The Hindu temple is the seat of a full culture including material commodities and services, arts ranging from cooking and flower decoration, to music and philosophy. To conceive, build, organize, manage, maintain such a privileged site of culture, an authentic and well-thought out theory and guidance is required. Sanskrit Āgamic literature plays this role. The Śaiva religion is based on a set of twenty-eight Tantras. The Ajitamahātantra is the fifth in a traditional list, a lengthy text, which invites the reader to approach the Saiva religion in a form, which probably goes back to the Cola period and is definitely located in Tamil Nadu. In eighty-nine chapters, it offers a systematic account of the installation of liṅga starting from the selection of the stone and construction of the temple to the great ceremony of installation of the deity. Thereafter it deals extensively with the daily worship, festivals and occasional rituals, with iconography, subsidiary rituals, as well as the rites of atonement of faults and failures.

The present publication in five volumes is the second revised critical edition with English translation and annotation. Wherever possible, descriptions have been illustrated with theoretical drawings or photographs of actual monuments and icons.