Kiss of the Yogini

"Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Contexts

David Gordon White

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780226027838
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

For those who wonder what relation actual Tantric practices bear to the "Tantric sex" currently being marketed so successfully in the West, David Gordon White has a simple answer: there is none. Sweeping away centuries of misunderstandings and misrepresentations, White returns to original texts, images, and ritual practices to reconstruct the history of South Asian Tantra from the medieval period to the present day. Kiss of the Yogini focuses on what White identifies as the sole truly distinctive feature of South Asian Tantra: sexualized ritual practices, especially as expressed in the medieval Kaula rites. Such practices centered on the exchange of powerful, transformative sexual fluids between male practitioners and wild female bird and animal spirits known as Yoginis. It was only by "drinking" the sexual fluids of the Yoginis that men could enter the family of the supreme godhead and thereby obtain supernatural powers and transform themselves into gods. By focusing on sexual rituals, White resituates South Asian Tantra, in its precolonial form, at the center of religious, social, and political life, arguing that Tantra was the mainstream, and that in many ways it continues to influence contemporary Hinduism, even if reformist misunderstandings relegate it to a marginal position. Kiss of the Yogini contains White's own translations from over a dozen Tantras that have never before been translated into any European language. It will prove to be the definitive work for persons seeking to understand Tantra and the crucial role it has played in South Asian history, society, culture, and religion.

Chapter 1

TANTRA IN ITS SOUTH ASIAN CONTEXTS

Je ne suis pas seul dans ma peau—
Ma famille est immense.
—Henri Michaux

Curiously, the most balanced overview of Tantra in South Asia written to date is the work of a Sinologist. This is Michel Strickmann’s posthumous Mantras et mandarins: Le Bouddhisme tantrique en Chine, which, in giving an account of the origins of Tantra in East Asia, brings together textual, art historical, and ethnographic data to sketch out the broad lines of South Asian Tantra.¹ The present volume will continue Strickmann’s project, within a strictly South Asian focus, bringing together text-based Tantric theory and exegesis (that has been the subject of work by scholars like Woodroffe, Silburn, Padoux, Gnoli, Goudriaan, Gupta, Sanderson, Dyczkowski, Muller-Ortega, Brooks, and others), Tantric imagery (the stuff of the pop art books by Rawson, Mookerjee, and others, but also of serious scholarship by Dehejia, Desai, Donaldson, Mallmann, and Slusser), and Tantric practice (the subject of a growing number of studies in ethno-psychology by Kakar, Obeyesekere, Caldwell, Nabokov, etc.). While each of these approaches has its merits, and while many of the studies published by various scholars in these fields have been nothing short of brilliant, the nearly total lack of attention to complementary disciplines (of art history and ethnography for the textualists, for example) has generated three very different and truncated—if not skewed—types of scholarly analysis of one and the same phenomenon. The life of Tantric practitioners has never been limited to textual exegesis alone; nor has it been solely concerned with the fabrication of worship images or the ritual propitiation of the Tantric pantheon. Yet such is the impression one receives when one reads one or another of the types of scholarly literature on the subject.

Here, by paralleling these three types of data, as well as attending to accounts of Tantric practice and practitioners found in the medieval secular literature, I intend to reconstruct a history as well, perhaps, as a religious anthropology, a sociology, and a political economy of (mainly Hindu) Tantra, from the medieval period down to the present day. In so doing, I will also lend serious attention to human agency in the history of Tantra in South Asia. Most of the South Asian temples upon which Tantric practices are depicted in sculpture were constructed by kings—kings whose involvement in Tantric ritual life is irrefutable. When the king is a Tantric practitioner and his religious advisers are Tantric “power brokers,” how does this impact the religious and political life of his kingdom? What is the relationship between “popular” practice and “elite” exegesis in the Tantric context? What has been the relationship between “pragmatic” and “transcendental” religious practice in South Asia?² These are questions whose answers may be found in texts and in stone, in medieval precept as well as modern-day practice. This book will grapple with these questions, and in so doing resituate South Asian Tantra, in its precolonial forms at least, at the center of the religious, social, and political life of India and Nepal. For a wide swath of central India in the precolonial period, Tantra would have been the “mainstream,” and in many ways it continues to impact the mainstream, even if emic misappreciations of Tantra tend to relegate it to a marginal position. In present-day Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet, Tantra remains the mainstream form of religious practice.

