RITUAL DYNAMICS ANDTHE SCIENCE OF RITUAL Volume II

Harrassowitz

Ritual Dynamicsand the Science of Ritual

General EditorAxel Michaels

Editorial BoardMichael Bergunder, Jorg Gengnagel, Alexandra Heidle,

Bernd Schneidmiiller, and Udo Simon

II

2010

Harrassowitz Verlag· Wiesbaden

Body, Performance,Agency, and Experience

Including an E-Book-Version in PDF-Formaton eD-ROM

Section IRitual and Agency

Edited by Angelos Chaniotis

Section IIRitual, Performance, and Event

Edited by Silke Leopold and Hendrik Schulze

Section IIIThe Body and Food in RitualEdited by Eric Venbrux,

Thomas Quartier, and Joanna Wojtkowiak

Section IVThe Varieties of Ritual Experience

Edited by Jan Weinhold and Geoffrey Samuel

2010

Harrassowitz Verlag· Wiesbaden

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Publication of this volume has been made possible by the generous fundingof the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Cover: The young Louis XIV in the role of Apollo, in the Ballet »Royal de Ie Nuit"by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1653), drawing, after 1653.Original in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France.Picture credits:: »bpk IRMN IBulloz"

Table of Contents

Section I: Ritual and Agency

Edited by Angelos Chaniotis

Angelos ChaniotisIntroduction:Debating Ritual Agency u u u _

Alexis SandersonRitual for Oneself and Ritual for Others u u uu _

3

9

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For further information about our publishing program consult ourwebsite http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de© Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden 2010This work, including all of its parts, is protected by copyright.Any use beyond the limits of copyright law without the permissionof the publisher is forbidden and subject to penalty. This appliesparticularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storageand processing in electronic systems.Printed on permanent/durable paper.Printing and binding: Memminger MedienCentrum AGPrinted in GermanyISBN 978-3-447-06202-2

Thomas WidlokWhat is the Value ofRituals?Effects ofComplexity in Australian Rituals and Beyond hu h__ 21

Christian MeyerPerforming Spirits:Shifting Agencies in Brazilian Umbanda Rituals 0. 0. 0.___ 35

Claudia WeberPrescribed Agency - A Contradiction in Terms?Differences between the Tantric adhikara Conceptand the Sociological Term ofAgency hh u_________________________ _ 59

Section II: Ritual, Performance, and Event

Edited by Silke Leopold and Hendrik Schulze

Andrea TaddeiMemory, Performance, and Pleasure in Greek Rituals 0.0.___ 87

Reinhard StrohmMemories ofAncient Rituals in Early Opera

U_

h hh109

Angela BelliaMusic and Rite:Representations ofFemale Figures ofMusicians in Greek Sicily(Sixth-Third Centuries B.C.) u uu uU hu_ 127

Alexis Sanderson

Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others

During the early medieval period of the Indic world, from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries, the old ritual order based on the archaic Vedic tradition became progres-sively complemented and overshadowed by another, developed and propagated by devotees of the god iva. In the first centuries of the Christian era the activities of these theistic sectarians were mostly restricted to brahmin celibate ascetics; but around the beginning of our period we find the first evidence that aivism had developed new forms that had moved beyond these narrow confines to propagate themselves in the broader society, creating in this process a new repertoire of ritu-als. This new aivism is known in Indian sources as the Mantram rga or �“Path of Mantras�”, as opposed to the purely ascetic �“Atim rga�” or �‘Path Outside the World�’ of the preceding period. The Indological term Tantric aivism may also be used to refer to it, though I prefer to avoid this expression, because the term Tantric has be-come contaminated by notions that apply only to certain forms that were mostly outside the mainstream of the Mantram rga.

