The Murder of a Buddhist Monk: A Perspective on Religious Diversity from Thirteenth-century India

One of the earliest authors of Vīraśaiva vernacular literature, Pālkuriki Somanātha, author of the thirteenth-century Basavapurāṇamu, crafts a hagiographical vision for his emerging community that relies heavily on narrative accounts of violence against religious others, particularly Buddhists and Jains. This article revisits the question of narrative violence in Śaiva and Vīraśaiva literature by way of an unstudied episode of the Telugu Exploits of Paṇḍitārādhya (Paṇḍitārādhyacaritramu). Through a close reading of Somanātha’s account of the murder of a Buddhist monk, I argue that the upsurge of narrative violence attested in Somanātha’s works and adjacent Śaiva vernacular literature must be read in the context of contemporary epigraphical and multilingual prescriptive literature. I suggest that discursive commonalities between these genres—in particular, the use of the term śivadrōha(mbu), “treachery against Śiva”—shed new light on the relationship between religion, law, and violence at the end of the Śaiva Age in south India.