Temple Worship and Management - Learning From The Śaivāgama-s

Pandit Sivasri Sambanda Sivacharyar receiving the President's Award, 23 Mar 2015

A series of articles on temples, Śaivāgama-s and temple management has been gestating for a long time yet I wasn’t sure if I was the most qualified medium. With so many stalwart scholars, historians, speakers, researchers, what could I - an upstart learner - have to say that would be valuable? 

Valuable or not, today I throw self-doubt aside to honour a great academician, Śaivāgama scholar, President awardee and member of the prestigious Ordre des Palmes Académiques – the nonagenarian Pandit Sivasri Sambanda Sivacharya, who passed away a few hours ago, on the 16^th of June 2019.

After stints at the Theosophical Society, Government Oriental Manuscript Library Chennai, Saraswati Mahal Library Tanjavur, Thiruvananthapuram Library and Mysore Oriental Research Library, Sivasri Sambanda Sivacharya worked with the French Institute of Indology (now IFP) for decades, first collecting precious manuscripts door to door from all over South India along with the late Pandit N. R. Bhatt, helping build what is now a UNESCO Memory of the World Collection of Śaiva manuscripts and then helping to critically edit, translate and publish many of the Śaivāgama-s. He also established a printing press and published many books. To the end, he was  reading, editing, translating, mentoring and strategising to muster enough resources to publish as many of the āgama-s as he could.

He truly leaves a giant void – of vision, scholarship, dedication, hardwork and tapas. We are shaken. The only tribute that befits mama is one of furthering the public knowledge and appreciation of the āgama-s. And so today, on a Jyeṣṭha Pūrṇimā, with humble pranams at his feet, and that of my ancestors, my generous gurus and the many giant scholars who've paved the way, I begin. 

The recent public discussions in India around various issues around temples exposed what has been overlooked so far in our conversations about religion, rituals and temples – which is that us general public do not know even the basic tenets and frameworks of the religious institutions we participate in (and I say this without judgement), which by itself would perhaps only be a happy testament to the glorious tradition of ‘to each her own,’ if not for the unfortunate fact that those majority of us without a clue to the principles behind the structures, are quite eager to pass judgement based on what is most often a superficial reading of traditions that completely misses the spirit of the practice and therefore clutches at shadows in demonising, denouncing and redesigning what we didn’t even grasp to begin with, thereby jeopardising not just the quality of the religious experience of the measly span of our generation but more importantly, the very nature and practice of the belief systems of that critical and eternal entity called posterity.

While most “dhārmika-s” – both the tiny section who know the underpinnings of how the dharma works and the large majority who perhaps don’t really know but believe enough in the authenticity of the lived experiences of their ancestors before them and who therefore follow the dharma anyway, hoping it would reveal its Truths to them through the practice – have always been reluctant to stand up and speak against the dilution of their culture (unfortunately by the very same people who have the mantle of protecting, practising and carrying it forward), in the firm belief that the good Lord doesn’t need anyone to defend Him/ Her, they have in recent times, been more vocal in opposing forces that to them, seem to be carefully set up specifically to attack the perceived vulnerabilities of an ancient way of life. On the other hand are people misapplying secular principles to a religious question.

However, the arguments back and forth while increasingly strident, don’t seem to serve the purpose of communicating  – each to the other. This is primarily because both parties are talking from completely different frameworks (or let us assume so in our naiveté) and are therefore unintelligible to each other. The framework of the modern rationalist is pretty obvious to most of us but the framework of the dhārmika isn’t, even to herself. So this is a humble attempt to present the temple framework as it is, as presented in the canonical texts, as practised in the subcontinent for more than at least 2500 years, in the hope that knowledge would empower us all and we could then actually hear each other and have more meaningful conversations – and arguments.

First, let me offer my credentials for doing so. Apart from love, a deep sense of obligation to the civilization that has lit my personal journey and a family heritage of being born into an Adisaiva Sivacharya family, which while serving mostly as a disclaimer, also got me front row seats to the tradition, my claim to be able to present even a tiny bit of the āgama-s is based off the research work done to fulfil my PhD requirement, for a thesis titled, “Temple Management in the Śaivāgama-s,” an inter-disciplinary research made possible by the vision and generosity of my guide and former HOD of the Department of Sanskrit at the University of Madras, Prof. Siniruddha Dash, who bravely took me under his wings when I decided – after an engineering degree, MBA and corporate career – to pursue Śaivāgama research.

With so much being said and written about how temples – the nerve centres of a long unbroken living religion – should be managed, with implications for worship schedule, materials, people and land management, my thesis attempted to go back to the source material and understand temple structure, function and organization as prescribed in the Śaivāgama-s. Why the Śaivāgama-s? Because they are the ancient canonical temple scriptures that are still used in the planning, design, construction, consecration of and worship at Śaiva temples. Our logic was, if the Śaivāgama-s have such detailed instructions on how to build temples and worship at them, surely there must be some clues there as to how to manage them? And the answers we found to this question were astounding.

But we’ll first back up a little bit and start with what temples are and why we should even care what happens there.

To be continued.