Agamas & Tantras

The Vedas grew up around the sacred fire. But the worship most Hindus know today — an image in a temple, bathed, dressed, fed and shown the lamp — is hardly found in the Veda at all. Its scriptures are the Āgamas and Tantras: a vast literature, composed from around the middle of the first millennium CE, that teaches how to build a temple, bring the divine into an image, worship it day by day, and initiate a disciple into mantra and meditation. The Map of the Texts gave them one shelf. This page takes the books down.

Three names for one library

The same kind of text goes by different names in different traditions:

The boundaries are loose. A Shaiva “Āgama” and a Śākta “Tantra” may teach very similar rituals. What unites them is that they present themselves as a revelation beyond or alongside the Veda, given by Shiva, Vishnu or the Goddess, and centred on initiation, mantra and worship.

The twenty-eight Śaiva Āgamas

Shaiva Siddhanta, the main Shaiva theology of the Tamil country, recognises twenty-eight principal Āgamas, said to have been revealed by Shiva from his five faces. Ten are called Śaiva — the Kāmika, Yogaja, Cintya, Kāraṇa, Ajita, Dīpta, Sūkṣma, Sahasra, Aṃśumat and Suprabheda — and eighteen Raudra, among them the Vijaya, Svāyambhuva, Raurava, Makuṭa, Kiraṇa and Vātula. Each has secondary texts (upāgamas) attached to it. Of the twenty-eight, the Kāmika and the Kāraṇa are the ritual handbooks most used in Tamil Shiva temples today, together with later priestly manuals (paddhatis) such as Aghoraśiva’s, written at Chidambaram in the 12th century.

Historians add that the oldest surviving Shaiva scriptures, such as the Niśvāsa, date from around the 5th–6th centuries, and that many Āgamas in the forms now used in the south were reworked over the following centuries. The names are old; the texts kept growing.

The Tamil Shaiva saint Tirumūlar, whose Tirumantiram is part of the Tamil Shaiva canon, put the relation of the two scriptures in a single line:

Four quarters of an Āgama

Ideally an Āgama has four parts, or pādas: knowledge (vidyā or jñāna), ritual (kriyā), yoga, and conduct (caryā). Few surviving Āgamas have all four complete; the ritual quarter is usually by far the largest. Shaiva Siddhanta turned the four into a ladder of spiritual life, climbed from conduct to knowledge. Shaiva Siddhanta view

1. Caryā चर्या — the servant’s wayServing the temple: sweeping, gathering flowers, lighting lamps. Tamil tradition takes the saint Appar as its model.
2. Kriyā क्रिया — the son’s wayWorship in full ritual form, with mantra and offering — loving God as a child loves a parent. Its model is Sambandar.
3. Yoga योग — the friend’s wayInner worship and meditation, intimate as friendship. Its model is Sundarar, who called Shiva his comrade.
4. Jñāna ज्ञान — the true wayKnowledge of God, soul and bondage that ends in union through grace. Its model is Māṇikkavācakar.

The Vaishnava Āgamas

Vishnu temples follow one of two Āgamic traditions, both introduced on the Map of the Texts.

Pāñcarātra is the larger: tradition counts 108 Saṃhitās, and three — the Sātvata, Pauṣkara and Jayākhya — are honoured as its “three gems.” It teaches that God exists in five ways: in his supreme form, in four emanations (vyūhas), in his avatars, as the inner controller of every heart, and in the consecrated temple image, the arcā — a real presence, not a symbol. Srirangam and most Śrīvaiṣṇava temples follow it. When orthodox critics called Pāñcarātra un-Vedic, the teacher Yāmuna defended it in his Āgamaprāmāṇya (“The Authority of the Āgamas”), and Ramanuja’s school accepted it fully.

Vaikhānasa traces itself to the sage Vikhanas and presents itself as wholly Vedic, rooted in the Taittirīya branch of the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda. Its priests are hereditary and serve at Tirumala (Tirupati) and many other temples.

The Goddess and the Śrī Yantra

The Śākta Tantras centre on the Goddess as Śakti, supreme power. The most influential living Śākta tradition is Śrī Vidyā, the worship of the Goddess as Lalitā Tripurasundarī, “the playful one, beautiful in the three worlds.” Its mantra is the fifteen-syllable pañcadaśī, given only at initiation, and its great hymns are the Lalitā Sahasranāma and the Saundaryalaharī, traditionally ascribed to Shankara.

