The Hindus (74 page)

Even wine that has been purified by the ritual is a danger if taken in excess. The social symptoms of alcoholism (“every step he takes results in something that he does not want and that other people do not want”) are as closely observed as those in the equally perceptive description of the compulsive gambler in the
Rig Veda
.

Another argument for the historical reality of the left-hand Tantric rituals is the fact that such rituals apparently continue to this day, particularly among the Bauls of Bengal and the Nizarpanths (“Hinduized” Ismai’ilis of western India). An unbroken line of teachers and disciples culminates in present-day living Yoginis, who endure for the most part in the greatly reduced form of aged, poor, widowed, and socially marginalized women, who are sexuality exploited, often accused of practicing witchcraft when an untimely death or some other calamity befalls a village, and still occasionally put to death.
⁷⁸
At the same time, the bowdlerizing continues too; in modern Kolkata, priests at the Kalighat temple sometimes “Vaishnavize” the goddess Kali by removing reminders of her Tantric background.
⁷⁹

In passing, we might consider the variant of the first argument that, in Tantric fashion, reverses it, turning history on its head and arguing that left-hand Tantra was at first just a mental exercise, and then someone took it literally. (First They Talked About It, and Then They Did It.) This too would account for the two levels of Tantra, and it is logically possible, but there is little historical support for it.

So much for the historical argument that Tantra was a ritual that became, for the dominant culture, a kind of myth (or a myth that became a ritual).

The second argument—that the left-hand Tantric ritual was always just a myth (or It was Always All in Their Heads)—is precisely the viewpoint of the people that those who hold with the historical hypothesis regard as the bowdlerizers, the people who insist that Tantra was never real, that the left-hand Tantric rituals were never actually performed and were only symbolic from the very start. These are probably the majority of educated Hindus today. In keeping with the doctrines of illusion (which were, like Tantra, being developed in eleventh-century Kashmir), this philosophical approach argues that all the Tantric rituals were illusory mental images of rituals that were never real, that Tantric sex was never a ritual but only a myth, as cannibalism has sometimes been thought to be, something that some people thought other people were doing, when in fact no one was doing anything of the sort. This would mean that even the people who wrote the early Tantric texts merely imagined that they were doing what they said they were doing. After all, people have imagined that they have flown to heaven and walked among the gods, so why not imagine that you’re drinking your sister’s menstrual blood?

But it is also possible that there were two levels of myth and ritual from the start, as there were in the early Upanishads, and this is the third argument: Some people would meditate on the sacrifice
and perform the sacrifice
(or They Always Did It and Imagined It at the Same Time), which also allows for the possibility that others would merely meditate, and still others would merely perform the ritual without meditating. In this view, the two paths of Tantra, meditation and action,
jnana
and karma, lived side by side, like the two paths in the Upanishads, and sometimes even coexisted in a single worshiper. I have argued that stories about Pariahs, goddesses, and antigods may simultaneously reflect actual attitudes to real Pariahs, women, and tribal people and symbolic attitudes to imaginary goddesses, antigods, and, indeed, Pariahs. So too Tantric rituals could be simultaneously real and symbolic. Few would deny that the dominant trend in Tantric interpretation has long been, and remains, metaphorical or metaphysical. But how do we know that the unsanitized school did not interpret their texts, too, metaphorically?

The
Mahanirvana Tantra
recognizes three grades of humans: men who are like beasts, capable only of conventional worship, such as image worship (corresponding perhaps to the third group in the Upanishads, below the main two paths); heroic men, who practice Tantric rituals (the path of rebirth); and godlike men, who practice Tantric meditation, having transcended and internalized Tantric ritual (the path of Release).
⁸⁰
Yet as we saw in the passage “What Use Are Imagined Images?” this text also seems to mock people who are satisfied with mere mental images of rituals without performing them, to argue that it is better to meditate upon the ritual than to perform the ritual, but only if the worshiper has reached a high level of understanding through
internalizing
the ritual—that is, by performing it many times.

An even closer parallel might be seen in the Upanishadic passage (BU 6.4) in which the worshiper in a sexual embrace with his wife imagines each part of the act as a part of the Vedic offering into the fire, while presumably anyone making the offering into the fire could also imagine each action as its sexual parallel.
^id
Tantra collapses the metaphor and says that the act of intercourse with the ritual female partner is itself a ritual, like making an offering into the fire. Thus the Tantras fold back into the path of Release the Upanishadic sensuality that the Brahmins had filtered out. The
mudras
, the gestures, may form a mediating bridge between the act actually performed and the mere imagination of the act; they gesture toward the act. This understanding of the multiple layers of ritual symbolism supplements rather than replaces the chronological hypothesis, for if, as appears most likely, both levels were present from the start, historical factors over the centuries may have caused one level, the purely symbolic and mythical, to rise in importance as the other, the unsanitized ritual, lost power and status.

Given the attention that Indian literary and erotic theory pays to double meanings, to the linguistic “embrace” that simultaneously means two different things, it seems wise to assume that the Tantrics too engaged in split-level symbolism. The substances would be both/and as well as neither/nor: both literal and metaphoric, but also neither of these, being signs pointing to a set of meanings—the irrelevance of pollution or the relevance of nonduality—for which the signifiers (in this case, the Five Ms) are arbitrary. What is significant is not whether these antinomian acts were imagined or performed, but that the higher-order discourse in which the debate about them took place was of central concern not only to the Tantrics but to mainstream Indian religion.
⁸¹

In part because some people argue that the early Tantrics
never
actually did any of the transgressive things they said they did (the second argument), one might be tempted to insist that they
always
did (the first argument). But the texts, like many, if not most, religious texts, are ambiguous; you can read them to say that they did or that they did not. Thus Tantra was for some people a ritual and for others merely a myth, or for some people a sexual ritual and for others a meditational ritual. And for some, both. Not only does imagination not preclude doing, but doing does not preclude imagination; they can be simultaneous. Tantrics were certainly capable of walking and chewing imaginary gum at the same time.

