Passionate Enlightenment

Women in Tantric Buddhism

Miranda Shaw

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780691235592
• eBook ISBN: 9780691235608
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

The now-classic exploration of the role of women and the feminine in Buddhist Tantra

The crowning cultural achievement of medieval India, Tantric Buddhism is known in the West primarily for the sexual practices of its adherents, who strive to transform erotic passion into spiritual bliss. Historians of religion have long held that this attempted enlightenment was for men only, and that women in the movement were at best marginal and subordinated and at worst degraded and exploited. In Passionate Enlightenment, Miranda Shaw argues to the contrary and presents extensive evidence of the outspoken and independent female founders of the Tantric movement and their creative role in shaping its distinctive vision of gender relations and sacred sexuality. Including a new preface by the author, this Princeton Classics edition makes an essential work available for new audiences.

CHAPTER ONE

Seeking the Traces of Sky-Dancers

ANYONE WHO READS a Tantric text or enters a Tantric temple immediately encounters a dazzling array of striking female imagery. One discovers a pantheon of female Buddhas and a host of female enlighteners known as ḍākinīs. The ḍākinīs leap and fly, unfettered by clothing, encircled by billowing hair, their bodies curved in sinuous dance poses. Their eyes blaze with passion, ecstasy, and ferocious intensity. One can almost hear the soft clacking of their intricate bone jewelry and feel the wind stirred by their rainbow-colored scarves as they soar through the Tantric Buddhist landscape. These unrestrained damsels appear to revel in freedom of every kind. Expressions of this motif in Tantric literature describe yoginis with magical powers, powerful enchantresses with the ability to change shape at will, and enlightened women who can spark a direct experience of reality with a precisely aimed word or gesture.

These female figures, with their exuberant air of passion and freedom, communicate a sense of mastery and spiritual power. They inspired my initial interest in the Tantric tradition and served as the lodestar of my explorations throughout. It seemed to me that the yoginis who grace Tantric literature and gaze so compellingly from Tantric paintings and statuary may provide evidence of the women of Tantric Buddhism—their historical existence, spiritual liberation, and religious insights. The present study is the fruit of my search for the women who inspired and helped to create these evocative female images.

Interpreters of Tantric art and literature have maintained that the positive female imagery does not reflect women’s lives or accomplishments. Rather, historians have held that Tantric Buddhism was an oppressive movement in which women were at best marginal and subordinate and at worst degraded and exploited. The prevalent view is that the human counterparts of the exuberant yoginis of Tantric iconography were downtrodden prostitutes and low-caste women exploited for ritual purposes. This assessment is not surprising, for statements that discount women’s religious lives are seen in all fields of historical study before significant research on women has been undertaken. For instance, similar assertions were made about the lowly estate of women in medieval European Christianity, before the first trickle of historical interest several decades ago became a rushing stream of increasingly specialized and methodologically sophisticated studies. Such statements also resemble those made about Australian Aboriginal women before female ethnographers discovered the rich world of women’s myth and ritual from which men—including male researchers—are excluded. Therefore, casual assumptions made in passing about the marginality of women in Tantric circles need not discourage deeper inquiry; they simply underscore the need for further research.

This volume challenges the prevailing view of the women of Tantric Buddhism by bringing forth new historical and textual evidence and reinterpreting central motifs and doctrines in light of that evidence. There is extensive evidence that women participated fully in the emerging Tantric movement. Tantric biographies portray bold, outspoken, independent women. Tantric texts prescribe how women should be respected, served, and ritually worshipped. Tantric literature introduces practices performed solely by women and others performed by women and men together. Tantric theory advances an ideal of cooperative, mutually liberative relationships between women and men. Where interpretive categories previously applied to practices, doctrines, gender relations, and social groups discussed herein have been found to be inadequate, they have been critiqued and either modified or abandoned in order to develop the following analyses.

