Over two thousand years ago the Indian prince Siddharta Gautama, after coming face to face with old age, sickness and death, committed himself to the elimination of all suffering, and became an enlightened being, the Buddha Śakyamuni. This has been widely considered as a good move. Through scriptures passed down to his followers, his religion spread throughout the Indian subcontinent, throughout Asia, and throughout the world.
Yet the potency of the new religion waned after the passing of the Buddha, who could liberate beings from samsara by his mere presence, and waned further still with the passing of his first students. In their absence, the remaining Buddhists huddled around the body and speech relics of the Buddha, but could only slow the decay. This degradation came to a rather shocking point in the 7th century, when a new form of Buddhist practice emerged which instructed its students to violate the precepts as a matter of practice: Tantra. The new scriptures recommended eating the flesh of cows, dogs, elephants, horses and humans, and the drinking of feces, urine, blood, semen and marrow, advocated lying and sexual misconduct, stealing and killing, all abhorrent to Buddhists of every stripe. Repressed monks uncovered the long-hidden ‘true scriptures’ that allowed them to do whatever they wanted, and they went wild.
After this gained traction in India, the cradle of Buddhism, it didn’t take long for the religion to disintegrate in the region. When European scholars arrived a millennium later, they found the people practicing Hinduism, but no Buddhism. When they learned about Tantra, the reason for Buddhism’s disappearance became obvious. It was the same thing which had struck down the Roman empire: faithlessness, decadence and the disintegration of traditional institutions.
Now let’s rewind the clock, and see what other stories we might tell.
As the religion of the Buddha (patriarchal, Aryan, classical, monastic) established itself in the Indian subcontinent, an old influence made itself felt anew, entering from below with the gradual bubbling up of concepts and ideas from the inexhaustible store of Indian folklore. This reintroduced into Buddhism the traditional (matriarchal, indigenous, pre-classical, non-monastic) religion of the subcontinent; a shamanic sex and death cult led by reviled outcast women, dakinis, who were regarded simultaneously as cannibal witches and enlightened goddesses, a religion of charnel grounds and worship of the female principle.
Over time these two lineages, the father lineage of the Buddha and the mother lineage of the dakinis, merged to form early Tantra; a religion popular among the freewheeling laypeople of India, which the stodgy monastic establishment worked tirelessly to domesticate, integrating bits and pieces into its renunciative worldview to stay relevant, never fully succeeding.
Let’s rewind one final time.
Tantrism is Indobuddhist medievalism, their Dark Ages, sandwiched between the classical Gupta empire and Muslim imperial renaissance (or the colonial British renaissance, depending on who you ask). It is the obsolete detritus of fallen civilization left to flounder until it can be reborn later. The idolatrous and magical tendencies of Tantra, shown in its spells (mantras) and rituals are analogous to the medieval superstition of the European Dark Ages. Sixteen centuries after Christ came the Protestant Reformation, and sixteen centuries after Śakyamuni Buddha also came a reformation, but this one destroyed the faith in India rather than redeeming it.
All of these narratives are represented among the histories of Tantra, with devotees from among Eastern and Western professional historians of Buddhism and India. According to Christian Wedemeyer, they’re all wrong.
The three narratives above represent three major forms of historiographical narrative, as applied to Tantric Buddhism in late first-millennium India.
The first is the narrative of decline, fall and ending, quite straightforwardly cribbed from histories of the Roman Empire, identifying Tantra as a degenerative, sex and decadence-obsessed cult which resulted in the ultimate disappearance of Buddhism in India. It was the reigning theory of Tantric history among Westerners during the nineteenth century, and remained prominent through the late twentieth as well. It relies on narrative models of organic development, which require a period of decline and then death, codified in the West by Vico’s New Science and with mythic roots in the progression of the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages, with its Eastern counterpart in the Hindu cycle of the Four Yugas.
It’s by no means wrong to use poetic narrative forms to describe history, but historians put the cart before the horse when they assume, not only that historical narratives are inherent ‘out there’ in the data, but that those narratives will take form as laid out by their favorite author, or even as in a particular book, as was unfortunately the case with Tantric historiography. T.W. Rhys Davids writes, with Wedemeyer's emphases:
[Edward Gibbon, author of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire] has shown us, in his great masterpiece, how interesting and instructive the story of such a decline and fall can be made. And it is not unreasonable to hope that, when the authorities, especially the Buddhist Sanskrit texts, shall have been made accessible, and the sites shall have been explored, the materials will be available from which some historian of the future will be able to piece together a story, equally interesting and equally instructive, of the decline and fall of Buddhism in India.
