A Microhistory of a South Indian Monastery: The Hooli Bṛhanmaṭha and the History of Sanskritic Vīraśaivism

Abstract

Abstract This article explores neglected currents in Vīraśaiva intellectual history by way of narrating an institutional microhistory of a single monastic lineage, situated in the village of Hooli in northern Karnataka. The lineage of what is today known as the Hooli Bṛhanmaṭha exemplifies Vīraśaivism’s contribution to Sanskritic thought particularly through its close connection with the emergence of Śivādvaita as a philosophical school, best known for its expression in the writings of the sixteenth-century polymath Appayya Dīkṣita. As attested in understudied works of Sanskrit and Kannada, moreover, pontiffs of the Hooli lineage from the sixteenth century onward were actively involved in the early systematization of what is now the Pañcācārya Vīraśaiva community, a project that drew no hard and fast boundaries between Sanskrit and the vernacular, or śāstric philosophy and devotion.

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