Some sentences in old texts stop you cold because they sound like they were written by someone who time-traveled from now. Wallis felt exactly this reading the Śaiva Tantric scriptures on caste: "Seeing it in the original Sanskrit is like recognizing the signature of someone who has travelled back in time from our era."1 What he found was a flat, unflinching repudiation of caste — the claim, "startlingly modern in its critique," that "caste is nothing but a cultural construct (kalpanā) without basis in fact, and that therefore all devotees of God form a single community regardless of birth."2
The word kalpanā — construct, fabrication, mental imposition — is doing radical work here. In a society organized top to bottom around caste as a natural, cosmic, birth-given order, these scriptures declared it a fiction with "no basis in fact." That's not a mild reform; it's a denial of the entire metaphysical justification of the social order, a millennium before "social construction" became a modern intellectual commonplace.
The scripture Wallis quotes, the Pauṣkara-pārameśvara, states it with a bluntness that would be at home in a modern manifesto: "There is only one caste, that of human beings. No 'caste' was ordained for them, nor color such as white. All arise from the union of a liṅga and a yoni, and thus all souls are one and the same. One who has the eye of wisdom sees God in all of them."3
Read the argument's structure, because it's tight. Premise: everyone is born the same way — "all arise from the union of a liṅga and a yoni" (sexual union). Therefore: there's no natural basis for sorting humans into ranked castes; the divisions were never "ordained." And the spiritual capstone: "all souls are one and the same," so "one who has the eye of wisdom sees God in all of them." The egalitarianism isn't merely social-reformist; it's grounded in the nondual metaphysics — if all souls are the one divine Consciousness, then caste-ranking is not just unjust but metaphysically false, a failure to see the single divinity present equally in everyone. The "eye of wisdom" sees through the construct to the one Self in all. Equality isn't a political demand here; it's what reality looks like once the fabrication of caste is seen through.
The practical engine of this principle is a radical reordering of who gets in. If caste is a construct and all souls are one, then birth can't be the qualification for initiation — and the actual qualification becomes sincere longing. Wallis notes "we have two commentators on record saying that it would be better to initiate a sincere foreigner than an insincere brāhmin," directly "supporting... that initiation was based, above all, on the sincere longing of the candidate."4
Sit with how subversive that is in context. The brāhmin sat at the top of the caste hierarchy; the foreigner (mleccha, "barbarian") was outside the system entirely, beneath even its lowest rungs. To say a sincere mleccha is a better initiation candidate than an insincere brāhmin is to invert the entire status order on the axis of interior sincerity rather than external birth. The whole question of whether foreigners can be initiated — which Wallis raises because "any Westerner who has been turned away from a Hindu temple on the basis of the color of his skin will realize this is a significant concern" — is answered by the scriptures in the affirmative, precisely "in the context of their assertions regarding the nonreality of caste."1 The non-reality of caste and the welcome of foreigners are the same doctrine: if birth-categories are fictions, then the foreigner's "outsider" status is also a fiction, and only the reality of their longing counts.
This is also, Wallis notes, why "the left-current Kaula-influenced lineages... would be the most appropriate for Westerners to practice in" — a "happy coincidence," since these are also "the lineages whose teachings I find Westerners most resonating with."4 The doctrine that welcomes the foreigner and the doctrine that most appeals to the modern seeker turn out to be the same left-current radicalism.
The most instructive part is the gap between the scriptural claim and the lived practice, and what that gap cost. The anti-caste teaching appears in the scriptures broadly, but "this repudiation of caste was only fully embraced in practice by the left current, in which referring to (let alone disparaging) the former caste of a fellow initiate merited expulsion from the spiritual community."5
Notice the gradient. The Pauṣkara-pārameśvara (a relatively mainstream Saiddhāntika-adjacent text) could state the one-caste-of-humanity doctrine — but stating it and living it are different things, and Wallis is precise that only the left current enforced it in practice, to the point of expelling anyone who so much as mentioned a fellow initiate's former caste. The right-current Saiddhāntikas, recall, initiated low-caste people but kept caste markings in their initiation names and seating; they held the doctrine in theory while accommodating the social order in practice. The left current alone took the construct-claim to its logical conclusion: inside the kula, caste doesn't just rank lower — it doesn't exist, and invoking it gets you removed.
And the punchline is sobering: "This egalitarianism was remarkably transgressive behavior in the context of medieval India (and, in the end, it was not tolerated)."5 The radical anti-caste practice of the left current is part of why those lineages (the Krama above all) were crushed and did not survive. The construct-claim was correct, "startlingly modern," metaphysically grounded — and it was exactly the kind of affront to the brāhminical social order that the surrounding society eventually destroyed. The case study's hard lesson connects directly to why the Krama died: being a millennium ahead on social justice is not a survival advantage in a society built on the hierarchy you're denying. The scriptures could write the future's signature; the lineages that actually lived it paid for it with their existence. A true and radical idea, stated in scripture, tolerated as theory — and extinguished when a community dared to practice it fully.
