Kashmir Shiva

Kashmir Śiva — the distinctive Shaivism of the valley

A tradition of texts as well as of shrines

Kashmir has one of the subcontinent's most distinctive Śaiva cultures, and it is defined as much by its scriptures as by its temples. The Śaiva Āgamas of Kashmir — the Śivasūtraviveka corpus, the Mṛgendratantra, the Netratantra and the Svaccandatantra among them — form the doctrinal base of Kashmirian Śaivism, where Svacchanda (Svaccanda Bhairava) is a principal form of Bhairava and Bhairava himself is treated as the one who brings the universe into being and, in the Netra, as the form of Shiva with a third eye.

The form most visible to pilgrims is Śārika — Śārikā Devī at Hari Parbat on the Ananthanag range above Srinagar, where an ancient and much-rebuilt temple keeps an image of the goddess with Shiva beside her, said to have been established when Shiva made the valley his abode. The Sharika shrine is the focus of the Kashmiri Pandit festival of Yaś Kara, when the deity is bathed in the Jhelum at a spot where the water is said to have been consecrated by a Rishi, and thousands bathe in the river below. That rite, performed with the image carried in procession, is one of the clearest examples of Kashmir's Śaivism being both a textual tradition and a living public practice.

The tradition also has a strong tantric and esoteric side — the cult of Bhairava with the skull-cup, the Aghora discipline, and a lineage of Kashmir Shaiva teachers — which sits alongside the public temple cults rather than beneath them, and which should be described in its own terms rather than as a local variant of the pan-Indian Shaiva temple.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Kashmir Āgamic literature, the Purāṇic accounts, and the Kashmir District Gazetteer for the shrines.

For a named guardian, ideally a Kashmiri Pandit or a Kashmiri Śaiva scholar: the chronology of the Śārikā temple's rebuildings, which successive historical periods altered; the current ritual status of Yaś Kara; and the scholarly attribution of the Netratantra and Svaccandatantra material, which is contested.