Over a thousand years ago, in the mysterious, quasi-shamanic early period of Goddess-centered Kaula Tantrism, the Kālīkula or “Family of Kālī” denoted several interrelated groups whose primary deity was Kālī, the beautiful Dark Goddess. Here we are not speaking of the much later Bengali version of Kālī whose image is well known today all over the world. The Dark Goddess worshipped by adherents of the Kālīkula was understood to be the all-encompassing Highest Divinity—the Radiant Void—the Ground of Being—unsurpassable timeless Consciousness. One particular lineage of the Kālīkula rose to prominence and eclipsed all the others: it was called the Krama, which means “the Process,” “the Cycle,” or “the Sequence.” It was so named because its initiates worshipped the subtle phases of the process of cognition as forms of the Goddess Kālī. But the Krama had many other names as well, such as Mahārtha (The Great Teaching), Mahānaya (The Great Way), Rahasyāmnāya (The Secret Tradition), and Devīnaya (The Way of the Goddess) or Kālīnaya (The Way of Kālī). Under whatever name, in this sampradāya (lineage-based body of teachings and practices) Kālī was worshipped as the central deity in a sequence of deity circles (cakras) seen as embodying successive phases of Her operation in and as the cosmic process. Those phases (krama) are seen as belonging to a single dynamic divine consciousness which is to be contemplated as non-different from the practitioner’s own cyclical flow of awareness in the perception of any and all objects of experience.
As noted above, the adherents of the Krama viewed Kālī as the Supreme Divinity whose ultimate nature is formless. Though it is impossible to understand Her with concepts or encompass Her with words, she was nonetheless described as the all-devouring Void in the Heart of Consciousness, that which the limited self cannot penetrate and survive. The only way for the limited individual to enter Her is to merge with Her and become Her.
The Krama was unequivocally the most radical, transgressive, feminine-oriented, and nondualistic of all the sects and groups that fall under the heading of Shaivism and/or Tantra—and yet it was also (in its post-scriptural phase, anyway) the most sophisticated and subtle of them all in terms of its philosophical doctrine, especially in the thoughtful way it assimilated philosophical ideas with ritual practice, and in its determined attempt to make the latter truly meaningful. Thus, the Krama included the most exquisitely refined spiritual thought in the same sphere as some of the most radically transgressive practices, a seeming paradox that fits well in a system that thinks of the Divine as precisely that which can meaningfully subsume all paradoxes within itself and devour their apparent contradictions.
Despite the serious potential challenges it posed to the social order, the Krama rose to a place of prominence in Kashmīr, counting many highly placed people (such as royal ministers) amongst its initiates. It influenced the Trika lineage in Kashmīr, and the two sampradāyas finally became fused in the theology of Abhinavagupta, who essentially propagated an esoteric Kaula Trika with a Krama core.
Having said all this about the significance of the Krama, it may come as a surprise to hear that there are no published translations into English of Krama texts and very little reliable published work on the subject. Virtually no one realized the Krama’s historical significance, or the stunning power of its ideas and its poetry, before Alexis Sanderson’s pioneering 2007 mega-study, “The Śaiva Exegesis of Kashmir,” which devotes perhaps 50 of its 200+ pages to the Krama.