And Wedemeyer comments:
In case there had been any doubt about the fundamental, formative influence of precritical, fictive, theoretical models on the construction of Indian Buddhist history, here there can be no question. Rhys Davids indicates in essence that, before scholars have even collected the evidence available from literary and archaeological remains, they can a priori assume a narrative structure along the lines of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s masterwork had allowed a new way of making sense of the fall of a hugely successful enterprise (Rome); some such account was seemingly needed to understand India’s loss of Buddhism as well. (p. 49).
Thus, the vigorous and youthful energy of early, monastic buddhism eventually matures and degenerates into Tantra, which must give way to a new age, as the decadence of Rome gave way to Christianity. Keep in mind, those tropes of decay and decadence employed by Christian historians against Rome were the same ones used by Greek and Roman historians against Etruria, whose decline was succeeded by youthful and vigorous Rome. It is these recycled tropes that later historians (especially Vico, Hegel, Marx) employ as evidence for totalizing theories of cyclical history. Wedemeyer gives it a pithy spin:
History, it might be said, does not repeat itself; historians repeat themselves. (p. 67).
The second and opposite narrative is that of beginning and new birth, pioneered by Bengali scholars and adopted by Western historians, for whom it offered a Romantic (counter-Enlightenment) reversal of the narrative of decline. In this narrative, Tantra is identified as the resurgence of the long-suppressed ‘primitive’ religion of the Indian subcontinent, often identified with Śaktism, which was native where the Vedas were colonial, matriarchal instead of patriarchal, pre-Classical instead of Classical, (keep in mind the relationship between Etruria and Greece/Rome established previously) worshipful of sex and the feminine principle instead of monastic and repressed.
That direction isn’t arbitrary, it’s specifically an eruption of the old undercurrent back up to the surface, the above/below duality flipped to valorize that which was suppressed (a corresponding extrapolation to the top/bottom duality is beneath me). Predictably, this was popular with the lower classes first, and gradually rose to acceptance by the elites. For twentieth-century historians uncomfortable with the decidedly un-hip assumptions and values of prior Tantric history, it’s both the easy and sexy move; keep the assumptions, dualities and structures created by older scholarship, with all the staying power they’ve accumulated, and flip them on their heads.
And where there is discussion of valorized binaries, gender can’t be far behind. Matriarchy gives way to Patriarchy gives way to historians getting hot and bothered over ancient Mother religions. Nobody had a bigger impact here than Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose theory of Mutterrecht und Urreligion (Mother Right and Primordial Religion) in the Mediterranean basin was copy-pasted over to India in the imaginations of Indologists in the same fashion as Gibbon’s Rome, a consistent and reliable narrative which, Wedemeyer insists, is short on evidence. It is, like the theory of decline, a convenient, comfortable cultural narrative imposed on the data, a canvas for the historian to display their contemporary attitudes, rather than a critical examination of history.
The third is the narrative of middle/medievalism, the dominant mode of Tantric history in contemporary literature. Here Tantra is cast as the midpoint, and low point, between two greater cultures, as the European Middle or ‘Dark’ Ages were characterized as the low point between Classical Roman and Renaissance or Enlightenment European culture. Historians, including textbook authors, make deliberate comparisons between Tantric yogis and Vajrayana (lit. Diamond/Adamantine Way, the term for esoteric nondualistic Buddhism) ritual practices and Medieval witches/wizards, hocus pocus and superstition. Ronald Davidson, in his Indian Esoteric Buddhism, is at the front of contemporary authors peddling this notion.
The prescription of medievalism becomes especially difficult when applied to Indian history, given that nobody can agree where it begins or ends. The Gupta empire is typically laid parallel to Rome, with its decline being medieval and the Islamic Delhi Sultanate being its renaissance, but elsewhere the Sultanate is identified with the start, not the end, of the medieval period, which would handily exclude Tantra. A brief gloss of major works on Indian medievalism reveals no point in the years 200-1600 A.D. that some scholars don’t consider medieval. Overall, one cannot escape the perception that ‘medieval’ means whatever the author wants it to mean, most always to condemn one stretch of history and valorize what came before and after. One would not threaten to ‘get classical’ or ‘get renaissance’ on a hypothetical opponent in a street fight.
Along with that characterization follow implications that Tantra is rude, primitive, violent, body-oriented (as opposed to mind or spirit), feudal, superstitious, offensive, contemptible. Not least of its undesirable qualities is the notion that the medieval, and thus Tantra, is in the past, something we’ve gotten beyond, transcended. All this, it can be assumed, is not appreciated by contemporary Vajrayana practitioners, who have their hands full with public opinion that their practice is a kinky sex cult from the Mystic East.
Choosing between these narratives is not a simple matter of weighing historical evidence, since different, mutually contradictory narratives can account for the same facts. The ideological element cannot be ignored or removed from the question, which is ultimately what use the historical narrative serves. The above can, variously, be used to legitimate or condemn a social order, past or present, deride or valorize a set of religious practices, or let the historian fly a particular cultural or political flag (if that seems overly critical or reductive, take a peek at how e.g. Thucydides’ history of Sparta was a political commentary on Athens).
It is precisely because these patterns and narratives are part of a cultural canon that they are so easy to apply outside of their boundaries, and why it’s so hard to see how contrived they are. In order to get some perspective, it will be necessary to get deep into traditional Buddhist historiography, epistemology, and semiology.
When modern historians deign to discuss native theories of Buddhist history, they are too often rendered as ‘the scriptures claim to have been given by the Buddha, who lived 2500 years ago and about whom we do not have strong historical evidence, despite the fact that they don’t show up in the record until the Xth century, and it is beneath our dignity to entertain this explanation further.’ Beyond just being dismissive, this approach ignores how these traditions were keenly aware of the problem of authorship and origins, and had well-developed epistemological methods for dealing with them.
The source of many of these problems is the notion that truth == good speech == Buddha-speech, summed up in the Buddhist proverb, “whatever is well said was said by the Buddha.” The word translated as ‘truth’, often also as ‘right speech,’ is subhāṣita, and keeping to right speech is one of the five lay precepts, containing not only the prohibition on lies, but also slander, rudeness, and gossip, all of which would be considered bad speech, or durbhāṣita. This statement does not only make the claim that everything the Buddha said was true, but also that the Buddha said everything that was true. This begs the question of how the Buddha Śakyamuni, who according to these same traditions taught for no more than 45 years, could have possibly spoken all true statements, and given all the extant scriptures (as an institutionally accepted scripture is the canonical example of good speech).
Buddhist scholars thought long and hard on this, and came up with a few solutions. First, the phrasing of the statement is misleading in referring to a singular Buddha, as Buddhas are infinite in both time and space. This is an orthodox position in most schools of early Asian Buddhism (though not all, as the Theravada scriptures admit only a single present Buddha). Not only are there many historical figures who are positioned as enlightened Buddhas (every lineage has at least one, and the Chinese Buddha Hotei or ‘The Laughing Buddha’ is depicted almost as commonly as Śakyamuni) but there are buddhas of other universes, and buddhas which transcend universes, such as the Five Transcendent Lords Akṣobhya, Vairocana, Amitābha, Amogha, and Ratnaketu, who in some Buddhist narratives initiate Śakyamuni with a Tantric empowerment ritual and authorize him to teach. Some scriptures are positioned as the teaching of all buddhas across all universes, while others are positioned as the unique developments of this universe’s first Buddha, custom made for its inhabitants.
A further problem arises with authorship and legitimation of scriptures. When your religion is descended from a semi-divine infallible founder, it’s hard to add your own ideas into the canon, and harder still to claim authorship if the Buddha already said it.
Five broad categories of justifications existed by which esoteric Buddhist communities could legitimate new scriptures and doctrines:
Bare Historical: The blunt assertion that the given scripture was taught by Śakyamuni in his mortal teaching career, a justification available to all communities, but perhaps less credible when the scriptures are clearly modern developments.
Divine Relation: The assertion that the scripture was taught by Śakyamuni, but not in his bounded mortal lifetime, instead in another realm; this is the justification used by early Theravadins for the canonization of the Abhidharma scripture, holding that the Buddha taught it in a heavenly realm while visiting his mother there, and that the scripture was thereafter communicated to the mortal world through divine mediation. This justification is likewise available to all Buddhist communities.
