The Tantric Body Cannot Be Understood Outside the Traditions and Texts That Give It Form
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(‘woven together’ in Sanskrit) is the Hindu-based religion Twhich originated , years ago, when the great erotic temples were built. In the West it is now best known for the inspiration of tantric yoga, and its associated ritualistic forms of sex. But is Tantra just about esoteric sexual practice or does it amount to something more? This lively and original book contributes to a more complete understanding of Tantra’s mysteries by discussing the idea of the body in Hindu tantric thought and practice in India. The author argues that within Tantra the body is a vehicle for the spirituality that is fundamental to people’s lives. The tantric body cannot be understood outside the traditions and texts that give it form. Through practice (ritual, yoga and ‘reading’) the body is formed into a pattern determined by tradition, and the practitioner thereby moulds his or her life into the shape of the tradition. While there is a great range of tantric bodies – from ascetics living in cre- mation grounds, to low-caste people possessed by tantric deities, to sophisticated high-caste Brahmans expounding the ascetic philosophy of Tantra – all share certain common assumptions and processes. Flood argues that while there is a divergence at different social levels and in different levels of tantric metaphysical claims, these levels are united by a process which the author calls ‘entextualisation of the body’. The body becomes the text through the tradition being inscribed on it. This general claim is tested against specific ritual and doctrinal examples, and the tantric traditions are linked to wider social and political forces. The Tantric Body is a fascinating study that makes an important contribution to the study of South Asian religion, and will have strong appeal to students of South Asian societies and cultures as well as to those of comparative philosophy. G F is Professor of Religion at the University of Stirling and Academic Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He is the author of An Introduction to Hinduism () and general editor of The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (). The Tantric Body The Secret Tradition of Hindu Religion Published in by I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd Salem Rd, London Fifth Avenue, New York www.ibtauris.com In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press, Fifth Avenue, New York, Copyright © Gavin Flood The right of Gavin Flood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, Frontispiece: Cakra man (Wellcome Ms β). With kind permission of the Wellcome Trust. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. (Hb) (Pb) (Hb) (Pb) A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by illuminati, Grosmont, www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Contents Preface ix PART I Theory, Text and History Introduction: The Body as Text Tantra, Tradition and the Body Reading Strategies: Text Reading Strategies: Body Experience and Asceticism The Argument of the Book The Vedic Body The Political and Social Context Legal Discourse Political Discourse The Highest Good The Tantric Revelation The Validity of Tantric Revelation The P®ñc ar® tra Revelation The ˆaiva Revelation Text and Tradition The Tantric Theology of Revelation Revelation and Doctrine Tantric Civilisation The Divinisation of the Body as Root Metaphor Tantric Polity The Tantric Temple Tantra and Erotic Sculpture Possession PART II The Body as Text The P®ñc ar® tra Emanationist Cosmology The Purification of the Body The Bha‚t ˜uddhi in the Tantric Revelation The Divinisation of the Body Inner Worship External Worship ˆ aiva Siddh® nta S´aiva Siddh®nt a Doctrine The Tattva Hierarchy The Six Paths The Ritual Process: Initiation The Ritual Process: Daily Rites The Ritual Process: Behaviour Ecstatic Tantra Absolute Subjectivity and Indexicality The Circle of Deities in the Body Kun. d. alin¬ and the Cakras Two Ritual Systems The Tantric Imagination Vision Gesture and Utterance Icon Indexicality Reading Epilogue Appendix: The Jay®khya-sam. hit® Abbreviations and Sources Notes Suggested Further Reading Index Preface represents the application of a general theoretical Tframework to a body of tantric texts that I have been reading, on and off, for a number of years. That theoretical framework develops the theme of the relationship between subjectivity and text. More precisely, the book offers a description and analysis of the idea that subjectivity is textually mediated within a corpus of tantric texts composed in the medieval period. To give