The transferable principle is the inversion of qualification from external status to interior sincerity. The scriptures' operative rule — better a sincere outsider than an insincere insider — is a usable selection criterion far beyond initiation: in any community or practice, the question that actually predicts who belongs is not their pedigree, credential, or birth-status but the genuineness of their longing for the thing itself. For a modern Western practitioner specifically, this doctrine is the tradition's own answer to "does this path even want someone like me?": yes — the Śaiva Tantric scriptures explicitly sanction the initiation of foreigners, ground that welcome in the non-reality of caste, and rank sincere longing above birth, with the left-current Kaula lineages (the ones that most resonate with Westerners anyway) being where this egalitarianism was most fully lived. The deeper implementation is the "eye of wisdom" itself: to actually see the one divinity equally present in everyone, seeing through the constructs (caste, race, status, insider/outsider) by which we rank people — which is both the metaphysical basis of the equality and a contemplative practice in its own right. And the cautionary half: living a radical egalitarianism fully, as the left current did, can make you intolerable to a hierarchical order — so the doctrine comes with the sober historical reminder that being right about human equality has often been dangerous.
The evidence is direct scriptural quotation (the Pauṣkara-pārameśvara) plus the commentators on sincere-foreigner-over-insincere-brāhmin, with Wallis's framing.34 The tension Wallis himself surfaces is the gap between scriptural statement and lived practice: the anti-caste doctrine is written broadly but practiced fully only on the left. This raises the question of how to weight a tradition's radical scriptural claims against its actual social behavior. Open question: when a tradition's scriptures state a radical principle (caste is a fiction, all are one) that most of its practitioners don't fully live, is the principle best read as the tradition's "true" teaching (the radical core, betrayed by timid practice) or as an aspirational ideal the tradition mostly honored in the breach — and does the fact that the lineages which did live it were destroyed mean the construct-claim was the tradition's genuine deep teaching, or a recurring radical possibility the tradition kept generating and the society kept crushing? In other words: is anti-caste Tantra's real position, or its perennially-suppressed conscience?
Wallis writes here as a Western scholar-practitioner with an obvious personal stake — the welcome of foreigners is, after all, the question of whether he and his Western readers belong in this tradition — and that stake shapes the page's warmth without distorting its honesty. He converges enthusiastically with the radical scriptural claim (caste is kalpanā; sincerity over birth; foreigners welcome), clearly delighting in finding "the signature of someone who has travelled back in time from our era." But he's scrupulous about the tension: he flags that the doctrine was fully practiced only on the left and that this egalitarianism "was not tolerated" — i.e., he doesn't oversell the tradition as uniformly progressive, conceding that the radical version was both minoritarian and ultimately crushed. Where his stake shows is the "happy coincidence" that the most egalitarian, foreigner-welcoming lineages (the left-current Kaula) are also the ones he finds "Westerners most resonating with" — a convergence that's genuinely fortunate for his project of bringing Tantra to a Western audience, and which he's transparent about. What that exposes is the scholar-practitioner doing careful work at a charged intersection: he wants (and personally needs) the tradition to welcome outsiders, the scriptures genuinely do, and he resists the temptation to flatten the messy reality (most of the tradition kept caste in practice; the radical version died) in service of the welcoming story he has every reason to prefer. The honesty about the gap and the destruction is what keeps the page from being mere apologetics for a tradition that happens to admit him.
The bridge: this is a page about declaring a deep social hierarchy a fiction with "no basis in fact," and about selecting on interior sincerity rather than external status — connecting to the history of social-construction arguments, to selection mechanisms, and to how radical egalitarian claims fare against entrenched orders.
The Sharpest Implication If a medieval Sanskrit scripture could declare caste a fiction with "no basis in fact" — grounding human equality in the metaphysical claim that all souls are the one divine — then the comforting modern assumption that egalitarianism is a recent moral achievement, the fruit of Enlightenment progress, is at least partly false. The "eye of wisdom" that sees the one God equally in everyone reached the construct-side of the hierarchy question a thousand years early, by a completely different route. But the sharper and darker implication is the fate of the lineages that lived it: the left current took the doctrine to its conclusion, expelled anyone who invoked caste, welcomed the foreigner over the insincere insider — and "was not tolerated." Being right about human equality, a millennium ahead of your society, was not a survival advantage; it was a death sentence for the communities radical enough to practice it. Take that seriously and you have to hold two uncomfortable truths at once: that the deepest egalitarian insight is old, recurrent, and available to contemplative metaphysics as much as to secular politics — and that stating it safely in scripture and living it fully in a community are utterly different acts, the first tolerated as theory and the second punished by extinction. The signature from the future was written; the people who tried to inhabit it were erased.
Generative Questions