Dashanami Sampradaya

The Dashanami Sampradaya is the principal order of Advaita Vedanta renunciates, and it contains within it something surprising: militant ascetics organised for combat.

Ten names

The tradition of ten names takes its foundation, by attribution, from the philosopher Adi Shankara in the eighth century. Its members take one of ten monastic surnames, such as Giri, Puri, Bharati, Tirtha and Saraswati, and it is associated with the four cardinal monasteries said to have been established by Shankara at Sringeri, Dwaraka, Puri and Badrinath. The attribution of the whole structure to Shankara is traditional and should be treated as such rather than as settled history.

The armed akharas

Alongside the settled scholar-ascetics the order includes armed naga regiments organised into akharas, the militant ascetics who historically defended pilgrimage sites and traders and who now lead the processions and ritual bathing of the Kumbh Mela. That a renunciate order committed to the illusoriness of the world should have maintained fighting regiments is one of the genuine paradoxes of Hindu monasticism, and it reflects the real conditions, contested pilgrimage revenues and insecurity, under which these orders actually operated.

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.