By the seventh century, the Mantram rga had emerged into a position of domi-nance, attracting widespread royal patronage, and from this time onwards exerted a profound influence on all the other religious systems that had to compete with it for patronage: ktism, Saurism, Vai avism, Buddhism, Jainism, and the long estab-lished Brahmanical substrate. ktism and Saurism were largely subsumed by ai-vism as it rose to prominence; and Vai avism, Buddhism, and Jainism reacted by developing new ritual systems along aiva lines: Pañcar tra, the Buddhist Mantra-naya, and the Jain Mantrav da. The Brahmanical tradition was also deeply influ-enced, responding to aivism�’s success by incorporating, and to some extent ex-purgating, forms of aivism in its ever-growing corpus of scriptural texts.

The aiva literature, which we are still in the process of discovering, comprises in the first instance a huge body of scriptural compositions from the fifth or sixth century onwards, teaching the procedures for the propitiation of iva and, in more esoteric and transgressive texts, of the god Bhairava and a variety of ferocious god-desses, worshipped either as Bhairava�’s consort or on their own. From the seventh century onwards, but in much greater abundance from the ninth, there emerged a learned tradition of commentaries on what were then the principal works of this scriptural corpus, and this was supplemented by the production of lucid, practical guides, which set out systematically the procedures of ritual, claiming to be rooted

Alexis Sanderson 10

in this or that scripture, but in reality drawing eclectically on various scriptural sources, developing their own standardised procedures, and, to a large extent, shift-ing the emphasis of those texts, as well as homogenising their content.

When I entered this terra incognita in the 1970s, the learned literature of com-mentary and systematisation was the natural starting point of my investigations, since, for all its shortcomings, it provided the only avenue of access to what was then a largely impenetrable mass of discordant scriptural texts and manuals, a mass which was, in fact, much vaster than I then imagined. Many works which seemed to have been lost, being known only by name or through citations in the learned commentaries, and many others besides, were still awaiting recognition in manus-cript collections, principally in the Kathmandu valley, where the climate has been much kinder to palm-leaf than in other parts of the subcontinent, allowing the sur-vival of numerous manuscripts copied in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and some from the ninth and tenth.

The world of ritual presented in this exegetical literature of commentaries and ritual manuals, which was my starting point and remained the basis of most discus-sion of aivism until recent years, is one of rituals for personal religious benefit, performed or commissioned for the purpose of salvation at death, conceived not as the attainment of some heaven, but the final cessation of rebirth through the attain-ment of liberation. The great selling-point of this religion was that it promised that this liberation could be attained effortlessly, by passing through a ceremony of init-iation in which iva himself, or Bhairava, or the Goddess, would destroy the soul�’s bonds, acting through the person of an initiated and consecrated officiant, who en-acted an elaborate sequence of rites in which the individual was introduced before the Ma ala of his initiation deity, freed of his bonds through the offering of many oblations into fire, and then united with his deity through a visualisation in which the officiant drew the candidate�’s soul into his own, and then raised it with his own up the central channel of his vital energy, and out through his cranial aperture to fuse it with the deity. Thereafter, the initiate was bound to observe a discipline which entailed the regular performance of a complex and time-consuming ritual of worship of his initiation deity, at least once a day and ideally thrice, until his death, combined with the regular study of scripture and the performance of yet more elaborate rituals on special occasions, both calendrically fixed and incidental. Here, then, was a religion for which ritual was everything. Ritual performed by an offi-ciant, while one remained a passive presence, would gain one the goal that other systems offered only at the cost of intense asceticism and disengagement from the social world. Thereafter one had only to perform regular rituals of worship until that goal, so far achieved in advance on a subliminal level, became fully manifest simply through the natural process of death.

However, since it was initiation itself that guaranteed salvation, the problem of maintaining commitment to this exacting routine between the time of initiation and

Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others 11

death was acute. Theoreticians strove to construct theoretical justifications for what appeared to be redundant, and I examined these strategies in 1995 in my study Meaning in Tantric Ritual. The problem was to keep alive a sense that these ob-ligatory rituals have a higher purpose than those of the brahmanical mainstream, which offered as justification for adherence to its own ritual obligations the realis-tic view that they were to be performed simply out of a sense of duty and adhe-rence to tradition, to avoid the sin of their omission, or, as we might wish to trans-late this, to maintain one�’s credentials as an observant member of one�’s caste. The most intellectually brilliant of the aiva theoreticans, the kta aiva exegetes of Kashmir in the ninth to eleventh centuries, adopted two strategies to this end. One was to read meaning into the rituals in such a way that their performance could be presented as a liturgical contemplation of the reality that would be realised at death, thereby opening up the possibility that an élite among initiates could, through their rituals, experience liberation here and now, without waiting for death; and the other was to support this mystical trend by insisting on the preservation of the transgres-sive and ecstatic elements of their tradition, such as the consumption of meat and wine and ritualised sexual intercourse as a means of activating an inner aesthetic of transcendence of the inhibited norms of brahmanical life, thereby resisting a well-documented trend to eliminate these elements as these traditions became routi-nised. But while these strategies make fascinating and, for some, inspiring reading, they were ultimately doomed to failure. They substituted knowing for doing in the first strategy, allowing the possibility of liberation in life through knowledge alone, and in the second by stressing that the purpose of the transgressive elements of ritu-al observance was to awaken an inner experience they opened the way to the sub-stitution of non-ritual and non-transgressive means of producing the same effect. In later centuries the brahmins of Kashmir among whom this kta aiva tradition had become dominant, duly abandoned all its rituals, thinking aiva but regressing on the level of rites to the received brahmanical traditions of their caste, reverting to the brahmanical duality of doing without knowing and knowing without doing.

How, then, one wonders, did aiva ritual survive, as it did, outside this commu-nity, whose literature forms such a conspicuous part of high aiva culture? What is it that set that community apart, and how did aiva ritual succeed in exerting such a tremendous influence in early medieval India, affecting all the other religions, when the presentation of ritual in this learned literature with its high soteriological purpose seems to promise a very different trajectory? The purpose of the rest of my address is to propose answers to these questions.

Ritual for Others The difficulty arises from the fact that the élite literature which has formed our natural point of entry into the study of aivism provides an entirely inadequate

Alexis Sanderson 12

representation of the historical realities of the religion. It privileges the aivism of a social élite conforming to the brahmanical ideal of personal religious self-culti-vation, an élite whose social identity was already sufficiently established by its conformity to the brahmanical stratum of its observance, an élite for whom distinc-tively aiva ritual was a supererogatory adornment, rather than a necessity, and was therefore always in danger of evaporating in favour of a purely devotional or gnostic aiva identity. What kept aivism alive, and enabled it to exert this influ-ence, was ritual for others, as the professional activity of officiants who operated outside the narrow confines of self-cultivation. In the élite literature, the officiant is presented as a spiritual guide acting for the benefit of liberation-seekers. In the broader reality, revealed both by the aiva literature that has been coming to light in recent times and by the epigraphical record, aiva officiants were professional ritualists who, while insisting on the superior spiritual character of their religion, succeeded in modifying its core rituals to create a repertoire of ritual services that made it increasingly attractive to royal patrons. For these officiants, conformity to the post-initiatory discipline, however difficult it may have been to justify theoreti-cally, was a professional necessity. It was the visible, and therefore objective, proof of their qualification to apply modifications and elaborations of these rituals for the benefit of their clients; and it was equally vital for their disciples, who are best seen as officiants in waiting. For them, it was gnosis not ritual that was the supereroga-tory adornment. A reputation for learning and spiritual insight could greatly heigh-ten the appeal of an officiant to a royal patron, but Gurus who claimed that learning and insight were sufficient were the enemies of their profession. What mattered to these aivas was verifiable qualification, certificates of ritual entitlement bestowed by recognised officiants, rather than spiritual charisma based on unverifiable mys-tical experience, that threatened to undermine their pre-eminence. In extending their influence by these means, they showed little concern, as we might expect, to maintain the theoretical coherence of the doctrines of their faith, compromising this in several ways as they adapted their rituals to strengthen their hold on society. Accordingly, the traditionalist theoreticians, while no doubt fully aware of these developments, tend to keep them out of the picture that they present, addressing themselves to a learned élite that likewise held itself apart from these changes. They largely conceal from us, therefore, an outstanding example of how inventive and adaptable the propagators of ritual systems can be in the drive to extend the power, wealth, and influence of their faith, a creativity that in this case set in mo-tion waves of competitive innovation in the religions around them that completely changed the character of Indian religion and thence that of Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Far East. None is more striking than the astonishing efflorescence of Tantric Buddhism during this period, which, following the lead of the aivas, developed a system of rituals that eventually died out in India but survives to this day in Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, and Japan. But the Vai avas, too, made strenuous

Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others 13

efforts in this direction, producing an entirely new ritual system closely modelled on the aiva and enshrined in the scriptures of the Pañcar tra.

In a recently published study, entitled The aiva Age, I have set forth the inno-vations that brought aivism to its position of dominance during the early medieval period, both on the subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, and I have offered an hypo-thesis that seeks to explain this success, namely that it extended and adapted its ritual repertoire to legitimate, empower, or promote the key elements of the social, political, and economic process that characterises the early medieval period, while at the same time taking steps to integrate itself with the brahmanical substrate in ways that rendered it accessible and acceptable to a far wider constituency, and therefore all the more appealing to rulers in their role as the guardians of the brah-manical social order. I shall end by summarising these innovations.

Initiating the Monarch The first of these key elements is the spread of the monarchical model of govern-ment through the emergence of numerous new dynasties at subregional, regional, and supraregional levels. From the seventh century onwards, inscriptions and pre-scriptive religious texts reveal that aiva Brahmin Gurus were holding the position of royal preceptor (r jaguru ) in numerous new kingdoms, both on the Indian sub-continent and in Southeast Asia, and in this capacity empowering and legitimating the monarch�’s rule by granting him aiva initiation ( ivama alad k ). It might be thought that this would have been an unappealing step for any but the most reclusive and ineffectual of kings, since, as we have seen, after initiation aivas were obliged to adhere to a complex and time-consuming programme of daily and occasional rituals. However, early in the development of the Mantram rga, the ai-vas, no doubt in order to extend their recruitment and hence their influence, admit-ted a category of initiates who, in consideration of the fact that they were incapable of taking on these onerous duties, were exonerated from doing so. The king was considered to qualify for this less arduous route to liberation by reason of his royal obligations. He was therefore required to adhere only to the obligations of an unini-tiated devotee of iva, which in his case were principally to support the religion and its institutions, and to sponsor and appear in conspicuous ceremonies in the civic domain.

Moreover, according to prescriptive sources, the king�’s initiation was to be fol-lowed by a aiva modification of the brahmanical royal consecration ceremony. In this way the monarch was incorporated as a new kind of aiva office-holder: while others were to be consecrated for purely aiva functions, the king was to be conse-crated to take up office as the �“head of [the brahmanical social order of] the caste-classes and religious disciplines�” (var ramaguru ), the role already assigned to him by brahmanical prescription.

Alexis Sanderson 14

As the function of the aiva consecration is modified in this case, so its form, though in general aiva, incorporates distinctive non- aiva elements appropriate to its mundane and brahmanical aspects, such as the inclusion of the royal banners, weapons, and armour in the objects of worship.

Just as this brahmanical rite is subsumed within the aiva process of initiation and consecration, so its outcome, the king�’s entitlement to rule as guardian of the brahmanical social order, now entails the additional requirement that he should en-sure that the authority of brahmanical prescription be subsumed within, and subor-dinate to, that of the aiva scriptures, an injunction supported by the promise that, by enforcing this hierarchical relationship, he would guarantee the stability of his rule and kingdom, implying that by neglecting to do so he would bring about their collapse.

The aivas also adapted the theory of their ritual practice to enable them to claim that those rulers who underwent their initiation ceremony would be empo-wered in their efforts to maintain their supremacy and extend it through conquest, a blatant but effective amnesia of the rite�’s purely salvific character.

