Indian Esoteric Buddhism

A Social History of the Tantric Movement

Ronald Davidson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231501026
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Bouddhisme

Despite the rapid spread of Buddhism—especially the esoteric system of Tantra, one of its most popular yet most misunderstood forms—the historical origins of Buddhist thought and practice remain obscure. This groundbreaking work describes the genesis of the Tantric movement in early medieval India, where it developed as a response to, and in some ways an example of, the feudalization of Indian society. Drawing on primary documents—many translated for the first time—from Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tibetan, Bengali, and Chinese, Ronald Davidson shows how changes in medieval Indian society, including economic and patronage crises, a decline in women's participation, and the formation of large monastic orders, led to the rise of the esoteric tradition in India that became the model for Buddhist cultures in China, Tibet, and Japan.

1

Introduction: A Plethora of Premises

But now, I will speak of those among the twice-born laymen, virtuous in the Dharma, who, through their persistent employment of mantras and tantras, will be engaged in the functions of the state.

There will be in the whole world at a calamitous time, the best of the twice-born, and his name will be pronounced with a Va.

Wealthy and completely familiar with the Vedas, let him wander all of this earth—girdled by three oceans—for the purpose of polemical eloquence.

He will love to fight with those non-Buddhist partisans [tīrthika].

Yet he always keeps the bodhisattva visualized before him, and recites the six-letter mantra, restrained in speech.

Thus, he will be a prince bearing the song of Mañjuśrī because of his motivation for the welfare of beings.

Indeed, celebrated for his accumulated performance of rituals, his intellect is superb.

There will be Jaya and the famous Sujaya, and also Śubhamata. They will be from a well-placed family, along with the righteous, ennobled, excellent Mādhava. There will be Madhu and Sumadhu as well.

There will be Siddha and thus *Madadahana (Destroyer of Pride).

There will be Rāghava the Śūdra, and those born among the Śakas.

They will all in this life recite mantras of the prince Mañjuśrī, with their speech restrained.

They will all be esoteric meditators, learned and intelligent.

They will be present among councilors of state [mantrin] for they will be completely based in the activities of government.

—Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa, LI.955a–963b.¹

The Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa’s obscure Mr. Va and his peers are enticing examples of the intersection of the religious and the sociopolitical realms in early medieval India. Rhetorically dedicated to the welfare of all beings, Mr. Va evidently employed his energy, wealth, and intelligence to travel over much of India to haggle, debate, and generally harass the adversaries of the Buddhist Dharma. Espousing a doctrine leading to the end of passion, he and the others were passionately involved in the affairs of state, employing the newly evolved tools of the vehicle of secret spells (Mantrayāna or Vajrayāna) to gain a hearing in the courts of kings and at the tables of tyrants. While the authors of the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa clearly believed Mr. Va to be an outstanding exemplar of the virtuous layman at the middle of the eighth century C.E., there can be little doubt that he was both an emblem and culmination of the profound shift of Buddhist public life from the seventh century forward.² Around this time, India fragmented politically and saw the rise of regional centers in a manner unprecedented and unexpected after the stable gravity of the Imperial Guptas and the Vākāṭakas (c. 320–550 C.E.). Pressed by military adventurism, populations moved across the subcontinent, while Buddhist coalitions sustained crippling setbacks in various parts of South Asia. The changes of fortune and the generation of new Buddhist institutions have remained almost as obscure as our quasi-anonymous Mr. Va, even if there can be little doubt that the contested domains of Indian political, military, and religious life profoundly affected Buddhist activity and self-representation.

