The Contested Authority of the Śaiva Purāṇas

[Full title: Unstable Recensions: The Contested Authority of the Śaiva Purāṇas]

In his commentary Kauṇḍa Bhaṭṭa’s Padārthadīpikā (The illumination of categories), an early modern treatise on formal logic, Gīrvāṇendra Dīkṣita, son of Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, embarks on an apparently peculiar digression while addressing the maṅgala verses of the work.^[1]

He begins his commentary by explaining,

By the term “black and white” is meant a thing that consists of both Hari and Hara, because, in the epics and Purāṇas, oftentimes Śiva is described as appearing [white] like a pure crystal, and Viṣṇu as appearing [black] like a dark cloud.

But one might wonder, “How can this be the case? Hari and Hara cannot possibly be nondifferent, as their difference is established by numerous authoritative means of knowledge.” In fact, the nondifference of Hari and Hara is understood from numerous Purāṇic statements such as the following:

Śiva alone is Hari manifest, Hari alone is Śiva himself.
The man who sees a difference between the two goes to Hell.^[2]

The difference [between them] is understood to be conditional, but the opposite [i.e., their nondifference being conditional] is inconceivable. We understand their difference to be conditional based on the previously exemplified statement “sattva, rajas, and tamas” itself; we do not likewise observe a statement of the conditionality of nondifference. Thus, the nondifference of Hari and Hara is absolutely real.^[3]

In the context of a hairsplitting commentary on the niceties of logical syllogisms, it may seem odd that Gīrvāṇendra would foreground such a seemingly irrelevant theological dispute. And yet he seems intent on locating in Kauṇḍa Bhaṭṭa’s maṅgala verse a particular theological vision—the nondifference of Śiva and Viṣṇu—that had become a matter of some contention in the south over the preceding generations, even more so than in Kauṇḍa Bhaṭṭa’s social circles in Benares.^[4] Why, we might wonder, was a descendant of south India’s most staunchly Śaiva intellectual families so determined to demonstrate the equality of Śiva and Viṣṇu, even when the matter bore little relevance to the discussion at hand? As it turns out, his motivations were likely much more complex than an irenic vision of religious pluralism. Rather, for a Śaiva Advaitin, inheriting the intellectual legacy of Appayya Dīkṣita, the nonduality of the two sectarian deities was a contentious claim in Gīrvāṇendra’s generation, and one that certainly would not have been endorsed by his Mādhva or Śrīvaiṣṇava rivals, who were keen to demonstrate their ontological difference—and, as a consequence, the status of Viṣṇu as supreme deity. Thus, the appeal to their unity by partisan Śaivas was a deliberate counterattack on Vaiṣṇava sectarian polemics.

The debate Gīrvāṇendra alludes to at the outset of his commentary is treated at much greater length by his own father, Nīlakaṇṭha, in his Śivatattvarahasya, or “The Secret of the Principles of Śiva.” Primarily structured as a commentary on a popular Śaiva hymn, “The Thousand and Eight Names of Śiva,” Nīlakaṇṭha’s Śivatattvarahasya also contains one of the most sophisticated and philologically sensitive sectarian tracts that have come down to us today. In this extended preface, Nīlakaṇṭha addresses a subject that was causing his Smārta-Śaiva contemporaries a fair amount of consternation—namely, the accusation, most likely leveled by his Śrīvaiṣṇava contemporaries, that the Śaiva Purāṇas were invalid textual authorities because of their intrinsically tāmasa character. Tamas, indeed, was the lowest of the three “qualities” of matter that the Sāṅkhya school of Indian philosophy proposed as the building blocks of the universe, associated generally with sloth, torpor, and moral degeneracy. And yet this accusation is founded on a serious hermeneutical impasse, one that was recognized equally by both parties with a greater trepidation than most authors of earlier periods—namely, that the Purāṇas contradict themselves. Given the numerous internal inconsistencies and blatant contradictions between Purāṇas that were thought to be equally authoritative, how could they all be salvaged as valid scriptural authorities? In response to this dilemma, the Śrīvaiṣṇava community had arrived at an expedient explanatory device, one that can be traced back to the time of Rāmānuja, but which had, by the seventeenth century, taken on an altogether new systematicity and precision.