The documented history of the Krama begins with the story of a devoted spiritual practitioner and seeker of the Truth, probably from Kashmīr, who in the mid-ninth century made a pilgrimage to the small kingdom of Uḍḍiyāna (in the Swāt Valley, the far northwest of the Indian cultural region), a site later considered one of the four most important Tantrik centers. (Note that this is also said to be the homeland of Padmasambhava, who brought Tantrik Buddhism to Tibet around this same time, the ninth century.) In Uḍḍiyāna, this spiritual practitioner of whom we speak journeyed to a town called Mangalāpura (probably modern Mingora), a town of several hundred households, where it is said nearly everyone at that time was a practicing Tāntrika. (Nowadays, unfortunately, this area is a stronghold of the Taliban, and no remnant of Tantrik culture remains.) Situated next to the town was a sacred power-center (śakti-pīṭha) in the form of a great cremation ground called Karavīra. This cremation ground was said to be the dwelling place of the Goddess Maṅgalā, an incarnation of Kālī, together with the sixty-four Yoginīs or Tantrik Siddhās that constituted Her retinue. This pilgrim took up residence at Karavīra, propitiating and meditating on the Goddess until She revealed Herself to him in an awesome epiphany, granting him divine insight (as documented in the Kālikā-stotra, see below). He became a siddha (“perfected master”) and received the name Jñānanetra Nātha (the Lord of the Eye of Wisdom). He became the first guru of the Krama lineage and the revealer/transmitter (avatāraka) of the principal Krama scriptures. He wrote these beautiful lines:
Through Your grace, O Mother, may the whole world abide as the essence of the Goddess within the transcendent Śiva, just as She was experienced by me in the Great Cremation Ground. || Kālikā-stotra verse 19
This hymn of essence-nature is sung by myself, Śiva, through the influence of the state of complete immersion [in You]. O Goddess named Maṅgalā (the Beneficent), may it be a blessing (śiva) to the whole world that is itself myself! || Kālikā-stotra verse 20
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There is a compelling question about this history, unlikely to be resolved with the data we have: was Maṅgalā an actual human woman of such awesome spiritual power that she was termed a goddess (devī) or was she an archetypal deity figure in the religious imagination and/or mystical experience of Jñānanetra? We do have certain examples of real human women of great spiritual attainment being called devī, and the possibility of Maṅgalā’s humanity seems hinted at by accounts of Jñānanetra being taught secret wisdom at Karavīra, such as this passage from the OK Mahānaya-prakāśa:
The Nātha, after being taught in the Praṇava-pīṭha (that is, Karavīra), was filled with compassion for living beings and as the ‘promulgator’ (avatāraka) emitted the internal and external silence of ultimate reality as the corpus of the Krama. (trans. Sanderson, 2007: 265)
If indeed Maṅgalā was a real person, then perhaps her retinue of 64 Yoginīs were also real women. After all, they are also termed Siddhās in the literature (a term not generally used for supernatural Yoginīs), and very specific practices are said to have been revealed by them, such as the bhairavī-mudrā and the khecarī-mudrā—both being meditative practices, not postures of the hands or body—and other practices taught in the anonymous Mahānaya-prakāśa (and mentioned in Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra verse 77). Though the number 64 was doubtless chosen retroactively to mirror the number of demigoddesses called Yoginīs enshrined in the circular hypaethral temples scattered through the wilderness regions of northern India (as documented by Stella Dupuis and Vidyā Dehejia), it may still have been true that Maṅgalā, if she was a human Guru, had several dozen female disciples venerated as Siddhā Yoginīs, also called the Pīṭheśvarīs (“goddesses of the sacred site,” namely Uḍḍiyāna). Whether historical or mythical, the Yoginīs/Pīṭheśvarīs were celebrated for many subsequent generations.
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The tradition records that Jñānanetra was a fully awakened spiritual master. An unpublished text called The Hymn to the Five Voids (Khacakra-stotra), which purports to have been an oral transmission from the Yoginīs of Uḍḍiyāna, lauds his greatness. We are told that the Yoginīs, in a great assembly (mahāmelāpa), sang the praises of Jñānanetra with these words:
Lord Jñānanetra has merged with the level where all experience is one! He is the solitary Hero of that beyond essence, in whom all phenomena have been brought to silence, radiant with the vision of his gnosis, who has realized the ultimate Reality, who has attained the bliss of understanding, and who relishes the highest awakening. (trans. Sanderson, with slight modifications)
Even more importantly, Jñānanetra’s Krama lineage successfully preserved the transmission of full enlightenment (parama-bodha) through at least nine generations, a rare feat in the history of South Asian religion. We can see the success of the transmission in the consistently high level of insight, joy, and overflowing gratitude in the exquisite poems of the Krama masters, which are positively aflame with awakened awareness, as is obvious to anyone who reads them (see excerpts in the two Krama chapters in my book Tantra Illuminated).
Jñānanetra directly initiated seventeen disciples. All three of his primary disciples were women, including his successor, the siddhā yoginī named Keyūravatī (literally, “she who wears a bicep bracelet”), who was informally yet respectfully known simply as “the Goddess K” (kakāra-devī). Unfortunately, we have no works from Keyūravatī, though some of the oral teachings of the Krama tradition called Chummās (composed in Old Kashmīrī, not Sanskrit) may be hers.
