Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism

History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions

Christian Wedemeyer

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231530958
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism fundamentally rethinks the nature of the transgressive theories and practices of the Buddhist Tantric traditions, challenging the notion that the Tantras were "marginal" or primitive and situating them instead—both ideologically and institutionally—within larger trends in mainstream Buddhist and Indian culture.

Critically surveying prior scholarship, Wedemeyer exposes the fallacies of attributing Tantric transgression to either the passions of lusty monks, primitive tribal rites, or slavish imitation of Saiva traditions. Through comparative analysis of modern historical narratives—that depict Tantrism as a degenerate form of Buddhism, a primal religious undercurrent, or medieval ritualism—he likewise demonstrates these to be stock patterns in the European historical imagination.

Through close analysis of primary sources, Wedemeyer reveals the lived world of Tantric Buddhism as largely continuous with the Indian religious mainstream and deploys contemporary methods of semiotic and structural analysis to make sense of its seemingly repellent and immoral injunctions. Innovative, semiological readings of the influential Guhyasamaja Tantra underscore the text's overriding concern with purity, pollution, and transcendent insight—issues shared by all Indic religions—and a large-scale, quantitative study of Tantric literature shows its radical antinomianism to be a highly managed ritual observance restricted to a sacerdotal elite. These insights into Tantric scripture and ritual clarify the continuities between South Asian Tantrism and broader currents in Indian religion, illustrating how thoroughly these "radical" communities were integrated into the intellectual, institutional, and social structures of South Asian Buddhism.

I

HISTORIOGRAPHY

1

ORIGINS, RELIGION, AND THE ORIGINS OF TANTRISM

Science deals with relations, not with origins and essences.

—E. E. Evans-Pritchard

The mode in which the genesis of a thing is explained is the candid expression of opinion, of sentiment respecting it.

—L. Feuerbach

Les origines sont rarement belles.

—Paul Veyne

IN SEEKING to make sense of Tantric Buddhism, scholars have often looked to its origins as a way of explaining its most basic nature and causes, identifying it, and thus accounting for it. This method has been common throughout humanistic and historical studies of culture, and the study of Buddhism is no exception. Like other scholarly discourses, this one has its own coherency and structure in which a limited number of rhetorical modes recur consistently. In fact, the various accounts of the origination of Tantric Buddhism comprise a highly delimited set of possible representations.

This chapter will explore the rhetoric of the origins of Tantrism and its modern history, observing its basic modes and its range of variants. Having surveyed the discursive terrain, the discussion will then turn to the cogency of these various models taken on their own terms, and argue that each of them contains fatal flaws of logic and evidence. Particular attention will be paid to two currently popular accounts that ascribe the origins of Tantric Buddhism to either tribal religions or Śaivism. The discussion will conclude with a more fundamental critique of the search for origins as a method in the human sciences, and of the approach to historical interpretation of cultural forms that it subtends and enables.

UNDERSTANDING TANTRIC BUDDHISM THROUGH ITS ORIGINS

Readers of historical literature will be quite familiar with discussions of origins as a mode of locating and interpreting figures or movements. This approach has, in fact, a very respectable pedigree in the human sciences. No less a thinker than Emile Durkheim stressed the need to trace one’s scholarly subjects from their origins and only then through the course of their subsequent existence. Historical objects, Durkheim argued, are shaped by and irrevocably linked with the circumstances of their birth:

Every time that we undertake to explain something human, taken at a given moment in history—be it a religious belief, a moral precept, a legal principle, an aesthetic style or an economic system—it is necessary to commence by going back to its most primitive and simple form, to try to account for the characteristics by which it was marked at that time, and then to show how it developed and became complicated little by little.¹

In the study of Tantric Buddhism, this method has been extremely popular. Throughout the scholarly literature, one finds chapters and subchapters with titles such as “Tantric Buddhism: Its Characteristics and Origins”² (L. de La Vallée Poussin 1898), “Origin of Buddhist Magic: Rise of Vajrayāna” (B. Bhattacharyya 1931), “The Genesis of Vajrayāna”³ (H. von Glasenapp, 1936), “Origin and Development of Tantric Buddhism” (S. Dasgupta 1946), “Origins” (D. Snellgrove 1959), “The Seventh-Century Beginning” (R. Davidson 2002), and so on. An entire volume on The Origins of Yoga and Tantra (G. Samuel) appeared as recently as 2008. Even among those authors who do not explicitly use the language of origins, recourse to this mode of explanation is frequent.

How then have we moderns discussed the origins of Tantric Buddhism? There seem to be three primary modalities.⁴ According to some, Buddhist Tantrism emerged as an outlet for transgressive or degenerate impulses by monks. Others discern its roots deep in the religious primordium of India. Yet others refer the rise of Tantric Buddhism to a wholesale borrowing from the traditions of its Śaiva compatriots. In a certain sense, each of these imputed origins is keyed to a particular narrative account of the history of esoteric Buddhism. That issue will be set aside for the moment, as it will form a part of the discussion in chapter 2. For now, let us get a sense of the variety of rhetoric that has been employed in discussing the origins of Tantric Buddhism and the interpretative work that these conceptions perform.

