From Mantramārga Back to Atimārga: Atimārga as a Self-referential Term

Abstract

The impact of Alexis Sanderson’s scholarship can be easily measured by the subject of the present paper. Before 1988, when Sanderson published his groundbreaking article “Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions,” the termAtimārga was hardly used by anyone with the exception of a few specialists of Tantric Śaivism, and it certainly was never addressed systematically.1 Thus, for example, Minoru Hara, who completed his dissertation on the Pāśupatas at Harvard in 1966 and published extensively on the Pāśupata tradition in the subsequent decades, never once used the term.2 In the years to come, however, various scholars started to use it with great confidence in increasing numbers and currently the Atimārga is widely regarded as one of the two major divisions of Śaivism, alongside that of the Mantramārga. Quite influential in the dissemination of the term has been Gavin Flood, who adopted it in his An Introduction to Hinduism (1996). The chapters on the Śaiva and Śākta traditions in this book are deeply dependent on Sanderson’s scholarship. As an illustration of how commonplace and accepted its use has become, reference may also be made to the entry on Atimārga in the popular A Dictionary of Hinduism by W.J. Johnson (2009). The description clearly reflects Sanderson’s scholarship: