The Atimarga and the Mantramarga
The teaching of Siva (sivasdsana) which defines the Saivas is divided between two great branches or ‘streams’ (strotas). These are termed the Outer Path (Atimarga) and the Path of Mantras (Mantramarga).
The first is accessible only to ascetics, while the second is open both to ascetics and to married home-dwellers (grhastha). There is also a difference of goals. The Atimarga is entered for salvation alone, while the Mantramarga promises both this and, for those that so wish, the attainment of supernatural powers (siddhis) and the experience of supernal pleasures in the worlds of their choice (bhoga). The Atimarga’s Saivism is sometimes called Raudra rather than Saiva. This is because it is attributed to and concerned with Siva in his archaic, Vedic form as Rudra (the ‘Terrible’), the god of wild and protean powers outside the srauta sacrifice. It has two principal divisions, the Pasupata and the Lakula.The Pasupata Division of the Atimarga
The ascetic observance (yrata) which is this system’s path to salvation is the Pasupata. It bears this name because its promulgation is attributed to Rudra as Pasupati (the ‘Master [-pati] of the Bound [pas'u-]’). Pasupati is believed by the followers of this tradition (the Pasupatas) to have appeared on earth as Lakulisa by entering and re-animating a brahmin’s corpse in a cremation ground. Thus yogically embodied he gave out the cult’s fundamental text, the Pasupata Aphorisms (Pdsupatasutras). Our principal source for the detail of the tradition is Kaundinya’s commentary on this text. It has been suggested on slender evidence that this commentator belongs to the fourth century. The Pasupata cult itself, at least that form of it which derives itself from Lakulisa, is at least two centuries older.
The Pasupata observance (pds'upata-vrata) was restricted to brahmin males who had passed through the orthodox rite of investiture (upanayana), which gives an individual access to his Veda and full membership of his community.
The stage of life (dsrama) from which such a brahmin became a Pasupata was irrelevant. He might be a celibate student (brahmacarin), a married home-dweller (grhastha), a hermit dwelling in the wild (ydnaprastha), or a peripatetic mendicant (bhikfu). Transcending this orthodox classification he entered a ‘fifth’ life-stage, that of the Perfected (siddha-asrama).The final goal of the Pasupatas was the end of suffering (duhkhanta). It means just this, but was also conceived positively as the assimilation of Rudra’s qualities of omniscience, omnipotence and so forth at the time of one’s death. This was the state of final liberation and it was to be achieved through four stages of discipline. In the first the ascetic lived by a temple of Siva. His body was to be smeared with ashes and he was to worship the deity in the temple by dancing and chanting, boisterous laughter (attahdsa), drumming on his mouth (huddukkdra), and silent meditation on five mantras of the Yajurveda, the five brahma-mantras which in course of time would be personified as the five faces of Siva.
In the second stage he left the temple. Throwing off all the outward signs of his observance he moved about in public pretending to be crippled, deranged, mentally deficient or indecent. Passers-by being unaware that these defects were feigned spoke ill of him. By this means the Pasupata provoked an exchange in which his demerits passed to his detractors and their merits to him. By acting in this way he was simply making unorthodox use of a thoroughly orthodox principle. He was exploiting his ritual status as one who had undergone a rite of consecration (diksd) to initiate an observance (vrata); for in the s'rauta system one bound by the observance (vrata) consequent on consecration (diksd) for the Soma sacrifice was similarly dangerous to anyone who might speak ill of him.
Purified by this period of karma-exchange, the Pasupata withdrew in the third stage to a remote cave or deserted building to practise meditation through the constant repetition of the five mantras.
