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Chapter 1 A Geographic Imaginary: the Skandapurāṇa, Lakulīśa, and the Localization of Tradition Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is com- pletely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. Edward Said1 ∵ The most archaic layer of the Skandapurāṇa (i.e. the one preserved in the Nepalese or S-recension, SPS)2 recounts the divine origins of the Pāśupata tradition and its subsequent expansion throughout northwest India. Framed by a series of māhātmyas that eulogize the Śaiva terra sancta writ large, the text’s authors designate a small region of northwest India as the ‘primor- dial Pāśupata landscape,’ a salvific region celebrated as the birthplace of the Pāśupata movement. The sanctity of this region is an effect of the presence of Lord Śiva himself: the authors report that in their present age, the Kali yuga, Śiva assumed a human form, as the teacher Lāguḍi (viz. Lakulīśa), and dis- seminated the Pāśupata doctrine via four students, each of whom presided over a prestigious locale in this sacred landscape—the storied cities of Ujjain, Mathurā, Jambumārga, and Kanauj. Articulated through the particular rhetorical and ideological framework of the literary genre of purāṇa, and its sub-genre, māhātmya, this literary can- onization of a Pāśupata geography records an authoritative effort to localize, order, and authenticate a particular vision of community and thus records 1 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 7. 2 Detailed analysis of the interrelationships between the manuscripts of the S-recension and formation of the text corpus is given in Yuko Yokochi’s Introduction to SP III, 30–55. On the editorial practices and principles that guide the ongoing edition and the manuscript tradition(s) see SP I, 36–38, 41–44; SP IIA, 10–12. On the composition and transmission of the text see Hans T. Bakker, The World of the Skandapurāṇa: Northern India in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 137–140. © Elizabeth A. Cecil, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004424425_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.Elizabeth A. Cecil - 9789004424425 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 10:00:51PM via free access 12 Chapter 1 a formative moment within the larger project of Pāśupata self-fashioning. But this narrative had far broader implications. The Skandapurāṇa’s cartog- raphy was a deeply political statement. The text’s claim to colonize a region that occupied the sociopolitical heart of northwest India presents an imagined geography—not a fanciful representation; rather, a spatial rhetoric aimed at locating the Pāśupata tradition at the center of the early medieval world. This process of localization served three discrete, yet intertwined aims: it presents a cosmological vision of a sanctified world or Śaiva hierotopy, provides a norma- tive model for community, and stakes a geopolitical claim. As a consideration of the unique temporality and historical contingency of this narrative history, this first chapter lays the necessary groundwork for the detailed regional case studies presented in the chapters that follow. These case studies use the Skandapurāṇa narrative as the occasion to examine other lay- ers of the sociocultural terrain, or ‘vernacular geographies’, within the map of the Pāśupata landscape that the text’s authors have drawn. In doing so, they initiate a detailed reconstruction of this area as a lived space in Early Medieval India (c. 6th–10th centuries CE). 1 The Narrative Frame Our story begins in a place called Kārohaṇa, identified with modern Karvan/ Kayavarohan in southwest Gujarat. Kārohaṇa was the center of a larger sacred region situated between the Mahī and the Narmadā rivers, and to the north of the Sahya Mountain, that was celebrated by the authors as the ‘primordi- al Pāśupata landscape’ (paśupateḥ kṣetraṃ purāṇam).3 It was here that Śiva is reported to descend to earth in every cosmic age. The avatāra of the cur- rent age is a teacher called Lāguḍi (viz. Lakulīśa, the ‘Lord with a Club’) who disseminated the Pāśupata doctrine via his four pupils, who are described as brahmins produced from Śiva’s four mouths. In the course of their wander- ings, the authors report that these agents of the Lord came to occupy some of the most vital cultural, political, and economic centers of Early Medieval India—Kauśika in Ujjain, Mitra in Mathurā, Gārgya in Jambumārga,4 and an unnamed brahmacārin in Kanauj [Figure 1]. By localizing the Pāśupata tradi- tion in this salvific kṣetra, the text’s authors offer an unprecedented new vision 3 SPS 167.136. See text below. 