In the seventh through twelfth centuries CE, Buddhism continued to change and develop. Many of these changes were conditioned on the progressively more distant relationship between the sangha and the laity. Within the monasteries, Buddhism became an increasingly scholastic endeavor as the sangha focused on the mastery of important texts. In opposition to the scholastic turn of monastic Buddhism, some members of the sangha began leaving monasteries for the life of wandering ascetics. For seemingly the first time in Indian Buddhism, the tensions between forest monks and the monastically based sangha, central to Tambiah’s (1976, 1984) studies of Thai Buddhism and Carrither’s (1979, 1983) studies of Sri Lankan Buddhism, come into play. At the same time, a new form of Buddhism—Tantric Buddhism, or Vajrayana Buddhism—developed alongside Mahayana Buddhism. Tantric Buddhism was not the sole province of either monastic or ascetic Buddhism—rather, Tantric Buddhism had both ascetic and scholastic variants, with substantial borrowing between them.
The origins of Tantric Buddhism are even murkier than those of Mahayana Buddhism. Just as early Mahayana scholars had done, the
Earliest practitioners of Tantric Buddhism claimed that their teachings were originally taught by the Buddha and were hidden until such time as the world was ready for them. Further, Tantric Buddhism was far more eclectic and heterodox than Mahayana Buddhism, subsuming a wider range of ritual practices and borrowing freely from other religious traditions. For these and other reasons, “it remains exceedingly difficult to identify what it is that sets the Tantric Buddhism apart” (Lopez 2001:214). That hesitation noted, among the more important characteristics of Tantric Buddhism was its use of supernormal or magical acts to greatly speed the attainment of enlightenment. Where earlier forms of Buddhism required long periods of meditation and potentially several lives to attain enlightenment, Tantric Buddhism held out the promise of almost immediate salvation. Tantric Buddhism also often had a more worldly focus, with the attainment of supernormal powers often seemingly more important than enlightenment.
Most scholars place the origins of Tantric Buddhism in India in the mid-first millennium GE, with more widespread practice beginning as early as the seventh and eighth centuries GE. By the ninth and tenth centuries, Tantric scholars were present at Nalanda and dominated in the monasteries in the Northeast. From there, Tantric Buddhism spread to the Himalayas, where it is still practiced today. Tantric practices were recorded in a new class of writings—tantras—from which Tantric Buddhism gets its name. In contrast to sutras produced in Mahayana Buddhism, tantras have a more revelatory and less philosophical bent. As reported in the tantras, Tantric ritual took many forms, ranging from the intentional transgression of social taboos to complex visualizations of Buddhist principles.
Much of ritual described in the tantras centers on the intentional breaking of social taboos. Tantric literature makes frequent mention of sex with low caste women, eating meat, and frequenting burial grounds. In Tantric Buddhism, these socially transgressive behaviors were seen to be a source, or demonstration, of supernormal powers. In part, these transgressions demonstrate the illusory nature of the world. If the world is truly an illusion, then sex with a low caste woman in a cremation ground would also be an illusion—and therefore not transgressive at all. At the same time, in an anthropological sense, transgressive rituals also brought Tantric practitioners into contact with the liminal. Following Mary Douglas’s arguments concerning pollution discussed in Chapter 2, contact with pollution was both dangerous and powerful. Those who mastered liminal forces gained substantial power to affect the world. Thus, transgressive Tantric rituals could allow practitioners to levitate, turn enemies to stone, or attain enlightenment.
It is not clear if transgressive Tantric rituals were ever commonly practiced in India. They might have been, but in terms of the historical study of Buddhism, tantras reveal more about the monastic tradition of Buddhism than they do the ascetic tradition. The reason for this is simple. In the latter first millennium GE, the vast bulk of the sangha in India lived within monasteries. Tantras were preserved in monastic libraries, read by monas-tically based scholars, and taught to novitiates as part of their education. Whether or not the rituals and activities described in the tantras ever occurred, the accounts of transgressive Tantric rituals must have resonated with the monastically based sangha—even if most never engaged in them. For the bulk of the sangha, tantras might have been intended more as allegories than as manuals for proper ritual behavior. In some sense, tantras might have been studied by the sangha for the same reason that Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is read by American high school students. Both the tantras and On the Road provide powerful lessons about life, but lord help any students who actually lived their lives according to either of them.
