Lingayat Deities

The Lingayats — a Shaiva sect that does not cremate

A community defined by a disagreement

The Lingayats (Karnataka; in Tamil Nadu, Viraśaivas or Ayyappas) are a Śaiva community in Karnataka and western Tamil Nadu who, among other things, do not cremate their dead but bury them in jagatis — small stone enclosures above open kabali pits, so that the body is available for direct dīkṣā without the ritual of cremation. Everything else follows from that: the sect holds that liberation is possible in life and body, that jagati burial is a gift rather than a deficiency, and that the Lingayat's own practice is sufficient.

The community takes its name from linga — the aniconic form of Śiva, without which no worship is valid in its own reckoning. Its theology centres on the Pañcākṣara mantra, the five-syllabled formula na ma śi vā ya (namah śivāya), and its followers hold that their religion is Śaiva by direct lineage, tracing to Basavanna (Basaveśvara, c. 1134–1196) in the Kolar district and, before him, to the line of śūdra teachers of the Vachana movement. The Vachanas themselves — short poems in old Kannada in the voices of Basavanna, Allama Prabhu, Akka Mahadevi, Kanakadasa and others — are the sect's own scripture, and they are radical: they attack caste, ritual hierarchy and the Brahmana claim to mediate salvation, they permit widow remarriage, and they insist on bhakti as the path.

This is what makes the Lingayat tradition materially important to a corpus of Hindu devotion: it is a sect whose defining practice is a disagreement with pan-Indian śamaṇa custom, whose scripture is in a vernacular, and whose social effects — inter-caste marriage, the position of women in the jagati and in temple keeping — have been disproportionately large in Karnataka's social history. The corpus's own tradition_name: "Lingayat Tradition" and historical_period: 12th century CE are about right and unusually so among machine stubs; the entry should keep that precision and add the vernacular and social material.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Vachana corpus in a named critical edition; Padoux on the mantra as a Shaiva practice; Nilakanta Sastri for the historical frame.

For a named guardian, ideally a Kannada speaker: the Vachana texts to cite with verse identifications rather than as a genre; the relation between the Lingayats and the wider Viraśaiva-Madhva dispute, which the corpus currently flattens into one tradition; the controversy over Lingayat claims to direct initiatory lineage from Basavanna, which some scholars dispute; and the contemporary legal and political position of the community in Karnataka.