Nīlakaṇṭha puts the matter eloquently into the mouth of an unnamed opponent (pūrvapakṣin), a traditional strategy of Sanskrit philosophical prose that allows the author to demolish the case of a hypothetical adversary. In Nīlakaṇṭha’s words, his opponent lays out the case against the Śaiva Purāṇas as follows:

Here, some people say that there is no validity to the Names contained in the Skanda Purāṇa, because the Skānda, and so forth, are not valid sources of knowledge given that they are tāmasa Purāṇas. After all, Brahmā, the author of the Purāṇas, in some eons was predominated by sattva, in some by rajas, and in some by tamas; when he was predominated by sattva, he composed Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas, when he was predominated by rajas Brāhma Purāṇas, when predominated by tamas Śaiva Purāṇas. And thus, the Śaiva Purāṇas, composed by a Brahmā who was blinded by tamas, are completely nonauthoritative like deluded prattle. But the Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas, composed by a Brahmā predominated by sattva, are authoritative, like the statements of a learned person.^[5]

This line of argumentation—which had understandably proven popular in a polarized sectarian environment—can be traced back to the works of Rāmānuja himself, albeit in embryonic form. In the Vedārthasaṅgraha (Compilation on the meaning of the Vedas), his problematic of inquiry is precisely the same: Why do the scriptural passages contradict each other, and what do we do about it? He writes, “If one were to ask, ‘How can it be that Vedic statements, which are unauthored, are mutually contradictory?’ then, as previously stated, there is actually no contradiction because a unitary purport [tātparya] can be determined.” In this context, Rāmānuja quotes the same Purāṇic passage above (suggesting a direct influence on Nīlakaṇṭha’s own imagined opponent), demarcating the same tripartite division among the Purāṇas based on their eon of composition and the guṇa predominating that particular eon. He moves on quickly, however, to proposing his better-known “adjectival” exegesis of the names of Śiva in the Upaniṣads: interpreting Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 3.11, śāśvataṃ śivam acyutam, he pointedly maintains that the name Śiva is nothing but a modifier of Viṣṇu—Acyuta—indicating his auspiciousness.^[6]

What does not concern Rāmānuja to any significant degree, however, is the strict opposition between Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas. For Nīlakaṇṭha’s imagined opponent, operating in a society in which sectarian tensions have reached new heights, it is the antagonism between the two bodies of scripture that is central. Clever as Rāmānuja’s interpretation of the name Śiva may be, Nīlakaṇṭha’s opponent shows no interest in it and, instead, expands upon the Tāmasic nature of the Śaiva Purāṇas at great length, arguing that it is the reliability of the speaker, Brahmā, that determines the relative authority of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas. Evidently the passage cited by Rāmānuja struck him as an ideal battle ground for exposing the relative merits of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava theology—not on philosophical grounds but based on the textual integrity of their respective scriptures.

Expanding on his initial complaint about the speaker’s unreliability, Nīlakaṇṭha’s opponent compiles a list of seven textual deficiencies that vitiate the scriptural authority of the Śaiva Purāṇas. He summarizes his case as follows:

Thus, the Śaiva Purāṇas are non-authoritative (1) because the speaker has the fault of being tāmasa, (2) because of contradiction with scripture, (3) because of internal contradiction [svavyāghātāt], (4) because the meaning of its own statement is not corroborated by another Purāṇa that is accepted as a valid authority[,]... (5) because it is clear that the intention of describing the greatness of the liṅga [Liṅgamāhātmya] as stated in the Liṅga Purāṇa has come forth sequentially from a question concerned with a particular topic,^[7] (6) because the Kūrma Purāṇa, and so forth, are well known to have lost their original recensions [naṣṭakośatvāt], and (7) because of the possibility of interpolation because of their excessive prolixity.^[8]

Intriguingly, none of the reasons adduced by the opponent for his distrust of the Śaiva Purāṇas has any bearing on the content, or doctrine, expressed by them. Rather, with each of the reasons Nīlakaṇṭha attempts to supersede doctrinal differences by appealing to an ostensibly shared sense of philological reasoning as to what ought to constitute an authoritative text, and what features of such a text may show proof of corruption or instability. If our author were a contemporary critical editor, his criteria for textual authenticity would by and large be accepted by academic audiences as eminently plausible, when translated into the idiom of modern philological practice.