SCHOLARLY CONTEXTS

Buddhist studies has lagged behind other fields in the use of gender as an analytic category. Male dominance has long been accepted as an ahistorical, immutable principle of Buddhist history. Since women have been present throughout all epochs of Buddhist history for over two and a half millennia and their presence inevitably had an impact on the ongoing creation of the tradition, there is little justification for continuing to neglect this dimension of Buddhist history. In the case of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, some progress has been made in the areas of women in early Buddhism,¹ monasticism,² and Mahāyāna Buddhism.³ Two articles have seriously broached the topic of women in Indian Tantric Buddhism,⁴ while somewhat more attention has been devoted to Tibetan nuns⁵ and lay yoginis.⁶

By concentrating on women in Tantric Buddhism in India, this study provides a basis for differentiating gender relations during the Indian phase of the movement from historical developments in Tibet.⁷ The emergence of powerful Buddhist dynasties, the consolidation of a priestly hierarchy that dominated the economic and political life of the country, the inauguration of an incarnation system that allowed male hierarchs to reproduce themselves without marrying, and a thriving eremitic subculture all affected the participation of women in ways that have yet to be studied in depth.⁸ The more radical Tantric teachings, such as those involving sexual practices, encountered official resistance in Tibet, resulting in restrictions upon the translation of offending texts.⁹ Nonetheless, the full spectrum of Tantric teachings survived and flourished in the Land of Snows. The Tantric ideal of inclusivism and the Utopian vision of men and women as companions in the spiritual quest were like embers that could be fanned into flame whenever a teacher or cultural setting supported their expression.¹⁰ Conflicts between celibate and noncelibate partisans, clerical authority and charismatic leadership, and hierarchical and egalitarian tendencies added greatly to the vitality of the Tibetan tradition. The present book also considers the degree to which the female pioneers of the Tantric movement are remembered and credited for their innovations by their spiritual heirs in Tibet.

This book is located within an expanding body of literature on women and religion and presents material relevant to cross-cultural inquiry in areas such as cultural constructions of gender, the self, the body, sexuality, and ritual. In the area of feminist theology, some scholars have articulated Buddhist principles that may complement, inform, and be informed by Western feminism, particularly by offering alternative models of selfhood and power. These scholars—most notably Anne Klein and Rita Gross—have concentrated on central Buddhist philosophical concepts and psychological insights, such as Buddhist understandings of nonself, interdependence, and meditative awareness.¹¹ Tantric understandings of embodiment, ecstasy, and the transformative dimensions of passion and intimacy may enrich this dialogue.

One of the foremost aims of this volume is to contribute a chapter on Tantric Buddhism to the religious history of Indian women. In the study of women and religion in India, as in other parts of the world, previous opinions are being revised and overturned by careful attention to women’s lives and religious expressions. Indologists in the past have tended to accept male religiosity as normative and universally representative. Many factors have predisposed scholars to fail to recognize the existence of women’s religious activities, such as an uncritical acceptance of the reports of male informants in the field, unwitting participation in sectarian polemics, an inability to gain access to women’s gatherings and religious practices (particularly in a highly gender-stratified society like that of India), and a concentration upon written sources at the expense of ritual and oral traditions. Scholars have begun to document the existence of religious traditions in India in which women are the custodians of treasuries of cultural knowledge, ritual and meditative arts, and oral and local traditions.¹² The impressive results of such pioneering studies reveal that the religious history of Indian women has just begun to be told.

Tantra in both its Hindu and Buddhist sectarian varieties appears to represent an arena in which Indian women can engage in religious disciplines freely, seriously, and at their own initiative. This is the conviction primarily of Indian scholars and of Westerners like Sir John Woodroffe and Lilian Silburn who have spent long periods in India as Tantric novitiates. These native and engaged scholars report that women can be gurus and perform rituals of initiation in Tantric traditions,¹³ and in some Tantric lineages women are regarded as preferable to men as gurus.¹⁴ Proponents also point out that male Tantrics are required to respect, venerate, and ritually worship women.¹⁵ In view of the generally high status of women in Tantric circles, several Indian scholars suggest that Tantra (both Hindu and Buddhist) originated among the priestesses and shamanesses of matrilineal tribal and rural societies.¹⁶

Rare firsthand accounts have provided an intriguing glimpse of women in Tantra as a living tradition. For instance, the feisty female Sakta and Vaisnava Tantrics interviewed by anthropologist Bholanath Bhattacharya displayed a complete lack of subservience to their male companions and belie any suggestion that they practice Tantra for the sake of someone other than themselves.¹⁷ In her anthropological fieldwork on women ascetics in Benares, Lynn Denton found the female Tantrics to be unconstrained by social conventions and freely and forthrightly to choose their own male partners and life patterns.¹⁸ In his spiritual autobiography, Brajamadhava Bhattacharya describes the instruction and initiations he received from his Tantric guru, the “Lady in Saffron,” a coconut-vendor in his native village who initiated and taught disciples independently of any male authority.¹⁹ Indologist Lilian Silburn’s technical descriptions of sexual yoga in Kashmir Śaivism, enriched by teachings she received as an initiate, demonstrate the complete reciprocity of male and female adepts in the performance of advanced kuṇḍalinī practices, for which both partners must be comparably qualified and from which they derive equal benefit.²⁰ These studies, while not directly relevant to the question of women in medieval Buddhist Tantra, confirm that women can be active, independently motivated participants in Tantric movements.