When he had achieved an uninterrupted awareness of Rudra by this means, so that he no longer required the support of the mantras, he left his place of seclusion and moved into a cremation ground to wait for death. While previously the Pasupata had begged for his sustenance he now lived on whatever he could find there. This fourth stage ended with his life. Entering the stage of completion (nisthd) with the falling away of his body and the last traces of suffering, he was believed to experience the infusion of the qualities of Rudra. The cause of this final liberation was not thought to be any action of his, but simply the grace or favour of Rudra himself.The Ldkula Division of the Atimdrga
The second division of the Atimarga, that of the Lakula ascetics, developed from within the original Pasupata tradition. It accepted the authority of the Pasupata Aphorisms and maintained both the mantras and the basic practices of its prototype. However, its special discipline required a more radical transcendence of Vedic values. After his consecration (diksd) the ascetic
should wander, carrying a skull-topped staff (khatvdriga) and an alms-bowl fashioned from a human cranium. His hair should be bounded up in a matted mass (jatd) or completely shaved. He should wear a sacred thread (upavita) [the emblem of orthodox investiture (upanayana)] made from snake-skins and he should adorn himself with a necklace of human bone. He may wear nothing but a strip of cloth to cover his private parts. He must smear himself with ashes and decorate himself with the ornaments of his God. Knowing that all things are Rudra in essence he should hold firmly to his observance as Rudra’s devotee. He may eat and drink anything. No action is forbidden to him. For he is immersed in contemplation of Rudra, knowing that no other deity will save him.
Nis'vdsatattvasamhita (MS), ch. 4.
Here the ascetic took on a more radical aspect of Rudra’s nature as the outsider within the Vedic religion.
He became Rudra the brahmin-slayer. For it is ruled in orthodox sources that one who is guilty of this terrible crime may exonerate himself only if he removes himself from society for twelve years, lives in a cremation ground and carries the skullbowl (kapdla) and the skull-staff (khatvariga) when he goes forth to beg for food. Thus the Lakula’s observance, generally called that of the skull (kapdlavrata), is also known as that of exile, ‘of those that are outside the world’ (lokatitavrata). It is also referred to as the Greater Pasupata Observance (mahapasupatavrata). While the Pasupata ascetic’s outsideness was limited to the system of life-stages (atydsramavrata), the Lakula skull-bearer was to abandon the more basic notion of the pure and the impure.The Kalamukha ascetics who are known from many south Indian inscriptions from the ninth to thirteenth centuries were part of this Lakula division of the Atimarga. Doxographic material from this region records among their practices bathing in the ashes of the cremated (their milder predecessors had been content with the ashes of cow dung), eating these ashes and worshipping Rudra in a vessel filled with alcoholic liquor. This mode of worship was common in the rituals of the Kaula Saivas (see pp. 679-89), but there is no reason to think that it was connected here as there with rituals involving sexual intercourse. It appears that these followers of Rudra the solitary penitent were bound by strict vows of celibacy.
The Lakulas had their own canon of scriptures concerned with both theology (jnana) and ritual (kriyd), the eight Authorities (Pramdnas). Of these nothing survives but their names and a single quotation from one of them, the Pancdrtha-Pramdna, in the works of the Kashmiri Ksemaraja. For their doctrines we have an account of Lakula soteriology and cosmography in the Nisvasatattvasamhita quoted above, and a few scattered discussions in later Saiva sources from Kashmir. From this we can see that the Lakulas had already developed most of the detailed hierarchy of worlds (bhuvanddhvan) which characterises the later Mantramarga.
The Lakula ascends to his salvation through a succession of worlds, each governed by its own manifestation of Rudra. The highest of these is the world of the Rudra Dhruvesa. Reaching this he attains liberation, a state of omniscience void of activity.In the closely clustered systems which form the Mantramarga the soul of the initiate is raised through such a world-hierarchy at the time of his consecration. The difference is that the hierarchy has been further extended. It contains that of the Lakulas, but adds a number of new worlds above Dhruvesa’s. The Lakula cosmos was itself the outcome of such a process of extension. For immediately below Dhruvesa is the world of the Rudra Tejlsa. This was the final goal of the Vaimalas, a superseded group about whom our surviving sources tell us little but this. Further down the scale are the worlds of the Rudras Ksemes'a and Brahmanahsvamin. These were the cosmic termini of two other obscure Pasupata groups, the Mausulas and the Karukas.