In particular, reason six will catch the eye of any contemporary textual scholar: is it truly possible that seventeenth-century intellectuals had developed a sophisticated model of the diachronic fluctuation of texts through circulation and accumulation of variants? By Nīlakaṇṭha’s day, commentators had been using terms such as pāṭha for centuries to indicate their awareness of variant readings in classic works of poetry. Here, however, Nīlakaṇṭha’s opponent employs a rather unusual and striking term, naṣṭakośa, which has little in the way of precedent in Sanskrit discourse before the intellectual giants of second-millennium south India.^[9] Its resonance, however, is unmistakable: the Śaiva Purāṇas, our unnamed opponent argues, have lost their original recensions—that is, the original “manuscript copies” of their authentic (divinely authored) textualized form have been lost. Succinctly, when first enunciated by their speaker, the Śaiva Purāṇas were known to have contained a vast number of verses, as several putatively original citations attest. The versions accepted as canonical by the opponent’s contemporaries possess far fewer verses, which suggests, quite logically, that the remaining verses have been lost over time. Thus the received text can be presumed to bear little resemblance to the original, divinely authored Purāṇa that one might have considered authoritative.

Nīlakaṇṭha’s reply illuminates the issue in more detail, illustrating his clear awareness that texts, whether revealed or not, have a history and, as historically bounded entities, are subject to loss and transformation:

And, as for the argument [that the Śaiva Purāṇas are not authoritative] because it is well known that the Kūrma and so forth have lost their original recensions, this also is insubstantial. For, the Brāhmī Saṃhitā, which consists of six thousand verses, is still available [pracarati]—it is not at all lost. If you maintain that the portion over and beyond the Brāhmī Saṃhitā is lost, consisting of eleven thousand verses from within the text of seventeen thousand verses known to have belonged to the Matsya Purāṇa, then let it be, who says it is not? After all, we are not citing any verses from there. But there is no ground for excessive doubt concerning further loss within the Saṃhitā that has come down to us as scripture. If some further portion is said to be “lost,” then any other Saṃhitā could also be conceived of as “lost,” given that there would be no deciding factor for discriminating what has been lost and what has not.

If you argue that the portion we have received could have been written by anyone—then, no, because there is no basis for this. For, it is not the case that if some has been destroyed then all of it must be destroyed, nor if some has remained then all must remain; nor, clearly, do either you or I have even a grain of discomfort the size of a sesame seed with regard to the grammar of Pāṇini occasioned by the Aindra Grammar’s having been lost. That being the case, even with regard to the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, it would wind up being very difficult to refute the anxiety about its extant six thousand verses, conjoined with the seventeen thousand verses of it that have been lost from within the twenty-three thousand verses we come to know of from the words of the Matsya Purāṇa.^[10]

Here we find Nīlakaṇṭha wrestling with what many would consider to be a cogent objection to the Matsya Purāṇa’s textual integrity: the Purāṇa has evidently suffered from poor transmission, which caused nearly two-thirds of the text to be lost, and consequently one might wonder whether the remaining portion has also been inaccurately transmitted. The debate, then, concerns the effect of textual transmission on the viability of scripture as a source of authoritative knowledge. Nīlakaṇṭha argues, as many of us would, that we cannot afford to abandon fragmentary textual traditions even if we can no longer recover a comprehensive picture of their recension histories, much less the form of works as originally enunciated.

Another of the opponent’s objections may strike us as odd at first glance—namely, his suspicion of the Liṅgamāhātmya—but in fact a very similar form of reasoning is used by textual scholars even today to track interpolations in classical texts. The Liṅga Purāṇa, Nīlakaṇṭha’s opponent argues, fails to conform to the traditional generic constraints of Purāṇic texts because it includes a number of interludes in which the characters raise lines of discussion that are seemingly irrelevant to abstract questions of ultimate truth, such as the nature and function of the śivaliṅga, the aniconic image of the god Śiva employed in ritual worship.^[11] In his opponent’s analysis, these passages seem to concern matters so highly specific and foreign to our expectations as to suggest a particular time and place of interpolation. Nīlakaṇṭha, for his part, agrees that a general internal coherence must exist for us to accept a Purāṇa as free from interpolations, but he maintains that the initial question itself around which the text is structured is not by itself sufficient to determine its unitary intentionality (tātparya). Such questions, he argues, often illuminate the bias and limitations of the questioner rather than the ultimate truth promulgated by the Purāṇa. In fact, if seemingly tangential questions were sufficient to overturn the authority of scripture, even the most-prized narratives of Vaiṣṇava devotion would be called into question. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa itself, Nīlakaṇṭha notes, begins with a similar exhortation: “Sūta, you know—we beseech you. By whose will was the Lord, master of the Yādavas, born of Devakī and Vasudeva?”^[12]