True Dharma: Among esoteric communities which take multitudes of buddhas for granted, it is further possible to claim that a scripture is in fact the eternal teaching, or true dharma (saddharma) of the buddhas of all universes (the Śūraṃgamasamādhi scripture and the Guhyasamāja Tantra both employ this one) as opposed to a local teaching of Śakyamuni created specifically for this universe. Optionally, one may further add one of the following two justifications:
Treasure Scriptures: Here the scripture is held to have been hidden away in a secret location, often a cave or a stupa, usually with a supernatural guardian, to await a later age when it would again be revealed to the world. The story of King Indrabhūti and the Iron Stupa is one such example.
Direct Relation by Buddha, or Enlightened Dialogue: The scripture is asserted to have been given by direct revelation of a buddha, sometimes Śakyamuni but more often another, such as Mañjuśrī or Amitābha. This can occur by a variety of methods, such as direct visitation resulting from practices such as the Samādhi of Face-to-Face Confrontation, or a ritual described in the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa, which promises physical transportation of the practitioner to heavenly realms. Consecration rituals instead bring a buddha to the mortal world to inhabit a visual depiction and teach. Since esoteric Mahayana holds that buddhas are omnipresent, the consecration is said to be “only done so that beginners will understand,” and to the more spiritually advanced the scripture may manifest directly, such that the dharma resounds from the sky and earth.
Analogy may be drawn between the fourth and fifth methods and the Tibetan tradition of terma, especially in the distinction between earth and mind/pure vision terma, but the doctrine remains distinct (thanks to David Chapman for clarifying this point.)
From an outside perspective this can all seem a bit contrived, an intellectual shell game that hides the real origins of things in supernaturalism. It is instructive to note that the same was common across all the Indian arts and sciences, and is by no means exclusive to the subcontinent; look no further than Galen of Pergamon attributing the origins of Greek medicine to a teaching by Apollo to the centaur Chiron. These games of visionary truth allowed Buddhist institutions to innovate without compromising their epistemic standards. The supernatural elements provide cover for the pragmatic process of consensus-building, vetting and stress-testing of new scriptures and practices behind closed doors.
To comprehend properly the function of the historical discourses of Mahā/Vajrayāna Buddhists in context, it is perhaps helpful to think about the Buddha less as a concrete human being, and instead to understand the manner in which “Buddha” served an ongoing epistemic function in Buddhist cultures. For the esoteric Buddhist traditions, clearly, Buddha was not a historical Buddha (and certainly not “the” historical Buddha of some modern scholars and Buddhists), but an epistemic Buddha. Throughout the Buddhist world, the word of the Buddha is considered equivalent to truth and vice versa. Hence, the famous statement that “whatever is well said [i.e., true] was said by the Buddha.” (p. 97)
It is a common failing of students of history to treat historical subjects as if they stepped out of their (very dry, boring) textbooks, and therefore had no sense of humor. This is especially fraught in the study of Tantra, where many of the scripture authors are actively fucking with you and having a great time.
Even worse, the Tantric scriptures are keen to joke about all the things which would get you thrown out of a dinner party. Even the briefest reading could not escape statements advocating disgusting actions and utterly perverse morals; instructions to eat shit and human flesh with a smile, to commit murder and adultery, to lie and steal. The Hevajra Tantra says explicitly,
“you should kill living beings, speak lying words, take what is not given, consort with the women of others,”
actions which break four of the five lay precepts by which all Buddhists live. Making sense of these practices and statements (Wedemeyer calls them ‘antisocial and antinomian’) requires going beyond surface language and understanding the whole system of symbols and meanings in which they were made. Only then will you be in on the joke.
The main object of this analysis are the five meats and five ambrosias: Wedemeyer lists them as beef, dog, elephant, horse and human flesh; and feces, urine, blood, semen and marrow, though different traditions have minor variations. The scriptures are replete with descriptions and instructions of their consumption, often in ritual environments, and much contemporary scholarship remains at the level of asking if these things were literally done, or else wondering what delicacies they secretly encoded. The former takes a literalist perspective and accuses the latter, figurativist scholarship of trying to sanitize the tantras (written by and for libertine laypeople) for a monastic audience, which criticizes the former as unsophisticated, their minds in the gutter. Keep that lay/monastic divide in mind, we’ll come back to it in the final section.