One of the original causes to which scholars have turned in accounting for the rise of Buddhist Tantrism is a lack of moral rigor in the flourishing Buddhist monasteries of the first millennium. One of the most influential advocates of this etiology is Benoytosh Bhattacharyya. This influential Bengali scholar rightly observes that “it is very doubtful whether we will ever be in a position to trace the origin of the Tantra in the most precise manner possible.”⁵ He nonetheless felt that an adequate account of its principal causes could be produced. In several of his published works, Bhattacharyya attributes authorship of the Tantric movement to the influence of degenerate monks and a need to accommodate these tendencies. Observing that sources relate that many monks either left on their own or were expelled from the Buddhist monastic community because they were unable to practice the strict morality required of them by the Discipline (Vinaya), Bhattacharyya speculates that

there were many others who were not bold enough to proclaim a war against the rules imposed on them, but violated them in secret. It is thus very natural to expect that there arose secret conclaves of Buddhists who, though professing to be monks, violated all the rules of morality and secretly practiced things that were considered by others to be revolting. After the death of the Buddha, such secret conclaves must have grown in number in every province, until they formed into a big organization. If we add to this the yoga practices and the practice of mantras, we get a picture of the Tāntrika cult at its early stage.⁶

Here, the inspiration for the development of the Tantric traditions is attributed to a moral turpitude alleged to have been widespread even in the time of the Buddha himself, to which period Bhattacharyya locates the earliest esoteric communities. There are some unexplained gaps in this account. For one, the argument is largely based upon speculative assumptions (“it is very natural to expect…”), which premises are implicit rather than acknowledged. Furthermore, while one can certainly understand that monks may desire pleasures prohibited them, it is more difficult to understand why they would necessarily gravitate toward the revolting. (Presumably, Bhattacharyya has in mind here the ritual consumption of polluting substances, with which this book began—a topic that will be discussed in detail in chapter 4.)

The rise of Tantric Buddhist literature is described in similar terms in Bhattacharyya’s works. “Those monks who saw salvation only in leading a natural life went on devising plans and probably by writing what we call the original Tantras which were secretly handed down through their trusted disciples who could practice the rites only in secret.”⁷ The notion invoked here—of a “natural life”—is central to this hypothesis. For Bhattacharyya, the monastic regulations were composed largely of “unnatural rules of discipline,”⁸ which he also calls “unnatural and strict rules.”⁹ Here, “natural life” means enjoying pleasures,¹⁰ a habit that is attributed to the Buddha himself who, the reader is told, “took food and nourishment in a natural way.”¹¹ As the monastic discipline asked Buddhists to go against their most basic human nature, it could only be expected that there would arise an impulse to circumvent the rules that frustrated the realization of such a “natural life.” This impulse, Bhattacharyya insisted, found expression in the Tantric scriptures, wherein “everywhere any casual reader can detect a desire on the part of the authors to thwart all unnatural rules and regulation forcibly chained on to the followers of Buddhism.”¹² In short, Bhattacharyya maintained that the Tantras were composed in order that unregenerate monks might enjoy the pleasures of life with Buddha’s imprimatur, thus giving rise to a long tradition of Buddhist thought and practice dedicated to the realization of this goal.¹³

Another influential account of the origins of Tantric Buddhism maintained that the Tantras could be traced back to the most remote antiquity in India. Tantrism, that is, has no discernible origins per se but rather represents the oldest indigenous religious tradition of the Indian subcontinent. These traditions are here regarded as “pre-Āryan”—belonging to the culture of India that preceded the alleged advent of Central Asian immigrants who brought the Vedic revelations southeast into new territories. The great art historian Stella Kramrisch wrote in 1929 that Śāktism (the worship of the female element, often considered the sine qua non of “Tantra”) had “its roots in the most remote antiquity.”¹⁴ Indologist E. J. Thomas made much the same claim in 1933, commenting that “Tantrism as a form of religion is of unknown origin, and may possibly have arisen among some indigenous and non-Aryan people.”¹⁵ This view too has continued to have its proponents. In 1962, R. O. Meisezahl wrote that “the Tantra, whether Hindu or Buddhist…consists essentially of religious methods and practices which were current in India from times immemorial.”¹⁶ The French Indologist André Bareau similarly claimed in 1966 that “the origins of the Tantric movement go back rather far in time and seem allied with ancient magical and religious beliefs that remain as alive in India as elsewhere.”¹⁷

Sinologist Robert van Gulik, in a monograph on the esoteric Buddhist divinity Hayagrīva, provides a more thorough elaboration of this idea:

The roots of this curious system may be traced back to very old, probably even pre-Indo-Aryan days. The belief in the power of the magic formulae…seems to be particularly rooted in the propensity towards magic existing among the ancient aboriginal tribes of India. Many of these ancient conceptions were adopted by the Indo-Aryan conquerors and made an integrant part of their own conceptions.

Van Gulik’s account incorporates a related but distinct claim that characterizes much of contemporary thought about the origin of the Tantras. This is the notion that—even after the ascendency of the Vedic cultural model—primordial, pre-Āryan religious currents continued to be pra...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Making Sense in and of the Human Sciences
• Part I: Historiography
• Part II: Interpretation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index