Hindu Sectarianism: A European Invention?

Sectarianism is a term that has been firmly ingrained in Western scholarly literature on Hinduism for more than a century—and with a definition that, at best, may seem peculiarly idiosyncratic and, at worst, dangerously misleading. In contemporary parlance outside the discipline, sectarianism most often connotes violence and aggression, leading many sociologists and twentieth-century historians to treat sectarianism as a self-evident synonym for communalism. Historians of religion, upon mention of the term sect, may gravitate toward an invocation of the work of Ernst Troeltsch, who, drawing on Max Weber, proposed the distinction between church and sect foundational to our use of the latter term in the Western context.^[1] According to Troeltsch, a church, the institutional foundation of a parent religion, represents the conservative establishment of a particular religion, imbricated with deep-rooted ties to political power and an elite social constituency. A sect, on the other hand, Troeltsch defines as a breakaway fragment of a parent religion, a smallscale movement designed as a reformation or a protest of social stagnancy in the religious mainstream, often catering to the needs of socially disadvantaged or marginalized populations. Such a definition of sect may prove appealing to scholars of bhakti, or devotional Hinduism, who narrate bhakti unproblematically as a religious movement that fostered populist resistance against the so-called Brahminical mainstream, as saints of all social backgrounds were revered for their charismatic authority.^[2] The majority of scholarship on Hinduism, however, makes use of the term sectarianism in a much more restricted, and indeed peculiar, vein—quite simply, as a stand-in for the compound “Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism,” a form of Hinduism that grounds itself in the worship of a particular deity.

How can we account for such an omnipresence of the term sectarianism in this idiosyncratic usage, to which scholars adhere unfailingly despite the connotations of violence and incivility that its popular meanings may inspire? The very classification of the core divisions of Hinduism as sects, according to this definition, runs afoul of an insoluble historical problem: namely, the assumption that a unified Brahminical Hindu “church” has always existed, under the shadow of which protest movements, from early Buddhism to the anticaste protests of medieval Maharashtra,^[3] strove to assert their independence. Indeed, a perusal of the archive of Orientalist scholarship on Indian religions confirms that Hindu sectarianism, as a scholarly category, was born from the well-documented alliance of European philology and the colonial state apparatus, filtered in the process through Christian theological categories. This very usage of Hindu sectarianism seems to have been first articulated by Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Oxford’s Boden Professor of Sanskrit, in his monograph Brahmanism and Hinduism (1891), with negligible variation from its contemporary manifestation.

As Monier-Williams writes,

“What then is the present idea implied by Hindu Sectarianism? It is clear from what has been already stated that every Hindu creed ought to be regarded as unorthodox which exalts favorite personal deities to the position of the one eternal, self-existing Spirit (Ātman or Brahma), in contravention of the dogma that even the highest divine personalities are finite beings destined ultimately to be absorbed into that one finite Spirit. Of course it must be understood that when Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism deny this dogma they offend against orthodoxy.”^[4]

What, then, is the problem with the worship of Viṣṇu or Śiva as the cornerstone of a Hindu’s religious identity? Hindu sectarianism, in Monier-Williams’s estimation, constitutes a seditious—or even malignant—threat to a primordial unity of a religion he calls “Brāhmanism”: “Hindu sectarianism is something more than the mere exclusive worship of a personal god. It implies more or less direct opposition to the orthodox philosophy of Brāhmanism.” Rife with the rhetoric of a neoVedānta that would privilege a monistic reading of the Upaniṣads as the unchanging essence of Indian religion, Monier-Williams’s model foregrounds unity over diversity, reducing in the process the rich variation in Hindu religious identity to a discordant threat to the legacy of India’s golden age. Moreover, that MonierWilliam’s usage was consonant with the Christian theology of his day, intriguingly enough, is surreptitiously revealed in the very same monograph. In Calcutta in 1883, Monier-Williams tells us, the Indian Christian convert Keshab Chandar Sen publicly disseminated a decree of the Bishop of Exeter, his 1881 New Dispensation, which included the following pointed claim: “Thus saith the Lord—Sectarianism is an abomination onto Me, and unbrotherliness I will not tolerate.”