Just as modern academics can read On the Road and write articles, dissertations, and books about it, so Buddhist scholastics studied tantras. In scholastic Buddhism, Tantric sex could be recast as the “union of female Wisdom with male Skill in Means” (White 2000:17). In some Tantric texts, sex was limited to those with the greatest spiritual prowess; in others, sex was part of the initiation of novitiates. Further, sexual union need not literally occur, but could be meditated upon or actively visualized. Within the scholastic tradition of Tantric Buddhism, sex and other transgressive rituals were often treated as a metaphor to ponder, rather than an act to perform. In fact, among the monastic elite, Tantric Buddhism increasingly centered on the practice of meditative visualizations of a complex cosmo-gram called a mandala.
Mandalas were exceedingly complex and varied symbols. In the most general sense, they were a cosmogram, a map of the universe. In some cases, mandalas depicted the sacred Mount Mehru in the center, with lesser peaks, continents, and oceans surrounding it. In other cases, the center was a palace. Typically, a major deity or Buddha inhabited the center of the mandala, with lesser deities or Bodhisattvas arrayed around him or her. There is no single mandala from which all others derive, but rather a huge number of different types of mandalas used by different sects, in different ways, throughout much of South, Southeast, and East Asia. In Indian Tantric Buddhism, mandalas often served as a meditation device—with a devotee visualizing a mandala with himself or herself at the center.
Overall, Tantric Buddhism was neither monastic nor ascetic, neither worldly focused nor otherworldly focused—it was all of this and more. However, due to the vagaries of historical and archaeological preservation, far more is known of monastic Tantric Buddhism than ascetic Tantric Buddhism. Tantras were preserved by the monastically based sangha in monasteries that have been archaeologically identified. As discussed in earlier chapters, at present, no archaeological traces of ascetic Buddhism have ever been found in India. For this reason, the ascetic tradition can only be known through the interlocutors of monastic textual accounts. As discussed in Chapter 5, it appears that asceticism began to be valorized in Mahayana texts beginning in the third or fourth century GE. Based on readings of Tantric texts, this process accelerated in the mid - to late first millennium GE.
While there are numerous examples of the valorization of the ascetic life in Buddhist tantras, the story of Naropa will suffice as an example (Lopez 2001:214-215). Naropa was a renowned scholar and abbot of Nalanda in the tenth century GE. One day, as the account reports, while outside the monastery he encountered an old woman who “laughed at him mockingly, claiming that his knowledge of the dharma was merely intellectual, that he had no true understanding of the path” (Lopez 2001:214). She told him to apprentice himself to her brother, Tilopa, who turned out to be a beggar in a distant village. During the long apprenticeship, Tilopa demanded that Naropa perform several transgressive acts, including violently attacking the members of a wedding procession and, later, marrying a woman himself. Through these acts, and the supernormal abilities of Tilopa, Naropa gained a more complete understanding of Buddhism than possible through his scholastic training.14
The story of Naropa illustrates numerous elements of Tantric Buddhism. First, the superiority of Tantric Buddhism over Mahayana Buddhism is demonstrated by Naropa’s achievements only after abandoning the scholastic Mahayana Buddhism of Nalanda. The second element of Tantra is shown in the old woman’s criticism of scholastic Buddhism as being sterile intellectualism, with the more mystical teachings of Tantric Buddhism more efficacious. Third, the revelatory rituals of Tantra often required transgressions of social or monastic norms and produced supernormal abilities for those who mastered Tantric rituals. Finally, the asceticism championed in Tantra is more worldly focused. Ascetics, as described in the tantras, were not living in the forests or meditating in caves. Tantric ascetics lived at the peripheries of cities and villages, interacting with the laity on a daily basis, if for no other reason than to beg for food. In this way, Tantric ascetics had more contact with the laity than those members of the sangha who lived within the monastery walls.