Nor was it only the theory that was adjusted to suit their patrons. The aiva Guru was to close the initiation ceremony by sprinkling the horses, elephants, cha-riots, and soldiers of the army with the water from the vase of the Weapon-Mantra (astrakala a ), one of the two main vases prepared in the course of the ceremony, �“in order to remove all obstacles and to ensure victory in battle�”. They also devel-oped an array of apotropaic, invigorative, and hostile Mantra-rites that could be performed on demand for the benefit of the realm, to promote the success of royal patrons, and to frustrate their enemies.

Just as the Guru imbued the king through these ceremonies with the numinous power of ivahood in the exercise of his sovereignty, so the aiva rites by which the Guru assumed his office ensured that he, as iva�’s agent among men, was im-bued with the numen of royalty. As in the brahmanical consecration of a king, in which the royal astrologer was to provide him with the royal elephant, horse, throne, parasol, fly-whisk, sword, bow, and jewels, so at the time of a Guru�’s consecration he received from his predecessor the non-martial symbols of sove-reignty (r j g ni, r jacihn ni), such as the turban, crown, parasol, fly-whisk, ele-phant, horse, palanquin, and throne. Furthermore, according to the prescriptions of the aiva scriptures, the residence to be built for the Guru by his royal disciple was in many respects similar in its layout to the royal palace. It included, for example, an arsenal for the storage of weapons of war. That Gurus should have needed the means of warfare may surprise those whose expectations are conditioned by the prescriptive literature. But on this point, as on many others, the epigraphical record shows the limitations that that literature imposes. For a twelfth-century inscription from the Kalacuri kingdom in Central India reveals that the activities of the R ja-guru K rti iva extended beyond the spiritual to those of a successful military com-

Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others 15

mander, who expanded his monarch�’s realm and thereby added to his own through the appropriation of temples in the territories gained.

Kings rewarded their aiva Gurus for initiations and other rituals with lavish gifts, most notably with grants of the revenue from designated lands and the dona-tion or construction of monasteries (ma ha ); and this largesse enabled these Gurus to behave like royal patrons themselves, making land-grants to brahmins and founding temples, new settlements, and further monasteries, thus facilitating the expansion of their institutions into new areas. In this way there developed a far-reaching network of interconnected seats of aiva learning. Figures at the summit of this clerical hierarchy therefore exercised a transregional authority whose geo-graphical extent was greater than that of any contemporary king.

Clearly the aiva R jaguru had become a far grander figure than the king�’s brahmanical chaplain, the R japurohita, who was tied to the service of a single king and was unambiguously his subordinate. Yet, it appears that the aivas did not rest with this, but sought also to encroach on the territory of that lesser office. For the Netratantra shows the existence of a new class of aiva officiants who were to function in almost all the areas traditionally reserved for that officiant: the perfor-mance of the king�’s recurrent duties to worship the various deities on the days as-signed to them, to celebrate the major annual royal festivals of the Indrotsava and Mah navam , to protect the royal family through rites to ward off ills, to restore them to health after illness, to ward off or counter the assaults of dangerous super-naturals, to empower through lustration (n r janam) the king�’s elephants, horses, and weapons of war, and to protect the king with apotropaic rites before he eats, sleeps, and engages in his regular practice of martial skills. We see here one of several instances in which the aivas used their authority to colonise downwards, producing modifications of their ritual procedures for this purpose. These adapa-tions inevitably entailed loss of status for those that implemented them, but we should understand that this did not affect those of the summit of the clerical hierarchy, the king-like R jagurus, but only the humbler clones that extended their authority into domains that those Gurus would not deign to enter.

The Consecration of Royal Temples The second element of the early medieval process that I have in mind is the pro-liferation of land-owning temples. All but the most ephemeral sovereigns during this period, both in the subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, gave material form to the legitimacy and solidity of their power by building grand temples in which images of their chosen God were installed, animated, named after the king (svan mn ), and endowed with land and officiants to support their cult. The great majority of these temples enshrined iva, in the form of the Li ga. The aivas of the Mantram rga soon extended their operations into this territory too, providing

Alexis Sanderson 16

the specialised officiants and rituals to establish these ivas following Mantra-m rgic models, and developing, in the course of time, a secondary body of scrip-tural authorities, the Prati h tantras, devoted exclusively to this domain.