Our usage of the term sectarianism, it would appear, in effect not only reproduces the rationale of Orientalist polemic but also encodes a theological worldview distinctly foreign to Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism in their lived reality. It is perhaps no surprise that, at a moment when the very concept of world religions itself was just beginning to crystallize in the Western cultural imaginary,^[5] Orientalist philology embarked on a quest to recover the historical unity of an unadulterated Brahmanism. Indeed, over the preceding two centuries, European missionaries and observers in south India, as William Sweetman (2003) has demonstrated, were utterly unaware of such a concept as a unified Hinduism, identifying Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism as distinct religious communities. Roberto de Nobili and Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, in effect observing an India considerably less conditioned by European categories, arrived quite naturally at a crucial insight that escaped even the painstaking philology of Sir Monier Monier-Williams: namely, that Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism, since at least the early second millennium, had been by no means socially marginal forces, subaltern shadows of a Brahminical mainstream. Indeed, writing in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Tamil country, de Nobili, Ziegenbalg, and their contemporaries would have to have been willfully blind not to observe that public life in early modern south India had been functionally segmented along the lines of distinct religious communities.

From within Hindu sectarian institutions themselves, likewise, our inscriptional record reveals that by the sixteenth century, Hindu religiosity was fundamentally mediated by the boundaries of sectarian identity. In 1533, for instance, in the course of renewing his endowments to the major religious sites of south India, Acyutadevarāya of Vijayanagara set forth an explicit proclamation that imperial grants to two of Kanchipuram’s most important temple complexes ought to be equalized. The direct intervention of the emperor of Vijayanagara, one might surmise, ought to have resolved this patronage dispute in no uncertain terms. Nevertheless, his vassal, Sāḷuva Nāyaka, taking advantage of his own administrative control over temple donations in the region, reapportioned a greater percentage of the endowment to the temple of his choice. When this misappropriation of funds was brought to light, Acyutadevarāya attempted to remove any ambiguity in his stance by inscribing his decree in stone on the temple walls as a visible reminder to all temple officiants and onlookers.^[6] The conflict, as it turns out, stemmed directly from the polarized sectarian affiliations of the temples in question: dedicated to Varadarāja, in one case, and Ekāmranātha, in the other—regional strongholds of Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva devotionalism, neighbors and chief rivals in one of south India’s most active and diverse temple towns.

These traces of competition for material resources and royal sanction indicate a deeper and more pervasive fault line underlying both the social and the intellectual dynamics of early modern south India—that is, sectarian competition, particularly between Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava adherents of prominent monastic lineages. During Cōḻa rule some centuries earlier, the Tamil South had already adapted to an economic structure in which the temple served as a primary node of economic distribution and a focal point for political authority. This pattern of social organization attained a new prominence under Vijayanagara and Nāyaka rule, as temples developed into megatemples, and monastic institutions began to hold a larger share of both the economic and the symbolic capital circulated by temple complexes. Monastic lineages that enjoyed heightened prestige during this period included regional “vernacular” traditions such as the Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta as well as multiregional Sanskritic traditions, such as the Mādhvas and Śrīvaiṣṇavas, whose branch outposts in Kanchipuram, Kumbakonam, and other Tamil temple towns were connected to broader networks spanning the southern half of the subcontinent. Often we find that these lineages staked their claims to authority in major temple complexes quite visibly by enshrining the spiritual and philosophical accomplishments of their most renowned adepts directly on temple walls.

At the same time, the systemwide centrality of these monastic lineages accompanied, and exacerbated, a marked increase in intersectarian debate in the intellectual sphere. Leading intellectual figures of the period began not only to define themselves explicitly by their sectarian identity but also to actively contribute to the demarcation of community boundaries, thus exerting a tangible influence on the extratextual shape of south Indian society. One of the best-known examples on the Śaiva side, for instance, is Appayya Dīkṣita (ca. 1520–1592), renowned for tireless efforts to propagate a Vedānta strictly for Śaivas—specifically, the Śaiva Advaita philosophy of Śrīkaṇṭha’s commentary on the Brahmasūtras. In fact, Appayya was sufficiently motivated to promulgate his own interpretation of Śaiva Advaita philosophy that he founded an academy in his home village of Adaiyappalam for that express purpose and composed numerous didactic stotras to circulate among his pupils.^[7]

Visitors to Adaiyappalam today will find that Appayya immortalized his own desire to propagate the Śaiva Advaita doctrine on the walls of the Kālakaṇṭheśvara Temple, a temple he commissioned as a setting for such instruction:

Raṅgarāja Makhin, the instructor to the learned, performer of the Viśvajit sacrifice,
And son of a performer of the great Sarvatomukha sacrifice,
Had a son renowned as Appayya Dīkṣita, devotee of the Mooncrested Lord [Śiva].