It must always be remembered that the existing accounts of Tantric asceticism were preserved and studied by scholastic Buddhists living within monasteries. The descriptions of Tantric asceticism cannot be straightforwardly read as simple descriptions of the lifestyles of Buddhist ascetics. In fact, these accounts, by themselves, cannot even be used to establish whether Buddhist ascetics actually existed in India, and if they did, how common they were. Despite this, it does seem likely that Buddhist ascetics were present in India in the mid - to late first century GE. In part, this is shown in the religious literatures of Jainism and Hinduism, which also lionize asceticism. Ascetics are also described in the kingly literature, though often in more disparaging terms. For example, the Mattavilasa Prahasana, an early seventh century Sanskrit play attributed to Pallava King Mahendravarman I (571-630 ge), is a comedic account of a drunken Shaivite ascetic accusing a Buddhist ascetic of stealing his begging bowl, only later to find out it was stolen by a dog (Lockwood and Bhat 1981). However negative the portrayal of asceticism in Mattavilasa Prahasana, the humor in the play would make no sense if ascetics were not a regular presence in Indian towns and villages in the latter half of the first millennium GE. The best evidence for the existence of Buddhist ascetics, however, does not come from the secular literature from the first millennium GE, but rather from the similarities between Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain tantras themselves.
From the start, Tantra was a highly heterodox and syncretic religious movement, encompassing Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, and other major and minor religious sects. Despite the divisions between rival religious orders, Tantric ideas and practices were freely adopted and shared. As argued by White (2000:23),
Within India, we may take the example of an early tenth-century Jain Tantra entitled the Jvalini Kalpa. This text. . . is in nearly every respect identical to Hindu and Buddhist Tantric sources of the same period. Nothing but the names of the deities invoked, visualized, or manipulated in these practices is specifically Jain; all the features, however, are specific to tenth century Indian Tantra, whether Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain.
The obvious question these similarities raise is, how did they come to be? How were Tantric ideas so freely shared by rival religious orders? There are several potential answers to this question. First, throughout the religious literature of the period great scholars are noted as being great debaters. These debates, often conducted before kings, might have provided a venue for the sharing of Tantric ideas among rival sects. Second, at locations like Ellora, where Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain religious institutions existed side by side, texts and religious ideas may have been shared. Finally, these ideas may have been shared among ascetics of different religious orders living outside religious institutions. That is, Tantric ascetics had less interest in religious affiliations than those living within religious orders, and could thus freely learn and borrow texts and ideas from each other. Over time, these ideas and texts would have percolated up to the monasteries. This last possibility would, in part, explain the more worldly focus of Tantric texts. It is not necessary to choose one of these possibilities as correct. Rather, it is likely that all occurred in the mid - to late first millennium GE.
Between the seventh and twelfth centuries in India, two strands of Buddhism become more clearly identifiable. The first was a scholastic version of Buddhism that emphasized the mastery of texts, housed in the large monasteries in the Gangetic Plain and Northeast India. The sangha living within these monasteries were largely divorced from day-to-day interaction with the laity, except as landlords over increasingly large monastic properties. The second strand was more ascetic, with practitioners abandoning the monasteries for a more revelatory and worldly focused form of Buddhism. Practitioners of this form of Buddhism lived on the margins of villages with ascetics of numerous faiths, depending on the donations of the laity for whom they served as ritual specialists. For individual members of the sangha, these two strands of Buddhism allowed for two different ways to balance their individual and communal desires. Some members of the sangha preferred the communal life of the monastery, while others preferred the ascetic life of the forest. Overall, however, Buddhist ascetics were far less numerous than scholastic Buddhists, and over time ascetics became less identifiably Buddhist as their ritual practices took on more Tantric elements. All that said, the scholastic and ascetic strands of Buddhism were never wholly distinct, with ideas and people constantly moving between the two in much the same manner as Tambiah (1976, 1984) and Carrithers (1979, 1983) describe in Thailand and Sri Lanka.
It must be remembered that all of these theological and ritual changes were occurring as the laity in much of India was increasingly abandoning Buddhism for other faiths. For the most part, the development of Tantric Buddhism had little impact in India beyond the Gangetic Plain, Orissa, and the Northeast. In some sense, the ascetic turn in Buddhism can be seen as an attempt to reconnect with the laity in the last remaining parts of India where the laity still had some interest in Buddhism. In the thirteenth century, however, this attempt failed, as monasteries were abandoned and ascetic Buddhism slowly lost its distinct identity within the increasingly heterodox world of Indian Tantra.
World History
