This is by no means a scholarly attempt, it’s in informal blog entry, a summary of my current understanding of Tantra in the context of Indian history and religious politics. It is informed by scholarly research. Over the very many years I’ve studied Tantra I’ve read many serious scholarly works and I’m on also on an ‘academic’ email list that has a number of scholars who contribute, so what I’m about to say is reasonably well informed and up to date.
There were two intriguing artefacts found in the ruins of the Mohenjo-Daro civilization, a statue of a naked dancing girls (there are other versions) and an amulet that shows a man with an erection sitting in a cross-legged position. The old theory was that the Mohenjo-Daro (or Harappan) civilization fell due to invasion from Aryan tribes that migrated from the plains of Central Europe (possibly Turkey/Armenia). They probably didn’t call themselves Aryans, although the name has stuck and modern day Iran derives its name from the same root. The current theory is that rather than invade the Aryans gradually infiltrated India, a process that actually took thousands of years and is still not complete (although it nearly is). The Aryans have given us two significant religions, Zoroastrianism and Orthodox Hinduism (which I will call Aryanism). Many scholars have remarked on the similarities between Zoroastrianism and early Aryanism.
It is also clear that early Aryanism was influenced by the indigenous beliefs of India and over a period of hundreds, even thousands, of years Aryanism adapted and adopted some traditional beliefs. It is here we encounter our first major problem in understanding this process. The Aryans had a caste system. The highest caste was that of the Brahmin, a priest/scholar whose task it was to maintain Aryan ideological dominance. As scholars they were the ones who recorded history. The indigenous religions of India seem to have been largely oral and there is not much of a written record. Instead what we have is what the Aryans have written and the major texts are the Vedas, which seem to have been compiled somewhere between 1500-1000 BCE. The Vedas describe the Aryan religion after it had encountered the mysticism of indigenous North India. Orthodox Hinduism is further divided into six Vedic darshanas, or schools of inquiry that are based on the Vedas.
Unfortunately many people assume that Hinduism is Aryanism, but this is far from the truth. India was never a unified country. Over thousands of years kingdoms and empires have risen and fallen, with the various rajas favouring this or that sect. Aryanism was one amongst many religions, including the unorthodox Buddhists, Jains, Shaktas, Tantrics and indigenous shamans. Often the rajas would allow competing religions to co-exist, sometimes he would favour one and suppress another. But here we face another important point. The rajas did not have absolute control and sects survived in remote areas untouched. India is the second largest tribal based culture (after Africa) and many of these adivasi (first people) maintain their own customs and languages even today.
Tantricism is indigenous to North India and it developed out of local shamanism. There are tribes in Northern India that still practice traditional shamanism and some of the iconography of Tantricism can be seen in shamanistic practices, particularly sex magic. A good example of the fusion of shamanism with Tantricism (in this case Buddhist) is the cult of Drukpa Kinley in Bhutan. Drukpa is depicted as a drunk and lewd womaniser who practised left-hand Tantra. Bhutan is full of phallic symbols, on doors, hanging in houses and as charms. It is believed such symbols stop evil spirits.
It is my feeling that some form of Tantra has always been practiced in Northern India, however, it seems there was something of a Tantric revolution around 500-1400 ACE. We can’t be certain about the dates at all and it seems much of Tantra was passed down orally from master to disciple. What we do know is that around this time Tantrics started to write things down. But there is something else we also know. Tantra was radically opposed to Aryanism. In fact Tantra is a radical critique of Aryanism. This was a political struggle with both sides trying to compete. Tantra refused to accept the authority of the Vedas, it rejected the caste system and deliberately flouted Aryan prohibitions, most notably the five prohibited substances.
The other thing we also know is that the Tantric revolution had an enormous impact on Indian society and whilst the Aryan Brahmin scholars tried to suppress it they ended up having to accomodate it, albeit in a modified form. The orthodox darshana of Yoga is a Vedic response to the Tantric revolution. This revolution had a profound effect. The disciplines of jyotish, ayurveda, the chakra system, hatha yoga, vastu shastra (Indian Feng Shui), etc, were all transformed by Tantric thought. We also know that Jainism and Mahayana Buddhism were heavily influenced and the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, Padmasambhava, was born in modern day Kashmir (on the Muslim side of the disputed territory) (and for a frank understanding of Padmasabhava’s left-hand practices read the biography of his chief consort, Lady Tsogyal, herself an enlightened adept who became his consort at the age of 16).
In fact most of what the West understands as Hinduism, ie Yoga, is in fact a watered down form of Tantra. The Aryan religion is largely a series of injunctions and rituals performed by Brahmin priests. Dr Giti Thadani has explained how many of these priests are corrupt – she wanted to perform darshan at a famous goddess temple, but the local Brahmins had appropriated it, covered the statue of the naked goddess and charged pilgrims to perform darshan on their behalf. When she complained and insisted on performing darshan herself the Brahmin priest yelled for the guards and told them she was a Muslim. In temples all over India you must pay the Aryan priest to perform darshan on your behalf. In contrast Tantra has always been an egalitarian system with an emphasis on inner transformation.
There is no question about which side I’m on. The Aryans are responsible for perpetuating the caste system and the Brahmin priest/scholars are guilty of creating a self-serving system of privilege. One only has to read the various smrtis (Aryan books of law) to see how venal and ridiculous the system is. The so-called ‘untouchbles’ were once the adivasi and indigenous Indians who would not be a part of the Aryan caste system so the scholars invented a new caste of untouchable, people who could not dare touch a Brahmin or cause a shadow to fall on their ‘twice-born’ and ‘pure’ bodies for fear of a terrible punishment in this life and the next (after torture in a hell loka). Of course its all self-serving bullshit. I particularly like the law that a Brahmin is permitted to have sex with any lower caste woman and that she will be blessed in a future life for fucking such a lofty being.
I don’t want to get sidetracked because the point of this post is to say that for centuries the Brahmin scholars have been trying to control and subvert the Tantric revolution. What they seek is simple. Aryan dominance and hence, Brahmin dominance. Sadly they have nearly succeeded. The almost final nail in the Tantric coffin came under the British. Naturally they were shocked at the permissive sexuality of the non-Aryan Indians and they formed an alliance with the Aryan upper-castes. They gave legitimacy to the Aryan Manu Smrti, a vicious set of laws that was not widely accepted – and then they set about suppressing non-orthodox sects. By the time of Independance the Aryans had gained control of most of India, a task they could not have accomplished under indigenous rajas or the Muslims. The modern Aryan is puritanical, patriarchal authoritarian who uses a distorted Indian history to justify right-wing nationalism. The upper castes have a grip on political, legal and academic power and they are quite shameless in their attempt to Aryanise Indian history. Giti Thadani tells another story where a male high caste academic is standing in front of a statue of a goddess insisting it is in fact a male god. She also describes how statues have been altered by Aryan priests, how academics refuse to translate and study Tantric texts, particularly the Shakta Tantra (goddess tradition) and how male museum curators hide goddess statues in basements. She knows because her book ‘Meobius Trip’ is about her travels all over India to uncover the goddess tradition.
I’ll write more, but I want to end with an anecdote (have I repeated this?). An Indian academic on an email list shared that many high-caste women do not know that the shivalingam is Shiva’s phallus. This is how much the Aryans have suppressed the truth about Indian religion. How could they not know? Well, they were never told about it. Apparently male Brahmins think that such information is not suitable for delicate female sensibilities. Mind you, I’m not sure who treats women worse, Muslim men or Aryan men.
What’s the moral of this story? Many Indians have simply been lied to about their own religious history and the importance of Tantra. There was (and still is) a major attempt to Aryanise Yoga – and it would seem to me that several modern Indian thinkers were and are part of that project, including Aurobindo (and Shankara).
Btw, I don’t want to suggest that there is nothing of value in Aryan philosophy. It has made some important contributions. What I am saying is that they are often prejudiced against Tantra and often give a distorted picture of what it is.
Oh, and the naked dancing girl and yogi with an erection? An intriguing suggestion that indigenous Indian religions were sex positive and that all of this puritannical bullshit in modern India is Aryan prudishness. What I’d like to see is a movie that accurately portrays a Northern Indian kingdom under the influence of genuine indigenous Tantric traditions, with none of this puritannical Bollywood revisionism.
I’m also posting the below from another thread, as I think they are relevant here:
AK Says:
June 16th, 2007 at 7:59 am
Read that Caldwell article. It is there that she writes how she discovered a text recommended by Muktananda, written by Abvinagupta, who wrote it for the Kashmiri Shivite/kaula practitioners.
The Abvinagupta test lists the ideal attributes of the woman who is to be the ‘mudra’ consort in tantric practice, and what I found interesting was that the list of very sexy attributes listed by Abvinagupta included this item:
‘Eyes beautiful like a fawn in fear’â€â€which to my unapologetic feminist mind hints that Abvinagupta was recommending a girl would pose no anxiety for the male, someone easily led and dominated, and thus quite different from the splendid, confident Siddhimata described above by Agehananda Bharati.
Abvinagupta could have eroticised and then canonized confidence as a desirable attribute for the ‘mudra’ partner, but did not.
And, Caldwell tells us that it was precisely these inexperienced nonconfident girls whom Muktananda selected, who were not experienced enough as yoginis to really understand tantra at all.
It may be that part of the way tantra became subverted was that the males who produced and transmitted the texts gradually began to select women who were gorgeous, but who lacked self confidence, and did not choose to list ‘eyes beautiful like a tigers’ in the job description. So, women like Siddhimata became marginalized, because of their true power and resemblence to the Goddess, while girls lacking confidence and who did not arouse awe or anxiety in the male became the preferred
types.
This possible ‘Jailbait bias’ (my term) would, IMO be part of the subversion of tantra.
Edward Berge Says:
June 16th, 2007 at 9:06 am
I question whether what AK says above is “subversion†at all but is inherent to tantra from the beginning. Ray laid out that tantra arose from the shamanistic practices of northern India, of which Padmasambhava carried with him to Tibet, where this branch of Buddhism then merged with the indiginous, shamanistic Bon traditions. It seems inherent in ethnocentric, shamanistic cultures to value men over women along with a host of other “pre-rational†endeavors. Sex itself is pre-rational, arising from the most basic human drive, just above survival. So sex itself is not “the answer†but must be “included†and not supressed or repressed in an “integral†theory/praxis. So for me one line of integral inquiry is de-mytholgizing tantra itself, from its origins, what is “merely†animal sex from what is “spiritual†sex, and also demystifying the pre-rational elements of the “spiritual†in such sexual practices. Tantra by itself is not some “magical†answer to the integration of sex and spirituality.
During the Tantric revolution women were given a high place. You cannot understand Padmasambhava without understanding Yeshe Tsogyal. The problem is that Aryans have downplayed the role of women and deliberately ignore their contribution. There were female Tantric adepts. But they suffered the same fate the goddess did. Dr Giti Thadani points out that the Indian goddesses were changed to suit patriarchal ideology. The goddess was often worshipped on her own, under the Aryans she was made a consort of a god. This was a fate that befell Saraswati and Kali-Durga. Thadani tells of the absurd situation where Aryan priests tell their flock that the image of Kali standing on Shava has a completely different meaning to the original. They say that the reason her tongue is pocking out is to indicate remorse for standing on her husband. What revisionist bullshit. The tongue is a mudra that indicates ferocity and Shava is nor her husband, she stands on him to indicate her complete dominance of Shiva.