Its sacred diagram is the Śrī Yantra or Śrī Cakra: nine interlocking triangles — four pointing up for Shiva, five pointing down for Śakti — forming forty-three smaller triangles around a central point, the bindu, enclosed by lotus petals and a square gateway. To worship it is to travel inward, enclosure by enclosure, to the point where the Goddess and Shiva are one. A yantra is not a picture of the deity but, for the initiate, a form of the deity. The Śrī Cakra is worshipped at the Shankara monastery of Sringeri, at the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham (which claims the same descent, though the claim is disputed) and at the Kāmākṣī temple in Kanchi.

What the Āgamas govern

Open almost any Āgama and you will find rules for:

• The temple — choosing and testing the site, the ground plan as a body of the divine, the tower and sanctum (alongside the architectural śilpa texts).
• The image — its proportions, and its consecration through prāṇa-pratiṣṭhā, “installing the life-breath,” after which the stone or bronze is the deity’s living presence.
• Daily worship — the pūjā offered at fixed times of day, up to six in great temples.
• Festivals — the flag-hoisting, processions, chariot festival and closing bath of the annual utsava.
• Initiation — dīkṣā, by which a guru purifies a disciple and gives the right to worship with mantra. Many Āgamas open it to all four varṇas, and some to women, more widely than Vedic rites — though temple priesthood stayed hereditary.
• The tools of worship — mantra, yantra, mudrā (sacred hand-gestures) and nyāsa (placing mantras on the body).

Here is a simplified outline of an Āgamic pūjā. Seeker’s synthesis Real sequences are far longer and differ between Āgamas; tap through:

Āgamic temples, from Tamil Nadu to Malaysia

The great temples of Tamil Nadu — Madurai, Thanjavur, Tiruvannamalai — are Āgamic temples (Chidambaram, with its own Vedic-rite priests, is a famous exception), and so are most Malaysian ones. Their priests, the gurukkaḷ or Śivācāryas, are trained in Āgamic ritual, and many Malaysian temples bring priests from Tamil Nadu or Sri Lanka for this reason.

The most visible Āgamic rite in Malaysia is the kumbhābhiṣekam: the consecration of a new or renovated temple, when sanctified water from pots (kumbha), charged by days of fire-rites and mantra, is poured over the tower finials and the deities. It is customarily repeated about every twelve years, and draws thousands of devotees. Community practice

Who may be a temple priest has become a public question. In Tamil Nadu, a long legal and political debate over appointing trained priests from all castes to Āgamic temples has run for decades, and still divides opinion.

What “Tantra” is — and isn’t

Mention “Tantra” in the West and many people think of sex. Modern Western reading That idea is largely a 20th-century creation — the “neo-Tantra” of popular books and workshops, which borrowed a word and a mystique from India and attached them to sexual self-help.

The actual Tantric literature is overwhelmingly about ritual, mantra, yantra, initiation, meditation and theology: how the one divine power unfolds as the universe, and how a disciple may return to it. Some lineages — the Kaula and “left-hand” schools — did include transgressive rites using wine, meat and sexual union, meant to break the practitioner’s bondage to purity and impurity. They existed and should not be hidden. But they were secret, restricted to a few initiates, and often reinterpreted symbolically by later teachers; Śrī Vidyā’s mainstream samaya school rejects them for outward practice. For most Hindus, Tantra simply means the temple and the guru’s mantra.

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Sources & further reading

• Richard H. Davis, Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshipping Śiva in Medieval India (Princeton University Press, 1991).
• Teun Goudriaan & Sanjukta Gupta, Hindu Tantric and Śākta Literature (A History of Indian Literature, vol. 2, fasc. 2, Harrassowitz, 1981).
• André Padoux, The Hindu Tantric World: An Overview (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
• Douglas Renfrew Brooks, Auspicious Wisdom: The Texts and Traditions of Śrīvidyā Śākta Tantrism in South India (SUNY Press, 1992).
• Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (University of California Press, 2003).
• H. Daniel Smith, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Printed Texts of the Pāñcarātrāgama (2 vols, Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1975–80).
• Alexis Sanderson, “The Śaiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism during the Early Medieval Period,” in Shingo Einoo (ed.), Genesis and Development of Tantrism (Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, 2009).