an account of this textually mediated subjectivity is also to give an account of the tantric body. A tradition-specific understanding of self and body is constructed, as it were, through the text. The book therefore does not claim to be a work of Indology as such but draws on Indology to present a particular reading of a range of textual material. This is a reading of the body as represented within those texts, along with a tradition- specific subjectivity that the body entails, and a discussion of the implications of that reading in the context of a broader, historical understanding. The specificity of the claim is that in the Hindu tantric traditions focused primarily on the deities Vi◊n. u and ˆiva in the early medieval period, the practitioner becomes divine through the internalisation of the text, through the inscription of the body by the text, and learns to inhabit a tradition specific subjectivity. The text is mapped on to the body. The range of texts I discuss is from the Vai◊n. ava and ˆ aiva tantric traditions, namely the P® ñcar® tra, the x The Tantric Body ˆaiva Siddh® nta, and the non-Saiddh ®ntika traditions often referred to as ‘Kashmir’ ˆ aivism that developed particularly from the ninth to eleventh centuries. While the examples I discuss illustrate my general point, a much wider range of textual material could have been presented but for reasons of space. I do not focus on later tantric traditions and do not deal with the ˆr¬ Vidy ®, although the general framework I develop would be equally applicable there. Most of this book was written during a wonderful year as a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia and I should like to thank both staff and students for discussion about the project and their astute observations. The two graduate seminars I conducted were especially helpful in testing ideas and I would like to thank all the students in those classes, including Wijitha Bandara, Suzanne Bessenger, Kristen Calgaro, David Divalerio, Andrew Godreau, Julian Green, Chris Hatchell, Gavin Irby, Sara Jacobi, Slava Komarovski, Karen Lemoine, Bianca Pandit, John Paul Patterson, Matt Rose, Carl Yamamoto, Umeyye Yazicioglu and Yongbok Yi. I would especially like to acknowledge conversations with James Gentry, who coined a felicitous phrase ‘variable indexicality’ to describe some of this work, Andres Montano, Lynna Dhanani and Craig Danielson. I became a student at the stimulating class on Buddhist tantric traditions across Asia conducted by Professors Paul Groner and David Germano, where I learned much (not least the advantages of team teaching). I also gained a lot from the ‘Tantra lunches’ organised by Peter Ochs, where ‘tantric’ topics were opened out for discussion within a wider milieu and in the context of other traditions and other thought worlds. These lunches provided an informal yet rigorous forum and, along with professors Groner, Germano and Ochs, I particularly appreciated the contributions of Jeffrey Hopkins and Jamie Ferriera. This was an extremely engaging experience, true to the dialogic nature that should characterise comparative religion. There are many debts of gratitude in a book such as this. I should also like to acknowledge those teachers who first introduced me to the study of tantric traditions, Andrew Rawlinson and David Smith at Lancaster, a few conversations with the charismatic Agehananda Bharati, and a dept of gratitude to Alexis Sanderson of Oxford, who Preface xi has so often responded to my questions with generosity and cordiality and to André Padoux, a great scholar who has done so much to further our understanding of the tantric traditions. The ˆ aiva texts were very much brought to life for me at the Centre d’Indologie in Pondicherry some years ago, where I had the good fortune to discuss these topics with Dominic Goodall and to read sections of texts with the deeply knowledgeable ˆ aivasiddh ®nta Tattvajñ® R. Subramanian and Dr T. Ganesan. Frits Staal indirectly introduced me to the tantric tradition of Kerala and to my friend and col- league, anthropologist Rich Freeman, who introduced me directly to that tradition. I should like to thank him for his reflections on our shared interest in linguistic anthropology and for his extremely important theory of ritual possession in the tantric context as the paradigm for the divinisation of icon and priest. His theory has been a strong influence on my own thinking. I remember with fondness the somewhat bizarre situation of reading together, late into the night, sections of the ¡˜®na ˜ivagurudeva -paddhati in an old house in a remote Welsh village. Lastly I should like to thank the I.B. Tauris readers for their encouragement.