The misery of hell is thus somewhat alleviated by schadenfreude, and the pleasures of heaven are undercut by the attitude of Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, who cries, “Ouch!” before she pricks her finger. 76
The sins that send you to hell and the virtues that send you to heaven are often described in detail that rivals that of the shastras, as the texts seem to vie with one another in imagining gruesome and appropriate punishments to fit the crime. After hearing the spine-curdling descriptions of the tortures of hell, the interlocutor (who is, as in the Mahabharata, built into the frame) often asks: “Isn’t there anything that I can do to avoid having that happen to me?” And yes, you will be happy to hear that there is: just as there was a Vedic ritual to protect you, now there is a Puranic ritual, or a Puranic mantra, or a Puranic shrine, or a Puranic pilgrimage, that the text mercifully teaches you right then and there. There are many pilgrimage sites described in the Mahabharata, particularly in the great tour of the fords (tirthas); but now each Purana plugs one special place.
For the moral dilemma posed by the massacre in the Mahabharata, the Puranic solution is a pilgrimage to Prayaga (Allahabad), the junction of the two sacred rivers (the Ganges and the Yamuna), above Varanasi, the site of the greatest annual festival in India, the Kumbha Mela:
AN EXPIATION FOR THE MAHABHARATA WAR
When King Yudhishthira and his brothers had killed all the Kauravas, he was overwhelmed by a great sorrow and became bewildered. Soon afterward, the great ascetic Markandeya arrived at the city of Hastinapur. Yudhishthira bowed to the great sage and said, “Tell me briefly how I may be released from my sins. Many men who had committed no offense were killed in the battle between us and the Kauravas. Please tell me how one may be released from the mortal sin that results from acts of violence against living creatures, even if it was done in a former life.”
Markandeya said, “Listen, your majesty, to the answer to your question: Going to Prayaga is the best way for men to destroy evil. The god Rudra, the Great God, lives there, as does the self-created lord Brahma, together with the other gods.” Yudhishthira said, “Sir, I wish to hear the fruit of going to Prayaga. Where do people who die there go, and what is the fruit of bathing there?”77
And the sage obliges him, in considerable detail.
Yudhishthira is haunted by the same problem that troubled Arjuna centuries earlier in the Gita: “Many men who had committed no offense were killed in the battle between us and the Kauravas.” In the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira performed a horse sacrifice to restore himself and the kingdom; in the Puranas, he makes a pilgrimage to Prayaga. The format of this myth—first a statement of a sin (the mess I got myself into), then the promise of a restoration, a solution—is a set piece, new Puranic wine poured into old Brahmana bottles.
The Puranas tackle other Mahabharata trouble spots too. In the Mahabharata, Balarama is the brother of Krishna, renowned for his physical power and his prowess with the mace. In the Vaishnava Puranas, Balarama becomes far more important and is sometimes regarded as one of the avatars of Vishnu. But he is also a notorious drinker, and the Puranas tell a striking story about this:
A RESTORATION FOR DRUNKENNESS AND MANSLAUGHTER
One day Balarama, the brother of Krishna, got drunk and wandered around, stumbling, his eyes red with drinking. He came to a forest where a group of learned Brahmins were listening to a bard, a Charioteer, reciting stories in the place of a Brahmin. When the Brahmins saw Balarama and realized that he was drunk, they all stood up quickly, all except for the Charioteer. Enraged, Balarama struck the Charioteer and killed him. Then all the Brahmins left the forest, and when Balarama saw how they shunned him and sensed that his body had a disgusting smell, the smell of bloodshed, he realized that he had committed Brahminicide. He cursed his rage, and the wine, and his arrogance, and his cruelty. For restoration, he undertook a twelve-year pilgrimage to the Sarasvati River “against the current,” confessing his crime.78
Since the Charioteer belongs to a low caste that is said to go “against the current”79 (born from a father of a caste lower than the mother’s), Balarama undertakes the appropriate pilgrimage “against the current”—that is, from the mouth to the source of the Sarasvati River. (Balarama is famous for having altered the course of the Yamuna/Kalindi River.80) Yet he understands that he has killed someone who is in some way the equivalent of a Brahmin, not in his caste but perhaps in his knowledge and in his status in the eyes of actual Brahmins, so that in killing him he has committed Brahminicide, and he accuses himself of arrogance for expecting the Charioteer to rise in deference to him. The pilgrimage and confession are his ways of dealing with what he acknowledges as his rage and cruelty, though he curses the wine rather than his own addictive drunkenness. In the Puranas, there is a cure for everything.