Since sex is both dangerous and central to Tantrism (
vama
means both “left-hand” and “a woman,” and so to call Tantra the Vama path, as was often done, was to feminize as well as stigmatize it), Tantric sexual rituals, and Tantric women, are very carefully controlled. Many Tantric rituals involve women both as sexual partners and as channelers of the goddess, therefore objects of ritual worship.
⁸³
The centrality of women to Tantric ritual may have had a positive influence on more general attitudes to women during this period, such as Bana’s enlightened attitude to the ritual immolation of widows. There is also much talk of
shakti
and goddesses. Where the
Mahabharata
and
Ramayana
and the early Puranas are framed as conversations between two men, one of them a professional narrator (Charioteer), most Shaiva Tantras (and even some of the Vaishnava ones) are framed as dialogues between Shiva and Parvati. But it is by no means clear that Tantra benefited rather than exploited the women involved.

In the central Tantric ceremony, the male Tantric invokes Shiva, who enters him, while his female partner invokes Shiva’s
shakti,
the goddess, who enters her. The body of the Tantric thus becomes the icon (
murti
) of the god, and when he unites with his partner, the power of the goddess in her (or in her sexual fluids) unites with his semen and travels up his spine through a series of wheels of power (chakras), or stations of the spine, until they reach the top of his head and produce what is variously described as bliss, complete enlightenment, or Release. The particular power involved in this ritual, called the Kundalini (“the Coiled One”), takes the form of two channels of bodily fluids imagined in the shape of two serpents, male and female, intertwined around the spine (like the medical caduceus, symbolizing the human body in perfect health). Yoga had already established ways of raising the Kundalini to maintain health and, sometimes, to attain immortality; Tantra added the idea of stirring it up with ritual sex. In Nath versions of Kundalini yoga, the submarine mare is said to be a fire at the base of the spine, homologized with the Kundalini serpent (for horses are often connected with snakes in India). The centrality of semen in this ritual suggests that it was designed for men, though some Indian texts (including medical texts) do assume that women, like men, have semen and can draw it up through the spine to the brain. Some texts go so far as to assume that the male Tantric is able to draw the female’s fluid back into his own sexual organ and up his spine, the so-called fountain pen technique.
⁸⁴

There is a lot of Tantric talk about how wonderful women are: “Women are gods, women are life, women, indeed, are jewels. One should always associate with women, whether one’s own wife or another’s. What I have told you is the secret of all the Tantras.”
⁸⁵
Yet there is no evidence that actual Tantric women were equal partners in any sense of the word; to the question What’s in it for the women? (once called “the most embarrassing question you can ask any Tantric”
⁸⁶
), it would appear that the answer is: Not much.
⁸⁷
Yet though Tantric ritual performance may construct rigid gender roles, it also allows possibilities for the subversions of those roles.
⁸⁸
Some women found a kind of autonomy, freedom from their families, in the Tantric community, but for the most part the rituals were designed to benefit people who had lingas, not yonis.

Though many Tantrics probably had no concern whatsoever for the way they appeared to others,
⁸⁹
and most of them were “less concerned with shocking the conventional sensibilities of the wider South Asian society than they were with the transformative effects,”
⁹⁰
some did seem to thumb their noses at the bourgeois who condemned them. We can see this attitude in the passage with which this chapter began, “What Use Are Imagined Images?” which mocks conventional religion—fasting and the worship of icons. (The extremists among this sort of Tantric were the Aghoris, “to whom nothing is horrible,” who would do, or eat, anything at all to cultivate and then to demonstrate their indifference to conventional ideas of pleasure and pain.) Since, as we have seen, texts like the
Kama-sutra
assume that sex and carnivorousness are perfectly normal, you have to go out of your way to make them godlike; hence, for some Tantrics, the ritual involved sex not just with your wife but with your sister and/or a low-caste woman.

The
Mahanirvana Tantra
distinguishes between one’s own wife (
svakiya
), who is permitted as a partner for the sexual ritual, and two forbidden women, another man’s wife and a woman used in common by the entire group (
sadharana
).
^ie
Other Tantric texts from which the author of the
Mahanirvana Tantra
takes pains to distinguish himself permit both one’s own wife and another man’s wife as partners. (His distaste for these texts is an instance of the sanitizing effect.) The ritual contact with one’s own wife involves the use of her “flower,” a common euphemism for menstrual blood. The other women present in the ritual are referred to as
shaktis
, a term that may designate the women who are the partners of the other men participating in the ritual.

Tantra combines with the indifference to caste characteristic of many renunciant movements the antipathy to caste characteristic of many bhakti movements.

By the eleventh century the Tantras had been available in Sanskrit for some centuries, and Tantra had filtered into Brahmin circles,
⁹¹
particularly in Kashmir (in part through the writings of Abhinavagupta), and into Kashmiri court circles.
⁹²
But this did not by any means limit Tantric audiences to Brahmins; group worship in temples made possible the dissemination of Sanskrit texts to Sanskritless people, and the same would have been true of Tantric circles too. In contrast with the equivocal position of women in Tantra, there is massive evidence that even more than the bhakti movements, Tantra from the very start involved low-caste people. The Tantrics co-opted impurity, using human skulls for their begging bowls, eating nonvegetarian food, and drinking alcohol; they included in their ranks cremation ground ascetics, who were certainly not Brahmins, though not all were from the very lowest castes.
⁹³
Tantra turns Puranic Hindu forms upside down; many of its rituals and myths invert, literally or symbolically, Brahmin concepts of power and pollution.