Although much can be said about Nīlakaṇṭha’s argument, two aspects of the debate on both sides are of particular interest in the present context. First, we witness a sustained and philologically sensitive inquiry into a particular textual problematic—that is, which features of textual structure facilitate comprehension of the overall purport (tātparya) of a text, and what bearing does this purport have on our assessment of the text’s recension history? Such dialogue flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; we may recall here the Mādhva-Śaiva debate on upakrama versus upasaṃhāra—the relative priority of the beginning or end of a text for determining its intentionality—a subject that rose considerably in popularity in response to the work of Appayya Dīkṣita. Second, we observe a kind of empiricist leaning in both opponents’ readiness to exemplify passages that problematize common assumptions about the Purāṇic genre and how it communicates authoritative knowledge. In both cases, our sectarian intellectuals employ philological reasoning to push the boundaries of normative textual practice—and yet the enunciatory context is not the traditional disciplines of text criticism but the sectarian polemical tracts themselves. It is the new intellectual space opened up through the irruption of sectarian polemics that provided an ideal venue for philology to reach new heights, in many cases moving beyond the language and problematics in which textual interpretation had been posed for centuries through the classical Sanskritic knowledge systems.

In the final analysis, we should be clear that philology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries flourished through the vehicle of sectarian theology, and its applications were by and large theological in their agenda. We would deceive ourselves in expecting to uncover a neutral, “secular” space in which philological reasoning developed free from external commitments. Indeed, the European case would caution us against expecting philology and theology to keep separate company. To name but a single instance, Isaac Casaubon, one of early modern Europe’s first groundbreaking philologians—who recognized that the hermetic revelations so foundational to Renaissance thinking were in fact anachronistic apocrypha postdating the biblical texts by several centuries—was both a classicist and a Huguenot theologian by trade, carrying out his intellectual work in the service of an antipapist agenda.^[13] In the Indian case, it was the theological offshoots of philology that truly took root in public discourse, moving beyond the most sophisticated of scholarly discourses to affect the motivations and predispositions of Sanskritic culture across the south Indian religious landscape. After all, it was not Nīlakaṇṭha’s definition of prolixity that his son Gīrvāṇendra alluded to in his commentary on the Padārthadīpikā but, rather, the relevance of the three Sāṃkhya guṇa s to casting doubt on the speaker of the Śaiva Purāṇas and, hence, their authority as scripture.

As it is perhaps this critique that troubles Nīlakaṇṭha the most—that the Śaiva Purāṇas are inherently tāmasa—he advances a revised theological model of the speakers of the various Purāṇas from the standpoint of his Śaiva Advaita philosophical leanings. Rather than disputing the Purāṇic attestations of a tripartite division in the Purāṇas and the guṇa s of their speakers, Nīlakaṇṭha circumvents the entire paradigm by postulating Śiva as the unitary creator of the Trimūrti—Viṣṇu, Brahmā, and Rudra—with Paramaśiva in the purest and most abstract sense being absolutely distinct from the embodied or qualified (saguṇa) form, Rudra, who was delegated to speak the tāmasa Purāṇas. By making this case, Nīlakaṇṭha aims not only to secure Śaiva immunity from a hierarchical paradigm that favors the supremacy of Viṣṇu—and one that has significant textual evidence to back it up, at that—but also to salvage the unitary authoritativeness of the Purāṇic corpus as a whole, irrespective of sectarian affiliation.

He proposes his siddhānta as follows:

And, as for the argument that the Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas are authoritative because they lack the seven previously mentioned faults of the Śaiva Purāṇas—with regard to this, the proposition [pratijñā] of the syllogism is valid, but the reason [hetu] is not worthy of being investigated.... Even if others were to argue that the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas have been situated as mutually opposed and, thus, because of that mutual opposition the Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas could be said to be invalid, given that our aim is to inform about the truth, it would not be reasonable for us to do so. For, the fact that others have erred does not mean that one must err oneself. Thus is introduced the established conclusion [siddhānta] that sets forth the validity of all Purāṇas.

