Shri Dattatreya is treated here only as he matters to the International Nath Order: a historical teacher, an Avadhut, and Adiguru of the Adinath Sampradaya—the line into which Shri Gurudev Mahendranath was initiated. Other panths give that first seat to Shiva or Gorakshanath. This line gives it to Datta. He is read as an incarnation of Maheshvara (Shiva). Later voices claimed him for Vishnu. That is not a second god. Names of the Cosmic Spirit take form.
Shri Gurudev Mahendranath wrote in The Pathless Path to Immortality:
Shri Dattatreya was a dropout from an earlier age than the period when Vedic and Tantra merged to become one simple cult. It was men like Dattatreya who helped to make this possible. Three of his close disciples were kings, one an asura, and the other two both belonging to the warrior caste. Dattatreya himself was regarded as an avatar of Maheshvara (Shiva) but later was claimed by Vaishnavas as the avatar of Vishnu. Not such a sectarian claim as it appears. Hindus regard Shiva and Vishnu as the same or as manifestations of the Absolute taking form.
The Dattatreya Upanishad opens by identifying him with Vishnu and closes with Om Namah Shivaya. The last movement of its third chapter names Maheshvara as all-pervading and then names Dattatreya as that Lord in form.
Life and places
Mahendranath had no doubt that Dattatreya was a historical figure. He gave the birth as Wednesday, the fourteenth day of the bright fortnight of Margashirsha. He gave no year.
Datta left home young and wandered naked in search of the Absolute. His ground was the country from northern Mysore through Maharashtra into Gujarat, as far as the Narmada. Realization is placed near Gangapur. Footprints are claimed on a peak at Girnar. The Tripura-rahasya has Parashurama find him in meditation on Gandhamadana.
The Markandeya Purana tells that he stayed years in a lake to drop attachment and to evade munis waiting on the bank. He came out naked with a woman, kept her as Shakti, drank, and sang. The munis did not leave. That is the Tantric Datta this page keeps. Later temples made a milder god. Nature was his teacher; the long roster of twenty-four gurus in the Bhagavata Purana is that fact turned into a list.
Texts
Two works carry his name here.
The Avadhuta Gita is the song of one who has cast off the fetters, said to have been taken down by the disciples Swami and Kartika. The old work has seven chapters. An eighth, moralizing and hostile to women, looks like a later graft. Some of its thought is common to Shaiva and Buddhist Tantra.
The Tripura-rahasya is read as a shortening of a Datta Samhita (also called Dakshinamurti Samhita), passed through Paramasura and written out by Sumedha Haritayana. The conduct section is lost. What remains is teaching on Lalita and on consciousness. This page does not teach that book.
Later image
Devotional cults show him with three heads—Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva—seated with his Shakti under an audumbara tree, a fire before him, four dogs at his side. Those dogs are sometimes called the Vedas. That is a later icon. This Order reads the dropout and the teacher.