The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  The Zen diagram of Tantra (that is, a cluster of qualities, not all of which need be present in any particular text or ritual) includes the worship of the goddess, initiation, group worship, secrecy, and antinomian behavior, particularly sexual rituals and the ingesting of bodily fluids. There are Tantric texts, Tantric rituals, Tantric myths, Tantric art forms, and, above all, Tantric worshipers. There are Tantric mantras (repeated formulas), Tantric yantras (mystical designs), and Tantras (esoteric texts), as well as Tantric gods and their consorts. Within Hinduism, there are Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta Tantras, as well as Tantras devoted to other gods, and there are, in addition, Buddhist Tantras and some Jaina Tantras; Buddhism and Hinduism once again, as in the Upanishadic period, share a number of features, in this case certain rituals and images.ia

  Tantra originated, both in Buddhism and in Hinduism, sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries of the Common Era,43 but it truly hit its stride in the tenth century, having changed significantly in the course of those centuries. 44 In particular, from the tenth century the Tantras were infused with the spirit of bhakti. Tantra probably began in the northern fringes of India, Kashmir, Nepal, Bengal, and Assam—places where Buddhism too flourished—but it soon took hold in central and South India. Something in the social conditions of the time inspired the Tantric innovations, a combination of the growing anti-Brahmin sentiment of some bhakti sects and the impulse, always present from the days of the breakaway Vratya ascetics of the Veda and the extreme renunciants of the later Upanishadic period, to find new religious ways to alter consciousness. In both yoga and Tantra the transformation was controlled by meditation. Similarly, the flying, drug-drinking, long-haired sage of the Veda reappears in the flying, fluid-drinking Tantric.

  Much of Tantric ritual took place during secret initiations in relatively remote areas, but these rites were not a particularly well-guarded secret. The secret was that there was no secret.ib Tantra and Tantric practices were well publicized, esoteric but not necessarily marginal or even subversive; much of it was public, even royal.45 Like the sages of the Upanishads, as well as the bhakti movements, Tantrics maintained a close association with kings,‡ who made good use of the Tantras themselves46 as well as lending to the Tantras the symbolism of kingship. Kings had participated in sexual rituals for many centuries (recall the horse sacrifice), and every king was wedded to at least one goddess, Shri (Good Fortune) or Lakshmi (Good Luck) or Earth itself (Bhu-devi). Moreover, if you transform your body so that you become a god, as Tantrics claimed to do, you are also becoming a king. And Tantra is all about power, and power is catnip for kings.

  Using the MO that had served it well for many centuries, the Brahmin imaginary absorbed many of the new sects,47 but this time it met its match in Tantra.

  There are several different sorts of Tantrics. Within the wider landscape of the two paths that had forked apart at the time of the Upanishads, Tantra effected a new resolution. Outside Tantra, Hindu renouncers on the path of Release still hoped for moksha at death, by which they meant casting off all constraints of form and individuality to be absorbed in brahman. But Hindu householders on the path of rebirth, whose texts were now the Puranas, expected, at death, to be reborn either on earth or—the new option—in the heaven of Shiva or Vishnu or the goddess, from which they would not be reborn again and might even achieve Release; indeed, some Hindus referred to rebirth in such a heaven as a kind of Release. Both groups therefore acknowledged Release as an ultimate goal, but understood it in distinctive ways. Entering this scene, the Tantric “path of mantras,” open to both ascetics and householders, promised to grant not only Release (which the Tantras often call nirvana) from the world of transmigration but magical powers (siddhis) and pleasures (bhogas) on the way to Release, 48 thus combining the rewards of the paths of rebirth and Release. The third path, the horrible dead-end reincarnation, mired in the worlds of corals and insects, still threatens the person who neither sacrifices nor meditates, but the Tantric path guarantees to protect the worshiper from that dreadful default. Tantra thus offered the best of both worlds, or, as the Tantric mantra has it, bhukti-mukti, bhoksha-moksha, or bhoga-yoga, “enjoyment-Release,” which has been nicely translated as the biunity of “sensual delight and spiritual flight.”49

  Another useful way to view the place of Tantra within the Hinduism of this period would be to divide the options slightly differently, into a devotional world of bhakti (guru/god/goddess) and a philosophical world further divided into Vedanta (meditation) and Tantra (ritual), a triad that comes out of the Gita synthesis of devotion, knowledge, and action. This formulation also divides Tantra into its “left-hand” or transgressive traditions (those that violated caste laws of purity—trafficking in blood, death, skulls, sex, all impure) and its “right-hand” or conservative traditions. Most non-Tantric Hindus regard all Tantrics as following a left-hand path (vama), while the right-hand Tantrics look askance at the Tantrics whom they regarded as left-hand, themselves being more right-hand than thou.