And as for what was argued—[that the Śaiva Purāṇas are not authoritative] owing to internal contradiction—this is refuted for precisely the same reason. There is not even a whiff of internal contradiction, because the origin of Rudra from Nārāyaṇa concerns the origin of the Rudra endowed with qualities, whereas the Trimūrti originates from Paramaśiva.^[14]

Thus, Nīlakaṇṭha effectively deflects the textual evidence marshaled by his Vaiṣṇava rival through a strategy of creative subversion, repositioning the Śiva of the Śaiva religion outside of the hierarchical paradigm Vaiṣṇavas had deduced through close readings of the Purāṇas. A strategy such as this bears not only theological but sociological implications as well, positioning the Brahminical Śaiva community, which had begun to style itself explicitly as “Smārta,” to appeal to a transcendent Hindu orthodoxy that conceptually denied the sectarian social structure from which it had arisen. In fact, despite the incisive philological insights of both Nīlakaṇṭha and his opponent, theological models such as these left an indelible impact on the sectarian discourse of subsequent generations. Over the course of the following century, Smārta-Śaivas enthusiastically adopted this conceptual distinction between their chosen deity, Paramaśiva, and the saguṇa Rudra of the Trimūrti, and they relegated the latter to the same subordinate plane of existence as Viṣṇu himself. This rhetoric soon attained such popularity that it became purely a matter of convention to assert, at the outset of Śaiva sectarian tracts, the transcendent status of Paramaśiva, the true Śaiva deity.

Take for example the following maṅgala verses from the Īśavilāsa of “Appayya Dīkṣita” and the Madhvamukhacapeṭikā,^[15] two Śaiva polemical works conspicuously prefaced with this same formula:

By whose command Brahmā is the creator of the universe and Hari the protector,
And the destroyer is known as Kālarudra, homage to him, who bears the Pināka bow.^[16]

I bow to the nondual Śiva, distinct from the Trimūrti, the cause of creation and so forth, who provides all refuge,
Knowable from the Vedānta throughout the entire universe, for the pacification of a veritable flood of obstacles.^[17]

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

The verse in question is: śrīmatsiddhikaraṃ kāntaṃ ramomāraṇātmakam | dayāsindhuṃ cidānandaṃ sitāsitam upāsmahe ||

[2]:

sitāsitam upāsmaha ity anvayaḥ. sitāsitapadena hariharātmakaṃ vastu pratipādyate. itihāsapurāṇeṣu bahuśo hare śuddhaspaṭikasaṅkāśatvasya harau nīlameghasaṅkāśatvasya ca varṇanāt. na ca hariharayor bhedasya bahupramāṇasiddhatayā ‘bhedāsaṃbhavāt katham etad iti vācyam... śiva eva hariḥ sākṣād dharir eva śivaḥ svayam | yaḥ paśyaty anayor bhedaṃ sa yāti nirayaṃ naraḥ || ityādyanekapurāṇavacanair hariharayor abhedāvagamāt.

Gīrvāṇendra Dīkṣita, Padārthadīpikāvyākhyā, GOML, Madras, Ms. No. R. 5133, fol. 1–2.

[3]:

bheda aupādhika eva. na ca vaiparītyam aśaṅkyam. sattvaṃ rajas tama ity udāhṛtavacanenaiva bhedasyaupādhikatvāvagamāt naivam abhedasyaupādhikatvavacanaṃ paśyāmaḥ. atas tāttvika eva hariharayor abhedaḥ. Gīrvāṇendra Dīkṣita, Padārthadīpikāvyākhyā, GOML, Madras, Ms. No. R. 5133, fol. 2.

[4]:

Kauṇḍa Bhaṭṭa (fl. 1650), best known for his grammatical work, the Vaiyākaraṇabhūṣaṇa, was also directly connected to the intellectual communities of south India. Son of Raṅgoji Bhaṭṭa (himself a prolific Advaitin theologian) and nephew of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, Kauṇḍa Bhaṭṭa may well have been influenced by the sectarian ideas prominent in the south, as Gīrvāṇendra leads us to infer. For more details on his grammatical work, see the entry under his name in Potter, Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophy, vol. 5: The Philosophy of the Grammarians.