This work discusses the factors in the formation of esoteric Buddhist traditions in the cauldron of post-Gupta India. Its thesis is that esoteric Buddhism is a direct Buddhist response to the feudalization of Indian society in the early medieval period, a response that involves the sacralization of much of that period’s social world. Specifically, this book argues that the monk, or yogin, in the esoteric system configures his practice through the metaphor of becoming the overlord of a maṇḍala of vassals, and issues of scripture, language, and community reflect the political and social models employed in the surrounding feudal society. Our investigation accordingly explores selected forms of Indian Buddhism that flourished in the early medieval period, here taken as the time from c. 500 C.E. to 1200 C.E. Ultimately, medieval Buddhist systems became fatally wounded in the profoundly altered Indian culture that coalesced in the fractious aftermath of the founding of Muslim states in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Yet these same systems and institutions had demonstrated successful strategies of survival through more than five centuries in the volatile world of medieval South Asia and had served as the platform for the profound Buddhist cultural transmissions to the surrounding societies of Southeast, Central, and East Asia. Our primary concern in examining the evidence is the tension that developed between forms of esoterism that evolved within the hallowed walls of Buddhist monasteries and those forms synthesized by the peripatetic figures of the Buddhist “Perfected” (siddha). These latter were reputed saints—mostly laymen like our Mr. Va, as opposed to monks—who conducted themselves in a wide variety of venues and who were frequently agonistic in their interactions with the non-Buddhist world.

The received hagiographies of both monks and siddhas are constructed from the interaction of romantic literature, religious inspiration, vernacular literary movements, and institutional and noninstitutional developments in Indic Buddhism and were principally brought into focus by the serendipitous arrival of Tibetans in early eleventh-century India. Most of these historical trajectories are still refractory to precise chronological placement, and we have no early archaeological or early datable non-Buddhist references to most of the protagonists found in the traditional hagiographies of its saints. Indeed, one of the problems of this era’s historical presentation has been scholars’ willingness to rely on certain Buddhist compendia of the saints’ lives, especially the Caturaśītisiddhapravṛtti (Lives of the Eighty-four Siddhas), attributed to Abhayadattaśrī. This work must be handled carefully, however, and the present work emphasizes instead the far greater number of individual hagiographies that have circulated in India, China, and Tibet.

As conceived, therefore, this work is an analysis of factors and contexts in the generation of the vehicle of secret spells, a movement specifically grounded in the Buddhist experience of the sixth to twelfth centuries in India. Even though the development of this form of Buddhist spirituality was clearly influenced by the manifold and dramatic transformations in India’s culture, the complexity of the context has not been fully considered to date. Certainly, several excellent studies have been written on its literature, ritual, and meditative praxis. However, Buddhological writing on India has sometimes neglected the context, a lament about the discipline rightly voiced by other Indologists. Thus a complete assessment requires that we consider the sociopolitical matrices of the Indian environment and their influences on the persons, texts, and traditions that came to constitute the new, ritually oriented Buddhist system.

To this end, chapter 2 covers the military and political background of early medieval India, with a view to Keegan’s thesis that a culture of belligerence is the result of many factors and becomes itself the agent of social transformation, such that all facets of culture are subsequently influenced. We are fortunate that in the past several decades this period has received much attention, through the work of both Indian and European historians. Like esoteric Buddhism, the early medieval period has been something of an orphan of historians’ sustained interest in the Gupta era, which is widely portrayed as India’s golden age. In response, the chapter situates medieval India in its dynastic and military developments from the fall of the Guptas to the rise of the Delhi Sultanate, from around 500 to 1200 C.E. The chapter seeks to demonstrate that, precipitated by the idealization of the universal conqueror, medieval Indian politics and literature recast kingship into a form of divinity. One consequence of the kings’ apotheosis was a concomitant feudalization of the gods in religious literature, such that the divinities become reformulated as royalty.

Chapter 3 addresses the Buddhist institutional and individual responses to the disintegration of previously supportive consortia in Indian society and its consequences for the Buddhist subculture. This chapter is concerned with the background of esoterism as a result of the convergence of both events external to Buddhist monasteries and decisions made within the Buddhist Mahayana intellectual and contemplative communities. The evidence reveals a declining capacity of Buddhists to direct political agendas or even establish parameters for much of their own discourse. The chapter identifies eight changes that mark the early medieval Buddhist cosmos, including the loss of guild-based patronage, the loss of the Kṛṣṇa River Valley and the lower Deccan plateau to Buddhist institutions and the decline of women’s participation in Buddhist activities at almost all levels. They further extend to the development of philosophical skepticism, the espousal of non-Buddhist epistemological axioms, and the rise of large Buddhist monastic establishments. Finally, we find the development of an institutionally based form of Buddhist esoterism and the phenomenon of the Perfected (siddha), the new variety of Buddhist saint. chapter 3 examines the first six of these changes in the context of the medieval Indian world.

