Sacred Facts · At a Glance
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Religions
Ganapatya (Ganesha Worship)
Ganapatya Dharma
Ganapatya Dharma
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Ganapatya is the Hindu tradition devoted to Ganesha (Ganapati) as the Supreme Being. Although it has never been a mass movement, it is culturally one of the most influential traditions of Hinduism — its god is invoked at the start of nearly every Hindu ritual across all sects (Courtright 1985, ch. 1).
Who is Ganesha?
Core beliefs:
Origins: From Obscurity to Supremacy
Ganesha is absent from the Vedic hymns; his cult emerges in the art and literature of the early centuries CE and becomes prominent from roughly the 5th–6th centuries CE onward (Courtright 1985, ch. 2; Brown 1991, ch. 1). The Ganesha Purana and Mudgala Purana — both medieval works, most plausibly composed between the 10th and 15th centuries CE (the dating is debated) — systematised his worship and elevated him to Supreme Deity status. The Ganapatya theology asserts that Ganesha is the source of both Shiva and Shakti rather than merely their child.
The thirty-two forms
The Mudgala Purana catalogues thirty-two forms of Ganesha. Six well-known examples:
Note: this list is sometimes loosely labelled "the six forms" in popular sources; the scriptural scheme is the Mudgala Purana's thirty-two forms, of which these are six (Grimes 1995, appendix).
The Ashtavinayak Circuit
The eight sacred Ganesha temples of Maharashtra, each associated with a different legend:
Scholarly assessment of the Ganapatya tradition
Courtright (1985) reads the Ganapatya movement as a comparatively late sectarian consolidation: while Ganesha's popularity spread throughout the Hindu world from the Gupta period, the specifically Ganapatya claim that he is the supreme deity is documented mainly through the two Ganesha Puranas and through the tantric cults of Ucchista Ganapati and Mahaganapati — a minority position within the broader Hindu mainstream. Brown (1991) documents the diffusion of Ganesha across Asia (Tibet, China, Japan, Southeast Asia), showing that the god vastly outgrew the sect that first elevated him.
Relationship to Shaivism
The classical doxographies treat Ganapatya as one of the five āstika devotional schools alongside Shaiva, Vaishnava, Shakta, and Saura. Its relationship to Shaivism is structural — Ganesha is Shiva's son — but theological: the Ganapatya Puranas invert the parentage, making Ganesha the source. Modern scholarship (Flood 1996, ch. 6) treats Ganapatya primarily as a Shaiva-derived devotional tradition rather than a fully independent religion; this is also the position of most practising Ganapatyas, for whom the sectarian boundary is less important than the god's universal availability.
Recommended reviewers: A Maharashtra religious historian; a scholar of Ganesha mythology (e.g. a specialist in Puranic studies).
