The Pāñcarātra Saṃhitās

At Srirangam, on its island in the Kaveri, the largest functioning Hindu temple in the world wakes the god each morning with a scripture that spent centuries under suspicion. The rites that bathe and clothe and feed Ranganatha, the reclining Vishnu, come in large part from the Pāñcarātra, the Vaiṣṇava branch of the tantric revelation. And the Pāñcarātra had to be defended, again and again, against the charge that it was not really scripture at all.

That is the unusual thing about this corpus, and the thread to follow through it. The Śaiva Āgamas governed the Shiva temple without much argument about their right to. The Pāñcarātra governed the Vishnu temple while the tradition argued, in its own highest philosophical registers, about whether it was legitimate. The Brahma Sūtra, the foundational text of Vedānta, appears to reject it. Some Purāṇas curse it. And two of the greatest names in Vaiṣṇava thought, Yāmuna and Rāmānuja, spent their authority defending it. The story of the Pāñcarātra is the story of a scripture fighting for its standing.

Five nights, and a corpus

The name is a puzzle the tradition never solved. Pāñcarātra means “five nights,” and the Saṃhitās offer seven or eight different explanations for it: the five modes of God, the five nights over which the teaching was first given, the five kinds of knowledge, the overcoming of the five senses. The Encyclopedia of Religion judges these to be later rationalisations that give no secure insight into the original meaning. The oldest trace of the word runs deeper still, into the Veda: the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa describes the primordial Puruṣa Nārāyaṇa performing a pañcarātra, a five-day sacrifice, and by it surpassing all beings and becoming everything. Whatever the name first meant, it was old, and it was tied to Nārāyaṇa.

The corpus itself is large and largely lost. The tradition counts one hundred and eight Saṃhitās, a sacred round number, but the actual named titles run past two hundred, and only a fraction survive, many in fragments, on palm leaf, in Grantha and Telugu script. At the head of the corpus stand the ratnatraya, the “three jewels”: the Sāttvata, the Pauṣkara, and the Jayākhya Saṃhitās, held to be the earliest and the most authoritative. Beyond them lie the Ahirbudhnya Saṃhitā, the text the German scholar F. Otto Schrader edited in 1916 and made the Western world’s entry point to this literature, and the Lakṣmī Tantra, and the Pādma, Īśvara and Pārameśvara Saṃhitās.

The fourfold Lord

The theology at the centre of the Pāñcarātra is the vyūha doctrine, and it is one of the most distinctive ideas in all of Vaiṣṇavism.

The supreme reality is Vāsudeva, God possessed of six perfect qualities, the ṣāḍguṇya: knowledge, lordship, power, strength, virility and splendour. From Vāsudeva emanates Saṃkarṣaṇa; from Saṃkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna; from Pradyumna, Aniruddha. Four forms, arising one from the next, presiding over the stages of creation and the faculties of the cosmos. The names are drawn from the ancient Vṛṣṇi heroes, the family of Krishna, lifted into metaphysics.

Around the vyūhas the tradition sets a second scheme, the five modes in which God makes himself available: para, the transcendent; vyūha, the emanations just described; vibhava, the incarnations, the avatars who descend into history; antaryāmin, the inner controller dwelling in every heart; and arcā, the consecrated image in the temple. That last mode is the theological engine of temple worship. The arcā is not a symbol standing in for an absent god. It is held to be a real and voluntary presence of the full God, condescending to be handled, bathed, and fed. When the Pāñcarātra priest treats the image as a living guest, he is enacting the doctrine that God is genuinely, and by his own grace, there.

The quarrel over the Veda

Now the controversy, which is the spine of the whole subject.

The Brahma Sūtra, in its second chapter, second quarter, turns to examine and refute a series of rival systems, and at aphorisms forty-two to forty-five it comes to the Pāñcarātra vyūha doctrine. The objection, as Śaṅkara reads it, is precise and damaging: if Saṃkarṣaṇa, an individual soul, is produced from Vāsudeva, then the soul has an origin, and what originates perishes, and a perishable soul cannot be liberated. On this reading the Brahma Sūtra rejects the Pāñcarātra.