CHAPTER 15
SECTS AND SEX IN THE TANTRIC PURANAS AND THE TANTRAS
600 to 900 CE
CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES ARE CE)
550-575 Kalachuris create the cave of Shiva at Elephanta
606-647 Harsha reigns at Kanauj
630-644 Xuan Zang (Hsuan Tsang) visits India
650-800 Early Tantras are composed
765-773 Raja Krishna I creates the Kailasa temple to Shiva at Ellora
900 and 1150 The Chandellas build the temples at Khajuraho
1238-1258 Narasimhadeva I builds the temple of Konarak
WHAT USE ARE IMAGINED IMAGES?
If the shapes that men imagine in their minds could achieve Release
for them, then surely men could become kings by means of the
kingdom that they get in their dreams. Those who believe that the
Lord lives in images made of clay, stone, metal, wood, or so forth and
wear themselves out with asceticism without true knowledge—they
never find Release. Whether they waste themselves away by fasting,
or get potbellies by eating whatever they like, unless they have the
knowledge of the ultimate reality—how could they be cured? If
people could get Release by performing vows to eat nothing but air,
leaves, crumbs, or water, then the serpents and cattle and birds and
fish would be Released.
Mahanirvana Tantrahs1
The texts called the Tantras mock physical icons and dream images, as part of their general challenge to most aspects of conventional Hinduism (including fasting and asceticism), but they go on to replace these physical processes and mental images with ones of their own, produced in Tantric rituals, claiming that they have the power to transform the worshipers into deities. Tantra is one of the many actual peripheries that survive against an imagined non-Tantric center, an all-encompassing religious movement that rivaled Hinduism as a whole and indeed explicitly turned upside down some of the most cherished assumptions of the Brahmin imaginary.
How you define Hindu Tantra is largely predetermined by what you want to say about it; some scholars define it in terms of its theology (connected with goddesses and usually with Shiva, though this is not unique to Tantrism), some its social attitudes (which are generally antinomian, also not unique to Tantrism), and some its rituals (often involving the ingesting of bodily fluids, particularly sexual fluids, which is indeed a Tantric specialtyht). Like Hinduism in general, Tantra is best defined through a Zen diagram combining all these aspects.
INDIA IN THE TIME OF HARSHA
After the Gupta Empire fragmented, in the seventh and eighth centuries CE, once again we enter a period when there is no single political power, which seems to be the default position for most of ancient Indian history; empires are the exception. Again it is a fruitful period of change and creativity, when new castes, sects, and states emerged, and new regional kingdoms.2 One of these was the kingdom of Harsha, who reigned from 606 to 647. We have far more information about him—more available light—than we have about most kings of this period, largely because of three witnesses. His court poet, Bana, wrote a prose poem about him
, the Harshacharita, which offers, hidden between the layers of fulsome praise and literary ostentation, quite a lot of information about life as it was lived at Harsha’s court. And the Chinese Buddhist traveler Xuan Zang (also spelled Hsuan Tsang, Hiuen Tsiang, Hsuien-tsang, Yuan Chwang), a monk and scholar, inspired by Faxian, who had visited the Guptas two hundred years earlier, visited India between 630 and 644, returning to China with twenty horses loaded with Buddhist relics and texts. He wrote a long account of India, including a detailed eyewitness description of Harsha’s administration. 3 Since both Bana and Xuan Zang were under Harsha’s patronage, we must take their testimonies with a grain of salt, but much of what each says is confirmed by the other, as well as by the third, even more biased witness, Harsha himself, who wrote three Sanskrit plays, two of which describe life at court.