To the point of the figurativists, see the quote above from the Hevajra Tantra, which after recommending, “you should kill living beings, speak lying words, take what is not given, consort with the women of others” turns around and interprets these statements to mean that one “kills living beings” by “developing one-pointed cognition by destroying the life-breath of discursive thought;” that one lies by vowing to save all sentient beings; and so on. (pp. 109-110). This is a core rhetorical tactic of the Tantras. Yet the figurativists cannot sit easy, as other texts invite literal readings, and the ancient Indian scholar Candrakīrti’s writing on Tantric hermeneutics retains literal readings as one of six forms of interpretation.
Even apparently straightforward literal readings can fall apart with a bit of context, such as a half-verse from the Guhyasamāja Tantra,
“one should always smear feces, urine, water, and so on, in order to worship the Victors.” (p. 111).
which would appear to be just more tantric disgustingness. But the gloss makes it clear that, in this case, these are cow feces and urine, perfectly normal ingredients in Indian purification rituals. Wedemeyer expresses his own distaste for excessively literal readings from fellow scholars.
“Bhattacharyya’s suggestion that [the meats and ambrosias] were delicious luxuries much desired by a repressed Buddhist ecclesia could not be further from the mark. I do not believe we are justified in maintaining that they appear in the Tantras merely because they are tasty and the monks were seeking scriptural legitimation for an exotic barbeque.” (p. 119)
A more thorough examination reveals that these statements are neither exactly literal nor exactly figurative; Wedemeyer goes a meta-level up, from purely denotative to connotative language, and specifically to connotative semiotics, by which a complete sign (signifier+signified) becomes the signified component of a larger sign. He gives an example pulled from Barthes, the Latin phrase quia ego nominor leo, which means ‘because my name is lion.’ In purely denotative language, the phrase is the signifier, a particular statement about one’s name is the signified, and the whole thing together is a sign. But here, in this connotative system, that sign is the signifier which points to another signified, the ultimate goal of communication; which in this case, is a grammatical example. Quia ego nominor leo is an example of predicate agreement.
This sort of communication is not the domain of professional linguists, but a formalization of the kind of language ordinary people use every day to deliver higher-order messages which would be invisible to one who can only perceive denotative language. Its content is defined by intention, but that intention is obscured by the process of signification, and that creates an ambiguous space in which sophisticated communicators, like the tantric authors, can work.
The meats and ambrosias frequently appear in the sādhana rituals, which in the Tantric context are self-creation rituals in which the practitioner leaves behind their self-perception as mundane and ordinary and instead kills and resurrects themselves as a divine, enlightened being. The question then arises, why would the ritual be accompanied by such disgusting things?
Consider that the disgustingness of these meats and ambrosias is considerably culturally dependent; all were disgusting to ancient Indians, but to a modern Westerner beef is perfectly normal, and marrow is in some places a delicacy (I’ve had some absolutely delicious marrow), and to Italians horsemeat is no strange thing. Both consider dog to be a repulsive thing to eat, but for different reasons; Indians considered dogs among the dirtiest of animals, while Westerners find eating their treasured pets near-sacrilegious. The consumption of animal blood exists the world over, such as blood pudding, or the Mongol practice of mixing mare’s milk and blood on the trail, and the discussion of semen must wait for the X-rated cut of this review.
This list of ten meats and ambrosias does not represent the author’s individual distaste, it’s a list which specifically and intentionally breaks every standard of Indian ritual purity. This becomes doubly clear through textual analysis showing that the meats and ambrosias overwhelmingly show up in the context of eating them or offering them to divinities, the two contexts where Indian religious culture is most paranoid about purity. The tantric authors are deliberately and precisely pushing the buttons of their target audience: educated monastics with deeply ingrained purity standards.
(“Wait, I thought you said these scriptures were written by and for lay people?” Put it in your back pocket, we’re getting there.)
The higher-order context of this conversation is the duality of purity and pollution. Now remember that the ultimate goal of tantric practice is the attainment of non-dual gnosis (advayajñāna), an enlightened state in which the inherent properties of things (as good/evil, pure/polluting, mundane/divine) are shown to be illusory. The ritual consumption and offering of the meats and ambrosias performs this transgression and transcendence on the purity/pollution axis, while the sādhana ritual does it on the mundane/divine axis.
As oneself, so an enemy/As one’s mother, so a whore/As urine, so wine/As food, so shit/As sweet-smelling camphor, so the stench from the ritually-impure/As words of praise, so revolting words/As pleasure, so pain. (from Nāgārjuna’s Pañcrakrama, cited p. 122)
These are the same strategies employed in modern marketing; the denotative sign is a medium through which to communicate feelings of comfort, or excitement, or attractiveness, etc., cf anything written by the Last Psychiatrist. When communicating such slippery ideas, this sort of higher-order messaging is more effective than plain-spoken persuasion. You can get a practitioner to chant mantras about embodying adamantine voidness all day, but they won’t experience that state without a little push.
