A Genealogy of Devotion

Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India

Patton E. Burchett

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231548830
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

Patton Burchett offers a path-breaking genealogical study of devotional ( bhakti ) Hinduism that traces its understudied historical relationships with tantra, yoga, and Sufism. He focuses his analysis on the early modern period, when the rise of bhakti communities in North India transformed the religious landscape.

PART I

From Medieval Tantra to Early Modern Bhakti

1

The Tantric Age

Tantra and Bhakti in Medieval India

In order to understand the rise of bhakti in early modern North India and its historical significance, we must first look back to India’s early medieval period (ca. 600–1200), a time we can characterize as “the Tantric Age.”1 From roughly the seventh to the thirteenth century, the thought, ritual practice, and institutional presence of tantric traditions played a major role in the life of South Asians. As Gavin Flood remarks, “The cultural, religious and political history of India in the medieval period cannot be understood without Tantra.”2 Critically, however, tantra’s rise to prominence was inseparable from the growth of popular traditions of devotion, or bhakti, with which tantra forged symbiotic relationships. In this chapter, I examine the tantric tradition in early medieval India—particularly its relationships with state power and popular forms of devotional religiosity—in order to set the stage for the book’s consideration of the relationships between bhakti, tantra, and yoga that emerged in late Sultanate and Mughal India. Tantra first arose as an esoteric tradition for initiated elites seeking liberation (mokṣa) or extraordinary powers (siddhi), but it later became deeply involved with royal power and with India’s public temple cult (and the political and agrarian expansion linked to it), making tantric ritual, institutions, and ideals of sacred power—epitomized in the figure of the tantric yogī/guru—a fundamental part of mainstream Indian social, religious, and political life.

Scholars have often emphasized the esoteric and fundamentally transgressive nature of tantra, yet transgression was quite marginal to the “mainstream” tantric tradition I focus on here. This mainstream tantra was simultaneously both esoteric and popular, brahmanical and folk. This chapter demonstrates how tantric monastic orders and their institutions became integral players in an early medieval religiopolitical economy that linked lay bhaktas, tantric yogīs, and kings in exchanges of economic, sociopolitical, moral, and spiritual capital. In the process it reveals how, in sharp contrast to the bhakti of early modern North India, bhakti in this period is regularly subordinated or assimilated to tantric ritual or yogic values and practices (jñāna, dhyāna, etc.).

What Is Tantra?

The tantric traditions rest on the foundation of a vast body of tantric scriptures, primarily termed Tantras, Āgamas, and Saṃhitās, that were composed in Sanskrit between the fifth and ninth centuries—in Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Saura, Buddhist, and Jain contexts—as well as on a number of other important (usually more exegetical) tantric works that were produced into the thirteenth century.3 As several tantric studies scholars have made clear, these three designations—Tantra, Āgama, and Saṃhitā—were synonymous and interchangeable terms for tantric scriptural revelation, thus in the pages to come I follow common practice in using the term “Tantras” to refer to the tantric scriptures in general.4 In the earliest phase of the tradition, the Tantras were concerned primarily with the various ritual techniques used in the initiated practitioner’s individual quest for spiritual liberation or occult powers. Certain branches of early tantric scripture (e.g., the Bhūta Tantras and Gāruḍa Tantras) also concern themselves with protection against and treatment of demonic possession, poison, disease, and other dangers or misfortunes related to the health and livelihood of individuals and communities. In the later, post–eleventh century development of the tradition in South India, many tantric scriptures came to focus on aspects of public religious and political life, such as the building of temples, consecration of kings, and conducting of public rites of worship.

The earliest extant tantric Śaiva scripture that we know of is the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā, the oldest sections of which were composed probably between 450 and 550.5 The text’s central innovation is the teaching that liberation (mokṣa) can be gained through tantric initiation (dīkṣā) itself. In this early scripture we can already see the core features that would come to characterize tantra more generally—namely, (a) tantric initiation (a liberating initiation, given by an enlightened guru and available to householders and all castes); (b) the ritual divinization of the body (i.e., the “consubstantiation” of the practitioner with the deity “in a transforming infusion of divine power”);6 (c) the use of tantric mantras; and (d) a conception of the Divine as immanent, accessible power that can be employed for bhukti or mukti.

The Tantras claim to be supremely authoritative teachings descended straight from the mouth of the gods. Medieval Hindu tantric communities typically recognized the Vedas as a legitimate but lower echelon of scriptural revelation that the Tantras include and transcend.7 In order to access the “higher” truths and practice the “more powerful” ritual methods taught in the Tantras, one first had to be initiated. Initiation into tantric teachings had great appeal because they offered new ritual techniques and potent tantric (non-Vedic) mantras that were understood to be more efficacious in—and, indeed, entirely necessary for—achieving the goals of spiritual salvation (mukti) or extraordinary powers and enjoyments (siddhi/bhukti). Certain initiatory forms of Śaivism preexisted tantra, but these Atimārga Śaiva traditions focused exclusively on the goal of liberation, demanded renunciation from initiates, and typically admitted only brahman males. Tantric traditions opened up initiation to all caste classes, and even women, and did not require the renunciation of family life and traditional social obligations.8 Hindu tantric traditions typically claimed that their major initiation ritual was unique in itself effecting salvation. In this tantric initiation rite, the guru uses the power of non-Vedic mantras to destroy the previous karma of the initiate, purifying his soul of all impurities and stains (mala) and allowing him to identify with God and realize the power of the Divine. As Elaine Fisher explains, “The implications of this assertion—that a mere ritual, in and of itself, possesses the means to sever the bonds that tie the individual soul to transmigratory existence—radically recast the sociological implications of elite Indic religion.”9 In offering this ritual initiation to a wide array of social groups (i.e., not just brahmans and renouncers), tantric Śaivism “effectively circumvented the strictures of varṇāśramadharma, providing both kings and Śūdras with access to liberation.”10

The Śaiva Āgamas came to articulate four basic classes of tantric initiates: (1) the samayin, or entry-level community member; (2) the putraka, who has received the primary, liberating initiation (nirvāṇa-dīkṣā) and whose only goal is liberation; (3) the sādhaka, who is authorized to practice a special discipline in order to acquire extraordinary powers (siddhis) and heavenly enjoyments; and (4) the ācārya, or guru, a community leader granted the privilege and power to give initiations, perform temple worship (pūjā) and installations (pratiṣṭhās), and comment on tantric scriptures.11 In tantra, the guru is a spiritually realized adept in and through whom the Divine acts (i.e., who is the vessel of, or even nondifferent from, God) and who—in a direct relationship with his disciples—transmits the knowledge necessary to conduct tantric ritual.

In most tantric systems, regular ritual action is required to maintain the purity and power attained in the main tantric initiation (nirvāṇa-dīkṣā) and to thereby ensure liberation. The daily ritual worship (pūjā) of the tantric initiate involves the systematic use of mantras and intricate visualization meditations to purify and empower a subtle body understood to have homological connections to the rest of the entire cosmos and to be, at its core, inherently divine—i.e., suffused with the same energy and pure consciousness as the Divine. Tantric ritual most differentiated itself from mundane brahmanical Śrauta and Smārta rites in offering a method for divinizing the body and infusing oneself with divine power through consubstantiation with a deity.12 As Alexis Sanderson has pointed out, this method is remarkably uniform across tantric traditions, as all forms of tantric religion share a single ritual system whose deeper structural unity is not significantly affected by differences such as the choice of deity invoked and the character of the visualizations, mantras, and maṇḍalas used.13 The general ritual structure found in the practi...