Harsha came of a powerful family and ruled over the fertile land between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, an area that he extended until he ruled the whole of the Ganges basin (including Nepal and Assam), from the Himalayas to the Narmada River, besides Gujarat and Saurashtra (the modern Kathiawar). He shifted the center of power from Ujjain and Pataliputra to Kanauj (near modern Kanpur). After Harsha’s initial conquests, there was peace in his empire. He died without leaving an heir; on his death one of his ministers usurped the throne. His empire did not survive him.
Harsha was descended from the Guptas through his grandmother, and his sister, Rajya Sri, was married to the Maukhari king at Kanauj. According to Bana, after her husband was killed in battle, Rajya Sri was taken hostage. She escaped and fled to the Vindhyas, where she was about to commit suttee, but Harsha snatched her from the pyre. She then hoped to become a Buddhist nun, but Harsha dissuaded her, because through her he could control the Maukhari kingdom.4 That Bana regarded the practice of suttee as a serious problem is apparent from a passage worth quoting at some length:
Life is relinquished quite readily by those overcome by sorrow; but only with great effort is it maintained when subjected to extreme distress. What is called “following in death” [anumarana] is pointless. It is a path proper to the illiterate. It is a pastime of the infatuated. It is a road for the ignorant. It is an act for the rash. It is taking a narrow view of things. It is very careless. All in all, it is a foolish blunder to abandon your own life because a father, brother, friend, or husband is dead. If life does not leave on its own, it should not be forsaken. If you think about it, you will see that giving up your own life is only an act of self-interest, for it serves to assuage the unbearable agonies of sorrow that you suffer. It brings no good whatsoever to the one who is already dead. In the first place, it is not a way to bring that one back to life. Nor is it a way to add to his accumulations of merit. Nor is it a remedy for his possible fall into hell. Nor is it a way to see him. Nor is it a cause of mutual union. The one who is dead is helpless and is carried off to a different place that is proper for the ripening of the fruit of his actions. As for the person who abandons life—that person simply commits the sin of suicide, and nothing is achieved for either of them. But, living, he can do much for the dead one and for himself by the offering of water, the folding of hands, the giving of gifts, and so forth.5
This remarkable statement combines, with no contradiction whatsoever, the religious assumptions of a pious Hindu and a sensible, compassionate, and highly rational argument against the ritual suicide of a widow. This is a valuable piece of evidence of resistance to such ritual immolations during Harsha’s reign.hu
Harsha was a most cosmopolitan king, known as a patron of the arts and of all religions. Besides the poet Bana and another famous poet, Mayura, he also kept at his court a man named Matanga Divakara, a critic and dramatist who is said either to have come from one of the Pariah castes (a Chandala) or to have been a Jaina.6 Harsha does not mention temple worship in his plays; he writes, instead, of a spring festival that the whole city participates in, dancing in the streets and sprinkling one another with red dye (as people do during the Holi festival even today), and of an individual puja to the god Kama that the queen carries out at a small outdoor shrine.7 Harsha was a religious eclectic; two of his three plays (the ones about court intrigue) are dedicated to Shiva, while the third, Nagananda, invokes the Buddha. But the plot of Nagananda is as Hindu as it is Buddhist: A prince gives up his own body to stop a sacrifice of serpents to the mythical Garuda bird, a myth that clearly owes much to the snake sacrifice in the Mahabharata as well as to the story of King Shibi (in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions). Xuan Zang noted a movement of nonviolence toward animals during Harsha’s reign: Indians are “forbidden to eat the flesh of the ox [or cow],hv the ass, the elephant, the horse, the pig, the dog, the fox, the wolf, the lion, the monkey, and all the hairy kind. Those who eat them are despised and scorned.”8
Harsha may have became a convert to Buddhism in his later life; we know that he sent a Buddhist mission to China and held assemblies at the holy Hindu site of Prayaga, where donations were made to followers of all sects.9 During this period Buddhism still thrived in large monasteries in Bihar and Bengal, though it had begun to vanish from South India and was fading in the rest of North India. Xuan Zang says that the king of Sindh was a Shudra, but a good man who revered Buddhism.10
TANTRIC PURANAS
PROTO-TANTRIC SHAIVA SECTS
Scholars have scrambled to find the sources of Tantra, the ur-Tantras, during this period, but those sources are numerous, hard to date, and widely dispersed. A number of sects with some Tantric features, though not yet full-blown Tantra, arose in the early centuries of the first millennium CE and later came to be regarded as Tantric—through our bête noire, hindsight. And a number of Shaiva Puranas describe sects that share some, but not all, of the characteristics of Shakta Tantras (that is, Tantras dedicated to the goddess Shakti). Tantric ideas doubtless developed in sources long lost to us, but they appear textually first in the Puranas and after that in the Tantras. We must therefore look to the mythology of Puranas composed during this general period (600 to 900 CE) for the mythological underpinnings of Tantric rituals.