The Temple Priesthood The involvement of the aivas of the Mantram rga in the temple cult, covered in early aiva scriptural sources and all the early manuals up to at least the twelfth century, does not extend beyond the performing of the rituals necessary to initiate the cult by consecrating the images and the temples that house them. The texts are silent on the nature of the worship that would be performed before those images once the aiva Guru had completed his task. It would appear, therefore, that the temple worship was in the hands of officiants of a different kind. However, the texts lagged behind reality in this regard. For at some point, well before the aiva literature was prepared to admit this fact, there had appeared yet another class of Mantram rgic officiants, working as the priests that performed the regular rituals in the aiva temples, a function that entailed a serious loss of status in the eyes of orthodox brahmins, who considered any brahmin who derived his living from serv-ing as a priest to have fallen from the caste of his birth.

The Consecration of Palaces, Settlements, and Irrigation Works The early aiva Prati h tantras show that the authority of the aiva Sth paka, the officiant who specialises in the installation of images and the consecration of temples, extended to the creation of the palaces of their royal patrons. They pre-scribe the layout of the royal palace in detail, and the design includes a section of the palace for teachers of the aiva Mantram rga. Moreover, the layout of the palace taught in these Prati h tantras is only part of the layout for an urban settle-ment to be established by the king around the palace, complete with markets and segregated areas for the dwellings of the various castes and artisans, with instruc-tions for the size and plan of these dwellings determined by caste status. Thus, we find the aivas involving themselves in what I consider to be the third key element of the medieval process, namely the creation of numerous new urban settlements from above. The epigraphical record demonstrates that any king of substance felt it incumbent upon him to demonstrate his sovereignty, not only by the building of temples, but also by the creation of new urban settlements (puram), which, like the deities he established, were generally named after him.

The creation of new settlements entailed the provision of the means of irriga-tion. Rituals for the consecration (prati h ) of wells (k pa ), step-wells (v p ), and reservoirs small (pu kari ) and large (ta ga ), were already provided by the

Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others 17

brahmanical tradition. There is no trace of irrigation rituals in the early aiva scrip-tures, including the Prati h tantras. But in due course aiva officiants, seeking to add this important domain to their ritual repertoire, produced their own versions.

Social Inclusivity The last respect in which I believe that the aiva Mantram rga can be seen to have played an active role in the historical process is that of the assimilation of the com-munities that were caught up in the extension of the reach of the state that characte-rises this period. For the aivas opened initiation to candidates from all four caste-classes, thus enabling the integration of powerful agriculturalist communities classed as dra, that were often dominant in the countryside, and providing a means of articulating a social unity that transcended, at least in certain contexts and to a greater or lesser extent, the rigid mutual exclusions of the brahmanical social order. Moreover, the non-Saiddh ntika traditions of the worship of Bhairavas and the Goddess, while perfectly adapted to support kings in the aggressive or punitive aspect of their function, also served as the means of assimilating the local deity-cults of the territories being drawn within this aiva-brahmanical culture through the expansion of state-formation at the subregional level; and while the Saiddh nti-kas came to initiate only members of those communities classed as dra who had already been assimilated by brahmanical culture to the extent that they had abjured alcohol, the kta aivas had no such reservations, opening initiation even to those that brahmanism considered untouchable.

The Integration of Brahmanism Finally, while extending its influence beyond the confines of the orthodox brahma-nical world, the aivism of the Mantram rga sought to guard itself against dissoc-iation from that world. It elaborated an inclusivist model of revelation that ranked other religious systems as stages of an ascent to liberation in aivism, the religion of the king manifest in his initiation, his consecration, and his royal temples, thus mirroring and validating the incorporative structure of the state�’s power. But though it thereby asserted, especially in its kta forms, the limited nature of the brahmanical observance that formed the lowest level and broad base of this hie-rarchy, it was careful to insist not only that the brahmanical scriptures that govern this observance are exclusively valid in their own domain, but also that their injunctions are as binding on aivas after their initiation as they were before it, if they remained in that domain as active members of society. aiva ascetics were allowed a degree of choice in this matter, at least in theory, but householders were not. The religion of the aivas, then, was not aivism alone, but rather aivism and

Alexis Sanderson 18

Brahmanism, a fact borne out not only by their literature, but also by biographical data and the epigraphic record of the activities of aiva kings.

