Lingayat, also called Virashaiva, member of a Hindu sect with a wide following in southern India that worships Shiva as the only deity. The followers take their name (“lingam-wearers”) from the small representations of a lingam, a votary object symbolizing Shiva, which both the men and women always wear hanging by a cord around their necks, in place of the sacred thread worn by most orthodox upper-caste Hindu men.
The sect is generally regarded as having been founded by Basava in the 12th century, but some scholars believe that he furthered an already existing creed. Philosophically, their qualified spiritual monism and their conception of bhakti (devotion) as an intuitive and loving knowledge of God show the influence of the 11th/12th-century thinker Ramanuja. It is in their cult and social observances that their split with orthodoxy is most apparent.
The Lingayats’ earlier overthrow of caste distinctions has been modified in modern times, but the sect continues to be strongly anti-Brahmanical and opposed to worship of any image other than the lingam. In their rejection of the authority of the Vedas, the doctrine of transmigration of souls, child marriage, and ill treatment of widows, they anticipated much of the viewpoint of the social reform movements of the 19th century.