Dressing for Power: On vrata, caryā, and vidyāvrata in the Early Mantramārga, and on the Structure of the Guhyasūtra of the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā

Abstract

If, twenty years ago, you had read most of the literature published before the 1990s about the Śaivasiddhānta, youwould probably have received the impression that this was primarily a South Indianmovement, whose scriptures, called āgamas, were divided into four sections, or pādas, devoted to ritual (kriyā), doctrine ( jñāna), yoga and pious conduct (caryā). The first two of these four sections, the kriyā-pāda and the jñāna-pāda, you would have learnt, were the most important, the kriyāpādabeingdevoted todescribing the rituals practised in the Śaiva temples of the Tamil-speaking area, and the jñānapāda (or vidyāpāda) being devoted to teaching and defending a strictly dualist system that presents an ontological ladder of thirty-six tattvas, but that recognises three irreducible ontological categories: pati, paśu and pāśa. That is to say: the Lord (pati), bound souls (paśu), and the bonds that bind them (pāśa), namely Matter, karman and an innate impurity calledmala or āṇava-mala. Each one of these pieces of receivedwisdomhas been challenged by the discoveries of the last two decades, so that we now know that none of the above propositions actually holds true for the earliest strata of the religion to which surviving primary literature can give us access. A great many of those discoveries are those of Alexis Sanderson and the students to whom for decades he devoted much of his time and energy. Of course it is wide reading of a very broad corpus of published and unpublished sources that has gradually revealed to us quite a different picture of the early phases of the religion. But if one were to single out any one text for its importance in expanding our knowledge of the early history of the Mantramārga, it would probably be the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā. Ten years ago, hardly any aspect of the text had been explored in print, but, thanks in part to the spotlight of the Franco-German ‘Early Tantra’ project, which between 2008 and 2011 focussed the minds of many people present at the Toronto symposium on the Niśvāsa and on its relation to other early tantric literature, parts of thework have been commented upon in an array of publications. The first major arcticle actually predates the ‘Early Tantra’ project, and is,