A History of India, Third Edition

THE REGIONAL KINGDOMS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIA

However, they were usually visited only for special purposes—for example,
the sacrifice for the ancestors at Gaya. Longer pilgrimages (tirtha-yatra) to
several holy places became known only in the early centuries with the rise
of the great temples and the belief in the divine presence in the icons
(arcavatra), whose worship was considered to be a path to salvation
(moksha) comparable with other paths. Later additions to the
Mahabharata and almost all Purana texts include detailed descriptions of
such pilgrimages and outlines of the routes followed.
The literature which is most characteristic of the temple cults of the
Bhakti movement are the Mahatmya texts of individual temples. They
served as pilgrim guides and were recited by the temple priests. These
priests tried their best to prove that ‘their’ Mahatmya belonged to one of
the eighteen great Purana texts in order to show that their temple was one
of the great centres of pilgrimage in India. The Skandapurana in this way
absorbed many such Mahatmyas of regional holy places until the Late
Middle Ages. From the end of the first millennium onwards, India was thus
crisscrossed by many routes of pilgrimage which greatly helped to enhance
the cultural unity of the country at a time of increasing regionalisation.

The quest for philosophical synthesis in medieval India

After several centuries of highly emotional Bhakti cults and their emphasis
on devotion to a personal god, a new wave of intense philosophical
speculation appeared at the beginning of the second millennium. The early
philosophical systems were deeply influenced by the debate about the
prevalence of an impersonal law or the domination of the world by the will
of an omnipotent god. Those who believed in the impersonal law were not
simply atheists—they held it to be irrelevant whether there is a god or not,
as he too would be subjected to the impersonal law. Shankara’s monism
had reconciled non-theist and theist claims: the Brahman, as universal
essence, is identical with the individual soul and encompasses both the
impersonal law and the divine manifestation which may appeal to the
individual believer. Thus Shankara had established a peaceful coexistence
between a highly abstract philosophical system and a variety of faiths. The
great god worshipped by the Bhakta—Mahadeva—was also part and
parcel of Shankara’s system. But in the strict sense of Shankara’s
philosophy, everything perceived as reality—including the Hindu
pantheon—was illusion (maya), and this was unacceptable to the Bhakta,
who saw in this world the manifestation of a divine creator. The tree, the
stone, or whatever he may have worshipped, were intensely real to the
Bhakta. Philosophical speculation in the wake of the Bhakti movement
therefore rejected Shankara’s strict monism. Whereas analogous
philosophical debates had previously not been conducted along sectarian
lines, medieval Indian philosophy became more and more identified with