But Jñānanetra’s lineage was not the only significant lineage of the Krama. The Chummās to which I have just referred were preserved by another lineage, that initiated by Śrīnātha (but note that this name was also an epithet of Jñānanetra, so it is possible that he initiated both major Krama lineages) and passed to his disciple Siddhanātha, a.k.a. Mauninātha a.k.a. Gandhamādana-siddha (“the silent siddha who was intoxicated by scent”), whose disciple was Niskriyānanda (“the bliss of non-action”), who wrote a Sanskrit commentary on the Old Kashmīrī Chummās after receiving them from his guru, who received them from the Yoginīs of Uḍḍiyāna. We are fortunate indeed that Niskriyānanda’s commentary survives (in a single manuscript), for it would be impossible to understand the Old Kashmīrī Chummās without it. The extraordinary story of Niskriyānanda’s enlightenment is related here, in my translation of his own autobiographical account, which precedes his commentary on the Chummās. This account is, as far as I know, unique in the entire corpus of Tantric literature for its autobiographical narrative detail, though the language is also formulaic in many parts, echoing a number of key phrases that characterize Krama literary discourse.
Niskriyānanda’s disciple or guru-brother (it’s not clear which) was a man named Unmattanātha a.k.a. Vātūlanātha, who went back to the source by journeying to Uḍḍiyāna himself to receive teachings directly from the Yoginīs. There, the Yoginīs both confirmed the 105 Chummās that Niskriyānanda had received and bestowed the gift of 13 more special sūtras known as Kathās:
According to tradition, the Pīṭheśvarīs first taught the venerable Vātūlanātha the collection of the Chummās, though [in truth its teaching] cannot be ‘taught’, being beyond all doctrines, from the six Darśanas* to the four [Kaula] Āmnāyas . . . and then taught [him], through the 13 Sūtras, the extraordinary highest reality into which nothing [limited] can enter—which is free of the stains of sequence vs. simultaneity, existence vs. non-existence, real vs. unreal, plurality vs. unity, conceptual vs. non-conceptual, and existence in the world vs. liberation—doing so by directly revealing to his experience the 13 Kathās nourished by the ultimate secret. (from the commentary on the Vātūlanāthasūtra, trans. Sanderson, with minor modifications)
* Being the Buddhist, Jain, Vedic, Saura, Vaiṣṇava, and Śaiva darśanas.
Vātūlanātha documented these 13 special sūtras (the first of which is mahāsāhasavṛttyā svarūpalābhaḥ), and his disciple Anantaśakti composed a Sanskrit commentary on them which has, fortunately, come down to us. The Vātūlanātha-sūtra with its commentary was published in the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies in 1923. Are you curious about these ultra-powerful, almost-unknown sūtras? Read to the end of this blog for a special surprise. :)
We may conclude this survey of mostly unpublished Krama literature (and here we have not treated the extraordinary spiritual poetry of the lineage, since that is treated in some detail in Tantra Illuminated) by highlighting one more text still untranslated into English: the Kaula-sūtra. This fascinating text of 64 sūtras combines teachings from the Chummās and Kathās as well as other sources now lost to us. It mentions Śrīnātha, Mauninātha, Niskriyānanda, and Unmattanātha a.k.a. Vātūlanātha. Its date and provenance are unknown, but it was compiled by Śitikaṇṭha, possibly the same Śitikaṇṭha who authored the Old Kashmīrī Mahānaya-prakāśa, another Krama text. Unfortunately the text as we have it contains many corruptions, but Dr Ben Williams and I are working to translate all the sūtras which are intelligible. Without doubt, the first three Kaula-sūtras are exquisite, powerful, even startling:
1. There is only one Guru, the unbroken transmission of the shining rays [of awakened awareness] that reach [us] through the succession (krama) of the lineage.
2. There is only one God: the Reality one perceives through that transmission [of awakened awareness].
3. It has only one Power of Awareness: the inner ‘ground’ of the unconstructed I-sense / the state of natural self-awareness.
Here we have learned a little bit about the Krama lineages, and touched on three key works: the Chummā-saṅketa-prakāśa of Niskriyānanda, the eponymous Vātūlanātha-sūtra, and the Kaula-sūtra of Śitikaṇṭha. Yet we have barely scratched the surface of the incredible body of literature associated with the Krama, a.k.a. Mahārtha a.k.a. Mahānaya. Stay tuned for more blog posts on the subject!
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If you want to know more, you can now access the 4 day retreat ‘Path of Pure Radiance’ we ran in September 2022. If you are a Sadhaka member, it’s included in your subscription to the learning platform Tantra Illuminated Online.