[5]:

atra kecid āhuḥ skāndapurāṇāntargatānāṃ nāmnāṃ prāmāṇyaṃ na saṃbhavati, skāndādīnāṃ tāmasapurāṇatvenāpramāṇatvāt. tathā hi purāṇānāṃ kartā caturmukhaḥ keṣucit kalpeṣu sattvenodrikto bhavati, keṣucid rajasā, keṣucit tamasā, sa yadā sattvenodriktaḥ, tadā vaiṣṇavāni purāṇāni praṇināya, yadā rajasodriktas tadā brāhmāṇi, yadā tamasodriktas tadā śaivāni. evaṃ ca tamoguṇāndhabrahmapraṇītāni śaivapurāṇāni bhrāntajalpitānīvāpramāṇy eva, vaiṣṇavapurāṇāni tu sattvodriktabrahmapraṇītāni prājñavākyānīva pramāṇāni. yathoktaṃ mātsye: saṃkīrṇāḥ sāttvikāś caiva rājasāś caiva tāmasāḥ | yasmin kalpe tu yat proktaṃ purāṇaṃ brahmaṇā purā || tasya tasya tu māhātmyaṃ tatsvarūpēṇa varṇyate | agneḥ śivasya māhātmyaṃ tāmaseṣu prakīrtitam || rājaseṣu tu māhātmyam adhikaṃ brahmaṇo viduḥ | saṃkīrṇeṣu sarasvatyāḥ pitṝṇāṃ ca nigadyate || sāttvikeṣu ca kalpeṣu māhātmyam adhikaṃ hareḥ | teṣv eva yogisaṃsiddhā gamiṣyanti parāṃ gatim || Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, Śivatattvarahasya, pgs. 2–3.

[6]:

See Schwartz (2010, 54–58), for a discussion of Rāmānuja’s commentary on this passage and its continuities with the interpretive practices of the early Dharmaśāstrins.

[7]:

See below for further discussion.

[8]:

tad evaṃ vaktus tāmasatvadoṣāt, śrutivirodhāt, svavyāghātāt, svoktā rthasya pramāṇatvābhimatapurāṇāntarān anugṛhītatvāt, laiṅgasyādau.... viśeṣaniṣṭhapraśnopakrameṇa pravṛtatayā liṅgamāhātmyavarṇanāgrahasya spaṣṭatvāt, kaurmādiṣu naṣṭakośatvaprasiddheḥ, ativistṛtatayā ca sarveṣāṃ prakṣepaśaṅkāsaṃbhavāc ca śiva purāṇānāṃ na prāmāṇyaṃ saṃbhavati. viṣṇupurāṇānāṃ tu sarvaprakāreṇāpy uktavaiparītyāt prāmāṇyam asti. Śivatattvarahasya, pg. 5.

[9]:

The only previous occurrence I have located for this particular term, naṣṭakośa, appears in Vedānta Deśika’s Śatadūṣaṇī: yāni cānyāni vākyāni saṃpratipannaśrutismṛtiṣv adṛśyamānāni svācārānurūpamataparicaryayā keṣucid aprasiddheṣu vā naṣṭakośeṣu vā anirūpitamūlāgreṣu vā purāṇeṣu prakṣipya paṭhanti pāpiṣṭhāḥ tāni pratyakṣaśrutyādipar iśīlanaśālinīṣu gariṣṭhagoṣṭhīṣunāvakāśaṃ labhante. I thank David Brick for drawing my attention to this citation. Kośa, as a term for “manuscript” or “copy,” was in active use in the Śrīvaiṣṇava circles preceding Vedānta Deśika (Cox 2016).

[10]:

