The accounts agree that Akka Mahadevi left a marriage. In the fuller versions she was pressed into marrying a local ruler on conditions he broke, and she walked out, discarding everything including her clothes, covering herself with her hair. She then travelled to Kalyana, where Basava and the Virashaiva leadership held the assembly called the Anubhava Mantapa, the hall of experience, a gathering that debated spiritual questions openly and admitted women and people of every caste to speak.
What happened there is the most striking episode in her tradition. She was questioned, and the questioning was hostile: Allama Prabhu, the assembly's presiding figure, challenged her nakedness directly and asked, in effect, whose she was and why a woman who claimed to have renounced everything still had a husband to renounce. Her recorded answers turn each challenge back, and she was accepted into the assembly on the strength of them. The exchange is preserved as a dialogue and is read as an examination she passed rather than an ordeal she suffered.
She is said to have ended her life at Srisailam, the great Shaiva site whose deity gives her signature its name, going into the mountains and not returning. The tradition presents her nakedness throughout as a doctrinal position and not as madness or as scandal, which is a considerable thing for a twelfth century movement to have committed to writing about a woman.