20 ronald m. davidson
art, and literature was developed during the early medieval period,
500–1200 C.E. However, we also see that the range of sanctified behav-
ior becomes much wider, with the new iconography now including
extraordinary multi-armed deities, sporting weapons of war or vio-
lence, and with inscriptional evidence for the valorization of distinc-
tive local religious practices in the literate horizon for the first time.
As a result, new forms of literature were developed to adjudicate, dis-
cuss, and (eventually) sacralize practices that included ritual murder,
suicide, sexuality, and the ritual employment of polluted substances
(bones, blood, semen, feces, urine) and their manipulation or inges-
tion. Some of the practices had their sources in regional goddess rituals,
some in local yakṣa or nāga rites, and some were Śaiva or Pañcarātra,
or had other formal affiliation in origin. The monothetic interpretation
of all cemetery or antinomian rites as uniquely Śaiva is contradicted by
the Buddhist, Jain, and secular literature, as well as by analogies from
modern Indian religious studies and anthropology (DeCaroli 2004;
Lutgendorf 2003; Michaels et al. 1996; Sontheimer 1993). Such prac-
tices were previously evinced in Buddhist literature (vinaya and jātaka
especially) as unacceptable, but as Indians became increasingly enam-
ored of power, these practices receive limited approval in medieval
texts. The new forms of literature include purāṇas, āgamas, tantras,
kalpas (lengthy ritual works), vidhis (focused ritual texts), and kavacas
(other focused ritual texts), to name but a few. Most of these genres
eventually become homogenized as “tantric literature” in Tibetan writ-
ing or Western Indology, an unfortunate application of an omnibus
category to a very diverse series of genres.
Buddhist institutions responded to the events in a variety of ways.
Internally, they institutionalized a series of intellectual developments
that subverted the authority of traditional Buddhist learning. This
subversion was especially true of the skepticism of the extreme Mad-
hyamaka of Candrakīrti and the epistemology of the logical schools;
both of these called into question the positivistic suppositions of the
previous Buddhist intellectual paradigms, suppositions that supported
doctrines of karma, reincarnation, and liberation. Moreover, in the
distribution of Buddhist institutions, entire areas became hostile to
the Buddhist dispensation. The Kṛsṇ̣a River Valley especially—the site
of early great communities, such as Nāgārjunakoṇḍa and Amarāvatī—
was lost to Buddhist activity for most of the period, in large part
because of the militantly Śaiva polities like the Cāllukya, Pallava, and ̣
Rāsṭrakūṭ a dynasties. Northern Indian monasteries began to assume ̣