Pashupata
पाशुपत
One of the oldest named Shaiva schools; its final avatara-teacher, per the Shiva Purana itself, coincides with Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa (traditionally placed at the start of Kali Yuga)
The Pashupata school takes its name from Pashupati, 'lord of Pashus' (bound souls), Shiva as the one who frees embodied beings from the Pashas (bonds) of ignorance and matter through devoted practice, ash-smearing, and the panchakshara mantra. Its founder-attribution to Lakulisha is genuinely disputed in scholarship: some treat him as the school's actual founder, others say the doctrine predates him and he was its first formal preceptor of record.
A genuine scholarly dispute touches this school's history - see below for what is settled and what isn't.
The Shiva Purana's own account: twenty-eight avataras, ending in Lakulisha
The Shiva Purana's Shata Rudra Samhita gives a direct, primary-source account of the Pashupata lineage's origin, read in full on this site. Shiva foretells to Brahma a chain of twenty-eight future births across the twenty-eight dvapara yugas of the Vaivasvata manvantara, each birth paired with that era's own Vyasa and four ascetic disciple-sons. The ninth of these is Rishabha, who revives a poisoned prince named Bhadrayu. In the twenty-eighth and final dvapara yuga, the one in which Krishna Dvaipayana becomes Vyasa and Krishna is born as Hari's partial avatara, Shiva enters an abandoned corpse in a cremation ground to heal it, astonishing onlookers, and is born under the name Lakuli (Lakulisha), with four disciples: Kushika, Garga, Mitra and Kourushya. This cycle of twenty-eight Vyasas and twenty-eight avataras is said to recur in every kali yuga, each time producing four undecaying Pashupata disciples, ash-smeared, rudraksha-wearing, bearing the Tripundraka mark, devoted to the lingam, numbering one hundred and twelve across the full cycle.
What this settles, and what it doesn't
This is the Purana's own primary-source basis for treating Lakulisha as the twenty-eighth and final avatara-teacher of this cycle, not a later scholarly inference. It does not, by itself, settle the separate historical question of whether the doctrine or practice of Pashupata worship existed before any human teacher by that name walked the earth, surviving manuscripts of the core Pashupata Sutra are archaic and effectively anonymous, and the main surviving commentary (Kaundinya's Panchartha Bhashya, c. 500 CE) was only rediscovered in 1930. Both positions, Lakulisha as true founder, and Lakulisha as first formal preceptor of an older doctrine, remain live in scholarship; this page states the Purana's own account plainly without resolving the historical dispute on its behalf.
The practice: Pashupata vrata and the panchakshara mantra
The Shiva Purana's Vayaviya Samhita gives the actual vrata (vow) in detail: a multi-day fire-rite performed on the full moon of Chaitra, culminating in the collection of bhasma (sacred ash), tonsure or a single tuft of hair, and minimal dress, ideally none at all, for a devotee without shame about it. A devotee who maintains this vow until death is called a Naishthika, Atyashrami, or Maha Pashupata. The same Samhita identifies the panchakshara mantra, Namah Shivaya, as the practice's living core, explicitly naming four historical propagators of this teaching in the current cycle of yugas: Ruru, Dadhicha, Agastya, and the sage Upamanyu, whose own milk-austerities story (also told in the Vayaviya Samhita) the text treats as the model Pashupata devotee's path.
The twenty-eight avataras and their one hundred six disciples
The Vayaviya Samhita separately lists all twenty-eight Yogacharya avataras of the current manvantara by name, from Shveta through Sutara, Madana, Rishabha, Goutama and Mahakala down to Lakulishvara, together with all one hundred and six of their named disciples across the twenty-eight lineages, including figures the broader Hindu tradition independently recognizes such as Sanatkumara, Kapila, Vasishtha, Brihaspati, Jaimini, Akshapada (founder of the Nyaya school) and Kanada (founder of the Vaisheshika school). The text describes them collectively as Pashupata siddhas who smeared their bodies in bhasma, wore rudraksha and Tripundra, and were free of attachment.
Read the source chapters
Source note
Built entirely from this site's own Shiva Purana translation, read directly from Bibek Debroy's Penguin Classics edition: Shata Rudra Samhita ch.4-5 ("Story of Rishabha" / "Nineteen of Shiva's Avataras") and Vayaviya Samhita ch.32-35, 44 ("Best Practices" / "Rules of Pashupata Vrata" / "Upamanyu's Austerities and Conduct" / "Shiva's Avataras as Yogacharyas"). The separate English translation of the Pashupata Sutra itself (Haripada Chakraborti, Academic Publishers, Calcutta, 1970) remains unacquired; it has no ISBN and would need a secondhand/library/archive.org hunt, so this page does not attempt to translate or quote that root text directly, only the Purana's own account of the lineage and practice.