On account of him the fame of the illustrious king Cinnabomma, breaker of the power of kings, was undefeated [avyāhata].
He excavated Śrīkaṇṭha’s commentary to establish the doctrine of Paramaśiva.
He, Lord Appayya Dīkṣita, son of the illustrious Raṅgarāja, has created
This most lofty and sublime abode of the Lord of Kālakaṇṭha, resplendent like the white mountain.^[8]

This opening pair of Sanskrit praśasti verses frames Appayya Dīkṣita’s life and scholarship in explicitly sectarian terms. Ostensibly author of a hundred works, many of them groundbreaking treatises in Mīmāṃsā (Vedic exegesis) and poetics, including the “best-selling” textbook on rhetoric, the Kuvalayānanda, Appayya is remembered by his community almost exclusively for his Śaiva theology—a reputation he himself appears to have fostered through this auto-eulogistic praśasti. Rather than literary theorist, or even “polymath” (sarvatantrasvatantra), Appayya’s public persona is that of reviver of the doctrine of Śrīkaṇṭha, foremost among the devotees of Śiva.

This Sanskrit verse, likewise, is followed by a donative inscription in Maṇipravāḷam documenting that Cinnabomma had agreed to sponsor five hundred scholars to study Appayya’s theology at the Kālakaṇṭheśvara Temple in Adaiyappalam and another five hundred in Vellore, thus financing Appayya’s project of disseminating Śaiva Advaita philosophy to the extended Śaiva scholastic community:

Hail! Beginning in the Śaka year 1504 [i.e., 1582 c.e.], in the Citrabhānu year, having composed the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā so that the Śrīkaṇṭhabhāṣya may be taught to five hundred scholars in the temple of Kālakaṇṭheśvara, and after having received an unction of gold from the hand of Cinnabomma Nāyaka, having acquired gold and agrāhāra s from the hand of Cinnabomma Nāyaka so that the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā also may be taught to five hundred scholars in Vellore—may this abode of Śiva, the creation of Appayya Dīkṣita, who composed one hundred works, beginning with the Nyāyarakṣāmaṇi and the Kalpataruparimala, be auspicious.^[9]

With such an institutional setting in place for propagating his theological vision, it is no wonder that Appayya’s primary epithets (biruda s) in academic discourse were Śrīkaṇṭhamata-sthāpanācārya^[10] —“the establishing preceptor of Śrīkaṇṭha’s doctrine”—and Advaita-sthāpanācārya, “the establishing preceptor of nondualism.” Appayya’s grandnephew Nīlakaṇṭha—whose exploits guide much of the analysis of this book—remembered his illustrious ancestor primarily for his contribution to Śaiva theology, particularly his Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, which some have argued represents a truly unprecedented maneuver to authenticate a Śaiva Advaita interpretation of the Brahmasūtras. That Nīlakaṇṭha considered Appayya an authority on Śaiva ritual practice as well as theology is made clear in the Saubhāgyacandrātapa, Nīlakaṇṭha’s unpublished esoteric ritual manual, which I discuss in chapter 2, in which Nīlakaṇṭha repeatedly refers to Appayya’s Śivārcanacandrikā as a primary authority.^[11] Even within public literary circles, Nīlakaṇṭha commemorated his uncle first and foremost not for his literary theoretical advances or his poetic commentaries, but for his composition of the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, a feat for which his patron, Cinnabomma, literally showered him in gold (kanakābhiṣeka).^[12]

On the side of his antagonists, leading Vaiṣṇava theologians of the period were all too well acquainted with Appayya’s theological project in the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, taking special note of their own preceptors’ attempts to refute his arguments and minimize his influence. For instance, the Śrīvaiṣṇava hagiographer Anantācārya recalls the particular rivalry between Appayya Dīkṣita and a scholar of his own lineage, Pañcamatabhañjana Tātācārya, so named for ostensibly “demolishing five doctrines”:

Best of those learned in Śaiva theology, the illustrious Appayya Dīkṣita
Of great fame, who had defeated his enemies, shone at Cidambaram.
Appayya Dīkṣita composed the text titled the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā,
Always devoted to the Śaiva religion, hostile to the Lord [Viṣṇu].^[13]

Tātayācārya, having set forth the “Demolishing of Five Doctrines,”
The Pañcamatabhañjanam,
Protected the undefeated [avyāhata] doctrine of the illustrious Rāmānuja.
He, the great teacher, of great splendor, having made the Caṇḍamāruta,
Protected that undefeated doctrine of that best of ascetics.^[14]