  TANTRA AS SALVATION IN THE KALI AGE

  Shiva’s role as a savior is not limited to establishing the sect of the Skull Bearer or the shrine in Varanasi that will save future sinners. In the Shaiva Tantric tradition, Shiva does more; he actively seeks out sinners and instructs them, by teaching them the very doctrines that, in the eyes of someone like Daksha, mark them as Pariahs.

  Several Shaiva Puranas disapprove of the Tantras and stand behind “the Vedas,” which probably means not actual Vedic sacrifice but “Vedic religion” in the sense of Puranic religion, in this case the worship of Shiva. These Puranas nevertheless assert that Shiva is the author of the Tantras and that the Tantras serve a useful purpose—for some people, but not for them. They narrate the tale of a group of sages, cursed to be barred from the use of the Vedas, who were saved by Shiva. How they are cursed takes many forms; sometimes they are the sages who stand with Daksha against Shiva and are cursed in punishment for that. This is one version:

  SHIVA TEACHES TANTRIC TEXTS

  When Vishnu learned that the sages had been cursed to be outside the pale of the Vedas, he went to Shiva and said, “There is not even a drop of merit in people who are beyond the Vedas. But nevertheless, because of our devotion [bhakti] to them, we must protect them even though they will go to hell. Let us make texts of delusion to protect and delude these evil people.” Shiva agreed, and they made the Kapala, Pashupata, Vama [“Left-hand,” i.e., Tantric], and other texts. For the sake of the sages, Shiva descended to earth when the force of the curse had come to an end, and he begged alms from those who were outcast, deluding them as he came there adorned with skulls, ashes, and matted hair, saying, “You will go to hell, but then you will be reborn and gradually work your way to the place of merit.”50

  The ambivalent moral status of the sages in this version of the myth is evident from Vishnu’s statement: The sages are evil and doomed to hell, but the gods must protect and delude them (an interesting combination) so that they will ultimately find merit. Moreover, even though the doctrines that Shiva teaches them are mediating ones—below the Vedas but above damnation—he cannot teach those doctrines while the sages are still cursed to be heretics (which is what being debarred from the Vedas amounts to in these stories); he must come to them “when the force of the curse had come to an end” to teach them new false texts. That is, they need to have worked off the curse, to have started on the path upward, before he can give them the Tantras.

  How can Shiva “protect” the sages by teaching them a new heresy? The “left-hand” doctrines help them by giving them some religion, albeit a heresy, since they are denied the Vedas; the heresy serves as a staircase between non-Vedic and Vedic religion,51 bridging the gap between complete darkness and true religion, purifying them enough so that they can enter the waters of purification. They need an orthodox heresy (an oxymoron, but it fits the situation) to break the ritual chain of impurity. This concept of weaning is expounded by apologists for the Tantras, who argue
that Shiva knew that the animal leanings of certain people made them need meat and wine and therefore invented Tantric rites in order gradually to wean them from this pleasure “in associating it with religion,” the idea being that it is better to bow to Shiva with your sandals on than never to bow at all.52 Shudras and the victims of curses are forbidden to study the Vedas; some other people are simply incapable. Out of pity for all of them, Shiva teaches heresy, raising them up “step by step,” a doctrine that may have been influenced by the Buddhist idea of skill in means, suiting the teaching to the level of the person to be enlightened. The assumption (often stated explicitly) is that he gives them a religion that is “natural” to them (sahaja, “born with” them), that makes use of the things that everyone naturally enjoys—sex, wine, meat. Tantra in this view is Hinduism with training wheels. Thus Shiva makes some people heretics in the first place so that he can ultimately enlighten them. This enlightenment at first appears as a heresy, which they reject, and indeed it is a heresy, in comparison with the ideal, Vedic or Puranic worship. But for some, this heresy is their only salvation, and their own god has created it for a good reason.