1. Revisioning the “Mainstream” of Indian Religion

Viewed through the lens of present-day reformed Hindu sensibilities as spread through the printed word and other mass media, “classical Hinduism” evolved directly out of the speculative hymns of the Ṛg Veda and the Upaniṣads and down through the teachings of the Bhagavad Gītā into the predominantly Vaiṣṇava forms of devotionalism that predominate in north India today. Most Indian and Western scholars of the past century have consciously or unconsciously adopted this reformist agenda, devoting their interpretive efforts to Hindu religious texts in the Sanskrit medium or to living vernacular traditions that partake of bhakti religiosity and neo-Vedantic philosophy. In so doing, they have succeeded in mapping, often in great detail, a thin sliver of the history of South Asian religions, which they have generally mistaken for a comprehensive history of the same.³

However, this selective chronology bears no resemblance to what may be termed the truly “perennial” Indian religion, which has generally remained constant since at least the time of the Atharva Veda, as evidenced in over three thousand years of sacred and secular literature as well as medieval iconography and modern ethnography. For what reformist Hindus and the scholars who have followed their revisionist history of South Asian religion have in fact done has been to project—backward onto over two millennia of religious history, and outward onto the entire population of South Asia—the ideals, concerns, and categories of a relatively small cadre of Hindu religious specialists, literati, and their mainly urban clientele. While it is the case that those same elites—the brahmin intelligentsia, a certain Indian aristocracy, and the merchant classes—have been the historical bearers of much of Indian religious civilization, their texts and temples have had limited impact on the religious culture of the vast majority of South Asians. “Classical” bhakti in some way corresponds to the religious productions of post-Gupta period elites—what royal chaplains and their royal clients displayed as public religion—as well as the religion of what Harald Tambs-Lyche has termed “urban society” in South Asia.⁴

The distorting effect of the hegemonic voices of these elites on the ways that twentieth- and now twenty-first-century India has imagined its past has been the subject of no small number of scholarly works, if not movements, over the past twenty-five years. The critical (or postcolonialist, or subalternist) approach to Indian historiography has been quite successful in deconstructing colonial categories.⁵ Where it has markedly failed—postmodernisme oblige?—has been in generating other nonelite, noncolonial (i.e., subaltern) categories through which to interpret the history of Indian culture. Yet such a category exists and is possessed of a cultural history that may be—and in many cases has been—retrieved through literary, art historical, and ethnographic research. That category, that cultural phenomenon, is Tantra, the occulted face of India’s religious history. In many ways the antitype of bhakti—the religion of Indian civilization that has come to be embraced by nineteenth- to twenty-first-century reformed Hinduism as normative for all of Indian religious history—Tantra has been the predominant religious paradigm, for over a millennium, of the great majority of the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. It has been the background against which Indian religious civilization has evolved.

A preponderance of evidence supports this conclusion. In ancient times as in the present, village India has had its own local or regional deities that it has worshiped in its own ways and in its own contexts. These deities, which are multiple rather than singular, often form a part of the geographical as well as human landscapes of their various localities: trees, forests, mountains, bodies of water; but also the malevolent and heroic dead, male and female ancestors, and ghosts, ghouls, and rascally imps of every sort. As will be shown in detail in the next chapter, these multiple (and often feminine) deities are, before all else, angry and hungry, and very often angry because hungry. Their cultus consists of feeding them in order that they be pacified.

As far back as the time of Pāṇini, Brahmanic sources have qualified these as laukika devatās (popular deities), while Jain and Buddhist authors have termed them vyantara devatās (intermediate deities, as opposed to enlightened jīnas and tīrthaṃkaras), and devas (unenlightened deities, as opposed to enlightened Buddhas and bodhisattvas), respectively. Yet when one looks at the devotional cults of the gods of so-called classical Hind...