As Anantācārya tells us, Pañcamatabhañjana Tātācārya composed the Caṇḍamāruta in direct response to Appayya’s Śivārkamaṇidīpikā. And through his efforts, the Śrīvaiṣṇava doctrine of Rāmānuja remained “undefeated” (avyāhata), at least according to the hagiography of his lineage. On the Śaiva side, we meet with this same term, avyāhata, in the Adaiyappalam inscription as royal imagery for the alliance of Cinnabomma and Appayya Dīkṣita, the crest-jewel of Śaiva theologians who adorned his court. Evidently, being theologically “undefeated” was a goal that persistently preoccupied the intellectual discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in south India. Although the Sanskrit intellectual circles of the Nāyaka courts fostered an impressive display of erudition in all fields of śāstric learning, no discipline so preoccupied public discourse as did theology, whether Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava. To be undefeated, then, in such a competitive marketplace of ideas was no small matter, and yet the honor seems to have been claimed equally by all participants.

In short, intellectual life in early modern south India—and indeed public religious life in general—had become polarized to the extreme, on both the institutional and the philosophical planes. Sectarian theology, employed strategically in debates between rival sects, became a defining structural pillar of the region’s intellectual sphere in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to an even greater degree than was true in preceding centuries. In some cases, conversation became heated, judging by the titles of sectarian pamphlets, ranging from Appayya Dīkṣita’s Madhvatantramukhamardana (Crushing the face of Madhva’s doctrine) to the possibly even more graphic insults of Benares pandits in subsequent generations as tensions became still more elevated: Durjanamukhacapeṭikā (A slap in the face of the wicked), Durjanamukhamahācapeṭikā (A great slap in the face of the wicked), Durjanamukhapadmapādukā (A boot to the lotus mouth of the wicked), and so forth.^[15] To better understand these rising sectarian tensions—in terms of both their theological influence and their social significance—requires a closer look at the origin and development of these debates and the textual strategies through which these debates were conducted.

While the religious networks of south India most readily point to the role of sectarianism in the Hindu religious landscape—since monasteries and megatemples visibly demarcate the terrain of rival Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava communities—Hindu sectarianism was by no means a phenomenon restricted to the South. In fact, we witness a veritable explosion of distinct Hindu communities in the domain of north India beginning around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, demarcated in emic terms through the authority of lineage, or sampradāya.^[16] Mirroring closely the social dynamic of the South, Vaiṣṇava devotional sampradāya s vied to establish themselves through Rājput and Mughal patronage, setting down institutional roots in the Vaiṣṇava heartland of Braj and its greater cultural ambit across Rajasthan. In fact, the groundbreaking work of John Stratton Hawley (2015) has situated the bhakti movement as such as the foundation of sectarian identity in Hindu north India, and as a phenomenon of the Mughal period (1526–1707) rather than of Indian antiquity. Mughal rule, some would argue, fostered in a literal sense a sectarian marketplace—as the spread of sectarian networks was heavily facilitated by the Mughal support of fiscal exchange across the northern half of the subcontinent.^[17] And over the following century, much of the Vaiṣṇava heartland witnessed a thoroughgoing state-sponsored sectarianization, as Sawai Jai Singh II set out to homologize the public religious culture of eighteenth-century Jaipur—a domain in which orthodoxy was described not as Hindu but as Vaiṣṇava.^[18]

Speaking constructively about sectarianism, then—in a manner that seeks to denude the term of its Orientalist overtones—requires us to resituate Hindu communities in their social and cultural context. Indeed, only a decontextualized doctrinal mélange, arguably, could have prompted Monier-Williams to read the religiosity of Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism as belligerent dissent from a unified Brahminical church—a mysterious institution, to be sure, that will be found nowhere in our inscriptional record. To be a Śaiva or a Vaiṣṇava in early modern south India, was, to the contrary, not simply to believe in the supremacy of Śiva or Viṣṇu but to belong to a socially embedded community and to mark one’s religious identity as a member of a particular religious public. Sectarian communities are not Venn diagrams of people and doctrines, demarcated by drawing artificial boundaries; they are dynamic social systems composed of networks of religious actors, institutions—temples, monasteries, lineages—and the religious meanings they engender. In the words of Niklas Luhmann, for instance, by which he defines a social system, we might describe a sectarian community as a “meaning-constituting system,”^[19] an operationally closed set of social institutions that maintains—and in fact reconstitutes—its own boundaries internally through the structures of meaning it generates. That is to say, Hindu sects function autonomously from one another as meaning-constituting systems, each individually reproducing the religious institutions that endow participation in that community with sectarian-inflected religious identity.