  The final Puranic rationalization for the Tantras is that heresies taught to heretics make them so evil that they must reach the furthest point of the cycle and then rebound from the extreme, to become good again, to go back to the head of the queue, to go back to GO, like all the creatures of the Kali Age. Indeed the “orthodox heresies” are also justified by the doctrine of the forbidden acts in the Kali Age (kali-varjya): Some things that were forbidden in the past (such as Tantric rituals) are permitted now because we are too corrupt to meet the old standards. This argument was then sometimes inverted to argue that some things that were permitted then (such as female promiscuity, or Draupadi’s polyandry) are forbidden now for the very same reason: because we are corrupt, in this case too corrupt to commit these acts without being totally destroyed by them.

  TANTRIC RITUAL: FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE THE FIVE MS

  What are these terrible, dangerous things that the Tantric texts taught people to do? Central to Tantric ritual is what the Tantras call the Five Ms, or the Five M Words (since all five terms begin with an m in Sanskrit), which might be called, in English, the Five F Words: madya (fermented grapes, wine), mamsa (flesh, meat), matsya (fish), mudra (farina), and maithuna (fornication). Like so much of Tantra, the Five Ms are an inversion, in this case an inversion of other pentads in more conventional forms of Hinduism. Puranic Hindus ingested the “five products of the cow” (panchagavya) to purify themselves of pollution: clarified butter, milk, and yogurt, plus bovine urine and feces.ic Tantrism, which accepts this schema, has, in addition, its own version of the five ritual elements, the Five M Words, or, in one variant, the Five Jewels (semen, urine, feces, menstrual blood, and phlegm) or Five Nectars (with marrow in place of phlegm).53 One Buddhist Tantra further divides flesh (mamsa) into Five Meats (beef, dog, elephant, horse, and human flesh), together with Five Ambrosias (semen, urine, feces, blood, and marrow, slightly different from the Five Jewels). 54 All these pentads were probably a deliberate antinomian travesty of the “five products of the cow”; one Tantric text substitutes for the bovine urine and feces the blood and flesh of the cow, a bovicide abomination that deliberately subverted orthodox categories of purity,55 forcing participants to look beyond the dualities of purity and impurity and the conventions of food and sex that drive so much of Hinduism.56 One can hardly imagine a more blatant, in-your-face, maithuna-you attitude than the one at the heart of this substitution.

  The Mahanirvana Tantra elaborates upon each of the Five Ms: Wine may be made from sugar (or molasses), rice, honey, or palm tree juice and made by someone of any caste. Meat may be from animals that come from the water, the land, or the sky, and again, it doesn’t matter where it comes from or who kills it; the only stipulation is that the animals be male, not female (as is the case for Vedic sacrifices too). Fish are best without bones, though the ones that have lots of bones may also be offered to the goddess if they are very well roasted or fried. The best farina (mudra) is made from rice, barley, or “earth-smoke” wheat, which is especially nice when fried in butter.57 And fornication may involve one’s own wife, another man’s wife, or a woman who belongs to the group in common.

  Wine, flesh, and fish were prohibited for high caste Hindus, and there is little debate about the basic lexical connotation or the denotation of these terms,58 though as we will see, there is much debate about whether they are to be taken literally. But the other two Ms, mudra and maithuna, have proved more problematic even to define in their primary meanings. Mudra, here interpreted as a fourth material article, farina, or parched grain (sometimes kidney beans, or “any cereal believed to possess aphrodisiac properties”59), has a primary lexical meaning of “stamp” or “seal” (as in “seal ring”); it also means “signal” or “hand gesture,” and may indicate, in some texts, not farina but either of two other Fs: finger positions (physical movements of the hands corresponding to imagined acts) or the female sexual organ, which “seals” the male organ in the sexual act.60 The uncertainty of the referents of words used in the Tantras compounds the question of their literal or figurative meaning.

