Tantric culture arose
within what one could call the 'Sanskrit
cosmopolis', a transcultural formation focused on literary (not spoken), Sanskrit. As such, tantric
traditions arose during the early centuries of the common era, developing in
Buddhist, Jain and Hindu contexts.
From the early
medieval period to the rise of the Delhi Sultanate, the history of India is characterised in political terms by the development of
feudal kingdoms and of the increasing awareness of regional identity with the
rise of important regional centres focused on temples
and the development of region-specific styles of art and architecture.
After the collapse of
the Gupta empire and generally from the mid-eighth century, kingdoms such as
those of the Rastrakutas in the Deccan, an early form
of the Rajputs called the Gurjura-Pratiharas
of Malava-Rajasthan, and the Palas
of Bengal, were engaged in bitter rivalry; kings and princes pursued policies
of military adventurism and an ideology of warfare developed, which became, a
facet of the erotic play of king, who was understood as the manifestation of a
divinity. The king, as divine, was the male consort of the land represented by
the Goddess. Tribal and clan power developed during this period, with Brahmans
being given land in return for legitimising the new
rulers and instigating a process of Sanskritisation
whereby local customs and deities became integrated into the overarching,
Brahmanical paradigm.
The vast body of
tantric texts however are inseparable from the traditions that gave rise to
them. Saiva, Vaisnava and Sakta
Tantras were believed by their followers to have been revealed by Visnu, Siva, and the Goddess (Devi), and there were even
Tantras revealed by the Sun (Sarya), now lost, whose
followers were called Sauras.1
There were also Jain
Tantras believed to be the word of Mahavira and, above all, Buddhist Tantras
believed to be the word of the Buddha, which became incorporated into the vast
Buddhist canon between c. 400 and 750 CE, to this day integral to the living
traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. Using the term `Hindu' to refer to the Saiva, Sakta Vaisnava and Saura material is anachronistic as the term was used by the
Persians simply to denote the peoples of the subcontinent. The historian Srivara, who was at the court of Sultan Zain-ul-abidin (r. 1420-70) was the first to use the term to
distinguish people in Kashmir, who shared certain cultural values and practices
(such as cremation of the dead, veneration of the cow, styles of cuisine and
dress, or shared narratives) from Muslims (`Yavanas').
And for the very first use of the term in 16th century Bengal, see J.T
O'Connell, `The Word "Hindu" in Gaudiya Vaisnava Texts.2 But as Julius Lipner, points
out in Ancient Banyan: An Inquiry into the Meaning of "Hinduness"
3 it
was not a common designation until the nineteenth century.
But the theistic
Tantras and traditions, those of Visnu, Siva and the
Goddess, are interrelated and share common structures of practice and belief
that can be distinguished from those of the Buddhists and Jains by their
proximity to the Vedas, orthodox Brahmanical revelation, and their
interpreters. Thus the term 'tantric tradition' refers to those religions, that
claimed to develop from textual sources referring to themselves as 'tantras',
regarded as revelation, the word of God, by their followers. This diverse
tantric revelation must be seen in contrast to the ancient, orthodox
Brahmanical revelation or the Veda that the Tantras reject completely or accept
as a lower level of scriptural authority.
In contrast to the
Hindu Tantras, the Buddhist Tantras do not respond to the vedic
tradition but rather look to Mahayana Buddhism and see themselves as a
development of it, even though much Buddhist tantric material, the Yogini
Tantras, was probably derived from Saiva prototypes.
Arriving at
definitions of 'Tantra' and 'Tantrism' has been notoriously difficult and has
varied between presenting external accounts of a phenomenon named `Tantrism'
and internal accounts of what the term tantra refers to. An important
indigenous distinction is between tantrika, a
follower of the Tantras, and vaidika, a follower of the
Vedas. This distinction operates across the sectarian divides of Saivas, Vaisnavas and so on. The
former refers to those who follow a system of ritual and teaching found within
the Tantras, in contrast to those, especially the Brahman caste, who follow the
Veda as primary revelation or iruti (and so called Srautas), or who follow the later texts of secondary
revelation called smrti (and so called Smartas).The issue is complicated, however, by some vedic Brahmans, particularly Smartas,
observing tantric rites and some texts in the vedic
tradition, namely Upanisads, being clearly tantric in
character, `which tantrika authors (Bhaskararaya, for example) consider as confirming the
validity of tantric teachings and practices.