Rāmānuja read the very same aphorisms the other way. In his Śrībhāṣya, translated by George Thibaut for the Sacred Books of the East, he takes the passage to establish the Pāñcarātra, not refute it. The emanation, he argues, is not the origination of a separate soul at all. It is the highest Brahman, “there called Vāsudeva, from kindness to those devoted to it, voluntarily abiding in a fourfold form.” God divides himself, freely, out of love, so that he may be approached. Rāmānuja quotes the Pauṣkara and the Sāttvata Saṃhitās by name as authoritative scripture. Two of the greatest commentators in the tradition read one passage and reached opposite verdicts. The article names the divergence and does not adjudicate it.

Behind Rāmānuja stood Yāmuna, his predecessor, whose treatise the Āgamaprāmāṇya, “the validity of the Āgama,” is the founding defence. Yāmuna’s argument cuts to the root. The special rituals of the Pāñcarātra cannot be known by ordinary perception or inference. Only God, whose knowledge is without limit, could have instituted them. And it is the same God, Nārāyaṇa, who authored both the Veda and the Pāñcarātra. The corpus is valid because its source is divine. The whole defence rests on the reliability of the author.

Yāmuna preserved, in order to answer it, the case for the prosecution, and it was as much social as philosophical. Opponents held that the very word sātvata marked a low, mixed caste; that the temple priests who worshipped images for their living were degraded; that these people did not perform Vedic duties and that Brahmins would not dine in the same row with them. The Kūrma Purāṇa lumps the Pāñcarātra with the Kāpālika and Bhairava cults as scriptures made “for the delusion of mankind,” and calls its followers non-Vedic. Other Purāṇas, the Viṣṇu and the Bhāgavata among them, praise it warmly. The tradition did not speak with one voice about the Pāñcarātra. It argued.

Pāñcarātra and Vaikhānasa

There is a quieter rival that clarifies what the Pāñcarātra is, and that is the Vaikhānasa, the other tradition that runs Vishnu temples.

The two divide almost as a matched pair. The Vaikhānasa uses only Vedic mantras and presents itself as Vedic, smārta, continuous with the orthodox fold; its priesthood is restricted to men born into Vaikhānasa families, the so-called garbha-Vaiṣṇavas, Vaiṣṇavas from the womb. The Pāñcarātra uses Vedic and tantric mantras both, is entered by dīkṣā, initiation, and in principle admits worshippers of every varṇa. One is birth-bound and Vedic in self-image; the other is initiatory and āgamic. The two systems are traditionally forbidden to be mixed in a single shrine. And the most famous Vishnu temple of all, Tirupati, follows the Vaikhānasa, not the Pāñcarātra, a reminder that the āgamic path never swept the field.

Śrī, the power of the Lord

One text pulls the Pāñcarātra toward its Śākta neighbours, and it is worth marking. The Lakṣmī Tantra, translated by Sanjukta Gupta, gives the creative initiative to Śrī, to Lakshmi, as the active power, the śakti, of the otherwise transcendent Nārāyaṇa. She is inseparable from God, as Gupta puts it, the way light is inseparable from the moon, and the universe is the manifestation of her will. In the Lakṣmī Tantra it is she who possesses the five cosmic functions of creation, sustenance, dissolution, concealment and grace. A tradition usually filed as sober, orthodox Vaiṣṇavism turns out to carry, in its own scripture, the Śākta insight that God’s power is a Goddess. The streams are never as separate as the labels suggest.