yad apy uktaṃ kaurmādiṣu naṣṭakośatvaprasiddher iti, tad apy asāram; tathā hi—yeyaṃ ṣaṭsahasragranthātmikā brāhmī saṃhitā pracarati, sā na naṣṭaiva;mātsyavacanāvagatasaptadaśasahasrīmadhye brahmasaṃhitātirikto yo ‘yam ekādaśasahasragranthātmako bhāgaḥ sa naṣṭa iti cet, astu, ko netyāha; na hi vayaṃ tatratyāni vacanāny udāharāmaḥ. śrūyamāṇā tu yā saṃhitā na tasyāṃ taditaranāśaprayuktaṃ kiṃcid atiśaṅkābījam asti. taditarabhāgasya naṣṭatayā anayāpi saṃhitayā tadvad eva naṣṭayā bhavitavyam, kasyacil lope kasyacid alope ca niyāmakābhāvāt; śrūyamāṇā tu kenacit kalpiteti syād anāśvāsa iti cet, na, aprayojakatvāt—na hi kenacil luptam iti sarveṇa loptavyam, kenacid vā sthitam iti sarveṇa sthātavyam, na khalu aindrādivyākaraṇanāśanimittas tilamātro ‘py anāśvāsaḥ pāṇinīye tava vā mama vāsti. kiṃ ca, evaṃ sati viṣṇupurāṇe ‘pi mātsyavacanāvagatatrayoviṃśatisahasrīmadhye saptadaśasahasrīnāśaprayukto vidyamānaṣaṭsahasryām anāśvāso duṣparihara evāpatet. Śivatattvarahasya, pgs. 19–20.

[11]:

As it so happens, Nīlakaṇṭha’s opponent’s instincts in this case are sound, as nearly half of the text that constitutes the published Liṅga Purāṇa is a direct adaptation of an eleventh-century paddhati of the Śaiva Siddhānta composed by the Śaiva Ācārya and Maṭhādhipati Somaśambhu, a work that sets out to systemize Śaiva ritual practices within a conceptual framework that differs substantively from what one typically finds in the Purāṇic sources.

[12]:

Śivatattvarahasya, pgs. 17–19.

[13]:

Casaubon’s theological agenda, in fact, is spelled out explicitly in the title of this work (1630), presented in the form of historical philology: The originall of popish idolatrie, or The birth of heresies Published under the name of Causabon [sic], and called-in the same yeare, upon misinformation. See also Grafton (1994) for further discussion of Casaubon’s philological and theological contributions.

[14]:

yad apy uktam viṣṇupurāṇaṃ prati śivapurāṇoktadoṣasaptakarāhityāt tat pramāṇam iti, tatra pratijñāṃśa ekaḥ sādhuḥ, hetvaṃśas tu na parīkṣākṣamaḥ.... yat tāvad uktam vaktus tāmasatvadoṣād iti, tad evāsiddham; tathā hi purāṇānāṃ ko vaktety abhimānaḥ. caturmukha ity uktam eveti cet, satyam uktam; tad eva tu tvaduktaṃ bhavadbhrāntikalpitam;sāttvikādidurvibhāgakathanābhijñena bhavataiva pramāṇatayābhyupagate mahābhārata eva śāntiparvaṇi rājadharme śiva eva sarvapurāṇānām ādivaktety uktatvāt.... ity anuktapurāṇasamuccayārthakacakāravatyā śrutyā sargādyakāle śivāl labdhānāṃ purāṇānāṃ pravaktā paraṃ caturmukha iti siddhatvena tasya purāṇapraṇetṛtvāsiddheḥ. na ca pravaktus tamobhibhāvo doṣāya; tasya praṇetṛdoṣavatprabandhāprāmāṇyānāpā dakatvāt, anyathāsma dādipaṭhitavedavākyāni aprāmāṇy āpatteś ca.... yac coktam—svavyāghātād aprāmāṇyam iti, tad apy etenaiva nirākṛtam, nārāyaṇād rudrotpattiḥ guṇirudraviṣayā, trimūrtīnām utpa ttis tu paramśivaviṣayeti vyavasthābhiprāyakatayā svavyāghātagandhasyāpy abhāvāt.

[15]:

See below for more details on the Īśavilāsa and on the identity of its author.

[16]:

yasyājñayā jagatsraṣṭā viriñcaḥ pālako hariḥ | saṃhartā kālarudrākhyo namas tasmai pinākine || Īśavilāsa of Appayya Dīkṣita, fol. 1.

[17]:

triumūrtibhinnaṃ śivam advayaṃ ca śrutyantavedyaṃ nikhilaprapañce | sṛṣṭyādihetuṃ satataṃ namāmi vighnaughaśāntyai sakalam śaraṇyam || Madhvamukhacapeṭikā, VORI 6922; Madhvatantracapeṭikāvyākhyāna of Tirumalācārya, GOML, Madras, Ms. No. R. 2263b, fol. 1.