Kayaka: Labour as Worship in Its Own Right

The Lingayat tradition holds kayaka, honest and disciplined labor, to be a religious act complete in itself rather than a task performed on the way to some separate spiritual goal, a doctrine the vachana poets who gathered around Basava in twelfth century Karnataka expressed in the phrase kayakave kailasa, work itself is Kailasa, Shiva's own abode. Speaking of Siva's introduction to this poetry explains that the doctrine collapsed a distinction most religious traditions of the period preserved, between ordinary worldly work and a separate sphere of sanctioned religious practice, treating a day's honest labor, whatever the trade, as itself sufficient devotion rather than as something to be set aside in favor of ritual observance. Several of the tradition's most celebrated vachana poets were themselves working people rather than renunciants or priests, cobblers, weavers and potters among them, whose verses were preserved precisely because the movement held that spiritual insight arising from ordinary labor carried the same authority as insight arising from formal religious training. The Origins of Virasaiva Sects notes that kayaka functioned as a genuinely binding doctrine rather than pious sentiment, since Lingayat teaching held that labor performed carelessly or dishonestly failed as worship exactly as an insincere prayer would.