I’m talking about such beliefs in tantra, for example, that a certain number of coital strokes from a certain angle in a certain position on a certain phase of the moon would enhance a particular organ’s rejuvenation. Is this “science” or mythological belief? Yes it’s sex but just as mythological as the literal resurrection of Christ.
No doubt it’s mythological. Tantra was part of a complex cosmology, same with Taoist practices. Much of Tantra is dense with mythic mumbo-jumbo. However, it is also quite clear they understood more about the physiology and potential of sex than we do today and that’s because the moral values of the day treated sex as a legitimate pleasure and skill.
In his two books, The Ochre Robe (his memoir) and The Light at the Center, Agehananda Bharati described how India’s indigenous sex-positive Hinduism was distorted by a puritan bias introduced during the Hindu Renaissance.
In The Light at the Center, Bharati offers one among many examples of how interpretations of basic texts was distorted: ‘..the basic content of the Hindu doctrine is hedonic, the canonical scriptures talk overtly about delight and pleasure, and even the last five centuries of puritianical subversion have not quite succeeded in suppressing them.
‘In the Taittiriya Upanishad’, Bharati continues ‘there is a famous long passage called “the hierarchy of ananda (pleasure)”. Now, official Hindu exegesis today, informed by that puritanism which I view as verging on the pathological, declares that ananda does not mean pleasure, it has no hedonistic underpinnings: rather it means controlled spiritual well being, etc. But the passage resists these dampening attempts, and if you really want to get a rise out of a modern Hindu pandit who speaks English (Bharati wrote this 31 years ago–perhaps matters have changed?) you quote the ananda-mimamsa, “the hierarchy of pleasure”. ”
(Light at the Center, pages 29-30)
And in his memoir, Bharati describes this same sex negative bias
distorting the work of scholarship: young Agehananda was a monk in the Ramakrishna order. Swami Madhavanada had just published an important English translation of the Brhadarnayaka Upanishad with commentaries by Samkaracarya.
‘The ancient canonical text contains, toward its conclusion, a section of candid erotics, how a woman should be courted, how she should be consummated, how male offspring is to be begotten in her womb, and how she ought to be treated if she refuses the earnest suitor’s wooings. Purianism had not yet clogged the Brahmin mind in the canonical age and as not to mar its abudant freedom for centuries to come….’
With dismay, Bharati wrote ‘In Swami Mahavandanda’s (edition) the full text is printed in the Sanskrit original, but these passages are simply omitted in his translation. It was to this omission I took strong exception. For if every word in the sruti is truth, then there is no human being who can tamper with the text itself; he may interpret it by all means,and make it speak about the preparation of vegetables, if he can torture the text sufficiently and sexual matters are an abomination in his ears, but he simply must not omit it without explanation…’
(For if nothing is done to tell the reader that passage X has been omitted, how can the reader know that he or she is reading an incomplete text? AK)
Years later, after leaving the Ramakrishna Order, Bharati was ordained a sanyassi and met another monk to whom he related the censorship episode described above.
‘He laughed aloud and said ‘If God does not mind creating a human or animal penis or a human and animal vagina, and if he does not mind arranging a particular relationship between thier carriers why should he hesitate to talk about them? Who are we to tell Him what is decent and what ought to be said or what ought to be omitted?’
Bharati, The Ochre Robe 136-7)
I guess I need to clarify a few points on tantra. Not only were there strong mythological elements (the “gods”) but strong magical elements (like the above example I gave). One might even argue that the openess to sex and better view of women was due to the immersion in a magico-mythic era (shamanaism) where sex was “mysterious” and women still had many misunderstood powers, like menstruation and childbirth. So to attribute a more free and open sexuality to them is not the same as a “liberation” of puritan anti-sex values, because they are “pre” such impositions. Same with the attitude toward women; they are not “liberated” but not yet differentiated from the “mumbo-jumbo.” One mgiht even attribute the “spiritual” aspects of tantra to the developments of the later Arya with their yogic techniques of sublimation etc. Granted they also overlaid such with their more “controlling” aspects of partriarchy, etc., but the upside was the “spiritualization” of sex. And now we must go beyond both to contextualize tantra in today’s miliue of “equality” (yet difference) of the sexes, etc. Sometimes I get the impression we’re romanticing tantra in its original form here, when we need to take from it what works (include) and throw away the rest (transcend).
