Monks Who Later Armed Themselves for the Road

Tradition credits Adi Shankara with organising the Dashanami order around four, and by some accounts five, principal monasteries at the cardinal points of India, at Sringeri in the south, Dwarka in the west, Puri in the east and Jyotirmath in the north, each overseeing the monks who took one of the order's ten names and each intended to anchor Advaita teaching in a different region of the subcontinent.

For most of its history the order's renunciates were understood in the purely contemplative terms the philosophy itself describes, monks who had formally renounced the world rather than armed defenders of it. That changed under the pressures of the medieval and early modern period, when groups of Dashanami ascetics organised themselves into militarised regiments, the akharas, that trained in weapons and physical combat, partly for self protection while travelling and partly to contest control of valuable pilgrimage sites and bathing rights at events such as the Kumbh Mela against rival ascetic orders. These armed Naga sadhu regiments still process at the Kumbh Mela today, a startling and much photographed survival of a defensive adaptation that grew up centuries after Shankara's original, purely philosophical monastic foundation.