These positive assessments by native and engaged scholars find no echo in most Western scholarship on Tantric Buddhism. When writing about its reformist tendencies, scholars stress the egalitarianism and radical inclusiveness of the emerging movement, but when discussing women, they assert the sexist oppressiveness and exploitativeness of Tantric circles, without explaining this dramatic inconsistency. Most Western scholars insist that the genuine, serious practitioners of Tantra were men and that women were only admitted to rituals when their “services” were required by male Tantrics. These authors depict the Tantric yoginis in derogatory, even contemptuous, terms:

The feminine partner … is in effect used as a means to an end, which is experienced by the yogin himself.²¹

We get the impression that they [men] are the main actors, and … their female companions are passive counterparts, participating solely to help bring about spiritual insights on part [sic] of the yogins.²²

In … Tantrism … woman is means, an alien object, without possibility of mutuality or real communication.²³

The goal of Sahajayāna sādhanā is … to destroy the female.²⁴

Women … are assumed to be recruited on each occasion and are made to participate in the assembly²⁵

The “slut” or “ḍombi” refers to a woman of the despised, low Ḍom caste—they earned their living as laundresses, vendors and prostitutes…. Tantric yogins employed them for the performance of sexual rituals.²⁶

The role played by girls of low caste and courtesans in the tantric “orgies” (cakra, the tantric wheel) is well known. The more depraved and debauched the woman, the more fit she is for the rite.²⁷

Their presence was essential to the performance of the psycho-sexual rites and their activities generally are so gruesome and obscene as to earn them quite properly the name witch.²⁸

Similar pronouncements have been made about women and Tantra in general:

Their attitude toward the woman is … she is to be used as a ritual object and then cast aside.²⁹

The chief role of women in the &akta Tantric cult … is to act as female partners (śakti, dūtī) of the male adepts.³⁰

These speculations are all offered in passing and treated as self-evident, without benefit of documentation or analysis. The scenario that these scholars have agreed upon is unambiguous. The men are religious seekers, and the women are “passive counterparts” who are “employed,” “available,” and “used” as a “ritual object” or “alien object.” Apparently the men had a religious motivation, but the women did not. The explanation offered for the women’s behavior is that they are “sluts,” “lewd,” “depraved and debauched,” “gruesome and obscene.” Although this scenario seems to have been crafted to elevate men as the true practitioners of the tradition, it has the presumably unintended consequence of creating an image of ruthless, self-serving Tantric yogis who will use anything—even the bodies of other human beings—in their pursuit of spiritual perfection.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The consistent disparity between indigenous and Western assessments of female Tantrics is telling. Several theoretical presuppositions have created a lens or prism that refracts the images in a predictable way. This refraction is now familiar as the pattern of colonial reactions to aspects of India that seemed incomprehensible, repugnant, or irreducibly alien. For instance, the disdainful appraisal of female Tantric practitioners is reminiscent of colonialist judgments of the Indian devadāsīs as “temple prostitutes.” These women, who are artists, scholars, and performers of ritual dance and worship, presented an unfamiliar and apparently disquieting sight to the colonial gaze. Since British civil servants and missionaries could not comprehend the religious offices of these temple votaries, they labeled them as “strumpets” and “harlots” and proceeded to outlaw the devadasT tradition. Such judgments reflected not only a lack of knowledge of the colonialized peoples but also deep antipathy for some of their cultural values.³¹ This judgment prevailed unt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the Princeton Classics Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Guide to Transliteration
• Chapter One. Seeking the Traces of Sky-Dancers
• Chapter Two. Tantric Buddhism in India: Religious and Historical Introduction
• Chapter Three. Women in Tantric Theory: Powerful and Auspicious
• Chapter Four. Women in Tantric Circles: Adepts and Experts
• Chapter Five. Women in Tantric History: Founders and Pioneers
• Chapter Six. Women in Tantric Relationships: Intimacy as a Path to Enlightenment
• Chapter Seven. Spontaneous Jewellike Yogini on Passion and Enlightenment
• Chapter Eight. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index