Reference

About

Who publishes this, and on what footing.

Published by Swara Yoga Peeth Sansthan, Rishikesh.

What this is for

The Śaiva Āgama is the largest body of scripture in the Indian tradition that most people have never read a line of. Much of it has never been translated into any modern language; a good deal of what has been edited sits in specialist series, in libraries, and in discussions conducted in French and German. The aim here is narrow and, we hope, useful: the texts themselves, accurately given, with enough surrounding context that a reader can follow what they are looking at and can tell one tradition from another.

That means naming the text and the chapter for every passage; setting the Sanskrit beside the translation so that any rendering can be checked; giving the edition and the commentator where the reading is contested; and saying plainly when a text is fragmentary, when an attribution is doubtful, or when specialists disagree. Where a page states a doctrine, it also says whose doctrine it is — the Siddhānta and the Pratyabhijñā read the same scriptures to opposite conclusions, and flattening that disagreement would misrepresent both.

Why so much of what circulates is unreliable

Very little of this literature reached English through the tradition's own scholars. It reached it through a small number of late and untypical texts, translated a century ago, and from there into a popular genre that has been recycling itself ever since. The result is that verses circulate with no source at all, or attached to whichever title sounds most authoritative; that passages are composed and attributed to scriptures which do not contain them; and that traditions with genuinely incompatible doctrines are blended into a single vague system belonging to none of them. A reader without Sanskrit has no way to tell any of this from the real thing, which is precisely why it persists.

On authority

This is a reading resource. It makes no claim to initiatory authority over the material it presents, and it is not a substitute for a teacher. The texts themselves are emphatic on that point, and they are not being modest: in a tradition where transmission is the mechanism by which anything works at all, a book is a book. What can honestly be offered in this form is orientation — what the texts say, who wrote them, what they were arguing about, and where to read them properly. What cannot be offered in this form is the relationship in which they are actually studied.

On adhikāraअधिकार

One class of material is not published here: the ritual-operative chapters — mantroddhāra, the extraction of a mantra from its coded matrix; prayoga, the procedures of application; and the abhicāra rites of subjugation and harm with which the Narpati closes. This is not squeamishness and it is not an editorial preference. The tradition itself does not hand this material to the unprepared, and the reason it gives is its own: such practice is understood to act, and to act on whoever performs it as much as on anyone else.

The tradition's word for the criterion is adhikāra — fitness, entitlement, the standing to receive a particular teaching. It is not a matter of birth, and the Āgamas say so repeatedly and at length; it is a matter of preparation, and it is assessed and conferred by an ācārya who knows the person in front of him. That judgement cannot be made by a website, so it is not attempted here.

Everything else is open. All doctrine, all history, all translation, and every verse of scripture on these pages is free to read, with no account and no condition.