Alexis Sanderson

Religion and the State: Initiating the Monarch in Śaivism and the Buddhist Way of Mantras. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Ethno-Indology, Heidelberg Studies in South Asian Rituals 2.
 

“The Śaiva Sources of the Buddhist Yoginītantras: The Case of the Ritual of Initiation Taught in the Laghusamvara-tantra.” In: The Proceedings of the International Conference on Esoteric Buddhist Studies, Kōyasan, September, 2006. Handout from the lecture here.

“The Śaiva Age: An Explanation of the Rise and Dominance of Śaivism During the Early Medieval Period.” Developing a lecture given in the International Workshop on Tantrism, Institute of Oriental Culture, Tokyo, October, 2005. A handout that outlines the lecture and sets forth the hypothesis is here.

Śaivism and Brāhmanism in the Early Medieval Period

Expanded version of a text delivered as the 14th Gonda Lecture on 24 November 2006. To be published by the Gonda Foundation.

Abstract of the Lecture: The early medieval period from approximately the fifth to the thirteenth century of the Christian era saw Śaivism rise to pre-eminence throughout the Indic world; and this pre-eminence was backed by its theoreticians, who insisted both on the autonomous validity of the Śaiva scriptures and on their superiority to all others. In this sense, then, Śaivism considered Brahmanism, Vaishnavism, Buddhism, and Jainism, its principal competitors for favour, in the same light, as lower religions to be rejected by those who aspire to genuine salvation, and, by implication, as inferior means of accomplishing through rituals of propitiation those benefits which, though lower from the theological point of view, were no doubt more vital to the maintenance of patronage, such as the warding off dangers of all kinds from society and the state, the empowerment and protection of rulers, and the consecration of royal and other temples, palaces, new settlements, and works of irrigation. However, Śaivism assigned Brahmanism a special position among its rivals. For it insisted that the injunctions and prohibitions of the scriptures of that tradition, both Śruti and Smrti, are man’s sole means of valid knowledge of the actions that benefit and harm the soul’s destiny in the domain of recurrent incarnation, and required, moreover, that these non-Śaiva ordinances pertaining to religious life within the brahmanical order of the caste-groups and disciplines (varnāśrama-dharmah) were binding for Śaiva initiates, who were required to continue to live in strict conformity with them, merely adding their Śaiva obligations to those by which they were already bound. Only for Śaiva ascetics, living outside the mundane social order, was this requirement relaxed; and even they are seen in practice to have sustained for the most part this same co-existence by supporting brahmanical learning within their monastic centres. Alexis Sanderson will show in his lecture on the evidence of authoritative Śaiva sources, published and unpublished, how this compliant co-existence was envisaged and justified, how far this compliance was expected to go, and the role assigned to the monarch as the guardian of this Śaiva brahmanical order. He will then confront the prescriptive and theoretical evidence with that of the epigraphical record of the royal patronage of religion during this period. Among the unpublished sources used are Bha.t.ta Rāmaka.n.tha’s commentary on the Caryāpāda of the Matanga-pārameśvara, Vaktraśambhu’s commentary on Aghoraśiva’s Mrgendra-paddhati, and the Śaiva Pratisthā-tantra Mohacūdottara.

"The understanding of Śaivism can only aspire to objectivity if it includes a sincere effort to see how things are in the subjective perception of its practitioners. One has to be able to enter into the spirit of their world, to be with them intimately, to see what they are saying and why they are saying it, to go beneath the surface of their texts. There has to be empathy." - from an interview with A.G.J.S. Sanderson (see quotes page)