This becomes even clearer in the context of ritual. Wedemeyer pulls out a verse from the Guhyasamāja Tantra, one so infamously transgressive it deserves to be quoted in full:
…the Lord Buddha Vajradhara teaches the assembled buddhas and bodhisattvas that “even those who commit great sins such as the inexpiable sins (ānantarya) will be successful in this buddha vehicle, the great ocean of the Universal Vehicle (mahāyāna).” Further, he teaches that those who violate the most basic Buddhist precepts—who take life, lie, steal, and are sex-maniacs—and even, notably, those who eat feces and drink urine, are considered by him to be “fit for the sādhana” (bhavyās te khalu sādhane). In a final flourish, he informs the assembly that those who commit incest with mother, sister, or daughter, will “attain vast success,” while the one who makes love to the Buddha’s own mother will attain buddhahood. At the conclusion of this pithy teaching, the bodhisattvas in attendance are said to have been “amazed and astonished.” Why, they ask, is this bad speech (durbhāṣita) being spoken in the midst of the enlightened assembly? To this query, the buddhas in attendance reply that they should not speak so: That this is the pure teaching of all the buddhas. Upon hearing this reply, the bodhisattvas are so overwhelmed that they actually pass out, whereupon the Lord has to rouse them by the light rays of the meditative samādhi called (notably) the space-like nondual vajra (ākāśasamatādvayavajra). (p. 127)
Elsewhere similar stories recur of rituals whose method is the slaying of living beings, theft of jewels and slander of buddhas, and whose ultimate goal is the instance of non-dual experience. It is crucial that Tantra is not interested in transgression for its own sake, or even for the power it can reclaim, in the manner of e.g. Satanism. Nor is it, as scholars like Davidson allege, covering for the libertinism of late-millennium monks. They are complex systems of signification dedicated to experiencing and understanding an especially slippery anti-meme: non-conceptual non-dual gnosis.
Modern scholarship runs into problems with interpreting ritual thanks to overlooked terms of art. A term of art is a phrase which has both a technical meaning within a particular system and a vulgar meaning outside of it. It is especially unfortunate that the misinterpreted term is ‘practice’ (caryā) itself. The term is pervasive, and frequently occurs in compound with the term vrata, meaning religious observance, where the two are treated as synonyms, and their ordering is irrelevant.
What, then, is the caryāvrata? In short, in the nondualist Tantric literature of the Buddhist Mahāyoga and Yoginī Tantras, this term and its equivalents come to encapsulate virtually all those features that have come most strongly to be associated with Tantrism (or so-called “Siddha Tantrism”) in the modern mind: Sex, to be sure, but also eerie places (cemeteries, lonely fearsome forests, etc.), eccentric dress, and ecstatic behavior, including the wholesale rejection of the mainstream practices of exoteric Indian religion. (p. 138)
Wedemeyer collates the instances of the term across many scriptures and identifies four consistent requirements of the practice:
[They foreground:] (a) liminal, isolated spaces, and (b) funereal and horrific items of dress. They further consistently (c) advocate certain behaviors (sex, wandering, commensality, song and dance, and consumption of meats, alcohols, and bodily fluids) and (d) proscribe others (recitation, meditation, worship, burnt offerings, textuality, image devotion, and attention to astrological auspiciousness). (p. 138)
These categories of place, dress, recommended and prohibited behavior are the same as in typical, non-transgressive texts. The signature accouterments of Tantric practice, such as charnel grounds, deep woods, skull-bowls and unbound hair, make consistent appearance. Throughout, the practitioner, or vratin, is told to disregard notions of desirable/undesirable, pure/impure, appropriate/inappropriate. These places, dresses and behaviors are precisely those which invert traditional purity norms, and those it proscribes are exactly the ones performed in ordinary, non-transgressive practice.
Was this how Tantra was practiced ‘on the ground’? Not quite. Contrary to Tibetan scriptures, the Indian scriptures only recommend the practice to extremely advanced practitioners far along the bodhisattva path. Nor is it a regular, hum-drum practice compatible with day-to-day life, lay or monastic, but a special practice intended to be performed within a particular time frame, usually six months, and in seclusion.