Moreover, the determination of the aivism of the Mantram rga to be fully em-bedded in the brahmanical tradition is manifest not only in this rule that initiates should maintain their brahmanical obligations, but also in the fact that they ex-tended their own ritual repertoire in order to bring it into greater congruence with the brahmanical. To this end, they created a aiva ritual of cremation and a series of rituals to mirror the numerous brahmanical postmortuary rituals in which the deceased receives offerings first as a hungry ghost (pretakriy ) and then in r ddha rituals as an ancestor, after his incorporation with the immediate ascendants of his patriline (sapi kara am). It is clear that the creators of these additions were motivated by nothing but the desire to be seen to conform to the norms of brah-manical society, once they had moved to extend recruitment beyond the inevitably restricted circle of ascetics into the more numerous ranks of married householders. After all, these rituals, and especially the r ddhas, make no sense in strictly aiva terms, since initiates are held to attain liberation as soon as they leave their bodies, and therefore should require no ceremonies designed to ensure their well-being af-ter death. This accommodation of Brahmanism no doubt gave aivism a distinct advantage over those religions, such as Jainism and Buddhism, that had denied out-right the authority of the brahmanical scriptures, and there can be little doubt that this would greatly have increased its acceptability in the eyes of kings, who could thus draw on the power of the new religion to sanctify their rule and enhance their might �– the former predominantly through the Siddh nta, the latter predominantly through the akta aiva systems �– while at the same time maintaining their legiti-macy in their ancient role as the protectors of the brahmanical social order.

Conclusions As aivism advanced by developing these strategies, it achieved a transregional or-ganisation and a consequent standardisation of its rituals and doctrines; and this transregional uniformity, I propose, would have heightened its appeal to kings by enabling it more easily to be perceived as a transcendent means of legitimation, empowerment, and the integration of regional traditions, as an essential part of a pan-Indian socio-religious order that each kingdom sought to exemplify.

It was by virtue of its great success in attracting royal patronage that it came to exert such a pervasive influence on the religions around it; and it was also on the basis of this success that it could construct the impressive edifice of a literature that, in its focus on ritual for oneself, is almost entirely silent about these vital but less elevated rituals for others, with the consequence that scholars who have at-

Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others 19

tempted to read this literature have mostly neglected to look in and beyond it for evidence of the factors that enabled and sustained this high-cultural efflorescence.1

1 Most of the arguments presented here in outline have been presented by me in detail else-

where, cf. the bibliography.

Alexis Sanderson 20

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�— 2003�–2004. �“The �Šaiva Religion Among the Khmers (Part I)�”. Bulletin de l�’École française d�’Extrême-Orient 90�–91: 352�–464.

�— 2004. �“Religion and the State: aiva Officiants in the Territory of the Brahmanical Royal Chaplain with an Appendix on the Provenance and Date of the Netratantra�”. Indo-Iranian Journal 47: 229�–300.

�— 2007a. �“Swami Lakshman Joo and His Place in the Kashmirian aiva Tradition�”. In: Bettina Bäumer & Sarla Kumar (eds.). Sa vidull sa . New Delhi: D.K. Print-world: 93�–126.

�— 2007b. �“The aiva Exegesis of Kashmir�”. In: Dominic Goodall & André Padoux (eds.). Mélanges tantriques à la mémoire d�’Hélène Brunner. Pondicherry: Institut français d�’Indologie / École française d�’Extrême-Orient: 231�–442; 551�–582.

�— 2009. �“The aiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of aivism During the Early Medieval Period�”. In: Shingo Einoo (ed.). Genesis and Development of Tantrism. Tokyo: University of Tokyo: 41�–349.