The writers and redactors who wished to provide a gloss over the growing body of the Bhairava canon could not keep up with the writings, the array of teachings, or even the names of the texts. It is noteworthy that in addition to “Mantram¯arga,” the BraY¯a in one instance uses the term “Tantram¯arga” in what appears to be a comparable sense. On the term tantra, see Sander´ son, “Saivism and the Tantric Traditions,” 661–62. The intensity of Bhairava’s Tantric revelations swept over the great Siddha masters and disciples and resulted in the outpouring of hundreds of texts in a relatively short period of time. While Shiva teaches with meditative calmness and Rudra with piercing depth, Bhairava teaches with tremendous power and a fierceness previously unknown. It is relevant to mention here that there is no one or no source that can tell us unequivocally what the names of sixty-four texts are.īut why is that so? As a mystical exercise, one may use the imagery of Shiva, Rudra and Bhairava to intuit the answer. The actual number of primary and secondary texts within the Bhairava canon is, no doubt, much larger. The number sixty-four is purely idealized, as it is the square of eight (the number of directional Bhairavas). Per tradition, there are sixty-four primary texts in this stream. Our focus here is on the mysterious Bhairava Tantras. Thanks to the multitude of sources related to Saiva Siddhanta, the names of the twenty-eight primary Siddhanta Tantras are well known. Within the Siddhanta stream we have the Shiva and Rudra divisions, which consist of ten and eighteen primary tantras, respectively.

Both the Siddhanta and Bhairava Tantras numbered in the hundreds of texts although most have been lost to time. So far as the evolution of Shaivism, its theology, ritual, philosophy and ontology are concerned only the Siddhanta and Bhairava Tantras are of importance. There were, traditional wisdom tell us, (srotas or amnayas) of Tantras arising from the five faces of Sadashiva - the Bhuta, Vama, Garuda, Dakshina (Bhairava), and Siddhanta Tantras.

From what we know of history, the Tantric corpus revealed by Shiva was truly mammoth, consisting of millions of verses of written literature in hundreds of texts.

Brahma tantra in hindi pdf