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Viṣṇu Yāmala

Vaiṣṇava — the gateway to Pāñcarātra: the vyūhas, the consecrated image, the three jewels among the Saṃhitās, and the long argument over whether the tradition is orthodox.

The Vaiṣṇava member of the seven, and the doorway to a tantric literature that most readers never encounter as tantra at all — because it is performed daily, in public, in some of the largest temples in India, by priests who would not describe themselves with the word.

Pāñcarātraपाञ्चरात्र

Vaiṣṇava tantra — the Pāñcarātra Saṃhitās — mirrors the Śaiva Āgama in structure while differing entirely in content. The same fourfold division of subject matter into jñāna, yoga, kriyā and caryā: doctrine, yoga, ritual and conduct. The same dependence on initiation rather than birth for the right to practise. The same elaborate apparatus for consecrating temples and images, and the same insistence that the apparatus works.

The name is not settled. The derivations offered include the five-night sacrifice of Nārāyaṇa described in Vedic ritual literature, a teaching given over five nights, a system with five subjects, and — polemically — a knowledge beside which the five rival systems are night. The tradition itself preserves several of these without choosing, which is usually a sign that the original sense was lost early.

Its own historical claim reaches back to the Nārāyaṇīya section of the Mahābhārata and to the Bhāgavata religion attested epigraphically before the common era. The Saṃhitās as texts are much later than that; the tradition of a hundred and eight of them is a conventional count, and over two hundred titles are actually known, with no two lists agreeing.

The five forms

The distinctive architecture of Pāñcarātra theology is a graded series of forms in which the one God makes himself available, each less remote than the last:

Paraपर

The supreme form, Para-Vāsudeva in Vaikuṇṭha, possessing all six divine qualities in full and accessible only to the liberated.

Vyūhaव्यूह

The four emanations by which creation, dissolution and scripture are administered.

Vibhavaविभव

The descents — the avatāras, listed at thirty-eight or thirty-nine in the standard enumerations, entering history at particular moments.

Antaryāminअन्तर्यामिन्

The inner controller, present within each soul as its witness and support.

Arcāअर्चा

The consecrated image in the temple or the household shrine — the most accessible form, and the most philosophically startling.

The order matters: it descends from the least available to the most, and it is the last term that carries the tradition's real theological weight.

The vyūhasव्यूह

God possesses six qualities — jñāna knowledge, aiśvarya lordship, śakti potency, bala strength, vīrya virility, tejas splendour. Para-Vāsudeva holds all six unrestrictedly. Each vyūha manifests two of them predominantly, and takes charge of a department of the cosmos:

The four names are those of Kṛṣṇa's own family in the epic and Purāṇic accounts — Kṛṣṇa himself as Vāsudeva, his brother Balarāma as Saṅkarṣaṇa, his son Pradyumna, his grandson Aniruddha. A theology of emanation has been built on a genealogy, and the tradition does not conceal it. Below the four, most Saṃhitās elaborate a further set of twelve sub-emanations, the vyūhāntaras, whose names are those recited in the daily Vaiṣṇava liturgy.

The image that is inhabited

The arcā-avatāra doctrine is where Pāñcarātra is at its most distinctive and least like anything in Western religious categories. The consecrated image is not a symbol of the god, not a reminder of him, not a focus for the worshipper's attention. It is a genuine descent — a form God assumes, voluntarily and out of accessibility, submitting himself to being bathed, dressed, fed, put to bed and woken.

The doctrine explains the exactness of the ritual manuals. If the image is inhabited, then the rites of installation that bring about the inhabiting must be performed correctly, the daily services owed to a present person must be rendered on time, and the consequences of error are not aesthetic. It also explains the tradition's theology of divine humility: that God should make himself dependent on the priest who feeds him is treated as the furthest reach of his accessibility, not as a concession to human weakness.

The principal Saṃhitās

Jayākhya, Pauṣkara and Sāttvata are traditionally the three jewels, the ratna-traya, and are among the oldest texts of the corpus. To them are added the Ahirbudhnya Saṃhitā, the fullest source for the doctrine of śakti and for the Sudarśana mantra and its ritual; the Lakṣmī Tantra, in which the Goddess speaks in the first person and which is the strongest Vaiṣṇava statement of the divine as active feminine power; and the Pārameśvara, Pādma and Īśvara Saṃhitās, which are heavily used in temple practice.

