A Lamp on Śivayoga: The Union of Yoga, Ritual, and Devotion in the Śivayogapradīpikā

Abstract

This dissertation centers around the study of a lesser-known Sanskrit yoga treatise from south India entitled the Śivayogapradīpikā, or the “Lamp on Śivayoga.” The text was written by an author named Cennasadāśivayogin, who my research shows likely lived in Andhra Pradesh in the first half of the fifteenth century, and who belonged to a religious tradition known as the Vīraśaivas, or the “Heroic Devotees of Śiva,” which flourished in the late-medieval Deccan. Little scholarly attention has yet been brought to bear on the Śivayogapradīpikā, although its prominence within south-Indian yoga traditions is attested by its reception history and citations in numerous early modern texts on yoga and Vīraśaivism. Read closely against the broader textual record of yoga and Śaiva literature, this dissertation offers the first text-critical study of the Śivayogapradīpikā through an investigation of its history, doctrine, praxis, intertextual relations, and authorial strategies of production. I argue that in codifying the Śivayogapradīpikā, Cennasadāśivayogin sought to reconcile different systems of yoga on the horizon in fifteenth-century south India—including Mantrayoga, Layayoga, Haṭhayoga, and Rājayoga—together within a unified framework of Śaiva ritual worship (pūjā) and devotion (bhakti), conceived as Śivayoga. It is the distinctly ritual and devotional orientation of this yoga, produced within a Vīraśaiva bhakti context, that makes the teachings of the Śivayogapradīpikā most unique—and indeed what differentiates Śivayoga from other well-known systems of yoga.