That is, where the Tantric scriptures refer to caryāvrata or vratacaryā, they do not refer simply to a practice, but to the capital-P Practice, which is exclusive with daily, non-transgressive Buddhist practice. These were not the daily experience of most Indian tantrikas but instead the rituals of the religious elite within those communities. With this knowledge, we can blow open the mistaken narratives of Tantra which opened this review.
In particular, we turn our attention to the claim that there were two separate communities of Tantric Buddhists: one composed of socially marginal, long-haired siddhis (lit. ‘accomplished ones’), who reveled in the transgressions of Tantra, and the other of repressed monastics who sought to suppress the former group while bowdlerizing their practices. These communities, contrasted as siddhas vs institutional Buddhists, were, in fact, integrated.
In retrospect, it is difficult to see how it could have been otherwise; the transgressive, nondualist Tantras are deeply aware of and concerned with the non-transgressive, dualist Tantras, often including nontransgressive rituals within their scriptures, and the transgressive rituals are their precise and deliberate inversions. If these two were merely different factions of Tantra, one institutional and one siddha, we could not expect that the latter would have such a precise knowledge of the inner workings of the former, and we would not expect it to be so keenly obsessed with inverting it, rather than just doing its own thing. The siddha Tantras only make sense within the structure of the institutions. They could only have been written by a practitioner far advanced along the conventional, monastic path, and Wedemeyer takes time to demonstrate how the popular image of a Vajrayāna practitioner included the traditional apparel of fully-ordained monks, how the intended audiences of the transgressive scriptures were intimate with metaphors of monastic life and discipline and how the siddha scriptures were spread throughout Asia by monastic missionaries.
There would be no reason to reject recitation of scripture, respecting monks, caitya worship, mantra recitation, and so on, if that was not already the tacitly accepted order of the day. Indeed, for every one of these radical injunctions, one could cite chapter and verse of a dualistic Tantra that says exactly the opposite; and—one may be certain—so could the authors of the nondualist scriptures. (p. 177)
Which is not to say laypeople were not at all involved; the actual state of Indian Buddhism did not consist merely of professional monastics and amateur laypeople, but also included many lay practitioners (upāsaka) who were very diligent and erudite, who learned the monastic arts even as they dwelt in the world of illusion, and who in some cases became respected teachers without ever taking vows, even taking monks as students. They were members of a para-monastic community, not a freestanding one, and certainly not opposed to the monasteries.
That is, the practitioners of the transgressive tantras in late-millennium India were Buddhist professionals, often, but not exclusively, monastics, and not marginal practitioners, but elites, their geniuses and virtuosi, temporarily contriving a socially marginalized identity and transgressive religious practice as the capstone of their orthodox, renunciative Buddhist path. While there were many Tantras in that time and place, they were not divided into such crude factions, for the siddhas were the greatest graduates of the institutions.
Along with this notion of two factions, other narratives of Tantra go up in smoke. The Bachofen-inspired assertion of a primitive and indigenous mother lineage of Tantra, seen in David Chapman’s statement,
“In the earliest days—according to the traditional histories—women were the primary teachers of tantra. Only later did men seize control; and only later than that did monks get involved,”
are shown to be matters of visionary history, not objective history, perfectly suitable for practitioners, but not for history textbooks. Assertions that Tantra was a degenerative force which led to the decline of Buddhism in India, or that it was a medievalist superstition resulting from the fall of a prior classical religion, are likewise dissolved.
In order to attain non-duality, one must first pass through and master duality. A poor person renouncing wealth is meaningless, but a wealthy person doing the same has great meaning. A marginal tribesman acting in disgusting and improper ways is just another Tuesday, but a high-caste Buddhist professional doing the same performs a daring and religiously significant act. Yet to assume that these transgressions were intended to overturn the social order is naive; more often than not, they upheld, negotiated and maintained existing structures. Bruce Lincoln notes:
For all that inversion can be an effective instrument of agitation… dominant orders are capable of employing their own symbolic inversions…. To be sure it is a powerful act to turn the world upside down, but a simple 180-degree rotation is not difficult to undo. An order twice inverted is an order restored, perhaps even strengthened as a result of the exercise. (cited p. 189)
One traverses from form to emptiness, then returns to form and integrates it with emptiness. The conventional order is shown to be void, and then arises again from voidness. Thus I have heard.