Thus, while making an appeal, on the grounds of Vedāntic exegesis, to an umbrella religion we may call Hinduism, sectarian communities maintained an internal coherence and mutual independence comparable to the discrete social systems of modern society, such as the political or legal systems, which Luhmann analogizes to the independent but permeable interactions of discrete biological systems. In south India, for instance, major sectarian communities such as the Śrīvaiṣṇava and Mādhva Vaiṣṇava lineages, and the Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta, attained virtually complete autonomy on a social as well as a doctrinal level by becoming major economic shareholders in the networks of exchange centered at major temple complexes and monasteries. This is not to say, naturally, that interactions between sectarian communities did not occur on a regular basis. In fact, it is just such interactions—whether polemical exchanges, competition for resources, or theological influence and reaction—that allow each sect to maintain its distinctive identity in the face of changing circumstances. A Hindu sectarian community, in short, mirrors closely what Luhmann describes as an autopoietic system, creating and maintaining its doctrines, ritual practices, and modes of religious expression from within its own boundaries.

A self-constituting religious tradition, in other words, generates its own meaning-creating institutions—monasteries, lineages (paramparā), temple complexes, sites of performance, and so on. These institutions in turn produce artifacts of religious meaning—doctrine, canon, hagiography, ritual practice, sectarian dress, and other semiotic signals—as the intellectual property, if you will, of those sectarian institutions, effectively erecting conceptual boundaries between competing traditions. When viewed macroscopically, the aggregate of such mutually independent systems facilitates the balance of an entire ecosystem—or, in our case, a religion inflected to its core by pluralism.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Ernst Troeltsch (1931) here draws on Max Weber’s distinction between Kirche and Sekte outlined in his Die Wirtschaftethik der Weltreligionen (1915–1919). See also Srilata Raman (2007, 180n2) for an alternative definition proposed by Louis Dumont.

[2]:

See Hawley (2015) for a deconstruction of the very idea of the “bhakti movement.”

[3]:

Novetzke (2016).

[4]:

Monier-Williams, Brāhmanism and Hinduism (1891, 60).

[5]:

Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (2005).

[6]:

See Subrahmaniam, South Indian Temple Inscriptions, 3:393, for the Tamil text of this inscription from the Varadarāja temple in Kanchipuram, recorded as ARE no. 584 of 1919.

[7]:

Bronner (2007).

[8]:

vidvadguror vihitaviśvajidadhvarasya śrīsarvatomukhamahāvratayājisūnoḥ |
śrīraṅgarājamakhinaḥ śritacandramauḷir asty appai dīkṣita iti prathitas tanūjaḥ ||
yena śrīcinnabommakṣitipabalabhidaḥ kīrtir avyāhatāsīt yaś ca śrīkaṇṭhabhāṣyaṃ paramaśivamatasthāpanāyoddadhāra |
tena śrīraṅgarājādhvarivaratanayenāppayajvādhipenākāri prauḍhonnatāgraṃ rajatagirinibhaṃ kālakaṇṭheśadhāma ||

This inscription is recorded in “Report on South Indian Epigraphy” as number 395 of 1991. The text is published in Y. M. Sastri (1929, 148–149), and Ramesan (1972, 25–26). Y. Mahalinga Sastri recommends emending the original “yena,” the first word of the second pāda of v. 2, to “yaś ca.” Sastri also believes this verse to be the original composition of Appayya Dīkṣita himself, as portions of it appear elsewhere in the author’s oeuvre.

[9]:

svasti śrī śakābdaṃ 1504 kku mēl collā niṉṟru citrabhānu varuṣam svāmi kālakaṇṭheśvararuṭa kōvililē śrīkaṇṭhabhāṣyam aiññūṟu vidvāṃsarukku paṭipikka atukku śivārkamaṇidīpikaivyākhyānamum paṇṇi vēlūr cinnabomma nāyakkar kayyilē kanakābhiṣekamum paṇṇi viccukkoṇṭu atukkuppiṉ vēlūrilē śivārkamaṇidīpikaiyum aiññūṟu vidvāṃsarukku paṭippikka cinnabomma nāyakkar kayyilē svarṇaṅkaḷum agrahāraṅgaḷum paṭaippiccu prativirājyaṃ [i.e., pṛthivīrājyam] paṇṇiviccu nyāyarakṣāmaṇi kalpataruparimala mutalāṉa ṉūṟu prabandha paṇṇiṉa appaidīkṣitaruṭa kṛti inta śivālayaṃ śubham astu. See the preceding footnote for the published inscription. The Sanskrit verses and Maṇipravāḷa prose are followed by the signatures of a number of scholars who served as witnesses.