These are not antiquarian documents. The Pāñcarātra Saṃhitās govern living worship at Śrīraṅgam and across the Śrīvaiṣṇava south, and the specific ritual programme of a given temple can generally be traced to a specific Saṃhitā.

Dating, and the modern study of the corpus

No Pāñcarātra Saṃhitā carries a date, and none names an author whose life can be fixed. What can be done is relative. The texts quote and presuppose one another, so an order can be established among them; and the Śrīvaiṣṇava theologians who defend them can be dated, which supplies a floor below which a Saṃhitā they cite must already have existed.

On that footing the three jewels are generally placed in the second half of the first millennium, with the Sāttvata and the Pauṣkara among the earliest and the Jayākhya often assigned to about the seventh or eighth century. The Ahirbudhnya Saṃhitā and the Lakṣmī Tantra are usually reckoned later — the tenth century or after — though earlier positions have been argued for the Ahirbudhnya in particular. None of these datings is secure, and the range proposed for a single Saṃhitā can span three or four hundred years. The relative statements are the ones worth relying on; the absolute ones are estimates.

The modern study of the corpus begins with F. Otto Schrader's Introduction to the Pāñcarātra and the Ahirbudhnya Saṃhitā, published at the Adyar Library in 1916, which reconstructed the theology of the vyūhas and of śakti from the Ahirbudhnya and set the terms in which the system has been discussed since. Schrader's readings have been corrected in detail by later work, and later work still positions itself against them. Sanjukta Gupta's translation of the Lakṣmī Tantra (1972) put the corpus's strongest statement of the divine as active feminine power into a modern language in full, and remains the usual entry to it for readers without Sanskrit.

Editorial work on the Saṃhitās has been uneven and is far from complete. Several of the principal texts were printed in Indian series during the first half of the twentieth century, and a number of temple-practical Saṃhitās have been edited in the south because the rites they prescribe are still performed; a great many titles known from the lists have never been edited at all, and some are known only as names. The situation is closer to that of the Śaiva Āgamas than to that of the Vedānta commentaries — which is to say that the literature is large, living, and only partly published.

The Vaikhānasa contrast

Pāñcarātra is not the only Vaiṣṇava temple tradition, and the difference between it and its rival is instructive about what makes a tradition tantric. The Vaikhānasas trace themselves to the sage Vikhanas and claim a direct Vedic affiliation through the Taittirīya branch of the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda. Their priesthood is hereditary and their qualification is conferred before birth, by a rite performed on the mother; they have historically rejected the Pāñcarātra requirement of dīkṣā as the gateway to service.

The consequences run through everything: a different fourfold form of the deity in the sanctum, a different liturgy, a different theory of the priest's authority. Both traditions serve major temples — Tirumala is Vaikhānasa, Śrīraṅgam Pāñcarātra — and the rivalry between them was sharp and sometimes litigious. The point for the present purpose is that initiation, not deity, is what places Pāñcarātra in the tantric family and leaves Vaikhānasa outside it.

The argument over orthodoxy

Because Pāñcarātra rests on revealed scripture other than the Veda, it had to answer the charge that it stood outside the Vedic fold. The charge was formal: the Brahmasūtras contain a short section on the doctrine of the Bhāgavatas — the sūtras are numbered slightly differently in different commentaries — and Śaṅkara, whom modern scholarship generally places in the eighth century, reads it as a refutation, on the ground that the Pāñcarātra makes a soul, Saṅkarṣaṇa, arise from another being, which no orthodox system may allow.

Yāmunācārya, the Śrīvaiṣṇava teacher of the generation before Rāmānuja and conventionally placed at c. 1000, answers at length in the Āgamaprāmāṇya, "the authoritativeness of the Āgama" — one of the more formidable pieces of sustained argument in the tradition. He contends that the Pāñcarātra was taught by God himself and is therefore of higher standing than a merely human composition; that the Bhāgavatas who follow it are not a separate caste outside the fold but brahmins; and that a scripture is not disqualified by lying outside the Vedic canon if what it teaches does not contradict it.

Rāmānuja, whose traditional dates are 1017 to 1137, takes the argument into the Śrībhāṣya and simply reverses Śaṅkara's reading of the same sūtras: the section is a defence of the Pāñcarātra, not a refutation, and the objectionable doctrine of an originated soul is not what the Pāñcarātra teaches. He is also credited with reorganising the worship at Śrīraṅgam, and a short manual of daily worship is transmitted under his name. After him the question is settled for the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, and Pāñcarātra becomes the ritual expression of a school that is unambiguously part of the Vedāntic mainstream.