The god who comes down, and stays

For all its cosmology, the Pāñcarātra is a religion of the temple, and its deepest idea is about how a transcendent God makes himself reachable. The five modes are really a ladder of nearness. The para is God in his unreachable transcendence; the vyūhas are his cosmic emanations; the vibhava is God descending into history as the avatars, Rama and Krishna and Narasimha, stepping into time to set the world right. The Sāttvata Saṃhitā, one of the three jewels, counts thirty-nine such descents, though the number moves from text to text. But the avatars belong to past ages. A devotee alive today cannot walk beside Krishna.

So the tradition presses on to the fifth and lowest rung, and finds there its most beloved doctrine. The arcā, the consecrated image in the temple, is God’s final descent, and the most gracious of all, because it is permanent and present. Śrīvaiṣṇava theologians name this God’s saulabhya, his easy accessibility, his willingness to bind himself into stone and metal so that anyone at all may see him and serve him. The Teṉkalai teacher Piḷḷai Lokācārya gave it a homely image: the avatars were a flood that came and passed, while the image in the sanctum is a pool on the bank, standing still, that anyone may come and scoop from. God at his most powerful is God at his most helpless, waiting to be fed.

This was already the God of the Tamil poet-saints. The twelve Āḻvārs, who lived across roughly the sixth to ninth centuries and included the towering Nammāḻvār and the one woman among them, Āṇṭāḷ, poured out their longing to the Vishnu of particular shrines. Their four thousand Tamil verses, the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, became for their tradition a Tamil Veda, sung in the temples beside the Sanskrit, and they mapped a sacred geography of a hundred and eight divya-deśams, the holy abodes, Srirangam and Tirupati and the rest. Nāthamuni, around the tenth century, gathered the scattered verses and set them into the liturgy. It was this fusion, the ecstatic Tamil devotion of the Āḻvārs married to the exacting Sanskrit ritual of the Pāñcarātra, that became Śrīvaiṣṇavism.

Rāmānuja, by tradition the long-lived teacher of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, is remembered as the man who organised it, ordering the worship at Srirangam on Pāñcarātra lines and opening the initiation, the pañca-saṃskāra, that marks a devotee with the conch and discus of Vishnu. His followers later divided into two schools that still part the tradition, the Sanskrit-leaning Vaṭakalai and the Tamil-leaning Teṉkalai, over a question the arcā itself had raised: whether the soul must cling to God’s grace as a baby monkey grips its mother, or is carried to safety, unresisting, as a kitten is carried by the cat.

What the record shows

The tradition holds that Nārāyaṇa revealed the whole Pāñcarātra himself, complete, from a lost Vedic branch called the Ekāyana. The documentary record tells a slower story, and the two are kept apart here.

The cult of Vāsudeva is genuinely ancient. A pillar still stands at Besnagar in central India, raised around the second century before the Common Era by Heliodorus, a Greek ambassador who had become a devotee, a Garuda-pillar to Vāsudeva, “the god of gods.” The Nārāyaṇīya, a section of the Mahābhārata’s book of peace, already carries the vyūha names and the worship of Nārāyaṇa, our earliest sustained literary witness to this religion. So the cult reaches back before the common era.

The Saṃhitās as we have them are later. The surviving three jewels are commonly placed around the fifth to eighth centuries; the earliest strata appear North Indian, preserved in Kashmiri and Nepalese manuscripts, and Sanderson has argued that Pāñcarātra ritual borrowed its very structure from the older Śaiva tantric models. The corpus then migrated South and flourished in symbiosis with the Śrīvaiṣṇavism of Rāmānuja and the four Vaiṣṇava sampradāyas. Ancient worship, medieval scripture. Both are true, and a careful account does not let the tradition’s claim of timeless revelation erase the historian’s record of composition, nor let the record dismiss the tradition’s own understanding of where its scripture came from.

The Pāñcarātra won its long argument in the end, at least where it mattered most: in the great Vaiṣṇava temples of the South, the god is still woken each morning by the scripture that was once told it had no right to speak. The tradition does not need the argument settled. It settled it in practice, one dawn at a time.