Besides the Puranas, there is scattered textual and epigraphical evidence of movements that may be considered proto-Tantric. In the first century CE, a sage named Lakulisha (“Lord of the Club”) founded a sect of Pashupatas, worshipers of Shiva as Lord of Beasts (Pashupati),11 and in the next centuries more and more people identified themselves as Pashupatas.12 A Pashupata inscription of 381 CE counts back eleven generations of teachers to Lakulisha.13 The Mahabharata refers to them, but examples of their own texts begin much later.14 The Kurma Purana condemns them, and the Linga Purana reflects some of their doctrines.15 They lived in cremation grounds (hence they were Pariahs, polluted by contact with corpses), and their rituals consisted of offerings of blood, meat, alcohol, and sexual fluids “from ritual intercourse unconstrained by caste restrictions.”16 The imagery of the cremation ground comes from older stories about renouncers and finds its way later into the mythology of Shiva and then into Tantric rituals.
The Pashupatas give a new meaning to passive aggressive; they went out of their way to scandalize respectable folks. The Pashupata Sutra, which may be the work of Lakulisha himself, instructs the novice Pashupata to seek the slander of others by going about like a Pariah (preta), snoring, trembling, acting lecherous, speaking improperly, so that people will ill-treat him, and thus he will give them his bad karma and take their good karma from them,17 a highly original, active spin on the usual concept of the intentional transfer of good karma or the inadvertent accumulation of bad karma. Now we have the intentional transfer of bad karma. For in fact these Pashupatas were perfectly sober and chaste, merely miming drunkenness and lechery (two of the four addictive vices of lust). The onlookers were therefore unjustly injuring the Pashupatas, and through this act their good karma was transferred to the Pashupatas, and the Pashupatas’ bad karma to them.18 (No one seems to comment on the fact that through their deception, the Pashupatas were harming the onlookers and hence would p
resumably lose some of their own good karma through this malevolence.)
An early text describes the Pashupatas as wandering, carrying a skull-topped staff and a begging bowl made of a skull, wearing a garland of human bone, covered in ashes (the ashes of corpses), with matted hair or shaved head, and acting in imitation of Rudra (the Vedic antecedent of Shiva).19 This behavior closely resembles the vow that Manu prescribes for someone who has killed a Brahmin: “A Brahmin killer should build a hut in the forest and live there for twelve years to purify himself, eating food that he has begged for and using the skull of a corpse as his flag (11.73).” Why was this said to be in imitation of Rudra/Shiva? Because Shiva was the paradigmatic Brahmin killer, indeed, the Brahma killer.
SHIVA, THE SKULL BEARER
The Pashupatas were eventually transformed into a sect called the Skull Bearers (Kapalikas), who no longer followed the philosophy or stigmatizing behavior of the Pashupatas except for the skull begging bowl and who developed their own texts. Several Puranas tell the myth of the origin of the Skull Bearers; one version runs like this:
SHIVA BEHEADS BRAHMA
Brahma desired Sarasvati and asked her to stay with him. She said that he would always speak coarsely. One day when Brahma met Shiva, his fifth head made an evil sound, and Shiva cut it off. The skull remained stuck fast to his hand, and though Shiva was capable of burning it up, he wandered the earth with it for the sake of all people, until he came to Varanasi.20
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