The Śivadharma Project will produce a variety of output, ranging from the production of critical editions and translations into English of Sanskrit texts — notably the Śivadharmottara, the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, the Umottarasaṃvāda, the Dharmaputrikā, and the Lalitavistara — to the first translations of Tamil texts such as the Civatarumōttaram and its commentary, as well as the 18th century Tamil Talapurāṇas that are among the research topics of the subproject “Tamil”. Critical work will also involve other texts that are relevant for our project, such as the Haracaritacintāmaṇi, the Bṛhaddharmapurāṇa, the Devīpurāṇa, the Kālikāpurāṇa and the Ekāmrapurāṇa, of which the team will edit, translate and study only selected chapters. 

Furthermore, the Śivadharma project will also produce a study, edition and translation of inscriptions of the so-called Kālāmukhas, a corpus of ca. 150 texts in Sanskrit, Kannada and Telugu, from the Deccan and the Āndhra region, as well as of 6th-7th century inscriptions from Odisha and Bengal that are relevant for the history of Śaivism in these regions, accompanied by a study of related iconography. 

The ultimate aim of our study is that of making a strong connection between a philological and a historical interrogation of the sources, and to develop even further — beyond the texts themselves — the interpretative component of the project, according sufficient attention to social processes. We will publish the results of our historical inquiry in the form of traditional monographs and articles, but we will also make available the sources of our study on the Śivadharma Database, one of the main output of the project. This will be set up with the support of the team at the University of Bologna, and will be hosted on the servers of the same institution. Besides storing all the pictures of manuscripts, inscriptions and icons that will be collected by team members, the database will contain the digital critical editions of works of the Śivadharma corpus. Preparing these editions for a digital publication, besides the usual printed format, will allow us to explore new possibilities in the analysis and presentation of our textual sources, and to ultimately achieve a better understanding of the traditions that we study. A section of the database will contain the reproduction and description of the manuscripts, that will be linked to the critical editions. A further area of the database will also be devoted to the publication of new editions and translations of the inscriptions that are relevant to the project, accompanied by photographic materials. From this point of view, the Śivadharma database will closely cooperate with the “DHARMA-base” that will be produced in the framework of the ERC-Synergy project DHARMA (link to the project blog: https://dharma.hypotheses.org/). The Śivadharma Database will be sharing with this project materials and publication methods. The database will furthermore store pictures and descriptions of the iconographic materials related to the Śivadharma project.