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Updated: June 22, 2025
As in Camboja, Śivaism and Buddhism both flourished without mutual hostility and there was less difference in the status of the two creeds. In all these countries religion seems to have been connected with politics more closely than in India.
Hsüan Chuang informs us that Bhaskaravarma king of Kâmarûpa attended the fêtes celebrated by Harsha in 644 A.D. and inscriptions found at Tezpur indicate that kings with Hindu names reigned in Assam about 800 A.D. This is agreeable to the supposition that an amalgamation of Śivaism and aboriginal religion may have been in formation about 700 A.D. and have influenced Buddhism.
He appears in human incarnations and is known as well or better by these incarnations than in his original form. But in Śivaism the main current of thought is scientific and philosophic rather than emotional. This statement may seem strange if one thinks of the wild rites and legends connected with Śiva and his spouse.
Another school of Śivaite philosophy flourished in Kashmir from the ninth century onwards and is not yet extinct among Pandits. It bases itself on the Âgamas and includes among them the still extant Śiva-sûtras said to have been discovered as revelation by Vasugupta. He lived about 800 A.D. and abandoned Buddhism for Śivaism.
It is only after the Vedic age that they became, each for his own worshippers, undisputed Lords of the Universe. A limiting date to the antiquity of Śivaism and Vishnuism, as their cults may be called, is furnished by Buddhist literature, at any rate for north-eastern India. The Pali Piṭakas frequently introduce popular deities, but give no prominence to Vishṇu and Śiva.
The deification of the Buddha, the invention of Bodhisattvas who are equivalent to gods and the extraordinary alliance between late Buddhism and Śivaism, are all instances of the general Indian view overcoming the special Buddhist view.
It has been held that Kashmirian Śivaism is the parent of the Dravidian Śaiva Siddhânta and spread from Kashmir southwards by way of Kalyan in the eleventh century, and this hypothesis certainly receives support from the mention of Kashmiri Brahmans in south Indian inscriptions of the fourteenth century.
The founder of a strange sect who declares that nothing is necessary but faith in a particular deity and that all ceremonies and caste observances are superfluous is not in the popular esteem a subverter of Hinduism. The history of both Śivaism and Vishnuism illustrates these features. Śiva begins as a wild deity of non-moral attributes.
It may seem strange that a religion whose outward ceremonies though unassuming and modest consist chiefly of the worship of the linga, should draw its adherents largely from the educated classes and be under no moral or social stigma. Yet as an idea, as a philosophy, Śivaism possesses truth and force.
Nagendranâth Vasu has published some interesting details as to the survival of Buddhist ideas in Orissa. He traces the origin of this hardy though degraded form of Mahayanism to Râmâi Pandit, a tantric Âcârya of Magadha who wrote a work called Śûnya Purâṇa which became popular. Orissa was one of the regions which offered the longest resistance to Islam, for it did not succumb until 1568. A period of Śivaism in the tenth and eleventh centuries is indicated by the temples of Bhuvaneshwar and other monuments. But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the reigning dynasty were worshippers of Vishnu and built the great temples at Puri and Konârak, dedicated to Jagannâtha and Sûrya-nârâyaṇa respectively. We do not however hear that they persecuted Buddhism and there are reasons for thinking that Jagannâtha is a form of the Buddha and that the temple at Puri was originally a Buddhist site. It is said that it contains a gigantic statue of the Buddha before which a wall has been built and also that the image of Jagannâtha, which is little more than a log of wood, is really a case enclosing a Buddhist relic. King Pratâparudra (
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