the brahmanical tradition draws, and in the handling of a dead body it is.

The same manuals rule that a man of higher caste should not follow the corpse of a lower-caste man to the cremation ground unless the dead man was an ascetic, and that if he does he must bathe and recite the mantra of his own caste deity a hundred times. At the communal meal after the ancestor rites, initiates of different castes must not sit in the same row and must face in different directions. On the strength of the seating and the cremation-ground rule, Mirnig says these texts embrace caste as a meaningful category despite the tradition’s claim to have transcended it.

The resolution is narrow and it is the whole of it. Initiation overrides birth in the treatment of the corpse. It overrides nothing else.

As for women, Mirnig reports that she found no reference to death rites performed for women anywhere in the early corpus. Her one named exception for death rites is a late scripture, the Brhatkalottara. Separately, Aghorasiva’s manual carries a rite for a dead mother which runs as the others do except that the guests are not fed, and in which the three generations keep the ordinary names, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, rather than being given Shaiva identities. This is an argument from silence and she says so. It may reflect nothing more than the general absence of women as ritual agents. It is still a notable hole in a literature this detailed.

The ancestors, and what replaced them

The brahmanical rite does something specific. It takes a dead man, holds him in a dangerous intermediate state, and then, at the rite of merging, incorporates him into the line of his fathers. The point is not sentimental. The chief mourner is defined as the man who will inherit, and the ancestor ritual is the machinery that keeps the patriline, and the property, intact.

The Shaiva rite replaces the ancestors with gods. In what becomes the standard version the father is addressed as Isa, the grandfather as Sadasiva, the great-grandfather as Santa. The All-Gods of the brahmanical rite are replaced by Kalagnirudra and Ananta, who govern the lowest and highest levels of the impure universe.

One caution, because the tidy version circulates. The recently dead man is not given a Shiva identity of his own in the early sources. He is addressed as Rudra only in later Kashmirian material. The three-generation substitution is solid; the fourth step is a development.

And then the Shaivas conceded the ground. Jnanasiva, in the twelfth century, rules that the rites up to the merging are to be performed as Vaidika rites, and gives his reason without embarrassment. They are done lokasamvyavaharartham, for the purpose of worldly interaction, which Mirnig glosses as conformity and nothing more. Only after that does the Shaiva ancestor rite begin. Elsewhere he states that a householder must not transgress the ordinary religion even in his thoughts, and that the period of impurity he observes follows common usage rather than his rank as an initiate.

Mirnig reads this as an almost open declaration that the needs of orthodox householder society were too pressing to be ignored. It is hard to read it as anything else.

There is a last detail that makes the point better than any argument. The Shaiva ancestor rite was adopted late, and when it was adopted, parts of it were lifted almost verbatim from a Vaishnava text. The borrowing runs the other way from the story the tradition tells about itself.

What it was really for

Mirnig’s answer to the question this article opened with is institutional, and she is careful to mark where it becomes inference.

What the texts say outright: after a death in a monastery, the teacher is to announce publicly, before the assembled teachers, initiates, lay devotees, servants and workmen, that the dead man’s donations remain the property of the house. Another scripture legislates in detail for the division of a dead disciple’s goods, and for the dead teacher’s wealth going to build temples.

What she infers from it, and flags as inference: that there were disputes over inheritance; that the specialists of one school saw the economic potential of widening their clientele; that this may have created friction with the brahmanical funeral priests whose work it overlapped. She closes the chapter by admitting that these considerations raise more questions than they answer.

The most telling evidence is a sentence of Brahmasambhu’s, written in the tenth century. He opens his treatment by pre-empting an objection: that the Shaiva funeral is no different from the ordinary one. He would not have needed to say it unless somebody was saying it.

That is not the posture of a transgressive cult. It is the posture of a profession establishing that its service is worth commissioning. The Shaiva priesthood was selling something, and it needed the product to look both familiar and better.

What survives

Almost none of this can be watched.

The strongest claim of continuity is for Kashmir, where Mirnig writes that the ancestor manuals were in use by Shaiva priests until recent times. That phrase is doing a great deal of work and the article cannot tell you how much.

In the Tamil country the institutions are alive. The manuscript of one of these very manuals was found in a working Shaiva monastery. That is not evidence that the funeral with its second initiation is performed, and Mirnig nowhere claims it is.

For the core of the thing, the catching of the soul and its return to a body it has left, there is no modern account at all that could be found. The gap should be named rather than filled.

So what is left is the literature: a few scriptures, a handful of manuals, a damaged manuscript in Kolkata carrying more of the chronology than it comfortably can, and a long argument conducted by men who were not able to say why they were doing what they did.

They inherited a fire they had no doctrinal use for, and they kept it lit.

The dead did not need it. The living did.