4 While the precise location of Jambumārga is debated, my research identifies it with the im- portant ancient settlement of Śākambharī located in the Salt Lakes region north of Puṣkara in modern Rajasthan. See Chapter 3. Elizabeth A. Cecil - 9789004424425 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 10:00:51PM via free access THE SKANDAPURĀṆA, LAKULĪŚA, and THE LOCALIZATION OF TRADITION 13 figure 1 The Pāśupata landscape of this region, one that participates in a comprehensive effort on their part to construct an entire landscape circumscribed and dominated by the memory of the Śaiva past. In this way, the text presents itself as an iconic geography, a map of great symbolic density that claims a Śaiva world.5 While this sacred kṣetra 5 I have adapted this term ‘iconic geography’ from Nancy Khalek’s discussion of medieval faḍāʾīl literature used to praise the sanctified spaces around Damascus. She describes these evocative literary sources as ‘iconic texts.’ In the case of the SP narrative, I think it is not only the text that is iconic, but the landscape as well. This region symbolizes the premier status Elizabeth A. Cecil - 9789004424425 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 10:00:51PM via free access 14 Chapter 1 is not the best known in the Śaiva canon—one might think first of Vārāṇasī, Himalayan locales, or the later networks of jyotirliṅgas—its anonymity vis-à-vis the received tradition suggests a particular historical contingency; that it was a response to the needs of certain members of the community at a particular moment in time. Those familiar with purāṇas and māhātmyas know that the creation and celebration of iconic geographies is part of the genre’s stock-in-trade. But among medieval India’s many literary constructions of sacred landscape, the SPS narrative is a significant cultural artifact and merits detailed attention. This geographic vision of Pāśupata origins is the earliest one known. It is also unique to the Skandapurāṇa (henceforth, SP).6 This text also marks the debut in the historical record of Lāguḍi as an ectype of Śiva. As obscure as this last point may seem on its face, this mention of a human teacher—whose name is derived from variant spellings7 of his signature club (lakula; laguḍa)—intro- duces a figure whose icons come to be emblematic of the Pāśupata tradition. The authors report that in their present time, Śiva ‘Lāguḍi,’ descended to the terrestrial plane in order to lead other brahmins to final beatitude.8 Through that the authors wish to ascribe to the religious community and its teachings. Nancy Khalek, Damascus After the Muslim Conquest: Text and Image in Early Islam (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 136–137. On the potential of maps to communicate social values see J.B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape, eds. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1988), 277–312 (278). 6 Kauṇḍinya’s Pañcārthabhāṣya on the Pāśupatasūtras mentions two of the places that also figure in the SPS version, but this account does not develop the geographic theme as does the purāṇa. According to Kauṇḍinya, who was writing in the 4th or 5th century, approxi- mately two hundred years earlier than the SPS authors, the Lord (bhagavān) took on the form of a male brahmin in Kāyāvatāraṇa (viz. Kārohaṇa) and in this human form he walked to Ujjain where he proclaimed the teachings of the Pāśupatasūtras. For further discussion of Kauṇḍinya’s account see, Hans Bakker, “The Gospel of Kauṇḍinya: The Descent of God in Gujarat and the Practice of Imitating God,” in Myths, Martyrs and Modernity: Studies in the History of Religions in Honor of Jan N. Bremmer, eds. Jitse Dijkstra, Justin Kroesen & Yme Kuiper (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 517–529 (517–518). 7 ‘Lāguḍiḥ’ is given in the S1 manuscript, which is the oldest dated manuscript. S2 gives ‘Lākulī’ which more closely approximates ‘Lakulīśa’, the spelling that becomes most common. 8 The SPS identifies Śiva as Lāguḍi only once in this account of the transmission of the Pāśupata doctrine. The other two recensions of the SP used by the editors in the critical edition (The Revā and Ambikā recensions—SPRA) never mention Lakulīśa, nor any established variant of the name. The appellation Laguḍīśvara appears in one other instance in SPS 167.169. In this passage, Laguḍīśvara and his pupils are referred to in connection with eight Śiva āyatanas in Magadha. In this case, however, the title is not explicitly made a name of Śiva; rather it suggests a reference to a distinct person. There is no parallel for this passage in SPRA. See Peter C. Bisschop, Early Śaivism and the Skandapurāṇa: Sects and Centres (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2006), 108; 218. The name Lakulīśa itself is not attested until the middle of the Elizabeth A. Cecil - 9789004424425 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 10:00:51PM via free access THE SKANDAPURĀṆA, LAKULĪŚA, and THE LOCALIZATION OF TRADITION 15 Lāguḍi and his pupils, the SP populated this sacred kṣetra with authoritative representatives of the tradition and, at the same time, elevated Kārohaṇa as the center of an expansive territory that occupied the heart of northwest India.

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