Which for me includes getting rid of the artifical and lower-meme categories of “spirit” as opposed to “matter” (sex) altogether and recontextualizing them within a more current, “nondual” context (like the undeconstructable of Derrida). Liberate sex and higher states of consciousness by limiting (differentiating) their paradigms, as Ken puts it, rather than “fusing” them a la tantra (pre-differentation, pre-rational). And note that the undeconstructable itself is not sex or a state or a stage but the “emptiness” that grounds them all, only again re-contextualized (and de-”spirited” [dualized]) from its origins.
An Indian academic on an email list shared that many high-caste women do not know that the shivalingam is Shiva’s phallus.
I’m not sure how to make sense of this. That’s like saying that it’s unknown to upper-class women that something called “God’s penis” is a representation of…God’s penis.
Incidentally, I recently attended a lecture by Wendy Doniger. She was asked about the asceticism and sensuality in Hindu culture and she said that it’s been a tension throughout Indian history, referring to Gandhi’s asceticism and the Upanishads on the one hand and the sculptures of Khajuraho on the other. She didn’t connect this with the North/South or Sanskrit/Dravidian division or with the Aryan migration.
Your account seems to be imputing everying admirable to the indigenous people and everything unfortunate to the late-comers (or nearly so), which strikes me as unlikely to turn out to be accurate when more evidence is in. History is rarely so black and white.
Aurobindo rejected the notion of an Aryan invasion or migration, right? And Georg Feuerstein believes that the Aryans refer to upper-class people of the same ethnic mix as the non-Aryans.
Hi Goethean,
I don’t mean to suggest it is B&W at all. Re the Aryan invasion. The reason that it is thought that the Aryans migrated was because of their influence outside India, notably Iran. If the Aryans were indigenous to India then how to explain Iran and the linguistic links to European languages, as well as the existance of Dravidian languages in the south of India?
If the Aryans were indigenous to India then how to explain Iran and the linguistic links to European languages, as well as the existance of Dravidian languages in the south of India?
Some Hindutva ’scholars’ claim that India is the original IE homeland (the “Out of India” theory), but that is a bit wacko. Feuerstein etc. believe that a migration to India occured before the Indus Valley Civilization. “the Aryans could just as well have been native to India for several millennia, deriving their Sanskritic language from earlier Indo-European dialects.”
I contributed to the following article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_the_Cradle_of_Civilization
I think the key is ‘hindutva’, precisely the type of revisionism I’m concerned about. But yeah – the issue isn’t settled by any means, except to say that the invasion theory seems to have collapsed. Also, much of this hinges on how old Vedic civilization is. When was the Mahabharata set?
Your comments, Ray?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070621/ap_on_re_au_an/australia_aborigines
CANBERRA, Australia – Australia’s prime minister announced plans Thursday to ban pornography and alcohol for Aborigines in northern areas and tighten control over their welfare benefits to fight child sex abuse among them.
Interesting and informative text about the Tantric Way versus the Aryan/mainstream Hinduism (with patriarchal biases)! May I recommend to you a Bollywood B-movie from the early 1980s, called “Pataal Bhairavi” (starring Jeetendra, Jaya Prada, Shakti Kapoor, Kader Khan and so on), which, although cheesy, features a strong Tantric message and influences, e g the Tantric “wizard” as played by Kader Khan is a treat to watch (that is, until he gets himself killed by our mainstream “Aryan” hero material, Jeetendra. Anyway, I hope you would check out on this one!