  As for the last element, maithuna is usually translated as sexual intercourse, more literally “pairing,” but since all the other terms seem to be material substances, it may mean more precisely “what is derived from sexual intercourse”—that is, the fluids produced in sexual intercourse. This gloss is a bit of a stretch, but it is lexically correct, does assimilate maithuna to the other substances consumed as food at the forbidden feast, and has the added virtue of linking the Five Ms with another widely attested characteristic of South Asian Tantra in its earliest documented stage, a ritual in which what Sterling Hayden in Doctor Strangelove called “precious bodily fluids” (in this case sexual or menstrual discharge) were swallowed as transformative “power substances.”61

  For the Tantras do say things like “The body of every living creature is made of semen and blood. The [deities] who are fond of sexual pleasure drink semen and blood.”62 Drinking blood and seed together is a very Tantric thing to do. In one of the Puranic antecedents of the Tantras, “Glorification of the Goddess,” the goddess Chandika came up against an antigod that was actually named Blood Seed (Raktabija), from every drop of whose blood (or, if you prefer, semen) a new antigod appeared. To conquer him, Chandika created the goddess Kali and instructed her to open wide her mouth and drink the blood as well as the constantly appearing progeny of Blood Seed; then Chandika killed him.63 The goddess Kali effectively aborts the birth of offspring of Blood Seed by prophylactically swallowing his seed, the drops of his blood.64 In other Puranas, the goddess emits multiforms of herself who extend their tongues to lick up each drop of the semen-blood before it can fall to the ground.65 The long tongue of the goddess Kali, like that of the female antigod Long Tongue, the bitch that licks up the oblations, is the upward displacement of her excessive vaginas, a grotesque nightmare image of the devouring sexual woman, her mouth a second sexual organ.

  But it is not semen-blood but female blood (together with male semen rather than male blood) that plays the central role in the Tantras. The menstrual blood of the female participant is connected to the polluting but life-giving blood of the menstruating goddess, which flows to the earth each year,66 and the blood of her animal victims, decapitated and offered in sacrifice. Not just the goddess, but the Yoginis, a horde of ravishingly beautiful, terrifying, and powerful female deities, participated in the drinking of the sexual fluids. These Yoginis were often placated with blood offerings and animal sacrifices but also propitiated by exchanging sexual fluids with the male practitioners and by consuming those fluids (as well as other prohibited foods). In return the Yoginis granted the practitioners, at the very least, “a powerful expansion of . . . the limited consciousness of the conformist Brahmin practitioner” and, at most, supernatural powers, including the power of flight.67

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nbsp; SANITIZING THE SYMBOLISM OF TANTRIC RITUAL

  In protest against these transgressive forms of Tantra, many texts insisted that the ritual instructions were never intended to be followed literally but were purely symbolic. The sanitized interpretation of the Five Ms, for instance, introduced new ritual substitutes, glossing madya (wine) as a meditational nectar, mamsa (flesh) as the tongue of the practitioner, matsya (fish) as his breaths, mudra as inner knowledge, and maithuna as “supreme essence.”68 We can view the symbolic as a historical development from the actual (as may have been the case with references to human sacrifice at a much earlier period), or we can assume that the ritual was always purely symbolic, never real (like the ogres in the Ramayana), or that both were always already present from the start (like the linga that is and is not the phallus of Shiva). We might summarize the question, Did the Tantrics actually have Tantric sex? and respond with three guesses:

  FIRST GUESS: They Did.

  Variant 1: Once They Did It; Now They Talk About It.

  Variant 2: First They Talked About It, and Then They Did It.

  SECOND GUESS: It was Always All in Their Heads.

  THIRD GUESS: They Always Did It and Imagined It at the Same Time.

  Let us consider them one by one.

  The historical argument implies that the Hindus themselves bowdlerized their own tradition: “No one is swallowing anything; we’re all just meditating.” The argument for historical development begins by asserting that Tantra began as a non-Brahmin (sometimes even anti-Brahmin), antihouseholder movement and then was taken up by Brahmins and householders. Since we don’t have access to the earliest layers of Tantra, before the extant texts, we can’t know who the original worshipers were or what they did then; perhaps they did drink blood at first and then stopped, perhaps not. But we do have Tantric texts that seem to indicate that their authors drank blood and performed the sexual ritual. One can argue that Tantric ritual texts tell us precisely what the practitioners did, and that they mean what they say.69