[10]:

We also find the variant “Śrīkaṇṭhamatapratiṣṭhāpanācārya.” This biruda also appears in the colophon of the first pariccheda of Nīlakaṇṭha’s Saubhāgyacandrātapa.

[11]:

For example: ata evāsmaddīkṣitaiḥ śivārcanacandrikāyām uktam—rājānaḥ strībālā rogiṇaḥ pravāsinaś ca śītodakena snānāśaktāv uṣṇodakena snānaṃ kuryuḥ. The Śivārcanacandrikā is one of Nīlakaṇṭha’s primary sourcebooks for daily Śaiva ritual practice.

[12]:

“Bathed in gold on account of his Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, he was praised by Samarapuṅgava Yajvan as follows: At the time of his unction in gold, on the pretext of heaping up gold all around him, King Cinnabomma made a golden water basin for the wish-fulfilling tree of stainless wisdom, Appayya Dīkṣita.” (tad api jñāyate yad eṣa śivārkamaṇidīpikāvasānalabdhakanakasnānaḥ praśaṃsitaḥ samarapuṅgavayajvanā yathā—hemābhiṣekasamaye parito niṣaṇṇasauvarṇasaṃhatimiṣāc cinabommabhūpaḥ | appayyadīkṣitamaṇer anavadyavidyākalpadrumasya kurute kanakālavālam || [Nalacaritranāṭaka, pgs. 4–5]). The work Nīlakaṇṭha cites here, Samarapuṅgava’s Yātrāprabandha, is structured as a biographical travelogue and commemorates the pilgrimage of the author’s elder brother to Varanasi. In a similar vein, Ramesan cites another anonymous poet as having described Appayya as follows, stressing once again the centrality of Śaiva theology to his scholarly work: nānādeśanarendramaṇḍalamahāyatnātidūrībhavat-kādācitkapadāravindavinater appayyayajvaprabhoḥ | śaivotkarṣapariṣkrtair aharahaḥ sūktaiḥ sudhālālitaiḥ phullatkarṇapuṭasya bommanṛpateḥ puṇyāni gaṇyāni kim ||

[13]:

śaivaśāstravidāṃ śreṣṭhaḥ śrīmān appayyadīkṣitaḥ | citrakūṭe jitārātiraśobhata mahāyaśāḥ || advaitadīpikābhikhyaṃ grantham appayadīkṣitaḥ | cakāra bhagavad[d]veṣī śaivadharmarataḥ sadā || (Prapannāmṛtam, 126.13). advaitadīpikābhikhyaṃ grantham appayyadīkṣitaḥ | cakāra bhagavad[d]veṣī śaivadharmarataḥ sadā || (126.14).

[14]:

vidhāya tātayācāryas tatpañcamatabhañjanam | śrīrāmānujasiddhāntam avyāhatam apālayat || mahācāryo mahātejāḥ sa kṛtvā caṇḍamārutam | avyāhataṃ yatīndrasya taṃ siddhāntam apālayat || (Prapannāmṛtam, 126.17).

[15]:

For more details on these texts, see Minkowski (2010), “I’ll Wash Out Your Mouth with My Boot,” a study of the sectarian controversies in seventeenth-and eighteenthcentury Benares concerning the authenticity of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Chronological and stylistic evidence makes it clear that this trend in north Indian sectarian debate was borrowed directly from the South, particularly by way of Bhānuji Dīkṣita/Rāmāśrama, son of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, pupil of Appayya Dīkṣita.

[16]:

See also Pauwels (2009).

[17]:

See LaRocque (2004) for this argument. LaRocque, however, somewhat overextends the historical reach of his evidence in painting a portrait of early modern Vaiṣṇavism and Jainism as ideological supports of a protocapitalist economy, which he literally equates with Weber’s Protestant ethic.

[18]:

Horstmann (2006, 2009).

[19]:

Luhmann (1995, 21).