We've never heard probably of Nandikeśvara Shaivism. It might be cool to study that form of Shaiva monism and compare it to the other forms of Shaiva monism that we might be more familiar with.1
That is the entire substance of the lecture's coverage of Nandikeśvara Shaivism. Selvalingam admits he doesn't know much about it; he names it as the sixth of the eight Shaiva schools in Casey Pandya's enumeration; he flags it as a form of Shaiva monism (not dualism, not qualified non-dualism); and he moves on.
This page is therefore a stub — a placeholder marking the existence of the school in the doxographical map, flagged as [LOW SOURCE COVERAGE], awaiting a future ingest with primary Nandikeśvara sources.
The school is associated with the figure Nandikeśvara — the bull Nandi who serves as Shiva's vāhana (mount) and gatekeeper. The texts attributed to (or about) Nandikeśvara include:
The school's distinctive position (per the surviving literature) is Shaiva monism of a kind that incorporates Nandi's perspective as gatekeeper of Shiva — emphasizing the boundary between the world that approaches Shiva and Shiva himself, with the practitioner identifying with Nandi (the witness at the threshold) rather than with Shiva directly.
This is structurally distinct from:
Nandikeśvara's "from-the-threshold" position — neither identical with Shiva nor permanently distinct from him, but in the position of approaching him as Nandi does — is the school's signature move. But because the surviving literature is sparse and the practitioner lineage is institutionally minor, the school's distinctive contribution to Shaiva soteriology is not well documented.
Selvalingam includes Nandikeśvara as one of the eight schools because Casey Pandya's three-volume enumeration includes it — and because the existence of these less-documented schools is itself an argument. The Trika-Krama-Shaiva-Siddhānta-centric coverage of Indian religion typically presents Shaivism as a clean three-or-four-school field: dualist Siddhānta + non-dualist Trika + transgressive Krama-Kaula + perhaps Vīraśaiva. The eight-school enumeration is a corrective — it flags that there are other Shaiva schools with their own integrity that the standard coverage omits.
Nandikeśvara is one of the omitted schools. Its inclusion in the doxographical map as a real school worth studying is part of Selvalingam's broader pluralism move. Each of the eight has its own integrity as Shiva's revelation; each merits study; the standard coverage's omission of the less-famous schools is a flattening of the actual Shaiva landscape.
This page does not present the Nandikeśvara doctrinal positions in detail because:
Future deepening of this page would require ingesting the Nandikeśvara-Kāśikā and other primary texts, plus available secondary scholarship (limited; mostly in specialist journals and Sanskrit-language scholarly works). When that ingest happens, this stub becomes the seed for a full page.
[LOW SOURCE COVERAGE] flag: this page is a stub awaiting primary Nandikeśvara source ingest. Material beyond Selvalingam's direct citation drawn from background knowledge of the surviving Nandikeśvara literature; should be verified against a deeper Nandikeśvara source ingest before being treated as authoritative.