Early Western
scholars like for example M. Eliade during the 1950’s presented Tantrism in
terms of a list of characteristics, such as locating a bipolar energy within
the body, while others have offered more precise definitions. So for example
the thesis presented by Ron Davidson in the context of tantric Buddhism is that
the central `sustaining metaphor' of the Mantrayana,
or tantric Buddhism, is that the path of the practitioner is akin to the path
of the king on his way to becoming an overlord (rajadhirdja)
or universal monarch (cakravartin), expressed through
the forms of consecration, self-visualisation,
mandalas and ‘esoteric acts'.4
Davidson's account of
Tantrism in terms of power is important and it is surely germane to point to
the political dimensions of the tantric practitioner that have been generally
neglected or ignored (probably partly due to the clear separation of `politics'
from `religion' that has, rightly or wrongly, characterised
Western scholarship). The practitioner, in Davidson's reading of the texts,
seeks to assume kingship and exercise dominion. We could, however, read this in
a slightly different way, that the central tantric metaphor is indeed, as Tsong-ka-pa identified, divinisation
and that the model of kingship - the king undergoing consecration and so on -
is in fact the king becoming divine. The divinisation
of the king through ritual consecration is directly akin to the divinisation of the icon in a temple and the divinisation of the practitioner in daily ritual (or even
the divinisation in possession). More fundamental
than the metaphor of kingship is the metaphor of transformation into a deity.
The idea that to worship a god one must become a god is a notable feature of
all tantric traditions, even ones which maintain a dualist metaphysics.The
empowering of the body, which means its divinisation,
is arguably the most important quality in tantric traditions, but a quality
that is only specified within particular traditions and texts.
Becoming divine is an
ancient trope in Indian civilisation. With reference
to the consecration of the vedic king, it is
fundamental `that the worshipper becomes one with the god to whom the worship
is addressed. Tantric ritual reflects this general idea but is text- and
tradition-specific in terms of content and in the explicit focus on the divinisation of the body as the enactment of its
revelation.
The practitioner in
ritual contexts becomes divine such that his or her limited subjectivity is
transcended or expanded and that subjectivity becomes coterminous with the
subjectivity of his or her deity, which is to say that the text is internalised and subjectivity becomes text-specific. This
is clearly in line with Tsongka-pa's understanding in
a Buddhist context and also makes sense in a theistic `Hindu' one.5
While the idea of liberation
as becoming one with the absolute (brahman) has a long history in Brahmanical
thinking from the Upanisads, the ritual construction
of the body as the deity through the use of magical phrases or mantras is
proto-typically tantric.6
In a broader sense,
the tantric traditions are examples of forms of practice and reflection handed
down through generations which locate themselves historically by reference to a
foundational text or group of texts, believed to originate in a, transcendent
source. This is, of course, true of many traditions including Islam, Judaism
and Christianity, as well as vedic tradition. But
while this is a general point, it is nevertheless an important one, for
processes of identification and entextualisation can
be identified within wider scriptural traditions that are also typical of
tantric traditions.
Scriptural traditions
all developed before modernity and before the Kantian understanding of the self
as an autonomous agent; an idea that connects with the notion of the citizen who
has civic responsibilities yet who remains distinct from the social body and an
individuality that comes to stand against tradition. In scriptural traditions,
such a notion has been alien, and the self is an index of a tradition-specific
subjectivity, formed in particular ways in conformity to tradition. In
scriptural traditions, the self is constructed through ritual and the
development of a tradition-specific interiority or variable indexicality that
is not individual in the contemporary, de-traditionalised
sense (characterised by fragmentation and
alienation). Scripture-sanctioned rituals serve as identity markers for
communities in medieval India, and, although these boundaries can be
transgressed, such transgression always assumes their existence.
The self in such
communities is bounded by text and ritual. Such a tradition-specified self,
develops philosophy as a craft or techne and needs to develop his or herself
into a particular kind of person if he or she is to move towards a knowledge of
the truth about his or her good and the human good. Tantra thus can itself be
seen in terms of techne, and the suffix tra expresses
the means or instrument of an action expressed by a verbal root. Thus as mantra
might be rendered `instrument of thought, so tantra might literally be taken to
mean `method or instrument of extension', perhaps with the implication that it
is the self or body that is extended to become coterminous with the divine
body.
In other words, the
tantric body is encoded in tradition-specific and text-specific ways. The
practitioner inscribes the body through ritual and forms of interiority or
asceticism, and so writes the tradition on to the body. Such transformative
practices are intended to create the body as divine. This inscribing the body
is also a reading of text and tradition. Indeed, the act of reading is of
central importance in the tantric traditions. The fact that the texts were
written is important and has sometimes been underestimated in focusing on
orality/aurality in the transmission of texts.
The (sanskrit) texts were intended to be read and heard by those
with the requisite authority, to be brought to life, and to be performed. The
importance of the written word here is evident from the commentaries upon the
primary texts by the later tradition. The importance of reading the texts is
further suggested by the presence of ritual manuals (paddhatis),
`cookbooks' that served to instruct and remind practitioners about how to
undertake particular kinds of performance and about particular tenets of a
system. The tantric body, constructed as a public act (even if limited in its
public nature through secrecy), is in turn `read' by traditional practitioners
in so far as some tantrikas wore external signs of
their cultic affiliation while others disparaged such signs, retaining their
tantric affiliation as 'secret'; such secrecy is an overcoding
of the body.