Chapter 4 continues with a consideration of the emergence of institutional esoterism. It argues that esoteric Buddhism is the most politicized form to evolve in India. This chapter proposes that the defining metaphor for esoteric Buddhism is that of the monk or practitioner becoming the Supreme Overlord (rājādhirāja) or the Universal Ruler (cakravartin). An examination of the issue of consecration rites providing ritual access to maṇḍalas, and their origin in the realpolitik of the seventh century, forms much of the discussion in this chapter. The position of Vajrapāṇi as the mythic guardian and military agent of the new doctrine is examined through the lens of literature. The chapter proceeds with an brief discussion of the new canon accepted by Buddhist institutions, the vidyādhara-piṭaka (Sorcerer’s Basket). A paradigmatic example of the new monk, in the eighth century person of Buddhaguhya, is viewed through a fragment of his surviving letter to a Tibetan king and his received hagiography. Finally, esoteric Buddhism is seen as an attempt to sacralize the medieval world, with the Buddhists seeking to transform the political paradigms into vehicles for sanctification.

Chapter 5 begins to investigate the world of Buddhist Perfected (siddha) and its ideological and cultural landscape. The chapter examines the background of sainthood in Buddhism and related systems. Previous models of this variety of Buddhist saint are considered, but alternative models are presented to explain the complex interaction between Śaivas, Śāktas, and the emerging Buddhist siddha subculture. The development of the new siddha goal—articulated in an ideological context that included outcaste, village, and tribal peoples—is examined through the surviving documents, epigraphy, and modern tribal ethnography. In the area of religion, particular attention is given to the successful Śaivite and Śākta orders: the Lakulīśa Pāśupatas, the Kāpālikas and the Kaulas, in terms of their contributions and discontinuities. The siddhas understood themselves placed within arrangements of imagined and real geography, and these schematisms are briefly discussed. The question of variety is considered as well, with the siddhas revealing a greater behavioral variation than monks, probably as a consequence of their irregular involvement with the socializing milieus of the Buddhist monasteries or princely courts.

Chapter 6 addresses the questions of language and scripture. The rise of new forms of Buddhist literature, principally that classified as mahāyoga and yoginī tantra, is examined, especially with regard to its use of sexual images and coded language. I look at the earliest siddha narratives of scriptural revelation and argue that siddha scriptural composition is best described by interactive and social, rather than individualistic, models of authorship. The earliest document on the myth of Indrabhūti is featured, demonstrating lay siddhas’ scriptural transmission and their proclivity for ritual performance. A classic instance of extreme language in the Buddhakapāla-tantra is taken as a test case for the apologetic that all esoteric language is secret, with the commentators’ lack of hermeneutic consensus as indicative of this position’s difficulties. The communication through secret signs and coded language is discussed in light of the multiple sources, such as the Sarvabuddhasamāyoga-tantra, that discuss such materials, and a Dravidian or tribal element is posited. Moreover, because of the siddhas’ employment of new languages, sociolinguistic issues of function, bilingualism, diglossia, and related questions are broached. The chapter concludes with a discussion of models of humor and play in siddha scriptures and hagiographies.

Chapter 7 examines siddhas and monks in communities, both imagined and, so far as we can understand, real. As an idealized community, the maṇḍala form is reexamined, and one variety of siddha maṇḍala appears drawn from earlier goddess temple arrangements. The idealized communities are also seen in the layout of the eight cemeteries. This latter, in turn, precipitates questions of numbering, particularly the emphasis on the number eighty-four, which is seen in some of the compendia of siddha narratives. This curious number, and most other siddha formulae, appears to have their grounding in village organizational units, which were developed for the purpose of political administration and taxation. In view of ascertaining real communities, Vitapāda’s record describing the early ninth-century congregations experienced by Buddhajñānapāda is presented, as well as an early eleventh-century description of Nāropā. The chapter continues with the codes for siddha socialization and Indrabhūti’s discussion of the sacramental process of ...