Gavin Flood - The Tantric Body: The Secret Tradition of Hindu Religion

T antra ('woven together' in Sanskrit) is the Hindu-based religion which originated i ,200 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 cremation 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.

Gavin Flood 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 (1996) and general editor of The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (2003).

The Tantric Body

The Secret Tradition of Hindu Religion

GAVIN FLOOD

I.B.TAURIS

LONDON NEW YORK

Published in 2006 by

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Contents

Preface ix

PART I Theory, Text and History

i Introduction: The Body as Text 3

Tantra, Tradition and the Body 7 Reading Strategies: Text 15 Reading Strategies: Body 20 Experience and Asceticism 24 The Argument of the Book 27

2 The Vedic Body 31

The Political and Social Context 32 Legal Discourse 37 Political Discourse 42 The Highest Good 45

3 The Tantric Revelation 48

The Validity of Tantric Revelation 50

The Pdncardtra Revelation 53

The Saiva Revelation 55

Text and Tradition 60

The Tantric Theology of Revelation 62

The Divinisation of the Body as Root Metaphor 74 Tantric Polity 76 The Tantric Temple 81 Tantra and Erotic Sculpture 83 Possession 87

PART II The Body as Text

5 The Pancaratra 99

Emanationist Cosmology 101

The Purification of the Body 106

The Bhutasuddhi in the Tantric Revelation 108

The Divinisation of the Body 113

Inner Worship 116

External Worship 118

6 Saiva Siddhanta 120

Saiva Siddhanta Doctrine 122

The Tattva Hierarchy 126

The Six Paths 129

The Ritual Process: Initiation 131

The Ritual Process: Daily Rites 138

The Ritual Process: Behaviour 144

7 Ecstatic Tantra 146

Absolute Subjectivity and Indexicality 147 The Circle of Deities in the Body 154 Kundalini and the Cakras 157 Two Ritual Systems 162

8 The Tantric Imagination 171

Vision 172

Gesture and Utterance 174

Icon 176

Indexicality 178

Reading 180

Epilogue 185

Abbreviations and Sources 194

Notes 198

Suggested Further Reading 235

Index 236

Preface

This book represents the application of a general theoretical framework 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 Visnu and Siva 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 Vaisnava and Saiva tantric traditions, namely the Pancaratra, the

Saiva Siddhanta, and the non-Saiddhantika traditions often referred to as 'Kashmir' Saivism 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 Sri Vidya, 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.