That is, while some
tantric traditions overtly reject vedic tradition and
normative, caste and feudal society of medieval India, most must be seen as
adding their own writing of the body on to the traditional vedic
writing or as reconfiguring the vedic tradition in
terms of the tantric. We see this, for example, in the Saiva traditions of
Kashmir accounted for by Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025
CE). For him, tantric rites were supererogatory to vedic
practice. The body, the vedic body, is overwritten by
the practitioner who constructs a tantric body through a further
superimposition of rites and the internalisation of a
tantric ideology. Thus, in his famous statement (probably a standard saying), Abhinavagupta writes that externally one follows vedic practice, in the domestic sphere one is an orthodox
Saiva, but in one's secret life one is a follower of the extreme antinomian
cult of the Kula which involves the disruption of the vedic
body through ritual transgression of vedic norms and
values.
There is much
speculation about the origins of Tantrism. On the one hand the origins have
been seen in an autochthonous spirituality or Shamanism (see below) that
reaches back to pre-Aryan times in the subcontinent, yet textual historical
evidence only dates from a more recent period. While certainly there are
elements in tantric traditions that may well reach back into pre-history -
particularly the use of skulls and the themes of death and possession.
Tantrism as I pointed
out, must however be understood as a predominantly Brahmanical, Sanskritic
tradition with its roots in the Veda. In his book on the origins of Indian civilisation, Bernard Sergent has
argued that our main resources for understanding the past are linguistic and
archaeological.7 There is no early archaeological
evidence for tantric traditions beyond the common era, and while there is
textual evidence for a cremation ground asceticism as far back as the time of
the Buddha, as well as tantric-like goddesses in the Veda, the specificity of
the tantric revelation appears more recently in the history of South Asia.
However traditions
are constantly reconfigured in the light of contemporary situations and there
is no reason to think that the tantric traditions are any different. While of
course receiving forms of practice and ideas handed down from the past, the
Tantras at the time of their composition were a new revelation that transcended
the older, vedic texts.
Second/the tantric
traditions are regarded as a revelation from a transcendent source and the
texts describe the `descent of the Tantra' (tantravatdra)
from a pure, divine origin but becoming eroded in the course of its descent to
the human world, where it is sometimes presented as a particular (visesa) or esoteric revelation for the few with the
qualification (adhikdra) to receive it, in contrast
to the exoteric, vedic scriptures. Third, the Tantras
need to be seen in a `scale of texts' in which a text is positioned in relation
to others usually in a hierarchy. Tantras thus, present themselves in a scale
of revelation, relegating other traditions to lower levels of this revelation
and reading the earlier traditions through the lens of their own revelation.
There is a high degree of intentionality in the scale of Tantras such that if a
text does not deal with the details of a particular topic, it is assumed that
this is covered elsewhere.
Finally, we need to
understand the anonymous Tantras (and some related texts with named authors) as
having a composite authorship, and so when speaking about the intentionality of
a text or `author' of a text we are not speaking in terms of authorial
intention in the usual sense. To give an example, we can say that according to vedic exegesis, the Mimarnsa,
revelation is a system of signs that points to a transcendent meaning. This
revelation has no author, and so that transcendent meaning must be understood
in terms of its inner intentionality and is therefore self-validating. Nyaya,
by contrast, refuted the atheism of Mimamsa and
proposed God as the author of the Veda. The Tantras are closer to the Nyaya
perspective and are interestingly defended by the Nyaya philosopher Jayantha
Bhatt.
Next, in part 2 of this
series I will turn to various issues like Kingship, the purification of the
body, possesion and and
most important the secret, inner practices.
As for a not entirely un-related subject see also:
Searching for Ancient Spirits in Asia P.1: November 2006, the Supreme Court in
Nepal ordered an inquiry into whether the tradition of worshipping a
"living goddess"
has led to the exploitation of girls. We investigated the true history of
Child Mediums in Asia.
Searching for Ancient Spirits in Asia: Research
Report P.2.
1. See Alexis Sanderson, “Saivism and the Tantric Traditions”, in S. Sutherland
(ed.), The World's Religions, London, 1988, pp. 660-704.
2. Journal of the
American Oriental Society 93/3,1973, PP. 340-44.
3. Religious Studies
32,1996, pp. 109-26.
4. Davidson, Indian
Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement, Columbia
University Press, 2002, p. 121. Tantra as a quest for power has also been emphasised by Brunner in 'Le sadhaka,
personnage oublie de l'Inde du Sud', Journal Asiatique,
1975, PP. 411-43.
5. Tsong-ka-pa, Tantra in Tibet: The Great Exposition of
Secret Mantra, trans. and ed. J. Hopkins, vol. 1, London,1977, pp. 64-6.
6. See also Satapatha Brahmana 1.1.1.4-5 about the self
becoming divine, passing from men to the gods. Julius Eggeling (trans.), The Satapatha
Brahmana, vol. 1, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 12, Oxford, 1982.
7. Sergent, Genese de
l'Inde,Paris, 1997, p.10.
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